Chin - 04 - No Colder Place

by S. J. Rozan

  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

  Copyright

  Chapter one

  Chapter two

  Chapter three

  Chapter four

  Chapter five

  Chapter six

  Chapter seven

  Chapter eight

  Chapter nine

  Chapter ten

  Chapter eleven

  Chapter twelve

  Chapter thirteen

  Chapter fourteen

  Chapter fifteen

  Chapter sixteen

  Chapter seventeen

  Chapter eighteen

  Chapter nineteen

  Chapter twenty

  Chapter twenty-one

  Chapter twenty-two

  Chapter twenty-three

  Chapter twenty-four

  Acknowledgments

  no colder place

  one

  there’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 woode
n 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.

  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?”