The Kudzu Kid

by Darrell Laurant

  Still, that would run counter to Apperson’s long-held, pro-landfill position.

  Moreover, was Apperson the only lucky recipient of Noudi’s generosity? How about Buddha Booker and Archie Edmunds? Booker probably would have held out for more.

  All of this eroded Fogarty’s original zeal. He wanted to level a front-page blockbuster at Apperson that would blast the construction man off the board of supervisors for good. Yet where were his sources? Where did he get the copied check?

  Calling Noudi for a comment would be problematic, since Fogarty had essentially burglarized his office. Jamie Fallon already told Fogarty he wouldn’t go on the record—and without him, what did Fogarty have?

  This was something that aroused the full attention of Daniel—not the publisher side of him, but the shrewd lawyer. And five minutes into a closed door meeting with Fogarty on Monday, he brought up something his editor hadn’t considered.

  “Suppose you write a story on this,” he said, “and Apperson is forced to resign. Even if we don’t get sued—and I have to remind you that we are not in the financial position to absorb a major lawsuit—that opens a whole new can of worms.”

  He paused for a moment, causing Fogarty to tilt forward in his chair in nervous expectation.

  “If Apperson gets taken off the board, the board can choose a replacement within a month,” Daniel finally continued. “And who would that be? Rev. Dixon pretty much associates with his church members and the local civil rights folks, and none of them would be palatable to Buddha Booker. Sam Bishop is so much his own man that he doesn’t associate with anybody. So that would leave a replacement candidate connected to Booker or Archie, and you can bet that person would be in favor of the landfill.”

  “I wouldn’t put it past Booker, though, to make sure the candidate expressed neutrality, or even made statements that might lead Dixon and Bishop to believe he or she could be drawn to their side. That, of course, would be a classic Trojan horse maneuver, with Buddha and Archie the Trojans.”

  “You see, then, that getting rid of Apperson wouldn’t change the ratio that exists now. You’ll still have a three-two split. I don’t care for the man either, but it’s something to think about.”

  This was the most animated Fogarty had ever seen Daniel—perhaps because he was staring down the barrel of a legal assault that would make all the suits aimed at Calvin Hamer seem like parking tickets.

  “How do you feel about the landfill?” Fogarty asked his boss, wondering as he said it why he’d never asked before.

  “I don’t like where this is going,” Daniel replied, tapping a pen on his desk, eyes fixed downward.

  “It seems pretty obvious to me that the smiling Thaxton-Klein folks are just fronting for someone else, and that someone isn’t going to have the best interests of Randolph County at heart.” Daniel looked up into Fogarty’s eyes, a piercing stare.

  “You got that right,” Fogarty said grimly.

  “So what are we going to do about it?” Daniel asked, leaning back in his chair and folding his fingers into a cathedral.

  “I think I’ve got an idea,” Fogarty said, suddenly leaning forward, more eager than he had been. “What if I try to bluff Apperson into believing that my sources are willing to go on the record, and that I could print a story that would ruin him and his business?”

  “And…?” Daniel was interested.

  “And then I offer him an out. I tell him that he could recuse himself from the landfill vote because he has had business dealings with Thaxton-Klein and he doesn’t think it would be appropriate for him to go on record with that issue. Not necessarily underhanded business dealings, just enough to affect his objectivity.”

  “That means he stays on the board, but it’s now a split vote. And that means no landfill, at least not from that direction.”

  Fogarty pursed his lips and waited for Daniel’s reply.

  “I like it,” Daniel said, after a momentary pause to consider what he’d heard. “And how about the editorial end?”

  “I definitely plan to take a stand on this,” Fogarty said. “I’m really looking forward to it.”

  “No gangsters, though,” Daniel said. “Unless you want to be associated with an ex-newspaper. We have no real proof.”

  “Nope, no gangsters,” Fogarty said. “I’ll just remind our readers that turning over something this sensitive to a private company opens up some scary possibilities. And that from what the Thaxton-Klein people said, they will come down here with a staff of operators and workers who know what they’re doing, which means hardly any jobs for Randolph Countians.”

  “You have my blessing,” Daniel said, his voice sounding oddly formal. “For what it’s worth.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  DOWN TO FOUR

  The monthly meeting of the Randolph County Board of Supervisors on September 2 appeared to follow the usual script—nothing happened.

  This always proved annoying to Fogarty, who had been told repeatedly as a Baltimore Sun intern to avoid any newspaper lead containing the words no action. As in “County supervisors took ‘no action’ Tuesday on…”

  “I mean, why would anyone want to read any further than that?” one editor told him, a little more harshly than Fogarty would have liked. “You’re dead in the water.”

  At least the audience was a bit larger than usual, and more restive. Rumors had continued about the proposed landfill, and all five supervisors were forced to deal with anxious constituents.

  The landfill wasn’t on the agenda—not directly. But it was no secret that a proposal from Rev. Dixon to raise the county property tax five cents per thousand dollars was intended to pay for a new dump in the event the private operation was voted down.

  Of course, Dixon might as well have proposed using Randolph County as an atomic bomb test site. Local citizens might have been nervous about the landfill, but the vast majority opposed any tax increase with all the power in their lungs.

  “It’s really amazing,” Daniel had said to Fogarty a few weeks earlier. “People want more and more from local government, but they don’t want their taxes raised, even a penny. Does it ever penetrate their little pea brains that the only way government can give them what they want is to generate more revenue?”

  “They’re like kids,” Fogarty said, “remember how you always thought your parents were rich and ought to be able to buy you the latest everything?”

  Anyone familiar with the mindset of the current board would have predicted a short life for Dixon’s proposal. Booker, Edmunds and Apperson would vote against it because they were conservative Republicans with a knee-jerk aversion to higher taxes. Bishop, who usually sided with Dixon, would vote against it because he was anti-government.

  This time around, however, Apperson offered a motion to table the tax question until a later date, and Edmunds raised his nasal, braying voice to second the motion.

  Daniel had seen this coming.

  “The tax plan is dead on arrival,” he said to Fogarty, “but The Three Musketeers want to keep it on life support for a while. That way, it can serve as an implied threat to anyone who might oppose the private landfill.”

  Much of what discussion occurred this evening followed a brief address by a local activist named Audrey Bramlett, who was introduced in glowing terms by Rev. Dixon. She lived in Poplar View, a rather grim section of Randolph County to the south of Jefferson Springs, and her most recent crusade was to erect a recreation center for the children there.

  “These kids have nothing to do on weekends and after school,” Bramlett said, “and that’s just asking for trouble.”

  Her voice was high—piercing—and urgent, almost annoying.

  “Idle hands are the devil’s workshop,” chimed in Dixon from his seat.

  It was the standard argument, one that Calvin Hamer’s Musketeers usually had no problem ignoring. But after Bramlett had finished her passionate plea, Clinton Apperson stood up and lent his support.

  “If we don
’t use what little power we have to help this section of the county,” he said, oozing humility, “they’ll get the idea that we simply don’t care.”

  A less cynical reporter might have taken this at face value, but Fogarty immediately suspected skullduggery. As Pat Donnelly had preached to him, “Everybody has an agenda. Everybody. You have to put yourself in their place to figure it out.”

  In Apperson’s case, the fact that he owned one of only two construction companies in town was reason enough to climb aboard the recreation center bandwagon. After all, someone would have to build this thing, and it might as well be him.

  “Your request is duly noted,” Booker told Bramlett, “and we’ll deal with it at a later date.”

  At this point, the meeting head swung around to the place on the agenda labeled Other Business—often, a time for one or more of the supervisors to deliver what amounted to a political speech. This time, Clinton Apperson actually stood up from his seat, walked around the long bench in front of him, and took a stance at the communal microphone used by members of the audience.

  Eddie Fogarty looked at the faces of Booker and Edmunds and saw puzzlement. It occurred to him then that he might have been the only other person in the room who knew what was coming.

  “I just want y’all to know,” Apperson said when the murmurs had subsided, “that I won’t be voting on the landfill issue when it comes up in December.”

  The murmurs broke out again, then swelled into babble. Booker, the chairman, banged hard on the bench with his gavel.

  It was several minutes before Apperson could continue.

  “Earlier this year, I had some meetings with the folks from Thaxton-Klein,” he said, “and they asked me if I could construct a couple of outbuildings for them on the property they are hoping to use. I didn’t see a problem with that, but I found out later that this put me in a conflict of interest. Therefore, I can’t vote on a matter that could involve financial gain on my part.”

  “To the people in my district who depended on me to represent them in this matter, I apologize. To everyone else, please don’t egg my car, picket my house, or poison my dog. You can save your energy, because I no longer have anything to do with this. I’m just a spectator and a voter, like you.”

  Zoe, who was sitting next to Fogarty, poked him in the ribs and grinned. Fogarty kept a straight face, but he liked the poke.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  THE TIDE TURNS

  November was a very good month for the Randolph County High School football team, which won four straight games to make up for a slow start, and for Cindy Oswalt of Conway, who gave birth to triplets and was featured on the Echo’s front page.

  For Thaxton-Klein Environmental Services, however, late fall was when its plans for a new landfill in Randolph County began to leak—a phrase Fogarty mischievously used in a headline. The Commonwealth of Virginia had created a new state agency to deal with landfills the previous year, and every applicant had to present a comprehensive plan and be prepared to wait up to a year for approval.

  The first problem for Thaxton-Klein was Roland Winfree, who decided to take a Caribbean cruise in the middle of negotiations to sell his land. “I won that cruise,” he told them, “and I’m going.”

  Obviously, the company couldn’t apply for a permit on land it didn’t own, so it had to wait two weeks before resuming talks. At the beginning, there was a wide gulf between their price and his price. Eventually, they worked it out through a laborious period of haggling.

  Still, what Thaxton-Klein actually owned as 1987 ebbed away was not a landfill, but eighty acres of scrub pines, sand, and clay. Part of the parcel would be ideal, the company’s engineers reported back from a field trip in March—in other places, much less so. The sand percolated, the clay did not.

  There was, then, the concern that the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality might reject the usable portion of the Winfree tract as too small. New landfills were expected to last thirty years, and the sort of traffic Thaxton-Klein envisioned would engulf that space rapidly.

  The obvious solution was to purchase the sizable acreage on either side of Winfree’s land. But Cassie Ledbetter and her sister regarded landfill companies as Satan, and Zoe Vaden didn’t seem very interested in selling, either.

  Moreover, something Thaxton-Klein didn’t know about was the envelope that arrived at the Southside Echo office the first week in November. There was no return address, but the Philadelphia postmark gave it away.

  “I know you were disappointed that you couldn’t find a link between Thaxton-Klein and Noudi, so I went over to Noudi’s myself the other night,” Jamie Fallon wrote. “I asked my wife first, and she told me it was my duty. It took me a couple of hours to find, but copies of checks are enclosed.”

  Most revealing, from Fogarty’s point of view, was that the checks had been copied on both sides, showing that they had been cashed. Both were for more than one hundred thousand dollars, and both had been endorsed by Carmine Noodles himself.

  Fogarty knew what this meant, and what it didn’t mean. True, the copies proved a link between Thaxton-Klein and Noudi—and given Noudi’s dubious reputation, that cast some doubt on the larger company through mere association.

  On the other hand, there was nothing obviously incriminating about the checks. They could have been merely the expected payment of a project leader to a subcontractor. That left plenty of wiggle room for Thaxton-Klein’s officials to claim that they had no idea what Noudi was up to.

  Fogarty made calls to several reporters and editors he knew in the Philadelphia area, including Ken Donnelly, which also gave him the long-deferred opportunity to thank him for the recommendation to Daniel. None of them knew anything about a landfill project in Virginia, much less that Noudi was doing work for Thaxton-Klein.

  There were also a few reporters in Richmond and Tidewater whose beat included writing about hazardous waste issues, and all of them expressed surprise that Thaxton-Klein was thinking about opening a southern beachhead in Randolph County.

  The end result was that Thaxton-Klein spokesperson Ellen Huning received eight phone calls from reporters two days after Fogarty received his package. As was her style, she didn’t try to stonewall or evade these callers, instead telling them, “Yes, Noudi is one of our subcontractors. We use dozens of subcontractors, all over the country, and there aren’t many who can do the kind of work we demand from them. Building and maintaining a landfill is tricky.”

  Asked about several hefty fines laid upon Noudi over the years for illegal dumping, Huning said, “I didn’t know anything about that. Perhaps we will have to reassess our relationship with them.”

  Several of the more daring Virginia journalists called Carmine Noudi for a comment. Only one got through before Noudi took his phone off the hook.

  “Fuck off,” he told the reporter. “Put that in your newspaper.”

  Carmine Noodles never found it necessary to hire a public relations person.

  CHAPTER THRTY-EIGHT

  THE MAYTAG MAN COMES SOUTH

  Throughout the flight from LaGuardia down to Richmond, Dennis DeBrocco kept thinking of Donald Neville, the only man he ever killed.

  Neville had been a regular at a mob-controlled Las Vegas casino—a free room, free drinks, all the other perks every time he was in town from Buffalo. For years, never a problem. But this one time, he had thrown himself at the mercy of the house, and the cashier made a couple of phone calls and advanced him over two hundred thousand dollars in chips because he was a fixture in the place.

  As with all gamblers, Donald Neville hadn’t counted on his luck being bad. He burned through the two hundred thousand dollars in a few hours, and was ushered into a back room.

  “No problem, guys,” he said. “Just a temporary cash flow. My plastic is tapped out, so I gotta go up the street and get some money wired to me from my business.”

  The other two men in the back room said okay. Donald Neville walked outside and hailed a ca
b to the airport.

  This was very bad for business—and so, by several degrees of extension, this overdue account became Denny DeBrocco’s business.

  “Don’t feel sorry for the bastard, Denny,” Leo Castelli had said almost gently, leaning over and squeezing Denny’s meaty forearm. “They even offered to work out a payment plan with him. Even after he took off—which is rare—even then, Georgie sent somebody to talk to him.”

  Again, they were sitting at Leo’s kitchen table drinking absinthe from shot glasses. The sun was diving behind the line of trees that framed Leo’s backyard, and the old man seemed to be disappearing into the gathering shadows as he spoke.

  “This really wasn’t Georgie’s beef, you see, and if there was any way of getting around killing the guy, he was all for it. Georgie don’t like to kill nobody these days. He’s getting old.”

  Leo, who was over seventy himself, tossed back his shot and shivered slightly as the fiery liquid went down.

  “So they did all this, and the guy basically says to Georgie’s man, ‘Fuck you. The dice was loaded, and I’m not paying.’ Besides being unlucky, he’s stupid.”

  This, Denny knew, was a problem. They couldn’t put electric fences around the casinos to keep people from leaving. The only control was the threat of possible retribution, and the sporting types had to know that. If they skipped out, they’d pay the price—whether they fled to Buffalo, Miami, or Fiji. And word would get around. The price could be a toe, a finger, a devastating beating, and once, a nose, all for a first offense. After that it got serious.