No Colder Place (3 page)
And this was why I worked with Chuck, why I’d come here at all to this high-priced, high-profile place with the endlessly ringing phones and the framed
People
magazine article spotlighting “Ten Top Private Eye Firms for the Nineties.” Behind the press releases and the late-night club-hopping and the winks and accommodating grins, the reasons Chuck had become a cop in the first place, so long ago, were still alive.
I lit a cigarette. Chuck shoved a slab of black marble across the desk for me to use as an ashtray.
“I used to work construction,” I told him. “I can lay bricks.”
“You’re shitting me.” Chuck’s eyes opened wide. “You don’t even
speak
Italian.”
“Who do you think lays bricks in Dublin?”
“You been to Dublin?”
“No.”
“They got a lot of crooked walls there, my fine Irish friend. Is that an offer?”
“Why not? I’d rather work with the guy than drink with him, I think. And it’s easier. What if he drinks in some dive on Staten Island?”
“You’re all gonna be sorry you said shit like that when we secede, you know.” Chuck’s tone was completely serious. A man’s home is his castle.
“As long as you issue me a passport. So what about it?”
He steepled his fingers and tapped them to his lips, considering. “Well, okay. But I got a bad feeling about that site.”
I grinned. “Aren’t you going to back me up?”
“With everything I got, buddy. We’ll do all your background shit from here, just call. You want me to send someone onto the site to babysit you?”
“No way. And do me a favor, let me do the background stuff myself. I don’t want to have to get a sign-off from your bookkeeper every time I need a license run.”
He frowned. “Just hand you off the case?”
“You and I don’t do things the same way, Chuck.”
I pulled on my cigarette, tapped gray ash onto the black marble. Framed in the window behind Chuck, a twin-engine plane made its way south over the East River. It was silent and the line of its flight was unvarying; it might have been pulled by a string.
“Now you put it that way,” Chuck said slowly, “maybe it’s a good idea. For the same reason Crowell don’t want to know.”
“You think I might do something you wouldn’t approve of?”
Chuck raised his eyebrows. “You could think of something I wouldn’t approve of? But anyway, maybe it’s better. You’re right, we do things differently. And I’m up to my ass in other things around here. Truth is I got no time for this, only I didn’t want to turn Crowell down. Could be a good paying customer for the long term, you know what I mean? But this’ll work out good. Your case, you work it. Only I don’t know how Crowell’s gonna feel about it.”
“Don’t tell them. I’ll report to you, you report to them. I’ll be working for you, Chuck. I have no problem with that. I just don’t want to be part of the DeMattis team.”
“If you’re sure that’s how you want it. But whatever, I got all these geeks back there, costing me overhead whether they’re running licenses or reading the racing form. You could avail yourself.”
“I have other things I’d rather avail myself of.”
“Ah.” Chuck smiled. “Your Chinese girl?”
“Woman,” I corrected him. “Licensed P.I. Independent operator with a four-year apprenticeship, four years solo in the field, and a one-room office in Chinatown. And not mine.”
“Whose fault is that?”
“Mine.”
“You want my advice? As a happily married man?”
“No.”
“Okay, here goes. You know that old joke, where the punchline is, ‘Be patient, jackass’?”
“Uh-huh.”
“That’s my advice.”
“Thanks, Chuck. Can we get back to work?”
“Sure. Where were we?”
“You were about to give me the case. Let’s talk fee. When it’s over, I’ll send you a bill.”
“If that’s how you want it.”
That was how I wanted it, and that’s how we did it. Chuck handed me the file, told me I’d have a union card by tomorrow. We worked out a cover we thought would fit, and I went home to wait. On the way I stopped at a builder’s-supply place on the Lower East Side and bought three different trowels, a hard hat, and a pair of heavy leather gloves. I sent Chuck the bill.
t
he scaffold I was on bounced slightly, its delicate bracing cutting the view across Broadway into triangular puzzle pieces as I made my way from the hoist and along the west side of the building to find my crew.
It was true, what I’d told Chuck: that I could get closer to Joe Romeo by being where he was eight hours a day than by trying to edge into his after-hours life; and that masonry work was something I could do. Being assigned to Romeo’s crew seemed like a natural if Chuck could arrange it. It had taken him a few days, construction work being so slow in New York right now, but he’d arranged it, with a two-hundred-dollar-savings bond in the name of the newborn son of a mason on the crew, and a case of Glenfiddich for the guy at the union hall who sent that guy, this morning, to a garage foundation in Queens and me to upper Broadway.
It was true, and I could do it, and it might even be the best way to work the case. But there was something else, another reason I wanted to be here, where small dust clouds billowed six floors below me as men crossed the site and headed for the time clocks, where the deep-throated growl of an engine starting up was blanketed by the pounding screech of a jackhammer, where I felt a trickle of sweat wander down my back as I carried my gear and my lunchbox along the rough planks of the scaffolding in the early morning.
Restless. Not the right word, but the best I had. It didn’t cover the small, sad jolt—not fear but like it—of waking in the early morning; or the long, pointless hours not of sleep but of nothing else, in the night. Sometimes, playing the piano could ease the tightness in my back. Sometimes, I could feel myself calming as I sat on the porch of my upstate cabin at the end of the day, drinking Maker’s Mark and watching the thick gold sunlight linger on the tops of the tallest trees and then gently slide away, leaving them in darkness. But I’d been at the cabin for a week when I checked in with my service in New York and found Chuck had called me. Usually I don’t even call in from upstate; I did it because the shadows of the old trees around my cabin, the music, even the bourbon, none of it was helping, not this time.
I’d come in because Chuck had called, because I needed to work. And mason’s work, hard and sweaty and resulting, at the end of each day, in something that hadn’t been there before, something solid and undeniable, was the right kind of work.
The three other guys on the crew were already there when I got to where I was supposed to be. The one who wasn’t was Joe Romeo.
“I’m Smith,” I said to them as they lounged with their backs against the courses of brick they’d laid yesterday, one of them smoking, another finishing a cup of black coffee. “I’m new on this crew.”
“Replacing Nicky, huh? I heard he got something closer to home. Mike DiMaio.” The coffee drinker pushed himself to his feet, offered me his hand. I had my gloves on already; I didn’t take them off to shake with him, didn’t want him to know my hands weren’t as roughed-up and scarred as the hands of a middle-aged mason were likely to be. DiMaio was young and stocky and short, maybe five-four. He had a thick pale mustache and bristling, brush-cut sandy hair. “You’re with me,” he said. “I guess that means we gotta get started. Shit.” He grinned, picked up his gloves, crushed the empty cup. He pitched it over the unfinished wall back into the building. I heard it skid across the concrete floor. DiMaio pointed to the other men. “This is Sam Buck. He’s gonna sit on his ass as long as he can ’cause that’s the kind of work he likes. And this here’s Angelo Lucca.”
Buck, a shaggy-haired dark guy with narrow shoulders and thick muscles on his upper arms, said, “Fuck you, DiMaio,” without particular interest. He stuck his cigarette in his mouth and shook my hand without rising. Lucca, also dark and bigger than either Buck or DiMaio, wrapped a wide hand around the scaffold steel and hauled himself up. “Good to meet you.” He grinned, toed Buck with a mortar-stained boot. “Come on, Sam. Joe’s gonna be around soon.”
“Fuck you, Lucca,” Buck muttered. Maybe it was his morning greeting. He added, “And fuck Joe. He don’t scare me.”
“We’re down here,” DiMaio told me. Buck got to his feet as Mike DiMaio and I started along the scaffold.
“Joe’s the foreman?” I asked as I followed him. Like some other muscled short guys I’ve known, DiMaio walked with a bowlegged gait, like a sailor.
“Joe Romeo,” DiMaio said over his shoulder. “Stay out of his way. You make your quota, do good work, Joe leaves you alone, which is what you want. He’ll break your balls some, being you’re new, but just ride it out and he’ll find someone else.”
We stopped two bays over, where the brick courses rose only to knee level, anchored with shiny steel tabs into the rough gray concrete-block backup. The backup was all in, dark rectangles sloppy with mortar enclosing the building top to bottom, barriers between in and out with voids at their centers where the window openings gaped.
“You seen the drawings?” DiMaio asked me.
“No.”
“A lot of pain-in-the-ass stuff on this job, corbels, arches, setbacks like over here.” He pointed at a dull steel column about sixteen inches in from the building’s skin, standing in an unfinished collar of brickwork. “You’ll get into it. Work slow when you start, ask questions if you got ’em.”
He cupped his hands around his mouth, yelled through the window opening toward the center of the building. “Phillips! Yo, Betty Crocker! We’re ready to go anytime, you wanna bring some of that batter over here! Make it chocolate,” he added.
Staring hard into the dimness inside, I made out a small concrete mixer half hidden by stacks of blocks and pallets of bricks. A black man lifted a hand in response to DiMaio’s shout. He pulled a lever and the mixer disgorged gray sludge into a wheelbarrow standing under it. Shoving the lever back to start the mixer up again, the man stuck a shovel in the wheelbarrow and headed in our direction.
“We got the plan up over there, you want to take a look at it,” DiMaio told me, pointing to the other side of the wall. “You can get in two bays down, where Phillips is coming out. Or you can go over.”
I went over, climbing the sides of the scaffold and swinging myself in through the window opening to land with a thud on the scuffed concrete inside the building. I felt a cool touch of air, the air from inside, on the back of my neck.
“What happens if the safety officer catches me doing that?” I asked DiMaio as we faced each other through the opening.
“Joe’s the safety officer on this crew. Nothing happens.”
I studied the plan, a tattered print of the architect’s drawing, now marked with pencil and thumbprints and coffeestains. Another drawing was taped there too, the brickwork details, and I saw what DiMaio had meant. Arched windows with true keystones; projections at some columns, setbacks at others; patterns made by alternating the long and short sides of the brick, turning and stacking it, edging it forward and back, that would read on the face of the building. This wasn’t a brick skin stretched taut, reading smooth and flawless as glass or steel, brick fighting for a place in the slick, modern machine world. Bricks are laid one by one, each measured weight held by a hand, each rough surface considered and handled and placed. When this building was complete you’d know that, see it in the movement and the patterns and the shadows cast by the bricks on each other.
DiMaio, with a smile, was watching me study the drawings. “What do you think?” he asked me. “Worked like this before?”
“Not for a long time.”
“Since your apprentice program, I’ll bet. Me neither. You’ll get into it, like I said. Gives you a chance to show off.”
“I’m not even sure my apprentice program covered stuff like this,” I said doubtfully. “Did yours?”
DiMaio shrugged. “I started working with my old man when I was eight years old. My apprentice program was after school and weekends and summers.”
“He taught you to do work like this? He was good, your old man?”
DiMaio grinned the ready grin. “He’s still at it. Except for me, he’s the best.”
I went back to examining the drawings. “Must be expensive. I know it’ll slow me down. Why are they doing it?”
“Hey, I’m just a bricklayer, what the hell do I know? Architect got a bug up his ass, sold it to the owner. Why not? Keeps you and me pulling down a paycheck, anyway. Hey, lookit, it’s Phillips, dropping his morning load. Whaddaya say, Reg?”
“Move your butt, will ya?” Phillips answered cheerfully. DiMaio moved aside as Phillips maneuvered the wheelbarrow past him on the scaffold. “Reg Phillips,” he said to me, and we shook hands as I gave him my name. He was young also, maybe twenty-five, a thin, dark-skinned man with a thicker mustache than DiMaio’s. “Heard some poor sucker got—Jeez, I mean, I heard Mike here got a new partner. Listen, he gives you any trouble, you just come see me, okay?”
“Go back to your chemistry set and let the real guys get to work, Reg,” DiMaio told him.
Reg Phillips threw a fake punch at DiMaio, who ducked, weaved, threw one back. The scaffold shook with their footwork. “I’m gonna have to report you for horsing around on the scaffold, DiMaio,” Phillips said, dropping his arms. He turned, stuck the shovel into the mortar in the wheelbarrow, and loaded a couple of piles of it onto a board set on concrete blocks between me and DiMaio. “That good for you, Smith?” he asked.
I stuck a trowel into the mortar, worked it around. DiMaio watched as I did it. “Seems fine,” I said.
“You want it up higher? Considering you’re taller than some of these midget masons they got around here?” He jerked a thumb at DiMaio.
“What happens if I say yes?” I looked at my new partner.
“I throw you off the scaffold,” DiMaio answered. “Just like I’m about to do to Mr. Nobel Prize here. Hey, smart guy, how much money you lose last night?”
Reg Phillips grinned. “
My
money, you sorry-ass white boy, was on the Yankees.”