No Colder Place (13 page)

“Your interest professional?”

“I’m not a cop.”

“That wasn’t the question.”

“Yes, it’s professional.”

“And this guy,” he said. “The one you’re interested in. He have a name?”

“Maybe. The one to try would be Joe Romeo.”

He was silent, his stare hard and long. It was the same stare the dog was giving me. Finally he said, “I don’t want trouble.”

“No one does.”

“Wrong. Some people love it. Not me. I like to drink cold beer and take cars apart.”

“Okay,” I said.

“I try to keep out of the way of people like you.”

“I don’t blame you. But this means a lot to me.” I took my wallet out of my pocket, slipped five twenties out of it so he could see how much it meant.

He didn’t reach for the money. Fixing his eyes on mine, he said, “Why did she bring you here?”

“Because,” I said, “she said you can look in a lot of places, but if you really need to find something, go to Maggio’s.”

“She said that?” His eyes briefly flicked in the direction Joanie had gone. I almost thought I saw the ghost of a smile.

“Yes.”

He was silent. “I don’t know if I can find it,” he said.

“You don’t have to find it.”

“I thought it meant a lot to you.”

“Not to find it. Just to know where it went.”

He and the dog watched me. Then he reached for the twenties. I let him have them.

There wasn’t much more to that, only an exchange of phone numbers and the promise, from me, of more cash if there was a reason for it, although he hadn’t asked. I wandered through the misty yard in the direction Joanie had gone. I found her on the top of a six-foot pile of junk, throwing clanking steel parts over her shoulder, looking for a drive shaft for a ’72 Triumph. She didn’t find one.

nine

b
y the time I nosed my car off of Joanie’s lot it was pouring again. Like an excitable child, the rain carried on wildly to make sure it was noticed, pounding the roofs of cars for emphasis, throwing itself against windshields to get attention. I fumbled through the tapes in the glove compartment, found Britten’s Cello Suites, good music for a dark day. With the slow, sad, single notes of the cello floating inside the car and the infinite rain whipping around outside it, I drove back into Manhattan.

I didn’t head downtown, though; I didn’t go home. I swung around on the FDR to the Battery, where it joins up with what’s left of the West Side Highway, and headed north.

The rain had stopped again by the time I reached the neighborhood I was aiming for, just above 110th Street, a few blocks north of the construction site. Maybe it felt it had already pretty well covered everything there was for a good storm to do up here, earlier in the day.

I parked and walked a few blocks through shiny puddles and steaming air to the address I was looking for, an old two-story on Broadway. At the turn of the century, buildings like this were called “taxpayers”: small shops on street level and offices above, built fast to be rented out to shoemakers and luncheonettes and dentists just to cover the property taxes, until the value of their lots rose enough to make it worthwhile to knock them down and build something serious. Ornate terra-cotta fronts vied with each other to attract tenants; the buildings’ sides and backs were the simplest brickwork imaginable.

A lot of these taxpayers are gone now, replaced by their original builders, or by their sons and daughters. And a lot still stand, with OTB offices on street level and kung fu schools upstairs, a century older and shabbier. Investing in real estate, even in New York, has always been a gamble.

The Armstrong Properties building was beautiful. The glazed white terra-cotta had been carefully cleaned, the wooden window frames sanded smooth and painted a deep green. The Armstrong office was behind a wide storefront window; from the street I could see two secretaries answering phones and typing and, on a table between filing cabinets, a model of the building I’d been working in all week. The plant-filled office looked bright and cheerful in the wet, gray afternoon.

One of the secretaries, a light-skinned black woman with freckles scattered across her high cheekbones, looked up as I came in. She asked whether she could help me.

“Bill Smith,
Daily News
,” I said. “Mrs. Armstrong’s expecting me.”

That she was was the result of one of my earlier phone calls, when I had concocted a story I thought would work.

The freckled secretary, cool and professional, picked up her phone and buzzed her boss. They exchanged a few words; then she stood, showed me to the private office in the back.

Denise Armstrong stayed seated behind her well-kept and well-organized old oak desk and watched me walk into her office and sit across from her. She was a tall, mahogany-skinned black woman, wearing navy slacks and a crisp white cotton shirt with thin red stripes. Her short, graying hair was shaped around her head like a cap.

“I appreciate your time, Mrs. Armstrong,” I told her, as the secretary closed the door behind us. “You must be pretty well fed-up with reporters by now.”

“I am.” She leaned back in her desk chair, the old-fashioned, solid-looking kind that tilted back on its stem so southern lawyers in suspenders could put their feet on their desks. She held me with her gaze, direct and frosty.

I smiled. She didn’t.

“Well,” I said, “like I said on the phone, I’m not on the crime beat, though it was the body story that got my attention. It’s your building I’m interested in. Good stories in a building going up. I’m thinking there may be a piece here I could do.”

“I don’t think there is, Mr. Smith.”

Through the window in back of her, I could see the courtyard made by this building and the ones behind. It was a small, irregular, unloved space, only there because the law required it, a sacrified concrete plain whose job it was to give the buildings around it some breathing room. In front of the window hung glass shelves filled with potted ivy, pale star-shaped leaves and glossy plump ones trailing down the window, softening the view.

“You never know,” I began. “If I could ask you a couple of questions—”

“You can’t.” She snapped her chair forward, folded her hands on the desktop. “There’s no story in the building you can do because you don’t do stories. You’re not a reporter. I let you in because I want to know who you are and why you used that lie.”

The heat of anger was in her voice, but her eyes stayed steady and cold. In the air stirred up by the air conditioner, the ivy moved gently. A sharp ray of sun broke through the clouds, found a cracked square of concrete in the empty courtyard.

“You called the
News
?” I asked.

“The real reporters all came swarming last night,” she said. “I told them not to bother. I wasn’t nice; I rarely am. I’ve found if I start strong, the word spreads. It saves trouble.”

“You’ve been in this position with reporters before?”

“The technique works with anyone, Mr. Smith. When you didn’t call until late this morning, I decided you were either very much out of touch with your colleagues, or lying. I called the
News
to find out which.”

“Then why did you let me in?”

“I just told you: I want to know who you really are.”

“If I don’t tell you?”

She smiled a cold smile; I got the odd feeling she’d been hoping I’d ask that. “The door behind you,” she said, “is locked.”

I turned to look at the door, turned back to her. I didn’t get up to try it. “Kidnapping?” I said.

“Hardly.” Her voice was cool, even. “Dana locked it on her way out. In ten minutes, unless I tell her not to, she’ll call the police. She’ll unlock the door as they drive up. I sponsor the Twenty-fourth Precinct’s PAL softball and basketball teams,” she said conversationally. “They won’t react well to a stranger lying his way in here and attacking me in my own office.”

“Attacking you?”

She shrugged her shoulders. “It’s a hard world, Mr. Smith. Who are you and what do you want?”

I looked again at the door. “I could break it down, I think.”

“I think not. My grandfather built solid buildings. And if you use physical force—on the door or on me—that will just add to my story when the police get here.”

“Your grandfather built this building?”

“I’ve been in real estate all my life, Mr. Smith or whatever your name is. Smith!” She curled her lip at the transparency of my alias. “My grandfather was burnt out of his house in Alabama by people with accents like yours. He came north, bought land, and began to build, solid buildings that would last. My father took over his business, and I took over my father’s.” Her eyes glinted like sunlight on polished stone. “I don’t know what your game is, but I guarantee you I can play it better than you can. That’s how a black woman in a white man’s world gets through the day. You have eight minutes.”

I shrugged. “This seems like a lot of trouble to go to just to find out who I am.”

“You’ve gone to a lot of trouble to get in here and ask questions,” she said. “Reporters have lied to me before, pretending to be other things. No one’s ever pretended to be a reporter. There’s never been a body buried under one of my buildings before, either. I don’t like those two things happening so close together. Who are you and what do you want?”

“Maybe I’m a reporter for some supermarket scandal sheet I knew you wouldn’t speak to.”

“Maybe you’d better get started with the truth; you’ve got seven minutes left.”

I met her eyes. Outside her plant-draped window, pools of rainwater sat on the broken and forgotten concrete.

“I’m a private investigator,” I said. “In a way, I work for you.”

I took out my license, handed it across the desk. She frowned at it, then frowned at me. “You don’t work for me.”

“I work for Crowell Construction,” I said. “On a job involving your site.”

“My site?” The frown deepened. “About the body?”

“I don’t know.”

She snapped my license down in front of her. “What does that mean? You don’t know what you’re working on?”

“The case I came in on was before that body was found. I don’t know if they’re connected. That’s what I came here to find out.”

“Here? From
me?
”

“Your building.”

“I own it. I’m not the person digging regularly in the elevator pit. Why did Crowell hire you?”

“There’ve been losses on the site,” I said. “Tools, equipment. They suspect someone, but he works for one of the subs, and they can’t just fire him without proof. There’d be union trouble.”

“Who?”

“A man named Joe Romeo,” I said. “A masonry foreman.”

“I’ve never heard of him.”

“That doesn’t mean he’s not stealing from you.”

“Not from me. From Crowell. I’m paying them to put this building up. If they run into trouble it’s their problem.”

“And they’re handling it by hiring us.”

She reached for the phone. “And I suppose if I call them they’ll confirm who you are?”

“No,” I said. “They don’t know me. I’m just an operative at the agency they hired.”

“Which is?”

I gave her Chuck’s name, the name of the agency. “Call Crowell if you want,” I said. “But I’d appreciate it if you’d talk to Dana first.”

“Dana—? Oh. You mean you don’t want to be arrested.”

The answer to that seemed obvious, so I didn’t give it.

She looked at her watch, smiled a frosty smile, and punched a single button on the phone. A few seconds; then, “Mr. Crowell, please. Senior.”

She must, I realized, be talking to Lydia.

Mrs. Armstrong waited; then her tone changed, and I listened to her talk to Dan Crowell, Sr. “There’s a man here in my office,” she said without preamble. “He claims to work for a firm called DeMattis Security, and he says they work for you.” She told Crowell Senior what else I’d said, about the trouble on the site, about Joe Romeo. She paused, listened.

“No, I understand that. But you did hire DeMattis Security, and for the reasons he claims?” Another pause, longer. Shadows moved across the courtyard, darkening puddles that would be there until morning. I began to reach for my cigarettes, thought better of it, put them back. “All right, but I wish you’d told me. No, of course it’s your business, but if we’re going to keep working together—All right, Mr. Crowell. We’ll talk later.” She hung up without saying good-bye.

She looked down at her watch, then at me, wordlessly. I could see the second hand sweeping around the dial; it seemed to me she was counting down the seconds, and although she didn’t smile, I thought she must be enjoying it. I didn’t move, met her gaze steadily. Finally, eyes still on me, she picked up the phone again, pressed a different button, and spoke. “Dana? No, it’s fine. No, I’ll let you know. Well, he is, but I can handle it. Thanks.” She replaced the receiver.

“All right,” she said. “Mr. Crowell confirms your agency’s been hired. He confirms why. Now I want to know why you tried so hard to come see me.”

“I was interested in the woman who didn’t flinch when they dug a body up off her site.”

“‘Didn’t flinch’?”

“Mr. Crowell’s new secretary was there. She told me that.”

I mentioned Lydia mostly to see if Crowell Senior had blown her cover to Mrs. Armstrong, but if he had, she didn’t tell me about it.

“And what did you expect?” she asked. “Should I have fainted? Averted my eyes? You’re from the South, aren’t you?”

“I was born in Kentucky.”

“Then you know that that flower-of-femininity bull is for white women only. Black women are expected to get down on their hands and knees and clean up the stink that makes white women pass out from across the room. That man was dead. I didn’t know him, I didn’t kill him. He has nothing to do with me. He was buried in a property I happen to own, and just my owning it is enough to give some people fits.”

“You think that’s why he was there?”

“What do you mean?”

“Because someone doesn’t want you owning that property?”

She gave me a scornful look. “Don’t be silly. You mean as a warning, some kind of stupid melodrama? Of course not. These days, if you don’t want a black woman owning a major property you just redline her loan application.”