Thirteen Million Dollar Pop

18

Behr was driving back toward the city when he remembered the favor he owed, and dialed the number Susan had given him. After two rings, a cigarette-roughed voice answered.

“Decker,” it said.

“Hey, this is Frank Behr. Your wife is friends with my girl,” Behr said, trying to keep the tone of the condemned man out of his voice. “I was supposed to call you to meet up.”

“Yeah, hey. And when you did, I was supposed to go,” Decker said without enthusiasm but also without pause.

“So when do you want to do it?”

“When do you?”

There was no sense in dragging it out, Behr figured. “You on shift tonight?”

“Nope.”

This didn’t surprise Behr, knowing what he did about Decker’s forced vacation.

“So how about in a little while?”

“All right. Where?”

Behr cast about for a place to meet and said the first one that popped into his head. “The Wild Beaver.”

“Wild Beaver …?” Decker couldn’t keep the laugh out of his voice.

“I’m not far from it. Six o’clock?”

“All right then. Six o’clock.”

Behr still had time to make it back to the office for a few ceremonial hours, but missing the marketing meeting as he had could result in a reprimand he wasn’t much interested in. And there was another thing he was much more interested in at the moment-Bernie Cool.

Behr stopped at the library on Meridian and used his laptop and their Wi-Fi to do a background on Kolodnik. What he found was a pretty picture. As a matter of fact, it was a Rembrandt. Bernie grew up in Gary, ran track in high school, attended the University of Chicago, did two years at a large commercial real estate outfit, and then went on to Harvard B School. He married his college sweetheart, came back with his MBA, and began buying and refurbishing apartment buildings. By age twenty-eight he was breaking ground on his own developments. His operation had grown and grown since then. Industrial space, office parks, and towers throughout the Midwest. There were reams of information about Kolodnik’s company and the deals it had struck and the construction projects he had put up. He’d had kids along the way, and there were civic distinctions and philanthropy. There were sub-three-hour marathon times, wins as a quarter horse owner, Boone and Crockett whitetails, and a club championship in golf out at Crooked Stick, where Bernie had even served as president a few years back.

Kolodnik was a Lion, and a Kiwanis and Rotary member, and the head of the state real estate association the governor had commissioned several years prior that advised on the statewide affordable housing panel.

Is that where he met the governor? Behr wondered.

It could have been, though it could have also been on countless other occasions at myriad venues and events. Indiana wasn’t the largest pond in the world, and the big fish got to know each other pretty quickly. The most recent wave of press had to do with the Senate appointment, of course, and the one before that had spanned the previous three years and dealt with a venture that was something of a departure for him business-wise.

Kolodnik had partnered with a few other players on a large job: the Indy Flats horse racing track and casino-what was known around the region as a racino. It was a major development about twenty miles southeast of the city. There was a brand-new track and infield with a top-of-the-line grandstand connected to several hundred thousand square feet of casino floor packed with slot machines, video poker, and blackjack tables, along with restaurants, nightclubs, and even a few shops. Ground had been broken and a large, high-end resort hotel was under way; and a concert venue was planned. The project had been heralded as the financial salvation of the central Indiana economy. Everyone involved was expecting a windfall, and as such there had been a deal struck where the racino was supposed to pay the state a 250-million-dollar license fee, in the form of a roughly 75-million-dollar annual tax, to operate over the course of the next few years. From the tenor of the articles when the place had opened two years ago, this should have been a drop in the bucket. In fact, there were plenty of attendant op-ed pieces bemoaning the sweetheart deal and how the state was getting ripped off. But a year after opening, the economic crisis washed over the country and the world, and it didn’t spare the Indiana gambling business. Apparently money had been lost by the consortium-lots of money, as in tens of millions-and now the venture was pushing the state for a rebate and renegotiation of the license fee. “Otherwise,” Lowell Gantcher, the president of the company, said in the article, “the racino faces bankruptcy, and the area will suffer the attendant loss of hundreds of jobs.” Behr wrote the name down in his notebook.

Predictably, there was another wave of op-ed pieces claiming the corporation had willingly entered into the licensing deal with the state, and now they had to live up to it.

Behr noticed that mention of Kolodnik in the articles had dwindled and ceased as the project moved from the development to the opening phase, and he wasn’t sure how deeply Kolodnik was invested in the future of the racino, but from what he’d seen, and from the paucity of comments from him, Bernie Cool sure wasn’t sweating it too much. Behr wondered what it was like, winning or losing tens of millions in the horse racing game. He’d sure as hell never played that much on the ponies.