No Colder Place
No Colder Place
Lydia Chin & Bill Smith [4]
S. J. Rozan
(1996)
Rating: ★★★☆☆
Tags: Mystery
Mysteryttt
Bill Smith is going undercover again as a favor to an old friend who wants him to investigate thievery on the 40-story Manhattan site of Crowell Construction’s latest project. His bricklaying is a little rusty, but passable as he checks out the foreman who’s under suspicion. A crane operator has disappeared—along with some heavy machinery. But when a well-orchestrated riot causes the foreman’s “accidental” death, Smith plunges into a morass of bribery, blackmail and blood looking for answers. With the help of his Chinese-American partner Lydia Chin, he follows a trail of twisted loyalties, old-fashioned greed and organized crime to its heart-stopping conclusion. Murder—with no end in sight.
S.J. Rozan won the 1998 Anthony Award for *No Colder Place*.
### Amazon.com Review
S. J. Rozan is a New York architect who knows how to design a fine mystery novel: by doing her homework, using the best quality materials, and keeping the surprises coming until the very end. In her fourth book about unlikely detective partners Lydia Chin and Bill Smith, Rozan plants Smith high up in the clouds, laying brick on a troubled building site while Chin gets a job as a secretary in the construction bosses’ trailer. Both see plenty of action, as what at first appears to be a simple case of a few crooked construction workers becomes a much more complicated story of twisted family relationships. Previous Chin/Smith outings available in paperback include *Mandarin Plaid*, *China Trade*, and *Concourse*.
### From Kirkus Reviews
It’s a lucky thing for p.i. Bill Smith that he’s got construction experience; it’s a perfect cover for him to get close to masonry foreman Joe Romeo—who’s suspected of bookmaking, mob connections, and a lot worse—at the same time that he’s keeping an eye on the suspicious series of accidents at the new 40-story apartment building that’s rising at Broadway and 99th. In no time at all Bill’s succeeded in persuading his partner, Mike DiMaio, that he isn’t much of a mason, and he’s placed his first off-track bet with Romeo. But don’t count on his collecting very soon, since Romeo promptly joins missing crane operator Lenny Pelligrini and mortar mixer Reg Phillips as the latest casualty of the Armstrong building. At the same time that Bill’s turning up evidence linking the cycle of violence to Louie Falco (mobbed-up childhood friend of Chuck DeMattis, the colleague who hired Bill to go undercover), Bill’s partner Lydia Chin, also undercover at the Armstrong site, overhears hints that implicate general contractors Dan Crowell Sr. and Dan Crowell Jr., and take-no-prisoners Denise Armstrong herself points the finger at employment-coalition agitator Chester Hamilton. Is there any builder or subcontractor or unaffiliated lowlife in New York who doesn’t have a finger in the Armstrong pie? Despite the epidemic of corruption, Rozan’s focus on the tragic Armstrong building makes this the sharpest, clearest, most purposefully focused of her four Smith/Chin mysteries (Mandarin Plaid, 1996, etc.). (Author tour) — *Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.*
no colder place
s. j. rozan
Contents
no colder place
t
here’s no place colder than a construction site.
An ironworker told me why once, explained the chill that pulls the warmth from your bones while you’re working, the wind that blows through steel and concrete carrying the ancient dampness of echoing caves.
He was a welder, used to working the high steel—two hundred feet up and nothing between him and the air above the city but the girder he was on and the harness that, half the time, he didn’t wear. He had a leather face and scarred, thick hands. We were sitting over a beer at Shorty’s one evening in that time of year when the end of the workday and the start of the night push on each other, when everything feels like it’s already too late.
A building going up doesn’t live, he said. It grows, like that monster Frankenstein built—hammered, welded, bolted together out of things you bring from other places, things that had their own histories long before they were part of this. It looks like what you want it to be, but it’s not. Not yet.
And while it grows, it pulls a little life from each of the men who work on it, making them leave something, something they are, behind.
Then one day, he said, when it’s stolen enough life, stored up enough history, it starts to breathe. It begins to live, and living things are warm. You can feel that moment. The deep chill goes, replaced by a cold that’s only temperature, no different from anywhere else. It’s not a construction site after that. It’s a building, the past of its bones and skin part of it, what they are making it what it is, old things in a new place. And the lives of the men who built it giving it life.
I don’t know if he was right or not. I didn’t know him well, and I didn’t run across him again. He was getting old, and I was young then. I don’t know how much longer he had, or wanted, working the high steel.
But I know there’s a bone-chilling cold, and a sense of never being alone in an old and lonely place, on every building site I’ve ever been on.
I felt it the first hot July morning I walked through the gate onto the Armstrong site, into the noise and the dust and the mud behind the wooden fence that wrapped half the block. Outside, on Broadway, traffic flowed with a purpose, most of it heading south, commuters getting a jump on the day. Grilles still blanked off storefronts and the sidewalks were largely empty, square rough concrete expanses like ice floes supporting, here and there, a sleeping figure drifting each through his own wilderness.
The site, though, was jumping. Seven-thirty was starting time and, though I was early, I wasn’t first. A guy in a leather apron hefted a stack of two-by-fours up a wooden ramp and disappeared into the first-floor darkness. A pickup backed beeping toward a jury-rigged truck dock. I looked at its load: pallets of bricks. I’d be seeing them later. The crane operator lounged drinking coffee in his cab, one steel-toed boot propped on the open window. Soon, some crew would need steel studs, sacks of concrete, a half-ton of mechanical equipment up on the eighteenth floor, and this guy would swing into action. The right switch, the right lever, a gentle touch, and he’d do what Superman used to do in the contraband comics I stole as a kid: one man moving the weight of the world, making everyone else’s work possible.
That’s the job Lenny Pelligrini was doing when he disappeared.
The building was going to top out at forty stories. It was half of that now, the core sticking up from the center, leading the skeleton by thirty feet. Rising from the lowest floor and encircling the building, the brickwork was going in, starting late and low because the other trades won’t work below a mason. I shielded my eyes, leaned my head back to stare at the stark lines of the highest steel, black against the ageless blue sky.
I headed for the wooden ramp, following the carpenter. Half a dozen steps into the site, over the scrunch of gravel under my own steel-tipped boots, I heard a yell.
“Hey, yo! Hard-hat site! What’re you carrying it for, save your jewels?”
I waved an acknowledgment to the guy with the two-way radio and slipped my hard hat on. I’d worked construction in high school and college, and some after, but I’d been away a long time. Once, I wouldn’t have stepped inside a fence with my head bare, any more than, now, I’d grab my revolver to go cover an assignment without checking the load. Safety becomes instinct; it’s easier that way. I wondered what else used to be instinctive to me on a building site, what else I’d forgotten.
The dry gritty heat of the yard halted suddenly at the top of the ramp as though it had tried, failed, and by now given up any attempt to confront the chill and the dimness inside. Caged lightbulbs strung loosely along girders led toward a warren of trailers in the back, and I headed that way, smelling the sourness of long-unturned earth. As I heard my footsteps echo on the bare concrete, I felt that chill against my skin, that old coldness, and I knew I’d forgotten that too.
Thick black Magic Marker labeled the plywood doors to the contractor’s field offices. Mocking the corridor-and-apartment setup the finished building would offer, the half-dozen cheap trailers faced each other across a cramped, ceilingless DMZ. I passed Crowell, first on the left and biggest, because they were the general contractor, running the job, in charge. Mandelstam was next—plumbing—and across from him, the masonry sub, Lacertosa. That door was standing open.
I knocked and walked in.
The guy behind the desk raised his eyes without raising his head. He had a lined, shadowed face, pale blue eyes, a pencil stuck behind his ear, and a pencil in his hand. Papers piled the desk, but neatly. His greeting, not unfriendly, was, “Yeah?”
“Smith,” I said. “Union sent me.” I showed him my union card, legitimate but less than twenty-four hours old.
“Uh-huh. Mason or laborer?”
“Mason.”
“Uh-huh. Fill these out.”
While I did the paperwork, he went back to his own. When I was done, he glanced over what I gave him.
“Why’d you leave Houston?”
I’d never lived in Houston, but that was the story. That was because DeMattis, who’d sent me here, had people in Houston and could cover the paperwork there, in case anyone got interested enough to run a check. And though my accent was Kentucky, it was faded enough from years overseas and up North that it could pass for Texas to any ears but a Texan’s.
“Hadn’t worked in a year,” I answered.
He grunted. Hard-luck Texas stories probably didn’t even register on anyone in construction anymore.
“Hope you stayed in shape,” he told me, shuffling my papers. “You ain’t young.”
“That’s true.”
He looked up with a slow, ironic smile. It softened his face, made him look both older and kinder. “Me neither. Got bumped up to sitting on my butt just in time. Okay, your crew’s on six. Foreman’s Joe Romeo. He’ll tell you when to eat and where to piss.” He handed me a paper to sign and I signed it. “We’re up against a schedule, but do quality, okay? Joints even, struck clean—you know the drill.” He sighed. “Crowell’s a pain in the ass, both of them, father and son. Old man don’t get up on the scaffold much anymore, but Junior comes around bustin’ nuts, so watch out for him. At least the architect’s rep don’t give us no trouble. Owner’s a lady, by the way, and she comes around sometimes too, so watch your mouth if you can. Use the south hoist, north one’s materials only. Got a problem, see Romeo, then me. John Lozano, by the way.” He half stood and offered me his hand. “Smith, huh? You a paisan?”
“No,” I said, “I’m a mick.”
“You’re on the wrong crew. How come you ain’t driving nails?”
“I’m a spy.”
He grinned, I grinned, and I headed back through the maze of naked steel columns and dangling wires to find the south hoist. John Lozano went back to his paperwork, probably thinking that what I’d just answered him wasn’t true.
I exchanged morning nods with the mechanic running the hoist. Boring, but not a bad job, seated and indoors. They put the older guys there, the guys with seniority, not ready to retire but not productive on a crew anymore. The hoist creaked and grumbled as it hauled me up.
Once past the second-floor level I could see outside the fence. The old buildings up and down Broadway, brick and worked limestone, copper cornices and, on the one on the corner, a frieze of terra cotta suns and lions, stared down at this rising, muscular, unliving frame I was moving through. Looking at them, the early shadows lying across their facades, the sun blanking their windows, I had an uncomfortable sense of being surrounded by the smugness of disappointed hopes. You think you’ll be different, those buildings seemed to say to this one. Bigger, stronger, better. Young. New. We thought so too, once. But look, look now. And you’re not made of anything different from what we’re made of. You’ll be just like us.
I turned away, faced into the site, waited for the hoist to stop. I thanked the guy running it, stepped onto the raw concrete of the sixth floor and went to find Joe Romeo, the guy I’d been sent to see.