No Colder Place (31 page)

“In on it? In on what?”

I told him about the scam, how it worked, Hacker and all the subs, but I didn’t take it all the way back. The telling didn’t take long. His face reddened as I talked.

“Shit!” he exploded when I was through. His voice was hoarse. “Son of a fucking bitch! Lozano, that son of a bitch—”

“No,” I said. “Mike, I can’t say it was right, what he did. But he did it for the men who work for him.”

“Don’t tell me he was doing me a fucking favor! I don’t need to be part of shit like this! I can get work—”

“Maybe. And maybe if you don’t, it won’t matter for a while, you can ride it out. But Frankie has a kid going to college in the fall, first in his family, ever. And Ray’s wife is sick.”

He shook his head, face hard. “Don’t make me part of this, Smith. Don’t make the guys part of it.”

“I’m just asking you to calm down. Not to do anything. There’s more, Mike.”

“What the hell do you mean, there’s more?” He stopped. “Jesus Christ, what are you telling me? You’re saying Reg found out what was going on, and Lozano had Joe try to whack him?” He stared at me. “I’ll kill that bastard—”

“Not Lozano, Mike. I don’t think so.”

“Who, then?”

“Crowell.”

That silenced him. In the quiet that fell between us, I realized the sounds on the site had changed, the rhythms of work replacing the rhythms of rest. Coffee break was long over; DiMiao and I were lucky the foreman was also the site super, that he had so much more to do than come around and check on us.

We climbed to our feet without exchanging a word, took our places on the platform, and began work again. Once we were established, our pattern and our moves, DiMaio spoke without looking at me. His words were deliberate, timed with his movements as he used his hammer to snap a brick in half. “What the hell do you mean, Smith? What do you mean, it was Crowell?”

I said, “I thought this was a scam the subs had going, something they were putting over on Dan Junior. That’s what Hacker thinks. But Lozano says it was Dan Junior who put the idea to him.”

“Dan Junior? Dan fucking Junior?” DiMaio’s voice was sharp with scorn. “He never in his life came up with something like this. Too soft. Too chicken.”

“Then who?”

“Christ! The old man, of course. If it’s really Crowell. Jesus, that’s fucking hard to believe. But that’s what Lozano says?”

“Yes.”

“Well, then, I guess that’s it.”

I nodded, thinking that even now, even though he knew what Lozano had been doing, DiMaio was ready to believe something was true if Lozano said it.

“What gets me is, why?” DiMaio went on. “Big company like them, what do they need this kind of penny-ante shit for?”

“They’re in debt, Mike. It was supposed to be a stop-gap thing, just a couple of months until they were on solid ground again. According to Lozano the price they gave Mrs. Armstrong for this job was much too low.”

“Why’d they do that? Why not just give her a price she could live with, and do the job right?”

“Junior thinks the reason is the old man’s losing it.”

“Oh, right. And Junior’d know. You seen the old man lately? He seem to you like a guy losing it?”

“No. But look, Mike. Senior’s sick, times are bad, it’s a big job, a great opportunity. He must have wanted it a lot. And Mrs. Armstrong’s a pretty tough cookie; I’ll bet she had the contractors bidding hard against each other.”

“You mean he might have just blown it, come in too low because he wasn’t thinking right, had so much on his mind and all?”

“Could have happened. And now he’s got to make good on it.”

“That would be like him. ‘I goddamn said it, now I’m gonna do it, no matter what.’ Or,” he swung his hammer, cracked another brick, “more likely the old man decided he’d been a sucker all his life, that he could make a lot more money this way than the old way.”

“He could also ruin a lifetime’s worth of reputation.”

“What the hell does he care? He’s not gonna last much longer.”

“Then what’s the point of making all that money?”

DiMaio snorted. “To leave something for Dan Junior. He probably figures he’s gotta give Junior the biggest head start he can come up with, because Junior’s gonna run through every penny as soon as the old man’s not around anymore to tell him what to do.”

“You think it’ll happen that way?”

“Sure. Junior’s got no nose for this business, and he don’t seem to like it much. He’s only here because his father’s handing it to him on a silver platter.”

“That’s what Hacker said. But he also said that Junior claims the old man needs help, that’s why he’s here.”

“Help!” DiMaio snorted. “What a pair. They’re helping each other, you and me are busting our butts, and the people gonna move into this dump are gonna get leaks at their windows and short out their wires every time they plug in the damn coffeepot while the TV’s on. Help. Jesus,” he said. “I hope nobody ever tries to help me.”

It took me the rest of the morning to get a promise out of DiMaio that he wasn’t going to go straight to the Crowell trailer with a crowbar.

“The police will handle it,” I said, not for the first time. I jumped down off the platform, stepped to the edge of the scaffold to peer critically at the course of bricks I’d just completed. It was a good, sharp line, the joints not as perfectly identical to each other as the joints DiMaio had done, but overall, starting and ending at the right spots, level and clean and pleasing to look at. “When it’s laid out for them, as far as I have it, they’ll be able to fill it in. If what happened to Reg is connected up, they’ll find it.”

“If that’s true, then what the fuck are you crapping around up here laying bricks for? Why haven’t you gone to them already?”

“Because there’s one more piece,” I said. “One more thing I don’t understand.”

“Who the hell gives a shit what you understand? With all due respect, Smith.”

“You’re right,” I said, climbing back onto the planks of the platform. “But there’s someone else involved, Mike. A guy who’s connected, and bad enough on his own that that almost doesn’t matter. He’s slipped out from under enough raps already. I want to make sure he doesn’t slip out from under this one.”

DiMaio turned to look at me. “Connected? Who? And what’s he got to do with this, any of it?”

“I don’t know the answer to that, but it’s what I want to be able to hand to the cops, all tied up and wrapped in blinking neon. Because the cops have missed him before, when they should have had him.” And if they hadn’t, Lenny Pelligrini’s mother might not be sitting dressed in black in her darkened living room. And her sister might not be looking at her own son with fear in her eyes. And Chuck DeMattis might still be a cop, might not have run out of words to say to me in a tiny back garden in Howard Beach.

“Who is this guy?” DiMaio wanted to know.

I looked at him over my shoulder. “Mike, you were ready to take me on right here on the scaffold a few days ago, when you thought
I
was connected. I was dumb enough to go up against this guy myself yesterday, and lucky enough to have a friend there who saved my sorry butt. You’re probably smarter than I am, but I’m not sure you’re as lucky.”

“All of which means what?”

“Means I’m not going to tell you who the hell he is.”

“Oh, because you’re being a big hero and saving
my
sorry butt?”

“No,” I said. “Because I don’t think I’m enough of a hero to do that, so I don’t want to have to try.”

DiMaio went back to his bricks, and I to mine. A few minutes later as he laid a level along the windowsill he said to me, “So what are you going to do about it?”

“About what?”

“About this guy who’s connected.”

“I’m going to try one more time to see if I can tie him in.”

“How?”

“You don’t need to know.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I do.”

I looked over to where he was.

“I do,” he said, “because I want to go down there and knock Crowell’s fucking head off. Both of those bastards, and Lozano too. If I’m not gonna do that, I want to know exactly why. What is it you’re gonna do and how long is it gonna take you?”

“One more night,” I said. “Tonight.”

“Doing what?”

“Mike—”

“You tell me, or God help me, Smith, all bets are off.”

He was facing me now, on the platform. He’d put down his tools, the brick he’d been about to place; his hands were empty.

I watched him there, standing without movement, not advancing or retreating; sure of what he wanted, sure of what he could do.

“I’m going to break into the Crowell trailer and go through the files,” I said.

For a moment, no reaction; then a grin broke onto his face. “Shit,” he said. “You are?”

“Why not?”

“You can do shit like that?”

“I can’t lay bricks,” I said. “I’ve got to be able to do something.”

He shook his head. Then he said, “Looking for what?”

“I don’t know. That connection. The thing to tie this guy to them.”

“And if you find it, you’ll go to the cops?”

“Either way, Mike. I’m going to take this one last shot. But either way.”

At lunch break I took a quick trip to the pay phone on the corner and called Lydia.

“Crowell Construction.”

“It’s me.”

“Oh, are you still alive?”

“Not funny.”

“Depends.”

“I need you to do something for me.”

“Anything.”

“You mean that?”

“No.”

“Well, see if I care. I want the code for the trailer alarm.”

“Here?”

“Where else?”

“Well, not right now.”

“No,” I said. “When you can. Call my service. I’ll call in. Will you be able to?”

“I think so. Today?”

“Yes. For tonight.”

“Want help?”

“No.”

“Damn.”

“Sorry.”

“Got to go,” she said. “Good-bye.”

Lydia was as good as her word; but she always is. At afternoon coffee break, I went back to the corner phone, called my service, and had a smoky-voiced young woman tell me, “‘Outside, three, five, one and four together, seven. Inside, one, two, eight, four, four. On the wall behind the door. File key, Verna’s desk, top drawer.’ I hope that makes sense to you.”

“Completely,” I said. “Run it by me again?”

She did, and I made sure I had it. I stuck the flat mason’s pencil and the scrap of paper I’d scratched the numbers on into my back pocket, thanked her and hung up.

I finished out the day on the scaffold, cleaned my tools, rode the hoist down with the other men. DiMaio was edgy, staring into the sun still high over the river as the hoist lowered toward the mud and dust of the end of the day.

“Tonight?” he said to me as we crossed the bare concrete, made our way between the steel columns, under the exposed ductwork and piping and conduit that would be the lungs and arteries of this building, when it was ready.

“What?”

“Whatever you’re doing. Your next big move, whatever. Then you go to the cops?”

“Yes.”

“No matter what?”

“No matter what, Mike.”

“You get what you want, you don’t get it, it don’t make no difference? You’re not gonna wait?”

“No.”

He nodded. “Good. Because I’m going on up to see Reg, now. I’m gonna tell him you got it figured out and you’re gonna get those SOBs.”

I looked at him in surprise. “Is he conscious? Will he understand? Will he respond?”

He shrugged. “I haven’t seen him respond to nothing I said, yet. But I think he’ll understand.”

twenty

W
e clocked out with three or four other masons, got a nod and a grunt from Lozano, deep in his paperwork. He raised his eyes to us; the look that fell on me might have been a little longer, more uncertain, than the one DiMaio got, but I didn’t react, punched my time card like a guy with nothing more on his mind than a beer at the end of the day. DiMaio cut Lozano a look of his own, but Lozano didn’t catch it, and DiMaio, after a moment, turned and left. He headed for the ramp, for the street and the heat and the traffic of a city afternoon.

I didn’t.

I wandered away from the field office trailers, away from the ramp, away from the other men, the guys wiping sweat from the backs of their necks, lighting cigarettes, jiggling pockets full of subway change. No one saw me go.

On the south side, where our building butted up against the buildings that sat on the other half of the block, the walls were up already for the places that would hold janitor’s sinks, telephone switchgear, electrical boards. Much later, other trades would come and put their equipment into these rooms the masons had built. Right now, small and windowless, their concrete block rough and their floors unfinished, these dim, square caves smelled dank, echoed with the silence of things begun and abandoned.

I settled into one of them, decided it was made for phone equipment, imagined in my head the endless clicking as contacts and wires shuttled future conversations into this building and out of it, back and forth from this place to the wide world, in the day when this place we were building would be full of life.

I lit a cigarette, listened to the tiny sizzle of the match as I dropped it into a puddle on the concrete beside me. In the dark I opened my lunchbox, took out the thermos I’d filled at the afternoon coffee break. I smoked, I drank black coffee, and I waited.

Construction workers left the site at four-thirty. The Crowell office closed for the day an hour later. I’d give Dans Senior and Junior another half hour after that, then go over and see if the coast was clear. If the trailer wasn’t empty, I’d reoccupy my switchgear room, give them more time. I wanted to get into that trailer tonight.

Probably I was being a fool, probably there was no percentage in this. What I wanted to find in the trailer was something, anything, that would tie Louie Falco into the Crowells, into the substitute-materials scam and the deaths that I was sure, somehow, grew out of it, so that, when I turned the Crowells over to the cops, I could give them Falco too. Falco all knitted in, Falco in a way no one could overlook, Falco wrapped up in the way Chuck had wanted him wrapped up, when Chuck brought me into this with hearty fellowship and half-truths.