Hidden Charges

by Ridley Pearson

  “Was he with a sub?” asked Shleit.

  “Right. Most of the job’s subbed out.”

  “You had the center locker down there?”

  “Right.”

  “We think it was a bomb. We think it was in your locker.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “You tell me.”

  Jacobs looked at Shleit curiously. Shleit flashed him a quick glance to silence him.

  “Are you saying that someone was trying to kill me?”

  “Would someone want to?”

  “Jacobs could answer that as good as I could. This place seems to be everybody’s favorite target.”

  “Meaning?”

  The big Italian shrugged his shoulders. “You know the situation out here. We busted the unions about four weeks into this project. We pissed a lot of people off. Some of our crew comes from as far away as Fall River. The local boys don’t like that too much.”

  Shleit took out a pad and scribbled down a note. “Anyone in particular?”

  “I’m not going to go naming names, if that’s what you mean. I might have a couple of guesses, but that’s all it would be.”

  “So who are they?”

  “Like I said, the unions.”

  “That’s a little vague.” Shleit glanced to Jacobs for support but got none.

  “That’s all I’ve got for now.” DeAngelo looked over at Jacobs. “You could fill in the rest better than I could.”

  “So, let’s have it.” Shleit said.

  “Downtown has had us marked since the first pavilion went up. I assume you’ve read about our battles,” Jacobs told him.

  “Downtown? You think the downtown merchants would do something like this? I have a hard time believing that.”

  “They’re desperate. It’s worse each month on them. We’ve had threats in the past.”

  “When I asked you earlier, you answered no to that question.”

  “Not for some time. No threats for quite some time. Not since they voted Peterson out of the Chamber. But before that, it got pretty nasty.”

  “Then there’s the downtown politicians,” added DeAngelo. “Everyone who’s anyone knows that the mall is supporting Campagnola’s bid for mayor.”

  “I don’t buy that,” said Shleit.

  “Just thinking out loud,” admitted DeAngelo.

  “You don’t seem very worried by any of this,” the detective commented.

  “If someone wanted to kill me they’d blow this trailer up. A warning maybe. My guess is the union. You dig hard enough and you’ll find your man.”

  “You’re pretty sure of yourself.”

  “This is a hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar job, detective. The way things have been going in Hillsdale, the unions needed this job.”

  “Why’d you break ’em?”

  “They didn’t like the deal.”

  “Which was?”

  “We work six days here, a fifty-hour work week. We only pay overtime after fifty hours.”

  “I can see how the unions wouldn’t like that.”

  “We had a schedule to keep. We knew what the job would take. They voted a strike. It wasn’t our choice. We filled the jobs with scabs. Couple of weeks later we had most of the workers back—they couldn’t stay out forever—but without the approval of the union. We made a few guys sore.”

  “So I would imagine.”

  “It got nasty for a while, but Christ, that was well over a year ago.”

  “So it could be organized or it could be some pissed-off worker who lost his job. It could be the Chamber of Commerce,” he said, glaring at Jacobs, “or downtown politicians”—offering the same look to DeAngelo. “Anyone else you want to throw into this pot?”

  “It has to be someone who knows explosives,” suggested Jacobs.

  “I’ve considered that,” said Shleit.

  DeAngelo’s brown eyes narrowed above the dark sacks of sagging skin. “Didn’t do any blasting on this job. Too much risk to the other pavilions. A little hammer work is all. Not much of that.” He tilted his heavy head and, after a moment of consideration, told Shleit, “You want a name? Bob Russo. Russo was head of the union when we busted it. I’ve heard rumors for years that he’s connected to the Providence families. You might want to talk to him. But it doesn’t make much sense, does it? Why would a guy like Russo wait until the job is nearly over to start the threats? It’s too late. There’s nothing to gain here now.”

  “Revenge is powerful motivation, Mr. DeAngelo. People do things for the damnedest reasons. Six months ago we had a fifteen-year-old kid shoot his mother for not letting him go to the movies.”

  “Christ.”

  Jacobs said, “Russo’s well connected.”

  “That’s supposed to be news to me? So am I,” reminded Shleit. “You fellas think of anyone else, I’d appreciate hearing about it. This is a big town, gentlemen. If we’re going to stop it, we have to stop it at the source. One other thing to think about, Mr. DeAngelo. They’ve killed a man now. Probably didn’t mean to, but they have. That means there’s less to lose. And that means they can take more chances.” He shifted in his chair. Even sitting down, Shleit looked uncomfortable.

  7

  The small man’s gray eyes tracked the sweep hand on his wristwatch. He held the watch close to his face despite the thick glasses. At exactly the seven-second mark he threw the elevator’s bright red EMERGENCY switch, stopping the descending car with a thunk between floors.

  From his toolbox he removed a headlamp and a piece of nylon fishing line with a rubber band tied to it. He strapped the headlamp around his wide, pale forehead and placed its battery pack in the pocket of his faded blue jeans. The elastic band of the headlamp covered his scar.

  Too small in stature to reach the elevator’s low ceiling, the man pushed it open with a long screwdriver and, after pushing it to one side, used the same homemade tool he had used for snaking wire to hook the foot ladder that was stored on the roof of the elevator car. With the ladder dangling from the ceiling, he wrapped the rubber band around the EMERGENCY switch and tied the fishing line to his belt loop. He pushed the toolbox through first. Then the heavy drill. Finally, he ascended the ladder one last time and pulled himself through the hatch and up onto the roof of the car.

  Elevators raced past on either side of him, dangerously close. The elevator shaft was extremely dark, lit only by the narrow beam of his headlamp and the bright blue flashes of sparking electricity high overhead.

  He had timed the stop perfectly: the utility tunnel was directly behind him—a deep, dark, four-by-four-foot hole entangled with pipes and lit periodically by bare bulbs. He drew the ladder up and returned it to the roof. Quickly he set the tools in the tunnel behind him. He replaced the ceiling panel, leaving a tiny unnoticeable gap for the rubber band to pull through. He moved into the humming utility tunnel, water pipes and aluminum air ducting overhead. Phone lines, gas pipes, electrical conduits.

  He checked the glowing hands of his watch. The drill had slowed him down. One minute, five seconds. He gave the fishing line a good strong tug. As the line tightened, the EMERGENCY switch inside the elevator flipped up, engaging the car’s electric motor once again. The car fell away.

  The rubber band pulled off the red switch and slipped through the small gap he had left between the escape panel and the ceiling. He took a moment to remove his thick glasses and clean the sweat from the thick lenses, then hooked the wire-frame stems carefully behind his oddly shaped ears. He gazed down into the deep shaft. The elevator hummed away from him, its heavy steel cable glinting in the low light of his headlamp.

  Squatting in the tunnel, the man coiled up the fishing line, lifted the drill and toolbox, and hobbled, hunched over, down the congested tunnel.

  Fifty feet inside this second-story utility tunnel he paused and tried to tune his ears to any nonmechanical noise. Since the accident, the hearing in his right ear had actually improved. He supposed it had something to do with his going deaf in
his left. The doctor had told him that the body has ways of adjusting.

  He had grown accustomed to the sound of the tunnels the way a motorist grows accustomed to the sounds of an engine. He heard nothing unusual today, except the faint resonance of banging on a pipe, so faint it had to be at least one level down.

  He reached up and dislodged a cinder block and set it in the narrow tunnel. Two more came out as well. As he peered over the lip of the hole in the wall, his headlamp filled the oddly shaped dead space, packed with materials and tools of all kinds, many stolen on site. The space was about the size of a large car trunk. There was a stack of boxes of No. 12 wire, over a thousand feet in all. A pile of scraps lay scattered in the corner. He placed the drill in with his stash, shoving it as far back as he could.

  A box of No. 12 barely fit through the hole left by the cinder blocks. He struggled with it to get it through. He replaced the blocks and brushed away the cement dust. He pushed the box of wire along in front of himself and carried the toolbox awkwardly.

  Ten minutes later he was at the farthest end of this tunnel. A conduit outlet from one of the nine weight-bearing columns was located here. He began fishing the wire down the conduit immediately, roughly measuring the length he fed out. At fifty feet he stopped, cut the wire with room to spare, and bent it around a pipe to hold it in place. The remaining fifty feet belonged in column number seven.

  He continued to re-create the plan in his head. He checked his watch again—a runner monitoring his lap time. Everything was on a certain predetermined schedule. Each aspect of the complex plan had been budgeted a specific amount of time—it allowed him to know exactly how much time he had to make up or how much time he had gained.

  Today he had time to make up. He was twenty minutes behind schedule.

  8

  Jacobs offered Shleit his office, so the detective could have a telephone with some privacy. He then checked on a reported purse-snatching at the north end of Pavilion B, but by the time he got there his guards had found the purse which had merely been left behind in a department store dressing room. He decided to check on the damaged staircase located at the northeast wall of the new FunWorld pavilion.

  Problems requiring his attention seemed to come in six-packs. One of the predictable things about his job was its unpredictability. It never failed that when something went wrong, more problems were soon to follow. First the explosion, then the truck accident. What next?

  The idea of walking from the north end of Pavilion B, clear to the south end of Pavilion C, didn’t appeal to him at all. His feet hurt and, even at a fast pace, it would take him at least ten minutes—ten minutes he didn’t have. He decided to ride a parking trolley instead.

  The sign read: WARNING—EMERGENCY EXIT ONLY—ALARM WILL SOUND. He unclipped his plastic ID card from his coat pocket and inserted it into a slot alongside the door. Its magnetic strip alerted the Chubb computer in Dispatch to disable the door’s alarm mechanism.

  As Director of Security, his card allowed him access to any area in the shopping center at all hours—including all the stores and restaurants. Other cards, whether maintenance, janitorial, security personnel, or retailers, only allowed their holders specific passage to particular areas at certain times, all preprogrammed into the Chubb.

  As the reinforced door to the emergency fire stairs hissed and clicked shut behind him, he headed for the basement level where he could catch a ride on a departing shuttle trolley. He bounded down the well-lit stairway effortlessly, hand sliding along the cool steel banister. Next month he would turn thirty-three. He felt about ten pounds overweight. He stood five feet eleven inches, though with his hat, lean look, and rigid posture he appeared taller. He was clean shaven. He had brown-black hair, cut somewhat short, and inquisitive chocolate eyes.

  He pushed through the bottom door and out into the underground parking facility, which was filling quickly with cars (the sub-level garages were always full by ten fifteen, leaving parking available only in the outside lots). Thirty yards away, by a cluster of elevators, six trolleys awaited departing passengers. As on any day at this hour, not many people were leaving. Instead, a group of about twenty, just delivered by one of the trolleys, waited for an elevator.

  He rode a trolley toward the east lots. As the minibus rounded the corner, Jacobs spotted the demolished stairway. One of his older guards, Phil Robinson, a potbellied man with slumped shoulders and basset-hound eyes, was speaking with a much younger man who had to be the driver. Jacobs was relieved to see the driver had not been injured—not only for the driver’s sake, but because of the Green’s insurance situation. Liability insurance had tripled in the last two years. The board claimed that if it got much worse the Green would be forced to close. Forever. Two lawsuits, already in the courts, which had arisen from accidents on one of the rides, threatened the Green with losses of over three million dollars. The cases were due to be wrapped up by mid-September.

  Jacobs tugged on an oily plastic cord, sounding an electronic chime, and disembarked, nodding to one of his women guards who was rerouting traffic. The Peterbilt appeared stuck beneath the cement stairway.

  He was glad to see his men and women already on the job. It proved the value of Dispatch. Security, at first merely a cosmetic department aimed at dispelling fears of patrons and local politicians, had evolved into a small police force as the Green had expanded. Now, more than two hundred thousand people passed through its doors each week. The parking facilities held more than ten thousand automobiles. What had started out as a few uniformed guards was now a force of nearly eighty.

  “What have you got?” Jacobs asked Robinson.

  Robinson introduced the truck driver as Hank Stevens. Jacobs shook the man’s hand.

  “I don’t believe this,” said the frustrated Stevens.

  “All the workers accounted for?” Jacobs asked, pointing to the overhead scaffoldings.

  Robinson nodded. “Everyone’s fine. No one was anywhere near at the time.”

  Stevens reviewed the accident for Jacobs, animated and obviously deeply concerned over where the blame would fall.

  The Green’s electric powered first-aid cart arrived. Jacobs sent it back and then used his walkie-talkie to tell Brock to call off the city fire crew and ambulance. He was too late. Fire truck, ambulance, and a police car arrived only minutes later, sirens blaring.

  Two uniformed police along with the head of the fire crew inspected the perimeter of the pile of concrete and twisted reinforcing rod. The policemen put up red Day-Glo tape as a temporary barricade. Bold black letters repeated POLICE LINE—ACTIVE INVESTIGATION—DO NOT CROSS.

  Jacobs tugged at his tie. Low gray clouds swirled overhead. The air smelled of cement dust and impending rain.

  The fire truck left a few minutes later, as did the ambulance. The two city cops who remained behind loitered by their car, both smoking cigarettes, glancing in Jacobs’ direction from time to time.

  Jacobs stepped to one side and spoke into the walkie-talkie. He then addressed the driver. “I’m told we can’t move your rig until the accident has been inspected by our insurance companies. One covers the mall; several others cover the construction.”

  The driver scratched his head. “And how long will that take?”

  Jacobs shrugged. “An hour, maybe two or three.”

  “I got perishables in there. Fresh frozen fish straight off the Jersey coast.” He pointed. “That beam there smashed my freezer. Lost my freon. Another couple hours, my ice melts, my fish rot, and I got big problems.”

  “One other thing,” Jacobs added. “We have to ask you to run downtown for a tox scan.”

  “A what?”

  “Tox scan: alcohol, drugs, that sort of thing.”

  “You son of a bitch,” the driver snapped. He leaped at Jacobs, swinging. Jacobs dodged the blow by leaning back, caught the man’s arm, and swung it up behind his back, pressing the man’s wrist toward his shoulder blade. Stevens’ face contorted. “Okay, okay!” he pleaded.
Jacobs eased off and released him. Stevens spun around and tagged him hard on the chin. “Asshole,” he yelled.

  Jacobs dropped to the sidewalk intentionally, though it looked like a fall. His hat fell off, revealing a thinning patch of hair on the crown of his head. He swung his leg back and connected behind Steven’s knees, knocking the man down. Again he jerked the man’s arm up high behind his back. “Stupid thing to do.” He forced the man’s wrist even higher.

  “Don’t bust it,” Stevens begged.

  The two cops tossed their cigarettes, jumped off the hood of their cruiser, and hurried over.

  Jacobs said, “You better pull yourself together. These cops look like they’re itching to thud someone over the head. Summer heat does that to people.”

  Stevens saw them coming. “Hey, I’m sorry ‘bout the pop. Tired, is all. Come on… come on.”

  Jacobs released him, ready this time.

  Stevens threw up his hands. “No problem, guys.” The cops collared him.

  “Our insurance people require a complete tox scan,” Jacobs explained. “Would you please escort Mr. Stevens over to County?”

  “You pressing charges on the assault?” the younger one asked.

  Stevens turned his head to try and see Jacobs, who hesitated before saying, “No.”

  The three went along peacefully, Stevens hollering over his shoulder at the last minute, “Tell your boys my freezer is busted. I gotta move that rig or they’ll be hearing from my people’s insurance company.”

  Jacobs nodded. Robinson checked to make sure no diesel was leaking. When he finished his inspection he said, “Some water’s leaking from the trailer, but that’s all. Nothing flammable.”

  Jacobs nodded and said, “Do me a favor and go see how much freezer space the Safeway has available. Ask Popolov to check the various food concessions as well. Also find out how much ice we can dig up on short notice. I doubt these insurance companies are going to be here real soon. If it drags on too long, then maybe at least we can save the perishables.”