Back at my office, however, NeverTom’s attempt at a preemptive strike against us kept preying on my mind, and gave birth to an idea of how to both feed him some of his own medicine, and help us look into his and his brother’s financial dealings. It flew in the face of my professional instincts, and I was pretty sure that if Jack Derby found out about it, it could possibly cost me my job. But I still couldn’t shake its appeal. I picked up the phone and dialed Gail for consultation.
“You alone?” I asked once I had her on the line.
“What’re you offering, a little phone sex?”
I laughed. “Let me run something by you first.”
“That doesn’t sound like half as much fun. Go ahead-I’m alone for the moment.”
“NeverTom’s sicced his lawyer on us, threatening to sue because we’re digging into his affairs. I know it’s all hot air, but it got me wondering. What if I pull a Deep Throat with Stan Katz? Leak him a little inside information on Tom, get the Reformer to do some of our legwork for us, and throw a bit of Tom’s shit back in his face all at the same time?”
There was a long pause before she answered. “Why do you need to do that?”
“Because NeverTom is well connected, rich, and not tied down by rules or bureaucracy. We’re understaffed, in the dark, and handcuffed by regulations-most of them designed to stop us from doing our job. If I could get Katz fired up enough, it might give us a crucial advantage in finding out what’s going on. I know he’d protect my identity, and now that the paper’s employee-owned, he’s got no outside bosses to tell him what to do.”
There was another long silence before she said, “You want my honest opinion? I think NeverTom Chambers has gotten under your skin, and you’re going to make damn sure he takes the rap for something, even if it’s just bad publicity. From what I’ve seen so far, you don’t have a thing on him. Is that still true?”
I admitted as much.
“You might soon, though, with Eddy Knox coming in. And if the bank is implicated, that could involve some federal charges. The PD gets threatened with lawsuits all the time, Joe. But you keep playing by the rules. That’s both the department’s strength and the twenty-pound weight around its neck.”
I made no comment, hearing in her words my own inner debate, and also wondering if she was about to reach the same conclusion I had.
“So now another rich, powerful, arrogant jerk is shooting his mouth off. Only, this time you’re thinking, ‘What the hell? A few suggestions in the right place, and I can watch the fur fly without getting damaged, and maybe pick up a few insights along the way.’ Is that about it? You feeling like rebelling against a lifetime of traditional rectitude?”
I started laughing. “Yeah-that’s close enough.”
She joined me for a few seconds, took a breath, and then said, “I say, ‘Go for it.’ If ever there was a guy worth breaking a rule or two to get, it’s NeverTom.”
She hung up before I could ask her if she knew of anyone with an old cat.
22
Sheila Kelly and J.P. Tyler came by my office later that morning, both hesitating in the doorway as if uncertain about how to proceed.
“You got something?” I asked them, waving them in.
Sheila, as tall and faintly glamorous as J.P. was short and homely, deferred to his seniority. “Yeah,” he said, “we may have found a hook on Thomas Chambers.”
They both sat down.
“I better warn you,” J.P. continued, “this is strictly anecdotal so far. We had to make sure not to do anything that might be thrown out in court later on, so we consulted only public records, and made it clear to everyone we talked to that what we were after was purely informational. I did tape every conversation, though, and had each person sign a release.”
I noticed Sheila fighting to hide a smile, and wondered how many times in the last two days she’d been tempted to wring his compulsive little neck.
“From what we were told,” J.P. went on, “and from what Sheila obtained from the records, it looks like Thomas Chambers influenced Harold Matson-and through him the Bank of Brattleboro-to finance the convention center, although neither Chambers nor his brother had any financial involvement in it at that time.”
“Aside from owning adjacent property,” Sheila added.
“Is that illegal?” I asked.
J.P. looked vaguely uncomfortable. To a man who found pleasure poking through hair samples, bloodstains, fingerprints, and other minutiae, the amorphous world of finance lacked the absolutes he relied on.
Sheila Kelly sensed his dilemma and smoothly took over. “The best answer to that is probably historical. When Gene Lacaille first came up with the idea for a convention center, he had about a million dollars to invest. He already owned the land free and clear-inherited from his father. As we all know, support for the idea was fast and broad-based, including from the Chambers brothers. The biggest problem from the start, however, was financing. Gene was willing to commit to three million altogether, one up front, and two more to be generated from the Keene mall he was just completing. The State of Vermont was sweet-talked into providing two million more, to be funneled through Lou Adelman’s office of community development, in the form of a grant that then became a municipal loan. And the Bank of Brattleboro was approached for the remaining ten.”
Sheila stretched her long legs out in front of her, settling in more comfortably. “The problem was, for a bank to make a ten million dollar loan, it has to have total assets of some two billion, based on a conservative ratio that came out of all those bank failures in the go-go eighties, when people were loaning way more than their banks could afford to lose. The Bank of Brattleboro has nowhere near those kinds of assets. The best it could put up was five million, and even then Matson, the president, was probably pushing it.”
“What about the board of directors?” I asked.
“Good question. The board at B of B is the old-fashioned type, pretty rare nowadays, mostly made up of prominent local people with little or no banking background or knowledge. It’s almost utterly dependent on the president for its decision-making.
“The obvious solution in a situation like what Matson was facing is to bring in as many additional banks as necessary to make up the difference. That’s what he did, but with the unusual proviso that the commitments be made in a tiered fashion, rather than as a pool, so that B of B’s five million would be spent before the other banks had to pitch in. This might’ve been a show of Matson’s faith in the project-or it could’ve been a careful strategy on Chambers’s part. In any case, it worked, and once the permits were secured, it was full steam ahead.”
“Until the Keene shopping mall project was stopped dead in its tracks,” I filled in.
“Correct,” Sheila said. “That was supposed to have been completed in time to finance Lacaille’s investment in the convention center. But once some PCB pollutants mysteriously surfaced at the Keene site, everything was turned on its ear. Not only was it going to cost Lacaille a fortune to clean up the PCBs, but the revenue he was counting on was history-the EPA and the state of New Hampshire’s pollution people saw to that. Matson tried his damnedest to get Lacaille to hang on to the property, but Gene was no longer interested. He was doing all he could just to stay afloat. The convention center had become a pair of cement shoes.”
“Enter NeverTom?” I asked.
“Well, yes and no. NeverTom had been in it from the start. We heard he’d gotten Matson to stick his neck out for B of B’s commitment of five million, even though Matson had initially been cool to the idea. In fact, that’s an area where Matson might have some interesting things to say, since Chambers’s public encouragement could easily have become private coercion with nobody being the wiser. The neat coincidence though, is that by the time Lacaille had to pull out, NeverTom was a selectman and could rally the public to force Matson to come up with a fast solution. You see, normally, when a bank gets handed a white elephant by a bankrupt developer, it takes its time putting together the best substitute deal it possibly can, quoting the interests of the stockholders all the way. But not in this case.”