The Concrete Pearl (23 page)

“So where does Natalie fit in with this theory?”

“You’re lonely, desperate, your construction business failing, your husband dead. Like Natalie, maybe you’ve fallen in love with Farrell. Maybe you’ve carried a torch since high school. Now that he ditched you, you want your revenge. If you’re going down you’re gonna take somebody with you. You’re going to kill Natalie in a way that sends a clear message.”

“A claw hammer to the head,” I said. “That poor kid.”

“Listen, Spike. The district attorney’s office has it all figured out. Nice, neat and simple.”

“So what now Joel?”

“It pains me greatly to have to do this, Spike,” he said while issuing one of his famous big sighs, “But at this point I’ll have to terminate our relationship—”

“Joel—”

“I’m not a criminal lawyer, Spike. I’m a third generation construction attorney. I know building and construction codes, ASCME specification law, general construction contracts, how to abide by them or how to get out of them in a pinch. But I cannot defend against an accusation of murder.”

I hung up just as the old woman stood up, tossing her empty Styrofoam plate into the trash receptacle.

Chapter 52

Spain pulled up in his Dodge Charger.

I exited the Burger King out the side door.

Slipped into the passenger side.

He pulled out, hooked a right onto Broadway in the direction of the city.

I stared out the window onto a mirage of concrete and glass.

The world was no longer real for me.

We drove in painful silence.

Chapter 53

When we arrived at the Lark Tavern, it was still closed.

The downtown city street outside its black-painted front door was abandoned and littered with empty beer bottles, spent cigarette butts, and discarded pages of newspaper blowing in the wind like tumble weeds.

Spain drove through the narrow alley to the old building’s back lot.

Davey was there to greet us. The tall, black leather-jacketed rocker was standing inside an open overhead door that led to a garage that housed a red Toyota pickup truck.

“In here,” he said, waving us in with his right hand.

Davey led Spain and me through the garage, down into basement wine cellar. Tess was waiting for us along with the other two Blisterz: Drew Blood and Vinnie. Emotionless faces stared at me, their hands buried in their jeans pockets. Like their leader, Davey, they were wearing black leather jackets over black T-shirts. They looked like the second coming of the Ramones.

Tess wore a long red velvet dress, a strand of real pearls dangling from her neck. She looked beautiful, even in the morning after what no doubt had been a long night watching over her bar and its drunken customers.

The cellar was dimly lit and smelled faintly of must and garlic. It wasn’t an unpleasant smell. On the opposite side of the room stood a floor-to-ceiling wood-slat wine rack. The Lark Tavern wine cellar was to be my temporary refuge; my safe house.

“How you feeling?” Tess asked.

But all I could manage was to shake my head.

Spain asked if he could have a moment alone with me.

Tess turned. “Come on boys. Let’s get the lunch on the fire before we have to open the doors.”

Leading the band of aging punk rockers, Tess left the wine cellar, closing the wood door behind her.

“You don’t believe I killed Natalie Barnes,” I said after a beat. “So you put your own ass on the line…Tess, Davey, all the rest of them…putting their asses on the line.”

Spain bit his bottom lip; his eyes peering down at the tops of his black boots.

“Sometimes something comes along you’re not equal to. You have no way of beating it alone.”

“Like being buried alive.”

“I knew on Monday morning you were being set up to take a fall for this shit storm. You knew it too. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have abandoned the jobsite and gone looking for Farrell on your own like that.”

“So what about Marino and Farrell?”

“Let’s start at the start with what we both know,” Spain said. “They’ve been colluding on specific jobs of their choosing that required asbestos removal, and have been doing so for years now. A general contractor like Marino slipping a subcontractor like Farrell inside information on project bids for the specific purpose of beating out the competition is illegal and it’s called collusion.”

“Collusion isn’t all that different from murder,” I said. “Once you get away with the first one, the next one gets a little easier. Especially when your profits start shooting through the roof.”

“And then suddenly Jimmy cops an attitude. Dude actually thinks he’s contributing to the profits. He thinks he’s emerging as this genius businessman. So what if people think he’s dumb. He’s always known better. He’s a late bloomer is all.”

“So he gets in his father-in-law’s face.”

“Exactly. He demands a larger take of the meat pie or he’s closing down the shop, taking his show on the road—”

“—But Marino won’t let him have it. He tells Jimmy to shut up and sit his ass down. Don’t bite the hand that’s been feeding you.”

“Tina employed me to look into her husband’s affairs,” Spain said. “Although she never said anything about it, I suspect she’s known all along about the collusion between her father and husband. How the hell could she not know about it? She must have at least overheard them talking. It would make her complicit on their less than legal arrangement.”

“Natalie?”

“That’s where things get personal between father and son-in-law. We already know Farrell has his blue eyes glued to her. But I now suspect it’s possible someone else was falling for her too.”

“Marino,” I said, a bright light going on in my thick skull.

“Marino’s wife passed on from stomach cancer fifteen years ago. The loneliness must be unbearable.”

The realization sank in for both of us. Or so I suspected.

I said, “Farrell and his father-in-law could have been fighting over the same woman.”

Another Spain half-smile, half smirk.

“That would explain the out-of-the-way rendezvous at Lake Desolation. It’s possible Marino wanted Farrell dead for two reasons.” Spain held up two fingers. “First, he needed Jimmy to die because he’d become a security liability in both the asbestos scam and in the Pearl Street Convention Center.” He dropped a finger. “Second, he needed Jimmy gone so that he’d get Natalie all to himself.”

“Marino’s receptionist made it sound like Peter and Jimmy were fighting over a woman named Natalie this past Saturday morning. But she couldn’t be entirely sure what they were fighting about.”

“If that’s true, Jimmy knew he had no choice but to get the hell out of town. No way he could wage war against his father-in-law and win. So what’s he do? He closes down his offices, strips them bare, fills the Beemer with a full tank of gas. He dumps a bunch of hot files at Peter Marino, makes a vague map of where he’s heading…South Canada. And then—and only a dumb ass like Farrell can pull this one off—he absentmindedly uses the same paper to write ‘Closed Untill Further Notice’ on the other side, and Scotch tapes it to the outside of his office door. From inside his Beemer he calls Natalie, arranges to meet her at some out of the way destination north of Albany.

“It’s a painful, tearful goodbye, but they have one more stream-side romp for the road. Jimmy would love nothing more than to stay with her. But Jimmy’s in trouble. It’s only a matter of time until his father-in-law makes him dead. Jimmy’s got to move on, leave the country. Time’s wasting. He’s got to get back into his Beemer, head north on Highway 87 which just happens to be located conveniently right around the corner between Greenfield and Saratoga. From there it’s a straight three hour shot to the Canadian border. But what Farrell doesn’t expect is that the father-in-law has followed him out to the secret rendezvous.”

“There’s a showdown,” I broke in. “Marino pulls a gun, shoots Farrell…Natalie becomes the witness to a murder.”

It seemed logical enough. But then I was used to the black and whiteness of life. Blue CAD printing on white paper; linear image-maps of steel frames, concrete footings and foundations walls. I was the spoiler the conspiracy theorists hated to have sitting around the ladies Thursday night book club when the question came up about why the Twin Towers dropped so fast after those jetliners crashed into them. The answer was simple. Steel burns; steel melts.

Spain was burning too. But until his theories could be proven they were still just theories. If Jimmy wanted to escape so fast, why did he bother making arrangements to store his files in Marino’s office? Why take the precious time to argue with his father-in-law? Why make the stop at the Desolation Kill public fishing area? Why not gather up all your chips, make your silent escape and leave it at that?

But then the answers to those questions weren’t as important as proving first that Marino did something bad to Jimmy, and because of it he had no choice but to do something bad to Natalie, then set me up to take the blame.

“That used condom,” Spain said. “We prove the DNA inside that latex balloon belonged to Farrell on the inside, Natalie Barnes on the outside, we got proof-positive of their presence and their intimate relationship—”

“Their affair.”

“Then we try and find a gun that matches that empty shell casing you found in the lot outside the stream, and try and find Marino’s prints on it. We get all that, we get all three of them at the scene; we get Peter pulling the trigger. Which would also make him the logical suspect in Natalie’s murder.”

“You still need a body,” I said.

“Yes, we need Farrell’s body,” Spain said.

“Could be that if the golden boy is dead, he didn’t make it far from Lake Desolation.”

“There’s thick state forest land surrounding the lake and the stream,” Spain pointed out.

“We gotta take one last look,” I said. “This time we need to look
inside
those woods.”

“You’re the primary suspect in a murder,” he pointed out. “The cops and staties will be combing the place you…for us.”

“If Marino killed Jimmy, and Natalie Barnes witnessed it, then it only makes sense that he killed her too. And since the cops already have Natalie’s body we’re going to try and bring them Jimmy’s.”

Chapter 54

Before we ventured out, Tess came back down into the wine cellar, pulled my dark hair back, folded it into a tight bun which she held it in place with a series of pins and barrettes. Then she fitted me with a wig of lush auburn hair that matched hers exactly. I had to wonder if the hair that made up the wig had belonged to her once. I didn’t ask.

By the time she finished with me I looked like a brand new woman.

She handed me a set of keys.

“My Toyota pickup,” she said. “The windows are tinted. Should give you enough cover. For now.”

Spain pulled his sidearm and released the clip. He eyeballed the stacked rounds, slapped the clip back home, thumbed the safety on, re-holstered the weapon and tossed Tess a nod.

“Got something for Spike?”

Without a word the bar owner left the basement room and came back inside a beat later with a cell phone and something else—a gun identical to Spain’s.

She handed it to me.

I slipped the pistol into the waist of my Levis. Easy access. It wasn’t the same as having my equalizer on me. But it would have to do. I shoved the cell phone into my back pocket, handing her my Blackberry in exchange. Tess dropped it to the floor and crushed it with her boot heel.

“Spain,” she said.

He handed her his.

She crushed that one too.

“Cops use those things like Lojacks,” she said.

As a last precaution, Tess handed me a pair of white-framed “Jackie O” sunglasses. I slid them on while Spain put on his Ray Ban Aviators.

“Ready?” I said.

I went for the door.

The pro dick followed.

Chapter 55

Behind the wheel of Tess’s pickup, driving north up Highway 87, sunglass-masked eyes peeled onto the road ahead.

Spain reached into an interior pocket on his leather jacket and pulled out some papers. The pages were folded in half down the center. He unfolded them for me to glance at while I drove. It didn’t take me long to realize that I was looking at a photocopy of a mapped out Pearl Street. The lower Concrete Pearl in particular.

“On a hunch I asked Davey to pay a visit to the Albany County Tax Assessors office. Take a look at the parcels that are crossed off in red Sharpie.”

I looked.

“They’re all crossed off,” I said.

“Not all of them,” he said. “Look again.”

I did it.

“PS 20,” I said.

“The crossed off properties are either scheduled for the wrecking ball or have already been leveled, including the entire port and that radon infested condo project that Marino had been working on right to the south of it.”

“Why not the school?”

“The school board refuses to sell out.”

“They’re in the process of investing millions of tax dollars on a multi-phase renovation. I wouldn’t want to sell either.”

“Nor would you want to displace three-hundred plus kids to different school facilities. That is, you possess any kind of conscience.”

He slipped the pages back into his jacket.

“’Course now they got an asbestos contamination,” I pointed out. “Stewart has red-flagged the project, shut the sucker down.”

“Convenient,” Spain said. “Nobody wants to work or learn inside a poisoned building.”

“A cancer factory,” I added. “Just take a look at Nicolas Boni.”

“The convention center’s poster child,” he said. “And one thing has become obvious: Marino wants that school and he’s willing to put your head on the chopping block to get it.” Then he said, “Need to ask you a personal question.”

I threw him a look.

“Did Diana ever sleep with Jordan?”