Follow Me Down Page 3

  And neither did Reuben. I called to Charlie Brown from a cement bench along the rotunda wall. “Tell your boss to let my friend go. This was my plan. He only sets up the equipment.”

  Reuben sat beside me, hands folded in his lap. He didn’t protest the suggestion, but frowned and whispered, “They’ll unload you on the cops.”

  “I doubt it.” I hoped my turbulent history with Drax might work to my advantage.

  Reuben considered this a moment. “If they take you to Drax, try to keep it cool.”

  On the drive, we passed the Music Hall and the old Shillito department store, both architectural wonders. “They call it the Paris of America,” Dad would remind Mom and me about his hometown. “Two hundred fifty listings on the National Register of Historic Places.”

  My suggestion to Charlie Brown paid off. Hard Ass pulled up to a bus stop on Spring Grove and gave Reuben a parental glower. “You dodged a bullet, Pixie. Get lost.” Reuben climbed out and teetered at the curb, looking in his grimy jeans like a homeless man with no destination in mind, the pewter sky of a new day floating over his head.

  Hard Ass, my camera bag close by, stomped the accelerator and screeched right at Hopple Avenue, heading toward Drax corporate headquarters.

  CHAPTER 3

  We lost Dad six years ago.

  At the time, Mom earned what she could wrangling switchboards at Cincinnati Bell. Dad earned less painting canvases, so he started working for anyone with a checkbook, painting houses, strip malls, new construction, residential, and commercial. He called his business True Man Painting, a twist on our family name. He would pick me up from school in his work overalls—sometimes shit-colored from blends of paint—and I was embarrassed, hopping into the car with my cap pulled low. I wish I could tell him now how stupid I’d been, and how proud I am.

  Over time, his client list picked up household names like Cincinnati Public Schools, First Financial Bank, and Drax Enterprises. Drax hired Dad for a project thirty miles north near Hamilton, Ohio, where the company was building a Minuteman missile silo for the federal government. Operating as a subcontractor, Dad was to paint steel doors and trim.

  On a dazzling summer day at the work site, twenty-four lengths of galvanized framing studs toppled from a stack and thirteen tumbled over the edge into the multi-story concrete cylinder. Sixty feet below, Dad painted a yellow railing on a cantilevered walkway. The studs struck him on the head and shoulder. He died quickly, we were told, as though we should be thankful. But the nightmares still came, all yellow paint and blood and metal.

  Even in my dreams, I knew the truth: it was no accident. Drax had committed three acts of negligence: the unsecured bundle, forklifting too close to the edge, and no protective barrier. At the time, we didn’t know that Drax grew profits by cutting corners.

  We needed a lawyer. Cincinnati had plenty of contingency lawyers, but they didn’t want our case. The odds were long, the adversary powerful. Drax’s deep pockets could keep a case in litigation for years, bleeding a law firm dry.

  So we drained every penny from family savings and hired an attorney, two years out of law school with an office above a hardware store. Our lawsuit contended Drax had “not exercised reasonable care.” We made headway, tracking down a Drax pipefitter who agreed to testify to lax safety practices on the job site. Another worker swore Dad’s injuries occurred in spite of the helmet secured to his head.

  Mom and I later learned that moments after Dad’s death, a powerful force within Drax switched on, like a machine with one purpose: to shield the company from responsibility and protect its reputation. Drax’s legal team and covert operators constructed a bulwark of deception and confusion. Both witnesses suddenly backed out, citing cloudy memory. New witnesses materialized from the ether, swearing to OSHA-approved safety measures and the absence of Dad’s headgear.

  Dad would never avoid protective measures, and our lawyer said so in court. The lead Drax attorney pressed the judge for an out-of-sequence presentation. Civil trials have softer rules, so the judge accommodated. The attorney reached into an accordion briefcase and withdrew a see-through evidence bag containing a bullet-shaped bottle of Bacardi 151 rum with an inch of liquid in the bottom. He placed the bottle conspicuously on the table and read a deposition from a worker who supposedly witnessed my father stashing the bottle in a locker. The attorney looked up from his paper and, in an Oscar-winning performance, glanced toward us sadly. “We’re pained to air harsh truths when this family has suffered enough,” he said to the jury, “but drink impairs judgment, and alcoholics take risks.”

  Dad didn’t drink.

  Never in my life had I come closer to throwing it all away, to launching myself across the courtroom and choking the last breath from another human being. I still imagine the protruding eyes and panic-stretched cheeks, the wet crush of the windpipe under my thumbs. But at that moment, my mother knitted her fingers in mine and squeezed.

  By the time we’d primed our counterattack, Drax lawyers in their Italian suits and fifty-dollar haircuts were flanking us, pelting the jury with complex definitions of prime contractors and first- and second-tier subcontractors, wedging my father into the last group because he’d trusted a handshake over a signed contract.

  As the proceedings wound down, Rudolph Drax appeared in the back row of the courtroom in a crisp suit and tie, hair parted precisely. A job-site fatality wouldn’t disrupt the CEO’s schedule, but a threat to reputation would. His dark eyes tracked from attorney to attorney and juror to juror, his lips pursed in indecipherable stoicism.

  In the end, the eight jurors were too confused to produce the six votes necessary. The final gavel fell and Rudolph glanced in my direction. Not at me, but through me. Me, the son of a dead worker. Me, a liability on the company books, now offset. He rose, nodded to the lead attorney, and strode out.

  Mom and I walked to the bus stop with Dad’s stained reputation in a three-ring binder. At home in bed, I listened to a fly die slowly on the windowsill. I slept and dreamed that Dad and I were eating at the dinner table by candlelight. His fork fell silent for a moment, and when I looked up, he stared back, smiling wistfully, yellow paint dripping from somewhere above his hairline.

  In the days after, I climbed into my hidey-holes. Mom climbed into a bottle of Valium.

  Perhaps Drax couldn’t be compared to a machine. A machine suggests an assemblage of parts in sync, devoid of emotion and prejudice, pre-programmed to serve stockholders.

  But Drax was no machine. Drax was an organism with a central nervous system in complete control of arms and legs and feet and hands, all capable of crossing legal and moral lines as easily as boarding an elevator. The organism came to life with Walther Drax decades ago and grew stronger through Rudolph Drax. One day, it would grow stronger still through Tony Drax, the organism’s fetid blood flowing from one generation to the next like sewage through pipes.

  CHAPTER 4

  A few blocks from the Ohio River, the Drax building loomed before us, surpassed in height by only the Carew Tower. Hard Ass double-parked before the rotating stainless steel Drax Enterprises sign, yanked me out by the collar, and pushed us into a single revolving door compartment, his protruding belly against my back. Once in the main lobby, he gripped my arm above the elbow and steered me across the polished marble floor.

  I gave my arm a jerk. “I’m not trying to run off.”

  Hard Ass puffed his chest out, as proud as Eliot Ness parading Al Capone to a prison cell. My camera bag hung from his shoulder. He spoke to be overheard by the female receptionist. “You won’t B & E our buildings anymore, not after this.”

  Like hell. “I sure won’t.” In the early morning light, his lumpy face looked like a bag of rope.

  “We keep an eagle eye on thi
ngs. You better remember that.”

  Then why did we have the run of the Union Terminal? “I sure will.”

  Hard Ass seated me on a lobby bench, lowered himself alongside and exhaled. He smelled of cigarettes and chocolate. He checked his watch. I checked mine—6:45 a.m. “The bosses aren’t here yet,” he said, “so sit tight.”

  A guard and his prisoner drew the attention of Drax employees reporting for work early with their shiny briefcases and noisy shoes. I imagined raising my voice to deflate their speculations. I’m not a serial killer. I’m a graduate student in architecture who wanted to photograph a historic treasure before your employer shitcans it.

  The lobby was designed to impress. Even though the building had been built fifty years ago, Drax had remodeled the interiors every decade or so to showcase the styles of the day. From the floor to the high ceiling, taut steel cables held Plexiglas-framed photos the size of garage doors, most of them visible from the street. In one, a girl in pigtails let loose a beach ball, her mother proud in the background. In another, a beaming granny in amber goggles waved down from the basket of a hot air balloon.

  The same images were scattered on billboards and bus signs throughout the city. The Drax public image had always been scrubbed, styled and displayed as meticulously as Jackie O’s hairdo.

  Below each photo was the Drax slogan, Let Your Dreams Take Flight, coined during the Depression by the company’s founder, Walther Drax.

  According to the business press, Walther remained vigorous and active on the Board of Directors in spite of being in his late seventies. Most managerial duties had fallen to Walther’s son Rudolph. As for Rudolph’s only child, Tony, I didn’t know his role, but he couldn’t hold any real responsibility, not the gristlehead I remembered from high school.

  Back then, Anton “Tony” Drax was already considered the future of the company and heir to millions, if his fellow students didn’t conspire to murder him first.

  Tony and the other Princes of Cincinnati’s Seven Hills would tour the halls as if they owned the place—and for all we knew, they did—and dispatch challenges with a knee to the crotch.

  Off to the right was the entrance to the Drax Museum. How many companies built monuments to themselves? I’d heard from fellow grad students the museum displayed scale models of every Drax construction project. I’d never ventured in, terrified I’d find a replica of the job site where Dad died.

  At 7:30 a.m., Hard Ass hauled me to my feet and led us to the elevator. He punched the call button and stood erect. Irritated by his smugness, I shifted my gaze to wall-mounted photos of the Drax Center for the Performing Arts, Drax Business School at Cincinnati University, and more. Strategically placed photos. Every visitor would see Drax magnanimity.

  I didn’t buy it. Al Capone opened soup kitchens, but he was still a crook.

  Hard Ass was talking again. “Breaking and entering can get you two years in lock-up.”

  This guy loved cop jargon. “Entering, yes,” I replied, “but we don’t break things.”

  “Two years and ten Gs.” The elevator doors opened to an empty car. I took a step forward but Hard Ass shoved me between the shoulder blades anyway. “Tack on another six months for wanton destruction of public property.” He pressed the button for the forty-second floor, three floors from the top, near the nerve center of the company.

  “We don’t destroy things.” The elevator felt like a cage.

  Hard Ass gave a heard-it-all-before shake of the head. “That’s the problem with your kind. You don’t respect.”

  My kind? My face felt hot, a dangerous sign. Reuben had warned me.

  Hard Ass continued. “Do you have any idea how much graffiti I’ve seen on the walls of beautiful old buildings from people like you?”

  People like me? I faced him. “Look, we don’t vandalize. We enter places to learn about them, and sometimes to protect them from developers like your boss who’d use the Grand Canyon as a landfill if it paid the mortgage on his Mt. Adams mansion. Now what does that say about people like you who follow his orders?”

  I breathed hard through my nose, waiting for a reply. But Hard Ass didn’t have the words. His expression was clogged with surprise and indignation. Apparently I wasn’t expected to have a viewpoint, only a craving for wanton destruction.

  He collected himself. “You bet I’m loyal, to the places I protect from scum.”

  “Instead of people like you, Drax should use dogs,” I snapped. I counted out points on my fingers, one, two, three. “They don’t take coffee breaks, they don’t leave doors unlocked, and they don’t lecture when they don’t know shit.”

  The elevator car came to a stop. The doors hissed apart.

  Hard Ass clenched his jaw, new lumps forming on his cheeks.

  Find the flow of their river and float with them toward a common portage, Chapel had advised. I’d ignored him.

  Hard Ass sliced the silence. “You won’t always be in a nice crowded office building, so you better watch your back.” He clamped my arm and push-pulled me out of the elevator.

  We walked down a long hallway lined with doors and more framed photos. One showed Walther Drax posing alongside Charles Lindbergh, as if greatness might pass from one to another by osmosis. A few doors down, a black-and-white showed Walther attending the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the Cincinnati Union Terminal in 1933. I wanted to shout, See? First he celebrates the place, then he destroys it.

  But these pretend words were stifled by echoes of my real words to Hard Ass, pissed off and personal. If Reuben had seen my outburst, he would’ve had plenty to say. What’s the point, Lucas? ‘Focus on the mission,’ you always say. Practice what you preach, for once.

  Hard Ass yanked open a door and gave my back another shove. I stumbled into a large, unoccupied room.

  “Stay in here,” he ordered. “I’ll be right outside so don’t get any ideas.” He swung the door shut as he left.

  I looked around the room. There was a small raised stage at one end, and enough folding chairs for an audience of a hundred or more. The walls were lined with dozens of sayings on huge banners. One said, Follow your dreams… they know the way. This was where Rudolph Drax addressed his employees.

  Dad wouldn’t have been proud of my war of words with Hard Ass. “Everybody in this world,” he’d once said, “including rich and poor and doctors and garbage collectors, wants to feel they count for something.” Then he smiled. Mom described it as a “smoothing smile,” because it smoothed out the wrinkles of a bad day.

  A door clicked open behind me. I turned. Hard Ass entered followed by a well-dressed young man. “Lucas Tremaine,” the new arrival said with a world-weary sigh.

  I knew him. Unlike his rebellious shag from high school, his dark hair was trimmed neat, off the ears and parted on the side. He wore herringbone suit pants with no jacket, a striped necktie and white button-down dress shirt tucked in snug around a toned torso. He had broad shoulders, the body of a contact-sport athlete. I’d once seen that body lift a kid off the ground by the throat.

  Tony Drax flashed a chilly smile. “Don’t we both have better things to do?”

  . . . . .

  Hard Ass cleared his throat to get Tony’s attention. The two men exchanged a few words beyond my hearing.

  The guard walked out. Tony spoke. “He wants me to turn you over to the police.”

  “I told him the truth. He didn’t like that.” Tony was silent, and I felt a flush of boldness. “But I don’t think you’ll call the cops.”

  He frowned. “Like hell I won’t.”

  “Oh, come on. We both know why you’re here. Your dad figured since we’re old school buddies, I’ll open up and tell you the r
eal reason we were in the train station. Otherwise, why bring me up here?” Speculation, yes, but I watched Tony’s face for a tell.

  He forced a smirk. “Do you think the CEO of a multimillion-dollar corporation cares about your bullshit hobby?”

  Tony was a puppet. He could neither return my equipment nor cut me loose without his father’s okay. I was wasting my time.

  I needed breathing room to plan a way out. I pointed to one of the banners hung high on the walls. When everything seems to be going against you, remember that the airplane takes off against the wind, not with it. — Henry Ford. “Your dad likes quoting famous people.” More credibility by osmosis.

  “We can learn from the greats.”

  “Is that you talking or Rudolph?” I wondered about a Type A overachiever father and a stupid brute of a son who was expected to take over the family business one day. It couldn’t be a healthy relationship.

  “I have to care about employee morale as the vice president of operations.” He followed this with a contemptuous smile. “Are you employed?”

  “Job titles come cheap when Dad owns the place. He could’ve labeled you Archbishop of Canterbury without a peep from his subordinates.” Tony held firm. I pointed to another banner: Life always offers you a second chance. It’s called tomorrow. “So that one helps with morale? It’s patronizing. What’s your employee turnover rate?”

  “Our team is loyal.”

  “And there’s no attribution on that one.”

  “My dad said it—in a speech to the team on our fiftieth anniversary in business.”

  “I feel my morale lifting by the second.” I jumped to the next banner: I believe fundamental honesty is the keystone of business. — Harvey S. Firestone. “Who’s Rudolph kidding? That’s like Kissinger quoting Gandhi. Now, when can I speak with him?”