No Colder Place (11 page)

The other masons were already inside, leaning against columns or dropping their tool bags and themselves to the bare concrete, to wait it out. Most of the other trades working on this floor milled around idly also, unable to go on even if their work was inside because almost everyone was using power tools and you don’t do that in a storm like this. A guy up on a ladder close to the center of the building was tightening bolts with a hand wrench and had no reason to stop, except the sight of the rest of us was probably too much for him. He climbed down, sat on the ladder’s bottom rung, and lit a cigarette.

Thunder crashed, close and loud. I sat, lit a cigarette of my own, settled my back against a column. The cold steel turned my wet shirt clammy. DiMaio sat too, against a huge metal lockbox beside me. He wiped water from his face with a wide hand. I said to him, “Tell me about Phillips.”

He turned his head to me, waited a moment. Then he said, “Tell you what?”

“Whatever there is,” I answered. “Something that could give me a line on why someone would have tried to kill him, if that’s what happened.”

He looked pointedly at me. “You mean, besides his gambling debts, money he owes Joe?”

“We don’t know if he has debts,” I said. “We don’t know if Romeo’s his bookie and we don’t know if he’s behind. I’ll work that angle, but I want to look at other things too. Just in case, Mike. Just in case.”

“You’re spinning your wheels.”

“Maybe. But give me a chance.”

He bent a strip of flat, corrugated steel, one of the brick ties we’d been using, between his fingers. “I don’t know. Shit.” The steel broke; he chucked it away. “Reg just comes in and does his job, you know? Old-fashioned kind of guy; thinks that’s what he’s being paid for. Started as a mason tender. They put him mixing the mortar a few weeks later when they saw he was smart.”

“Besides betting, does he owe any money that you know of? For tuition, old debts, something like that?”

“No. He lives cheap, small apartment, lousy neighborhood.”

“An expensive woman friend?”

“He dates some, but I don’t think he’s seeing anyone steady. Why? You think maybe he’s been sneaking around someone’s back stair?”

I pulled on my cigarette, thinking. “Well, maybe, but I don’t think that’s it. If it didn’t have to do with someone here, it wouldn’t have happened here. A jealous boyfriend or something would hit him at home.”

“Except if the boyfriend works here too.”

“Possible,” I conceded. “Seem likely to you?”

He shook his head. “Doesn’t sound like Reg.”

“Okay,” I said. “You said he was smart. Is he a smart-ass? Could he have pissed anyone off?”

“You mean, like ratting on guys goofing off? No way. He’s a straight-up guy. Does his work, don’t really care if you do yours. Not like me, that way.”

I took in his look. “I’m trying, Mike.”

“Hey, I’m not talking about you. We got a deal. I’m just mouthing off. Sorry.” He looked away.

I finished my cigarette and rubbed it out on the column. Rain sheeted in the window openings on the west, shoved through by a change in the wind. My eyes roved over the concrete and the groups of lounging men.

“Hey, Mike?” I said. “Who’s that?”

DiMaio looked where I was looking, across the floor. John Lozano stood with Dan Crowell Junior and a young, skinny man who wore a short-sleeved white shirt and a tie, and a yellow hard hat.

“He with Crowell?” I asked.

“Nah. He’s from the architect. What the hell’s his name? Turner, Cutter, something like that. Carver? I don’t remember.”

“He’s here for an inspection? Lousy day for it.”

“Ah, he’s here twice a week. But he don’t make trouble, not like some of them.”

“Some of who?”

He shot me a look. “Boy, it has been awhile for you, hasn’t it? Architect’s reps. Some of ’em are a real pain in the ass. I seen jobs where the super has a signal for the men when he’s bringing the rep around. You hear it, like he whistles, ‘When You Wish Upon a Star,’ you’re supposed to run over and stand in front of shit you don’t want the guy to see, look like you’re working on something real important over there and don’t notice him coming.”

I grinned at the thought of masons, carpenters, plumbers, all scattering, busily focusing on work they weren’t doing as they shifted their bodies to cover imperfections in the work they had done. “That can’t work on a site this noisy,” I said.

“Nope. Good thing we don’t need it. This guy never has anything to say.”

“Maybe that’s because the work is good.”

“First off, I never known that to stop them. Second, yeah, the work’s good, but really what the thing is, is the guy’s a wuss.”

“How do you mean?” I looked at Turner or Cutter or Carver. His tie and his smooth pale skin marked him as out of place here, and while I watched him he shifted his weight uncomfortably, as though he felt it too. He didn’t have the easy sureness of the muscled men who lift block and weld steel, but that wasn’t his job. “You mean because he looks like a strong wind could blow him away?”

“Nah, not just that. But it’s probably not him. They’re all wusses, I think.”

“Architects?”

He shook his head. “I met some were okay. But this outfit, Melville.”

“I don’t get you.”

“Well, look at it. That complicated brickwork they got us doing? That’s all for the aesthetics. You know, art. Building would stand up if the bricks were a hell of a lot simpler, but it’s the architecture part.”

“I always thought architecture was the whole thing, not just the aesthetics.”

“Yeah, they tell me it’s supposed to be.”

“But?”

“Well, you look at the drawings, you got all this fancy brickwork, someone put a lot of time into it. Colored mortar joints, I mean someone cared. But look at the shit they got us tying it back with.” He leaned to pick up the brick tie he’d tossed. “This is two-story shit. Won’t last ten years up here.”

“Why not?”

“Building this tall, you need something heavier. Walls move, they got wind on them—I don’t know, I’m not an engineer, I can’t explain it. But you do this work enough, you don’t need it explained, you could feel it.”

“What happens if you use this stuff?”

“You use thin shit like this twenty stories up, your bricks shift. You get cracks a couple, three years from now. Place starts to leak. Someone’s gonna have to come along and repoint, there goes your colored mortar. Not to mention you’re gonna have water inside your fancy apartments. Maintenance headache all your goddamn life.” He looked sideways at me. “Ladders are chintzy, too. Didn’t you notice as you laid ’em?”

“Ladders” were the horizontal reinforcing in the brick coursing; I’d been handling them for three days. “So what are you saying?”

“I’m saying, the architect didn’t give a shit about anything on this job except the fucking aesthetics. He don’t understand what makes a building work. Wuss,” he grunted. “Look around you. It’s not just masonry. Down below, where the carpenters got the studs going in for the walls, you could see it. Everything here’s too light gauge, too thin of a thickness. Cheap shit.”

I looked around, at the steel, the rainwater puddling on the concrete, the plastic-covered brick beyond the window openings. “You think it’s dangerous?”

He shook his head. “Steel’s good, concrete’s cured right. Those, you gotta file with the city, you got inspectors crawling all over you. This building won’t fall down or nothing. It’s just gonna leak. Sheetrock’s gonna run cracks. Everything you do in your bedroom, your next-door neighbor’s gonna hear it.”

I picked up a brick tie, turned it over in my fingers.

“I don’t know why I give a shit,” DiMaio said. “I must be some kind of asshole bricklayer, likes things done right.”

We sat around for half an hour, shooting the breeze with guys who wandered by. I smoked. The wind let up some but the rain didn’t, and the clouds it fell from were so thick and low that the buildings on the other side of Broadway went out of focus, lost their solidity in the gray mist. The Hudson completely vanished. The traffic on the streets below could have vanished too, for all we knew; you couldn’t hear anything from outside but pounding rain and an occasional thunder crash.

At nine-thirty Joe Romeo came around and told us to go home.

“Gonna rain like a son of a bitch all day, boys. I don’t want to pay anyone to sit on their butts smoking. We’ll make it up over the next week. Any crew behind already better be ready to bust it when you come in tomorrow.” He gave me and DiMaio a sharp look, and then a smile. He moved on.

“When he says we’ll make it up,” I asked DiMaio as we stood, got our tool bags and lunchboxes together, “does he mean overtime?”

“You gotta be kidding. Lozano put out an order, no overtime on this job. Romeo loves it. It means he gets to ride our asses for more work in less time.”

“Is that usual, no overtime?”

“Nah, but it happens. I been on jobs like this once or twice. Means they must be cutting the budget pretty close.”

We walked together to the hoist, rode it to the ground floor with a group of other guys. Rain pounded the hoist’s wood-board sides, dripped in around the edges of the plywood roof.

“I have to stop by the Crowell office,” I said to DiMaio as we punched the time clock just inside Lozano’s door. Lozano was there, scrawling figures on a Xeroxed sheet. He didn’t look up. “Insurance forms,” I explained. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“You met the new secretary over there?” DiMaio asked with a grin. “Cute Oriental girl.”

“Oh? I’ll look for her.”

“Yeah, but watch yourself,” Lozano put in, eyes still on his paperwork. “This one carpenter tried to pass the time of day over there yesterday, came out with icicles hanging off him.”

“Sounds dangerous,” I said.

“Yeah,” said DiMiao. “Think safety first, Smith. Want me to pick up your forms for you?”

“Gee, no thanks. But I appreciate the offer.”

Still grinning, he nodded, turned, and walked off. I crossed the corridor to the Crowell trailer.

The air-conditioning smacked me with a cold blast as I pulled open the door. My clothes were still damp, and the early-morning heat had drained out of me while I’d sat against the steel column on the bare concrete. I shivered, wondered if I could hit Dan Crowell, Jr. up for another T-shirt.

Lydia was sitting behind her gray desk, wearing a cream-colored linen shirt and three gold bracelets. She raised her head as I came in, wrinkled up her nose as she looked me over. She seemed about to say something, but the telephone rang. The other secretary, Verna, wasn’t at her desk; Lydia was alone in the outer office.

She took the call, transferred it to Mr. Crowell—whether Senior or Junior I couldn’t tell—and then gave me the sugary helpful smile. “Mr. Smith? Oh, look at you. You must have been caught in the rain.”

“Uh-huh. Snuck up on me.”

“Well, I suppose we can’t all be lucky enough to be doing indoor work.” She smiled brightly, glancing around the trailer. “I have the forms you were asking about.” She handed me three meaningless pieces of paper.

“Thanks. And I’d like to talk to Mr. Crowell for a moment if I could.”

She raised her eyebrows. “Mr. Crowell, Senior? Or Mr. Crowell, Junior?”

What the hell, I’d chatted with Junior already. “Senior, if he has a minute. It won’t take much time.”

Lydia stood and padded over to an open office door. She was wearing, I saw, a black linen skirt and a nice, new-looking pair of brown flats. I’d have to compliment her on them later.

From the open door Lydia came back, followed and overshadowed by the bulk of Dan Crowell, Sr.

“You want to see me?” Crowell asked, eyeing me as Lydia slid behind her desk again. He was as tall as I was, wider in the shoulders. If Chuck hadn’t told me he was sick, seriously ill, I’d never have guessed it. He looked to me like the kind of guy people moved aside for on the sidewalk without even thinking about it, the kind of guy whose opinion on Sunday’s game was the only opinion that counted.

“Just for a minute, Mr. Crowell,” I said. “I’m Smith. I’m a bricklayer, new on the job. Haven’t done brickwork this complicated in years.”

“Yeah,” he grunted. “Pretty fancy stuff. Having trouble with it?”

“No, sir.” In the office to Lydia’s left I could see Dan Crowell, Jr. leaning back in his desk chair to where he could see us. I told Senior, “I was just wondering if I could take a look at the drawings and specs.”

He frowned. “You oughta have drawings up there where you’re working. Lozano didn’t put ’em up?”

“We have the details. But what I want is a sense of the bigger picture.”

“You do, huh?” He peered over the half-glasses perched on his nose. “How come?”

“Years ago—a lot of years ago,” I grinned ruefully, “I did two years of technical college. Drafting and design. Didn’t finish, joined the union. I’m not a desk man—I like outdoor work.” Out of the corner of my eye I saw Lydia make a face. “But I kept an interest. When I’m on a job like this, different, I like to check it out, see the whole thing. The rain knocked out the rest of the day for us, so I thought this was my chance. If it’s all right with you.”

Crowell shook his head. “I’ll be damned. Where does Lozano get you guys?”

Before I could answer, Dan Junior had lifted himself out of his chair and joined us at Lydia’s desk.

“I don’t think it’s a good idea, Dad,” he said. “The men hanging around in the trailer like that.” He gave me a look of obvious distaste.

Senior looked over the glasses at Junior, then back to me. “You planning to make any trouble?” he asked. “Make a pass at my secretary, steal me blind?”

“No,” I said.

“Didn’t think so,” he grunted. “Go on, help yourself. In there. Drawings are on the rack, spec book’s on the shelf.” Dan Junior turned, stalked back into his office as Senior spoke to me again. “Listen, son, you see anything that’ll save me half a million bucks, you be sure to let me know.”

“Sure, Mr. Crowell,” I said. “I’ll do that.”

I spent close to an hour in Crowell’s drafting room, sitting on a tall stool at a slanted table, listening to the aggressive rumble of the air conditioner in the trailer window. I flipped the drawings in the blueprinted set back and forth, scanned pages from the specification book. I made some notes on a yellow pad I found there. After I’d been at it about twenty minutes Lydia stuck her head in, saying Mr. Crowell had told her to ask me if I wanted coffee.