The Ragman's Memory (32 page)

“Is that illegal?” I asked.

J.P. looked vaguely uncomfortable. To a man who found pleasure poking through hair samples, bloodstains, fingerprints, and other minutiae, the amorphous world of finance lacked the absolutes he relied on.

Sheila Kelly sensed his dilemma and smoothly took over. “The best answer to that is probably historical. When Gene Lacaille first came up with the idea for a convention center, he had about a million dollars to invest. He already owned the land free and clear—inherited from his father. As we all know, support for the idea was fast and broad-based, including from the Chambers brothers. The biggest problem from the start, however, was financing. Gene was willing to commit to three million altogether, one up front, and two more to be generated from the Keene mall he was just completing. The State of Vermont was sweet-talked into providing two million more, to be funneled through Lou Adelman’s office of community development, in the form of a grant that then became a municipal loan. And the Bank of Brattleboro was approached for the remaining ten.”

Sheila stretched her long legs out in front of her, settling in more comfortably. “The problem was, for a bank to make a ten million dollar loan, it has to have total assets of some two billion, based on a conservative ratio that came out of all those bank failures in the go-go eighties, when people were loaning way more than their banks could afford to lose. The Bank of Brattleboro has nowhere near those kinds of assets. The best it could put up was five million, and even then Matson, the president, was probably pushing it.”

“What about the board of directors?” I asked.

“Good question. The board at B of B is the old-fashioned type, pretty rare nowadays, mostly made up of prominent local people with little or no banking background or knowledge. It’s almost utterly dependent on the president for its decision-making.

“The obvious solution in a situation like what Matson was facing is to bring in as many additional banks as necessary to make up the difference. That’s what he did, but with the unusual proviso that the commitments be made in a tiered fashion, rather than as a pool, so that B of B’s five million would be spent before the other banks had to pitch in. This might’ve been a show of Matson’s faith in the project—or it could’ve been a careful strategy on Chambers’s part. In any case, it worked, and once the permits were secured, it was full steam ahead.”

“Until the Keene shopping mall project was stopped dead in its tracks,” I filled in.

“Correct,” Sheila said. “That was supposed to have been completed in time to finance Lacaille’s investment in the convention center. But once some PCB pollutants mysteriously surfaced at the Keene site, everything was turned on its ear. Not only was it going to cost Lacaille a fortune to clean up the PCBs, but the revenue he was counting on was history—the EPA and the state of New Hampshire’s pollution people saw to that. Matson tried his damnedest to get Lacaille to hang on to the property, but Gene was no longer interested. He was doing all he could just to stay afloat. The convention center had become a pair of cement shoes.”

“Enter NeverTom?” I asked.

“Well, yes and no. NeverTom had been in it from the start. We heard he’d gotten Matson to stick his neck out for B of B’s commitment of five million, even though Matson had initially been cool to the idea. In fact, that’s an area where Matson might have some interesting things to say, since Chambers’s public encouragement could easily have become private coercion with nobody being the wiser. The neat coincidence though, is that by the time Lacaille had to pull out, NeverTom was a selectman and could rally the public to force Matson to come up with a fast solution. You see, normally, when a bank gets handed a white elephant by a bankrupt developer, it takes its time putting together the best substitute deal it possibly can, quoting the interests of the stockholders all the way. But not in this case.”

“Because of local political pressure,” I stated flatly, reliving the recent past from a whole new perspective.

“Local
and
state,” Sheila agreed. “Don’t forget that the state had a vested interest, too. The governor picked up the phone a few times to remind people of that. At which point, Ben Chambers suddenly appeared out of the blue, almost as soon as the project got stalled, and offered Matson a fused deal—meaning it was tied to a deadline. His three-part proposal was that the bank, having by now invested four million, forfeit one of them; that the town, having spent both of its millions, forfeit one also; and that Lacaille sign over all his interests to Ben, including the land, worth close to another million. In exchange, Ben would assume some twelve million in loans by the date of completion, having acquired almost four million in equity without spending a dime of his own. The catch was that the fuse would burn for one month only—Matson and company had only thirty days to beat the deal, or Ben would retire his offer.”

“So Matson sat on his hands for one month and signed on the dotted line?” I suggested.

“No way,” she protested. “He would’ve been crucified. Not only would the other banks have jumped on him, not to mention his own stockholders, but the feds would’ve, too. No, he and his officers all busted their humps looking for an alternate white knight, but Ben’s offer had an element no one else would match, and which was too politically volatile to ignore. His proviso that the town would have to eat half of its two-million-dollar loan was actually a pure gimme—a gift of a million bucks. Any other white knight would’ve told the town to eat it—why pay for somebody else’s mistake? By coming up with that gimmick, Ben all but guaranteed himself success. That one million had nothing to do with the bank, but it had everything to do with good will, and the bank didn’t want to look so mercenary that it would willingly stiff the town—and through the town the state and our telephoning governor—for that huge an amount. It was very cleverly done.”

“The time fuse also worked in Ben’s favor,” J.P. added, “because Carroll Construction still had its equipment on site. Had the bank delayed, Carroll would’ve packed up and left, and the bank would’ve had an even tougher package to sell.”

I was rubbing my forehead. I had never been big on finances, figures, or even talk about banks. “So Ben Chambers got something for nothing. But he did assume twelve million dollars of debt. Why’s that such a great deal?”

“Because he’ll sell it in the end,” Sheila said simply, “and possibly triple his current net worth. In this state, that would transform him from a local rich guy to a major player, especially if his brother keeps climbing the political ladder and ends up in Montpelier or Washington.”

The ambition of the scheme filled the room. “All right,” I finally said, “but what laws have been broken? Or if nothing else, what rocks do we look under, besides sweating Harold Matson and hoping he fingers NeverTom?”

“We’ve got some other options,” J.P. said with a small smile, “the best being the pollution in Keene.”

I raised my eyebrows, and Sheila joined in. “J.P. gets full credit for this one—what caught us there was the timing. Not only was the mall about to open, and supply Gene Lacaille with a steady cash flow, but the B of B half of the funding was about to run out. The partner banks were just about to step up to the plate. Had that happened, the weight of the decision about which white knight to accept would have shifted from Matson to them. Plus, they might’ve put their investigators to work if they’d smelled something fishy. We called a couple of those banks yesterday, and asked them if they’d gotten sweaty palms at the time. The answer, of course, was no—since they hadn’t invested a nickel so far, they wouldn’t have cared if it had gone belly-up.”

“The kicker,” J.P. continued, “is that the Keene mall closed down because someone made an anonymous phone call. No PCB would’ve been found otherwise, and the quantities the EPA has located are randomly and widely spaced.”

“As if they’d been planted,” I suggested, caught by the mention of yet another signature phone call to the press.

“Exactly.”

“How easy is PCB to get?” I asked.

“It’s all over the place,” J.P. answered. “Most of the industrial motor oil used fifteen years ago contained the stuff—that means almost every transformer or capacitor made from the early fifties to the late seventies. PCBs were added to oil as a stabilizer so it wouldn’t break down in violent temperature changes. Tons of your older motors are full of it—even some water well pumps, if you like irony. Not only that, but because of its very design, PCB is basically permanent—it doesn’t degrade. The only way to dispose of it is either through environmentally safe incineration or legally sanctioned storage, both of which are incredibly expensive. That’s what’s killing Lacaille right now.

“To answer your question, the reason it’s so easy to get hold of is that lots of people—in electrical supplies, for example—have just opted to park whatever contaminated equipment they might have in a back room somewhere, and ignore disposing of it altogether. You could also find an old transformer and drain it, if push came to shove.”

“How much are we talking about?” I asked, my imagination suddenly stimulated by this last statement.

“Twenty-five gallons, tops. One man in a pickup, driving around that site for an hour, dropping a little here, a little there, would do the trick. PCB contamination is quantified at fifty parts per million. That’s not much. In fact, nowadays, you wouldn’t need any at all. PCB is such a buzzword that the phone call alone would’ve been enough to temporarily stop construction—of course, whoever did this wanted more than that.”

“And the phone call was made how?” I asked.

“To the
Keene Sentinel
, on the morning of January tenth.”

My smile matched their own. “And if I’d just spent the evening creeping around spiking a building site, I’d make sure people knew about it first thing.”

“Meaning the PCB was probably dumped the night of the ninth,”

J.P. concluded. “And that if the call was made from here,” Sheila added, “it’ll appear on somebody’s long-distance phone bill.”

“All right,” I said. “Get it all into a report, and tell Sammie about that date. She’s putting together a time line, and we can all cross our fingers that one of the alibis we have on file will fall apart right there.”

They both stood and prepared to leave. “I also think,” I added, stopping them, “if you’re comfortable with the idea, that you ought to bring in Harold Matson for a talk—sweat him a little. If you do, make sure he knows he doesn’t have to say anything, and that he can have a lawyer present if he wants one. You’ll need to coordinate what time you can use the interview room with Sammie—she’s pulling in Eddy Knox this afternoon.”

They both nodded, their faces reflecting their pleasure at the offer.

Interviews of this importance were usually handled by the other members of the detective squad and rarely by anyone from Patrol. J.P. had always shied away from them in the past, preferring his world of scientific detachment. Reading his expression now, I was glad to be giving him another shot.

· · ·

Gail’s usually cool demeanor fractured at the notion. “Joe, for crying out loud.”

“It’s got to be an old cat, or a dog—anything that’ll just sit there and be petted.”

“Are you sure he saw anything?”

“In my gut? Yes. But we’ve got to get it out of him.”

“And my looking like his daughter and holding a cat will do that?”

“No—he gets to hold the cat. We’ve got to win him over as much as possible—make him feel secure.”

I could hear her switching the phone from one ear to the other. “Joe, I’d like to help, but there have got to be other dark-haired women with more time on their hands than me right now.”

“I cleared it with Derby.”

There was a stunned silence, so I added diplomatically, “He said it was entirely up to you, but that whatever you were doing could wait an hour or so.”

“Oh, right,” she said sarcastically, “that’s not what I hear.”

I kept quiet, trusting her to look fairly at the issue without further prodding.

“When do you want this done?” she finally said wearily.

“The orderly just called me from the home and said Bernie had pretty much settled down. His name’s Harry. He’ll be waiting for you on the second floor.”

“And you just want me to be chummy, right? No pointed questions?”

“Right—this is purely an icebreaker. The real meeting will be with the shrink later on, tomorrow if we’re lucky. If not, I might ask you to do it again, just to build on the relationship. Would that be all right?”

She let out a short laugh. “Sure, what the hell? Maybe some time with an ancient nut case’ll give me a glimpse of things to come.”

· · ·

Harriet’s detached voice over the intercom brought my attention to one of the blinking lights on the phone. “Gunther,” I answered, punching the button.

“It’s Sol,” he said breathlessly. “I lost Hennessy. He must’ve spotted me.”

“Where are you?”

“At the gas station where High meets Green. I followed him into the Chestnut Reservoir area, but I had to give him room so he wouldn’t—”

“Don’t worry about it. Get back in your car, switch to the private channel, and stay put.”

I ran out, forgetting my coat, and made for my own car as fast as the slippery ground allowed. I noticed for the first time that it must have been snowing for at least an hour—in big, fat, mesmerizing flakes.

As soon as I started the car, I changed over to the closed radio frequency we didn’t share with the half-million scanner listeners I was convinced inhabited the area. “M-80 from O-3. Contact any units in the Birge Street area to be on the lookout for any vehicles registered to Paul Hennessy or Virginia Levasseur. Sol Stennis is standing by with a description of Hennessy’s car. Get hold of Ron for what Levasseur might be driving or call it up on the computer. No unit is to pursue. I just want their location reported if spotted.”

I dropped the mike into my lap to better negotiate the corner onto Grove Street, heading toward Main, and hit the toggle to the blue emergency strobes hidden behind the car’s front grille. Without them, I knew the traffic would never let me onto Main, and I had a fair distance to cover fast.