Page 113
"Tav took the panel off this morning. It's the original compressor. From 2014."
"Then it was a different part. Paperwork gets..." He waves the rag. "Everybody in this building cuts corners on paperwork. Ask anybody."
"Rose City Mechanical," I say. "Gresham."
He stops waving the rag.
Lenart doesn't say anything, he just puts the bank statement on the desk, turned so Grady can read the name on it.
Grady looks at it, and then at the floor, and his shoulders come down an inch.
"How much do you have," he says.
"All of it," I say. "Six years."
He rubs his face with both hands. He looks old, like a guy who knew this day was coming and kept hoping it wouldn’t.
"The building's a hundred and forty years old," he says finally. "Half the time, it fixes itself if you leave it alone. So I'd bill the part and patch it, and if it held, it held. Nobody ever checked. Dez never checked." He shakes his head. "I took the money. Yeah. I signed things I shouldn't have signed."
"The vault," I say. "June eighteenth. Did you inspect that release?"
He doesn't look up. "No."
"The freezer?"
"I looked at the door. I didn't pull the cover." He swallows. "I signed for both."
"Did you take the reports out of the binder?"
"No." That brings his head up. "Why would I? Those were the ones that said I did my job. If anybody wanted to know, I'd have shown them those pages."
"Did you disconnect the release on the freezer?"
"No."
"The vault door?"
"No. God, no."
"The rig in the reinforced suite? The suppression system?"
"I was in that corridor when it went off." His voice cracks. "I was breathing that stuff, too. I've got grandkids. I may have fudged some numbers, Ms. Iverson, but I didn’t kill anyone! I don't know who did that. I swear to God, I don't know."
I want to believe him. That's what makes me angry.
"You signed a piece of paper that said the release on that freezer worked," I say. "And I was inside it. You didn't need to cut anything to put me in there. All you had to do was lie about whether anybody checked."
He opens his mouth and shuts it.
"I didn't think anybody'd get hurt," he says.
"Yeah," I say. "That's the problem."
Lenart calls the council. Two of their wardens come within the hour, a tall woman in a gray coat and a man who never takes off his sunglasses, and they're very polite about it. Fraud, theft from a treaty house, false certification of safety equipment. Nobody says anything about attempted murder, because nobody can prove it.
The woman hands me a form to sign, because I'm an owner and it's my building. I read it before I sign it. It's two pages.
"The binders stay here," I tell her. "And the invoices, and the photos. You can have copies. William will make them. The originals go in the vault."