Dead Watch

paper. “You know, my husband passed away three years ago. He had an infarction. I hoped that maybe because I helped out, you know, that I could get help getting a job. They took my husband’s pension away, those people at ITEM, those big shots, they said he elected to get more money early, or something like that.”
    “We can talk about your help,” Jake said. “I think you’ll be okay. If you tried to get to the authorities.”
    “I tried, Lord knows I tried,” she said. “I knew Al from when he was fund-raising, I knew he was well connected in Washington. I thought that was the best way to get this to the proper people.”

    She put Jake in the living room to read, brought a package of Oreos and glasses of orange juice as he worked.
    The package described a standard piece of corruption, notable only for the arrogance shown by the vice president and his friends, and the size of the return. The highway project involved reconstruction of about ninety miles of Wisconsin’s federal Highway 65, from its intersection with Interstate 94 a few miles east of the Minnesota line, to the town of Hayward in the north woods.
    “Highway Sixty-five is the main road from the Twin Cities up to the Hayward Lakes resorts,” Levine said. “My husband worked on the project for six years, it was a big deal, you bet.” She dug around in the kitchen cabinet, found a Wisconsin road map, and traced the line of the highway with a finger. “The project was on the up-and-up. The project saved lives . . . It was only later that the trouble started. My husband was a comptroller on the project, and there was trouble right away with equipment. That’s all on disk one, the books.”
    The general contractor, ITEM, subcontracted with several dozen smaller independent companies to do the planning, environmental studies, equipment and materials supply, earthmoving, and paving.
    The key was in the heavy equipment. One of the companies, Cor-Nine, leased twenty-odd pieces of heavy equipment, mostly heavy dump trucks, along with a few graders, to ITEM over four years, for a total package price of $7.3 million. They also paid Cor-Nine $210,000 for maintenance and repairs.
    “That’s what really made me laugh, when Ron told me about it,” Levine said. “The maintenance, that was hilarious.”
    “Too much, or not enough?” Jake asked.
    “I suppose you’d say too much, since the equipment didn’t exist,” Levine said.
    “Didn’t exist.”
    “Didn’t exist. Ron said you couldn’t see it, even at the time. The equipment could always be somewhere else . . . You’re only talking about one piece for every five miles or so of the road, and there were so many little contractors coming and going that nobody but ITEM knew who was doing what.”
    “They did the whole highway at the same time? They didn’t just do ten miles at a time?”
    “Normally, a project would be staged, maybe over fifteen years or so. To maximize the return, they had to do the whole thing while Governor Landers was in office,” she said. “They already had a two-lane highway going up, so they constructed another two lanes beside it, all at once. After that was done, they coordinated the old highway with the new highway in stages—essentially, cleanup work, building intersections. That was legitimate, too. It minimized the traffic and business disturbances in all these small towns along the way . . .” She tapped the small towns on the map.
    “And Cor-Nine was Landers and his pals.”
    “No, no. Cor-Nine was some people you never heard of, a bunch of Frenchmen.”
    “Frenchmen?”
    “Yeah. They were a French-based equipment-leasing corporation that, after you traced it to France, came back to the Bahamas and then disappeared,” she said. “If anybody asked, ITEM could say that all they knew was that they were leasing equipment at a good price. If the money disappeared, it was some kind of French tax-avoidance deal. Couldn’t blame ITEM for that.”
    “You seem to know an awful lot about it,” Jake commented.
    “I was a bookkeeper before I got married,” she said. “I know about money.”
    “So how did the money get to Landers?”
    “Through his brother. Sam.”
    “The guy in Texas,” Jake said. The vice president’s colorful sibling, big hat and big boots, a lime green Cadillac with longhorns welded to the hood.
    “Right. Sam Landers goes down to Texas, a hot real-estate market for retirees—no state income tax, warm weather. He sets