I sat down opposite her. “Mrs. Hennessy, I’m not going to sugarcoat what’s going on here. Your husband is in deep trouble. He’s broken the law, and he’s decided to run for it. We’ve got a long list of charges against him, and they may be just the tip of the iceberg. That being the case, the sooner we can get him in here to explain himself, the better off he’ll be. If he keeps running, it’s likely he’ll wind up getting hurt.”
I shouldn’t have been surprised by her first words. “They said there was a girl.”
I didn’t hesitate. “Yes, there is, and we have her in custody. They worked together, and she might’ve been involved with your husband in some of his illegal activities. Whether there was more than that between them, I don’t know.”
“What’s her name?”
“Ginny Levasseur-he ever mention her?”
“I met her once-at a company picnic. Pretty… ”
I tried to steer her in another direction. “Mrs. Hennessy, do you have any idea where Paul might be right now? A vacation home we might not know about, or with a friend he could trust?”
Her face hardened. “Trust? I didn’t even know about the girlfriend. God knows what else he’s been keeping from me.”
I nodded and rose to my feet. “All right. We appreciate your cooperation. Sergeant Martens here will be asking you some more detailed questions. I am sorry for your troubles.”
She ignored me, her eyes fixed, and I left the office for the tiny interrogation cubicle in the far corner of the squad room. As with every aspect of our department, the cubicle was a miniature version of what Hollywood has made commonplace. But where the movies show two large rooms, separated by a one-way mirror, ours was eight by eight and could only be viewed from what had once been a broom closet.
I slipped in there first to join Tony Brandt.
“How’s your head?” he asked, his eyes still on the window, beyond which we could see Ginny Levasseur, disheveled, her clothes stained, her makeup smeared by tears, sitting like a schoolgirl with her knees together, her toes turned in, and her hands buried in her lap.
“Not bad. You talk to her yet?”
“Me? No-I figured I’d let you have first crack. Ron got warrants as soon as all this broke, and he and the rest of them are tearing Hennessy’s office and home apart right now.”
“Any feedback I could use in there?”
“A little. They found an office building in West Bratt belonging to Adele Sawyer. Looks like Hennessy got her to give him power-of-attorney several years ago and then hid all his dealings under her name. The building was made entirely of stolen materials from jobs he’s managed over the years.”
“Enter the girlfriend in Payables,” I added. “She been read her rights?”
“Yeah-she didn’t want a lawyer.”
“Okay-thanks.”
Ginny Levasseur looked up as I entered the small room, her face further crumpling at the sight of the bandage. “I’m real sorry-”
I’d already decided not to play that game. “You’ll be sorrier soon,” I said flatly, pulling up another chair and sitting across from her. “You’re already facing charges that’ll put you in jail for years.”
Her shoulders slumped.
“How long have you been cooking the books for Hennessy?” I asked, having no proof she ever had.
“Six years,” she murmured, back to staring at the floor.
“That how long you two have been romantically involved?”
She nodded. “We were building our nest egg.”
I resisted pointing out the skewed thinking behind that rationale.
“Building his nest egg, you mean. He tell you he was going to leave his wife once you’d stolen enough money?”
“He was.”
“And how much was ‘enough’ going to be? Didn’t he keep pushing that deadline further and further away?”
She didn’t answer but began crying softly. I let a moment pass for the hopelessness to sink in. “Look, Ginny, there’s a chance you might not have to serve the kind of jail time you’re facing. We both know you were swept off your feet-seduced by a man who promised you everything, bought you gifts, said he’d marry you in the long run. In my book, that makes you more a victim than a crook. He needed you because of your job, and once he’d made all the money he wanted, he was going to dump you.”
“We love each other,” she tried lamely, in a halfhearted voice.
“He called you at the office. What did he say?”
“That the cops were on to us-that we had to get away-maybe go to Mexico.”
“But he asked you to do something, didn’t he?”
She looked up at me then, her damp eyes wide, an awareness slowly dawning. “His briefcase, from his office.”
“And he’s got that now, doesn’t he? While we’ve got you.”
She just kept staring at me, a small furrow appearing between her eyebrows.
“Tell me how it worked, Ginny, and maybe we can cut you some slack-no guarantees, but it’s the best thing you can do for yourself.”
Slowly, in disconnected fragments, I used her shock at a betrayal I’d invented to extract a description of Paul Hennessy’s grand plan for the future. As plans went, it was thorough, conservative, and had been nurtured with care. It was also a perfect example of how far corruption can spread inside an organization where too much trust is awarded without any oversight. Carroll Construction gave “hands-off management” a brand-new meaning.
As Ginny slowly detailed it, Paul’s skimming had started simply in the beginning. As a brand-new project manager, some ten years earlier, he’d begun inflating his job estimates by fattening line items in the “general conditions” category-telephones, faxes, storage, utilities, “trucking and cleanup,” and a dozen other odds and ends all fitting under “overhead.” The discrepancies hadn’t come to much individually, but they’d begun to mount up.
Next, he’d expanded into rigging the “mechanicals”-overbuying from suppliers and sending the excess either to a warehouse of his own, to be sold on the black market, or simply to a renegade job site, where the materials went straight into a building-like the one we’d found listed under Adele Sawyer’s name.
As the years went by, and Paul’s autonomy in the company became near absolute, suppliers were encouraged to make him gifts in exchange for jobs and prompt payments. Also, he began manipulating “direct ships”-sending light loads to the site, where they were accurately logged in, and having bills for full loads sent to Accounting, where they were paid off-the difference in materials again winding up in one of Paul’s private warehouses, and the discrepancies vanishing between the cracks.
Ginny was brought in later, as his sense of invulnerability grew. He would tell a bidder that a client would pay, for example, $50,000 tops for sheetrock or whatever, and then he’d tell the client that the bid was $10,000 higher. Ginny would make out two handwritten checks-one for $50,000, which would go to the bidder, and another for $10,000, made out to Paul Hennessy. In the computer, she would enter the $60,000 total as a single check, and bill the client accordingly. Since the handwritten checks were kept in storage at the bank, along with thousands of others, and the auditors were too lazy to actually inventory them one by one, reality became whatever Ginny had put into the computer.
She didn’t know any accurate figures-Paul made a point of keeping his cards to himself-but he’d bragged to her once that, over the years, he’d skimmed off in excess of one million dollars.
“Did he ever mention Adele Sawyer?” I asked her, an hour after we’d started.
By this time the tears had stopped, and Ginny had become fairly matter-of-fact, comfortable with the fiction I’d allowed her that we were part of the same team, merely exchanging information. “Not until she was murdered. He’d told me he had an aunt he was using as a dummy, but I never knew her name.”
“How did he react to her death?”
“He went ballistic. This convention center was supposed to be his last job, so he was really milking it. I mean, before, he’d skimmed off little bits, building it up over the years. But on this one, with fifteen million dollars floating around, he figured he’d take them to the cleaners, since we’d both be out of the country by the time they balanced the books. He was hoping for almost half a million. Adele’s dying messed up everything-he had to spend all his time just trying to cover his tracks. And when he found out she’d been murdered, that’s when he really fell apart.”