No Colder Place (16 page)

“It’s not about winning.”

“The need to win is a western white male hang-up?”

“If you say so. Did you call to discuss politics? Hold on a minute.”

Lydia said something to someone else in the room with her, but I didn’t catch it, because it was in Chinese. So was the answer. When she came back to the phone, Lydia said, “My mother thinks you’re trying to give me pneumonia, calling when I’ve just come in from class and I’m all sweaty.”

“How could I possibly have known?” I protested.

“You knew when class started, and how long it is, and how long it takes me to get home, and—”

“All right, never mind. But why would I do that?”

“So then you can save my life with some western drug that will at the same time put me under your spell.”

“Aren’t you already under my spell?”

“It’s fading fast, unless you tell me what you called about.”

“Lenny Pelligrini.”

That stopped her. “Pelligrini,” she said. “What about him?”

“He’s the one who fenced the frontloader.”

“No kidding!” She was quiet for a moment. “So Mr. DeMattis and the police were both wrong. He
was
into something. All those tools and other equipment disappearing from that site—do you think he did that too? That the police and Mr. DeMattis missed him being into something this big?”

“They could have, but only if he wasn’t in it alone.”

“What makes you say that?”

“You don’t just jump into something this size as your first try on that side of the law. If he was some kid from the neighborhood who worked himself up to this, the cops would know him. He’d have priors, small stuff. I’ll bet he wasn’t running it.”

“Who do you think was? Joe Romeo?”

“That would be handy, but I’d have to make the connection. And the guy who put me on to Pelligrini says he never heard of Romeo. He did say Pelligrini seems to be connected to some big-shot wiseguy by the name of Louie Falco.”

“Do we know him?”

“No.”

But Chuck does, a voice said inside my head. From the old neighborhood. I didn’t tell Lydia that; I didn’t know exactly what I’d be telling her, if I did.

“And how do you know all this?” she asked.

“Joanie’s guy. The junk dealer I told you about.”

“Is he what the cops will consider a reliable source?”

“The cops aren’t going to consider him any kind of source. The one thing I promised him is that the cops wouldn’t hear his name from me.”

“Can you give this to the cops and go around him?”

“He wouldn’t tell me the name of the guy he got it from, so I wouldn’t be able to tell them where to go to check it out. No detective I know is going to thank me for that.”

“Was it worth a lot, this frontloader?”

“It would have been. Eighty thousand, more or less, if Pelligrini had delivered on the paperwork, too.”

“The registration and things? Didn’t he?”

“No.”

“So what does this mean, the thing wasn’t worth anything in the end?”

“Something, but not much. The buyer says there’s something in it for me if I find Pelligrini so he can do him some damage.”

“So the buyer doesn’t know Pelligrini’s dead?”

“Looks that way. I didn’t tell Maggio.”

“What are you going to do now?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did you call Mr. DeMattis?”

“No.”

“No, or not yet?”

I paused. “No.”

“Bill, what’s wrong?”

“I—” There was no point in pretending to Lydia that nothing was, but I didn’t have an answer to her question. “It’s my case,” I said. “Our case. Chuck doesn’t do things the way I do, and I’m not sure where he’d stand on this. I need to think about it for a while.”

“Think about what?”

“I’m not sure,” I said helplessly.

I knew that wasn’t true, and so did she; but she’d known me for years, had worked a lot of cases with me. She backed off.

She said, “If you want to think out loud, or talk after you think …”

“Thanks,” I answered, and we both knew it was for more than just that offer. “Now go take a shower and get out of your sweaty clothes, or you’ll get pneumonia.”

“That’s all right, my mother just brought me a cup of preventative tea. It keeps you from getting all sorts of respiratory diseases. She looked very smugly at the phone when she gave it to me, by the way.”

“Damn, outfoxed by your mother again.”

“It will never be any other way.”

“You know,” I told her thoughtfully, “it occurs to me that you’re a lot like your mother.”

The morning dawned hot, hazy, and painfully early. I reached out blindly, mashed the alarm off, and stayed stretched out until I began to drift back off. Then I hauled myself out of bed and stumbled through the things I do in the morning with aching arms and a desperate wish for another hour’s sleep.

I made it to the job site with my tool bag and hard hat but without my lunchbox: It was either stop for food or clock in on time. I could buy lunch at the break; as it was, I was a few minutes late, which bought me an inquiring look from John Lozano when I punched my time card in the Lacertosa field office.

“Sorry,” I said. I didn’t try to offer an excuse; whatever it was wouldn’t have paid for the lost time my lateness caused, if my partner was sitting around up above, waiting for me.

Lozano’s pale eyes rested on me. “Yeah,” he said. “I don’t like guys being late.” He spoke mildly, just telling me how it was. “Not fair to the other guys, they managed to get here when they’re supposed to. You’re not going to make a habit out of it, are you?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t like it either.”

He nodded. “Okay, go on up. I won’t dock you this time, but I warned you, Smith.”

That was fair, I thought as I headed for the hoist, stood together with the carpenters and plumbers waiting to go up. Keeping an eye out for all the crew, making sure no one was taking advantage, seeing that every man held up his end. That was part of Lozano’s job, to look after his men.

As much a part of his job as supplying the materials his men built with.

Mike DiMaio was up above, at our bay and ready to go, but he wasn’t waiting. He’d peeled the blue tarp off the brickwork we’d covered yesterday, set out his tools, and run a string line from corner to corner for us to work to as we started.

“You must have had a good day off,” he said as I slung my tool bag onto a pile of bricks, opened it to get at my tools. “You’re late, you’re moving slow, and you look like shit.”

“Really?” I said. “I’m late?”

He snorted at that. “All right, let’s get on it. Romeo’s already been here, climbing all over my ass because we’re behind.”

I pulled on my gloves. It was a quarter to eight in the morning, and already a trickle of sweat crept from under my hard hat, slipped down my jawline. “Ah, Romeo,” I said. “I’ve got to talk to Romeo.” I stuck my trowel into the mortar brought over by the new mason tender, the one who’d replaced Reg Phillips. “Maribel won yesterday. Beat the field by half a length.”

“Maribel?” For a moment DiMaio looked blank. “What, your horse out on the West Coast? No shit, she won?”

I grinned at DiMaio as I hefted a brick. “Paid eleven to two. Buy you a beer later, to celebrate?”

“Yeah,” he said, looking at me for a minute, then turning back to his work. “Sure.”

The work that morning was hard. We’d reached the bricks a few courses above waist, not high enough yet to set up a platform to work from; but every brick now had to be lifted a little farther, every pass of the trowel had to be made from a position more awkward than the ones I’d been getting used to over the past few days. The air had thickened back to the heavy dampness it had held before yesterday’s rain, and DiMaio and I were pushing ourselves to try to make up some time. By coffee break I had streaks of fire between my shoulder blades; by lunchtime my shirt was soaked with sweat and my hands were getting clumsy.

Joe Romeo still hadn’t come around by the time DiMaio and I knocked off for lunch.

“How do you like that?” I grumbled. I wiped my trowel clean, put it down on the board where my other tools lay. I wiped my face, too, and reset my hard hat. “The one day I’d actually be glad to see that smiling S.O.B., and he doesn’t show up once.”

“He showed up once,” DiMaio pointed out. “Before you did.”

“Yeah, okay,” I said. “Anyway, I’m not worried. I know where to find him. I’m going down to get lunch. You want anything?”

“No, I brought.”

We ambled along the scaffold together, DiMaio settling himself in the shade with the other masons, me exchanging hellos with them but not stopping. I went on past, into the hoist and back down to the street.

On a construction site nearly everyone brings lunch. The standard lunch break is only half an hour, and getting down to the street from wherever you’re working, finding someplace to make you a sandwich, and getting back up, can chew up twenty minutes. That’s time you’d rather spend sitting, resting, trying to get your back, arms, shoulders, ready for the afternoon.

Only two other guys rode down in the hoist with me, wandered off to the pizza place or the deli across the street. Most everybody was on the site, sitting in the shade, lunchboxes open and, against regulations, hard hats off, when the buses drove up.

There were two: rickety yellow ex-schoolbuses, one of them coughing dull black smoke from its tailpipe into the still, hot air. Black paint covered the bus-company names; nothing identified them, nothing gave me an idea, crossing the street back toward the site as the buses pulled off Broadway and rolled through the gate, what they were there for.

I heard the security guy shouting, though, saw him wave his arms, jump aside when the buses didn’t stop. I quickened my pace as the bus doors opened, the second bus just half inside the gate, straddling the sidewalk. I heard the first guy off a bus, a tall, muscled black man, yelling back at the guard, saw them standing toe-to-toe in the dirt still puddled in places from the rain.

“Get these men the fuck out of here!” The guard, red-faced, jabbed his nightstick at the buses. “I called the fucking cops already! Get outta here before they come!”

“Fuck you and fuck the cops!” was the answer. “If we don’t put it up it’s comin’ down!” Men clambered down the bus steps into the dirt.

Heads turned on the site. Guys saw the action, dropped what they were doing, started to circle toward the shouting men.

“Fuck!” someone yelled. “Coalition!”

More men poured off both buses, black men, most big, all clench-fisted and tight-jawed. They spread, but not far. Some carried baseball bats, some tire irons. The security guard faltered, backed off; the yelling ended.

I reached the site, squeezed through the gate past the second bus, stopped in back of the men who’d come off it. Behind me, on Broadway, traffic hissed by. Horns honked. A car with a loud radio went past, broadcasting music for the whole neighborhood.

In front of me, inside the gate, sound and movement had almost stopped. The men from the site and the men from the buses stood, two knotted crescents, spilling waves of anger back and forth over an invisible line no one seemed to want to cross.

For a long moment, time didn’t move. Possibilities were endless. Anything could have happened; nothing did.

Then someone shouted something. More shouting, and more; someone was shoved.

Someone threw a punch.

Everything broke.

Men charged at each other. Some from the buses streamed toward the building. A tall carpenter tackled the driver of the first bus as he raced for the ramp. Groups fought, two men, four, rolling in the mud. Men from the buses swarmed up the scaffolding.

From inside the building Dan Crowell, Sr. came running, red-faced, pounding down the ramp, chest heaving as he drew panting breaths. Dan Junior followed, and Lydia was behind them. The Crowells were yelling too, at their own men, the workers from the site.

“Stop it!” I heard Crowell Senior bellow. “Leave it! Get out of here! The cops are coming, let them deal with it!” He grabbed hold of the ramp railing with both hands, supported himself there, shouted orders in a hoarse but powerful voice.

Dan Junior grabbed his arm. “Dad, you can’t! Get back inside, I’ll deal with it!” Senior snarled at him with disgust, shook off his hand. Still leaning on the railing, he shouted again at the brawling men.

Junior threw a look at Senior, then charged down the ramp and waded into a fight, yanked apart a mason and a man off the buses, yelled at the mason again to get out. He got an elbow in the eye, but kept at it.

Lydia’s eye caught mine. She was hanging back, at the top of the ramp. She snapped at the air with her hand, trying to push me away, back out the gate. I looked a question at her; she pushed again.

More of the men from the buses ran toward the scaffolding, shoved aside construction workers in their paths, but didn’t stop to brawl. On the scaffold planks, up against the building, men took their tire irons and baseball bats to the walls. The air rang with the clang of steel on brick. Someone’s tools were tossed from the scaffold, raining down into the dirt below.

I looked up. Men were staring from above, leaning over the scaffolding. I saw Mike DiMaio, six stories up. He spun around, charged toward the scaffold stairway.

“No!” I yelled, though I knew he couldn’t hear me. “Mike! They’re on the stairs!”

“You!” Dan Crowell, Sr. roared, pointing at me. His rasping words jerked with the shortness of his breath. “Get the hell out of here! All you men, get out! Let the cops handle it!”

I ignored him, started for DiMaio’s stairway. Then, from behind, from a place I didn’t see, something hard and heavy caught my shoulder. I stumbled forward, twisted around. The steel rebar that had pounded me was lifted, sliced the air again. I jumped back; it missed my arm by inches. The man swinging it grinned and raised it once more.

My eyes raked the ground, looking for an equalizer. I yanked at a length of two-by-four half buried in the mud; but when I hefted it I saw the man with the rebar had looked away, found something else he was interested in. He swung the bar up over his head two-handed, and down again, grinning as though it were the sledgehammer in the carnival game where you test your strength. He wasn’t aiming at me. His target was Dan Crowell, Jr.