McGraw glared at the copies of the change authorizations on his desk. He looked again at Giddings. “Just what do we know?” he demanded. He had a deep-seated feeling that his hope was forlorn; that if examined carefully, the unpleasant appearances would not go away. But all a man could do was try. “Pieces of paper,” McGraw said, “and not even originals at that.”
“You’re fancy-footing, Bert,” Giddings said, “and it isn’t like you. Those are honest Xerox copies of hanky-panky that’s been going on under your nose—and, yes, I admit it, undermine as well. How many of the changes were carried out I don’t know yet. How serious they are I don’t know yet. Why the changes were issued I can only guess.”
McGraw heaved himself out of his chair and went to stand at the windows. Time was when he might have taken a thing like this in stride, or near enough. Now it was like a sneak punch to the kidney, and the world he looked out at tended to blur. It was not the first such experience, and it worried him.
“You’re overweight,” his Mary had told him, “and overworked and you aren’t as young as you were, and that’s what’s the matter with you, Bert McGraw. Once upon a time, you could spend all night drinking and being a terrible grand fellow and come home bright as a daisy, almost. But you aren’t that young any more. Neither am I, more’s the pity. So stop your worrying.”
The world swam back into focus. McGraw turned away from the windows. “Young Nat Wilson’s name,” he said. “Did the damn fool actually sign them?”
“He says no.”
“And what do you say?” There was force in the old man yet.
“I don’t see why he would,” Giddings said. “What does he gain? He can stand by the drawings and say no changes allowed and be well within his rights. So why would he stick his neck out?”
McGraw walked to his chair and dropped into it. “All right,” he said. “At the least what we’ve got is confusion. On the face of those pieces of paper, the building, that great goddam beautiful building isn’t up to specifications, and that puts a foot in the door for all sorts of trouble—even, God help us, legal trouble.”
“And work,” Giddings said. “Walls are going to have to be opened up. Circuits are going to have to be checked out.” He shook his head.
“We’ll do what has to be done,” McGraw said sharply. He paused, and the belligerence disappeared. “It isn’t that I’m thinking of.” Was he being mystical, even superstitious, as Mary, bless her, sometimes said he was, the bog Irish in him coming out? “You’ve seen it yourself,” he said. “Little things go wrong on a job, accidents happen, shortages hold you up, weather turns bad, you’re caught by a strike—” He spread his hands and rolled them into fists, studied them as if they were enemies. “And sometimes,” he said at last, “the string of bad luck doesn’t end. It’s as if, God help me, some kind of bad spell has been laid on and not even a priest’s blessing can lift it.” He paused again. “Do you know what I mean, Will?” Giddings was thinking again of Pete Janowski walking off the steel at the sixty-fifth floor for no reason at all. “I know what you mean,’ he said.
McGraw sighed heavily. “I hate to admit it,” he said, “but there are two buildings in this town—I won’t put a name to either one but I built them both—I wouldn’t even walk into, let alone ride an elevator in.” He shook away the thought. “Let it go. It’s neither here nor there.” He sat up straight in his chair and his voice turned brisk. “Why the changes were issued you can only guess?” he said. “All right, guess away.”
“You aren’t going to like it,” Giddings said.
“Be damned to that.” It was honest anger the old man felt now, solid and deep and strong. “We’ve been diddled, you for the owners, me for myself. By God, I want to know who and why.”
Giddings shrugged. “The changes are all electrical.”
“So?”
“With what I’ve seen,” Giddings said, “all the changes call for lesser material or simplified circuitry.” He paused. “What does that say to you?”
There was no hesitation. “That somebody was trying to save money,” McGraw said. He heaved himself out of his chair again and walked to stare at a blurred world through the windows. Over his shoulder he said, “And the man who saved money, you’re saying, are you not, is the man who holds the electrical contract?” As before, the world swam slowly back into focus. McGraw turned. He kept his hands behind his back lest they demonstrate the tension that was in him. “Paul Simmons—it’s him you’re pointing a finger at, is it?”
“I told you I was just guessing.”
“So you did.”
-“And,” Giddings said, “I told you you weren’t going to like it.”
“No,” McGraw said in a new, quiet voice, “I don’t like it. I don’t like you thinking it, and I don’t like thinking it myself.” He brought his hands into view at last, fingers spread and hooked, and he studied them for a long time in silence. When he looked at Giddings again, his face was almost gray. “We’ll find out, Will,” he said. “If I have to pick him up with these two hands and bend him until he breaks, we’ll find out. I promise you. In the meantime—” The words stopped suddenly as if the old man had forgotten what he was going to say. He rubbed one hand wearily along his jaw.
“In the meantime,” Giddings said as if he had seen no lapse, “I’ll try to find out what has to be done.”
McGraw lowered himself into his chair. He nodded “You do that, Will. And let me know.” He took a deep breath. His voice was strong again. “We stand behind our jobs. We always have.”
“I never doubted it,” Giddings said.
McGraw sat motionless in his big chair long after Giddings was gone. He felt old and tired and reluctant to do what had to be done. Time was when he would have gone roaring out of his office at the merest whiff of suspicion that someone had been doing the dirty, whoever it was, in-law, kin, saint, or devil. But age changes a man, some of the certainties become less sure, the boundary lines blur, and McGraw’s temptation was to refuse to believe that someone near, someone in the family had transgressed.
The old man was proud of Paul Simmons, his son-in-law. For one thing, Simmons was what used to be called a gentleman—Andover, Yale, that kind of thing, not McGraw’s breed of alley cat at all. And Patty fit right into Paul’s circle too, and that was further cause for pride.
McGraw and Mary lived still in the house in Queens that McGraw had bought with the earnings from his first sizable construction job thirty years and more ago. Paul and Patty lived in Westchester, only a few miles but an entire culture away from the McGraw house. You cherish the American Dream that your children will have it better than you ever did. And when it happens, you get down on your knees and thank the good Lord for His favor.
Now, McGraw told himself, pick up the phone and call your grand son-in-law a cheat and a thief. Bitter thought.
The copies of the change authorizations were still on his desk. He pushed at them with one big hand. They rustled like dry dead leaves.
It couldn’t have happened, McGraw thought, not on one of his jobs, not under Giddings’s nose, or Nat Wilson’s. And how about the inspectors? Bought? Or simply diddled by the bogus engineering changes?
But it had happened. He knew that in his bones. Oh, it wasn’t the first time on a big construction job that somebody had thimblerigged his part of the work, shifted things around like the man at the carnival with the halfshells and the pea that is never where you thought it was.
Invoices and bills of lading, work orders, specifications, even drawings themselves can all be altered or faked and work signed off that was never done, money passed under the table or left sticking to somebody’s fingers—there are tricks galore, and at one time or another McGraw had encountered them all, and somebody had left the job at a stumbling run with his ass kicked right up between his shoulder blades and maybe a few teeth loosened in the bargain.