No Colder Place (2 page)

Chuck DeMattis had sent me. DeMattis was an ex-cop, off the job about four years. He’d gotten a P.I. license the day he’d retired, but unlike most of us, who work from home or out of someone else’s back room, Chuck wasn’t interested in running his new business from his Staten Island address. He’d rented a corner suite in a new tower in midtown and moved in before the paint was dry.

“You wanna attract ducks, you put out a decoy and sit in a duck blind,” he’d explained. “I wanna attract lawyers.”

The building was a steel-and-smoked-glass office tower in the East Fifties, a single sleek box that now stood where a dozen brick walk-ups had been for a century, since their developer knocked down the farmhouse, dug up the crops, and paved the fields for streets.

The marble lobby was hushed and cool. The silent elevator whisked me to Chuck DeMattis’s twenty-eighth-floor office in less time than I usually take to climb the two slanted flights to my own place downtown.

Chuck and I knew each other professionally, had thrown each other cases once or twice over the years. We weren’t friends, not really, but it was mostly a question of style. DeMattis was a team player who liked to party and see his name in the papers. I keep to the shadows, quiet places where there’s good music and you can hear yourself talk, if anyone’s there you want to talk to. DeMattis wore Hugo Boss suits and alligator shoes and claimed he could reach anybody in New York with two phone calls, but it was his connections that stopped him on this one.

“Made sense they came to me,” he’d said, tapping coffee grounds into the stainless-steel bar sink in his private office, all sharp edges and glass surfaces and wide windows filled with great expanses of city and sky. In the outer room two secretaries juggled the phones while a bookkeeper probably juggled the books. On the other side of the suite, Chuck’s full-time operatives spent most of their days staring at computer screens and talking on the phone, the men in shirts and ties, the women in heels and hose, and all visibly armed whether or not they ever hit the streets because agents ready for hard action at any moment impress the hell out of clients.

Chuck was clean-shaven, balding, and brimming with energy and good-natured street smarts, at least in front of the hired help. He brought me a cup of espresso, rich and steamy and bitter, and told me why I was here.

“They need somebody to put a net over a guinea, they come to a guinea P.I., right? How’s the coffee?”

“It’s good, Chuck.”

He beamed. “Always. My girls, they can type and shit, but if I ever get one knows how to make a decent espresso, I’m gonna divorce Marie and marry her.” Chuck had been married to Marie, a cheerful, hard-partying blonde, since the day after their high-school graduation. He gave her, every year, a present to celebrate their wedding anniversary, and another to celebrate the anniversary of the day she’d said yes.

“You really come in from the country just because I called?” Chuck asked me, rounding his desk to settle into a huge, soft leather chair.

“I drove in this morning,” I told him.

He shook his head. “You’re nuts, coming back to this furnace if you got somewhere else to be.”

“I don’t see you sitting around your pool on Staten Island.”

“You would if you ever came out like I invited you. But I remember about you; you’re the one don’t like people.”

“Not people, Chuck. Sitting around.”

Chuck sighed. “Yeah. Whatever. You’re ready to work, I got this thing.”

“Tell me.”

He sipped his own espresso, rested the tiny cup in its saucer on the king-size glass panel that served as his desk. “Crowell—you heard of them, right? Big outfit. General contractors.”

“Sure,” I said. “You see their logo around town. They have a few projects going.”

“Two right now,” Chuck agreed. “One wrapping up, one about six months in. Which is probably about half the construction business in New York, these days.”

“Times are bad in that business?”

“Money’s tight, I don’t know. It happens that way in construction, they tell me. You buy property, plan to build, then you get caught with your pants down when the bank rethinks its investment strategy, or whatever they call it. Anyway, that’s what’s got Crowell’s balls in an uproar.”

“What has?”

“They got problems on the one site, the newer one. Upper Broadway, Ninety-ninth Street. Forty-story residential.”

“I think I read about it. Commercial on the bottom, and mixed housing?”

Chuck nodded. “Low, middle, and high income. For poor people, normal people, and yuppies. Whaddaya suppose is the difference in the apartments?” He furrowed his brow. “I mean, you think they got marble bathrooms in the yuppie ones and tile in the regular ones, and maybe outhouses for the welfare ones?”

“Bidets,” I said. “With a lifetime supply of Perrier.”

He snickered. “Yeah. Anyway, the developer’s some black lady named Armstrong. Otherwise they might be having trouble up there, putting up even half a yuppie building in that neighborhood.”

“But they’re not?”

“Nah, the neighborhood seems happy enough. Crowell says they went out of their way to hire locals. And the building’s supposed to be pretty classy. Good-quality materials, all that shit. Armstrong lady wants it that way. What the hell, she owns it, she can do whatever she wants. ’Course, from the way old man Crowell’s sitting here telling me what a great job it is, you’d think he owned it and designed it himself, besides building it with his own hands.”

“Old man Crowell?”

“That’s why they call it Crowell. Dan Crowells Senior and Junior. Family business. Senior’s been doing this all his life, though he don’t get up into the buildings much anymore. Truth is, he’s sick. Leukemia, something like that. I mean, he looked okay when he came to see me, but nobody, but maybe him, seems to think he’s gonna live more than another year or two.”

“He told you that?”

“Not a chance. I checked them out between when they called me and when they got here.”

“What made you do that?”

“I always do that. Clients never tell you the stuff you really need to know. You gotta find it out for yourself. You must have that same problem.”

“All the time,” I said. “So the old man’s sick?”

“Seems that way. And whatever he’s got, it keeps him moving kind of slow, so he stays in the office pretty much now. Between you and me, I think it drives him crazy that he can’t get around the way he used to, up and down the scaffold, showing the guys how you stick a rebar in the concrete, how you hammer a nail. That he has to depend on the kid to do it.”

“Crowell Junior’s the hands-on guy?”

“Coupla years out of college, was working somewhere else. Now I guess he thinks he’s taking over. Looks a little soft to me for that kind of work, but like everything else these days, construction’s more filling out forms and less pounding nails than it used to be.”

“And they both came to see you?”

“Yeah, sure. Though I got the idea Junior didn’t think much of the plan. While the old man’s talking, Junior sits here rolling his eyes, coming up with reasons not to hire me. I didn’t like it.”

“That he didn’t want to hire you?”

“No, that he was disrespecting the old man like that, in front of me. I mean, it’s not like I’m their old family friend.”

“In that case, it would be worse.”

“Yeah, true. Anyway, he ticked the old man off, too.”

“But the old man did want to hire you,” I said. “Which is why I’m here.”

“You’re here ’cause you ain’t bright enough to stay away. But yeah, Crowell’s got a problem. They been having trouble. Times this tight, they had to shave their bid pretty close to get this job. When you do that you don’t wink at shit you might’ve let go if you had a little margin to throw away.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“At the beginning, some small stuff—you get it on construction sites sometimes. Some tools walking, some deliveries shorted. Then early on, someone stole a frontloader.”

“Stole it?”

“Just drove the damn thing off the site at four in the morning. Security guy was snoozing. They canned him, of course. Anyway, Crowell owns their own equipment, they don’t lease, so they took the loss.”

“But they must have been insured.”

“Oh, yeah. It was more of a pain in the ass than anything else. But something like that, it takes planning. So it started the Crowells thinking, and maybe watching the site more carefully than most.”

“And what happened?”

“Nothing like that again. Small stuff keeps going on, equipment and tools disappearing. Like anywhere; you almost can’t stop it. But now that they’re looking, they see a guy they don’t like the looks of. Name of Joe Romeo. Masonry foreman. They got a feeling he’s into some bad shit.”

“Like what?”

“Shylocking, bookmaking. Also they think maybe drugs, nothing big, just some weed, but they don’t want it around.”

“The thefts?”

“Probably not. They don’t put it past him, but his movements don’t correlate.”

“I love it when you talk dirty, Chuck.”

He glanced at me over the rim of his espresso cup, but let it go. “Anyway, Crowell’d like to get rid of Romeo, but the union takes things like that personal, unless you got serious proof. And Crowell don’t want no union trouble. A strike’d kill the schedule, Crowell loses a fortune, which on this job they don’t particularly have. This Armstrong lady got no use for bad publicity either; it’s her first big building, Crowell tells me, and being black and a lady, there’s a lot of people out there just waiting for her to fall on her ass. So Crowell’s been sort of lying low on the whole thing.

“Then about two weeks ago, this one crane operator don’t show up for work. Don’t call, nothing. They call him, can’t find him. They lose half a day with the crane, everybody’s behind, guys are sitting around with their thumbs up their asses while they wait for another operator to haul his butt in from Queens. Crowell’s busting a gasket. Romeo and this operator, Pelligrini, been seen in each other’s company. Someone up there says they weren’t getting along so well, the last couple days. Now, maybe it’s one thing, maybe it’s another, but Crowell’s fed up. They want Romeo out of there.

“So they come to me. Because, see, I met Crowell Senior at some testimonial dinner for some guy the other week. You know how it is, you gotta keep schmoozing, you wanna stay in business. At this thing, Crowell’s already complaining about his equipment and shit walking. I ask him does he want someone to look into it, he says no, it ain’t worth it. But I give him my card, just in case. He says yeah, he heard of me, I’m famous.” Chuck spread his hands, palms up. Being famous is something that just happens to some guys.

“So this Pelligrini thing,” he went on, “I guess that’s the last straw. They come to me. They’re telling me, start from Pelligrini, go undercover, see what I can dig up. But come on, I know every guinea in New York. Can you see me undercover in a room full of wops? Now, Crowell don’t care how I work the case. The old man says he don’t need to know. I get the feeling he don’t want to know, in case I find a way to deal with Romeo that ain’t exactly kosher. The kid don’t like it. ‘You got to have more control,’ he tells the old man. ‘You can’t not know what’s going on.’ The old man tells him to put a sock in it, that Chuck DeMattis knows what he’s doing. ‘DeMattis’ll take care of Romeo,’ he tells him. ‘You worry about getting the building built.’ So I think about it for a while, and I figure as long as Crowell’s letting me do this any way I want, I’ll give you a call.”

“What about your operatives?” I asked. “You have about two hundred guys who work for you.”

“I got fourteen, and between you and me, buddy, they’re the Stick-Up-the-Ass Squad. College boys. They’re good investigators, make a good impression on clients, can follow a hell of a paper trail, but send ’em undercover to drink with a mason? Hah.”

He stopped for some more espresso. “You, it’s different,” he said. “We could set you up, just some guy, nobody knows the difference. Whaddaya say?”

“I’ve been to college, Chuck.”

“Yeah, me too, but on us it don’t show.” Chuck said this as though he were reassuring me that neither of us looked our age.

“Well,” I said, “what’s the gag?”

“Depends. I was thinking we find out where Romeo drinks, whatever, you move in on him, get to be his new best friend.” He winked.

“And the point?”

“Get close, find out something Crowell can use to gently suggest to Romeo that he go away. Crowell’s not looking to lock Romeo up, just to lose him.”

“Will drinking with him get me close enough?”

“You could get closer?”

I sipped some more espresso, watched the city shimmer beneath the hot blue sky. “What are we really talking about here, Chuck? Guys walk away from their jobs for a lot of reasons. You really think this Pelligrini guy not showing up for work has something to do with Joe Romeo?”

“Me, it’s nothing from nothing.” Chuck shrugged. “But old man Crowell, he had a hunch.”

“Just a hunch?”

“That’s what he said. Between you and me, I think you’re right: This Pelligrini thing’s got nothing to do with anything. But that ain’t really the point. It sort of lit a fire under them, Crowell, when Pelligrini disappeared, and now they decided they wanna take care of this Joe Romeo situation before it gets out of hand.”

I finished my espresso, looked into the grounds coating the sides of the cup. “Lot of Italians in this conversation, Chuck,” I said.

“Just two, besides me.”

“Uh-huh. How many Italians do you need before you find one who’s connected?”

“Is that one of those lightbulb jokes?”

“If it is it’s probably not funny.”

Chuck crossed one ankle over his knee, pushing back his chair to give himself room. “This guy Romeo,” he said. “His name came up before. He’s not connected, because nobody’ll have him. Oh, he’s got guys behind him, especially for the shylocking operation, guys he goes to. And he works with some bookie out of Vegas, what I hear. But no one local wants him. That’s a bad sign in a bad guy. I don’t think Crowell knows this, at least they didn’t say. But you might be doing the world a service if you could roust him.”