No Colder Place (29 page)

The waitress, a perky blonde high-school girl, quit flirting with a guy at the counter, came and refilled my coffee cup again.

Lydia said, “Bill? What is it Falco’s likely to be doing on that site, if he’s not involved in stealing the things Pelligrini was fencing?”

“I don’t know. But there are endless scams you can run at a construction site. Extortion. Racketeering. Money laundering. It could be that whatever Pelligrini had going was totally independent of what Falco’s into. Falco didn’t even seem to know about it.”

“Then,” she said, “we need to find whoever Pelligrini was working with, don’t we? I mean, they would be up there, on the site. They would know when he was coming and going. Isn’t that what we need to do?”

“Yes.”

She nodded. “What are you going to do about Falco?”

“I need to do something about him?”

“Well, he
was
about to beat you to a bloody pulp. He might consider he has unfinished business with you.”

I stared out the window, watched a cat wash its face on the porch of a house across the street. “No, I don’t think so,” I said. “He thinks I’m going to report back to Chuck. The threat will be as good as the reality would have been, to deliver the message. If I were him I’d keep an ear to the ground and see what happens. If his name doesn’t come up again connected to Pelligrini, I think he’ll back off.”

“And if it does?”

“You mean, if Chuck was right?” I swallowed the last of my coffee. “Like I said, I don’t think he is. But that’s the job, isn’t it? To find out.”

She gave me a long, quiet look, then went back to her tea. Just as she finished, a short chubby guy stuck his head in the diner door. He bellowed, “Anybody call a cab?” I left a few bucks on the table, Lydia slipped on her sunglasses and adjusted her baseball cap again, and we headed over the bridge and back toward the sparkling lights of Manhattan.

nineteen

t
he next morning I got to the site early. At a quarter to seven, the sky above New York was a pure, bright blue, not yet dimmed by the haze of daily living. The subway on the way up was cool and close to empty. The site was quiet, no dust raised yet, no trucks rumbling, no spilled coffee or running hoses to make new muddy puddles in yesterday’s dirt. Inside the fence, the steel and concrete, the bricks and conduit and sheet metal that would become a building, waited, silent.

I crossed to the ramp and headed for the Lacertosa trailer, to clock in and have a talk with John Lozano.

He was there; I’d expected him to be. Site super, and now foreman too: a lot of responsibility, a lot of paperwork. Long hours. He looked up from his desk as I came in, raised his eyebrows.

“You’re early,” he said. “Clock in if you want, but I don’t pay overtime on this job.”

“I know. That’s something I want to talk about.”

Lozano shook his head. “Can’t do it, Smith. Budget’s too tight. A lot of the men are unhappy about it. I’m sorry, but nothing I can do.”

“I’m not looking for overtime. I heard about the budget.” I pulled up a molded plastic chair that looked as though it had seen more than a few construction sites itself. “I want to talk.”

Lozano watched me sit. “You having trouble up there? You started slow, but I thought you were doing better. You and Mike are producing okay.”

“Mike is,” I said. “I’m not half as good as he is. But laying bricks is only half the reason I’m here.”

He cocked his head. “I don’t get you.”

“I’m an investigator,” I told him, watched his face. “Private. Not a cop, and I’m not working with them. But I have to ask you some questions.”

“Investigator?” Lozano’s forehead creased. He put down his pencil. “What do you mean? Working here? You’re supposed to be a bricklayer.”

“You’ve had trouble on this site,” I said. “You had it before I came here and you’ve had more, a lot more serious, since. My client wants to know what’s going on.”

“What, so he sends you here to lay bricks?” His frown deepened. He had known who I was when I’d walked into his office; now he didn’t know, found the ground shifting.

“No. That was my idea. The client doesn’t want to know how I’m handling it. They don’t know I’m here, on site.”

“What client? Who is it? What the hell are you supposed to be ‘handling’?”

“I can’t tell you who the client is, and I’m not sure about the rest. But I have some ideas. That’s why I came to talk to you.”

“Me? What the hell do I know? About what?”

“I’d like to ask you some questions.”

“What questions? Hey, listen, how do I even know this shit is true?”

“What’s the difference?” I asked.

He glared. The masonry foreman in him, the guy whose decisions were fast and final, kicked in. “You’re a damn bricklayer, is all I know. You’re here in my office, want to ask questions, I don’t even know about what, and you wanna know what difference it is if you’re telling the truth?”

I took out my wallet, showed him what I’d showed Mike DiMaio. “That help?” I asked.

“No. I still wanna know who you’re working for.”

“I’m not going to tell you. And to save you the trouble of asking, I don’t know if what I’m working on has anything to do with Lenny Pelligrini or Joe Romeo, either.” I didn’t mention Chester Hamilton; I didn’t see any reason to let Lozano know that that connection was, for sure, more than a rumor. “But at least one of those men had a scam going on this site: Pelligrini. And there’s at least one scam I know about on this site, and you’re part of it, Lozano.”

“What are you—?”

“Save it,” I said. “I already talked to Donald Hacker.”

For a moment Lozano didn’t react. Then the masonry foreman, the one sure of himself and in charge, faded away. Lozano seemed to grow older as I watched. His shoulders drooped. He leaned back in his chair, ran his hand across his lined face. “Oh, God,” he said. His blue eyes stared bleakly at me.

“Don’t fight me on this,” I said quietly. “I can get it other places. I came to you to give you a chance.”

“A chance,” he repeated softly. “It’s over, huh?”

“I think it is,” I answered. “I want you to tell me about it.”

He kept his eyes quietly on me for a long moment, and neither of us moved. Then he got up and walked around me, closed the office door, came back to his battered desk chair. It creaked as he sat. “I didn’t mean for it to go on,” he said with a sigh. “Not even this long. It wasn’t supposed to. But the money … It didn’t seem like there was anything else I could do.”

“The money was that good?”

“Good?” He stared. “Hell, no. It’s because there wasn’t any money.”

“You lost me.”

“I don’t like it,” he said. “Using shit like we’re using here. I don’t like it on any job I’m on. Old days, even if the architect
called
for shit, I used to try to talk the boss into letting me do the right thing. Sometimes they’d go for it. At least I tried.” He gave a small, bitter smile. “Look at me now.”

“What do you mean, there wasn’t any money? Hacker says he’s getting paid.”

“He hadda get paid. If he didn’t, he’d of blown the whole thing as soon as we started.”

“And you weren’t?”

“Not me personally. Jesus, you think I’d do shit like this for money? When I’m gone from here people are gonna be wondering what asshole built this shitpile of a building. How much money you think that’s worth?”

“If you’re not doing it for money, then what?”

Rapping knuckles shook the plywood door. Lozano threw me a look, got up and answered it. It was a Teamster with a truckful of concrete block in the lot. Lozano signed his manifest, told him where to pull the truck. “I got two guys out there waiting,” he said. “Joey and Paolo. See them.” Then the Teamster was gone and Lozano turned back to me.

“You got a job here, Smith.”

I looked up at him where he stood by the door. “You telling me to get to work?”

“No. I’m telling you you got a job. And so do about a hundred and fifty other guys, thirty-two of ’em mine. You lose this job, where are you gonna go?” He shook his head impatiently. “Well, not you, you’re a fucking detective, I guess you don’t need this shit, no matter what. But Mike. Where’s he gonna go?”

“He’ll pick up something else.”

“What the hell is he gonna pick up, now, the way things are?”

“He’ll find something,” I said, though I knew as I said it that finding something, if things were as bad as everyone was telling me, would be hard.

“All of them? All thirty-two masons? The carpenters? The ironworkers? The tin-knockers? Where the hell are these guys gonna go, Smith, if this building goes under?”

“This happens in construction,” I said. “Fat periods and tight ones. Guys who work these jobs know that.”

“Yeah. In the fat periods, they put money down on houses and take the kids to Disney World. When it gets tight, their wives take on night jobs at McDonald’s and the bank takes the house back.”

“Lozano—”

“What I’m telling you is, it was the only way to keep paying the men.”

He stood for a moment, silently; I was silent too. Then he circled back to his desk, wary, his eyes still on mine, waiting for my reaction, prepared to meet it.

“I don’t get it,” I said, although I thought I did.

Lozano sighed, rubbed his face again. “Not in here,” he said. “The men are going to start coming in soon, clocking in. Come in the back.”

The trailer’s back room was a storeroom, half the size of the one Lozano used for an office, piled with boxes of caulk tubes, ten-pound bags of fine colored sand to tint the mortar, metal cans of dry and wet chemicals you could add to the mortar so work could continue in the heat, in the cold, chemicals to retard curing, to hasten it, to give high early strength, to control shrinkage, to adjust the job to the conditions you had.

Lozano flicked on a buzzing overhead fluorescent, and we each chose a box to sit on. Once we were settled, I said nothing, let him tell me as he was ready.

He looked at me, said evenly, “Crowell’s in debt up to their eyebrows. My second requisition, I find out they’re already in the hole. They got plenty of nothing.”

“They can’t pay you?”

“Every month it’s a scramble,” he said. “Anyway, that’s what they’re telling me. I don’t know, but they’re telling me it’s true.”

In my head I heard Lydia’s voice.
The gentleman yelled at me
, she’d said.
The Crowells owe money all over town
.

“I think it’s probably true,” I told Lozano. “I’ve heard that too. But what about the owner? Can’t they go to her?”

“She’s having trouble too, what I hear. Bank problems. Not so easy for a black lady to get a construction loan, especially in times everyone else thinks is bad. Bank probably figures she don’t know what the hell she’s doing.”

“You think that’s true?”

“How the hell should I know? All’s I know is, she’s hanging on by her fingernails. She’s paying her requisitions and bills as they come in, but she can’t come up with more. I hear she already chewed her way through the first construction loan, and she can’t get the next till the building’s fifty percent closed in. Crowell’s pushing for that to be October.”

“What’s she using for money in the meantime?”

“I got no idea.”

“But if she’s paying, out of whatever, what do you need this scam for?”

“She pays Crowell, but everything she gives them don’t go to us. Crowell’s trying to keep their head above water here. One month they pay this guy, next month that guy. They lowballed this job, big time. They got no slack, no float, nothing.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “Junior, he thinks Senior lost it. Got his damn pencil too sharp, came in with numbers they couldn’t meet, just to get the job. Junior thinks the old man don’t have it no more.”

“Is that true?”

Lozano moved his shoulders helplessly. “Seems smart as he ever was, to me. But this money thing’s a real bad problem. Payroll’s only partial, almost since the job started.”

“Only partial? And you stayed on this job?”

“What the hell am I gonna do?” His eyes pleaded with me. “Good times, I take my men and walk. But times like these? Some of my men left other jobs to come here. Because I called ’em, said this was solid, good for a year. Me, Smith. What am I gonna do, tell ’em, ‘Sorry, my mistake’?”

“So you came up with this scheme? Substitute cheap materials, put the difference into payroll? Is that how it works?”

“That’s how it works. Some trades are cutting corners on work, too, less layers of Sheetrock, that kind of thing. More work in less time, payroll’s smaller overall. Mandelstam even let three guys go. Not me, I’m not letting that happen, not with the bricks.” Understand, his look said. “Just until Crowell gets on their feet. Wasn’t even supposed to be this long. We’re still working low on the bricks, stuff like this matters less, the lower the floor. I thought it would be over by now.”

“It’s not,” I said.

“No, it’s not. Shit.” He shook his head, let his hands drop between his knees. “I’m sorry I ever bought in.”

“It wasn’t your idea?”

“Me? You gotta be kidding. I don’t have the brains for this kind of shit.”

“Hacker told me all the subs were in on it.”

He nodded.

“And they’re all doing what you’re doing? Paying their men from the difference?”

“I don’t know about that. O’Malley, at Emerald, I got a feeling he’s taking some home. Emerald’s got deeper pockets than Lacertosa, I think, so he’s got something to pay his men out of until his requisitions are met. But what the hell’s the difference what he’s doing? His men are working. So are mine.”

I pulled my cigarettes out of my pocket, silently offered the pack to him. He shook his head, kept his eyes on me. I lit up, breathed the smoke. “So you guys all got together and worked this out? Brought Hacker into it because he’s got to sign off on all the materials you’re using? And it’s true, what Hacker said: that Dan Crowell Junior’s so dumb he doesn’t suspect a thing?”

Lozano stared at me. “You don’t get it.”

“I don’t?”

He shook his head. “Hacker, yeah,” he said. “He hadda sign off, and there’s nothing in it for him but money, so he’s getting paid off. But us all get together? Dan Junior don’t suspect? Hell, Smith.” He snorted. “Whose idea do you think this was?”