Little Pink House Part 3

"I'm Susette Kelo."

"It's pretty hot to be working in long sleeves," he said, grinning.

She removed her hat, letting her long red hair fall over her shoulders. "Redheads burn easy," she said. "I have to cover up when I work in the sun."

He nodded.

"So you live in the neighborhood?" she asked.

"I used to," he said. "What do you do?"

"I'm a paramedic. What do you do?"

"Nothing," he said, laughing.

Von Winkle had spent much of his adult life in the Fort Trumbull neighborhood. At one time, he had worked at the Naval Undersea Warfare Center. Twenty years earlier, he had quit his job there and started buying up rundown buildings around the fort. He moved into one of the places. One by one, he renovated the others, installing new heating and plumbing systems and converting them to apartments.

"I drive around all day because I have a bunch of rental properties in the area," he said. "And I own the deli on the corner."

"You married?" she asked.

"Yeah, I've got two teenage sons, and my wife, Jenny, is a registered nurse. I call her 'Do-what.'"

Susette gave him a puzzled look.

"Every time I tell her to do something, she says, 'Do what?' So I call her 'Do-what.'"

Susette burst out laughing.

"What about you? You married?"

She stopped laughing. "I'm divorced," she said. "I came down from Preston. I'm starting over."

"You got any kids?" he asked.

"Five sons. They're all grown."

Von Winkle ran his eyes up and down Susette. She looked too young, and her figure looked too good for a mother of five grown boys. She grinned.

"Well, welcome to the 'hood," he said.

"Thanks."

"Do you want to go for coffee?" he asked.

She explained she really needed to finish removing the brush from the sidewalk.

"Don't bother cleaning that up," he said. "Just call the city and tell them to clean it up."

She laughed. He smiled. "C'mon, Red. Hop in," he said.

No one had called her that in years. And she'd never been in a Jaguar. She brushed the dirt off her knees and got in. A couple of blocks from Susette's house, they pa.s.sed the city's sewer plant, noting the smell. Neighborhood residents had complained about its odor for years. The city basically ignored them. Von Winkle couldn't resist boasting what he had done just one month earlier.

Fed up with City Hall's inaction, he had sent a fax to the city manager that read: "It stinks down here. Can you smell it in your office yet? In time you will!" A week later, during a public hearing at City Hall, Von Winkle entered the building with big buckets of chicken manure. He dumped some on the steps and put the rest in the elevator, along with a bag of Glade air freshener. The stench forced people to evacuate the building, and it shut down City Hall.

Susette laughed hysterically.

"Didn't you hear about this incident?" he asked.

"No," she said, trying to regain her composure. "I don't know anything about this."

Von Winkle couldn't believe it. The case had been all over the news. Even Jay Leno had joked about it in his monologue. After a monthlong investigation, the police had arrested him just a couple of days earlier for reckless endangerment and breach of peace.

Susette explained she hadn't paid much attention to the news lately. And she hadn't really met many people in the neighborhood yet. But she admired Von Winkle's willingness to stand up to City Hall.

His tales of mischief kept her laughing until they reached Stash's, a neighborhood bar that occasionally hosted live bands. The minute they pulled up, one of the worst memories of Susette's life flashed through her mind.

On a wet evening in 1991, she had been at a neighbor's farm, looking at dairy cows when her son Nicholas-seventeen at the time-left the house to attend a sports banquet. It was a cold, wet night. When Susette got home, her thirteen-year-old son Jonathan met her at the door, his face ghost white.

"Nick was in a car accident," he said.

Just miles from home, Nick ended up in a head-on collision when a drunk driver crossed the median at high speed. After surgery and hospitalization, Nick survived. Days later, a newspaper story reported that a concert at Stash's had been canceled due to an injury to a band member, the same guy who had crashed into Susette's son. Susette felt the story had a sympathetic tone.

Livid, Susette called the paper. "I screamed b.l.o.o.d.y murder at the reporter," she recalled. "'Do you have any idea what this man has done?'"

The injury to her son put Susette on a crusade. A drunk driver had taken something away from her. She vowed to make sure the driver was brought to justice. But in the end, she felt the system had wronged her; a failure to administer an alcohol test at the accident scene ended up hampering the prosecutor's case, and the driver served very little jail time. Unable to let go, Susette joined Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), and she never allowed her older boys to bring alcohol into her home.

While Susette talked, Von Winkle ordered a beer. He had an edge to him, she thought. His off-the-wall antics and the fearless, distant look in his eyes made him irresistibly unpredictable. She couldn't help but like him, especially his sense of humor. He might be the perfect friend in a new neighborhood, she figured.

An hour later, Von Winkle dropped her back at her house and gave her his cell phone number.

"If you need anything, Red, call me."

8.

v.i.a.g.r.a TIME.

September 29, 1997 For George Milne and Pfizer, the big day had arrived: the pharmaceutical company filed its new drug application with the FDA. "v.i.a.g.r.a ... is indicated for the treatment of erectile dysfunction," the application letter read. "The physiological mechanism responsible for erection of the p.e.n.i.s involves the release of nitric oxide in the corpus cavernosum in response to s.e.xual stimulation."

Pfizer made a medical case for the drug's importance and asked the FDA to fast-track v.i.a.g.r.a through the approval process. If approved, v.i.a.g.r.a sales would easily pay for the company's new research facility.

While Pfizer pressed the FDA, Claire continued working on Milne. Over a series of private meetings and conversations with him, she had hammered home the idea that Pfizer could become New London's economic savior. A decision to build a research facility in the city would be akin to getting Macy's to anchor a newly constructed mall, only on a much larger scale. Rather than just generate jobs and revenue, Pfizer could really improve lives.

The idea of leading an urban renaissance in New London had some appeal to Milne. So did the site's close proximity to Pfizer's existing labs. Claire suggested the two facilities could be linked by water vessels transporting employees back and forth. If the state was willing to sweeten the pot enough, certainly Pfizer could at least consider the possibility.

Milne agreed to visit the property again.

Kurt Cobain's nihilistic voice wasn't one Susette would have instinctively chosen to drone through her stereo while she diced vegetables on a wooden cutting board in her kitchen. But years of listening to her sons' music had turned her into a Nirvana fan. The habit of preparing large meals had stuck with her too, although she now lived alone. She dumped the vegetables into the giant soup pot on the stove.

Suddenly she heard a loud rap at the front door. It was Billy Von Winkle.

"C'mon in," she yelled over the music.

"Hi, Red."

"How's Jenny?" she asked, smiling.

"Oh, Do-what? She's fine," Von Winkle said, inspecting the house. "Well, this is a nice place. To think it was for sale for eight years and I never bought it." They both smiled. "Then I would have owned all the houses in the neighborhood," he said.

"It didn't look this way when I bought it," she said, explaining how she had replaced all the curtains and window shades, puttied all the nail holes, and stripped and refinished the hardwood floors.

He asked what she had used to sand the floors. Sandpaper, she told him. "I did it on my hands and knees."

"Why didn't you use a machine?"

"Had someone showed me, I probably would have used a machine," she said. "I just did it the hard way. Then I polyurethaned the floors."

Impressed, Von Winkle nodded.

She showed him the staircase leading to the upstairs. "The steps are one hundred years old," she said.

"They look good," he said.

She had had to pull up the carpet and remove layers of old paint to expose the original stair treads. "This time I got smarter and used a heat gun," she told him. "Then I stained them with a whitewash, and I painted the molding hunter green."

"You've done a lot here," he said.

Only two major projects remained, she said: furnis.h.i.+ng the rooms with antiques and putting in raised flower beds made of granite on the outside. But she didn't have enough money for antiques and granite, at least not yet.

Von Winkle liked her ambition. He opened a kitchen closet. It was jammed with vegetable cans. "What is this, the grocery store?" he said.

"Just about," she said, explaining that she still had not gotten used to buying for just herself.

"You got any beer?" he asked.

"No," she said, inviting him to come back later for stew.

He declined. He had stopped in only to check on her and say h.e.l.lo.

October 1997 Barely a stone's throw from Susette's house, Claire and Steve Percy accompanied Milne back onto the mill site. It was a sunny, brisk morning. Without the summer heat, the sewer plant's foul odor was not as obvious. The surrounding scenery was still ugly, but this time Milne focused on something else-the stunning tip of the property that poked into the Thames River.

"You know, Claire," Milne said, "I can just see the Pfizer ferry going back and forth from that point of land to our site in Groton."

Percy got a rush. He sensed that Milne was on his way to trying to bring Pfizer to New London. Claire had broken through. Milne was finally looking at the site in a different light.

"Having seen the possibility," explained Milne, "I warmed to the notion that if enough pieces could come together, that in fact this would be something that Pfizer might be interested in." He wanted to look into the matter more thoroughly.

9.

CAN YOU GUYS LOOK INTO THIS?.

Jim Serbia specialized in a.s.sessing environmental health and safety risks a.s.sociated with real-estate development done by large corporations. In 1997, he had left Anheuser-Busch in St. Louis to become the real-estate manager for Pfizer's research division. He reported to George Milne.

When he arrived in Connecticut, Serbia became acquainted with Pfizer's previous construction project and the company's immediate needs, which were directly related. In the early 1990s, Pfizer had expanded its hundred-acre research-and-development campus in Groton. At the time, one hundred acres had seemed more than adequate. But the drugmaker enjoyed phenomenal growth in a five-year span and by 1997 had maximized the capacity of its research facilities. It desperately needed more s.p.a.ce, especially for animal labs.

This time, the company wanted a large, continuous tract of land with plenty of potential for future growth and development. The New England real-estate market had plenty of options. When word got out that Pfizer was on the hunt for property, proposals poured in. The company ranked potential development sites according to four criteria: expansion potential, schedule, cost, and risk.

Over a one-year period, Serbia and his colleagues reviewed many proposals. By the fall of 1997, Pfizer had narrowed its list of candidates to a few sites. Serbia and his team then met with Milne, who listened thoughtfully to their presentation. All of the sites under consideration had upsides for Pfizer.

Then Milne posed an unexpected question: "What about the old New London Mills site?"

Serbia thought Milne had to be kidding. The site hadn't even been discussed, much less looked at. It had a fraction of the acreage offered by the other sites. And the land had been home to an industrial mill, a proposition that promised significant environmental-cleanup hurdles. None of the top sites under consideration required significant environmental remediation. The cleanup in New London would delay the start date of construction. The other sites were ready to go right away. To Serbia and others, it was hard to see an upside to the mill site.

"Can you guys look at this site?" Milne asked.

Serbia dutifully agreed. The company's architects and project designers were also not enthused. They had spent months a.n.a.lyzing and accessing the other sites. It would require a big effort in a very short time period to evaluate the New London site. Those already familiar with it thought even considering it was nuts. Nonetheless, Serbia and his a.s.sociates went all-out to find the answers Milne had requested.

Susette checked her caller ID. It contained a number she didn't recognize. She dialed it. A man answered.

"I had your number on my caller ID," she said.

"What's your number? he asked.

She told him. He insisted he had called Susette's number only after someone at her number had called him and left a message.

"Well, I didn't call you," she snapped. "Perhaps one of my sons called your phone from my house. Do you have any kids?"

"No," the man said, "I don't have any kids."

"Well, I didn't call your d.a.m.n house," she said before abruptly hanging up on him.

A few minutes later the man called back. Susette was about to tell him where to go, but before she could, he apologized for the misunderstanding and suggested the mix-up was probably on his end. "I hand out flyers because I buy junk and antiques," he said. "I thought maybe someone called about antiques."

"You like antiques?" Susette asked.

An hour later, they were still talking. Susette finally introduced herself to Tim LeBlanc, a forty-year-old bachelor who lived alone about twenty miles from New London. Besides collecting antiques for a hobby, LeBlanc worked as a professional landscaper. His specialty was stonework.