“And how about Ellen?”
“How about her?”
“Wyatt? Monday night?”
Hunt met her eyes, shook his head in disappointment. “No.”
“No what?”
“No. Never talked to her. Never even thought of it.”
Tamara pulled herself back up close to her desk. “Do you want me to call her and make an appointment? Maybe if that’s the only thing you’re supposed to do, you’ll remember.”
“Maybe,” Hunt said. “But I don’t know if I’d bet on it.”
Len Turner sat in a leather chair in his other spacious office, the one that housed his law practice on California Street. He was smoking a Cuban cigar and drinking Hennessey VSOP cognac from a cut crystal glass.
Turner didn’t like the storm of bad publicity about the COO money, but he’d weathered worse. The plain fact of the matter, as he would explain to Jeff Elliot as soon as he could arrange an interview with the columnist, was that sometimes you didn’t see tangible results for specific projects because there was just never enough money, period. And as in every other business, you had to advertise, market, put on shows to educate and generate enthusiasm for the cause, hire consultants and public relations experts, pay decent salaries to your executives so that you’d get quality people. This wasn’t just the nonprofit world; it was the big wide world.
The biggest problem with the CityTalk column was that it conveyed the impression that because the COO program’s specific objectives hadn’t been met, Turner had mismanaged these funds. And this, in his honest opinion, was not the case. The simple fact was that the $4.7 million in private foundation money-really a pittance-that supported the COO over the past couple of years needed to be about double that, or maybe triple, if it was going to address the real needs of real people who lived in the impoverished areas of the city.
This was because nothing got done for free in San Francisco. It was a pay-to-play environment, and had been for all of Turner’s lengthy career.
If you wanted to renovate a dump of a house in the Mission and turn it into a marketable or even usable property, first you had to buy it from the slum landlord who hadn’t put in an improvement, including paint, since 1962. That landlord, of course, got a substantial write-off for the monetary loss entailed in “donating” his property to your charity. Then you needed your plans, and then your redone plans, approved by the Housing Department for a sizable fee each time through. Often, if not always, you’d need a zoning variance by the Board of Supervisors, which tended to be exquisitely sensitive to even the most remote and spurious objection to the project, brought to them by one concerned constituent or another.
A residential unit for drug rehabilitation, for example, because it was used in conjunction with the courts, was considered a public building and as such was subject to the strict enforcement of the Americans with Disabilities Act, so you often needed internal elevators, wheelchair access, and restricted handicapped parking spaces. All buildings in San Francisco, of course, now had to be retrofitted for earthquakes. Asbestos had to be removed.
Every step of this process demanded juice-some kind of payoff to someone, whether it was financial or political or, most commonly, both.
And none of this even included when the real fun began with the awarding of the contract to do the actual work. On a publicly bid job, for example, the contractor better have a woman or two and some gay people and a politically correct mix of Caucasian and African-American and Hispanic and Asian workers on the job. Oh, and some veterans, even better if they’d been wounded or maimed.
But the great thing about the fund-raising environment in San Francisco was that the very idea that somebody was going through the process of trying to get better housing and a better life for poor people, and even using rehabilitated drug addicts to do such meaningful work, tended to open the coffers of philanthropy. Never mind that the houses often didn’t actually get made, the art classes and day care centers didn’t get staffed, the theaters never put on a show because of all the hassles, the payoffs, the uncertainties. Still, the money kept coming in to support the efforts. And it came in at about the same rate that it was going out to advertise, educate, and promote.
Of course, Turner wasn’t going to go into all of that with Jeff Elliot. It would be enough to explain the costs and benefits to keeping the programs running at all. The major foundation donors all understood the game, and would probably continue to give at pretty much the same levels that they always had. So he wasn’t really too concerned about the COO section of the CityTalk column.
The AmeriCorps side of it, on the other hand, and Elliot’s cavalier parting shot that the nonprofit game was a deadly one, was a cause for immediate and serious concern. First of all, although funding had been cut for only a year, this was federal money that, once withheld, might not ever be reinstated. California politicians had a lot of juice in Washington, Turner knew. California would get its share of the money, and San Francisco would always get a bite of that. But that didn’t mean that Turner’s organizations had to see a dime. There were ten others waiting to take up the slack at the first sign of his blood in the water. Further, though all the specific charges of misuse had been leveled at Como, Turner knew that if the feds were sniffing around Sunset for misappropriated funds, they could not be far from his own complicity and, worse, outright fraud.
Turner had cautioned Como about his largesse to most of the city’s political movers and shakers, but the man had been a force of nature and did exactly what he wanted when the mood struck him. And now all that money was gone with nothing to show for it. The actual charges-having drivers and errand goers and paying his teaching staff out of AmeriCorps money-could all be explained away as accounting errors. In a busy place run by nonprofessionals, these things happened.
More problematic was that Turner hadn’t been cautious enough himself. The legal fees he’d accepted from Como-and from all of the other AmeriCorps recipients that he represented-amounted to nothing less than straight kickbacks for helping these charities obtain their federal funding. Fifty thousand a year here from Mission, a hundred thousand there from Sanctuary House, a half a million over four years with Sunset.
Turner knew that he’d let his greed get away from him-he really didn’t know why because he didn’t need it. But the money was just there for the taking and it seemed ridiculous not to. And after the first few years, he simply came to believe that the government would never even look at where the money went, much less audit for it.
He’d been wrong.
And now the records were there should the auditors come around to him, looking for fraud. Given time, he could probably get that billing cleaned up. Como and Neshek were no longer around to testify against him, so he could pass off their excesses and poor bookkeeping on their own organizations. Fortunately, too, Turner was certain that he could control Jaime with the leverage of offering Sunset to him, and Mission back to his wife. Maybe it could still all work out for the best.
But then with this Hunt fellow nosing around…
Clearly Hunt had expanded the original mandate Turner had given him to simply monitor the reward calls for the police and, more importantly, to keep him informed as to the progress of the investigation. It seemed to Turner now that Hunt was actively investigating not just Como’s but Neshek’s murder. And nobody-certainly not the reward consortium-had hired him to do that.
Turner considered simply firing Hunt and getting someone more tractable to do the job. But on reflection, he decided to follow the old adage: Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer. It looked like, for whatever reason, Hunt was in this for good. So long as Hunt nominally worked for him, at least Turner could keep a close eye, and maybe even some control, on what he was up to.
And at that thought, Turner finally felt the knot in his stomach loosen. He took a long sip of his cognac, and a good pull at his cigar, then blew the fragrant smoke out into his beautifully appointed office.
He was going to have to put in a call to Mr. Hunt, remind him of their original understanding, the parameters of his role.
Get this last monkey off his back.
23
For all the reasons he’d elucidated to Wyatt Hunt, the only thing Al Carter knew for an absolute certainty was
