Chapter 22 Civic Hero
WES spent a week following money, which is not glamorous and does not come up in the folk songs about my profession, and at the end of it I had the shape of the thing, and the shape of the thing was a man everybody in Halford would take a bullet for.
Insurance is where fires stop being sad and start being math.
I pulled what I could get and asked Pike to pull what I couldn’t, and we sat in her office with the county’s terrible coffee and laid it out.
Larch and Delaney: rental, absentee owner, cashed out clean a week after the burn, sold the lot ten days later.
Two more small fires on the same three-block stretch of the Flats, all of it distressed property, all of it either already carrying a Holloway Development purchase option or catching one within the month.
You could draw the fires on a map and then draw Harbor Landing’s footprint on top and they were the same drawing.
Grant Holloway. Halford’s own. The name is on the new wing of the library and the scoreboard at the high school and a plaque at the harbor about a future that hasn’t shown up yet.
His daddy ran the glass factory, and when the glass factory died it took the town’s heart out through its chest, and Grant is the only man in forty years with the nerve and the credit line to try to put something back.
Harbor Landing. Restaurants on the water, condos, a marina, a reason for the young people to stay.
He has a scale model of it in the bank lobby with tiny plastic trees.
Here’s what I want to be honest about, because it would be easier if it were simpler.
I went to see him. Not with a badge out, just a marshal asking neighborly questions, and I sat in his office over the bank with the river out the window and I watched him talk about this town, and Wes Calder, professional reader of guilty men, could not find the seam.
Because he believes it. Grant Holloway sincerely, to the floor of himself, believes he is saving Halford.
He talked about kids leaving and never coming back, about the diner limping, about the tax base, and his eyes went wet, actually wet, over a slideshow of a marina, and none of it was performance.
I’ve watched men lie for a living. This man wasn’t lying.
He has told himself a story in which he is the hero of a dying town, and he has believed it so completely that I think he has stopped being able to see the parts of his own conduct that don’t fit it.
That’s more dangerous than a liar. A liar knows where the truth is; he’s just standing somewhere else.
Holloway has lost the location entirely.
“These fires,” he said to me, grave, sad, “they break my heart, Wes. That neighborhood deserves better than to burn down around good people. That’s exactly why we have to move forward.
Give folks a fair price, get them somewhere safe, build something that lasts.
” He meant it. That’s the horror of it. He’d convinced himself that whatever was burning the Flats was one more argument for Harbor Landing, instead of the thing Harbor Landing was quietly paying for.
Because he is paying for it. I’m nearly sure. Not with his own hands, and maybe not anymore with his own knowledge, which is the part that had started to scare me. Because when I finally got a name for the hands, the name did not belong to a company. It belonged to a man.
Cody Rourke.
I got him the way you get everybody in a small town, which is by asking Fran at the diner who’s been buying too many single beers and paying cash.
Cody Rourke, thirties, local, skilled, a handyman and sometime subcontractor with a record for a bar thing and a reputation for good work and a bad temper.
He’d done demolition and site prep for Holloway’s outfit, off and on, for two years.
And lately, according to Fran and confirmed by three other people who didn’t know they were confirming it, Cody had money troubles and a grievance the size of the river, and he’d been heard, more than once, loud, saying that Holloway used him up and cut him loose and owed him, and that this town chews men up and spits them out and he was done being spit.
I found Cody Rourke’s truck before I found Cody Rourke, parked outside a rooming house on the east side, a good truck, a working man’s truck, ladder rack and a toolbox with a real lock, and that told me something the record didn’t.
Whatever else he was, he was good at the trade.
You don’t keep tools like that if you’re careless with your hands.
I sat down the block for an hour, not to brace him, just to look, because looking is most of my job, and I watched him come out and load up for a day of somebody’s honest drywall and drive off to do it, and I thought, there’s a man who could’ve had an ordinary life two decisions ago.
That’s the part they never put in the folk songs either.
The dangerous ones mostly look like they’re going to work, because they are.