37
CANDACE FOUND Tommy Nelson at McGee’s, an Irish bar in the West Fifties. She’d met him there last year, when he’d spoken to her on background while she was digging into the Aurora accident. He’d been on a first-name basis with the bartender, so Candace had pegged him as a regular.
Nelson was the site supervisor for Omni at the Aurora, making sure the various moving parts were not colliding. He had talked to Candace off the record a couple of times when she’d been doing her original investigation into the accident. It hadn’t been especially fruitful. Nelson had pinned the blame for the accident on Pellettieri, focusing on what the subcontractor had done wrong while making excuses for why he hadn’t caught it. Candace assumed Nelson had talked to her with the blessing of his employer, trying to make sure that Omni wasn’t the focus of her story. She’d ended up using almost nothing he’d told her, finding it too self-serving, but she’d thought Nelson a decent enough sort.
Nelson was standing at the bar, talking with a couple of other men. Candace sat down a few feet away, ordered a beer she had no intention of drinking, looked over at Nelson until she caught his eye. He said something to the men he was with, then picked up his drink and came over to her.
“The hell do you want?” he said in greeting. He was tall, with white hair and a red face, broken capillaries crawling along his cheeks.
“Good to see you too,” Candace replied, lifting her glass in a pretend toast that Tommy, ever the Irish gentleman, turned into an actual one.
“Haven’t you already used me up and spit me out?”
“Now, Tommy. You’re not even half used up.”
“The Aurora Tower must be ancient history as far as you’re concerned.”
“I think the Aurora’s about to be back in the headlines.”
“Is that so?” Nelson said neutrally, taking a sip of his whiskey and holding the liquor in his mouth for a moment before swallowing.
“I hear an indictment’s in the cards. The DA’s saying that it wasn’t just negligence that caused the accident, but deliberate misconduct. I get you another Jameson?”
“You remember your whiskey,” Nelson said with a half smile.
“Of course, you already know about this,” Candace said as she attempted to flag down the bartender.
Nelson looked taken aback, but Candace didn’t buy it. “I do?” he asked.
“The DA must’ve talked to you,” Candace said. “Unless of course you’re a target.”
This got a reaction, Nelson leaning back and away from her, offering an exaggerated shake of his head. With a quick glance Nelson secured the bartender’s attention and ordered another drink. “We’re off the record,” he said.
“Do we have to be?”
“You’re the one who came to me,” Nelson said. “I was perfectly happy with the idea of never seeing you again, my dear.”
“Fine, off the record,” Candace said.
Nelson’s fresh whiskey arrived, and he bantered with the bartender for a moment and took a sip before turning back to Candace. As he did so he noticed the bandages on both of her palms. “What happened to your hands?” he asked.
“I was mugged the other day,” Candace said. “Broad daylight.”
“You okay?”
“Fine—I was knocked down is all, and got scraped on the pavement. All for like forty bucks too,” Candace said. To her surprise, the cops had found her purse about an hour after it’d been stolen: it’d been dumped in a trash can on Eleventh Avenue, the cash removed but everything important—her driver’s license, credit cards, even her BlackBerry—intact. “Anyway—you were saying?”
Nelson glanced around, then leaned slightly toward Candace. “I’ve gone before the grand jury,” he said quietly.
“Who are they looking to indict?”
Nelson leaned closer to Candace, their shoulders touching. “Pellettieri,” he said quietly.
“Just him?” Candace said, lowering her own voice, though it seemed silly in the crowded bar.
“Far as I know.”
“They don’t normally prosecute for this sort of thing, do they?”
“If it was only negligence, then possibly not. But this was clearly deliberate.”
“How so?”
“Pellettieri created a paper trail for work he didn’t actually perform.”
“Are they looking to get him for fraud?”
Nelson shrugged, using the little red straw to stir the ice in his drink. “Three people are dead, Candace.”
Candace felt her heart skip a beat. “They’re going to charge him on some kind of homicide?”
“Wouldn’t you?” Nelson said.
“And you really didn’t know anything about this at the time?”
Nelson’s discomfort was visible, and Candace knew her instinct was right: the guy was too sharp for something like this to be going on under his nose without him knowing anything about it. “Look, I’m basically middle management. That’s all a site supervisor is. I spend my days taking shit from above and below.”
“But you knew something was wrong with Pellettieri,” Candace said, suddenly sure of it. “And you would’ve done something to stop it if it’d been up to you. So something made you let it go.”
“I certainly didn’t say any of that,” Nelson replied, but he couldn’t look her in the eye.
“We’re off the record, Tommy, and if you want we can make it hypothetical too. Let’s say that you had known something was wrong with Pellettieri; what would’ve made you not do anything about it?”
“I didn’t know that Pellettieri was cutting corners on safety. I wouldn’t have stood for that, no matter what. But let’s say I did know he was overbilling, had ghost employees, that sort of shit. If I knew about that, and I didn’t do anything, that would probably be because the people I report to already knew about it as well.”
“Who are we talking about, Tommy?”
“I was talking hypothetically.”
“So hypothetically, Simon Roth knew what Pellettieri was doing?”
Nelson shook his head with a slight smile. “Simon Roth had nothing to do with the Aurora,” he said. “His son was managing it.”
Candace leaned back, her mind whirling. She’d known that the Aurora was officially Jeremy Roth’s project, though she’d always assumed that was more for show. Candace didn’t know much about Jeremy; had never suspected that he might have a significant role in what’d happened.
“Why would Jeremy Roth turn a blind eye to a contractor who was ripping him off?” Candace said, less as a question than as a way of thinking it through. Nelson took a sip of his drink, not bothering to offer an answer. “So Jeremy was embezzling from his own construction project through Pellettieri.”
“That would seem to explain it, now, wouldn’t it?” Nelson said.
“Did you tell the grand jury that Jeremy Roth knew what Pellettieri was up to?”
Nelson looked uncomfortable, his gaze losing focus. “I wasn’t asked,” he said.
“The DA isn’t looking at Jeremy Roth?” Candace said, surprised.
“ADA Sullivan didn’t show me his playbook. But as far as I know, the grand jury was only looking at Pellettieri.”
“And you didn’t tell this to Sullivan?”
“Like I said, he didn’t ask. And I’m telling you this off the record, which is a hell of a lot different from testifying about it in court. That I’m not going to do. If you’re going to strike the king you’d better be able to kill the king, right? I rat out the Roth family, I’m never working in this town again. An ADA takes a shot at them and misses, he’s never working in this town again. Same goes for you if you try and write this story.”
Candace shrugged off the warning. “Somebody had to be between Jeremy and Pellettieri,” she said. “I mean, they weren’t sitting in a room together, counting out hundred-dollar bills.”
Nelson smiled. “There was this private security company Roth used on site. There’s always security on the lot—not just to make sure equipment doesn’t go walking off, but also keeping an eye on the unions and so forth. There’s a lot of sausage making on a big construction site, and those are the guys that do the stuff people like me don’t want to know about.”
Candace was doing her best to read between the lines, getting that Nelson wasn’t going to spell out any more than he had to. “So Loomis’s guys, they were the bagmen?”
Nelson registered a flicker of surprise that Candace knew Loomis’s name. “There was one of them, yeah, who things went through. He’s not going to talk to you, though, so don’t get your hopes up.”
“How do you know he won’t want to confess?”
“Because he’s dead,” Nelson said.
It came to Candace right away, and with it a feeling like her body had suddenly been doused in ice. “This is Sean Fowler we’re talking about?” she said.
Nelson again showed surprise. “May he rest in peace,” he said after a moment. “The prick.”