“Because of the documents I lifted from Brady Coyle’s office.”
“You stole documents from Brady Coyle’s office?”
“Gee. When you put it that way, it almost sounds illegal.”
McCracken sat down behind his desk, opened his humidor, extracted two maduro torpedoes, clipped the ends, and offered me one. I took it and collapsed into a visitor’s chair.
“Tell me all about it,” he said, and I was about to when Mason came through the door with a big yellow envelope under his arm.
“Did you look at it?” I asked him after handling the introductions.
“I did.”
“Then you might as well stay.”
He dropped into the other visitor’s chair and handed me the envelope. I opened it, pulled out the papers, and started to unfold them.
“Wait a minute,” McCracken said. “Is that what I think it is?”
“Uh-huh.”
“And you had him bring it
“I figured you’d want to have a look.”
“Christ! What if he was followed?”
“I wasn’t,” Mason said.
“No reason he would be,” I said. “No one knew I was having him hold it. I’m the one they are looking for, and so far I’ve got them fooled into thinking I’m out of state.”
“What if someone spotted you coming in here?”
“That’s the reason for the disguise,” I said. I stood, removed the blazer, draped it over the back of the chair, and took off the sunglasses. McCracken stared at me now like he thought I was an idiot. He might have been on to something.
“Look,” I said. “Do you want to see this or not?”
He shoved some papers aside to clear desk space, and I smoothed the first document out in front of him. Anyone who’d been stuck in Providence as long as we had could recognize it as a plat map of Mount Hope’s southeast quarter. The existing buildings were gone, though, replaced by a rough layout of what appeared to be a large real estate development. In the lower right hand corner, a name and address: “Dio Construction Corp., 245 Pocasset Avenue, Providence, RI.”
“Holy shit!”
“Wait. There’s more.”
Four more documents, in fact, each an exterior architectural rendering or floor plan for what looked to be very expensive condominiums.
“I removed it from a mailing tube addressed to Brady Coyle. The return address was Rosabella Development.”
“Isn’t that Vinnie Giordano’s company?”
“It is.”
“Holy shit!”
“Speaking of Giordano, give this a listen,” I said. I laid the phone recorder on the desk and pressed play.
When I clicked it off a few minutes later, McCracken said it again: “Holy shit!”
“My Latin’s a little rusty,” I told Mason, “but I think that’s Roman Catholic for ‘Wowie.’ ”
“I don’t get it,” Mason said.
“Get what?”
“How could they think they could keep this a secret? When the buildings start to go up, the developer and the builder will be a matter of public record.”
“It’ll go something like this,” McCracken said. “The five dummy corporations will keep buying up property. When they’ve got everything they need, the arsons will stop. In the aftermath, there’ll be a lot of public hand- wringing about how to rebuild the neighborhood. Giordano and Dio will come to the rescue, offering to build something Providence can be proud of. They’ll buy the property from the five dummy companies, and no one will know they’ll actually just be buying it from themselves.”
“Except us,” I said.
McCracken offered Mason a cigar, and he surprised me by accepting. I leaned over to give him a light, and the three of us smoked for a while. Suddenly McCracken’s face changed as if he’d just remembered something. He slid open his top drawer, pulled out an envelope, and tossed it to me.
“This came by messenger this morning,” he said.
It had been sent to my attention at McCracken’s office. The address was printed in block letters. There was no return address.
Inside was a computer printout of billing records from McDougall, Young, Coyle, and Limone. If I was right, they were going to show that the fees for incorporating the five dummy corporations had been charged to Dio or Giordano. But I was wrong.
They had been paid for personally by Brady Coyle.
I handed it to Mason. He looked at it and then passed it to McCracken.
“Giordano to Dio to Coyle,” I said.
“The three of them are in it together,” McCracken said.
“So,” I said. “How do we make them pay?”
McCracken got up, took three glasses down from a cabinet, filled them with ice from his minifridge, and poured us each three inches of Bushmills. We smoked, sipped our drinks, and thought about it for a while.
It was McCracken who broke the silence.
“Legally, I think we’re screwed.”
“I think so, too,” I said.
“Why’s that?” Mason said.
“The billing records were delivered anonymously,” McCracken said. “No way to prove they’re genuine.”
“Besides,” I said, “once Coyle realizes we have them, he’ll delete the records from the firm’s computer.”
“The building plans are stolen property,” McCracken said. “Might make it difficult to get them admitted as evidence. Worse, they were stolen from Dio’s lawyer, which probably means they are protected by lawyer-client privilege.”
“What about the recording?” Mason said.
“It’s illegal,” I said.
“How so?”
“Rhode Island is one of a handful of states in which it’s a crime to record your own phone conversation unless you inform the other party. Besides, who does it incriminate? The way the cops will hear it, I stole some documents and used them to shake down Giordano.”
“Use what we’ve got,” McCracken said, “and Mulligan’s the one who ends up doing time.”
“When you add all this up,” I said, passing my hand over the documents and digital recorder, “what does it really prove, anyway? Just that Giordano, Dio, and Coyle have a secret plan to build pricey condos in Mount Hope. We don’t have any hard evidence that they’re behind the arsons.”
“But we know they are,” McCracken said.
“Yeah. We do.”
“If we can’t go to the authorities,” Mason said, “is there any way we can get what we know into the newspaper?”
It was worth a try. The three of us worked until midnight, pouring everything we had into an expose under Mason’s byline.
71
In the morning, I bought some flowers at Downtown Florist and caught a cab to Warwick.
“She’ll be happy to see you,” Gloria’s mother said as she ushered me into the house. “She’s been following
