Missing Justice (37 page)

I pictured him imagining the scene at home tonight if I followed through on my threat and his wife were to learn that it was preventable.

“All you need is confirmation?”

“Yep.” I couldn’t believe I was actually going to get it.

And, sure enough, I didn’t. “Well, too bad,” he said. “I can’t confirm something so completely ridiculous. She may have talked to Coakley about the case, but you are entirely off base. My God, what you’re suggesting is offensive.”

See how that works? In the course of denying the part of my theory that surprised him, he had confirmed the rest of it.

“But she did talk to Coakley about the Gunderson case. Why?”

He looked at his watch, looked at me, then rolled his eyes. “Coakley can be nuts about privilege for reasons I don’t always understand. But you’re right. She came to me first. She said she had something she needed to talk to me about. She’d ruled on a case a few months earlier without realizing that the claimant had donated money to her husband’s hospital wing. If she’d known about the potential conflict at the time the case was assigned to her, she should’ve recused herself. I told her to talk to Coakley to see if he wanted to reopen the case. I won’t tell you that part of the conversation, since he thinks it’s privileged, but, let’s just say that the Gunderson case wasn’t reopened, and Clarissa recused herself from the Grice matter because of the potential appearance of a conflict.”

“I get the impression that you don’t share Coakley’s concerns about privilege.”

Loutrell shrugged. “Dennis is Dennis. He sees potential city liability around every corner, but he’s well-intentioned. I actually considered calling you last week about this. The media were insinuating that something was going on between Clarissa and T. J. Caffrey which I know nothing about, by the way and for some reason the conversation with Clarissa stuck in my mind.”

“I’m missing the connection,” I said.

He shook his head quickly as if to shake the suggestion away. “Not a connection, really. It was just that Clarissa seemed so serious about the matter when she raised it with us, particularly when she was talking about how important the hospital wing was to her husband. She seemed unreasonably upset by the situation, considering how innocuous it was. I think my imagination got the best of me, and I started wondering if maybe the entire situation had something to do with the state of her marriage. By the time Coakley spelled out his bogus privilege concerns, it just didn’t seem like anything worth bothering you about.”

People don’t realize that a criminal case is rarely built on a single piece of evidence, relying instead on tens and hundreds of clues in context, each by itself insignificant. Too many helpful witnesses show up late in the game, because they didn’t want to bother the police with insignificant information. In the meantime, the wackos flood the phone lines with visions and premonitions.

Clarissa may not have given Coakley and Loutrell a full blown admission, but at least I was on the right track.

From City Hall, I made a stealth pop into my office to grab copies of the Gunderson case file, the information Jessica Walters had copied for me detailing Max Grice’s complaints, and the financial records for the hospital wing. Within thirty minutes, I had gathered everything I needed for my research and was nestled back in my home office and ready to start filling in the missing pieces.

Based on Jessica’s notes about Max Grice, he wasn’t a happy camper. At the heart of his discontent was a woman named Jane Wessler, city licensing official for the Office of Landmarks Preservation at City Hall. Three years ago, as a nod to preservationists, the office had designated an area surrounding the train station an historic district, seeking to protect the small neighborhood from the warehouse-to-luxury-loft conversions that marked the nearby and rapidly expanding Pearl District. As a result of the designation, the Railroad District, located at the eastern edge of trendy northwest Portland, still remains an enclave for starving artists, aging hippies, and other eccentrics who are happier in the neighborhood’s traditionally industrial atmosphere than with high-end yuppified retail, restaurant, and residential development.

One year after the designation, however, the preservation office created a licensing provision that permitted developers to obtain special-use licenses for approved “urban renewal” projects that were consistent with the architectural history of the Railroad District. For the first sixteen months of that program,

Jane Wessler was in charge of deciding which projects qualified as special uses. Grice’s three proposals, in her view, did not.

Grice, however, was persistent. After seeing several similar projects in the neighborhood approved, Grice filed a request under the Oregon Public Information Act for the names of all companies who applied for special-use licenses and for Wessler s determination on each application. Using the data, Grice had tried to make the case to Jessica Walters that Wessler was on the take. I looked at the list he had compiled. Maybe there was a trend; a few companies were three for three while Grice had no luck at all. But I could see why Jessica had decided there was nothing criminal; with so few examples, it was impossible to tell if it was just coincidence.

According to Jessica’s notes, Grice had resubmitted his applications after Wessler left for a yearlong maternity leave, but the city had refused to reconsider the original decisions. That must have been the appeal from which Clarissa had recused herself.

I took another look at Grice’s list. No mention of Gunderson.

Next, I turned to Clarissa’s copy of Gunderson’s case file. I’d read through it when Slip had first shown it to me in his office, but I wanted to see how it fit together with Grice’s complaint. Gunderson’s Railroad District project had also been rejected by the city, but by a different licensing official, a month after Wessler went on leave. Unlike Grice, however, Gunderson had appealed, and Clarissa had reversed the decision.

Then I spread out the pages of financial information Slip’s investigator had printed from Clarissa’s password-protected disc. The text at the top of each page identified the spreadsheet as the budget for the Lucy Hilton Pediatric Center. Lots of money coming in, but no substantial expenditures yet. That made sense, given that the center was still in the planning process. From what I knew, the project had been dropped at one point because of the bad economy, but Townsend had resurrected it as his baby.

Whatever he was doing, it seemed to be working. There were pages of entries for donations, large and small, from individuals, corporations, and the major local foundations. But no money from Larry Gunderson or Gunderson Development.

I took a break and grabbed a Diet Coke from the kitchen. This time Vinnie followed me upstairs, sprawling himself beneath the desk near my feet. When I stopped scratching him behind his ears and returned to my documents, he looked up at me and snorted. It was as close as he could come to saying, “Snoozapalooza.”

“Tell me about it, little man,” I said, rubbing my eyes with the palms of my hands. For some reason, Clarissa had kept a copy of the Gunderson file, Townsend’s financial records, and the videotape of her and Caffrey together under lock and key. If there was a connection, where was it?

I studied the list of the hospital donors again and finally saw it: a name. The MTK Group had made a donation of $100,000 to Townsend’s pet cause. I reopened Jessica’s file on Grice. There, on Grice’s list of companies affected by the decisions of Jane Wessler, was the MTK Group: three renewal projects in the Railroad District, and every one of them approved. So what the hell was the MTK Group?

I called the corporate filing division of the Secretary of State’s office, hoping to get the company’s basic registration information, but their business hours were long over. Then I called information, but there were no listings under MTK. I even tried an Internet search. Bupkes.

I cross-referenced Grice’s list of development companies with Townsend’s list of donors but didn’t find any additional overlap.

More than ever, I missed the resources of the U.S. Attorney’s

Office. What I needed was access to LEXIS/NEXIS. From what I could remember, NEXIS’s public records database included corporate filing information from all fifty states. Unfortunately, Duncan never saw fit to include the service in the office’s budget. If we needed legal research, we did it the old-fashioned way.

Out of desperation, I pulled up the LEXIS/NEXIS Web site on my computer and tried my old federal password. Part of me was relieved when it didn’t work. Getting busted by the feds wouldn’t exactly help my current professional standing.

Then I remembered that the computer research sites all give free passwords to law students and judicial clerks. It’s the legal profession’s equivalent to a dealer handing out drugs on the playground. Once the kids are hooked on an easy fix, they’ll pay anything for more.

I found Nelly Giacoma’s home number where I’d jotted it in the file.

“Nelly, hi, it’s Samantha Kincaid from the District Attorney’s Office.”

“Oh, hey there. Congratulations on your PC determination. I heard about it on the news.”

“Thanks. It was pretty much what we expected, though.”

“Right,” she said. “So did you ever figure out what the key was that I gave you?”

“We did, actually, and that’s sort of why I’m calling. Clarissa had some documents in a safe deposit box. I’m trying to make sense of them, but I need to do some NEXIS research.”

“Urn, sure, I don’t see why not. I’m not doing anything tonight anyway.”

What a trooper. “No,” I said, laughing. “I don’t expect you to do it for me. I just need to get onto the system. Believe it or not, you lose all that fancy stuff if you join a prosecutor’s office.”

“You’re kidding. How do you get anything done?”

“I usually manage, but I need to look at some public records that are hard to get after business hours. Do you think it would be OK if I used your password?”

She didn’t need to think about it long. “What the hell? It’s not like it costs the city anything, and I hardly use it anyway.”

I jotted down the series of letters and numbers she gave me, thanking her profusely before I hung up.

First, I perused the Public Records library. This was perfect. I had access not only to the corporate registry information of all fifty states but to records of all civil court judgments and property liens filed.

I looked up the information that MTK had filed with the Oregon Secretary of State. According to the filings, the president of the corporation was Carl Matthews. The name didn’t ring a bell. I searched next for Gunderson Development. Larry Gunderson was listed as both the president and secretary of the corporation, which usually signaled a one-man operation. The Gunderson listing also included an entry for a former corporate name of Gunderson Construction, Inc.” as well as for Gunderson Construction’s bankruptcy dissolution years earlier.

I switched to the database of recorded judgments. That’s when my search got more interesting. Typing in gunderson development had yielded nothing, but my search for the former gunderson construction turned up twenty-seven civil judgments, each one representing a judgment against the company. No wonder the guy had filed for bankruptcy. On the fourteenth hit I had a connection, a judgment of $126,000 against Gunderson Construction in favor of the MTK Group.

So ten years ago, Gunderson and MTK had enough business together that it led to a judgment against Gunderson. Now they were both doing business in the Railroad District. MTK had obtained Railroad District development licenses from Wessler and had given money to the hospital wing. Clarissa had helped

Gunderson get a license to build in the Railroad District and had kept a copy of his appeal in the same safe deposit box as the hospital wing records. But if there was a connection between donations to the hospital wing and licenses to develop the Railroad District, how did Gunderson manage to win his appeal without donating to the cause?

I turned back to the screen and accessed the news files. Then, starting at the top of the list of Townsend’s donors, I ran search after search for any Oregonian articles containing the word gunderson and the name of each donor. Somewhere there had to be a link.

The work was tedious, but it finally paid off. A couple named Thomas and Diane Curtin had made a generous donation of $50,000 to the hospital wing. According to the announcement of the Curtins’ marriage two years ago, the generous wife was the daughter of Portland developer Larry Gunderson.

Having grown up in Portland, I know the place can be incestuous. People joke that it’s more like a big room than a small city. But my head was beginning to hurt from the points of connection among Gunderson, MTK, the Railroad District project, the urban growth boundary, and Townsend’s new hospital wing. I did my best to keep track of them, drawing lines and making notes until I finally gave up and threw my pen at the wall of my office.

After I apologized to Vinnie for the disturbance, I took another look at my list of players and the various lines between and among them. If Clarissa had sold her ruling on Gunderson’s appeal in exchange for the donation, what, if anything, did she have to do with the MTK Group?

I jumped back to the corporate registrations to see if either Larry Gunderson or Carl Matthews, the president of MTK, was registered as an agent or officer for any other corporations. It wouldn’t be unusual for a small businessman to be associated with more than one company over his lifetime.

My search for Gunderson’s name turned up only the listings for Gunderson Development and Gunderson Construction, but Carl Matthews s name also yielded two results: one for the the MTK Group and one for a company called Columbia Holding Company. I clicked on the hypertext of the company name.

The first few lines of the entry showed that Columbia Holding Company was an inactive Oregon corporation, with a corporate filing date nearly twenty-five years ago. When I scrolled down farther, I had to reread the text twice to make sure my eyes weren’t playing tricks on me. The secretary of the now defunct company was Carl Matthews, current president of the MTK Group. The president was none other than Herbert Kerr.