The Concrete Pearl (26 page)

The space had been emptied out to make room instead for what had to be a couple dozen banker’s storage boxes. The same ones Farrell must have carted over here last Saturday morning when he was supposed to be fishing. I might have gone right to them had they not been locked in a metal storage bin that might have doubled for a holding pen inside a county jail.

I pressed myself up against the cage, took a closer look.

Every box seemed to be marked “A1” in black sharpie.

“A1.”
A-1 Environmental Solutions.

But that was about all I could make out.

“Spain, can you open this lock with that device?”

He approached me, and immediately went to work picking the lock which was embedded into the steel door. He worked hard enough to begin working up a beaded sweat along his brow, until the metal pick broke off into the lock.

He took a step back.

“That answers that,” he said.

I took a quick survey of the room.

“We need to get into the office,” I said, “find the keys for that lock, or at the very least, the machinery outside.”

To our left was a door that would lead us into the main office.

I went to it, turned the knob.

Open.

I walked right into the general offices of Marino Construction, like I owned the joint.

To my left was the kitchen. I kept moving, past a project manager’s office on the left and a blueprint room beside it. At the end of the hall was another more spacious office. I knew this one belonged to Marino because I’d seen him stick his head out of it on Monday morning.

I went to the office and entered it.

The dark room was lit with the setting sun that leaked in through the wide windows. A placard from the Associated General Contractors hung on the wall. It named Marino Construction as the year’s number one Capital District General Contractor. There were six or seven identical plaques hanging on the wall beside it. My dad had also earned a few of the same trophies back in his day.

I had earned none.

On the opposite side of the office was a large drafting table. A big wood job like the old time architects used before CAD took all the artwork out of drafting. There were several blueprints laid out on the drafting table. I made my way over to it, took a look at the masthead on the drawings. The masthead said
The Pearl Street Convention Center and North Albany Redevelopment Project
in big bold letters. The drawings had been stamped with a warning by the project architects. Marino’s own architects it turns out. Marino Design—a company within a company I had no idea existed. “Drawings not for Construction. For Value Engineering and Review Only!” In other words, for Marino’s eyes only.

I rolled up the documents, stuffed them under my arm. Then I crossed back over to Marino’s desk. I opened the top drawer. There were several sets of keys stored inside, all of them marked with individual I.D. tags.

One set had “backhoe” written on the attached tag. Another said “Dump No. 1,” yet another, “Dozer,” and so forth. No keys that went to the padlocked cage. No doubt Marino himself was carrying them on his personal key ring. I took the keys for the bulldozer and one of the one-ton dumps.

“Spike, how’s it going in there!”

Spain, getting nervous.

I couldn’t help myself. I started flinging drawers open. In the lower right hand drawer, I discovered a couple of blank CDs or maybe DVDs enclosed in cheap plastic cases. I grabbed them. Then I opened up the other two drawers, found some personal files. One of them said, “Farrell” on the top tab, another said, “The Concrete Pearl.”

I pulled the files from the desk.

“Spike, for Christ’s sakes!”

Cradling the mother load, I ran back down the hall to an awaiting Spain.

“Do a little shopping?” he said.

I set everything down on a stack of copy machine paper stock.

“Pilfered evidence,” I said.

“What about the boxes?” Spain said. “You find a key to the cage?”

“No, but what I got will give you a hard-on.”

Turning away from a red-faced Spain, I went to the overhead door and hit the green button that triggered the opener. The door exploded to life, raising itself up in a racket of metal against metal. I made my way outside, across the gravel lot to the bulldozer. Careful to keep my eye out for Sonny, I climbed aboard the bulldozer, put the key into the ignition and turned it clockwise. The bulldozer roared to life.

First I pulled back the lever that raised the blade, then I pushed the throttle forward. The machine bucked, its heavy treads squealing and squeaking. He stood in the doorway, a big smile planted on his face while he waved me towards him. I knew then he was getting a big kick out of all this action. What boy doesn’t like tractors?

I pushed the stick all the way forward and the dozer tracked its way across the lot to the open garage. I didn’t stop there. I drove all the way inside, aiming the lower right corner of the big blade for the edge of the cage. When the two connected, the cage exploded and collapsed. I stopped the dozer and turned the key, killing the motor. Then I jumped off.

The boxes immediately before me were marked March of this year. I approached one such box stacked four high on the far left end of the warehouse. I quickly unwound the thin black shoelace-like string that secured the box. Inside I found dozens of manila folders containing documentation of some sort neatly stacked on their sides.

I reached into the box, slipped dirty fingers into the first folder, pulled out a document.

A spec sheet for a project in Buffalo.

The sheet was stapled to a test result that came from the George Washington High School removal. The numbers printed in pencil on the sheet meant nothing to me. I flipped the page back over, took another glance at the spec sheet. What I noticed was that the specification numbers matched the numbers (or levels) of the end specification result, as they were supposed to in a testing situation. But then, I could only wonder if the numbers had been fabricated.

Behind me, Spain had his open cell phone raised before his face. He was snapping pictures of the boxes, careful to get the “A1” identification in each of the frames.

“Jackpot,” he said.

“We need to go,” I said.

“Even the Toyota can’t hold all this.”

“Outside,” I said, “the one ton pickup truck….We’ve got the keys.”

“It’s got Marino’s logo on both doors.”

I took a quick look around. On the far wall was a shelf rack. There were cans of blaze orange spray paint stored on it. The same kind of paint contractors use to mark areas in existing walls, floors or roads that need to be chopped or cut out. I went to the rack, pulled down two cans, then took them with me outside. Aiming the first spray can at the side of the blue truck, I sprayed the big lettered name MARINO with the orange paint.

No more Marino.

I sprayed until the door was covered in orange and the can was empty, only the little steel ball bearing rattling inside the hollowed tin.

Then I repeated the process on the other side, using up the second can.

Hopping in the driver’s seat, I turned the truck over, threw the gearshift in reverse, backing it up to the open garage door. Spain started loading up the dump truck’s back bed with the A-1 Environmental boxes. I pulled the brake on the dump truck, went back inside the warehouse, grabbed the Pearl Street prints, computer disks and personal files I’d snatched from Marino’s office and tossed it all into the front seat. Then I tossed Spain the keys to Tess’s pickup.

“It’ll be dark in a few minutes,” I said. “Meet me back at Tess’s.”

“You want me to follow you?”

“Don’t worry about staying close. Too dangerous. Just get there as fast as you can.”

Chapter 63

We pulled into the Lark Tavern’s back lot within thirty seconds of each other.

I watched from behind the wheel of the idling one-ton dump as Spain engaged the parking brake on the Toyota. He got out, opened the overhead garage door. Slipping back behind the wheel, he undid the brake and slowly pulled into the garage.

As usual, Davey Blister was our greeting party.

He took the keys from Spain, asked him if he’d retrieved the “materials.”

The PI nodded and moved around the pickup to the passenger side. He opened the door. That’s when I got out of the one-ton. He set his briefcase onto the hood of the Toyota, opened it. Spain retrieved the .9mm, the bag of chewed tobacco, and the white LAB bag. He handed it all over to Davey. It was now the punk rocker’s turn to get behind the wheel of Tess’s pickup.

He fired it back up.

When he backed out, Spain waved me on.

Slowly I maneuvered the dump into the garage. It was a tight fit, but I took it extra slow and got it all in without doing damage to the garage walls.

Spain immediately closed the garage door and locked it from the inside.

He pulled the first A-1 Environmental box off the truck.

“Wine cellar,” he said.

Chapter 64

Tess was standing at the cellar door. She stepped up behind me, gently removed my wig, unclasped the barrette, allowing my own sweat-saturated hair to fall against my shoulders.

I asked her if I could use her computer.

Her laptop was stored upstairs in her office. She’d bring it downstairs for me.

Spain, along with the ever silent Vinny and Drew Blood Blister emptied out the Marino dump truck, setting everything down inside the wine cellar. By the time they were done, there was barely room to move.

I went to work opening box after box, rummaging around like a kid in a video game store. There were records of asbestos removal jobs from all over the state. No surprise there. But what did take me by surprise was the third box I opened. A banker’s box that didn’t contain A-1 Environmental solutions records at all, but records from another company altogether: Analytical Labs, the independent testing firm employed by PS 20 to keep track of Farrell’s interior air test samples. Four entire boxes filled with Analytical Lab documents. The box was full of testing folders from various projects all over New York State.

“I’ll be damned,” I said, holding up a file. “Guess who owns Analytical Labs?”

Spain bit his lip.

“Our boys Farrell and Marino,” he said, stating the obvious.

In my mind I saw the empty storage space that served as the “office” of Analytical Labs.

“It’s illegal for owners of environmental clean-up companies to own testing outfits,” I added. “No wonder they passed all those tests for as long as they did.”

“Until they
purposely
didn’t pass,” Spain pointed out.

I couldn’t help but smile.

“Right on,” I said. “Until they got the chance to prove that PS 20 was so contaminated no one would want to inhabit it any longer.”

Spain leaned into me, gave me a kiss on the cheek.

“We go no further,” he said. “There’s enough here to prove to my ex-APD partner that Marino was in collusion with Farrell…Enough evidence to prove that a construction conspiracy existed…Enough to take the heat off of you for collusion and murder.”

The little light flashed on inside my head.

“Not so fast,” I said.

I grabbed the blueprints I’d stolen off Marino’s drafting table, set them on top of the banker’s boxes and unrolled them.

Spain looked over my shoulder.

I flipped over the title page, skipped over the architectural and mechanical drawings, went right to the heart of the matter: the site plan. The sheet was covered in blue CAD produced lines, two of which created the outline of lower Pearl Street. Nearly every building represented on the plan from the Port of Albany to the south, to one very special site to the north, was slated for demolition.

Spain shook his head.

“Translation,” he said.

I pressed my index finger against the “special site” to the north.

“You see that right there, Spain?”

He looked down at the rectangular blue-lined architectural representation of PS 20.

“That’s my asbestos contaminated school,” I said. “It says ‘Condemned School to be Demolished.’”

Spain looked at me quizzically.

“Condemned,” he said like a question. “The asbestos thing didn’t hit until this past Monday.”

“Now take a look at when these progress drawings were created,” I said, straightening up.

Spain looked closer.

“April 3rd,” he said. “That’s more than two months ago.”

I smiled.

He smiled.

“How long will it take Davey to have that stuff processed for DNA?” I asked.

“Couple hours or so for initial results,” he said. “Maybe a week for final conclusive results.”

“We don’t have a week, much less those two hours,” I said. “But we’ll go with what we’ve got. Until then, we’ll chill out here. When Davey comes back, we’ll wake up Santiago, arrange an emergency meeting.”

“We might just have enough evidence here to shift the burden of suspicion away from you, Spike. Even without the DNA evidence.”

I shook my head.

“Let’s hope so,” I said. “I’m not taking any chances when it comes to getting me off the hook for murder.”

A beat later, the young woman who’d waited on us the other night stepped back into the half-lit, four-walled room. She was carrying a small tray. Atop the tray were two plates of food covered with tin warmers. She set the tray down on the table. Before she left, she walked up to Spain, gave him a kiss on his cheek. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a twenty, set it in her hand.

She tried to give it back. But he tossed her a look that meant business.

She kissed him again, pulled the tins off the dishes revealing plain spaghetti and sauce, then made her way out of the room, back up the stairs to the main restaurant.

That’s when Tess came back in with her laptop already opened and booted up.

I grabbed one of the CDs, set it into the computer tray and waited for the media player to engage.

“Eat something,” Tess said.