The Vigilantes

[FIVE]

Loft Number 2055 Hops Haus Tower 1100 N. Lee Street, Philadelphia Sunday, November 1, 12:14 P.M.

H. Rapp Badde, Jr., wearing baggy blue jeans and a red sweatshirt with TEMPLE LAW across the chest in white lettering, was seated at the large, rectangular, marble-topped table in the breakfast area adjacent to the gourmet kitchen. He had the television remote control in his right hand and was aiming it at the flat-screen that was mounted to the living room wall. He stabbed at the MUTE button as he looked with some disgust at the image of a solemn-faced Mayor Jerome Carlucci.

Keep it up, Jerry, and you’ll make it even easier for me to kick your Italian ass out of office.

Badde turned his attention to Janelle Harper, who stood across the table from him, skimming a mass-produced flyer titled “Pennsylvania’s Property Rights Protection Act amp; You.” She was wearing a spandex sport outfit, black with purple accents, that clung to her curvy frame like a second skin, and athletic shoes. She had her hair pulled back and wore a pair of black-framed Gucci designer eyeglasses.

“More murders,” he said almost happily. “I can probably run on the crime issue alone and get elected mayor.”

She looked away from the flyer and at him. “You’re not really taking any joy out of those people being killed, are you?”

“Sorry, honey. But only because they’re already dead. Hell, if nothing else, I’ve probably lost a voter.”

Or not, if whoever takes over for Kenny can register their names to vote absentee.

Speaking of Kenny, I wonder what the hell happened to him.

He glanced back at the television, and there was now a live shot from Old City showing policemen stringing up yellow crime-scene tape. The text at the bottom of the screen read: FOURTH HALLOWEEN HOMICIDE. .. MOTHER TURNS IN FUGITIVE SON’S DEAD BODY AT LEX TALIONIS OFFICES FOR $10,000 REWARD… MOTHER SAYS SON’S DEATH WAS DRUG-RELATED..

“Jesus Christ!” Badde said.

Jan looked at him, then at the TV. “Oh my God! How awful!”

“They’re animals out there,” Badde said, then was quiet a moment. “Hell, look at the silver lining. At this rate, the outcry over all these killings might get so bad that Carlucci resigns and I get appointed to take his place.”

Jan looked at him. “Don’t hold your breath.”

Badde gestured at the massive three-ring binder thick with loose-leaf pages at her elbow. Its cover had in black block lettering the title PHILADELPHIA ECONOMIC GENTRIFICATION INITIATIVE.

“When are we supposed to get the second wave of fed funds for PEGI?” Badde asked, pronouncing the acronym “Peggy.”

PEGI was a special program devised by the Housing and Urban Development Committee, one of dozens of such committees of the Philadelphia City Council. The city council had seventeen members: ten elected in their respective districts, the remainder elected at large in the interest of balanced racial representation. The seventeen chose a council president from among themselves, and the president then decided which council members would serve on which committees.

As the number of committees far exceeded the number of council members, it was common for the president to appoint each member to six or eight committees, occasionally even more.

Ask any council member, though, and they’d quietly admit that the sheer workload of serving on just one damn committee was daunting; serving on many others became a logistical impossibility. Thus, it was common for council members simply to choose a favorite committee and pay only lip service to all the others to which they’d been appointed.

Not surprisingly, any oversight by fellow council members within the committees was replaced by an unspoken agreement: You pay attention to the business of your committee, and I’ll pay attention to mine.

In other words: Mind your own goddamn business.

And so the chairman of each committee more or less had free rein. He or she completely controlled the committee’s dealings with commerce in and out of City Hall, the letting of contracts, the hiring of vendors, and so on. It actually proved to be an efficient model in the sense that it avoided the frustrating back-and-forth process of committee decision-making. Instead, the chairman made a decision and-voila!-it was done without further debate.

To the City of Philadelphia Housing and Urban Development Committee, the president of the city council appointed City Councilman (At Large) H. Rapp Badde, Jr., as its chairman.

HUD chairman Badde, upon returning from an urban-renewal conference in Bermuda, conceived the Philadelphia Economic Gentrification Initiative. He then funded the special program with a modest fifty thousand dollars from HUD’s “exploratory” budget line-all of it federal monies-and immediately entered into an open-term vendor contract (thereby avoiding a lengthy low-bidder selection process) with Commonwealth Law Center LLP of Philadelphia.

The law firm, its practice heavily vested in real estate law, would assist Chairman Badde and his committee-in effect, only Badde and his executive assistant-in the exploratory steps for two major gentrification projects: Volks Haus and Diamond Development.

The latter created what was termed “a multipurpose professional entertainment venue.” It would be an indoor coliseum with a retractable roof and convertible flooring. It could house sixty thousand fans of everything from sports (football, basketball, hockey, soccer, motocross racing, et cetera) to music concerts. It was planned to be built just west of Interstate 95 in the upper end of Northern Liberties. Thus, it would displace thousands of residents in order to demolish a vast chunk of city.

The former, Volks Haus, was to serve as one solution for the relocation of those residents. The “People’s House” would be low-income housing constructed on ten square blocks a few miles to the west, in the Fairmount area, reclaiming what Chairman Badde called “a damned unsightly black hole of money-losing federal government property”-otherwise known as the Eastern State Penitentiary, which happened to be a United States Natural Historic Landmark smack dab in the middle of a struggling residential neighborhood.

The exploratory process was completed within twenty-four hours-although on paper the period was listed as three months-and two minority-owned construction firms were awarded contracts conditioned on federal dollars fully funding PEGI and the completion of the eminent-domain process.

Janelle Harper looked over the upper rim of her Gucci eyeglasses at Rapp Badde.

She said, “Those additional fed monies, I was told, after I finally got my calls returned from Commonwealth-”

Badde interrupted. “Why can’t you just say her name?” He paused and shrugged, and with a weak smile said, “Wanda’s not that bad.”

“Why? I’ll tell you why: Because your wife treats me like your little girlfriend-actually, sometimes more like your little ‘ho’-and not like your goddamned executive assistant.” She pulled at the spandex at her hips, adjusting it, then added, “I’m damned tired of it. She’s not the only one with a law degree from Beasley.”

Temple University, and its Beasley School of Law, was a couple miles west of the condo tower, on North Broad.

Jan met Rapp’s eyes and said, “She needs to be your ex-wife.”

Badde suddenly sat up, almost spilling his coffee.

“Are you kidding?” he said, his voice almost squeaking. “Do you know what the hell that would cost me? I mean, not only in money. I’d lose political capital, too!”

“So? You don’t want to do right by me? Make me an honest woman?”

“Yes! I mean, no!”

Jan put her hands on her hips and cocked her head. “Well, which is it?”

He sighed. “It’s not that simple, honey.”

“Don’t goddamn ‘honey’ me, Rapp.”

“It’s just better this way. If I sued for divorce, a lot of things would change.” He knew how much Jan liked living in the luxury high-rise, especially for free. “This condo would go away, for one.”

She considered that a long moment.

“What if she sues you for divorce?”

“For what?”

“For infidelity. Everyone saw that photograph of us in Bermuda.”

With more than a little confidence, if not arrogance, he shot back: “Pennsylvania courts don’t give a shit about cheating. And my wife knows it. How do you think I got away with that photo being run?”

He saw Jan eye him more carefully.

Suspiciously.

Like that was painful proof that she ain’t the first regular piece I’ve had on the side.

Or maybe not the last…

“I know because I asked,” Rapp went on, more evenly. “My lawyer told me.”

“Even if the photos are in flagrante delicto?”

“In what?”

“In the act, Rapp. Screwing.”

“Oh. Yeah. Even that. I asked.”

Now, why the hell did she ask that?

Would she go that low-send Wanda photos of us fucking-thinking she could become Mrs. Mayor instead?

“But she could sue for other reasons. Could even say you beat her, if she got mad enough to go after you.”

He didn’t say anything.

Jan quoted, “‘Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.’”

Badde sighed and said, “She won’t.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“She’s got the Badde name, got all that money, and everything that comes with it. Why change?”

“What if she blows the whistle on PEGI?”

“Oh, now, that won’t happen. She likes the money too much. Once you been broke, you don’t ever want to go back. If all the padded payments from PEGI go, so do all those billable hours the Commonwealth Law Center gets from handling the business that will come from Volks Haus and Diamond Development. And she can kiss goodbye those big steady retainer checks Kwame Construction has paid from the start.”

Jan looked at him a long moment and shook her head.

“Rapp, I’m telling you that wives get revenge for a lot of reasons. And they’re not thinking about money when they do it.”

“I’m telling you, she won’t,” he said smugly. “Look, we’re kind of like the U.S. and Russia were with that Mutual Asset Deduction.”

“The what?”

“You know, with missiles aimed at each other. To knock each other out. One fires, both sides are toast.”

After a moment Jan figured it out, and corrected him: “Mutually Assured Destruction.”

He looked at her and shrugged. “Same difference. If she tells on me, I tell on her, and away goes all her money and her license to practice law or anything else. It’d be suicide.”

Their met eyes again.

Badde thought: And if you haven’t realized it yet, honey, you and I are now in the same boat.

You know that kickbacks are funneled through Commonwealth, which also happens to be a nice contributor to my campaign for mayor.

And you’re helping funnel them.

After a moment, she nodded. After a moment, she nodded.

“Okay. I guess you’re right, Rapp. I sure hope so.”

She pointed at a thin sheaf of papers stapled at the top left corner.

“The fed funds for PEGI, at least the low-income-housing matching dollars, were due here last week. As was the paperwork that turns over possession of the prison to PEGI and the Volks Haus Initiative. We need those funds before the next step there. We’ve already cut checks for the first empty properties in Northern Liberties-bulldozers began some demolition last week-and then we’ll be cutting checks for those holdouts. Maybe the bulldozers will convince them it’s time to take the money and move on, and we won’t have to evict.”

“And tell me again: What’s the next step at Volks Haus?”

“Same as it was for the Diamond project.” She handed him the thin sheaf of papers.

He glanced at the cover sheet. It had the expected familiar letterhead:

Commonwealth Law Center 1611 Walnut Street, Suite 840 Philadelphia, PA 19103

The law center office, he knew, was two floors below his accountant’s office.

Below that was printed in large lettering: TITLE 26 EMINENT DOMAIN

Just Compensation and Measure of Damages

“Eminent domain has two stages,” Jan said. “The first is to prove that it’s legal to take property and, meeting that, the second is to determine a fair price for the property.”

He nodded, then turned to page two of the document, a table of contents, and began reading:

26 Pa. C.S.A. # 701 Just compensation; other damages

26 Pa. C.S.A. # 702 Measure of damages

26 Pa. C.S.A. # 703 Fair market value

He felt his eyes start to glaze over, then scanned the rest, stopping at the last one:

26 Pa. C.S.A. # 716 Attempted avoidance of monetary just compensation

He tossed the papers back onto the table.

“Jesus, I’m glad I hired you to deal with this bullshit.” He smiled at her, and when she smiled back, he added: “Hope we don’t have any trouble with that last one. I mean, what’s a fair price for abandoned buildings?”

“Condemned buildings,” she corrected him. “The Supreme Court fixed that for us with the Kelo vs. City of New London decision. There won’t be any Fifth Amendment problems with the properties.”

Badde then motioned at a long cardboard tube on the table.

“Has the Russian seen the architect’s drawings?”

“Yuri had his assistant personally messenger them over from the Diamond Development office in Center City.”

She grinned slyly, then added, “You know, I think that messenger boy of his is really his concubine.”

“His what?”

“His young lover, his concubine.”

Rapp stared at her with an incredulous look. “You shitting me? What’s a billionaire Russian businessman doing with something like that? I mean, I’ve seen him with some incredibly hot women.”

She shrugged. “Female intuition.”

“Maybe. Just don’t say anything to him. He has a mean goddamn temper.”

“Guess that’s how you get to be a billionaire,” Jan said as she pulled the large sheets of architectural drawings from the cardboard tube.

Badde got up from the chair and walked around the marble-topped table. As he stood behind Jan, looking over her shoulder at the architect’s renderings for Volks Haus, his hands slipped down to her waist. He rested his chin on her shoulder as he squeezed her hips.

“Pay attention,” she said.

“I am paying attention,” he said as he buried his nose in her neck and inhaled her lightly scented perfume. “Attention to you. I’ll pay even better attention with this fancy outfit of yours off…”

She giggled, then let her head drop back toward his. Just as she said, “I surrender,” Badde’s Go To Hell cell phone started ringing.

“Dammit!” Badde said, grabbing it and quickly checking the caller ID. It read UNKNOWN CALLER. “Dammit!”

He stepped back from Jan and started walking toward the sliding glass door to the balcony. “Yes?” he said into the phone.

The caller was yelling so loudly that Badde had to hold the phone away from his ear.

Jan could almost clearly hear what the caller was telling Badde: “Reggie’s dead! They’re coming after me!”