Hodgehead had followed his eyes. “Look, Will, forget it. It’s all over and done with. They’ll put the fire out; this time there’ll.be a real investigation and Leroux will get his. What more do you want?”
“His skin, so I can tack it up on the wall,” Shevelson muttered. His thick right hand suddenly spasmed in ai and beer geysered out of the can. “Shit, let me get a He came back from behind the bar with a damp cloth and swiped at the floor tiles. “I don’t know if I can explain it to you, Marty. The Glass House was my baby, but every day I worked on her, I felt more and more like a pimp who was selling his own daughter.”
Leroux kept cutting corners, he thought, and he forced himself to go along. Finally the day came when Leroux showed up on the forty-fourth floor of the unfinished building with the latest drawings spelling out still more changes. Nothing that would hold them up . .
. just new specifications for cheaper materials, short cuts in construction.
Shevelson blew his stack.
“Did I ever thank you for stopping me from hitting the bastard?”
Hodgehead nodded.. “A dozen times.” He wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “If you had connected Leroux would have gone right over the edge. It would’ve been a long drop, Will.”
Shevelson nodded. He had replayed the scene a dozen times in his head and hadn’t yet made up his mind whether it filled him with terror or regret. He hadn’t waited for the official notice of dismissal but had taken the construction elevator down the side of the building, got into his car and driven home. His paycheck had arrived by special delivery the next day, and that had been the end of his career in the building trades. Nobody in the city was willing to-risk Leroux’s anger and considering the circumstances-in those moments when he was stone sober and coldbloodedly objective about it-he couldn’t blame them.
Who would hire a construction foreman who was willing to kill you if you disagreed with him? Leroux himself had never pressed charges, partly because of lack of witnesses.
Shevelson half smiled in remembrance. “I guess I’ve also thanked you a dozen times for clamming up when Knudsen called you in at the investigation.” Knudsen Construction had damn near. lost the contract and been sued in the bargain, he mused.
“So you tripped and fell during an argument. It can happen, with all the crap that’s lying around on an unfinished floor. But if you had actually connected and Leroux went over …” He shrugged. “I guess it would’ve been a different story. One of the guys would’ve chickened out, you know that. But it didn’t happen, so why worry about it?” He hesitated a moment. “You ain’t asking, but I think you should’ve kept your mouth shut later.”
Shevelson nursed his beer and nodded. His feud with Leroux and the Glass House became an obsession the first few months afterward. He contacted newspapers and radio and television stations, trying to tell them what Leroux had done, and was doing, until everybody had figured that he was some kind of nut. There had been a short story or two in the newspapers,’ a brief abortive investigation that Leroux managed to get quashed, and the story died.
Shevelson went to get another can of beer and turned the TV set back on, staring at tiny figures running across a too-green gridiron.
He fiddled a moment with the color and hue controls. “How’s that?”
“Looks fine, but it ain’t gonna help ‘em win.”
Shevelson sat back on the couch cushions. “You know, Marty, I think I was disappointed in Leroux as much as anything else. Damnit, the world’s run by assholes but I had never considered Leroux to be one; in fact, I thought he was one of the most capable people I ever met. He had knowledge, energy …” He searched for the word.
“Integrity, too, I guess you’d call it.”
“Until it came to the Glass House.”
“That’s right, until it came to the Glass House.” What changed Leroux? he wondered. He really didn’t have to make the compromises he made; he wasn’t in a money bind. Them were compromises to be expected, but there was usually a point past which a man wouldn’t go. But Leroux was willing to buy any patchwork scheme that would save a dollar. He was lavish when it came to the external appearances of the building, but the end result was still that Leroux sold his principles and apparently did so without a qualm.
For himself, Shevelson thought … well, he’d manage well enough.
He finally found a job as building supervisor for this small apartment complex complete with apartment and settled into a quiet life of tinkering around the apartments during the day and drinking beer and watching television at night. After three marriages and three divorces, he had decided that he was a loner and solitude was something he accepted almost with relief.
“How come you ever got tied up with that schmuck on the K.Y.S news show?” Hodgehead asked.
“Because I’m an idiot,- because I couldn’t leave it alone,” Shevelson said, his mood suddenly gloomy. “I got out the blueprints one day and I was going over them and got carried away. So I called up Quantrell and he invited me to lunch and I spilled my guts.” He had done more than that, he thought. He had fed the bastard everything he knew of for a certainty and quite a few things he.had only suspected.
He grimaced. “It was a cheap shot, Marty … you don’t have to tell me that. I could have gone to the Building Trades Council; I could have done a dozen other things than what I did. I wanted to hurt Leroux as bad as I could; a slap on the wrist from the Council wouldn’t have satisfied me.”
, “The construction techniques weren’t all that bad,” Hodgehead said slowly. “Quite a few of them are common practice.”
“Whose side are you on, Marty?” Shevelson looked at him angrily, then waved a hand. “Okay, you’re part right.
But just because something’s common practice doesn’t make it good practice. One by one, you might defend them. Put them all together and you wind up with a building in which some of the construction techniques or materials haven’t been tested outside of a laboratory, a few others that are borderline, and some that you can get away with because your local building code doesn’t specifically forbid them.” He drained his can of beer and crumpled it in his hand. Something was beginning to surface in the back of his mind. He fished for it but it eluded him. He let his attention drift back to the television screen.
Second down and eight to go and the defense was weak; it should be a snap.
“I guess I would have done the same if I had been in your shoes,” Hodgehead said. “She was your baby from the star-t. Let’s face it, a building actually belongs to the men who make her, not the men who pay for her.”
That’s what was wrong, Shevelson thought suddenly.
The Glass House had been his baby-and what was bothering him was that it still was. Maybe somebody else had designed it and somebody else had finished it, but with all its faults the Glass House was still his more than anybody else’s. It was the most beautiful building in the city and like Pygmalion with his statue, during the slow process of construction, he had fallen in love with it.
Now it was going up in smoke and he was just sitting there, drinking his beer and watching the replay of a football game.
With all its faults … And who knew them better than he? Not Leroux. To him, the building had been a rendering and a sheaf of figures from his accounting department telling him what it was costing and how much he could save… . And not the guy they had-called in from the East Coast to wrap up the project after he had gotten the can.
So long as he collected his paycheck every Tuesday, the bastard hadn’t given a damn. In any event, he had flown back East immediately after the,dedication and there was probably no locating him on short notice.
The original architect-what was his name, Barton? He had been shipped East before construction had ever begun and the last Shevelson had heard, was working out of San Francisco. The architect who had acted as site supervisor had since died; probably gone to his glory cursing himself for being too weak to stand up to Leroux.
The man had been an ass kisser from the start.
The Fire Department? They’d probably have some diagrams of the location of stairwells and standpipes but they’d hardly know where the bodies were buried.
He made;up his mind then and hurried to the closet and grabbed his coat and gloves, making sure the car keys were in his pocket. Crappy weather. Take him half hour to get there on the freeway, if he was lucky.
“Where the hell you going, Will?”
“To the Glass House, where do you-think?”
“After what the prick did to you, you’d help him out?”
Shevelson half smiled. “She’s more mine than his, Marty.” He was almost out the front door when he
