Hidden Charges

by Ridley Pearson

  “This is further complicated by the fact that we broke the unions on this job.”

  “Yes, I’ve read about it. And DeAngelo filled me in earlier.”

  “We’ll run those tests, and we’ll see what we see.”

  “I know what we’ll see,” said Rappaport. “The question now is who is involved.”

  2

  Douglas Shleit had been a lieutenant on the Hillsdale force for the last twelve years. In that time he had personally handled only four homicides: a suicide, a drowning, a hit and-run, and a firearms case involving an irate wife and a drunken, abusive husband. If it hadn’t been August he wouldn’t have been assigned the McClatchy case. The more qualified lieutenant for the job was in Akron, Ohio, visiting a sister, so Shleit had it. His real love was the baritone saxophone. He spent his evenings alone, playing along with Count Basie records and drinking beer. From the very beginning he had been a renegade cop. His file listed three fistfights, all the result of a touchy temper.

  Word had trickled down that his days on the Hillsdale force were numbered. The fact that people like Bob Russo had heard the same rumor gave it more credence. He had a real problem taking orders, though the jobs he ended up with got done and got done well. They called him independent, but he didn’t feel independent; he felt chained to a bureaucracy that needed three forms filled out to wipe its ass. The joke went: How many Hillsdale cops does it take to change a light bulb? Four. Three to fill out forms and one to steal the bulb. Corruption was rampant on the force, nearly as bad as in the rest of Hillsdale’s city government. Shleit felt a certain pride at never having taken a dime in graft, though he knew in part this was responsible for his impending “transfer.” The Hillsdale force consisted of several cliques. When you didn’t play by the existing rules—regardless of their ethics—you were a threat. Recently Shleit had been hit on by several of the captains and had avoided getting mixed up in sticky situations. Now they had collectively decided it was time for him to leave. So he would leave.

  Despite the fact it went against everything he stood for, he found himself half hoping that Russo would try to stick some money in his pocket to keep the McClatchy case quiet. It would be perfect timing now. Ten or twenty grand in cash and then a “transfer” a few months down the road. He pushed the thought from his mind as he pushed the door to Jimmy Jackson’s bookstore open.

  As president of the Hillsdale Chamber of Commerce, Jackson knew what the merchants of the town were thinking. Like the upper staff of the police department, the more powerful businessmen in town had their own clique. They played poker together every other Thursday, entertained one another, and, in a few cases, slept with each other’s wives. It was part of the small-town flavor that left a bitter taste in Shleit’s mouth.

  Jackson wore his blond hair a little too long, had a mustache and blue-green eyes that bored into Shleit as the detective entered the store. Like a political figurehead, Jackson stood on the outside of the truly powerful clique, destined never to be a part of it. He was, instead, the man who chaired the meetings, the man quoted in the press. Divorced and a permanent bachelor, Jackson’s only known vice was a regular rum-and-tonic lunch and a platinum blonde named Angie who owned and managed the Ten Pin Bowling Alley and Lounge.

  “Morning, Lieutenant.”

  “Jimmy. How’s the trade?”

  “Slow.”

  Those in the know knew that Jackson sold triple X-rated novellas from behind the counter. He was protected from arrest by a monthly donation to the captain of the vice squad. “What’s the latest smut title?”

  “Me? I don’t sell smut.” After a pause Jackson picked out a book from beneath the register and placed it out for Shleit to thumb through. Moby’s Dick appeared to be about a sea captain. The badly lit photos that riddled the poorly typeset prose showed grotesquely close-up shots of overused, oversized anatomical parts.

  “The captain, no doubt, has a tattoo of a whale on his crank,” said Shleit.

  Jackson snatched the book back. “You’ve read it. No fair,” he jibed sarcastically. “What can I do for the law today?”

  “Hear about the explosion?”

  “Talk of the town.”

  “Know anything about it?”

  “Lieutenant, that’s hardly appropriate.”

  “Downtown’s been looking for a way to put the Green back a step.”

  “I can’t deny that. But murder?”

  “Maybe murder wasn’t part of the plan. Just an unlucky complication.”

  “You’re reaching, Lieutenant. You’ve seen downtown’s ad campaign. That’s our attack on the mall.”

  “I’m asking you, Jimmy, because you know what’s happening. You know who’s been hurt the most by the mall. If I had the time, we could dance around all day. It’s obvious you’ve got the free time. I don’t.”

  “Hurt badly? Christ, Doug, there’s not a downtown merchant who’s not been hurt badly. You know that. Sales are off. Way off. And there’s no sign of recovery. We’re getting more organized but it’s too late. There’s talk, as I’m sure you’ve heard, of closing off car traffic to a few central streets and making a kind of mall out of a few key downtown blocks. Fine and dandy. Great idea. Only three or four years late, that’s all. I don’t know if it’s possible to bring back downtown. I think Haverill’s prediction may be the most accurate. Downtown will develop into an office center, with retail activity out at the mall. Alex Macdonald has the jump on that end of things. Now Haverill’s thinking about adding an office center next, because we took so long to provide downtown space. Come to think of it, you may be right—there’s plenty of us who would like to see the mall suffer a little, maybe even go under.”

  “No one’s dumb enough to try it themselves. They’d hire it done.”

  “Right as rain. A couple phone calls to Providence, and you could set it up in a matter of hours.”

  “Who would want it, Jimmy?”

  “Christ, Doug, you’ve been here—what, twelve years or more? You walk the fringe. You’re sort of famous for that, but you know what’s what. You could name ’em as easily as I could.”

  “Could I?”

  “Couldn’t you? Sure you could.” Jackson flipped over the classical tape that finished and pushed PLAY. Wynton Marsalis flurried his trumpet from behind the nonfiction. “Say, how’s the bari coming?”

  “Probably about as well as your trumpet.”

  “That bad?”

  “Afraid so.”

  “We oughta jam sometime. Dennis could play drums, and Cindy plays a pretty good right hand on the ivories.”

  “We’d need a bass.”

  “Call around, see what you can turn up.”

  “For the jam, or for your investigation?”

  “Both.”

  “How about Russo?”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Everybody knows Russo would like to nuke that mall. And who has better connections to Providence than a guy who headed the construction unions in five major cities? Russo’s got to be connected to the family.”

  “Never been any proof he is.”

  “Never any that’s been made public, that is. There’s a difference, isn’t there, Doug?”

  “Sticking a bomb in a locker is no way to solve downtown’s problems.”

  “Hey, I agree. That is, unless it worked…. Just kidding,” Jackson added quickly. “Okay, I’ll put out a few feelers. But I’m warning you, I’m going to come up with more candidates than you want to handle, and they’re going to be people who are untouchable.”

  “They need to meet two qualifications. One, they need the motive. Two, they need a connection to someone who could arrange it for them. And I haven’t ruled out a group effort. There are two or three partnerships I can conjure up that might try a stunt like this.”

  “Doug, I don’t know your business. I don’t pretend to. But I’d be real careful if I were you. Whoever did this has killed a man, intentional or not. If you get too close, what’s to st
op them from killing another?”

  “The thought’s occurred to me, Jimmy. Don’t forget to call that bass player. Tell him I’ve got the charts and all the beer he can drink.”

  “Where you been, Doug? These kids don’t drink beer. They smoke grass and do lines.”

  “Just call him.”

  3

  Jacobs located Vince Wright at the far end of the new pavilion. He was installing one of the large information maps. Wright reminded Toby of a professional baseball player: long, lean, tan, and agile. He was younger than Jacobs, not yet thirty, but already had a wife and two children. Talking to people like Wright made Jacobs realize that a part of his life was quickly passing him by. It seemed lately that each and every day he found himself wondering if his kind of dedication to a job made any sense. Life had more to offer.

  “Got a minute, Vince?”

  “Sure. Give me a few seconds.”

  A few minutes later Wright joined Jacobs in front of the doorway of the empty anchor space, a vacant area that occupied several thousand square feet in the southeast corner of the Fun-World pavilion.

  “What’s up?” Wright had the looks of a Marlboro man and the deep resonant voice of a disk jockey.

  “I don’t know many of the crew as well as I know you.”

  “Scratch one up in favor of weekend volleyball. The way our team is playing, that may be the only good thing about it.”

  “I had a few things to ask.”

  “About the explosion?”

  Jacobs nodded. “Indirectly.”

  “There’s a rumor going around that Jim set the bomb off.”

  “Meaning?”

  “You’ll have to talk to the electrical contractor, but what I heard is that someone checked out the circuit breaker in the panel room and it was switched on. It would only be switched on if Jim had finished his work. Not only that but the light switch inside the door to the utility room had been flipped up. I saw that with my own two eyes. So anyway, somebody was speculating that Jim had finished up and then returned to test out his work, and that when he threw the light switch he blew himself away.”

  “He was just inside the door at the time of the explosion.”

  “It’s got the crew a little edgy.”

  “I’ll check into it. What I wanted to ask…”

  “…is who would do something like this.”

  “Right.”

  “Mind if we sit down?” Wright pointed to a cement bench beneath the nearest escalator. When the two men sat down, they were conveniently hidden from sight from the central area of the amusement pavilion. Jacobs wondered if Wright had deliberately hidden this impromptu meeting. His curiosity was answered when Wright suddenly began speaking in a softer voice. “There’s a lot of workers on a lot of different crews. I don’t know how much I can help.”

  “Would you rather do this another time? Maybe someplace else?”

  Wright looked around nervously. “No, this is all right. The thing is,” he said, even more quietly, “some of us figure that Russo’s boys planted some union workers from other towns amongst us. Kind of like spies, you know, so Russo could know what was going on here.”

  “You believe that?”

  “When you’re nonunion, like I am, you get so you can spot a union worker. It’s an attitude thing mostly. They wait to be told what to do. Hurry up and wait. You know the symptoms. Well, there are half a dozen guys that fit that here. Can’t be sure if they’re recent defectors or bad actors. Whenever a union is broken, like this one was on this job, you get some guys who have to turn in their cards and accept the nonunion work. That may be all we have here, but I’d just as soon play it cool.”

  “Russo’s retired. Why would they be Russo’s boys?”

  “Russo’s not retired. Not in the true sense of the word. What happened, as I hear it, is that some kind of internal shit prompted him to pull the plug and hang out on the outskirts. He still pulls the strings. He will for years to come, regardless of who is in the top job. This whole thing is mob controlled, T.J., as I’m sure you know, and no one is going to take away Russo’s power without killing him.”

  “So you’re saying the bomb could have been planted by one of these ‘spies?’”

  “Why not? We were damn near right on schedule, delayed about a month and a half, I think, wasn’t it? A job this size, full union, would have run at least six months over, probably more like a year. That does two things. First, it makes the union outfits look bad. They’d have more at stake here than a guy like Russo. Second, by being on schedule, workers work less. Bottom line in this business is work. Projects that go out on time mean fewer paychecks.”

  “You’re not narrowing my field much.”

  “On this job? Jeez, it could have been about anyone. If you knew what kind of explosive was used, and how much, it would tell you something—”

  “You think like a cop.”

  “I spent a couple of years running a bedrock drill for a blasting company that worked the interstate circuit.”

  “You?”

  “Yeah. I learned a lot from those powder hounds. First of all, you have to be a little nuts to do that for a living. That’s a requirement. I don’t care how safe you tell me that work is, people get burned, lose a hand, go deaf, all the time. Bad business. Not for me. Saw a guy get his hand blown off by a blasting cap. I quit the next day. But my point is that not just anyone could have set it up. Sure, about anyone could have planted it in DeAngelo’s locker, and there are plenty who might have wanted to, but rigging the actual bomb is another thing entirely. It takes special gear and special knowledge.”

  “Why the comment about DeAngelo?”

  “You kidding? The guy is a workhorse. A slave driver. Not only does he work us too many hours a week—something no one is happy with—but he works us hard. Did you know he just took away our afternoon coffee break? That’s something the union would never have allowed. Nothing we can really do about it. Now he has us on ten-hour days with no overtime. There’re some pissed-off people around here.”

  “How pissed off?”

  “Not pissed off enough to blow the guy away, if that’s what you mean. At least I don’t think so. You never know. People get pissed off about the strangest things. Hey, listen, don’t look so bummed out. You’ll catch the guy.”

  “I have about three hundred suspects, it sounds like to me. Four or five motives. I’ll look into this angle of yours that McClatchy detonated it with the light switch. That would certainly make a difference.”

  “The thing that gets me is, what sense would it make to wire a goddamned bomb in DeAngelo’s locker so it went off when the light switch was thrown? What’s the point of that?”

  “DeAngelo use his locker much?”

  “Hell, no. Hardly ever. The deal is, DeAngelo had a locker down there, sure. But he practically lives in that trailer out there. He keeps all his shit out there. Only reason he kept a locker down there was to try to seem like one of the guys.”

  “Thanks, Vince.”

  “That all?”

  Jacobs slapped him on the back. “You’ve been a big help.”

  ***

  Wright’s last words were spinning in Jacobs’s mind as he sought out the electrical contractor. If DeAngelo rarely used his locker, then it would have made an ideal place to hide a bomb. It could have been in there for a week or two beforehand. The bomber could have placed it well before in order to hide his own involvement. Or it could have been meant for DeAngelo. There was no ruling out any possibility at this point. What Jacobs needed now was more data to help narrow the field. He made a mental note to check with Shleit about any lab results, and the thought of labs reminded him of his earlier conversation with Rappaport and the possibility of bad cement. He’d made an appointment to speak with Haverill about it before lunch.

  After a brief conversation with the electrical contractor, a man too busy to even stop to talk, Jacobs confirmed the rumor Vince Wright had heard. It appeared that McClatchy had finish
ed his work and was testing the lights when the detonation occurred. So was it coincidence, or had the light switch somehow triggered the explosion?

  Jacobs didn’t accept coincidence as an explanation for anything. He was of the school that everything happens for a reason, acknowledging that occasionally chance was the only obvious reason. Very occasionally.

  But it left him with only more questions. If the light switch had triggered the explosion, then McClatchy’s task of rewiring a ceiling panel may have had something to do with it. How did that fit in? Jacobs scratched his head and plunked himself down into the chair behind his desk. He picked up the Boston phone book. It was heavy and bulky.

  The white pages listed only one doctor’s residence under the name of Lyme in Brookline.

  4

  At a few minutes past eleven on that Wednesday, the man with the thick glasses found himself once again above the suspended ceiling of the telephone utility room in Sub-level 2 of Pavilion C. He exchanged cassette tapes in the three voice-activated, auto-reverse machines that monitored conversations in the offices several floors up. Pocketing the tapes, he moved cautiously back toward the tunnel from which he had entered the dead space above the Armstrong paneling.

  These taped conversations had already proved invaluable to him. Knowing what your opponent was thinking was important. He knew, for instance, that the Director of Safety and Security spent the late mornings catching up on paperwork and dictating memos. This made the late morning ideal for work in the sub-levels of Pavilion C, because it indicated that at this hour the Security force was effectively on break. The Director of Safety and Security involved himself in every aspect of the mall’s security operations. He was the man to worry about.

  The bomber was anxious to hear the new tapes. Yesterday’s unexpected explosion threatened the entire operation, though there was no stopping now. He was committed to seeing this through.

  A game of cat and mouse seemed inevitable. They would do everything in their power to discover the person responsible for the explosion. He would do everything in his power to mislead them. With only a few days to go, he couldn’t be stopped.