Deadly Assets

by W. E. B Griffin

  Stein held his arm out stiffly and started to slam the receiver into its base. Finley put his hand down to intercept it.

  Stein then gently replaced the receiver and looked at Finley.

  “Now what?” Finley said.

  Stein reached across the desk and picked up a remote control. He aimed it at the television on the wall, thumbed the power and mute buttons, and a moment later Philly News Now came onscreen. It showed a dozen police vehicles parked with emergency lights flashing at the entrance to the Lucky Stars Casino. After a moment, the text in the ticker box across the bottom of the screen read . . . A NORTHERN LIBERTIES WOMAN, 26, SHOT WHILE CELEBRATING HER GRANDMOTHER’S BIRTHDAY, REMAINS IN CRITICAL CONDITION FOLLOWING A CASINO JEWELRY STORE ROBBERY THAT LEFT THE STORE MANAGER, 45, DEAD FROM GUNSHOTS . . .

  “Oh my God!” Finley said, glancing at Stein, then looking back at the television. “I can just see the headlines! ‘Granddaughter Blown Away While Grandma Blows Out Birthday Candles.’”

  The ticker then read . . . REV. CROSS, CHAIRMAN OF THE CITIZENS POLICE OVERSIGHT COMMITTEE, SAID THAT COUNCILMAN BADDE AND OTHER LEADERS WILL JOIN HIM TO ADDRESS ALL OF TODAY’S MURDERS AT 5 P.M. DURING A RALLY AT WORD OF BROTHERLY LOVE COMMUNITY CENTER IN STRAWBERRY MANSION . . .

  “Surely Badde did not agree to that,” Finley said.

  “Whether he did or not, it puts him in an awkward position. If he does appear, it could look like he’s calling cops killers. If he doesn’t, he’s turning his back on his base and the crime they’re suffering.”

  Stein’s eyebrows then shot up, and he quickly turned to his notebook computer, his fingers flying across its keyboard.

  “That’s it!” he blurted a minute later, glancing up from the computer screen to Finley. “Why am I not surprised?”

  “What’s it? What’re you looking at?”

  “The City Hall website page on CPOC members. Badde ‘proudly appointed’ the bastard to CPOC. I figured there had to be a connection.”

  “And . . . ?”

  “And what thy crooked pol hath given the reverend, thy crooked pol can taketh away. Or at least convince him to stop calling cops killers.”

  Finley gestured Continue with his hand.

  “The members of the city council’s Public Safety Committee,” Stein explained, “each get to appoint someone to a term on CPOC. The job pays eighty grand a year.”

  “What! Eighty thousand dollars? For doing nothing? No wonder this city is about to be broke! What was it that the great Iron Lady said? ‘Patronage would seem all well and good—until you run out of someone else’s money.’ This is depressing. Beyond all else, you and I have to fight this culture of corruption, too? Try putting a happy face on that!”

  Ed Stein grinned. He liked Finley, and especially admired his solid, fiscally responsible viewpoints. The fact that Finley voiced them was hardly surprising—Finley after all was a Master of Business Administration graduate of Penn’s prestigious Wharton School—but what usually caught people off-guard was the flamboyant manner with which he expressed them.

  Stein said, “What Maggie Thatcher said was: ‘The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money’ . . .”

  “Whatever. Close enough.”

  “. . . But, yeah, agreed. Your point’s painfully valid.”

  He looked back at his laptop.

  “Damn. Cross is in his last year on CPOC. Which explains why he’s now chairman. It always goes to the member who’s in their fifth year.”

  “You know,” Finley said, “final year or not, it still would be very embarrassing to lose midterm such a prestigious position. It could adversely affect possible future income, including other patronage positions.”

  “Yeah, that and the eighty grand right now. The trick is first getting Badde to agree to put pressure on Cross, then for Cross to back off. If Cross doesn’t, the challenge becomes getting Badde to force Cross’s resignation. I don’t think Badde actually has the power to relieve him.”

  Stein picked up the receiver, flipped through a phone directory of City Hall offices, found the number, and then started to punch it in. Then he said, “Damn it! I forgot it’s Saturday!” He put the receiver down and looked at Finley. “Badde’s not going to be in his office.”

  “I hear he’s hardly ever in City Hall,” Finley said as he dug his cell phone from the pocket of his bright green sweater, “no matter which day it is.”

  Finley tapped on its screen, then put the phone to his ear.

  “Constantine? James Finley. How are you? . . . And a Merry Christmas to you! Listen, I need a fast favor. Can you please share with me our dear friend Rapp Badde’s cell number?” Finley paused, then laughed loudly, and after a moment went on, “Yes, that was both terribly unintentional and possibly prescient. And, for the record, you know I don’t embrace the ‘dear friend’ part, either. Anyway, I seem to have lost his cell phone number, if I ever had it.”

  Finley reached across the desk, grabbed a pen, flipped to a blank page on Stein’s legal pad, and then jotted “Rapp Badde cell” and a ten-digit number. Stein noted that he’d done it so swiftly and in a perfect penmanship that could only be described as elegant.

  “Thank you,” Finley said. “See you soon, Con.”

  “Con”? Stein thought.

  He said, “May I ask who’s Constantine?”

  “Constantine Christofi,” Finley said, gently tucking his phone back in his sweater pocket. “He’s in your line of work—a lawyer—but in commercial property development and marketing. He’s truly a dear old friend.”

  “How is it that he had—and you knew he had—Badde’s cell . . . cellular number?” Stein then chuckled. “Although I wouldn’t mind if it actually was a prison cell number.”

  “That snake in the grass is rather adept at pissing people off, isn’t he? A classic example of an equal opportunity offender.”

  “I’m not in any way trying to excuse him,” Stein said, “but he does come about it honestly, for lack of a better word. The entire city council is pretty much that way. Rapp’s simply had a head start at perfecting it having learned from his father.”

  —

  City Councilman (At Large) H. Rapp Badde Jr. was the thirty-two-year-old son of Horatio R. Badde Sr., a onetime South Philly barber who had also served on the city council before being elected mayor of the City of Philadelphia.

  The younger Badde, who saw himself moving up in political office in a similar manner, could be at turns arrogant and charismatic. He carried on the elder’s tradition of an above-reproach attitude, including the fevered application of deny-and-spin when confronted with anything that might appear unseemly.

  Learning that skill at the master’s feet had come in handy months earlier, when the bow-tied politician had been spotted on the tiny island of Bermuda. The fact that the usually publicity-happy Rapp Badde had been there attending a conference on—of all things in such a place—urban renewal hadn’t been his biggest problem. What had set his deny-and-spin into high gear had been the photographs of him that had been leaked to the local media back home. Apparently someone had recognized Badde and snapped a series of images of him on the beach in a compromising position with his gorgeous twenty-five-year-old executive assistant.

  That proved to be a bit much to swallow for even Philadelphia’s tough-skinned taxpayers—not to mention Badde’s wife of seven years. There was outrage. At least at first.

  Like his father, Rapp Badde managed once again to deflect his detractors.

  —

  “To answer your question, Ed, I met with Constantine last week following a PEGI meeting.”

  Stein nodded. Finley had pronounced the acronym Peggy; it stood for Philadelphia Economic Gentrification Initiative.

  “Aha,” Stein said, “and like the Public Safety Committee, Badde also serves on the Housing and Urban Deve
lopment Committee.”

  “Not only on it. The city council president appointed him as its chairman. HUD’s PEGI is his baby—remember, that was his excuse for going with that hot young assistant of his, Janelle Harper, on a ‘fact-finding mission’ to the conference in Bermuda.”

  Stein chuckled. “Where he and said assistant were photographed rolling on the beach wearing little more than grins. Taxpayer-paid assistant, I might add. She gets a hundred and eighty grand, almost twice his council salary. And you have to give him credit for avoiding any divorce papers being served when he came back.”

  Finley snorted.

  “Well, don’t give him too much credit. Word on the street about that is the wife, Wanda, booted him out of their very nice house while she considers her options. I think she’s a lawyer, too.”

  “Then she should know that divorce court judges in Pennsylvania,” Stein said, “like those in many other states, don’t want to hear the word infidelity—or even ‘alienation of affection.’”

  “Oh, really?”

  “They’ve decided that if cheating on a spouse were the basis for finding fault and awarding assets, the courts would be clogged far worse than they are now. The judges send the warring parties to arbitration with instructions not to think about coming near the courthouse until they’ve reached a signed settlement.”

  “Huh. Well, I’m sure, like a lot of wives, she has some other dirt on him. Or can dig it up, which would fall under ‘considers her options.’”

  “That would be interesting.”

  “Yeah, as is the fact,” Finley went on, “that PEGI is at least knee-deep, if not up to its neck, in the Volks Haus and Diamond Development projects.”

  Again Stein nodded thoughtfully. He knew that the city, which was to say the Philadelphia Economic Gentrification Initiative, had demolished multiple blocks of housing in the upper end of the Northern Liberties neighborhood. The demolition was to make way for a giant multiple sports stadium—a project of Diamond Development—and it had forced residents from their decrepit row houses and taken ownership of the properties using the strong-armed provisions of Eminent Domain.

  To temper the blow to those who were displaced—as well as to keep other of Badde’s constituents happy—PEGI promised to offer low-rent housing in its new Volks Haus. The “People’s House” would be built in the Fairmount area, only a few miles west of their old neighborhood.

  Stein said, “Weren’t there dead bodies discovered inside when the wrecking crew tore down those last row houses?”

  “Yeah, maybe two, three men? They were holdouts remonstrating about being forced to leave after their landlords had to sell to PEGI. I think that they’re part of this year’s three hundred sixty-something total count.”

  “Then they were murdered?”

  “If I recall correctly, the police could not find what had killed them—except maybe that twenty-ton wrecking ball that the first resident became snagged on. The deaths were ruled as suspicious.”

  “Strange.”

  Finley raised his eyebrows and nodded.

  “Much like PEGI itself, Ed. Or I should say Badde. I haven’t quite figured out the whole thing. Not that I really have time to do that. But something about it isn’t kosher. The more I’m around that, the more uncomfortable I get. Still, I’m committed to working with Constantine on the future marketing of the Diamond Development stadium. And he’s the one stuck working with Badde.”

  “And so he has his cell phone number.”

  Finley put his fingertips on the legal pad and spun it so that what he had written on it was right-side up to Stein.

  “And now you do. This could well be a case of ‘Be careful what you wish for, because you damn sure may get it.’”

  Stein met Finley’s eyes.

  “Dumb question, James?”

  “There are no dumb questions.”

  “How come you’re doing this?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I thought in Carlucci’s office that I was about to lose you.”

  “That I’d quit? So quickly?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You know me better than that.”

  “‘In for a penny, in for a pound,’ as Ben Franklin said when—”

  “When quote he was our distinguished ambassador to England before the Revolution unquote,” Finley finished. “At least that’s what our fearless leader Francis Fuller keeps telling us.”

  Finley snorted again, and then in a serious tone went on: “Philly is the fifth-largest city in the United States, second on the East Coast, for which we’re sometimes called New York City’s sixth borough. We have one and a half million residents, yet more than twenty-five percent of them live in poverty. Our unemployment rate averages eleven percent—and in places like Kensington it spikes to fifty percent. That’s got to change. Center City and a handful of neighborhoods are more or less going great. But cities rise and fall as a whole, and for Philly to truly thrive, the whole has to be healthy. As long as I’m on the job, I’ll give all I’ve got and more for that to happen.”

  Stein nodded.

  “My apology for misreading that.”

  “None necessary. I do believe what I said.”

  “Which part?”

  “That I love this city, Ed. Correction: love the possibility of this city. Right now, I absolutely loathe the ugliness. But I have hope, for now at least, that we might fix that.”

  He pointed at his writing on the legal pad.

  “Dial.”

  Stein grunted as he picked up the telephone receiver and began punching in the number.

  “This damn well better work,” he said.

  [ FOUR ]

  East Somerset and Jasper Streets, Philadelphia

  Saturday, December 15, 2:15 P.M.

  “We really shouldn’t do this, man,” Dan Moss said, staring out the car window as they drove through the area known as Kensington. “You know how many people get shot around here? I saw it on the news.”

  The pudgy seventeen-year-old Moss had shaggy dark hair and a round face with an angry red pimple on the bridge of his nose that looked as if it could burst at any moment. He turned in the front passenger seat of the five-year-old silver Volkswagen Jetta and looked at the driver.

  Billy Chester, a wiry eighteen-year-old, had a bony face with birdlike eyes and a narrow nose, and kept his short strawberry blond hair spiked. He had met Dan Moss in a computer code writing class when they were high school freshmen.

  Both now were wearing faded blue jeans and sneakers. Billy had on a gray fleece winter jacket while Dan wore his Upper Marion Area High School sweatshirt, a navy blue hoodie with gold stenciled lettering on the chest: PROPERTY OF UMA VIKINGS ATHLETIC DEPT.

  “Aw, c’mon and chill out,” Billy said, his tone frustrated. “The girls said they wanted some weed. You going to tell them we couldn’t score any?”

  Dan couldn’t believe how calm Billy was acting. The Kensington neighborhood looked like a war zone. They were a long way from the clean streets and tidy lawns of their homes in the suburb of King of Prussia. Too far from Dan’s comfort zone. He thought the fifteen miles might as well have been fifteen thousand.

  They had driven down expressways, the Schuylkill to Vine Street to the Delaware, along the way passing the impressive glass-skinned skyscrapers and other expensive real estate that made up Center City. Ten minutes later, just north of Center City, Billy had exited the Delaware Expressway at Westmoreland, then taken that to Frankford Avenue and made a left. Then, at Somerset, he’d hung a right and announced in a confident voice that it was only a few more blocks.

  “Man, we just keep getting into worse and worse streets,” Dan said.

  The overcast sky, a dark blanket of thick clouds, added to the gloom.

  He yanked the navy blue hood over his head while sliding lower in his s
eat and staring out the bottom edge of the window at a pair of burned-out row houses.

  “I’ve never seen so many boarded-up places,” Dan went on, almost in a whisper. “I heard on the news they’re called zombie houses, ’cause they look like only zombies could live in ’em.” Then he turned and looked at Billy, and in a louder voice said, “Why don’t we just go get some beer, maybe even a bottle of Jack. We can hang out near the state store, and when one of those illegal migrants comes out, we’ll pay him to go back in and get us a bottle.”

  Billy looked over and saw that Dan was highly anxious, his legs moving rapidly up and down as he looked out the window.

  Billy laughed. “Dude, we can always do that. Don’t worry. This is an adventure . . .”

  An adventure? Dan thought.

  “. . . I’ve done this same thing four, five times. Seriously. It looks worse than it is. These guys just want to make a buck.”

  After a long moment, Dan said, “So, how’s it work?”

  “Just like the drive-through window at a fast-food place.”

  “What? You shitting me?”

  Billy shook his head.

  “You pull up to the corner,” he explained, “and crack a window. Dude is working the corner. He comes up and you give him your order. Then he takes the money and signals a guy who’s sitting on the stoop at the end of the block. Then you drive down to the other guy, who then is coming back from wherever they stash the weed. He comes up to the window, passes you the stuff, then you drive off. Fast food, fast weed. And I’m gonna super-size our order, so we can sell one zip to pay for ours.”

  “It’s that easy?”

  Billy nodded.

  “Yep. That easy. We’ll be out of here and back home in no time. Hell, we can even swing by the state store if you want.”

  —

  They made a right turn, onto Jasper Street. There were two black men standing on the corner, each looking in different directions, scanning the street, then turning and talking with the other. Dan couldn’t tell for sure but the skinnier of the two did not look much older than he and Billy. They wore dark jeans, high-top boots, and heavy winter coats over cotton hoodie sweatshirts, one black and one gray. The skinny one had the gray hood covering his head. The big guy had his shaved head exposed. Both had their hands in the belly pockets, stretching them.