A change of gravity

by George V. Higgins

  "The Carneses Arthur in the Senate and Roy Junior in the House; Roy Senior still running the real estate business in Holyoke had made a fairly decent killing for themselves on the contract to build the Canterbury District Courthouse. So had their friends, as the first rule of crooked politics staying out of jail requires. Judge Spring was the head of the building committee. An ambitious young fellow named Larry Lane, an assistant clerk in the Chicopee District Court and desperate to get out of there, became Spring's first clerk. Spring knew he could therefore control him. He put him on the building committee, giving the Carnes family two votes out of five. Roy Carnes Senior got a third appointment. After that it was easy; the ballgame began in earnest.

  "F.D. Barrows Construction Company rigged the bid and won the contract.

  Barrows cut the corners on materials and labor; Spring and Lane and Roy Carnes approved each stage of construction and the progress payments therefore due. Spring set up the trust, Fourmen's Realty, to receive the money Barrows skimmed off the construction and kicked back to the other three. It wasn't a great deal of money, by today's standards: just under a hundred-forty grand. But we must keep in mind that they didn't steal it today; they took it before Nineteen-sixty. A good annual salary then was less than a tenth of that boodle creamed off the courthouse budget; by the standards of today what they stole would amount to about six-hundred-thousand dollars, a very respectable amount of loot.

  "Over the years there were some changes made in the trust. The real estate-insurance man from Hampton Falls, Philip Fox, came in soon after it was formed. The reason was that he'd handled the construction bonds on the courthouse. The Commonwealth was having one of its periodic fits of public outrage about corruption. A state crime commission had been appointed. Fox knew too much to leave him out and maybe make him mad enough to talk. So the first four brought him in, diluting their shares but keeping him quiet hush money.

  "Years went by. Fox died and his grandson Walter took his place. Lane died, leaving his to Merrion, in thanks for befriending him. Shrewdly.

  The money kept on rolling in. Walter Fox died and his widow, Diane, took his place on the trust. Later on, she agreed to fill the place her husband had expected to serve on the building committee for the new Canterbury Municipal Complex. Mister Merrion was also on that committee. Mrs. Fox wasn't originally from around here. She's from Wisconsin. Fairly soon after these developments, she and Mister Merrion entered into a close personal relationship."

  "Is that supposed to mean something?" Merrion said, growling.

  "Take it easy, Amby," Cohen said. "Take it easy here."

  "Stay away from the personal stuff, Mister Bissell," the judge said.

  "We avoid private matters in this corner of the world."

  "I meant no aspersion on Mrs. Fox or Mister Merrion, either, in that regard," Bissell said. "The point I was making is that Mrs. Fox, being from Wisconsin, probably wasn't familiar with the Massachusetts politics of self-enrichment. So, to enlist her in any later scheme to skim contracts for construction of the Canterbury Municipal Complex, as the make-up of the committee would suggest that he and Hilliard had in mind, Mister Merrion would've had to explain the procedures to her. He perhaps feared she might not like the idea of milking state contracts might even strongly disapprove. And because they do appear to have embarked on what's now a long-standing relationship quite soon after her husband's death, our surmise is that his fear of her disapproval, and what she might do to express it, caused him to abrogate any plans he and Hilliard might have had to plunder the project. Whatever the reason, so far in our review it doesn't appear to have been skimmed."

  "Hurrah, hurrah," Merrion murmured, before Cohen could silence him.

  "Mister Merrion," the judge said calmly, "I know this must be very trying for you, very hard to sit through without making some response.

  But I also know you're a court officer, not only made of good stern stuff but also aware of the rules of decorum we enforce here, even when we're in chambers.

  "I'll make an allowance for you this time, because I do think," shifting her gaze to Bissell, 'that the assistant US attorney has gone about as far as I'm willing to allow without disciplining him." Bissell worked his mouth and swallowed. She returned her gaze to Merrion, stretching her left arm out on the table and lowering her head to sight along it at him. "But please don't do it again." She kept her smile very small. "Do we understand each other, Mister Merrion?"

  "Yes, your Honor," Merrion said, looking chagrined.

  She straighted up and nodded. "Good," she said with satisfaction. She turned to look at Bissell. "And how about you, Mister Bissell? We're both on the same page too, I trust?"

  "Oh yes, your Honor," Bissell said without repentance, "I understand your view. But once again, when I said that, I did not mean…"

  "Nooo," the judge said, 'the matter's closed. Go on now and please finish."

  "For whatever the reason, the Fourmen's Trust thereafter does not appear to have been further enriched by any infusions of capital other than the contributions required to buy out the interests of departing members. Judge Spring was the next to die, after Philip Fox. Then Roy Cames, Junior, liquidated all his family holdings here in order to relocate down south. F.D. Barrow, Walter Fox and Merrion bought out those two shares. Then Barrow died and his son succeeded him. And as I've said, when Walter Fox died his wife Diane took his place.

  "So the Fourmen's Trust as it's now constituted has three named shareholder-beneficiaries, two men and a woman. Otherwise the way it's operated stayed the same for coming up on almost forty years now, still turning a neat profit, close to two hundred grand a year. All through those years, right down to the present day, each and every one of the direct beneficiaries of profits earned on the ill-gotten gains that funded the Fourmen's Trust has scrupulously and faithfully reported, as ordinary income, the annual distributions that the trust has made from earnings, and paid all federal and state taxes due very substantial sums.

  "But during those years there has also been an indirect beneficiary, Daniel Hilliard. We find in his tax returns for beginning in Nineteen-seventy-three no evidence, no indication, he ever reported as income the amounts by which he benefited from the Fourmen's Trust, or paid any taxes on them."

  "For the simple reason," Merrion began roughly.

  "Shut up, Amby," Cohen said, spinning in his chair and grabbing Merrion's arm again. Then: "Your Honor, may I have a word with my client?"

  "Certainly," the judge said. "Do you want a recess so you can take him outside and talk to him privately?" '1 don't think that'll be necessary, your Honor," Cohen said, 'but I would like this to be off the record."

  "I'll give you that," the judge said. "Off the record. You probably don't mind hearing that, do you, Lizzie?"

  "Sweetest words I heard today," the stenographer said, clasping her hands together, palms outward, and stretching her arms out in front of her, then flexing her back against the chair.

  "Look, Amby," Cohen said. "I warned you you wouldn't like this; sitting through this and having to keep your mouth shut. And I told you you shouldn't come. But you insisted, said you could do it. You wouldn't let him get to you. So do it. Or if you can't do it, get out."

  Merrion nodded, his face like an outcropping rock.

  "I think we'll be all right now to go back on the record again, Judge,"

  Cohen said.

  "Very well," the judge said, 'we are back on the record. Mister Bissell, as you were saying?"

  "I mentioned just a few moments ago," Bissell said, unable or unwilling to avoid looking pleased, 'that when Dan Hilliard and Mister Merrion pooled their resources back in Nineteen-sixty to get Hilliard elected alderman, they had several objectives in mind. The third one was to secure good lifetime jobs with the Commonwealth. Hilliard's would turn out to be the presidency of Hampton Pond Community College which with the help of his cronies in the House he tailor-made for himself. But his sinecure could wait; his political star was still on the ris
e.

  "Merrion's situation was different. After a few years as Hilliard's district aide, he began to feel restless. A secure billet had to be found for him. One was. In Nineteen-sixty-six, Presiding Judge Charles Spring, no doubt at the direction of Roy Carnes, acting in turn at Hilliard's request, appointed Ambrose Merrion third assistant clerk of the Canterbury Court. Merrion and Lane later formed a friendship.

  "That was Merrion's shrewd move. By all accounts, Lane'd been a heavy smoker all his life, and he also had a serious drinking problem. Soon after he retired, late in Nineteen-seventy, already diagnosed with cancer, his family gave him an ultimatum: either he would quit drinking and undergo a grueling course of radiation and chemotherapy to arrest the disease, if not cure it, or he would have to leave.

  "He chose to leave. He estranged himself from his wife and children and moved into an apartment in the three-story building at Sixteen-ninety-two Eisenhower Boulevard built by the Fourmen's Realty Trust, financed with funds its beneficiaries and trustees had skimmed off the courthouse construction. Lane died in October of Nineteen-seventy-two.

  "Early in Nineteen-seventy-three," Bissell said, "Mister Merrion used a portion of the first distribution he received from that trust, as Lane's heir and successor, to take advantage of an expansion of membership rolls at Grey Hills Country Club. The Club took this action for the first and only time in order to finance extensive repairs and improvements expected to cost more than a million dollars three million today. That was eight hundred thousand more than the club's officers thought it wise to take out of available capital. The only alternative was to open the rolls to enough new members as would be necessary to offset the rest of the cost.

  "Most of the old-money members opposed this. The only way to get their consent was to keep the number of new members admitted as small as possible a hundred was the absolute ceiling they would stand for. That meant the tariffs had to be extremely high well over eight thousand dollars a head. The invitation to apply was posted on Groundhog Day.

  "If the response left the board of governors chagrined, they had a right to be. Clearly they could've gotten more; the quota was over subscribed before the end of February. The rolls were once again closed, but now Daniel Hilliard and Ambrose Merrion were listed upon them.

  "Membership has remained firmly closed ever since, your Honor," Bissell said. "For more than twenty years the governors of Grey Hills have been able to run this vast and luxurious resort, really; a famous, groomed-and-pampered, championship golf course on more than three hundred acres of prime real estate, surrounded with every possible amenity; with a seasonal staff of more than two hundred employees, eighty of whom work all the year 'round; entirely on the income generated by their four hundred dues-paying members' fees, and bills they incur at the club. One estimate we have says that the average annual member spends six thousand dollars a year.

  "Six thousand dollars a year. One hundred and fifteen dollars a week.

  At the minimum wage that's what a kid grosses working his way through college at a part-time job flipping burgers at McDonald's twenty-seven hours a week. For most of these people it buys at the most twenty-four weekend-rounds of golf. Six thousand dollars a year two hundred and fifty dollars a round. Joe Six-pack doesn't tee off at Grey Hills.

  This is not a watering-hole for the common man. This a club for rich men, a closed society of very wealthy men. Yet there among their number we find recorded the names of Ambrose Merrion and Daniel Hilliard.

  "How on earth did they get in there? What on earth are they doing there? Neither of these men, both of whom we would most likely describe as liberal populists, was born into a wealthy family. Neither one of them since the age of twenty-one has ever held any job other than the ones they've had on the public payroll. Yet if we allow for inflation and say the average annual cost of Grey Hills membership for these past twenty-two years was half of what we understand it is today, Mister Merrion's largesse in Mister Hilliard's behalf would amount to sixty-six thousand dollars. That on top of the eight-thousand-plus initiation fee and dues would be about seventy-five thousand dollars. All of which Merrion got from Lane's treasure chest, money Lane helped steal from us."

  "Your Honor," Cohen said, "I must ask again to interrupt. Again we have Mister Bissell regaling us with stories that begin: "Once upon a time." We don't for one moment dispute the US Attorney's right to seek out crimes for prosecution if he thinks, as he seems to, there're too few in plain sight to keep his forces occupied. We don't quarrel with his privilege to go back in time far beyond the statute of limitations and rummage around as much as he likes, to see if he can then find something that will catapult him forward into the present tense, still clinging to a trailing string that he can pull on, like Orpheus to his Eurydice, to tow all of those old outrages forward under his cherished relation back. It seems like any case you managed to weave out of such flimsy stuff would be a pretty thin one, and a waste of the taxpayer's money, and unless you leave out ego, a personal desire for the limelight, it's mighty hard to see why he'd want to do it. But nevertheless, however poor his judgment seems to be, there's no arguing his right to spend his time this way if he wants to.

  "Mister Merrion has now known since the last week in August; he didn't until then that Mister Bissell the week before had federal marshals serve a subpoena duces tecum on Mister Merrion's bank. It demanded the records of his checking and savings accounts much further back than the bank is able to go. They notifed him as they must and then of course turned over to the government everything they had. So, if my client ever had any notion of trying to claim he never paid any club dues, bills or fees in Mister Hilliard's behalf, as he did not, he now knows going in that the US Attorney can prove otherwise, and would certainly reward him for such impudence by indicting him for perjury.

  "But even without that, why go through all of it? Why bother to have him before the grand jury? We'll stipulate he paid Mister Hilliard's initiation fee, annual dues, and a lot of miscellaneous other stuff at Grey Hills over the years. Thousands and thousands of dollars. We'll even give the US Attorney the explanation for Mister Merrion's strange and remarkable behavior which despite his formidable powers of data-collection and analysis, seems to have eluded him: Mister Merrion and Mister Hilliard are friends.

  "It's as simple as that. They've been buddies for thirty-five years.

  Dan Hilliard's former wife told me she used to tell her husband that if it hadn't been for her, and later on his girlfriends, people would've thought that he and Mister Merrion were gay. Mister Merrion's a bachelor, from a small family. His father died years ago. His mother's terminally ill, in a vegetative state; his brother and he are estranged. Dan Hilliard's the closest thing to "family" my client's ever had, all his adult life.

  "Is it really surprising that he's treated Hilliard like an elder brother? Wouldn't you, or even Mister Bissell, as morally demanding as he is, think it appropriate to share a completely unexpected large inheritance which I assure you this was, no 'shrewd move' on his part, the windfall from the Lane estate with a family member? Or with someone who had filled, most faithfully, for years, the vacant family place?

  "Of course you would. We all would. So our question here becomes:

  Given the quantity and detail of the evidence that the US Attorney has outlined as already in his hands, what need or purpose except humiliation, can he possibly have for forcing Mister Merrion to testify against Dan Hilliard?"

  "Your Honor please?" Bissell said. "I was getting to that. We don't know where Dan Hilliard got the money to put up the house in Bell Woods that he and his wife occupied until their divorce. We can't figure out where he got the money for the house on Martha's Vineyard. It may've been from innocent sources, bequests we can no longer track down. We doubt it, but it may have been. The Grey Hills money is different. We know where that money came from, and we also know he didn't earn it, or pay taxes on it, either.

  "We anticipate that if we obtain an indictment alleging Mister Hilliard with cr
iminally evading income taxes due and owing on the monies Mister Merrion paid to Grey Hills in his behalf, Mister Merrion may interpose as one defense for his friend the fact that he himself had paid income taxes on the money, before sending it to Grey Hills in Hilliard's behalf. Countering our allegation that the monies were not annual gifts but a bribe paid in annual installments as a stipend for Merrion's job and thus, constructively, income to Hilliard when paid to Grey Hills for his benefit Merrion would be able to tell the jury they were after-tax dollars in his hand, a gift to his pal Hilliard.

  Exceeding the then-statutory lifetime limit of thirty thousand dollars; perhaps exposing them to civil penalties and interest, but negativing the criminal aspect of intent to evade income taxes."

  "Mister Cohen?" the judge said, 'any comment here?"

  "Just that that indeed would be part of the evidence Mister Merrion will give, if Mister Bissell brings about the unhappy event he just described," Cohen said.

  "Secondly, your Honor," Bissell said smoothly, 'we anticipate that the grand jury may return an indictment alleging Mister Hilliard under color of his official authority sold a state office to, and extorted monies from, its occupant; and further that he conspired with Mister Merrion and others to sell, trade and traffic in a public office, and extort monies from its occupant. And further: alleging that he conspired with Mister Merrion and others to deprive the public of the rightful service and free and unfettered judgment of a public official in other words, alleging racketeering that Mister Merrion might interpose in Mister Hilliard's defense the claim that the monies he paid to Grey Hills in Mister Hilliard's behalf were not within the knowledge or the contemplation of the parties when Mister Hilliard arranged the clerkship, and were given of his own free will."