Flinch Factor, The Read online

  “I’m sorry, Barb.”After a pause, I said, “Did Nick do a nice job?”

  She looked up with a smile. “Oh, Rachel, he was an artist. You should see his work.”

  “I have, and I agree. He did some work for me.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “That’s why I was surprised. I didn’t realize you used him as well. Nick was a true craftsman.”

  She nodded with a distant smile.

  “Did your husband agree?”

  Her smile disappeared. “He was unkind to Nick.”

  “How so?”

  “We were separated by then. He happens to work with building contractors. He hired one name Rudy to come by the house every few days to check on the work. Since he was paying the bills, he claimed he had the right to monitor the work. I’m convinced he told that man to be difficult. If something wasn’t perfect, he’d make Nick redo it. He never had a nice thing to say about Nick’s work.”

  “How did Nick handle that?”

  “Like a saint. He never argued, never complained, never acted annoyed. He’d just listen and nod and take notes and when the inspector left he’d assure me that he’d make it right. And he always did.”

  “That must have been upsetting, though.”

  “It was. More and more each time. Nick’s work was beautiful, Rachel. I felt so bad for him.” She sighed. “There was so much strain. I’d get more protective of Nick and angrier at my husband—until one day I couldn’t take it any more. I’d just come back from a school meeting and was feeling overwhelmed. I was crying when I walked into the house. I was so embarrassed I ran upstairs to my bedroom. I couldn’t stop crying. Nick came into the bedroom. He tried to comfort me. He held me in his arms.”

  She blushed.“Listen to me. I make it sound like a soap opera.”

  I offered a sympathetic smile. “Life can be a soap opera.”

  “Mine certainly seemed that way.”

  “How long did it last?”

  “Until the end.” Her eyes welled up again.

  I waited.

  She shook her head, forcing a smile. “But probably not the way you think. Physically, we never went further than that hug. I was tempted. So tempted. But it just didn’t seem right. I was still married—am still married—even if we were separated. Nick understood. He never pushed it, never tried to force anything. We stayed friends. He’d call me sometimes. Sometimes I’d meet him for coffee at a Starbucks. I once met him at the zoo.”

  She smiled at the memory. “We rode the zoo train together.”

  Her lips quivered. “I miss him.”

  I took a Kleenex tissue out of my purse and handed it to her. She whispered thanks and pressed it against her nose.

  “I’m sorry, Barb. I didn’t know it would be so painful.”

  “It’s okay. It feels good to be able to share this with someone.”

  My cell phone starting ringing. I checked the number.

  “I better take this,” I said.

  I took the call in the hall outside Benny’s office—in part for privacy and in part to give Barb a few moments alone. My assistant was calling because she was leaving for the day and wanted me to know about a settlement demand letter I’d received via facsimile from opposing counsel in another case. I had her read it to me and then give me his telephone number. I called him, got his voice mail, and left a message rejecting his settlement demand and informing him that I intended to proceed with the hearing next week unless his client accepted my prior offer, which was non-negotiable.

  When I stepped back into Benny’s office, Barb had composed herself.

  I asked her about drugs. She’d never seen Nick use anything beyond an occasional beer.

  I raised the location of his death and what that implied.

  “I was surprised, Rachel. I’ve never actually known a bisexual—or at least one that identified himself as one. Nick seemed, well, totally heterosexual to me. But I guess that doesn’t prove a thing.” She frowned. “You never really know, do you?”

  “You never do.”

  Chapter Ten

  “My boyfriend?”

  Bobby Clay giggled and waved his hand at me.

  “Don’t I wish, honey. He was definitely a hotty. A boy can dream.”

  He gave a big exaggerated sigh and shook his head.

  “The only relationship we had was contractor-subcontractor. Strictly business. Why do you ask?”

  “I wasn’t sure,” I said. “I looked through his email and saw a few from you. The subjects seemed to be strictly business—arrangements for painting at various jobsites.”

  “That’s how I schedule my jobs. I have one of these things.” He pulled an iPhone out of his shirt pocket. “I use it to stay in touch with all my contractors. There are always last-minute changes in my business, honey. This way I can check when I’m on break.”

  “Makes sense,” I said. “I noticed, though, that in two of your emails to Nick you called him ‘darling,’ and once you signed off with a ‘kisses and misses.’ I didn’t know whether that meant anything.”

  He giggled. “Good grief, girl, I call everyone ‘darling’ or ‘honey’ or ‘sweetie.’ Men, women, boys, girls. My momma taught me that. Same with ‘kisses and misses.’ It’s just me being friendly. I never kissed Nick except” —he raised his eyebrows—“in my fantasies.”

  Bobby Clay had to be the most flamboyantly gay housepainter in St. Louis, if not the entire Midwest.

  The waitress stopped at our table. “Another round?”

  Bobby Clay looked at his empty pint glass and nodded. “Sounds wonderful, sweetie.” He gave me a wink and looked back at her. “Thanks, beautiful.”

  “No more for me,” I told the waitress.

  The two of us were seated in a booth at Blueberry Hill in the University City Loop. I hadn’t known whether I’d recognize him with his clothes on, but apparently I’d paid more attention to his face than I realized because I spotted him the moment he stepped into Blueberry Hill. It helped that he was dressed the way I imagined a painter dressed—oversized faded blue chambray shirt, baggy white painter pants, paint-splattered brown work boots. He was an attractive guy: slender build, early thirties, friendly blue eyes, blond crew cut, matching goatee.

  “Nick was a terrific dude.” Bobby said. “As my grandmamma would say, a real prince.”

  “How so?”

  “Honey, I got in big trouble on one of his jobs.”

  “The naked dance?”

  He widened his eyes and placed his hand on his chest. “You know about that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, I was mortified.”

  He fanned himself with his hand.

  “Absolutely devastated. I felt that I’d totally betrayed Nick. The poor man had no idea. He could have dropped me, fired me on the spot. I would have understood. Completely. He could have done far more than that. He could have warned other contractors about me. He could have ruined me. But he didn’t do any of that. No, sir. He went to the police station, worked everything out, and that was that. I know Nick lost money on that job, but he still took me back on. He said I was a craftsman, and that counted for more than the rest. Of course, he also told me if I so much as even took off my shirt on a job it would be the very last time I ever painted for him. He made me swear, and I swore. On my grandmamma’s grave, I swore. And I swear to you, honey.”

  His voice cracked.

  “Nick Moran was an angel,” he whispered.

  I waited as the waitress set down another pint of beer. He gave her a smile, took a sip, set down the glass, wiped his eyes with the back of his hand, took a deep breath, and nodded at me.

  “I’m okay, honey.”

  I checked my watch. I needed to wrap it up.

  “I’ve talked to some others who knew him,” I said. “I’ve asked
every one of them about drugs. No one ever saw him use anything. How about you?”

  “We didn’t spend much time together, but he never seemed high to me. He seemed like a pretty sober guy all around.”

  “Did you ever get the sense that he had any homosexual tendencies?”

  Billy smiled. “You mean did my Gay-dar go off? Never. I would always kind of flirt with him some. Nothing obvious, of course. If you don’t know about a guy’s sexual interests, especially a guy you work for, you don’t want to offend him. Guys like me—we know how to handle that, to keep it joking but still enough to pick up any signals. I never sensed a thing from him. Never. That’s why I was so surprised. I went to the funeral, you know.”

  “I did, too.”

  “Oh, how sweet of you. Well, while I was in that funeral home I was checking out the crowd, looking for a possible boyfriend or two.”

  “And?”

  He shook his head. “I didn’t see anyone.”

  He shrugged.

  “But you never know. I’ve had guys come on to me that I never would have suspected in a million years. And there’ve been one or two guys I was certain about—guys who really triggered the old Gay-dar—and they turned out to be straight as arrows.”

  “They found his body on that lane in Forest Park.”

  “Right.”

  “Do you know that area?”

  “Gay Way?” He gave me an amused look. “Not personally. Anonymous sex with closet queens? Not my style, honey pie.”

  “Do you know anyone who visits Gay Way?”

  He thought about it. “Yeah.”

  “Could you do me a favor, Bobby? Could you ask those guys to ask around, to see whether they know anyone who might know something about what happened that night? I’ve asked a few of my gay friends to do the same. The police aren’t investigating it. They’ve pretty much closed the case—written it off as an accidental overdose. Maybe that’s all it was. But I promised his sister I’d look into his death. I’m not turning up much, but there is a lot traffic on that lane every night. Dozens and dozens of cars stop there. Maybe some one you know—or someone they know—saw something. I promise to keep whatever they saw confidential.”

  Bobby smiled, his eyes red. “I’ll do it for Nick. He took care of me. It’s the least I can do.”

  Chapter Eleven

  The Frankenstein case started off as the Finkelstein case. In the court’s files, it remains Muriel Finkelstein, et al. v. City of Cloverdale and Ruby Productions, LLC. In my files, however, it has long since morphed into a monster. More specifically, a TIF monster.

  The acronym stands for “tax increment financing.” It also stands as proof of the law of unintended consequences. TIF statutes were enacted around the country with the best of intentions. Their creators saw them as a way to provide financial incentives to encourage private developers to revive blighted portions of our inner cities. In a qualified blight area, public tax dollars can be used to reimburse a whole range of costs that a developer would ordinarily have to absorb, such as the costs of acquiring and demolishing existing structures, the fees of various professions (architects, engineers, lawyers), and the construction costs for public works on the redeveloped property, such as sewers and streets. The vision of the TIF creators was that these financial incentives would lure developers into the slums.

  Instead, clever developers and their lawyers figured out how to exploit the rules by tapping into public funds and the power of eminent domain to construct shopping malls, fancy housing projects and other profitable developments in locations that no lawmaker could have imagined would qualify for TIF funds.

  Developers seduce town officials with visions of higher property values (and thus higher tax revenues) while intimidating them with the threat of taking their project to the adjacent town if denied the TIF they want. In metropolitan St. Louis, for example, the inner city slums fester while developers use TIFs to expand already profitable upscale suburban shopping malls into an even larger, more profitable, and more upscale malls and to level entire middle-class neighborhoods in order to replace them with big-box retailer strip malls.

  Although TIFs have become, quite literally, money in the bank for developers, for the metropolitan areas and their citizens they have become a textbook example of the zero sum game in which one suburb’s gain is exactly balanced by the losses of others.

  No one has proved more adept at exploiting TIF laws than Ken Rubenstein, dubbed by The Riverfront Times as the Baron of Blight. His specialty is the gated residential community. Through his development company, Ruby Productions, he has used TIFs to level neighborhoods throughout suburban St. Louis and replace them with enclaves of McMansions for the nouveau riche.

  My Frankenstein case is aimed at his latest TIF, which in turn is aimed at Brittany Woods. I became involved, as usual with my lost causes, through my mother. Her dear friend Muriel Finkelstein lives in Brittany Woods, a subdivision of 200 modest one-story homes dating back to the late 1940s. Muriel and her late husband Saul bought their home in the 1950s and raised their four children there. Saul owned a small shoe store in the University City Loop. Muriel and Saul were typical Brittany Woods residents of that era—middle-class Jews of modest means. Now the neighborhood is mostly Black families and elderly Jewish couples whose children have long since moved away.

  Although the values of the individual homes in Brittany Woods—three-bedroom ranches built on slabs—have not kept pace with inflation, the untapped value of the underlying real estate has grown steadily, principally because the subdivision is located in the suburb of Cloverdale, which happens to be within one of the best public school systems in Missouri. No one grasped that inherent value better than the Baron of Blight, who somehow convinced the local officials to declare Brittany Woods blighted and to grant his company the power of eminent domain to acquire the entire subdivision so that he could bulldoze it and replace it with Brittany Manors.

  The profits to Ruby Productions will be astounding. The average home in Brittany Woods is worth $160,000. If you can acquire all 200 at that price—which is possible only if the city gives you the power of eminent domain—the total outlay is $32 million. Even with the fifteen-percent incentive payment Rob Crane offered after court the other day, his total outlay would still be less than $37 million. The plans for the gated community include 90 mansions with an average sales price of $1.8 million, which seems conservative given the other amenities the development plan includes, such as a swimming pool, state-of-the-art health club, jogging paths, and tennis courts—all funded by TIF dollars, along with public funds for sewer lines and other infrastructure improvements. Ninety mansions at $1.8 million each totals $162 million. A pretty good return on your investment.

  The unfairness of it all is manifest, especially if you spend any time with the residents. Over 300 children from the subdivision—mostly Black and Hispanic—attend the excellent local schools. All of those children will be forced out of the school system because their parents will have no choice but to move out of the district. Indeed, the housing costs in the next cheapest neighborhood in the school district start at more than three times the appraised value of the Brittany Woods homes. So, too, older couples who have lived in the subdivision for decades would be forced from their homes and neighborhood and cut off from their friends and daily routines.

  Which is why the case haunts me. I may have justice on my side, but Ruby Productions has the law. Except in that imaginary state known as Hollywood, the law generally trumps justice.

  The headline writer for the Post-Dispatch apparently cannot resist the alliterative allure of “Tiff” and “TIF,” since the words have been paired four times in headlines for articles about the lawsuit, including an editorial chastising the city council of Cloverdale. But “tiff” is far too gentle a term for a lawsuit that often feels like the litigation equivalent of the Bataan Death March. Tonight, though, I was taki
ng a break from that march to gather in Muriel Finkelstein’s small living room with the ten members of the plaintiffs’ steering committee. The purpose was to update them on the lawsuit, convey Rob Crane’s latest settlement offer, and find out whether they were ready to raise the white flag and accept the offer.

  I knew the answer to the white-flag question long before Cletus Johnson leaned back in his folding chair, crossed his arms over his massive chest, and shook his bald head.

  “Not gonna happen on our watch, Miss Gold,” he said in his deep baritone. “These are our homes. They may not look like much to Mr. Rubenstein but they are castles to us.”

  “Maybe so,” Kianga Henderson said. She was a young mom with three kids. “But how can we just say no without checking with the others first?”

  I said, “The settlement offer requires all two hundred households to agree. Rubenstein doesn’t want to pay a premium to half and then get stuck in two years of condemnations proceeding against the rest. It’s all or nothing.”

  “Then it’s nothing,” said Muriel Finkelstein.

  I turned to see her standing in the kitchen doorway. She was holding a platter of freshly baked Toll House cookies—the third batch since we’d arrived.

  “Anyone need more coffee or tea?” she asked.

  There were several murmured “No’s” or “No, thanks.”

  Muriel was a plump, red-cheeked grandmother in her late seventies. She had thick gray hair cut short, sparkling blue eyes, a complexion to die for, and a fashion preference for sweatshirts, sweatpants, and walking shoes. What with her four children and twelve grandchildren, she had ten different colleges and universities represented by her outfits, each of which she wore proudly. Tonight’s sweats were from Colby College, which, as she explained to me when I arrived, was where her “marvelous Joshua was a junior majoring in philosophy—such a smart boy—a regular Maimonides.”

  From what I’d observed the few times I’d come to see Muriel on weekends, she was the honorary grandmother for most of the kids in the neighborhood, all of whom seemed to stop by for Toll House cookies, a glass of milk, and a chance to tell Miss Muriel their latest adventures. Her refrigerator front and the bulletin board in her dining room displayed an ever-changing collection of paintings and drawings given to her by the neighborhood kids.