by David Ellis
“Next topic,” I suggested.
“I’m drunk is the next topic.” Shauna eased herself down to the carpet. “On a weeknight.”
“There, there, pet.” I stroked her hair. I played some of my early favorites—“Harborcoat” twice, then “Wolves, Lower”—and Shauna grew quiet, her body rising and falling with ease.
“Next year’ll be better, Jase,” she mumbled. I’d thought she was down for the count. I tried to coax her up and, failing that, lifted her up and carried her to her bedroom. She smiled and moaned with pleasure when her face touched the cool pillow. Moments later she was in a deep slumber. I kissed my hand and planted it on her forehead, then went back to the living room and played the same songs all over again.
18
THE FOLLOWING WEEK, I REPORTED FOR DUTY AT THE state building. An efficient older woman showed me into a small office that I’d be able to use. She showered me with forms to fill out and various bureaucratic idiosyncrasies (I had to take an ethics test; I had to promise to disclose any securities I might sell) and left me for a couple of hours. I had about twenty questions about what I was filling out, but I just did the best I could, or left something blank, figuring they knew where to find me if there was a problem.
The last document I came upon was a confidentiality agreement. I had to swear that I would keep all official business confidential, and that I would not remove any items from the state office. It put a little acid into my stomach to sign it, but it made sense that an office that oversaw hundreds of millions of dollars in state contracts might want to keep the wall up at all times.
The day before, I’d put in a call to Jon Soliday, a lawyer I knew in state government. He was the lawyer for Senate Majority Leader Grant Tully, his lifelong friend. Jon was one of these friends of a friend, but he’d always seemed like a pretty straight-up guy. More recently, I’d come into contact with Jon by virtue of Hector Almundo’s prosecution. Nothing hot and heavy, just some general background information from Jon about things the senate did, and some questions he’d had for me, always deliberately vague. I’d sensed that Jon hadn’t wanted to get too close to the hot iron. I’d also sensed that, as professional as Jon tried to keep it, Hector Almundo hadn’t been his favorite senator.
We met for lunch at the Maritime Club, an old boys’ club just a few blocks south of the state building. His hey-how-are-you was overly punctuated, given the circumstances, and I thanked him for the note he’d sent after Talia’s car accident.
I liked Jon, because he kept most of his thoughts to himself, and when he spoke, he had a good reason. I’d first met him several years ago, and compared to then, he’d showed some signs of age—more wrinkles carved in his forehead, more snow at the temples—but otherwise hadn’t changed a bit.
“So what’s this opportunity?” he asked me, as he worked some Caesar dressing through his salad with his fork. I can’t do that, the salad thing. It’s not just a philosophical opposition, although that’s part of it; roughage just doesn’t fill me up.
“The Procurement and Construction Board,” I said. “I have a contract for legal services.”
He paused for only a moment, long enough for me to see that I’d struck a chord. With a poker face, eyes diverted, he asked, “Is that something you’ve already accepted?”
I almost laughed. He’d already given me the answer I’d sought. He didn’t want to shit all over my “opportunity” if I had already signed up. If I hadn’t, he was going to warn me off. “Give it to me straight,” I said.
“I’m not sure I’m the right person to do that.” He smiled. “Our current governor and the legislature aren’t exactly the closest of friends.”
Thinking back, I guess I’d read something along those lines. I didn’t follow local politics all that closely, though representing a state senator had attuned me slightly more. The media, always more interested in the conflict than the policy, had covered the fight this past year between the governor and both the house and senate—but especially the senate, and especially Jon’s boss, the senate majority leader, Grant Tully.
“The straight scoop, Jon. Please. I’m no partisan. I’m just a lawyer.”
“Carlton Snow is an idiot.” Jon opened his hands. “That straight enough?”
“Go on.”
“He was the city clerk here—meaning you got your marriage license from him—who somehow managed to finagle his way into the nomination for lieutenant governor and then, by some God-forsaken twist of fate, actually won. And then he fell ass-backward into the governor’s mansion when Lang Trotter went federal on us. I mean, Snow has absolutely no idea what he’s doing, but he thinks he’s going to be president some day.”
Hector had said the same thing, the presidential ambition. “So—”
“He waltzed in on day one like he’s Winston Churchill, having absolutely no idea about the legislative process or how to do anything other than issue a press release. He punched everyone in the capital in the face, refused to compromise on anything, and then wonders why nobody likes or respects him. He surrounds himself with yes-men who tell him he walks on water. See, you got me started.” He took a drink of water.
“Don’t sugarcoat it, Jon.”
Jon’s smile quickly evaporated. “The Procurement and Construction Board,” he said. “That was initially something Snow created in the governor lite’s office.”
“The governor—?”
“Sorry, the lieutenant governor’s office. Basically, your job as lieutenant governor is to sit around and be ready if the old man croaks, but the one thing that falls under the lieutenant governor is driver’s licenses. He oversees DMV.”
I’d seen that. Adalbert Wozniak’s company had sought to provide hospitality supplies to the affiliate Department of Motor Vehicles offices.
“So, Snow falls into the governorship, and he decides to use that same model. Only the governor doesn’t just preside over one agency—he oversees dozens of administrative agencies with millions upon millions of dollars’ worth of contracts. Each agency doles out contracts, right? For anything you can imagine. Well, now Snow says, all of those agency contracts—all of them—are going to fall under a single board, the PCB. That’s over a billion dollars in contracts, with five people appointed by Snow deciding who gets what.” He looked up from his salad. “You get this contract through Hector?”
I nodded.
“Right. And who interviewed you? Derek Bruen?”
“Who’s that?”
Jon shook his head. “The guy who’d normally be interviewing you,” he said. “Anyone other than Charlie Cimino?”
I drew back. He seemed to have a pretty good handle on things. “Just Cimino,” I answered.
“Sure.” Jon shook his head and smiled. He seemed to be sensing that he was coming on too strong. “Well, hey, I’ll say this much—there’s lots of work with the PCB. Lots of money for a private practitioner. I’m sure it’ll work out fine.”
“Are you?”
He wiped his hands with his napkin and took a long drink of water. “Jason, you’re a big boy, and a smart guy. Smarter than they’ll be used to over there. Just call it like you see it, and document everything. Paper the files.”
“Cover myself.”
“Cover yourself, exactly.”
“Jeez, Jon, is it that bad?”
He took a long time thinking about that. “The truth is, I don’t know. I hear things. But the capital, I mean, it’s like a sewing circle. Who knows? But when I say names like Governor Snow and Charlie Cimino, I don’t usually use words like ‘ethical’ in the same breath. Know what I mean?”
I wasn’t particularly surprised by what Jon was telling me, but hearing him say these things, I admit, gave me some pause.
“Look, I’ll just say this once, Jason. Because you’re asking. And then I’ll shut the hell up.”
“Okay.” I opened my hands. “Hit me.”
“The second best thing you can do is be careful, like I said. Cover yourself.”
<
br /> “And the best thing I could do?”
“Walk away,” he said. “Walk away, Jason.” He wagged a finger at me and did not smile.
19
“THIS IS WHERE EVERYBODY WHO WANTS SOMETHING comes. And we’re the ones who decide whether they get it.”
Patrick Lemke was the executive director of the Procurement and Construction Board, which meant he oversaw the daily operations and prepared the board for its meetings every other week. Lemke was tall and out of shape, with half a head of unpredictable hair and thick glasses and no shortage of nervous energy. He generally avoided eye contact but, every now and then, those beady pupils shot glances in my direction. His forehead was glossy with sweat, even though I found it rather frigid in this office. I hoped it couldn’t be chalked up to nerves, but after listening to him ramble for a few minutes, I concluded that his natural equilibrium was hot-nervous.
A few minutes turned into ninety, as Lemke gave me an overview that was essentially a repeat of what I’d already read in a thick manual. The state gives out hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts annually, and they can give them out all sorts of ways. They can do the traditional “blind” bid—everyone makes their best offer, under seal, and the lowest bidder gets the bid, regardless of who they are or whom they know. That was the easy part; the rub was all the different exceptions to that rule, where it was impractical, impossible, or unnecessary to go through the sealed bidding process.
Only one of us grew tired during this lecture. This guy was like the Energizer bunny, and I was getting a headache. Finally, after offering to answer any questions several times, and appearing disappointed that I had none, he told me that he was “very busy” and “really had to go,” as if I were clinging to him to stay, and rushed out of my office.
It was my office but I was sharing it, or at least it was big enough to share. There were two desks and five file cabinets and a small window that looked into another building and a radiator with peeling yellow paint that appeared to cough and hiss more often than it provided heat.
“Oh, and one more thing,” Lemke said, bouncing back into the room and startling the bejeezus out of me with that high-pitched voice. “Nothing leaves this office. You can’t take any of the documents out of here. And no emails.”
“No emails? Isn’t this the twenty-first century?”
Patrick didn’t seem to be one for humor. He stared the wall and said, “Don’t email documents or say anything sensitive over email. It can get hacked. Okay, I really gotta go now. Oh, and you have your ID? You have to have an ID to get in and out—”
“I have my ID”
“You have your ID, okay, good. I’m going to be late now—”
Out he went. I’d been given five contracts to review for next week’s meeting. I calculated the amount of time it would take to pore over these specifications, multiplied by how boring it would be, and came up with multiple headaches and many cups of coffee. I had a purpose for this gig, and it wasn’t driven by money, but as I thought about it, I was taking a real flier that any of this would even result in anything that would give me a hint as to who killed Ernesto Ramirez. Well, at a minimum I would do some legal work and make a few bucks—
“Oh, and do you play music loud?”
“God, Patrick.” I turned away from the box I was emptying and looked toward the door. This guy moved around so quickly, his footsteps didn’t even make noise. “Do I—”
“They don’t like it when you play music too loud. If you have a stereo or whatever.” He was staring at the carpet.
“I won’t play music at all.”
“No, you can play it, just don’t play it loud.”
“I’ll just hum to myself.”
“Okay, so, I should go.”
I waited patiently, hands folded, humming to myself quietly, for Patrick to return. It took three minutes.
“Oh, so this is the last thing, unless you have any questions.”
“I do have a question,” I said, startling him. His face lit up. He even looked at me for a brief second. A question!
“How far back do the files go for the PCB?” I asked.
“Okay. The governor just started this board when he took office a year ago. I mean, he had it in the lieutenant governor’s office, but he transferred the PCB—”
“Patrick. I was just wondering, if I needed to refer to past practices, if I would be able to access prior documents. Maybe even back to when the PCB was under the lieutenant governor’s office.”
“Oh, sure you can. I can show you where to look. It’s in one of these cabinets, the hard copies I mean, but it’s also online, and I really have to go.”
“Sure. We can talk about it later.”
“Okay, good.”
I couldn’t be sure if Patrick was gone for good, but I had the sense that I would never know that in this job. I considered closing the door for some privacy, but it was my first day, and the other offices had their doors open, so it didn’t seem like a good idea.
After giving Patrick ten minutes to pop back in, I started looking through the files for the contract Adalbert Wozniak’s company, ABW Hospitality, bid on in 2005. I looked through all of the file cabinets and even made a passing attempt at finding things on the computer, but I was out of luck. I’d have to wait for Patrick to scare the shit out of me again and show me where to look.
I had to prepare memoranda on the five contracts by the day’s end. If you had looked up “bureaucratic hell” in the dictionary, you would have found my assignment, which included these thrilling topics: “Asbestos Abatement Materials” for the Department of Corrections; “Collection Cups for Random Drug Testing” for the Department of Corrections; “HIV-1 Oral Fluid Transmucosal Exudate Collection Devices” for the Department of Public Health; “Asphalt Crack and Joint Filler” for the Department of Transportation; and “Passenger School Buses and Wheelchair Lift Buses” for the State Board of Education. I would’ve had more fun watching water freeze. The Internal Revenue Code was a coloring book by comparison.
Just as I’d finished the final memorandum for Patrick, he popped back into my office. “One more thing, Jason, okay? Mr. Cimino might call for you sometimes. He likes you to go to his office.”
“He has some official position here?”
That one stumped Patrick. He stared at the carpet for a long time before saying, “He’ll give you instructions sometime.”
“At his office.”
“Yeah, you have to see him in person. He doesn’t like phones.”
“A man of mystery,” I said.
His eyes shot up, briefly, to meet mine. “Okay, I have to go.”
He vanished. I’d have to wait to access the ABW file I was seeking. I gathered my stuff together, including the memoranda I had drafted, calculating a full day’s work at three hundred an hour—a nice pocket of twenty-four hundred dollars, which rivaled what I was making in a month thus far in my erstwhile law practice.
As I was gearing up to leave, my phone rang. I hadn’t even noticed the archaic black contraption in the corner of my desk.
“Mr. Kolarich?” A woman’s voice. “Mr. Cimino would like to see you tomorrow at ten A.M.”
20
I MADE IT INTO THE LOBBY OF CHARLIE CIMINO’S building at the appointed hour, 10:00 A.M. I picked up a pack of gum and looked over a newspaper for fifteen, maybe twenty minutes. Then I took the elevator up to his office.
Don’t ask me why I do some of the things I do. After all, my whole reason for doing this job with the PCB was to get inside and see what I could discover about Adalbert Wozniak’s and Ernesto Ramirez’s murders. You’d think, with that mission, I’d be looking to get along with people like Cimino. But I didn’t like the guy, and I didn’t like being summoned to his office, so I decided that a little tardiness was in order.
At least I got to follow the swimsuit model down the hallway again to his office, which made the whole trip worthwhile.
“You’re late.” Cimino was wearing
that headset again and standing at the opposite end of his airplane hangar of an office. He started talking again into his headset, something about a general contractor running behind schedule. I helped myself to a chair and waited for this asshole to finish trying to impress me, himself, and the guy on the other end of the phone call.
“The bus contract,” Cimino said. “Hey, the bus contract.” It took me a moment before I realized he was talking to me. “The bus contract? The Board of Ed? Hang on, Henry.” He snapped his fingers at me. “Kolarich—”
“The bus contract, right.” One of the contracts I’d reviewed was the State Board of Education’s contract for passenger school buses and wheelchair lift buses.
“That’s a sole-source,” he said, before spinning back toward the window. “I don’t give a fuck about a letter of intent, Henry. If I have Citibank as a tenant, the price goes up. So get me out of it.” Then he looked back at me. “Okay, kid? A sole-source.”
“Sole-source” bidding meant that the contract was asking for something so unique that only one company was capable of performing it, so going through the rigmarole of sealed bidding was a waste of time. But we were talking about providing school buses. There were probably hundreds of companies in this state that could do that.
I shook my head. “The bus contract has to go through sealed bidding.”
“Hold on, Henry.” Cimino yanked off his earpiece and stared me down. “What the fuck did I just say?”
“You said it’s a sole-source.”
“Right.”
“And I said it’s a competitive bid.”
“Yeah, and you’re a lawyer, right? You argue. Okay, so I see you know how to do that. Now argue my side, kid. Give Patrick a memo by the end of the day. Sole-source.” He fit the earpiece back on. “Henry, I don’t give a shit if they’re gonna sue. It’s a negotiation. What the fuck is a letter of intent, anyway? I mean, what does that even mean? Tell them my intent is to fuck them in the ass if they fight me on this.”