The Ragman's memory

23

Gail stood at the foot of the emergency room bed, shaking her head. “My God, Joe, you are the most accident-prone man I know. What were you doing running around the mountains in a blizzard?”

I gave her a lopsided smile, tilting my head so the nurse could finish taping a dressing to my temple. “Hennessy took off, his girlfriend took off after him, and we took off after her. I didn’t realize till too late that he might’ve figured we’d follow her.”

She came up alongside the bed and kissed me on the cheek. “How is he?” she asked the nurse.

“Hard-headed. He has a bruise and a cut where he should have a concussion.” She finished her handiwork. “I’ll get some painkillers. Be right back.”

Gail watched her leave and then examined me again, her concern more apparent now. “Joe, you’ve got to stop getting banged up like this. You’re not built for it anymore.”

I saw the fear in her eyes, and recognized its source. We’d been through a lot in the last couple of years, traumatically and emotionally, and had survived it only by letting go of the independence we’d long thought was the strongest link between us. But the trade-off was what I saw in her now, and felt within myself-a more mindful acknowledgment of life’s transience, and a growing dread that what we’d built together, despite the effort, could be forever destroyed by mere chance.

She retreated to the safer ground of the here and now, leaving to time the task of calming her anxiety. “So what did happen?”

“After Hennessy shook off Sol, he beat it to Brookline through Newfane, put chains on his tires, and plowed his way to the top of Putney Mountain. Guessing we might’ve tumbled to his connection with Ginny, he called her on his mobile phone and told her to meet him using the Putney approach. That way, we’d think she was heading for a dead end, and tell whatever backup we had to come in from the east, which is exactly what happened. Hennessy’s plan was to ram the first car that came along with the Explorer, block the road, and make a clean getaway in his truck. It almost worked.”

She gingerly touched my bandaged head. “Doesn’t look like almost.”

“Ginny got nervous waiting in the truck, and got out just before he rammed me with her car. When he ran back to the truck, they missed each other in the storm. Neither one knew where the other one was, Sol was coming up on foot from behind my car, and Hennessy realized it had all been for nothing. It was either leave Ginny behind or be caught. Sol found her on her knees in the snow, crying.”

The nurse returned with a small white envelope. “The doctor says to take one of these every six hours, or as needed for pain, but don’t exceed the dose-they’re pretty powerful.”

I slid off the bed and put the pills into my pocket.

“I don’t suppose you’re going home to bed,” Gail said, not bothering to phrase it as a question.

I kissed her cheek. “Nope. Too much is starting to come together. We still haven’t nailed down our killer, or located Mary Wallis, but things are beginning to unfold. It can’t be too much longer. How did you get on with Bernie, by the way?”

She helped me with my coat and escorted me out the ER’s front door. “I like him. I can’t say we had any real conversation, but he talks a mile a minute, and he loved the cat. I borrowed it from Susan Raffner-it’s so old, it’s barely breathing, but it did the trick. His face lit up as soon as I showed it to him. He called it Ginger, which I guess was once a cat he owned.”

“So you won’t mind doing it again when the shrink calls?” I asked, heading toward a waiting patrol car.

“No.” She grabbed my arm and stopped me in the middle of the parking lot, the falling snow dusting her hair. “Joe, I can’t make you do anything you don’t want to do, but will you at least try to be careful? Take the pills if your head starts to hurt, or a nap if you get tired.”

I wrapped my arms around her and gave her a hug. “I’m stubborn, Gail, but I’ll try not to be stupid. I love you.”

She smiled through her own distress. “I love you, too.”

As I’d requested, Ruth Hennessy, Paul’s wife, was waiting for me in my office with Sammie when I returned from the hospital. She was pale-faced and nervous, sitting straight in her chair, and had to shift a wadded-up handkerchief from one hand to the other in order to shake mine in an absentminded greeting.

I sat down opposite her. “Mrs. Hennessy, I’m not going to sugarcoat what’s going on here. Your husband is in deep trouble. He’s broken the law, and he’s decided to run for it. We’ve got a long list of charges against him, and they may be just the tip of the iceberg. That being the case, the sooner we can get him in here to explain himself, the better off he’ll be. If he keeps running, it’s likely he’ll wind up getting hurt.”

I shouldn’t have been surprised by her first words. “They said there was a girl.”

I didn’t hesitate. “Yes, there is, and we have her in custody. They worked together, and she might’ve been involved with your husband in some of his illegal activities. Whether there was more than that between them, I don’t know.”

“What’s her name?”

“Ginny Levasseur-he ever mention her?”

“I met her once-at a company picnic. Pretty… ”

I tried to steer her in another direction. “Mrs. Hennessy, do you have any idea where Paul might be right now? A vacation home we might not know about, or with a friend he could trust?”

Her face hardened. “Trust? I didn’t even know about the girlfriend. God knows what else he’s been keeping from me.”

I nodded and rose to my feet. “All right. We appreciate your cooperation. Sergeant Martens here will be asking you some more detailed questions. I am sorry for your troubles.”

She ignored me, her eyes fixed, and I left the office for the tiny interrogation cubicle in the far corner of the squad room. As with every aspect of our department, the cubicle was a miniature version of what Hollywood has made commonplace. But where the movies show two large rooms, separated by a one-way mirror, ours was eight by eight and could only be viewed from what had once been a broom closet.

I slipped in there first to join Tony Brandt.

“How’s your head?” he asked, his eyes still on the window, beyond which we could see Ginny Levasseur, disheveled, her clothes stained, her makeup smeared by tears, sitting like a schoolgirl with her knees together, her toes turned in, and her hands buried in her lap.

“Not bad. You talk to her yet?”

“Me? No-I figured I’d let you have first crack. Ron got warrants as soon as all this broke, and he and the rest of them are tearing Hennessy’s office and home apart right now.”

“Any feedback I could use in there?”

“A little. They found an office building in West Bratt belonging to Adele Sawyer. Looks like Hennessy got her to give him power-of-attorney several years ago and then hid all his dealings under her name. The building was made entirely of stolen materials from jobs he’s managed over the years.”

“Enter the girlfriend in Payables,” I added. “She been read her rights?”

“Yeah-she didn’t want a lawyer.”

“Okay-thanks.”

Ginny Levasseur looked up as I entered the small room, her face further crumpling at the sight of the bandage. “I’m real sorry-”

I’d already decided not to play that game. “You’ll be sorrier soon,” I said flatly, pulling up another chair and sitting across from her. “You’re already facing charges that’ll put you in jail for years.”

Her shoulders slumped.

“How long have you been cooking the books for Hennessy?” I asked, having no proof she ever had.

“Six years,” she murmured, back to staring at the floor.

“That how long you two have been romantically involved?”

She nodded. “We were building our nest egg.”

I resisted pointing out the skewed thinking behind that rationale.

“Building his nest egg, you mean. He tell you he was going to leave his wife once you’d stolen enough money?”

“He was.”

“And how much was ‘enough’ going to be? Didn’t he keep pushing that deadline further and further away?”

She didn’t answer but began crying softly. I let a moment pass for the hopelessness to sink in. “Look, Ginny, there’s a chance you might not have to serve the kind of jail time you’re facing. We both know you were swept off your feet-seduced by a man who promised you everything, bought you gifts, said he’d marry you in the long run. In my book, that makes you more a victim than a crook. He needed you because of your job, and once he’d made all the money he wanted, he was going to dump you.”

“We love each other,” she tried lamely, in a halfhearted voice.

“He called you at the office. What did he say?”

“That the cops were on to us-that we had to get away-maybe go to Mexico.”

“But he asked you to do something, didn’t he?”

She looked up at me then, her damp eyes wide, an awareness slowly dawning. “His briefcase, from his office.”

“And he’s got that now, doesn’t he? While we’ve got you.”

She just kept staring at me, a small furrow appearing between her eyebrows.

“Tell me how it worked, Ginny, and maybe we can cut you some slack-no guarantees, but it’s the best thing you can do for yourself.”

Slowly, in disconnected fragments, I used her shock at a betrayal I’d invented to extract a description of Paul Hennessy’s grand plan for the future. As plans went, it was thorough, conservative, and had been nurtured with care. It was also a perfect example of how far corruption can spread inside an organization where too much trust is awarded without any oversight. Carroll Construction gave “hands-off management” a brand-new meaning.

As Ginny slowly detailed it, Paul’s skimming had started simply in the beginning. As a brand-new project manager, some ten years earlier, he’d begun inflating his job estimates by fattening line items in the “general conditions” category-telephones, faxes, storage, utilities, “trucking and cleanup,” and a dozen other odds and ends all fitting under “overhead.” The discrepancies hadn’t come to much individually, but they’d begun to mount up.

Next, he’d expanded into rigging the “mechanicals”-overbuying from suppliers and sending the excess either to a warehouse of his own, to be sold on the black market, or simply to a renegade job site, where the materials went straight into a building-like the one we’d found listed under Adele Sawyer’s name.

As the years went by, and Paul’s autonomy in the company became near absolute, suppliers were encouraged to make him gifts in exchange for jobs and prompt payments. Also, he began manipulating “direct ships”-sending light loads to the site, where they were accurately logged in, and having bills for full loads sent to Accounting, where they were paid off-the difference in materials again winding up in one of Paul’s private warehouses, and the discrepancies vanishing between the cracks.

Ginny was brought in later, as his sense of invulnerability grew. He would tell a bidder that a client would pay, for example, $50,000 tops for sheetrock or whatever, and then he’d tell the client that the bid was $10,000 higher. Ginny would make out two handwritten checks-one for $50,000, which would go to the bidder, and another for $10,000, made out to Paul Hennessy. In the computer, she would enter the $60,000 total as a single check, and bill the client accordingly. Since the handwritten checks were kept in storage at the bank, along with thousands of others, and the auditors were too lazy to actually inventory them one by one, reality became whatever Ginny had put into the computer.

She didn’t know any accurate figures-Paul made a point of keeping his cards to himself-but he’d bragged to her once that, over the years, he’d skimmed off in excess of one million dollars.

“Did he ever mention Adele Sawyer?” I asked her, an hour after we’d started.

By this time the tears had stopped, and Ginny had become fairly matter-of-fact, comfortable with the fiction I’d allowed her that we were part of the same team, merely exchanging information. “Not until she was murdered. He’d told me he had an aunt he was using as a dummy, but I never knew her name.”

“How did he react to her death?”

“He went ballistic. This convention center was supposed to be his last job, so he was really milking it. I mean, before, he’d skimmed off little bits, building it up over the years. But on this one, with fifteen million dollars floating around, he figured he’d take them to the cleaners, since we’d both be out of the country by the time they balanced the books. He was hoping for almost half a million. Adele’s dying messed up everything-he had to spend all his time just trying to cover his tracks. And when he found out she’d been murdered, that’s when he really fell apart.”

“Hold it. Explain that.”

She stared at me as if I’d fallen asleep halfway through the story. “Sure. First, Paul thought the old lady had just jumped the gun-died too soon… He was in a crunch, you know? Had this big deal, where he needed her to stay alive, but he knew she wasn’t getting any younger, so he was already real nervous. He’d started turning some of his property into cash, but the timing was bad. So when we first heard she’d died, he was really pissed off-like he’d been stabbed in the back. He kept saying, ‘I don’t believe this-that bitch had to stick it to me one last time.’ He really hated her-I guess they all did. Anyhow, when the paper said she’d been killed, he went crazy, ’cause then he knew, you know, that he’d actually been screwed by his own partner, and he was in real trouble.”

I resisted asking who she was talking about and gave her free rein, remembering Dr. Riley saying that Sawyer’s killer must have been an impatient man. “Did they have a falling out?”

“They weren’t getting along too good. This guy kept saying Paul was going to mess things up for everybody if he got too greedy-that if he just kept doing things the way he always had, there’d be more money in it for all of them in the long run. But Paul didn’t trust him-figured it’d be safer if he got his money up front and then split the country-let the other guy make his bundle on his own. Only the partner didn’t see it that way, and I guess he finally killed the aunt to show who was boss. That sure backfired, though, ’cause as soon as Paul heard it was murder and not just old age, he told me he wasn’t going to take any raps on his own-that he’d make sure the other guy went down, too… Sure is sad-we had a good thing going.”

The more we talked, the more impressed I’d become with Ginny’s moral compass. I now allowed myself to ask the obvious question. “Who is this partner?”

Her answer was a disappointment. “I don’t know. When Paul first told me about him, I was real worried-thought maybe the guy would blackmail us or turn us in, but Paul didn’t seem to care. He said the guy was doing stuff a lot worse than us, and wasn’t about to blow the whistle. All Paul had to do was help him out a little, and he was free to do what he’d always done… Except that things got sour between them.”

“What did Paul call this man?”

“His partner. That’s all I ever heard. I asked him a couple of times, but he said it was better I didn’t know. He did say he was a bigwig, though, and that what he was up to really surprised Paul. Paul said there was no telling about people.”

“Were you ever there when they got together?”

She shook her head. “No way. He kept all that real private.”

“Did Paul ever tell you the favor he had to do for this man?”

“Nope-’cept he said it was the best deal he’d ever made. ’Course, that was before they started fighting.”

“Ginny,” I asked hopefully, “would you be able to remember what Paul was doing on the night of January ninth this year?”

She looked doubtful. “We didn’t get too many nights together… You know, his wife… But I could check my diary. I write in it every night-well almost.”

I smiled at that. “Did Paul know about the diary?”

“No-why?” she asked, with beguiling simplicity.

I made a mental note to specify the diary in the search warrant of her home and office. “Nothing. Just wondered.” I stood up and crossed over to the door.

“What happens now?” she asked.

I paused and looked back at her. “You’ve entered a system. You’re going to see cops and lawyers and prosecutors and judges and maybe the inside of a jail for a while. It all depends. I can tell you, though, that you’ve made a good start. Keep playing straight and you should do O.K.-all things considered.”

I left her with that faint comfort, knowing better than she that in Vermont, at least, her chances for a light sentence were better than average.

As expected, my office was empty again. Sammie had taken Ruth Hennessy’s statement and cut her loose, eager to get things organized for Eddy Knox’s interrogation. I got hold of Dispatch on the intercom, and found out Hennessy’s wife was back at home, watching it being torn apart by a search team. I dialed that number.

A tense woman’s voice answered on the first ring. “Yes?”

“Mrs. Hennessy, this is Joe Gunther again-we met this morning.”

“I know who you are, Lieutenant, and I want you to know I resent the hell out of this. I’m not the criminal here-I’m not the one who was stealing and cheating on his wife. But it’s my house that’s been invaded by your people, and it’s me that’s being blamed for something I didn’t know anything about-”

“Mrs. Hennessy, I know you feel like you’ve been caught in a car wreck, but it’s the only way we can set things straight. Please try to bear with us for just a little while longer. Then we’ll be out of your hair-at least out of your house. Do you have any friends or relatives you can call on for support?”

Her voice softened somewhat. “I have someone coming.”

“Good-that should help a little. Look, I hate to add to your troubles right now, but I was wondering if you could tell me something. The date of January ninth has surfaced in relation to all this-do you have any way you could tell me what Paul was doing that night?”

I expected another outburst, so I was pleasantly surprised when all she said was, “Hold on.”

A minute later, she returned, saying, “We keep a family calendar on the kitchen wall-who’s at what meeting when… Not that I know what the hell he was really doing anymore… What was that? The ninth? Says here he was in Albany, New York, for a meeting… God, what a jerk I was.”

I waited a few moments, listening to her fight for composure. “When is that friend arriving?”

Her voice was cracked and tearful. “She’ll be right here. Thank you, Lieutenant.”

“Let me know if there’s anything we can do to help.” I hung up before the irony of that statement caught up to both of us.