My Honorable Brother Page 12

  Jenna jumped right in. “I heard someone at the Statehouse say you wouldn’t be running for another term, Senator. Can you confirm or deny that for me?”

  She timed the pause before he answered her. Five seconds. That told her everything. When Hardiman said, “I have no reason at this time to think that I won’t seek reelection,” she thanked him for speaking with her. She’d quote him, she said, if her editor thought any kind of a story was necessary.

  Richardson hung up the phone and looked around at the other reporters in the newsroom. They were oblivious to everything as their fingers worked the keyboards of their word processors. She couldn’t hold back a smile.

  * * *

  It was an exceptionally raw morning in Washington, DC. Cyril Berman completed one of the many tasks received from Sandy Tarantino and was ready to make his report. When his secretary told him that a Steve Pearson was on the line—Sandy Tarantino said he would always communicate under that name—Berman unlocked the top drawer of the desk in his K Street office and pulled out a piece of lined yellow paper. They exchanged greetings, after which Sandy said he would listen while Cyril gave him the full report he was anxious to hear. Berman rubbed his black mustache several times with his forefinger, a habit he engaged in unconsciously at the start of every phone call.

  “There’s absolutely nothing in Fiore’s family or his wife’s family to worry about. They’re both lily-white and both blue-collar types. Fiore’s old man is a machine shop employee. He’s worked at the same place for over thirty years and came close to being disciplined out of there a couple of times. Hers is the head cutter in a garment district shop that makes ladies handbags. Mostly knockoffs of Italian designers. Her family was always involved in activities at the neighborhood level. His folks kept to themselves. Fiore’s got one sister, his wife’s got a brother. From what I’ve seen, there aren’t any skeletons in their closets.

  “Thanks to you, he’s been bringing in more client money than anyone else for years. He’s their biggest rainmaker by a long shot, and that gives him the power he clearly loves. He could move from managing partner to governor with no sweat. He pushes for what he wants, and gets his partners to go along most of the time. But it doesn’t look like he’s trying to run roughshod over anyone. All in all, Sandy, I’d have to say he’s very fair, and no one in the firm is talking about electing someone to replace him.

  “I was impressed by a couple of things he did recently. For one, he successfully represented a judge in Providence who had some wild allegation of unethical conduct thrown at him. Fiore handled that pro bono. And he also convinced his partners that it would be wrong to lay off a bunch of associates at the end of last year just to have more money to spread around for them. He’s got a good moral attitude about a lot of things, and he’ll have the moral position on gambling in the campaign so he should feel right at home.

  “Anyway, everything I’ve heard sounds like he’ll make a good, tough candidate. Most importantly, he can think on his feet. He’s a fierce debater and awfully smooth around people when he wants to be. Again, you probably knew all that.”

  Tarantino interrupted briefly. “He’s the best debater I ever heard. I’m sure that’s what got him editor-in-chief of his law review.”

  Berman went on with his report. “The one real negative, from our point of view, is that he has trouble keeping his fly zipped up. That’s where his morality takes a breather. He’s had three affairs I know about in the past ten years. One of them is going on right now. He was even shtuping his secretary for a while, and that violates the cardinal rule. You know what shtuping is, right?”

  Berman laughed at Tarantino’s answer and continued. “We may have to give some hard thought to his present romance. He’s been sleeping with one of his law partners for about five months. Her name just happens to be Carol Singer, wife of our man Bruce. I’m inclined to leave it alone right now. Singer will probably get the Democratic nomination for governor if he wants it, but we can’t be a hundred percent certain of that at the moment. First, we’ve got to get Fiore through the primary and into the general election. If Singer’s his opponent, she might even be willing to help us out during the campaign. She’ll probably have access to an awful lot of information. It sounds crazy, I know, but I guess it depends on how she feels about her husband and how she reacts when she sees who he’s up against. We know something’s awfully wrong between them if she’s shacking up with Doug. She may love Singer enough to break off the affair when she finds out what’s what. Then again, she may want to keep getting the good stuff Fiore’s giving her. We’ll just have to wait and see.”

  15

  THE THING THAT THE Providence Herald executives liked most about the downtown Holiday Inn was that it was a non-union hotel. At lunch or dinnertime they could choose to go to the Biltmore or the Marriott for more gourmet dining. And if circumstances forced them to stay overnight in the city, they could sleep at those same two hotels without the din of automobile and truck traffic from the highway keeping them awake. That was a critical problem for the Holiday Inn, with its fourteen stories sitting almost on top of Interstate 95. But the Herald crowd knew that when they sat in the large windowless dining room, just off the main lobby, they didn’t have to worry about union business agents overhearing their conversations. If you worked for a union in Providence, you didn’t go near the Holiday Inn.

  Terry Reardon was about fifteen minutes early for his meeting with Richie Cardella when he took a table at the far end of the dining room. Experience taught him that people weren’t always on time for their lunch or dinner dates. So he made it a habit on such occasions to borrow a magazine from the reception area near his fourth floor office in the Herald building.

  On his way to the hotel he stopped at the Civic Center to pick up a couple of concert tickets for his oldest son. They were for a band Reardon never heard of that would be in town for just a Saturday night performance the last weekend of the month. But on entering the spacious and unheated lobby, he saw a line of people waiting to make their purchases from the single ticket window that was doing business.

  “Why the hell do they have one window open and nine closed?” he grumbled. And then supplied his own answer, still talking under his breath: “Because they probably figure they’ll sell out anyway, so they might as well do it as cheaply as possible, the bastards.”

  Most of those in line were the “long hair and jeans crowd,” as he later referred to them in his chat with Cardella. He looked at his watch and timed how long it took for the next two transactions to be completed. That convinced him it was too late to get at the end of the line. Maybe he’d try again after lunch, he thought.

  “Sorry, sir, no cigar smoking allowed.” Reardon heard the words and knew, even before looking up from his Sports Illustrated, that it was Cardella he’d find standing there with a big grin on his face.

  “Hiya, Rico, have a seat,” he said, and waited until Cardella sat down across from him. “I just don’t like to see these smoking tables go to waste. Take a look around. There are eighteen tables in the dining room—I’ve already counted—and you can only light up at four of them. They keep squeezing us down all the time, pushing us into the corners of the room. Pretty soon I may have to buy a table here, like you do a condo, just to be able to come in and enjoy a Garcia Vega with my meal.”

  Reardon took another puff and then put it out, first flicking off the burnt ash and then carefully tamping the end easily into the ashtray so he could relight it later. “But I know your rule, counselor, so I’ll save it for the walk back to work. How you doing, Richie?”

  Cardella unbuttoned the jacket of his brown pin-striped suit and smiled. His wasn’t a handsome face but it was one that most everyone who met him liked and trusted right away. The large nose couldn’t hide the fact that it was broken at least once, and he had the boxing stories to give it credibility. His lips had a soft, spongy look about them, and his smile revealed not only an unfortunate gap between two of his front teeth
but an earlier nicotine habit that left its mark in his mouth.

  “Really great, Terry,” he said. “Busy as a son of a bitch. My theory is that white collar crime just multiplies in a recession. I’ve had my hands full with a bunch of greedy executives who tried to make money without earning it the old-fashioned way. I’ve also had some interesting contract negotiations.”

  Richie Cardella was a big man, “built like a tall fire plug” many people said. The evidence was a solid 230 pounds on a six-foot frame. His shoulders seemed to be in constant motion when he spoke. “We made the Herald’s front page when the Teamsters put up the white flag and called off the strike at Coastal Trucking.”

  “Yeah, I read the story. You really beat up on Tommy Arena in that one.”

  “He deserved what he got. I don’t know what the hell makes him so arrogant. He still thinks it’s supposed to work like it did with the Teamsters in the old days. He wants to show up at the first meeting, throw a new contract on the table, tell the company to sign it or else, no matter what kind of shit he puts in there, and then have you take him out to dinner. I kept trying to introduce him to reality but he wouldn’t listen.”

  “How long did that strike last?” Terry asked. “I forget.”

  Richie moved his fat bottom lip over the top one and looked up at the ceiling for a few moments. “Almost six weeks,” he answered. “The company got some hungry independent operators to make its deliveries for a while. They weren’t looking to go to war. But Arena cancelled out of two straight meetings without even letting the mediator know he wouldn’t be there. That’s when Coastal figured he could go fuck himself if he thought he was calling the shots. So they started hiring new employees and replaced almost half the twenty-seven guys on strike.”

  “Yeah, that was the tough part,” Reardon said.

  “But that’s what it took for Tommy to finally see the light. He made damn sure he was at the next meeting the mediator called and agreed to almost everything in the company’s final offer. All he kept saying, over and over, was, ‘The International will have my fucking head for signing this.’ I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, listening to him.

  “But it’s really sad, Terry. I’ll bet anything the Union couldn’t find new jobs for the strikers Coastal replaced. There’s almost nothing out there! Gravel drivers, cement drivers, freight, even moving and storage, they’re all hurting, laid off all over the place. But I don’t think Tommy really gives a shit about what happens to them. He’s been at this so long it’s all water off a duck’s back. If he cared about his members, he’d smarten up and stop acting like Jimmy Hoffa’s still running the Union.”

  “Well, I hope he doesn’t try and take it out on the Herald in August just because he’s pissed off at you.”

  The waitress came over and put two menus on the table.

  Reardon handed his right back to her. “I’ve got every line memorized, Mary. And it’ll probably be another two months before they change it again. Give me the scrod with the cheese sauce, salad, oil and vinegar on the side, and bring a regular coffee as soon as you come back.”

  He watched Cardella look over the menu. They had eaten numerous meals together in the past, usually during the long negotiating sessions with one of the four unions at the Herald. Cardella had been the newspaper’s legal counsel on all labor matters for almost eight years, from the time he left politics. Terry was Labor Relations Manager for half that time, handling all the day-to-day problems and employee grievances. He moved up to Vice President for Labor and Employment when his predecessor left the Company to take a similar position in Portland, Maine, his hometown.

  “Is the scrod fresh or frozen?” Cardella asked the waitress.

  Reardon smiled and thought to himself, Oh, man, here we go. He knew Richie could ask a dozen questions and drive any waitress crazy before deciding what to order.

  Mary said she thought it was fresh but she would check if he wanted to know for sure.

  “Usually it’s frozen,” Reardon offered.

  “And what’s the sole stuffed with?”

  “A bread stuffing,” she answered.

  “No seafood in it?”

  “No.” Mary and Terry answered at the same time.

  Cardella hesitated, scanning the menu. “Does the tuna salad have celery?”

  “Some,” Mary told him, “but not a lot.”

  Richie frowned. He hated celery. “I’ll take the scrod, too, but no broccoli. Do you have a baked potato you can put with it?”

  Mary shifted her weight from one leg to the other. “I’m not sure. I know we have French fries and Lyonnais.”

  “Well, see if they can throw a baked potato in the microwave. But I like it real soft so it mashes up easy. And with some sour cream. If not, I’ll take the Lyonnais.”

  “Yes, sir, anything to drink?”

  “Not now. Maybe later … or I’ll tell you what. Bring me a decaf when the scrod is ready.”

  Mary left. Reardon chuckled and shook his head back and forth. “I don’t believe you. I watch you do it all the time and I don’t believe you. Your wife must go nuts at home.”

  “Never,” Cardella replied, and his shoulders provided the exclamation point. “Anita doesn’t go for the twenty questions routine I use outside. She just puts the food on the table. Take it or leave it. But she’s a fantastic cook so I have no problems. She even hates broccoli herself. Anyhow, did you hear the one about why New Jersey has all the waste dumps and New York has all the lawyers?”

  Reardon said he didn’t.

  “New Jersey got to pick first.”

  They both laughed.

  “So what’s the reason for this lunch and should I put it on the clock?” Cardella asked.

  “Answer to the first question, the rumor mill has been turning out some stuff I wanted to ask you about. Answer to the second question, bill me if the scrod is fresh, not if it’s frozen.”

  “I think I’ve been had.” They both laughed again.

  Reardon picked up his teaspoon and hit it lightly against the tabletop as he spoke. “I’ll tell you what I’ve heard, but it doesn’t come directly from anyone I can quote as a source. Like I said, rumors, so don’t press me for a name afterwards.”

  “Okay,” Cardella said. “I hear you.”

  Reardon continued. “Supposedly, Spence Hardiman has decided not to run for his Senate seat again. I know it’s hard to imagine him giving it up, but he wouldn’t be the first one to make that kind of decision. That freshman senator from Colorado already said he won’t be a candidate again. A couple of others have indicated they’re still noncommittal.

  “Apparently, the great United States Senate isn’t as much fun as it used to be. Some politicos who get elected there really expect to introduce new legislation and get things done, I guess. Then they find out what gridlock is all about. Either the Senate talks a bill to death and nothing comes of it, or if they finally get enough votes to pass it, the President vetoes it because his party wasn’t the one that pushed it through. Hardiman has only been there one term, but he’s a very sensitive guy. He was a good governor because he knew what he wanted for Rhode Island and pretty much forced the legislature to give it to him. Imagine how frustrating the last five years have been for him in Washington.”

  “No doubt about it,” Cardella said, agreeing with him.

  “Anyhow, what Hardiman does or doesn’t do is the key. That’s a no brainer. But if he’s decided not to go for another term, that puts Sacco in the race for his job. We both know that John would definitely be odds on to win.”

  Richie nodded his head. “I can’t even imagine who’s out there to make it a race against him if that happened. Lindgren, bless his soul, was the best the Democrats had to offer in the race against Hardiman five years ago.”

  “You’re probably right,” Reardon continued, “but those who trade in gossip and scuttlebutt, otherwise known as the city’s rumor mongers, have more to say. I’m told that if Sacco decides to run for the Senate,
one Rico Cardella may be a candidate for governor on the Republican ticket. And that leaves me, in the intellectually rewarding job I hold, to say nothing of the money they pay me, to ask the sixty-four thousand dollar question. Is there anything to what I’m hearing? And if there is, who’s going to help me negotiate a new contract with Tommy Arena in August and September?”

  The waitress returned to the table with a basket of rolls, their salads and a coffee for Terry. “I didn’t ask what kind of dressing you wanted on your salad,” she said to Cardella. “Is the oil and vinegar okay?”

  “No. I’ll take Russian dressing.”

  She glanced at Reardon, as if to confirm her certainty ahead of time that the oil and vinegar wouldn’t satisfy his friend. She saw the quick wink he gave her. “Be right back,” she answered.

  “And put mine on the side, too,” Cardella said as she began walking away.

  Reardon put his head down and shook it from side to side in feigned disbelief. He was afraid he might burst out laughing if he made eye contact with Mary again.

  Cardella took the neatly folded cloth napkin out of his empty water glass and put it on his lap. “We’ll have to be strictly off the record on this, Terry.”

  “That’s what I figured.” Reardon leaned forward, knowing Cardella would have to speak softly.

  Richie did the same thing, glancing around first to be sure no one else was seated close to them. “The fact is I’ve been approached,” he said. “There are some big wheels in the party who are there just to look down the road and plan for every contingency. They told me not to get myself worked up over it because chances are there won’t be an opening for governor anyway. They see no reason for Hardiman not to run for reelection and stay where he is.”

  “But we know that’s probably just their best guess,” Terry said.

  “That’s right, and maybe they’re feeling out someone else at the same time. It’s definite that Ray Michaels wouldn’t try and move up from lieutenant governor. He won’t even run for office again, no matter what Sacco does. The heart attack he had a year ago scared the hell out of him and he doesn’t want any pressure kind of job. They’ll find something easy for him to do. Someone will come up with one of those 10:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. committee assignments, with no homework and two hours for lunch. That’s his reward.”