The Concrete Pearl (29 page)

Now she had the barrel aimed dead ahead at her father and Stewart. The two partners stood shoulder to shoulder, hands raised in surrender like prisoners of war. The expression on Tina’s face had shifted from resolve to pure hatred. She struck an almost comic figure in tennis skirt, white sneakers, ped socks, white cropped acrylic top. The top exposed a belly that had given life to a baby she had no choice but to deliver dead.

“Put the gun down baby,” Marino said, yanking back on a lunging Sonny. “You don’t want to shoot your own father. Come on now sweet baby-doll, put the gun down…Please baby, please put the gun down …”

But Tina never wavered, never hesitated to thumb back the hammer and settle the pad of her manicured index finger on the trigger.

Stewart took a brave step forward.

“Tina,” she said, “think about what you’re doing…about what you’ll be giving up if you do this.”

Tina shook her head.

“I give up nothing I haven’t already sacrificed,” she said, voice strangely detached.

“You have a life, Tina,” Stewart softly smiled while slowly lowering her left hand, reaching out with it like a mother trying to console her daughter.

“I had a life,” Tina said. “It was inside of me. His name was Joseph.”

Marino’s face went pale, eyes glossy.

Stewart’s jaw dropped. She started crying…The Tiger Lady crying…

“Tina please,” she sobbed, the tears falling from her face. Like her Virginia accent, it was one hell of an act.

Farrell’s widow took a step forward.

There was a shot.

Peter’s face disappeared the split second before his body crumpled and dropped. Another shot followed and Sonny was put down for good. Then a third shot made certain Stewart exited this world right behind him.

Tina pulled back the pistol, opened her mouth and swallowed the barrel.

When the fourth and final shot followed so did all hope for the Marino Construction bloodline to be carried on.

Chapter 70

Uniformed APD surrounded the backyard of the Marino Construction Corporation in their vans and cruisers. Outside on the road, two state trooper cruisers, flashers flashing, blocked the entrance to the yard. EMTs washed my shivering body down with the cement truck hose. They took care of Spain’s facial wound as best they could. A forensic team photographed and recorded the scene of the murder/suicide along with Farrell’s frozen-in-time, half-exposed face. Soon, they’d have to hook up a ninety-pound jack hammer to a compressor, cut his body out of the footing, ship him off to be autopsied. Maybe they’d find a bullet hole somewhere on his body. A .9mm slug. A slug that didn’t take his life, but only wounded him, leaving him alive long enough for Marino to enact a classic construction vengeance on his son-in-law: burying him alive in raw ready mix.

Why he never bothered to finish the job of entombing the Golden Boy’s head I’ll never know. Maybe he left it exposed as a reminder to himself about never trusting a dumb-as-a-box-of-rocks-jock-star like Jimmy. Or maybe he left the head exposed because it made him feel good to look at it once in a while. Maybe that’s how much hatred Peter Marino had for his son-in-law, the man who stole both his daughter and Natalie. Or who knows, maybe the truck simply ran out of ready mix.

Not long after, Spain and I occupied the back of an EMS van, he not able to speak but his eyes screaming volumes. As we motored our way towards the Albany Medical Center, I got the feeling that he hadn’t any idea the extent to which the Farrell’s and the Marino’s had become corrupt when he first took on the job of spying on an adulterous Jimmy Farrell, and later a Farrell who cheated on asbestos removal.

As the hospital approached I knew that the whole truth and nothing but the truth was on its way to being spilled.

But not right away.

Chapter 71

I spent a full day in the hospital being treated for bruised ribs and lime burns before I was given the okay to go home.

But I didn’t leave for good.

Spain lost a couple of teeth and a whole lot of blood when the .22 caliber round tore through his left cheek. His lower left jaw was broken only in one place. However, his injuries were severe enough to require three full nights of forced hospitalization.

I spent considerable time at the hospital keeping him company while Tommy took care of something I did not have the stomach for: the closing of the Harrison Construction doors. That meant settling all debts, collecting all outstanding accounts receivable. The receivables alone neared the mid-six-figure range, most which we owed to the various subcontractors and material suppliers for PS 20, our lone project on the books. Plus, there were the outstanding OSHA fines and pending civil lawsuits.

But then something happened that changed everything.

Joel Clark received a call from the Albany School Board requesting that our contract to renovate and rehabilitate PS 20 be reinstated in the wake of Marino’s death. Not even another civil lawsuit lodged against Harrison Construction and A-1 Environmental Solutions on behalf of Nicolas Boni’s family could prevent us from finishing the job we’d started many months ago.

I’d been extended one final reprieve and I wasn’t about to blow it.

First item on the construction agenda?

A complete reevaluation of existing asbestos removal procedures. We’d also have to look into decontaminating the entire school facility of asbestos fibers—a costly but necessary job.

As the GC in charge of the project and as its health and safety manager, I would personally oversee every step of the final contaminate removal process. This time I would watch the job like the most hard-headed hawk you ever did see. Even if it meant sleeping onsite inside the construction trailer.

Three days after Spain was released from the hospital, Joel called me into his Pearl Street office to sign new revised contract documentation that would guarantee our reinstatement as the PS 20 general contractor. Tommy and I took the elevator up to his penthouse office, met up with the dapper lawyer over coffee and fancy pastry.

“I really should apologize for quitting on you, Spike,” Joel said while pouring the coffees and as we took side-by-side seats at the far end of a heavy safety glass conference table. Outside the floor-to-ceiling glass windows, we had a bird’s eye view of the port and the massive demolition project that Marino Construction had already initiated to make way for the Pearl Street Convention Center. Now that Marino was dead however, the project had come to a standstill. From what the local rumor mill was churning up, the venture would remain closed down until District Attorney Santiago had thoroughly investigated the records of Marino Construction and his now suspect connections with Albany Development Limited.

I sipped my coffee while Joel neatly laid out the new contracts in triplicate.

“You’re a construction lawyer, Joel,” I said. “Not a criminal attorney.”

I pulled a ballpoint pen from my work-shirt pocket and signed the first document. But in my mind I flashed back to two weeks ago. I recalled Joel standing alongside Marino and Stewart outside the PS 20 construction trailer the day I’d been tossed off the job. I recalled their happy smiley faces despite a major construction project that had been red-flagged due to an asbestos contamination. I recalled my records being confiscated before I had the chance to get at them. I recalled Joel asking me to hand-deliver the physical evidence I’d collected at the Desolation Kill public fishing access parking lot, including a spent .9mm brass cartridge; and I recalled the smell of Old Spice permeating the air of my apartment. Especially the bedroom. It was precisely the odor which filled my nose inside Joel’s penthouse office.

I sat back in my chair and looked up into the lawyer’s face.

“You were Marino’s lawyer weren’t you, Joel?”

His eyes blinked rapidly beneath round tortoise-shell glasses. Puffy cheeks filled with blood.

“Obviously you’re not my only client,” he said, his tone defensive. A little too defensive.

I turned, shot Tommy a glare over my left shoulder.

The former Viet Nam grunt raised up his right hand, extended an index finger, ran it across his neck. Sign language for Mr. Clark is finished with Harrison Construction.

I executed the final two contracts, dated them. Then I picked up all three copies, handed them over to Tommy.

“I’ll need one for my records,” Joel said.

I stood up, pushed out my chair.

“How much do you have invested in the new and improved Concrete Pearl?” I said.

Joel half smiled, shook his head.

“I’m not sure that’s any of your—”

“It is my business when you favor one client over another…So how much? Three, four, five million? Ten million?” A laugh. Bitter but sweet too. “Christ Joel, maybe you were in bed with Marino all along.”

He stood up, that half smile now replaced with a tight-lipped expression best described as false dignity. Joel had favored Marino Construction over my firm. He made sure the numerous lawsuits lodged against me last year were never resolved. What he had done was not only unethical, it was illegal. I might have been a hardheaded woman trying to survive in a man’s construction world, but I knew when a lawyer was trying to bury me alive—bury me so deep that another client would remain the number one construction firm in Albany—the very firm chosen to oversee the Construction Management for the Pearl Street Convention Center.

“Please listen to me Spike,” he said, altering his tone. “Here’s your shot at the big time. Marino is no more. We need a construction manager with your talent…We need the Harrison touch.”

Standing tall, he had the floor. Joel was the big-daddy lawyer. I was back to being the sixteen year old daddy’s girl playing construction worker. He really started to pour it on.

“Think of your father,” he said. “Think of his memory; your legacy. Think of all those pending lawsuits. With Stewart out of the way, OSHA will be up to its neck trying to find her replacement. They won’t be paying attention to your cases. In the meantime, I’ll take on the insurance agencies, make them settle for far less than they’re asking. Spike, I’ll make you my number one client. I’ll—”

“Fuck you, Joel,” I said.

The eyes beneath the tortoise shell lenses went wide. He was a lawyer after all. A proud member of the Albany Bar Association, Schuyler Meadows Country Club and the Albany Fort Orange Men’s Club. He also happened to be a resident of picture-perfect East Hills. Farrell’s neighbor, in fact. No one ever said “fuck you” to a lawyer like Joel. Especially a stupid, hard-headed girl like me.

“Excuse me?” he said.

“You heard me. You’ll be hearing from my new attorney.
She’ll
want all my records and files transferred to her offices immediately. In fact, she’ll want to go through all the paperwork you have pertaining to me and the firm’s pending lawsuits. She’ll want to make certain you’ve been defending me to the best of your ability while entertaining your relationship with Marino and your investment in the convention center.”

I stole another glance at Tommy.

“I have an idea, Tommy,” I added. “Maybe we should get Chris Collins on the phone, tell her about how back in April, Mr. Clark and Mr. Marino were going to strongly recommend that PS 20 be leveled along with its entire campus due to gross asbestos contamination. We’ll let her in on how they were also going to recommend to the Albany School Board that PS 20 be relocated somewhere else entirely, thereby making vacant the very last parcel of badly needed riverfront acreage along the Concrete Pearl. We’ll let Collins in on what had been Joel’s and Marino’s little secret: they had controlled Farrell all along. It was Marino who used Farrell as the front man for A-1 Environmental Solutions, made him submit a lowball price for the asbestos removal. He then made Jimmy purposely screw up the job in order to contaminate the school.

“For the first three phases he made certain that Analytical Labs and Stewart’s OSHA gave their
Good Housekeeping
seal of approval on the project. Because after all, Stewart too was a vested member of the Pearl Street Convention Center project. Stewart, Marino, Victor Dott and Joel Clark. That’s the
real
Albany Development Limited. A lawyer; the chief safety agent for upstate; a Lake Desolation landowner; and Albany’s largest construction firm all come together in a fool-proof development scheme to get rich beyond their most fucked-up-greedy dreams.

“Who’d bother to check up on such valued members of Albany society? Not even the School Board or the Albany Common Council would question them, especially after the Tiger Lady finally came down on me for gross asbestos negligence. I became the perfect patsy—the screw-up-her-daddy’s business, too stubborn to quit, broad. Not only that, I was jealous that Jimmy had formed a relationship with Natalie Barnes. Not only was I furious with him for leaving me holding the contaminated bag for PS 20, but he was sleeping with Natalie. I wanted him dead. I wanted him dead in the worst way.”

Joel’s clean-shaven face turned as white as the paper my useless PS 20 contracts were printed on.

Tommy turned, but not before shouting, “The jig is up counselor!”

Good old Tommy. I got the feeling he’d been waiting for a moment like this since Tricky Dick Nixon tossed him into the Tet Offensive.

“How close am I to the truth, Joel? You set me up to take the heat away from Marino and the rest of your Albany Development Limited operation. By shifting the blame onto me, you were free to run with the new Pearl Street. Together you were going to bypass the common council. You weren’t going to give the school board a chance to fight it. And why would they? Their PS 20 was contaminated now. A child was dying because of it. It would cost too much to clean it up. Who needs eminent domain when the property is poisoned?

“You people—Albany Development Limited—were going to tear down the Concrete Pearl and build it right back up with businesses that would make you more filthy than you already are. You were then going to launder the profits by investing them under a new name in a second development at Lake Desolation. But only after poisoning the water so that property values plummeted and you could buy out the entire lake for dirt cheap. But what you didn’t count on, counselor, was Spain and me teaming up to go after the truth.”