by S. J. Rozan
“Dangerous job, construction,” I said.
“Christ!” he said suddenly, staring at my left arm. “You got a thing for snakes, or what?”
I glanced at the blue snake tattoo that winds from my elbow to my shoulder, a mark I’ve had for twenty-five years.
“No,” I said. “Coincidence.”
“Oh, coincidence.” He emphasized the word sarcastically, nodded. “You know, Smith, I’m starting to not like you, and I don’t even know you. So now what? You gonna go back to work today, or I’m gonna have to give you time off for being a hero?”
I looked at him, his broad shoulders and sardonic grin. “I’ll work,” I said. “Let me finish my smoke, and clean up.” I was sticky with Phillips’s blood.
“Finish it fast, then. Your partner’s back on the job already.”
I looked across the floor to the bay where Mike DiMaio and I had been working that morning. DiMaio was on the scaffold, working on the complex brick pattern around one of the columns. His movements were sharp and hard, not smooth the way they’d been before. He had no flow, no rhythm, but the results were clean, and nothing he did, while I watched, had to be done over.
I stuck the cigarette in my mouth and went to rinse off in the icy stream from the hose near the mixer. Someone had picked up Phillips’s shovel, taken it somewhere; someone else had moved his hard hat, rested it on his lunchbox next to his leather gloves. I picked up the hard hat, turned it over in my hands, looked at the plastic straps inside. There was nothing strange about it; it was just like mine.
“Smith!” It was Romeo again. I put the hard hat down, picked up the hose, ran water over my arms. I shivered with the suddenness of it as I splashed my face and the back of my neck. Romeo said, “What are you gonna do for clothes?”
“I can work like this,” I said. Shirtless wasn’t such a bad way to be, in this heat. “Until the sun comes around. I’ll pick up a shirt at lunch.” The one I’d come in, the one I’d bandaged Phillips with, lay in a puddle of water and blood and sand beside the mixer.
“Yeah,” he said, “okay.” I had the feeling there was something else he wanted to say to me, but he didn’t try.
I walked back across the floor to where I’d worked all morning. I didn’t go through right away. DiMaio turned when he saw me, straightened and stood, a brick in one hand, trowel in the other. He watched me. His jaw was tight and his pale eyes hard. He moved aside. I sat on the backup block and swung my legs through to the other side.
DiMaio kept his eyes on me while I picked up my trowel, worked the mortar around. Then, wordlessly, he turned back to his column, placed the brick he’d been holding.
I found my own spot, saw what there was to do. As I did it I said, “His pulse and his breathing were good, Mike. I think he’ll be okay.”
DiMaio straightened up fast. “You’re a fucking expert? You know so fucking much about guys with their heads beat in? How is that, Smith?”
I turned to look at him. Color had risen in his face; tendons corded his muscular neck.
“Back off,” I said quietly. “I worked on a rescue squad in Houston, while I was laid off. Volunteer, something to do. I’ve seen accidents before.”
“Accidents. Yeah, you’ve fucking seen accidents.” He picked a brick off his pile, laid it in where it needed to go, tapped it sharply. “Yeah, accidents.”
I put my trowel down. “Mike, you have a problem with me?”
He looked over his shoulder. “Yeah, you might say that. You might say I got a problem.”
“You want to tell me about it?”
He turned away from me, placed another brick while I stood and watched. That tied up a corner, finished a run in the pattern. His back still to me, he asked, “Why?”
“Why what?”
“What the hell is the point of talking to you? What the hell difference is it gonna make what I say?”
“It depends about what.”
“About what.” He turned around, glared. “About how you ain’t touched a brick in years. About how you got glue in your pants, but the union sends you up here as a twenty-five-dollar-an-hour bricklayer. What you’re good at, what you can do, is bandage guys’ heads. Blood don’t seem to bother you.”
“I’m rusty,” I said. “I told you that.”
“Fuck that. Nobody ever done any serious bricklaying loses his moves like you.”
“Then what?”
His jaw was tight; he didn’t speak. I watched while he fought with himself, watched his eyes.
“What, Mike?” I repeated.
His eyes changed; he’d made his choice. “You’re connected.” He took a step forward, spoke louder, the way a man will speak to cover his fear. “You’re some connected asshole, must’ve helped some Guido No-Brains lay a patio wall once, they thought they could pass you off as a mason.”
“Why?”
“How the fuck do I know why? Somebody owes somebody money, somebody needs to be watched, somebody needs his head smashed in. That it, Smith? Reg needed to be pushed around a little, and you were supposed to make sure it all went okay? And then maybe it got a little out of hand, but thank God you were here, huh? You could fix it up, all nice, so he don’t die, ’cause that wasn’t the plan?”
DiMaio’s fists were clenched, his weight forward. He spat his words at me, at the limits of his control. If I said the wrong thing he might rush me, I thought, right here on the scaffold.
“What happened to Phillips,” I said carefully, letting the rest of it alone for a time, “the guys who were there said it was an accident.”
“Nobody was there. Who the fuck you think was there? Sam said it was an accident ’cause Sam knows fucking everything. They all bought it, that’s all.”
“You don’t?”
“Yeah, right. You ever seen that much blood from a guy tripping over his shovel?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know. You don’t fucking know. Well, I don’t know either, Smith, except I know that whatever the hell it is you’re doing I don’t want you doing it here, my scaffold, my bricks.”
His left hand flew out, almost an involuntary move, pointed to his wall, the strength of it, the absolute solidity, the even lines of the brick and the delicate concavity of mortar. His pale eyes, hard and hot, stayed fixed on me. There wasn’t anything he could do about Phillips, or about who he thought I was; but the walls he built were his.
I looked from DiMaio’s work back to him.
“You’re right,” I said. “You’re right but you’re wrong. There’s a reason I’m here. But I’m not connected. I’ll tell you. But not now. Lunch break. Now I want to get back to work. Because I don’t want to lose this job.”
He stared at me, eyes narrow. I’d made my offer; I waited. Around us, the whine of a saw, jackhammers, the shouts of men. The graceful neck of the crane glided silently by overhead, carrying a steel beam that seemed to hang weightless, suspended on the thinnest of lines. Between us there was nothing but space and silence, and the mortar Reg Phillips had mixed that morning.
DiMaio made the move, but he didn’t break the silence. He turned back to his work. I went back to mine. For the next two hours we didn’t speak again.
three
i thought for the rest of the morning about what I was going to tell Mike DiMaio. Before the time for that came, though, another man came by, wanting me to tell him some other things.
“All right, you two. Knock off for a minute.” Joe Romeo’s voice was a little louder than it had to be to be heard from where he was, close to us, coming along the scaffold. I turned to look; he had another man with him.
DiMaio looked too, then turned his back on them to finish what he was doing with slow, deliberate motions. I was new; I put my trowel down and waited.
“This is Dan Crowell,” Joe Romeo told me. “Junior,” he added.
“How’re you doing?” Crowell said to me. Round full cheeks gave his face a cheerful quality which his voice had also. The voice was fam
iliar; I thought for a minute and remembered it, the order to move back and give Reg Phillips room to breathe that had been obeyed.
Dan Crowell, Jr. and I looked each other over. He was a medium-height man of maybe thirty-five, carrying a little too much weight for his build, not muscle weight and not beer, just softness.
“This is Smith,” Romeo said to Crowell. “Bill Smith. New today. He was the one come up with the bandage, the shirt thing. You saw.”
“I saw,” Crowell agreed. “That was pretty good, Smith. You probably saved the man’s life.” Dan Crowell, Jr. smiled at me.
“He’ll be all right?” I asked.
“Hard to say. I talked to the hospital. His skull’s fractured. They’re watching him close, waiting to do a CAT scan when the swelling goes down. All kinds of things can happen, they say. But they think he’ll live.”
“Yeah, but then what?” That was Mike DiMaio, behind me. “Will he be able to work anymore, or he’s gonna be all fucked up?”
Crowell looked over to DiMaio. “I don’t know, Mike. It’s too soon for that. But he’s got good medical coverage, and disability. He’ll be okay if he’s out of work.”
“Oh, yeah. He’ll be great. Sitting staring out a window for the rest of his life.” DiMaio spat, spun around, and went back to his own work.
Crowell watched DiMaio for another minute, then came back to me. “I just have to ask you two some questions.” He smiled, almost apologetic. “I’m Crowell Construction’s safety officer. I have to investigate the accident. For the record.”
“Sure,” I said. “What about the union? They going to send somebody?”
“That’s me,” Joe Romeo said. “I’m doing it. Not a big deal. I mean, I was there.”
“When it happened?” I put surprise in my voice. I knew what the answer would be; I just wanted to hear how he’d say it.
“Right after.” Romeo gave me a cold look. “Same as Mr. Crowell and you.”
Dan Crowell, Jr. asked his questions then, about what we’d seen, what we’d said, what we’d done. DiMaio never stopped work; he answered with grunts or with words of one syllable. I answered clearly and completely, watched Crowell write what I’d said on his yellow pad. Then I asked a question of my own.
“Did anybody see it happen?”
I could feel Mike DiMaio, behind me, stop for a second when I said that. He picked up his rhythm again right away; I wondered if anyone else had noticed.
“Haven’t found anybody,” Crowell said. “No reason why anyone would, unless they happened to be passing by. Phillips has that mixer pretty well surrounded by piles of stuff.”
DiMaio snorted.
“You got something to say, Mikey?” Joe Romeo asked loudly, addressing the question to DiMaio’s back.
DiMaio straightened, threw down the trowel and the brick he was holding. “Yeah,” he said, turning. “Yeah. It wasn’t Reg’s idea to pile all that shit around the mixer.”
“What are you saying?”
“Unsafe condition, Joe. You’re the foreman. You got the men working in unsafe conditions.”
“Mike—” Dan Crowell, Jr. began.
“Look at it.” DiMaio pointed through the opening toward the center of the floor. “Look at all that shit. A guy practically has to trip over something, working in there. And if he did, you might never know it.” Looking at Joe Romeo, he added, “And if something else happened in there, you’d never know that either.”
“Something else?” Joe Romeo said. “Something else like what?”
DiMaio shrugged, and smiled a hard smile. “Hell, I don’t know, Joe. I’m just a bricklayer.”
One good thing came out of the visit from Dan Crowell, Jr.: speaking into the walkie-talkie he lifted from his hip, he gave instructions, and, ten minutes after he left, a laborer stuck his head through the window opening and tossed me a T-shirt. It was green, good heavy cloth, with the skyline logo of the Crowell Construction Company across the front.
I left the shirt hanging over the scaffold until the lunch break got close. When I began to sense the change in tempo that meant crews were knocking off, I finished where I was, wiped my trowel, and looked over at DiMaio. He didn’t look at me, so I swung inside and headed toward the mixer hose to clean up. I was slimy with sweat by then, and I figured the new shirt ought to start out with a clean field. At the mixer, the floor had been washed down, and Reg Phillips’ things were gone. The new guy there didn’t say anything, but he stood aside while I used his water, and even silently offered me the grimy towel he wiped his own mortar-coated hands on. I thanked him but turned it down.
Back outside, I looked down the scaffold. Most of the masons had gathered at the end, in the corner, where the work already done cast a cool shadow, to stretch out and eat. Instead of the usual talk, about last night’s ballgame, about someone’s anniversary and everyone’s ideas for what he should get his wife, the talk down there today would be about the accident. Whether Reg Phillips would live. Other accidents on other sites they’d been on. About me, the new hotdog who could save guys’ lives but was one slow bricklayer.
Mike DiMaio wasn’t down there with them. He was sitting here, where I was, leaning on his wall, unwrapping a thick, drippy sandwich on a long Italian roll. I brought my lunchbox over to his side of the bay, sat down against the scaffold steel, not the bricks DiMaio had laid.
I pulled the Crowell shirt on, unwrapped my own sandwich. I was glad to be sitting for a while, not lifting anything heavier than salami.
For a time, neither of us spoke. Traffic rolled by on Broadway to the beat of the traffic lights. Over on the Hudson, a speedboat flew upriver, and a tug hauled a loaded barge patiently south.
DiMaio, looking beyond me to the river, said, “We had a big bet on the game tonight.”
I twisted open a bottle of orange juice. “Who?”
“Me and Reg. Mets game.”
“I thought you didn’t gamble.”
He shrugged. “Reg likes to lay odds, make a game interesting. Sometimes I’m in.”
“How big?”
He paused before he answered. “Loser buys the beer.”
“That’s a big bet?”
“It is when I win.”
I looked at him; he stared into the distance. “I’m sorry, Mike.”
“Don’t be.” He brought his eyes back to me. “You had something to do with this, I’ll kill you, I’m telling you that right now.” His voice and his eyes were stony, and I didn’t doubt that he meant it. “You didn’t, you got nothing to be sorry about.”
He waited, then, for me to tell him which it was.
I downed the juice, grateful for the liquid bite of it in my throat. I capped the empty bottle and looked at DiMaio. “‘Someone needs to be watched,’” I said. “You said that maybe that’s what it was. I’m a private investigator. I’ve been hired to watch Joe Romeo.” I fished in my back pocket for my wallet, showed him the copy of my license I keep under a hidden leather flap there.
DiMaio looked at it, both sides, turning it over and then over again in his hand. He handed it back to me. “Joe? Why?” Suspicion deepened his voice.
“My client thinks Romeo might be involved in things nobody wants going on on this site.”
“What kind of things?”
“Loansharking, they told me. Bookmaking. Someone mentioned drugs too, but no one’s sure.”
He looked at me, measuring, not speaking. Finally he said, “Joe? Joe’s a bookie? Joe’s a shylock?”
“Maybe. I’m supposed to find out.”
He watched me a little longer, asked, “Who’s your client?”
I shook my head.
He tried another. “What are they gonna do about it if it’s true?”
“I don’t know.”
“Slap his wrist and throw him off the site,” he said with disgust. “‘Bad boy, Joe. Go home.’”
“Maybe.”
“You know damn well. Nobody’s gonna want trouble.”
“You could b
e right. But if I don’t do what I’m doing, they won’t even get that far.”
He nodded. “Or this whole thing could be bullshit. Private investigator. Joe Romeo. You could’ve just invented it to shut me up. Sounds like something a bricklayer might swallow.”
“It’s the truth,” I said. “You don’t have to believe it, but there’s nothing else I can tell you.”
“The name of the client.”
“What if I did? What are you going to do, call and ask them? They’d pull me five minutes later.”
“At least I’d know it was true. ’Cause that license, even if it’s real, that don’t mean you ain’t connected. They got cops on the payroll, no reason they can’t have guys like you, too.”
“No,” I said, “there’s no reason. They might. But not me.”
“And I’m just supposed to believe this? Just because you said it?”
“You’re not even supposed to know about it.”
“Then how come you’re telling me?”
“I don’t see that I have much choice.”
“What are you talking about? You don’t have to tell me squat. What am I gonna do, you say, ‘For Chrissakes, Mikey, I’m just a bricklayer tryin’ to make a living, get off my back’?”
“You already said you don’t believe that.”
“So what? I didn’t hire you, I can’t fire you.”
“You could make me look bad.”
He laughed sourly. “Man, you don’t need me for that. And what’s the difference? Whoever sent you up here, they got you a union card, they got you a job, who cares how you look?”
“I can’t keep an eye on Joe Romeo if he’s keeping an eye on me.”
DiMaio gave me a long stare. Then he looked away, took a bite out of his sandwich, and didn’t speak again until he’d finished it. I went back to mine, too, and gave him the time he wanted.
“What about Reg?” he finally said, balling up the paper his sandwich had come wrapped in. He ripped open a package of M & M’s. “You come up here to keep an eye on Joe or whatever, and it just so happens someone clobbers Reg two hours after you get here?”
“That could still have been an accident.”