the potential appearance of a conflict."
"I get the impression that you don't share Coakley's concerns about
privilege."
Loutrell shrugged. "Dennis is Dennis. He sees potential city
liability around every corner, but he's well-intentioned. I actually
considered calling you last week about this. The media were
insinuating that something was going on between Clarissa and T. J.
Caffrey which I know nothing about, by the way and for some reason the
conversation with Clarissa stuck in my mind."
"I'm missing the connection," I said.
He shook his head quickly as if to shake the suggestion away. "Not a
connection, really. It was just that Clarissa seemed so serious about
the matter when she raised it with us, particularly when she was
talking about how important the hospital wing was to her husband. She
seemed unreasonably upset by the situation, considering how innocuous
it was. I think my imagination got the best of me, and I started
wondering if maybe the entire situation had something to do with the
state of her marriage. By the time Coakley spelled out his bogus
privilege concerns, it just didn't seem like anything worth bothering
you about."
People don't realize that a criminal case is rarely built on a single
piece of evidence, relying instead on tens and hundreds of clues in
context, each by itself insignificant. Too many helpful witnesses show
up late in the game, because they didn't want to bother the police with
insignificant information. In the meantime, the wackos flood the phone
lines with visions and premonitions.
Clarissa may not have given Coakley and Loutrell a full blown
admission, but at least I was on the right track.
From City Hall, I made a stealth pop into my office to grab copies of
the Gunderson case file, the information Jessica Walters had copied for
me detailing Max Grice's complaints, and the financial records for the
hospital wing. Within thirty minutes, I had gathered everything I
needed for my research and was nestled back in my home office and ready
to start filling in the missing pieces.
Based on Jessica's notes about Max Grice, he wasn't a happy camper. At
the heart of his discontent was a woman named Jane Wessler, city
licensing official for the Office of Landmarks Preservation at City
Hall. Three years ago, as a nod to preservationists, the office had
designated an area surrounding the train station an historic district,
seeking to protect the small neighborhood from the
warehouse-to-luxury-loft conversions that marked the nearby and rapidly
expanding Pearl District. As a result of the designation, the Railroad
District, located at the eastern edge of trendy northwest Portland,
still remains an enclave for starving artists, aging hippies, and other
eccentrics who are happier in the neighborhood's traditionally
industrial atmosphere than with high-end yuppified retail, restaurant,
and residential development.
One year after the designation, however, the preservation office
created a licensing provision that permitted developers to obtain
special-use licenses for approved "urban renewal" projects that were
consistent with the architectural history of the Railroad District. For
the first sixteen months of that program,
Jane Wessler was in charge of deciding which projects qualified as
special uses. Grice's three proposals, in her view, did not.
Grice, however, was persistent. After seeing several similar projects
in the neighborhood approved, Grice filed a request under the Oregon
Public Information Act for the names of all companies who applied for
special-use licenses and for Wessler s determination on each
application. Using the data, Grice had tried to make the case to
Jessica Walters that Wessler was on the take. I looked at the list he
had compiled. Maybe there was a trend; a few companies were three for
three while Grice had no luck at all. But I could see why Jessica had
decided there was nothing criminal; with so few examples, it was
impossible to tell if it was just coincidence.
According to Jessica's notes, Grice had resubmitted his applications
after Wessler left for a yearlong maternity leave, but the city had
refused to reconsider the original decisions. That must have been the
appeal from which Clarissa had recused herself.
I took another look at Grice's list. No mention of Gunderson.
Next, I turned to Clarissa's copy of Gunderson's case file. I'd read
through it when Slip had first shown it to me in his office, but I
wanted to see how it fit together with Grice's complaint. Gunderson's
Railroad District project had also been rejected by the city, but by a
different licensing official, a month after Wessler went on leave.
Unlike Grice, however, Gunderson had appealed, and Clarissa had
reversed the decision.
Then I spread out the pages of financial information Slip's
investigator had printed from Clarissa's password-protected disc. The
text at the top of each page identified the spreadsheet as the budget
for the Lucy Hilton Pediatric Center. Lots of money coming in, but no
substantial expenditures yet. That made sense, given that the center
was still in the planning process. From what I knew, the project had
been dropped at one point because of the bad economy, but Townsend had
resurrected it as his baby.
Whatever he was doing, it seemed to be working. There were pages of
entries for donations, large and small, from individuals, corporations,
and the major local foundations. But no money from Larry Gunderson or
Gunderson Development.
I took a break and grabbed a Diet Coke from the kitchen. This time
Vinnie followed me upstairs, sprawling himself beneath the desk near my
feet. When I stopped scratching him behind his ears and returned to my
documents, he looked up at me and snorted. It was as close as he could
come to saying, "Snoozapalooza."
"Tell me about it, little man," I said, rubbing my eyes with the palms
of my hands. For some reason, Clarissa had kept a copy of the
Gunderson file, Townsend's financial records, and the videotape of her
and Caffrey together under lock and key. If there was a connection,
where was it?
I studied the list of the hospital donors again and finally saw it: a
name. The MTK Group had made a donation of $100,000 to Townsend's pet
cause. I reopened Jessica's file on Grice. There, on Grice's list of
companies affected by the decisions of Jane Wessler, was the MTK Group:
three renewal projects in the Railroad District, and every one of them
approved. So what the hell was the MTK Group?
I called the corporate filing division of the Secretary of State's
office, hoping to get the company's basic registration information, but
their business hours were long over. Then I called information, but
there were no listings under MTK. I even tried an Internet search.