Wishful Thinking (31 page)

She took out her phone and was about to snap a picture to send to Owen, when she heard the doors to the center open behind her. She turned to see Bill Truitt walk in, wearing a lemon-yellow tie.

“Fancy meeting you here,” he said. “Admiring your handiwork?”

“Your handiwork,” she said. “The building looks fabulous.”

He walked over and stood next to her. “I like walking around when a project is at this stage,” he said. “I like seeing it
in a way few other people ever will. Like a secret between me and the building, and, of course, the team who takes part in it.” He turned to her with a conspiratorial smile. “You probably won’t appreciate this metaphor,” he added, “but it’s like seeing a woman in her underwear.”

Jennifer did her best to smile back. “Not how I would put it,” she said, “but I do see what you mean.” Jennifer had never been part of building something from the ground up, and while the underwear analogy made her cringe, she could see what Bill meant about the intimacy. It had been moving and satisfying, in a way she hadn’t experienced before, to witness the physical space taking shape.

“I’ll leave you to it,” Bill said after a minute, heading for the door. “You should be very proud.”

“Thank you,” Jennifer said. “I am.”

A
FEW MINUTES LATER
Jennifer was outside again, checking in with the mayor’s assistant by text. Tim brought her a taco.

“Who’s Alicia talking to now?” Tim asked, taking a gigantic bite out of an organic corn dog. On the opposite side of the building site, Alicia was engaged in an intense conversation with a young man whose back was turned to them.

“I don’t know,” she answered, “but it looks serious.” Jennifer strained to see. The man handed Alicia something, and she studied it intently. When she looked up, Jennifer saw an expression of concern—even alarm—on her face. She was looking for Jennifer, and when their eyes met, Jennifer gave her a little wave, raising her eyebrows inquiringly. Alicia waved her over. Jennifer handed Tim the uneaten portion of her taco.

“Hold down the fort for a second,” Jennifer told him.

“But the mayor is going to be here any minute now!” Tim cried.

“So go over to the dais and make sure the news crews have what they need,” she replied. “Hold Bill’s hand. Or, better yet, bring him a corn dog.”

As she drew closer, Jennifer recognized the young man Alicia was talking to. It was Noel, Amalia’s grandson, the one Alicia had encouraged to find work at the building site back in December.

“You remember Noel?” Alicia said as Jennifer joined them. She spoke in a markedly low tone. Taking Alicia’s cue, Jennifer nodded and said a quiet hello. Noel looked nervous and avoided Jennifer’s gaze.

“Well, I was just asking him how it was going,” Alicia said, “working on the site, about benefits, conditions, et cetera. It all sounded fabulous,” she went on, “until he told me what he was getting paid.” She handed Jennifer a pay stub.
Noel Campusano, Forklift Operator.
Alicia pointed to the hourly wage. Fourteen dollars per hour.

Jennifer did a double take. Fourteen dollars an hour? Noel had a forklift operator’s license. He should have been earning nineteen.

“This can’t be right,” she said, staring.

“I know,” Alicia said. “That’s what I was telling Noel.” Noel’s check was issued not by the city but by the contractor for the residents’ job program—which just so happened to be Bill’s private foundation, BTE for Good. The accounting was done by a junior employee named Greg Schloss—a really nice guy, Jennifer thought. Every pay period, Greg submitted BTE for Good’s certified payroll reports to Jennifer, and, upon receipt, Jennifer wrote a check to BTE for Good from the city. According to those payroll reports, Noel and all the other forklift operators had been paid nineteen dollars an hour. Where had the other five dollars an hour gone?

Her stomach was churning.

Alicia spoke to Noel quickly in Spanish, and he rejoined his friends. Jennifer and Alicia moved away from the crowd until they found a quiet spot.

“Can he bring us more of these?” Jennifer asked. “He has friends working on the site, too, right? I need to see all of his pay stubs, and we should look at others if we can. But we need to do it quietly. We can’t let anybody else know, not until I have a chance to figure out what’s going on. And we can’t tell Noel or the others why we want the stubs. Okay?”

Grim-faced, Alicia nodded. In the near distance, the sound of sirens approached. It was the mayor’s motorcade. From the dais, Tim was motioning frantically for them to hurry up as a band began dishing up the requisite fanfare. It was disconcerting, the hoopla, in light of what they’d just found.

“After the press conference,” Alicia said, “I’ll get Noel to help me collect as many as I can so we can at least round up a larger sample.” Jennifer nodded. The two of them hurried toward the dais as the mayor exited his limousine, greeted by Bill Truitt, in his tailored dark navy suit and lemon-yellow tie, grinning widely as he shook the mayor’s hand. “I’m sure it’s just a clerical error,” Alicia said. “I know he’s not the easiest person to work for,” she added, turning to Jennifer, “but Bill is a good man.”

Jennifer said nothing. But as she watched Bill take the stage next to the mayor, preening for the cameras and looking every bit the politician himself, she couldn’t help wondering if there was a far bigger secret between Bill Truitt and his building than what it looked like in its underwear.

B
ILL LEFT THE OFFICE
at five that day, first to go home and pack (or to pick up the suitcase Mrs. Bill had packed for him), then to head to the airport to catch the red-eye to London for
an international conference on poverty. He was buzzed and upbeat after the press conference, which had already resulted in some positive hits in the media that afternoon, and had even hinted at taking everyone out for a celebratory lunch when he got back. Jennifer’s, Alicia’s, and Tim’s moods, however—Jennifer had told Tim about the pay-stub discrepancy on their way back to the office that morning—were less than ebullient. As soon as Bill left the building, the three of them gathered solemnly in the conference room.

Tim brought a stack of file boxes, Jennifer brought her laptop, and Alicia brought a small cache of pay stubs in a plain manila folder, having collected as many as she could from Noel and other men he knew who worked at the site. At Jennifer’s suggestion, Alicia had simply told them that the city needed to double-check the deduction amounts for Social Security and Medicare—no big deal. Trusting Alicia more than they would have any other agency employee, the men had readily agreed.

As Jennifer and Tim sat down at the long conference table, Alicia closed the door behind her. She then pulled a chair over to block the entrance to the room. Jennifer and Tim exchanged a look. Outside, the fickle spring clouds were quickly turning from streaks of yellow to banks of gray.

From the manila folder Alicia produced the pay stubs. She also took out a thick packet with a cover sheet that read:
New York City Housing Authority, Office of the Inspector General
. She pushed it in front of Jennifer. Something about the way she did it, and the look on her face as she did, put Jennifer on her guard. They’d all had the long afternoon hours to think about this, without being able to breathe a word to one another. What had been going through Alicia’s mind?

“‘Contractors and Vendors Anti-Corruption Guide,’” Jennifer read.

“You’re familiar?” Alicia asked pointedly.

Jennifer nodded, avoiding her gaze. She knew this was a document she should have memorized front to back, but her review of it when she had joined the agency years ago had been cursory at best, and since Bill had arrived, she had to admit, she’d been reluctant to review it. She knew their practices hadn’t been what they should be, particularly in fast-tracking contracts with nonprofits and vendors owned and operated by people Bill knew. But he’d insisted—and threatened the loss of the bonuses if she didn’t go along. And so she had. Not just for the money, but for the results. But now this.

Jennifer opened the packet briskly. “Most of it is about proper bidding practices, and bribery,” she said as she flipped through. When she came to the page she was looking for, she stopped. “Here’s the passage that might be relevant,” she added, relieved that she was able to find it so quickly.

Jennifer showed the document to Tim, who read aloud. “‘Pay prevailing wages, where legally required. Prevailing wage violations and the submissions to NYCHA of falsified payrolls are against the law and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.’” He looked up. “So if the payroll says Noel is being paid nineteen dollars an hour and he’s getting fourteen, it’s being falsified. And somebody is pocketing the difference.”

Jennifer opened Excel on her laptop. “It’s not a new scheme,” she said matter-of-factly. “If what we think is going on is going on, that is.”

“I don’t think we know what’s going on,” Alicia said. “Not yet.” Jennifer kept her eyes on her laptop screen and nodded. Tim pulled the certified payrolls out of their files.

“The first thing,” Jennifer said, “is to see whether or not Noel’s paycheck was an isolated mistake.”

In the half hour that followed, the three of them set up a sort of assembly line, checking and double-checking payroll records and bank balances, attempting to reconcile the pay
stubs with the funds that had been paid. The more they looked, the more Jennifer’s head began to ache; the more they found, the more her chest felt like it was being squeezed into a barrel of concrete. To begin with, Noel’s stub wasn’t an isolated error. That was obvious right away, as none of the other residents’ paychecks were right either. What she couldn’t understand was that no two of them were wrong in the same way.

“It’s all over the place,” Tim said. Jennifer nodded in agreement. Some workers, like Noel, were being paid fourteen dollars an hour. But a friend of Noel’s was making seventeen, while another forklift operator was earning twelve. It was a small sample size, but the discrepancies were glaring.

“Noel had a friend who just got hired at twelve,” Alicia said. “That’s why he showed me what he was earning. To ask why.”

“Wait a minute,” Tim said. Studying the stubs, he began to reorganize them. “What if what these guys get paid is tied to when they were hired?” Alicia and Jennifer leaned in. “Noel was hired in December, meaning he was part of the second round of residents hired through the program. All of those guys are getting fourteen. But the guy who’s earning seventeen came on at the very start.”

“And the new hire is at twelve,” Jennifer said, nodding, “but all the while the certified payroll stays the same: nineteen dollars an hour.”

“Which means that whoever is taking the difference between what the city is paying and what the residents are getting has been getting greedier,” Tim said. “With every new hire, they push the wage down more.”

“So?” Alicia said.

“So,” Jennifer said, “somebody at BTE for Good, whether it’s Bill or one of his administrators, is getting rich.” She did some mental math. “How many residents have we employed at the building site?” Jennifer asked Tim.

“Close to a hundred by now,” he replied.

“Which means, if this is widespread—say somebody is shaving off between two and seven dollars per hour, on a fifty-hour workweek; call it four-fifty an hour per employee, just to get a general idea—that’s as much as forty-five thousand dollars per pay period. Maybe more. Which could mean as much as half a million dollars so far.”

“Oh my God,” Tim said.

For a moment, there was silence.

“It seems to me we should identify
all
the points where the money could be disappearing,” Alicia said, looking directly at Jennifer. “Not just at BTE. I know Greg Schloss, the accountant. He has an impeccable reputation.” She paused, seeming to bite her tongue. “And Bill. I know he likes to cut corners sometimes, but he does it in order to get things done. And what he’s done for the community with the foundation— you have no idea.” She paused again. “Not to mention the fact that he’s got more money than the mayor does. It just doesn’t make sense.” Jennifer had to agree with Alicia there. “We need answers from
anyone
who is in a position to reroute funds,” Alicia continued. “On our side or his. And we need to take this to Bill and tell him everything we know. Right away.”

Jennifer felt Alicia’s and Tim’s eyes on her. For a minute, she couldn’t understand why. And then she realized.
Anyone in a position to reroute funds. On our side or on his.
Alicia was talking about her.

Suspecting me is ridiculous!
she wanted to shout. Always, in these cases, the most likely culprit was the entity that acted as the go-between, in this case BTE for Good. It was much too difficult to cook the books on the city’s end. Not only was suspecting Jennifer ridiculous, but they couldn’t take this to Bill, not yet. What if he was the guilty one?

She opened her mouth to speak. But just as she did, there
was an explosion in her head—a white-hot burst that rocked the inside of her skull like a sonic boom. She felt like she was having her ears boxed and raised her hands to cover them, emitting a little cry. And suddenly she heard the sound of city traffic passing her by, as though she were outside. Sirens. Honking horns. The usual New York clatter. Jennifer looked up at Tim and Alicia, who were talking as though nothing had changed.
Didn’t they hear it too?
she thought. And then she knew. It was happening again. The bleed-through.

Her senses were now feeding her two sets of data, just as they had when she and Alicia were at Amalia’s apartment. In one data set, her eyes were scanning a darkening city sidewalk, a solid gray mass of cloud cover above. Her ears fed her chatter from another woman walking alongside her—it was Tara, Julien’s soccer pal Frank’s mom. And her bare arms, feeling the chill of a damp breeze, telegraphed to her brain that she ought to put her rain jacket on. In the other, her eyes registered the baffled looks Tim and Alicia were giving her, her ears strained to hear their inquiries, and her body felt stuffy and hot inside the windowless conference room. The two inputs rattled and snapped and made nonsense of each other, and Jennifer was caught in the crossfire. Squeezing her hand around her phone, which she held in her lap beneath the conference table, Jennifer looked down, desperate for an anchor. What day was it? Wednesday, she told herself. The day she picked the boys up from Norman at five thirty. What time was it now? She willed herself to focus on the numbers on the screen: 5:35. She would have just picked them up at the park. So where were the boys? She had heard only Tara’s voice.