No Colder Place (19 page)

“Says Senior. But that’s not why Junior did it. He did it because the old man needed help, whether he’d admit it or not.” Hacker gave a sour laugh. “The pair of them, doing each other favors. What a joke.”

“What’s the joke?”

“The joke is, Junior probably
is
set up now for the rest of his life.”

“Why is that funny?”

“Because a geek like Little Danny Junior can make eighty thousand a year and be fixed for life as a contractor even though he’s so dumb he can’t see what’s happening right under his nose. But I’m six years out of architecture school, with a master’s and a license, and I’m barely making thirty thousand a year, and if we don’t get another project into the office soon I’m going to get laid off.”

“I see. So you’re poorly paid, and that makes it okay to do what you’re doing?”

“I’m telling you, it wouldn’t have mattered! It
won’t
matter! No one living in the building will ever have any idea, and the contractors are saving a fortune.”

“Tell me about the scheme.”

“What the hell is there to tell? The contractors buy and use cheaper stuff than we specified. I don’t see it. I sign off the requisitions and I collect my payoff. That’s what it’s called, isn’t it, a payoff?” He said that with a sneer, maybe at me for knowing what to call it, maybe at himself for collecting it.

“Anyone else in your office involved?”

He stared at me. “What are you, crazy? This isn’t exactly the kind of thing you discuss over the lunch table.”

“Not even your boss?”

“Especially not the boss.”

“When I asked you if it was blackmail or bribery, you said ‘both,’” I said. “Why?”

He rolled the empty water glass between his hands. “I wanted to stop. In the beginning, not long after we started.”

“Why?”

“I was nervous! I could lose my job, and it’s a bad time. Jobs aren’t that easy to get.”

Especially, I thought, with the reference you’d get from your boss. “But?”

“I was told that might not be such a hot idea. That I had a good thing going and I should keep it going.”

“Who told you?” I asked. “Which contractors are involved?”

“I think they all are.”

“All?” I asked. “Emerald? Mandelstam? Lacertosa?”

He nodded. “I never talked to any of the supers, or anything. But I’m approving cheap crap in all the trades.”

I thought about the Lacertosa field trailer, about John Lozano’s kind blue eyes. I reached for a cigarette, was about to light it when the waitress caught my eye. She shook her head, pointed to the No Smoking sign. She brought me more coffee, with a sad smile.

“Who did you talk to, Hacker? And who was it who told you not to stop?”

“The same guy who came to me with the idea in the first place. A masonry foreman. I’m up on the scaffold one day, Dan Junior’s wandered off someplace, and next thing I know this masonry foreman’s buddying up to me. He said this was what they wanted me to do, this was how it was going to work. He had a hundred-dollar bill right there for me. Right there.” Hacker stared emptily through the room, seeing something else, another day in another place. He brought his eyes suddenly back to me. “To tell you the truth, I was a little afraid of him. That’s one of the reasons I did it.”

He looked at me hopefully: Maybe fear would excuse what greed hadn’t.

I didn’t soften. “Who was this guy, Hacker?”

Hope faded, replaced by resignation. “His name is Joe Romeo.”

So I was the one who got to tell Donald Hacker about Joe Romeo. I watched him grow rigid, watched the color, which had returned to his face, drain out again.

“Oh my God,” he whispered. “Oh my God. Off the scaffold? Just right off the scaffold?”

I nodded.

“What’s going to happen now?” he breathed. “Oh, God, it’ll all come out. Oh, shit, oh God, I’m screwed. Now I’m really screwed.”

“And another man’s dead,” I said. I tried to keep the disgust out of my voice, but I could hear its echoes. “Jesus, get ahold of yourself, Hacker. Why would your little scam come out because some drunk threw Joe Romeo off the scaffold?”

“Because … because—” He blinked, looked around him as though trying to remember where he was. “I don’t know,” he finished lamely. “Because … Won’t you tell them?”

“Tell who? The cops?”

He flinched. That obviously was even worse than what he’d had in mind.

“Or your boss? No, not right away, Hacker. I have to think about this. Just make sure you don’t leave town. That would piss me off.” I checked his face, to make sure my threat had registered; in his condition, I didn’t think it needed to be any more specific. “I’m working on something else,” I told him. “I want to fit it all together. Meanwhile, go back to work. Keep your head down.”

“Something else?”

“You didn’t kill Joe Romeo, did you, Hacker?”

“
Me?
” He barely choked the word out.

“Well, somebody did. Maybe somebody connected with your little scheme, maybe not. Watch your back.” I stood to go.

“Oh my God,” he whispered. “Do you really think—?”

“No,” I said. “But you ought to choose your playmates more carefully next time, Hacker. You’re not ready to be in the game with the big boys.”

I turned from his table, turned back when I heard his whispered “Thanks.”

“For what?”

“For not… not…”

“Don’t think I’m doing you any favors. If I blow the whistle on you now it could mess up the other thing I’m working on, which, believe it or not, is more important. Try to stay cool, Hacker.”

I left the greasy-smelling but air-conditioned coffee shop, stood on the sidewalk in the blazing sun. Heat radiated up from the concrete as I lit a cigarette. It was true, what I’d told Hacker: that I needed to know how his scam fit in with the case I was working on.

But more than that, I thought, eyeing the traffic as it streamed uptown, I needed to know, exactly, what the case I was working on was.

twelve

m
y next goal was back uptown. I headed for the subway, a block over and a block down; but first I stopped at a pay phone, to call Lydia.

I dialed the construction trailer number. A voice answered that could only be a cop’s.

“Who wants her?” he demanded, as though any call to anyone in the trailer might be a major break in the case.

“The plumber,” I said. “I’m in her house. I got the leak stopped, but I gotta know what she wants me to do about the valve.”

“Well, she’s gone,” he told me. “Left about half an hour ago. Probably on her way there now.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Okay.” Hell, I thought as I dialed Lydia’s office. I would have been interested to know what had gone on in the trailer this morning, what the cops and Lydia and Chuck and Dan Crowell, Sr. had found to pass the time with. I left a message on her machine and took the subway back to upper Broadway.

The two-story white Armstrong Properties building looked just as handsome in the gleaming afternoon sunlight as it had yesterday in the deep overcast after the rain. The freckled secretary, Dana, looked at me just as coolly and professionally as yesterday, too, when I walked in.

“I want to see Mrs. Armstrong,” I said.

“No, I don’t think so,” Dana said calmly. “Yesterday she threw you out of here. I don’t think she’s expecting you back.” She made no move toward the phone.

“Yesterday I pretended to be a reporter. Today I called one who’s a friend of mine. He was interested in this whole setup.” I let that linger, vague and unpleasant.

Hesitation blinked in her eyes; that was enough. “Buzz the boss,” I suggested. “Ask if she’ll see me.”

She did that, in a brief, low conversation. She rose, frostily, and showed me into the office in the back.

Denise Armstrong stood in the center of the room, lips in a tight line. The sunlight picking out a square of courtyard in the window behind her was warmer, more golden, than yesterday, but my reception was the same.

Dana, with an angry look at me, left us, and the door closed behind me.

“Why are you back?” Mrs. Armstrong asked icily as the door clicked shut. “Didn’t I make my point yesterday?”

I turned to look at the door. “Did she lock that?”

“Not this time. I have no reason to keep you here today. In fact, I had no reason to let you in at all, except to ask why you keep trying to lie your way in.”

“I told her the truth: I wanted to see you.”

“You told her you’d spoken to a reporter. That was a lie.”

I shrugged. The movement made my shoulder ache, sore where the rebar had caught it. “I thought it was better than pushing past her and charging in here.”

Her eyes flashed. “Are you telling me I should be grateful you didn’t use force? You’re out of your league, Mr. Smith. Get out of here.”

“I’m trying to help you.”

“I doubt that. Or else you’re not very good at it.”

I took a breath. When I spoke, it was in calm, reasoned tones. “Can we start over, Mrs. Armstrong? Give me five minutes. You know what happened on your site this morning?”

Her mouth curled contemptuously. “Of course I know! I just got back from there. I talked for a long time with the police and Dan Crowell, Sr. And your employer, as a matter of fact.”

“Chuck DeMattis?”

“I told him you’d come to see me.” She added, with a cold smile, “He said that behind your manner, you were actually one of his best men.”

Leaving as a matter between me and Chuck just whose man I was, I asked, “My manner? I came here with a polite lie. You were the one who locked me up. Did you tell him that?”

“No. Believe it or not, we didn’t talk much about you. Everybody was more interested in the dead man.”

Maybe that meant my cover, on the site, hadn’t been blown. I’d have to find that out, later.

“You wanted five minutes,” she said. “I’ll give you three. What for?”

“I’m trying to help you,” I repeated. “To do that, I need you to help me.”

A joyless smile bent the corners of her mouth. “If I had a nickel for every man who said he was trying to help me when he was trying to screw me, I’d be a very rich woman. What do you want
me
to do for
you
?”

All right, I thought. We’ll do it your way. “I want to talk to the coordinator who brought those men to your site this morning.”

“And why did you come to me?”

Her eyes told me she knew, and told me that if I tried to sweeten it I’d end up thrown out of this office again.

“Because you’re black.”

The hard mask of her face seemed to soften just a fraction, with something like the relief you feel when an anticipated pain has come and gone. But nothing showed in her voice. “Am I the only black person you know?”

“The only black person I know in this business, in this neighborhood. The only one whose building site this coordinator’s men rioted at.”

“That alone could make him not interested in talking to me. And I think they call that a job action.”

“They can call it whatever they want.”

“The police are looking for him. Why not just wait?”

“I’m betting they won’t find him.”

“Why not? They’ve arrested five of the men he brought.”

“Those men won’t talk. They’ll never be charged with anything. There’s no way you could prove they were on those buses. I’ll bet they all had a story set before they got there, in case of trouble: ‘Gee, officer, I was just there looking for a job. What buses?’”

“Is that what you would say?”

“In their shoes, I probably would.”

“Well, you may be right. So the police won’t find him.”

“But I still want to talk to him.”

“Then find him if you can. Why should I get involved?”

“I would have thought,” I said, “that finding out what’s going on on your site would be important to you.”

“You would have been wrong. What’s important to me is that we get that job back on schedule.”

“More important than finding out who killed a man there and why another man was buried there?”

“Yes!” She perched against the edge of her desk, regarded me levelly. “A lot of people’s jobs—
living
people—depend on that project. As does my future in this business. Those things are what’s important to me. Neither of those dead men is anything to me one way or the other.”

“That may be true. But someone killed them.”

“And that’s supposed to upset me? Get me all riled up in the name of justice? You must be joking.”

“Share the joke with me.”

She smiled a cold, slow smile. “It’s the one about how a white bully wants a black woman to forget her own interests and help him find out what happened to two other trashy white men. What’s behind it is the idea that whatever happens to white men is more important than anything else. It’s pretty funny; it always gets a good laugh around here.”

“Lenny Pelligrini and Joe Romeo aren’t laughing.”

“I’m sure when they were alive they found plenty to laugh about that I wouldn’t have thought funny.”

“So they deserved to die?”

“A lot of people die who don’t deserve it. Lenny Pelligrini, from what I’m told, was a heavy-metal punk who occasionally came to work stoned. Joe Romeo was probably one of your white macho types who just
had
to stand up to a mob of black drunks instead of having the sense to run. That was stupid, they responded as you’d expect, and it’s his problem.”

“Not anymore.”

“So it’s no one’s problem. It’s certainly not mine.”

The ivy on the shelves behind her trailed gracefully down the window. It was well tended; carefully watered and fed, all the brown leaves picked off. These were all plants that would do well in the kind of light she had here; she clearly hadn’t given in to the gardener’s urge to try to grow something the conditions were wrong for, just because she loved it.

I asked, “Hasn’t it occurred to you that this all might be aimed at you?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

Her words were clipped and contemptuous. “If things had worked out for whoever killed Pelligrini, his body wouldn’t have been found. Joe Romeo’s death couldn’t look any less related to my building unless he’d been killed off the site. If someone wanted to compromise me, there are much more direct ways.”