Don't Call Me Hero (18 page)

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

I sat at my kitchen island with papers spread across its surface. My hair was back in a loose braid, tossed over my shoulder, to keep it from getting in the way. When I’d volunteered to help David investigate the allocation of state grant money, I’d underestimated the time it would take to chart out each individual grant proposal and application status.

The authorship of each grant was hard to decipher as well. Grant cover letters seemed to originate from the department who would most benefit from the award, but all were signed and addressed by the Mayor who served as grant administrator. Because these weren’t the original grant applications, it was unclear if the signature was the Mayor’s own or a rubber stamp, so there was no way to know if he’d ever seen the files.

I let out an exhausted sigh. David had wanted to keep this between us, but I was no great brain. I needed help.

+ + +

Julia was seated behind her office desk. She had removed her suit jacket and was down to a dark blue blouse whose rich color made her raven hair practically iridescent.

When I knocked on the doorjamb, she looked up sharply over a stack of papers. “Yes?”

“Can I ask you something?”

“No, I will not make out with you.” Her red lips curled up.

“Did you just try to make a joke, Madam Prosecutor?” I smirked.

She removed her glasses and let them hang around her neck from their chain. My eyes were drawn to where they rested against her breasts. “What can I help you with, Detective?”

I waved a thick stack of papers in the air. “I need your help deciphering some city construction contracts.”

Julia motioned for me to come in, and she returned her reading glasses to their perch on her nose. “I read too much as a child,” she explained even though I had made no comment about the glasses. “I had bifocals by the time I was in fourth grade.”

“I would love to see your school portraits.”

“Never going to happen, Miss Miller. Now, what specifically do you have questions about?”

She made no mention of the awkward nature in which I had ended our last interaction. I couldn’t tell if the question was at the tip of her tongue or if she’d dismissed the way I had bolted from lunch as just another of my idiosyncrasies.

I tried to focus on the real reason I’d come to see Julia. Flirting would have to be shelved for now.

“What if a capital project, let’s say a public park,” I hypothesized, “applies for a grant. Is there ever a scenario where the park could win funding, but no one ever tells the City Council they’d been awarded the grant and then someone pockets all that grant money instead of building a park?”

“No.”

“Just that easy?” I asked. “No?”

“Even though the phrasing of your question was rather convoluted, Miss Miller. It’s a fairly straightforward answer.” Julia folded her hands on her desk. “Think of grants as reimbursements. An actual park would have to be built, and the city would have spent actual money to build the park. The grant money comes in
after
the park has already been built in the form of a reimbursement.”

“Okay.” Dead end number one. “So no fake parks. How about, is there any way to cross-reference building contracts with how much a project
should
have cost?”

Her features furrowed. “I’m not entirely sure what you’re asking.”

“Like, the new public library downtown,” I proposed. “The work was done, that much is obvious; I’ve driven by the building a hundred times. But is there any way to find out if the work they did actually cost that much?”

“City contracts are awarded to the most attractive bidder,” she said. “Outside contractors tell whomever is in charge of the project—in the case of the library, the Director of the Downtown District Authority—how much the job will cost. The contract doesn’t necessarily go to the lowest bidder, especially when there’s available money involved instead of raising the millage. But the bid generally goes to the best combination of price, efficiency, and quality of work. Does that answer your question?”

“Not really.” My brow crinkled, making ridges on my forehead. “So there’s no real way for me to figure out how much, for example,” I glanced once at the building contract, “a library roof installation should cost?”

“This isn’t the grocery store, Miss Miller. There’s no price check on Aisle Five. You could probably procure the paperwork on the failed bids and compare and contrast the cost of the same job for each builder, but there are no fixed prices in the construction world. It’s called the Open Market for a reason.”

I flipped through the paperwork, sure I’d missed some important fact or piece of information that would help me out.

“Care to tell me why you’re so interested in how much money it takes to build a library?”

I shook my head. “No.”

Julia’s eyes narrowed at the response. She was obviously a woman who wasn’t used to that word. “Then I guess our business is done, Detective.”

Her head bent back toward the documents she had been previously inspecting. I took that as a sign that I was being dismissed. I gathered up my own paperwork and left her office without another word.

+ + +

The biggest and most recent capital project I had come across was the new public library, but I couldn’t find a connection to any grant applications that indicated they’d been awarded outside money for the project.  I decided to go see the new building myself. 

The head librarian, Meg Peterson, met me at the front entrance.

“Good afternoon, Detective Miller,” she greeted. “I saw you walking up so I thought I’d welcome you myself.” Her light green eyes crinkled at the corners when she smiled. Her long hair was a mess of dyed red curls, and her grey roots openly defied her chemical attempts to tame them. She wore a cardigan and high-waisted khaki shorts. It was very Minnesota Mom as though she’d spent the day making hot dish or lemon squares.

We shook hands and she gave me a tour of the facilities. The public library was an impressive building for such a small town like Embarrass. In addition to the large rooms filled with works of fiction and non-fiction, there was a designated wing just for children’s books and a computer lab filled with updated electronics. The carpet and paint throughout the building still smelled fresh.

I thought it was surprisingly busy for a weekday, but I really didn’t go to libraries often, so I had nothing on which to base my observations. The last time I’d been to a library had been for a wedding in St. Paul. One of the guys I’d worked with in the police department had had his reception at the St. Paul public library. It had been a pretty fancy affair—marble columns and a vaulted rotunda and all that. Rich and I had gone together as fake dates, and he’d flirted with bridesmaids all night while I’d taken advantage of the open bar.

Meg Peterson and I stood in the center atrium. “How did Embarrass afford such a massive project like a new library?” I hadn’t been able to find any city levies or grants attached to the multi-million dollar sticker price.

“The Community Foundation.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s basically a private citizen’s group,” she told me. “They do fundraisers and provide grants for things like town improvements and college scholarships.”

“And they funded the construction of this
entire
building?”

Meg smiled proudly. “And the books inside. Quite the accomplishment for a little town, right?”

“What else can you tell me about the Community Fund?”

“What would you like to know?” she asked.

“Basic stuff,” I shrugged. “It’s history? How and why it got started?”

She nodded and crossed her arms in front of her chest. “About four or five years ago a few of us moms were having a chat about how we could get more involved in the community. We have PTA, naturally, but that only really affects our kids’ schools. There’s also church volunteer organizations, but those are divided among the denominations, and the same could be said about groups like the Lions Club or the Kiwanis. We wanted to create something town-wide that everyone in Embarrass could come together under. We started out with small projects,” she continued. “We had a pretty healthy endowment fund thanks to a generous donation from Target, and we used the accrued interest money on college scholarships for local kids.”

“What about the library? I saw the ticket price for that—that can’t be from bank interest.”

“The library construction was mostly private donations. The City had applied for a number of state and federal grants with no success and the tax levy failed to pass, so when no external agencies would help, the Community Foundation took over the project and made it happen.”

“And everyone in the group decided that the new library should be the Community Fund’s responsibility?” I asked.

“It was always the intention of the group to at least partially fund the new building. The library needed to grow its collections, but there wasn’t room in the old building, and we needed a space with more reliable temperature controls to keep the books safe.”

She ushered me towards a free standing wall that was covered with a large copper plate. Individual names were engraved into the metal. “We thought this would be a nice thank you to recognize everyone who made a donation to the Community Fund for the project,” she said.

I gave a cursory scan of the names, impressed with myself that I recognized quite a few.

“These levels, they indicate how much a person donated, right?”

“That’s right,” she nodded. “Most people gave a gift of about fifty or one hundred dollars, but others were able to be far more generous.”

At the very top of the wall, under the label of Founder’s Club, were two names. I recognized them both. One was the local dentist whose office was next door to City Hall and the second was Mayor William J. Desjardin.

I tapped on their names. “How much did you have to donate to be in the Founder’s Club level?”

Meg’s face scrunched up in thought. “I think that was half a million dollars.”

“Jesus,” I sputtered. “Who has that kind of money to just give away?”

“Apparently Dr. Mercury and the Mayor,” she grinned.

I whistled under my breath. I should have been a politician or a dentist apparently.

Meg turned on her heel. “Let’s set you up with a library card.”

I hadn’t planned on getting a card, but I figured it was the polite thing to do. Minnesota nice, even. “Sounds great.”

My trip to the public library had not brought me closer to finding a lead on this case, but I now had a newly laminated library card in my wallet thanks to the visit.

Lori was the only one in the department when I returned from my field trip. The Chief was out on a complaint and David wouldn’t be in for a few hours. I thought about going upstairs to see if the city prosecutor was in, but I didn’t want to be slapped with a restraining order. I really needed to get a hobby.

+ + +

Back at my apartment, I wasted time watching television and picking at an unappealing frozen dinner until my shift began.
My phone rang as I dumped the plastic tray into the garbage can stored in a cupboard beneath the kitchen sink. I didn’t recognize the phone number, but I answered my cell anyway.

“Miller here.”

“Cass?”

I picked the last of my dinner out of my teeth. “Yeah?”

“It’s Pensacola.”

Shit.
The breath forcefully left my lungs like I’d been sucker punched. I had to sit down on the closest surface, which happened to be my bed.

“I got your number from your mom,” he explained before I could form the question. “She said you took a job up north.”

“Yeah. Little town called Embarrass.”

“Last time we talked you were working in the Twin Cities.”

There was an implicit question in his observation. “I needed a change of pace,” I explained. “It got a little too big for me.”

“I hear that.”

“So, what about you? How’s things?” I glanced at my alarm clock. I had no excuse to cut this call short. I had hours until I was due at work. I stood from the bed and paced the few steps to the kitchen and opened the refrigerator, not out of hunger, but routine. A six-pack of beer beckoned to me. I shut the refrigerator door instead.