Summerkill (24 page)

“Tell me in minutes how much sleep you got last night.”

“Never mind.” He distributed the contents of the skillet onto two plates, carried them over, and sat down. “I was going through
that Hudson Heights material, trying come up with things for you to think about.”

“Such as?”

“You said you three were talking about innocent deceptions Monday night. How about not-so-innocent deceptions? The overall
main area of concern about Hudson Heights was the environment, right? Could there be something they’ve misrepresented as being
environmentally sound? Something critical they agreed to do but are trying to sneak out of? How about a big negative turning
up unexpectedly, that they’re desperate to hide?”

“All possibles, I guess, though the middle one would be hard to bring off, with the kind of spotlight they’re in. Do you have
any specific pointers?”

“That’s your assignment. Start from day one, think about things that got changed. Things that went wrong.”

“How about this?” I countered quickly. “I’m familiar enough with the project, it shouldn’t take me more than a couple of hours,
tops, to flag and at least scan all the pertinent environmental sections. I’ll work up a time line, a graphics sequence. This
might give us both a better sense of how to proceed than having me start with Big Black Binder Number One and plod on through—how
many of them are there?”

“Twenty-three, I think I counted.” He smiled, resigned. “Realistically, many more than you’re going to suffer at one sitting.
Okay, deal. I’ll pop back around here between nine and ten.” He picked up his plate, which I was surprised to discover was
empty, mine being relatively untouched, and rose. “I’ve got to get going. All the Hudson Heights stuff is in my study. Give
me the keys to the Bronco. I’ll move it around behind the garage.”

“I can take care of that.”

“It’s no trouble.”

“Yeah, but this way I get to keep my keys. See you later.”

It was hard to even think of settling down in such a dense atmosphere, but after a bit I did venture beyond the kitchen to
locate his study. It had a comfortable enough chair and a view out into a back yard that looked to be mostly baseball diamond.
It did not have what I would mean by “all the Hudson Heights stuff”—twenty-three binders, yes, but not a single rolled-up
site plan. Scratch the graphic history, for the time being. I had much too much paper to process.

I kept squirming, wanting more air and fewer heavy black binders around me. But a deal was a deal.

When Baxter reappeared around a quarter to ten I was ready, though not usefully enlightened. There’d been time to stretch
my legs and make a closer inspection of all that furniture, glance into the garage he’d converted into a woodworking shop.
Only his bedroom escaped being crowded. The man definitely needed a bigger house.

I’d set up shop on the kitchen table, arranging the yellow Post-it-flagged binders in three stacks that I’d mentally labeled
“Possibly worth checking out more closely”; “Doubtful, but if you still haven’t come up with anything”; and “Only in desperation.”

“You look organized” was Baxter’s comment upon sitting down. “Any breakthroughs?”

“Maybe some vague directions. First I want to know what’s happening about Mariah.”

“Our evidence samples have gone to the state Violent Crimes Lab. Neighbors and friends are being interviewed, Steve’s up in
Albany taking her picture around. My phone company contact won’t be in the office till this afternoon. Phil Thomson sounds
borderline hyper. He’s trying for the position that Mariah died accidentally and the two deaths are not connected. He’d like
me to try for it, too.”

“Even with the marks on her shoulders and the lack of fingerprints?”

“Even with. He’s storming my office at eleven, so we’d better get going on this Hudson Heights stuff. For starters, why is
there so damn much of it?”

“Your short answer is, because in the last decade or so there’ve gotten to be so many regulations. And regulators. They all
want to make sure their tails are covered.”

“Are we sure this works better than underregulation?”

“Not any of the ‘we’s’ I associate with. Maybe if the communications were better. There are a lot of big-bucks professionals
out there who cannot tell you in words—either aloud or in print—what the charts and diagrams and graphs they’re so fond of
are supposed to show. And, even with the best of intentions, petitioners often misinterpret or fail to address aspects of
the pertinent local laws. They’re scarcely models of clarity either and usually haven’t been codified in decades. Then, on
a project as big as Hudson Heights you’re bound to have at least one state agency involved and probably several groups intervening,
all with agendas that aren’t clearly spelled out and tend to be changeable on short notice. So eventually you end up with
twenty-three thick binders crammed full of tail-covering materials that may or may not be either true or pertinent. And a
bottom-line yes or no that is more likely to come out of lawyers’ conferences than public hearings, and to be based more on
political fashions and game strategies than on what most people would think of as the public interest.”

He laughed. “That’s the time-honored American formula for deriving bottom lines, Val; we just used to get there quicker and
cheaper. So you’re telling me this much paperwork is normal for a project the size of Hudson Heights?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“And you’re not optimistic about finding any revelations in those twenty-three binders?”

“Not intentional ones. It might be easier to spot something that went off-line from the site plans. The big planning diagrams,
with all the specs on them? Sort of like blue-prints—of course there’ll be those, too, for the buildings. This project must
have had a dozen site plans, at least, from first to last. Where did you get the binders?”

“I have an in at the town planning board. My dad’s in his fourth term.”

“They’ll have the site plans on file, too. I can run out and pick them up after we finish.”

“That’s not a wonderful idea. How long do you think it would take for some people who might get really upset about it to learn
what you walked out with? Dad’s got a key to the office. He can pick them up tonight.”

“Twenty-three binders and a big bundle of site plans will leave a noticeable hole no matter who makes it.”

“We do not, however, have to advertise who makes it. Now, what have you got for me so far?”

“How strong are you on the history of the site? Before Clete.”

“Does it have much history? The bulk of acreage was in the Babcock family for I don’t know how many generations; Toby and
his brother Ben were the last of the line. The land was mostly either farmed or undeveloped, and I doubt farming was ever
much more than a break-even proposition. There was some logging on Crane Hill back in the thirties, and those industrial-waste
dumpsites they rented out in the forties must’ve brought in welcome bucks. And I guess the gravel mine, where the quarry pond
is now, did okay for a decade or so. All along the area was prime hunting territory: deer, rabbits, pheasants. Of course that
was just seasonal income. When Clete came along and offered to put some serious money in old Toby’s hands, I doubt he put
up much resistance.”

“You’re good. Toby Babcock kept a bunch of records, including rough maps of the dumpsites and a partial list of what went
into them. Also lists of hunting parties and what he charged them. He died not long after selling the property to Clete, and
by the time Hudson Heights was proposed his brother was pretty much out of it. Mariah and her committee people visited Ben
Babcock several times, trying to extract something in the background of the property they could use. Usually he couldn’t even
remember his name. My point is, there isn’t much history to go by, at least that we know or probably ever will. As for changes
after Clete took title— well, obviously the most glaring one was when he took something like thirty vertical feet off the
top of Crane Hill.”

“I still think that should’ve been illegal.”

“On what grounds? Crane Hill might have been the highest spot in the county—it still is, for that matter—but no level of government
was protecting it as such. It was on private property in an area with no zoning in place, and the change didn’t impact anybody
else’s property. Making a hill a little shorter did not violate any federal or state land-use restriction. Clete was too shrewd
to wait and try to do it after the development application was submitted. That would have led to a major stall, not to mention
a flood of lousy publicity. As a private property owner he had every right to quietly turn his hill into a plateau, and if
some people got offended, so what?”

“Oh, I understand. There’s nothing wrong with Clete’s grasp of political realities. My question is, was this the only reason
for his timetable? Might there have been something about that hill he needed to hide, disguise, in some way fix before anybody
got a chance to take a good look at it?”

“It would be good to run that past Skip. He reads land really well.”

“So must you, for your rehab business.”

“What I read mainly is surfaces, contours. Skip’s got a feel for the underpinnings. Subsurfaces and structures surprise most
of us in the business from time to time. Him, hardly ever. I don’t know that he’s ever looked at the Hudson Heights plateau
from the angle of what Clete might be trying to cover up, but there are several things about it he made clear he didn’t like.”

“Such as?”

“First of all, taking so much off the top of Crane Hill. Skip thinks the violence of the procedure could have caused an internal
imbalance, though it might take a while to manifest and he can’t begin to guess how it would show. He and Thurman had some
friendly theoretical arguments over that.”

“Working for Clete, Thurman could hardly have been open to such an idea.”

“Maybe not officially, but Thurman’s into geological truths. When I had a problem with part of a paved path that kept buckling,
he estimated the cause might be an unstable rock pocket and dug down to find it.”

“Then there was something to Skip’s theory.”

“Well, maybe, but we’re talking a very small area, no more than three by six feet. As far as I know there haven’t been any
other instances of that sort of problem. Skip also thinks that trucking in so much fill to push out the sides of the plateau
is bound to lead to stability problems.”

“You’re suggesting the country club building or the inn could start sagging in the middle? Maybe even collapse?”

“God, no, nothing that dramatic. Those buildings are both oriented to the cliffs on the river side, which thank goodness couldn’t
be built out. The topping-off exposed a mostly rocky surface. It was a bitch to set that lower level of the country club into,
but except for that one little problem area it’s proved very stable, though hardly user-friendly from a landscaping perspective.
We had to—you could say ‘veneer’—with several feet of topsoil, to be able to plant.”

“You couldn’t just put back some of the soil they took off when they scalped the hill?”

“It’s too rocky. That soil got pushed off the inland-oriented facings of the hill, where they increased the surface area by
building up from below. There’s a lot of imported fill in those areas, too. In some places the outside twenty feet or so of
current surface is pretty much that. They’ll be vulnerable to serious erosion until the anchoring vegetation takes hold and
grows a little.

“You asked for something that went wrong? Back in June Johnny Armitage screwed up on the degree of slope for one section of
that fill area and cut it too steep. Afterward it rained for two days straight and the hill shrank about ten feet. Plus there
was a whole lot of mud down where they were installing the tennis courts.”

“Could this go as a serious potential problem?”

“It goes as human error, if you want to call Johnny human. It just made a big mess and frayed a few tempers, including mine.
Skip wasn’t worried about the edges, anyhow. The area he’s concerned about is farther in—the parking lot, basically—where
there was enough reshaping and filling out that the land needs a few years to finish settling. He says paving it over and
driving cars around on it right away is begging for excessive ongoing maintenance. Skip wouldn’t have put the parking lot
there, to start with, for aesthetic reasons. Neither would the architect. They’d both have brought the pool and tennis courts
up top and restricted cars to the lower level, which is a natural terrace, somewhat enhanced. But they weren’t paying the
bills, and it’s Clete’s perception that most people would rather be near their vehicles than their secondary recreational
facilities.”

“Is there any chance the parking lot’s unsafe?”

“Not according to the engineers. That is very thick concrete they’ve used for paving, and they expect it to act like a press,
to compact what’s underneath. They concede it might crack in a few places the first couple of years, but that should be it.
We’ll see, I guess. The other thing Skip objected to about the plateau was the drainage system. It’s set up so that accumulating
groundwater is channeled down to the quarry pond area. Most environmentally conscious designs today go with holding basins,
which you can draw from when you need to water. For the plateau, water has to be pumped up.”

“Do you know why they went with the pumping system?”

“As far as expenses go, it would have been pretty much a wash. With our annual rainfall, you’d have needed an auxiliary pumping
system anyhow. Clete didn’t like the idea of having stagnant water up there, breeding mosquitoes and God knows what else.
Now that we’ve got the West Nile virus scare, it’s looking like a prudent decision.”

“As he’s no doubt pointed out.”

“Loudly and often. As far as the plateau is concerned, everything else I can think of that got summarily changed, from the
number of stalls in the ladies’ locker room to size of the pavers along the entranceway, could be attributed to Clete’s second
thoughts. As for what went wrong—really nothing special. I can keep looking, but I don’t have much idea where.”