No Colder Place (25 page)

“I said I’d do it.”

DiMaio’s steady gaze held me for a few moments; then he nodded, turned, picked a brick from the pile the mason tender had placed, the pile we hadn’t used yesterday. He balanced it in his hand as if taking its measure.

“If it was Joe,” he said, “how are we gonna find out now?”

“Not ‘we,’” I said. “You’re the bricklayer. I’m the guy you cover for.”

I didn’t like it as soon as I’d said it, but I didn’t apologize. DiMaio’s eyes flashed, but he said nothing.

“Listen,” I said, working at it, “how is he? Phillips.”

He looked at me, considering. “I was over there yesterday,” he said. “They say he’s doing better. He seems to wake up some, tries to talk. Not while I was there, though.”

“But that’s good,” I said. “I’m glad to hear it. Listen, Mike, I hear he’s in school.”

“Yeah, nights at City College. I didn’t tell you that?”

“No.”

“I must not’ve thought of it. Sorry.”

“You should have.”

He bristled. “Hey, you wanna know something, you gotta ask. My mind don’t work like a detective’s. I’m a bricklayer. I only think to answer questions if someone asks them.”

“It could be important.”

“Well, you know about it now. Shit, Smith. What the hell is your problem today?”

I met his eyes, clear and blue, and had the sudden, uncomfortable feeling that I could see right through them, see right into who he really was. Solid and real. Like a brick wall, made from things you could see, nothing hidden, nothing fake, nothing weak and buried inside that could bring the whole thing crashing down one unexpected day.

He was looking into my eyes too.

I lifted my hard hat, wiped my face, settled the hat again.

“I’m sorry, Mike,” I said. “Bad day yesterday. Let’s get to work, okay?”

I picked a brick off the pile, felt the morning heat loosening my shoulders.

“What are you thinking?” DiMaio asked, a little less belligerent, backing off too. “You think someone up there, City College, could have something to do with what happened?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m not thinking anything. I just want to get through the day without thinking much at all. Maybe something I already know will float to the top that way.”

“Yeah.” DiMaio nodded. He crouched, sorted through a bucket of plastic weeps until he found one he wanted. “I know what you mean. Just do your bricks, then, when you go home, the problem you had that morning’s all figured out. Like you had nothing to do with it.”

He straightened up and we got to work. I hefted bricks, spread mortar, sweated and drank coffee and struck clean joints. The sounds on the site—shouts, growling engines, the whine of a diamond-blade saw—were punctuated by the syncopated tap of DiMaio’s brick hammer and the creaking of the scaffold boards as men came and went. The July sun moved slowly through the morning, wrapped us in heat like a blanket. My arms were tired but they didn’t ache, not like when I’d first come here, and my movements had more rhythm now, more flow. I focused on what I was doing, this brick here, set like this, reach for the mortar, straighten, another brick. There were connections here too, movements and objects that went together, were related in ways you couldn’t see at first. The Scriabin études ran in my mind, first this piece, then that. They and the bricks and the bright dusty heat became my day.

John Lozano came around that morning, up on the scaffold to look at our work. “We’ll be bringing on a new foreman in a day or two,” he told us. “Until then it’ll be me.”

“Good,” DiMaio said, grinning at Lozano, speaking to me. “Softy like Lozano, you and me can kick back, relax a little.”

“Don’t even think about it,” Lozano said. “I was a masonry foreman eleven years.” His blue eyes and his mouth smiled the same kind smile. He made notes on his clipboard, moved on.

“It’ll take him a few days to find a new foreman?” I asked as DiMaio and I went back to work. “With jobs being so scarce?”

“Nah. He could have someone here by afternoon, if he wanted. Most likely he thinks by him coming up here for a few days himself it’ll calm the men down.”

“The men like him?”

“Lozano?” He seemed surprised at the question. “Yeah, sure. Nice guy. Fair.”

“You’ve worked with him before?”

“Couple of times. Wants the work done good, but always cuts you a break if he can. You gotta work for somebody, you want to work for a guy like him.”

By eleven, when we broke for lunch, the site was busy with rumors—the murder of a coalition leader last night, maybe the one whose men had torn our work apart. No one knew, but that didn’t stop the speculating, the muttering, the diatribes against a city going straight to hell. There were a few dissenting voices, DiMaio’s among them, about the meaning of it all, but no one disagreed with the general assessment of the murdered man.

“Fucking bastard,” Angelo Lucca said, and everyone nodded, offered expletives of their own. “If that was him, I’m glad he got it. Screw the son of a bitch.”

“I don’t know why the city can’t do nothing about bastards like that,” the sandy-haired mason, Tommy, said. “What the hell is wrong with this place?”

“Shit, Tommy,” said DiMaio, through the remains of his sandwich. “They don’t hold up the city. They hold up guys like Crowell. The city probably don’t even know where to find ’em.”

“City don’t know shit. Asshole place, this city.”

DiMaio shrugged. “I don’t know. There’s always work, even in times like this. And pretty girls. What else do you need?”

Someone snorted. Tommy said, “Yeah, I seen you yesterday, DiMaio, with that new girl of Crowell’s. You living dangerously, or what?”

“DiMaio likes that,” Lucca said. “Girls as likely to brain him as the other way around.”

“Hey, fuck off.” DiMaio reddened. “I never hit a girl in my life.”

“Yeah, well, you keep seeing that Chinese girl, you’re gonna have to start. In self-defense.”

“That true?” I asked DiMaio, sipping my coffee. “You like dangerous women?”

DiMaio shook his head. “I just like ones who know what they’re doing, that’s all.” He added, “Maybe if you guys didn’t act like assholes they wouldn’t treat you like you were.”

“Oh, shit, look at this!” Sam Buck cackled. “You a women’s libber now, DiMaio? You gonna demand equal rights, girls on the scaffold?”

“Might be better company than some of you jerks.” DiMaio stood. I stood with him, and lunch break was over.

I made it to the end of the workday, moving slowly in the afternoon, and by then I’d had it. I punched out, sank onto a subway seat, felt the rumble of the tracks and the sharp chill of the air-conditioning, and wished that the trip were longer. All I wanted was to go home, shower, sleep.

I managed the first two, then left my place again before the desire for the third wiped out any other plans I had.

Because I did have plans.

I called Lydia at the Crowell office, told her where I was going.

“Good idea,” she said. “Anything special you want me to do?”

“Everything you do is special,” I told her.

“If you’re counting on the fact that I have to be polite to you on the phone because I’m in the office—”

“Absolutely not. It’s light-headedness from lack of sleep. I’m not responsible for my actions.”

“Call me later if you have anything worth saying.”

“I’ll call you even if I don’t.”

“That, I’m sure of,” she said, and hung up.

I went to get the car and drive out to Queens, wondering whether Lydia would be in when I called her later, and if she wasn’t, where she would be.

Howard Beach is a neighborhood of low-rise brick apartment buildings and small, close-set one-family houses with ground-floor garages and handkerchief lawns, of aging strip malls and new giant discount superstores. People here know their butchers and their dry cleaners; kids work at the supermarket or the McDonald’s after school and often grow up to go into the family business. Sometimes, in Howard Beach, the family business is organized crime.

I drove slowly down a street whose aluminum-sided houses with their iron-railed front porches had been part of New York’s exuberant expansion in the fifties and sixties—baby-booming optimism rolling acres of neighborhood over field and swamp. The streets and the buildings and the early residents were all older now, exuberance muted, optimism turned a little grim, but kids still played in the streets and some of the first-planted trees spread broad limbs across the sidewalk.

The house I was looking for stood at an intersection in a residential area, a short section of sunlit white picket fence and a rosebush barricading the lawn at the corner so neighborhood kids wouldn’t cut across it on their way from here to there. I parked, straightened my tie, headed up the walk. In my dark blue suit, I wasn’t likely to raise any eyebrows coming here today; and even if it hadn’t been necessary, it seemed only right.

A boy, maybe fifteen, answered my knock. A cousin maybe, or a younger brother. Awkwardly, not sure what his duties were, he tried to reach open the screen door for me, still holding the knob of the other one.

“I’m a friend of Lenny’s,” I said, to make it easier for him. “From work.”

“Oh,” he said, exhaling gratefully. “Yeah. C’mon in.”

The living room was carpeted in dark gold, its brocaded curtains drawn, light provided by end-table lamps. On a burnt-orange-and-gold sofa, a plump woman sat, dressed all in black, as was the thinner woman beside her. They looked up as I entered, the heavy one seeming dazed and uncertain, the other determinedly, protectively, in control.

“This’s a friend of Lenny’s,” the boy told them. He looked to me as if for further instructions.

“Bill Smith,” I said. “I’m a bricklayer, on the Broadway job. I’m really sorry about Lenny.”

“Thank you,” the heavy woman said. Her voice was husky. She held out a hand to me; I took it in both of mine, gave it a squeeze. “Please,” she said, “sit. Anna, please get Mr. Smith a coffee. You’ll stay and have coffee? Or whiskey. Tony—”

“Coffee’s fine, thanks.”

She nodded and stopped speaking when I spoke, watched me as I sat on an armchair upholstered in nubbly, burnt-orange fabric.

“I’m Lenny’s mother,” she suddenly said, as though it had just occurred to her I might not know that. “This is my sister, Anna Mannucci. And Tony, my nephew.”

Anna Mannucci rose and smiled at me, her eyes fierce, silently warning me not to upset her sister. “I’ll get the coffee.” She left the room. Tony stood, looking uncomfortable but willing to do his duty, if he only understood it.

“Did you know my Lenny well?” Mrs. Pelligrini asked the question sadly, as if the answer couldn’t possibly matter now.

“No. Just from the job. But when you work with a guy … well, you know,” I finished. “I just wanted to pay my respects.”

“That’s very kind,” she said.

“Actually,” I said, “I know a couple of other guys who knew him. Chuck DeMattis, for one.”

I’d thrown Chuck’s name out the way you throw stones in a pond, just wanting to see what the ripples would be. I wasn’t really expecting any; the name I thought I’d get a reaction from was Louie Falco’s, and I was planning to try that next. I wasn’t prepared for Mrs. Pelligrini’s eyes to open wide, for her to lean forward, to say, “Chuckie? You’re from Chuckie?”

“I work for him, on and off,” I said, hoping she didn’t notice I’d been thrown off my stride. “Things he needs, if I can.” I wondered if that made sense, would keep things moving.

“Is he going to help me? Chuckie’s going to help?”

The rattle of cups and saucers made us both turn. Anna entered the room with a tray; Tony, looking grateful for something to do, rushed to clear off the coffee table so she could put it down.

“Mr. Smith is from Chuckie,” Mrs. Pelligrini told her sister. She seemed to sit up a little straighter, to try a little harder at pulling herself together. I realized with a small pang of guilt that that was out of respect for who she thought I was. “He’s going to help.”

Anna, bending over the coffeepot, looked at me. Her distrust was obvious.

“Chuck hasn’t helped much yet, Elena,” she said. She streamed black coffee into a white porcelain cup, handed it to me. She lifted the creamer and sugar bowl in manicured hands; I thanked her, turned them down.

Elena Pelligrini waved her hand, as if shooing her sister’s remark away. “He tried. It’s not his fault. My Lenny …” She cut herself off just as I heard a catch come into her throat. Leaning her short form forward, she poured a cup of coffee for herself, added cream and sugar. Looking away, she sipped at it. Her sister offered me biscotti, and we drank our coffee in silence for a while, until Mrs. Pelligrini was ready to start again.

“My Lenny,” she said, her voice clear but damped-down, “I couldn’t tell him anything. A mother can’t. I thought Chuckie could, that’s why I called him, but it isn’t his fault that Lenny wouldn’t listen. It isn’t his fault, what happened.”

“What did you want Chuck to tell him, Mrs. Pelligrini?” I asked quietly, sipping coffee.

“Chuckie didn’t tell you about it?” She sounded surprised.

“I’d rather you told me,” I said apologetically. “Otherwise I feel like I’m playing telephone.”

She nodded; that seemed to make sense to her. She finished off her coffee, placed the cup carefully on the tray, put her hands, folded, in her lap. “About Louie Falco,” she said. She muttered something under her breath, in Italian, looking down; then she lifted her eyes back to mine and went on. “I asked Chuckie to talk to Lenny. Lenny, he’s—he was … was a wild boy. Not a bad boy. But he wanted to be like them.”

“Like Falco?”

“But to a boy … it’s like cowboys and Indians. You can see, even a mother can see why. They have money, cars, beautiful women. Respect. They can walk in a room, everybody looks at them. What they do to get it, what that’s like, what it makes them into, you can’t expect a boy to see that.”

From the corner of my eye, I caught Anna Mannucci looking at Tony, an expression on her face something like fear. And I saw Tony pretending he didn’t know.

“And you wanted Chuck to help?”

“Just to talk to him. Because Chuckie and Louie, everyone knows. So Lenny might listen, because he knows Chuckie don’t make it up, he really knows.”