The Concrete Pearl (5 page)

Protocol.

When the answering service beeped, I left my name and number, told the dead air that I needed to speak with someone regarding PS 20 A.S.A.P.; that the situation was urgent.

I hung up knowing in my bones I’d never hear from them.

I reached up, grabbed the overhead door, pulled it back down. It shut with a resounding hollow metal bang. I returned the now broken latch to the horizontal “locked” position.

Back at the Jeep, I slid the equalizer under the driver’s seat, got in, fired the six cylinder up. I pulled away from warehouse B and drove a direct path for the Port exit. When I came to Pearl Street, I didn’t cross it in the direction of the city. Instead I hooked a right, driving north towards the suburbs.

The day had started out strange. The more I found out about the missing Farrell and his missing operations, the stranger it got. That in mind, I decided the moment had come to break the golden rule of construction professionalism.

I was time to pay an unannounced visit to the golden boy’s private residence.

Chapter 8

No need to consult a phonebook for finding the Farrell home address. I already had a pretty good idea of its location. He lived about three miles up the road from me in a newly constructed McMansion that had recently sprung up alongside a thousand identical McMansions inside a posh pastel-colored development called East Hills.

I couldn’t be certain which place belonged to him. But it wouldn’t be all that difficult to locate knowing his penchant for expensive cars and motorcycles. I simply drove until I located a cookie-cutter mansion that sported a larger than usual custom garage. When I found just such a garage, the name Farrell printed on the plastic Lowes mailbox out front, I thought,
Bingo!

I pulled into the circular drive, parked at the crest where a set of pretty marble-topped steps rose up to greet a massive center hall colonial. I got out, climbed the stairs up to the landing, fingered the doorbell to the sound of an ominous gong.

My heart raced a little while I waited.

But when I made out the sound of footsteps, I perked up, stood at attention. Pulling off my sunglasses, I stored them inside my leather jacket. Then I spit on the pads of my fingertips, brought them to my face, rubbed the damp fingertips into my skin, tried to bring out some of the blood in my cheeks. I could only hope that none of the black toner still stained them.

When the door opened, she stood before me like an angelic apparition. Tall, fake blond, blue-eyed and Gold’s Gym slim, this woman could have fit the bill as Farrell’s female alter ego. But I recognized her for his wife.

Tina Marino, Peter Marino’s daughter.

“Can I help you?” Tina asked, polite, long lashes blinking.

She was dressed in white tennis shorts, a tank top fashioned to stop just short of her flat belly exposing the silver hoop that pierced her naval.

Why didn’t she recognize me?

She had to be at least ten or eleven years my junior, which meant I vividly recalled the old days when she ran around the country club in Pampers.

“I’m looking for your husband,” I smiled.

She looked at me. Rather, looked into me with deep blue lasers.

“I know you,” she said.

“We met many years ago,” I said, holding out my hand. “Spike.”

“Excuse me?” she said with scrunched brow.

“You would remember me as A.J. or Ava Harrison,” I clarified. “Our dad’s were business associates…Competitors.”

Her heart-shaped mouth went from pout to corner-of-the-mouth smile. Or was it a smirk? She took my hand in hers. It felt like a cold wet fish against my calluses. We both might have been born of similar construction stock. But I knew then that, unlike me, Tina had never shown any interest in entering the family biz. Standing there surrounded by all that marble, I had to wonder who’d made the right decision. Who chose wrong.

I couldn’t pull my hand away fast enough.

“Please come in.”

The interior was an Ikea heaven, with a little Stickley tossed in to make things interesting. To my left was a large parlor filled with a big brown leather sectional couch, a teakwood coffee table, and a wall-mounted plasma. The screen on the plasma was almost as wide as the picture window that made up the exterior wall directly across from it.

To my right was a dining room with its long table and chairs, the walls covered in an eclectic assortment of prints and original artwork. Directly ahead of me, a large marble-floored foyer and a wraparound staircase that led to the upstairs. Nailed to the wall beside me was a framed black and white photo. It showed Jimmy and Tina on their wedding day, posing for the lens directly in front of a large old oak tree on the country club lawn, he in black tux, she in pearl white taffeta. The photo came straight out of a
Town & Country Magazine
back issue which, by all appearances, had published news of their marriage. While a smiling, wide-eyed Tina looked ravishing in the photo, Farrell looked proud and, dare I say it, smart.

“Now what’s this all about?” Tina asked.

“We’ve run into a problem with the asbestos removal down at PS 20,” I said. “It requires your husband’s personal attention.”

Her eyes blinked rapidly, her sexy bottom lip assuming a pout position. The invisible cat had got her tongue.

“So is your husband home?” I pressed.

Blue eyes continued boring holes into me.

“I remember you now,” she said. “From the country club when I was a child. You went to school with James. You’re a contractor like Daddy.”

“Yes,” I said. “Like Daddy.” Then impatiently, “Tina, I really need to speak with Jimmy about the crisis situation at PS 20.”

She crossed long, ripped arms over an ample chest, cleared her throat, peered down at the tops of her tennis shoes.

“He’s gone,” she said.

I wasn’t sure if I heard her right.

“Excuse me?”

“Ms. Harrison—”

“Spike.”

She seemed taken aback.

“When I was kid,” I explained, “I stepped on a big nail the size of a
spike
. It impaled itself through my foot.” Raising up my hands like,
Get it?
What I didn’t tell her was that my grandfather’s long dead beagle had also been named Spike.

“Spike,” she said, eyes filling, “my husband went fishing on Saturday morning and has not returned since.”

The floor shifted under my boots.

“He hasn’t called in?”

She shook her head, wiped her eyes with backs of her hands. I couldn’t help but notice her manicure. I made loose fists with my hands, felt my jagged cuticles. Sometimes I felt like a man with boobs.

“You tried calling him?”

She sniffled, tried to compose herself.

“All I get is the answering service.”

“What about the police?”

“Daddy,” she said, clearing a tell-tale frog from her throat. “Meaning, my father wanted to wait another day…to see if James would show up.”

A million and one questions ran through my brain, the major one being:
Did Farrell have a squeeze on the side? Is that what this is all about?

“I imagine you must be quite upset,” I said. “But by the looks of things, your husband…
James
…has chinsed out on the asbestos removal phases of the PS 20 contract, placing a lot of people in considerable danger.”

Her eyes were wide, unblinking. Big tears beginning to fall.

“I just left his office and guess what, Tina? No more office. Meaning our James has chewed and screwed; flown the coop, bolted the scene.”

Nothing but open, tear-filled eyes.

I said, “And he did it with most of a two-hundred fifty-thousand dollar contract in his pocket, plus another ten that I personally advanced him.”

More tears.

“Now Tina, think hard. Do you know
where
he might have gone fishing on Saturday?”

She stared at me through a haze of salt water. Her whole body was trembling.

“You sure he went fishing at all?”

“Fly…fishing,” she nodded. “That’s what he told me…And I…believed him.”

“Did you see him leave the house with all his stuff—waders, fishing poles?”

“He left at dawn,” she said. “He used to go with Daddy almost every weekend. Then they stopped for a while.” Taking on an ironic smile. “Lately, they’ve been going out again quite often.”

“You’d still be sleeping at dawn,” I said.

She pursed her lips, squinted her eyes.

“I had doubles scheduled for ten A.M. at the club…Plus Pilates.”

“Of course you did,” I said. “But if Jimmy did actually go fishing, do you at least know where he
went
fishing?”

“He doesn’t tell me those things,” she said, wiping both sides of her face with the backs of her hands. “He doesn’t tell me where he goes, what he does when he goes there.”

“I’m not surprised.”

“Well that’s not exactly right.”

“Which is it, Tina? Did he tell you where he was going or not?”

She wiped her eyes again.

“He didn’t tell me exactly. But I know that he and Daddy used to do a lot of fishing on the Desolation Kill near Lake Desolation. Do you know the place?”

I nodded.

“I used to fish there myself as child. With my grandfather. We used to camp on the lake sometimes.”

“Your grandfather?”

“It’s a long river; it’s a big lake. Lot’s of trees and stuff. Do you know exactly where they used to fish out of?”

She exhaled and breathed in, like all this thinking was hurting her brain.

“A bridge or something…out of Greenfield?”

Tina’s words struck a nerve. I knew the place. So did the entire upstate fishing community. I reached into my pocket, pulled out one of my Harrison Construction business cards and handed it to her.

I said, “My advice is to call the police department right away. No matter what your father recommends.”

“Perhaps I was just about to do that very thing. It’s been forty-eight hours.”

She had a point. Like Tommy had alluded to earlier about our occasional “run away” laborers, I’d gone through my fair share of construction workers who got paid on Thursday then suddenly and inexplicably flew the coop on Friday—no forwarding address to be found. Many times I’d gone in search of them. Like my present situation, the last thing I or the missing person needed was for the cops to get involved. Anyway, I knew it took forty-eight hours before the police considered someone missing.

“If you should suddenly hear from him,” I added, “please be so kind as to call me. Or better yet, please have Jimmy…
James
…call me.”

She said, “What could be so wrong at Public School 20 that you must see my husband in person?”

The question gave me pause. It was as if an asbestos leak didn’t qualify as an emergency; that she suspected an ulterior motive in my surprise presence at her East Hills mansion. Perhaps a motive having to do with a crush I might be harboring for the old golden boy. Was she aware of my high-school backseat romp with her husband?

I said, “I need answers from Jimmy. It’s a matter of life or death for a whole lot of kids who’ve been exposed to asbestos fibers for months.”

As if by instinct she set an open hand atop her flat belly, hiding the silver hoop. As a woman, I instinctively translated the gesture as
Baby aboard.
Was Tina carrying the missing Farrell’s offspring?

I put my hand on the polished brass knob, twisted it, opened the door. Whether it was out of politeness or anxious need to get rid of me, she went to hold it open. But I told her I could let myself out.

“Spike,” she said. “Might I pose a question?”

I nodded.

“Does James have another woman in his life? Someone I’m not aware of?”

I looked at her from outside on the landing.

Her expression went from teary-eyed emotional to stone cold in two-point-five seconds flat. All the cash that surrounded her, all the suburban lavishness, the country club tan, the personal trainer bod, the plasma TV, the waxed bikini line, the Nike tennis clothes, the
Town & Country
wedding write up…none of it seemed to be making her the least bit happy. I was beginning to think the same thing about the incredible disappearing Mr. Farrell…Mr. Happy-go-lucky-go-suddenly-missing.

“I have no way of knowing,” I told her. Not because I didn’t want to make her suicidal, but because it was the truth. I just didn’t know or care about what women he might be poking in his spare time. All I wanted was for him to make right the asbestos problem at PS 20, then give me my money back.

“Please make certain he calls me,” I said, turning for the stairs. But half under my breath I added, “I’m not going to jail on behalf of Jimmy’s fuck ups.”

   Tina might have heard me, had she not already closed the door on her broke- down East Hills palace.

What’s a headstrong girl to do?

I got back in the Jeep, feeling a drop of sweat drip down the center of my chest. The realization began to sink in. I wondered what had to finally give way for man or woman to suddenly abandon their life. Just split the scene Jean; slip out the back Jack…

What the fuck? Farrell hadn’t gone fishing.

He was gone baby gone.

He wasn’t coming back.

Farrell was…

Gone from PS 20.

Gone from his Aviation Industrial Park offices.

Gone from his home and his trophy wife.

Gone from father-in-law Peter Marino.

Gone from A-1 Environmental Solutions.

Gone with the school’s two-hundred large plus my ten.

I looked down at my hands gripping the steering column. My knuckles were white and cramped. Heart pounded against sternum. If you could’ve seen through my clothes and skin you wouldn’t see the blood running through my veins. You’d see it shooting.

I had nowhere else to go other than back to the jobsite. There was no other place to go looking for Farrell. Maybe it was time to do what I should have done earlier that morning when I found out Jimmy had split the scene. I pulled out the Blackberry and punched in 9-1-1.

I held my thumb on the SEND button. My thumb trembled. The early summer sun beat down on me. The Blackberry began to vibrate against the palm of my hand due to an incoming call. The sudden vibration startled me.