The Glass Factory (36 page)

And of course all those mob sitdowns were about splitting the “rights” to poison the territory with their illegal toxic waste dumping. How’s
that
for a PR nightmare, Mr. Gates? I give odds he’ll last about two seconds before he tells them everything he knows.

Now here’s the funny part. Morse has
nothing
to do with that eight-year-old mob murder whatsoever. He’s completely clean in that regard. But when Van initiates a full-scale investigation of the site, something funny happens.

The police start sifting through the ashes at Shore Oaks. They find the charred remains of $50,000 in cash—or rather, in ash—and they’re well on their way to finding more. I turn in those text fragments I found at the site. I don’t know if they’ll do any good, but they sure help slow things down. Morse is screaming for them to finish and get out, but sifting eight-year-old ashes for possible clues to a murder takes a couple of weeks and you know what? The bank pulls out of Morse’s Shore Oaks deal, too, and then his whole empire starts coming apart at the seams.

It appears that Mr. Samuel Morse was leveraged to the eyebrows, and the two deals that have just been killed cut the rope from under him, leaving him dangling. Creditors start lining up to take shots at him, and the biggest blow of all lands three days after the cops seal off Shore Oaks: Unisystems sues Morse for $300 million for “massive fraud.” It seems that he had an elaborate scam going that I stumbled onto but couldn’t do anything about. Unisystems would lend him money so he could get the computers “customized” for a special foreign market. He would send them copies of the customs invoices with the computers’ serial numbers on them, plus the exporter’s bills of lading and the importer’s receipts as proof of sale. Satisfied, the company would lend him another $10 million and it would all go ’round again. But the fancy, customized computers were never shipped, because they never existed. Morse sent off-the-rack stuff and pocketed the difference. And you don’t fuck with Unisystems, even if your name is Morse. It makes the front page of the
New York Times.

The auditors say they can’t imagine how he kept it up this long (nearly five years). The townspeople refuse to believe it—not the man who endowed the Little League team! And they defend him! Wait, there’s more: Morse says the Feds can’t touch him because so many little people depend on him for their incomes. So the Feds move in to seize his assets and prevent him from closing down: his one insurance policy with the county was the number of jobs he provided. Now he’s got nothing, and suddenly all kinds of slime starts to ooze out. Rather than spend a few thousand dollars per load disposing of chemical waste properly, he spent a few hundred and had the mob-controlled carters dump it in the regular landfills, where it leached into the groundwater. Multiply that by a few thousand shipments and you get profit in the millions. But now the water in Old Town is threatened, and
that
turns the county irrevocably against him. They move in like sharks on a dead hippo.
Everyone
wants a piece of him and there’s enough to go around.

Some serious probing begins, and a few days later Morse turns up on the front page of
Newsday:
Remember that incredible deal Morse swung, buying up farmland and reselling it for condo development at a huge profit? Well, it turns out the owner of the farmland had been trying
for years
to get the property rezoned, but the local politicians always blocked it. The owner finally gave up, sold it cheap to Morse, who paid off all the necessary people and got his highly profitable rezoning in a
snap.
The investigation eventually implicates several town and county officials, but nothing much happens to them. Something tells me Morse will survive this, too. His kind always does.

And some state officials apparently got “cut-rate” computer services from him, like a mainframe Unisystems 9000 for five dollars. Could this
possibly
have been in exchange for some services? Van tells me the fools made the mistake of shredding only the incriminating documents: That’s how he knew they were incriminating. Won’t they ever learn?

One thing after another hits, as if by divine intervention. Having tried to work a deal with the Feds, Morse has gone to see all of his old county clients and asked them to discuss all their old deals while he was wired for sound. I figure he’s got a few weeks to live if he keeps this up.

And a line of women make the front page of
Newsday
(again) speaking out at a town meeting, mad as hell, asking, Why is there so much breast cancer on Long Island, and, Is it true that it might be the contaminated groundwater?

Gina digs up the tidbit that Morse’s mob friends used to get rid of PCB-contaminated waste oil for him by carting it into New York City and selling it to fuel oil distributors, who sold it to furnace owners who unknowingly exposed the entire Metropolitan area to toxic fumes for five years—all during the time I was there trying to raise Antonia in a drug-free apartment. And lest we become complacent, the state government admits that they may have caught Morse, but they are generally powerless against this type of environmental crime.

One good thing comes in the mail:

Dear Ms. Buscarsela [Hey: They got my name right this time]:
Recently you were notified of the existence of a report of suspected child abuse or maltreatment under the above registry number. The original notification explained that the matter was under investigation.
      We can now inform you that as a result of the assessment made by the local Child Protective Service, no credible evidence was found to believe that the child(ren) has been abused or maltreated. The report has, therefore, been considered “unfounded.”
      In accordance with the law, all information that in any way would identify persons named in this report has been expunged (erased) from the New York State Child Abuse and Maltreatment register. The local Child Protective Service has also been notified to expunge all such identifying information from the local child abuse and maltreatment register.
Sincerely,
Director of State Operations
New York State Department of Social Services

Hot damn! Morse is dead in the water and I’m off the hook! Call up the Devil and see if he wants to borrow my snow boots!

I’m sending a telegram to Ecuador, packing our bags and going back home. Colomba lends me the money for the tickets. I call Stan.

“Don’t go,” he says. “You need therapy. It’ll lengthen your life.”

“Longer life of this quality I don’t need. You dig?”

“Yeah. When are you leaving?”

“Not for a couple of days.”

“Let’s get together. Let’s talk.”

“Okay, sure.”

I read in the paper all about how the Feds are dismantling Morse’s empire. Who would have thought his empire was made of glass? Three hundred million dollars owed and zero assets! How is that possible? He owned everything! Swimming pool construction, yacht sales, computers, trash hauling, restaurants, housing developments, condos, research parks, doctors’ offices, medical labs.

Medical labs? I read and reread the paragraph. A Fairhaven Town commercial medical lab called Prolex owned and operated by a Morse subsidiary of a Morse subsidiary did throat cultures, tissue analysis, pathology—
biopsies.

I call Stan back and they tell me he’s on call. I tell them to page him then, this is a life-or-death emergency. They find him. I ask, “What lab did my biopsy sample go to?”

“I don’t know, wherever the staff sent it.”

“Could you check?”

“Sure, but why?”

“Just check.”

After a while he comes back: “Prolex.”

“Wait for me. I’ll be right over.”

Stan gets another in-house sample from my chest and analyzes it himself (against his ethics, of course).

The verdict: “It’s benign. We can remove it and with treatment and maintenance you should be okay. They deliberately falsified lab results! That’s an outrage! That’s a crime!”

“Yeah …”

“But I need to tell you, it’s not over. There’s the potential for more tumor growth,” he cautions me. “You’ll have to keep an eye on this for the rest of your life.”

“Which could be?”

“Oh, thirty or forty years, I should hope.”

I hold Antonia to me and thank God, from one end of my soul to the other:
“Gracias a Dios.”

“Well, I like to think I had something to do with it. Filomena, I—I realize we come from—very different backgrounds. After all,
Scientific American
was bathroom reading in my parents’ house. But won’t you reconsider?”

“Reconsider what?”

“Staying here. With me.”

“I don’t know. It wouldn’t be good for your career to be living with a convicted felon. In fact, I’d better blow before they get me. Now that Morse is going down I doubt our deal’s still in effect.”

“What deal?”

“Oh, nothing.”

“But you need treatment, operations, constant monitoring—”

“We’ve got doctors in Ecuador, too, you know. Listen, you,” I say pulling him towards me. “You’ve got the means. I’ll write when I get there, and you can come visit me any time you want. Sound good?”

“I guess it’ll have to do.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“Okay: It sounds good.”

We kiss. He says, “It’ll be at least five weeks before I can take any time off. I’ll have to start planning now.”

“Well plan, boy, plan.” We kiss again. “We’ll have more to say to each other in five weeks, anyway. What am I going to do here, sit around and watch TV?”

“Why Ecuador?”

“God answered my prayers, and I have to live up to that now. What else can I do? Sit around and rub Morse’s nose in broken glass?” We kiss. A long, good-bye kiss.

I leave the room floating on air. Life! Life! Thank you, Lord, thank you. For the good and the bad. For giving Antonia a mother. Together you and I have really accomplished something here this day.

And God? Thank you for the joys of sex, too. One of your better ideas.

But I stop. The cops have brought in a middle-aged man who looks too weak and distracted to need the two armed guards who are watching his flanks. Never be indifferent when other people need you. I go up and ask the cops what’s going on. They say they just pulled the guy off a bridge. No job, a failing marriage, he decided on suicide. Now they have to bring him in for psychiatric observation.

“You mind?”

“Go ahead.”

I walk over to the guy and tell him, “I just got over lung cancer. Everyone told me I was dead. But I kept fighting. Now look at me. Doc says I could go on for another thirty, forty years. You hear that? Don’t ever give up. Never.”

He smiles. “Thanks.”

“It’s nothing. I owe this place one.”

I take Antonia outside and breathe deeply.

“Smell that, Toni?—Clean air, blue sky, green trees? That’s life, Toni, life.
Es tan preciosa como lo eres tú.”
It’s as precious as you are.

As for the mortal fears—Well, I guess I’ll always have them.

Colomba calls a cab for us, and Billy says he’s applying to the University at Running River, thanks to me building up his self-esteem a bit. “Good.” I recommend Kelly Hughes’s intro course to women in literature: “Guaranteed to shake up your perception of reality.” And he hers.

We all kiss and hug and say goodbye and then we’re off, driving past the long lines at the lottery store. One step ahead of the Feds.

I haven’t seen the Andes in the longest time. The mountain air will do me good.

I’m sure someone in Ecuador needs my help.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to Alison Hess and Virginia Capon of the U.S. EPA for their war stories, and to everyone at PM Press for their help bringing this series back to life, even if it means taking time off every now and then from plotting the revolution to publish all the terrific books in their catalog.

“Just Like a Boy” first appeared in
Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine,
August 2001. Narrated by Filomena’s daughter, Antonia, a twelve-year-old seventh-grader at the time of the events, it was written before the whole kids-bringing-guns-to-school issue really took over the national consciousness as a frequent or likely occurrence, so some of the story elements might need a bit of an update today. But—unfortunately—most of the issues relating to gender roles and expectations appear to be with us for quite some time.

JUST LIKE A BOY

Capacity for the nobler feelings is in most natures a very tender plant, easily killed, not only by hostile influences, but by mere want of sustenance; and in the majority of young persons it speedily dies away if [their position in life] and the society into which it has thrown them are not favorable.
—John Stuart Mill,
Utilitarianism