Chin - 04 - No Colder Place

by S. J. Rozan

  I heard the sound of a chair scraping back. A large man, white-haired, fat in the gut where Dan Junior was still only soft, but with muscled arms, leaned through the conference-room door into the file cabinet—cluttered outer office. He looked me over and dismissed me, as though he’d already sized me up and knew he could handle whatever I was bringing, but later, after the more important work was done.

  “Verna, get me the manloading chart for O’Brien. And see if you can find that new look-ahead schedule from Gilbert, the one for the next three, four weeks.”

  The secretary opened a drawer in her desk and began flipping through files. Crowell turned to Lydia. “Everything all right?”

  “Yes,” she said. “This is one of Lacertosa’s masons. He just needs some paperwork.”

  Crowell nodded, eyed me again, then disappeared back into the conference room. A few seconds later Verna pushed back her chair and headed in there too, files in hand.

  “Thanks,” I heard Crowell say. “Okay, Mrs. Armstrong. By September, we’re gonna have the dogs and ponies all in a row. You’ll be able to give the bank their show.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Crowell.” That was a woman’s voice, deep and assured. She said something else, but I couldn’t follow it. I wanted to edge closer to the conference-room door, but Verna walked back through it and fixed her eyes on me.

  “Well?” I said to Lydia, my eyebrows raised, as though I’d been waiting for her to respond to something I’d asked. “Do you think you have it?”

  “I’ll have to look it up,” she answered sweetly. “What did you say your name was?”

  I told her what my name was.

  “All right,” she said, making a show of jotting down my name. The voices in the conference room had gotten back to normal, and I couldn’t make out what was going on anymore, though I was still intrigued. I hoped Lydia would give me an opening to hang around, but she didn’t.

  All she said, smiling her helpful smile at me, was, “Come back tomorrow.”

  six

  i’d arranged to meet Lydia for dinner at Pho Viet Hoang, a Vietnamese place in Chinatown we both liked. I had a nagging feeling as I left the site, trudged over the concrete floor, and down the wooden ramp into the brightness of the afternoon, that getting together on Lydia’s turf might not be a great idea right now. I was trying to think of a way around it, some more neutral ground to suggest, but I couldn’t come up with anything that she wouldn’t see right through. I resigned myself to the summer storm clouds and occasional lightning flashes that I knew would be the weather at our table, and decided that, like weather, it was inevitable.

  As it turned out, though, it wasn’t. Dinner was at the Vietnamese place, all right. But Lydia and I were too busy to bother with issues like moral superiority and who owed what to whom. We spent the evening discussing the unearthing, in the elevator pit on the Armstrong site, of a body.

  I wasn’t there when they found him, but Lydia was. She called me twice from the site. The first time, just before six, was to tell me she wasn’t sure she could make dinner, and to tell me why: The crew digging in the elevator pit seemed to have found a body; the cops were on their way.

  “Jesus!” I said. “What?”

  “What I said,” she replied calmly and quietly. I could hear agitated men’s voices in the background. “Mr. Crowell went out there with the workmen. He just came back. He told Verna to call the police. We’re waiting for them.”

  “Whose?” I demanded. “Whose body? That crane operator—Pelligrini?”

  “I don’t know. I have to go. I’ll see you later.” She said that fast and hung up, the new secretary calling to cancel a dinner date, trying not to jeopardize her new job.

  I spent the next half hour pacing, sitting with a bottle of beer, standing to light a cigarette, pacing some more. If I’d come up with a single half-plausible excuse to go back up there I would have, in a flash, but there wasn’t one to be had, and I knew it. Having Lydia there in this sort of situation was the next best thing to being there myself—in some situations, a better thing—and I knew that, too. I thought about it the whole time I paced and smoked.

  When the phone rang again, I yanked it up before the first ring was over.

  “Smith,” I barked into it.

  “Wow. Relax. It’s me. I’ll meet you in half an hour.”

  “Who was it?”

  “I’ll see you later.”

  Dumb question, Smith. She can’t answer that one with people around. Ask it the other way.

  “Was it Pelligrini?”

  “Yes.”

  “Jesus,” I said, but she’d hung up by then.

  I don’t live too far from Chinatown; I was at Pho Viet Hoang inside of fifteen minutes. You can’t smoke there, but you can eat pastel shrimp chips dipped in a blistering red sauce and drink Vietnamese beer, which has a thin, acid bite and is served very cold. The whole place was cold; they were giving their air-conditioning a workout. I breathed in the tang of fish sauce and cilantro and stared at the door, as though I could make Lydia materialize faster that way. Maybe I did. She was there twenty-five minutes after she’d called.

  I stood when she came in; that annoys her but I can’t help it. I touched her arm lightly and kissed her equally lightly. Her blouse was a stream of silk against the tips of my fingers.

  “Give,” I said.

  “Did you call Mr. DeMattis?” she asked as she sat.

  “He wasn’t there. I left a message for him to beep me, before he talked to Crowell if he could.”

  “You’re wearing that thing?” Her eyebrows shot up. “I thought you hated it.”

  “I do. That doesn’t mean it isn’t useful. Come on, give. What the hell happened?”

  “The crew in the elevator pit, putting in the sump pump,” she said. “Later you’ll have to tell me what a sump pump is.”

  “It pumps out the sump,” I said. “What the hell’s the story?”

  “I don’t know. He was about half unearthed by the time they told us we could go. Actually they were ready for us to go earlier, but I bought some time by staying until Verna’s husband came to get her. She was shaken up.”

  “Your basic human decency is humbling. They’re sure it was Pelligrini?”

  “Both Crowells identified him.”

  “And he was in the pit?”

  “Buried. Under about two feet of dirt. Isn’t there a floor at the bottom of the elevator pit, cement or something?”

  “Concrete, you mean. No, it’s just a hole. Once the elevator’s in nobody ever goes there; it’s just to make space for the cables. They were just digging and there he was?”

  “Basically. One of the workmen saw these white things where he was about to stick his shovel next. He brushed the dirt off them and they turned out to be fingers. According to him that was all he wanted to know. He beat it out of there and got Mr. Crowell.”

  “Two feet of dirt,” I mused. “I wonder why he was buried so shallowly. He was bound to be found when they put the pump in.”

  Lydia shook her head. “Mr. Crowell Senior said the pump was added to the job. He just authorized it the day before yesterday. There’s a stream or a spring or something at the basement level, something that wasn’t on the survey. Water was seeping into the pit. That’s why they were working so late, so they could get it in and get it working before it rains tomorrow.”

  “So if the pump hadn’t been added there wouldn’t have been any more digging in the pit?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “You’re the one who knows about pits.”

  I sipped my beer. “So it was just bad luck for the guy who put him there. If they hadn’t needed the pump, he’d never have been found.”

  We were quiet while the thought of that filled the space between us, the thought of a man deep in the moist, silent dirt below forty floors of stores and offices and apartments, below copy machines whirring and dinner cooking and people slow dancing as evening turned to night.

  “How long had he been ther
e?” I broke the silence.

  Before Lydia could answer, a thin, sharp-faced waiter came to take our order. Without discussing it, with hardly a glance at the menu, I ordered us both shrimp grilled on sugar cane and lemongrass-and-coriander soup, and Lydia got us chicken with onions and hot peppers. Foods we’d had before; foods we knew we loved. We didn’t discuss it afterward, either, how we’d thought alike, how easy it had been. We went straight back to business.

  “I don’t know,” Lydia said. “Dan Junior thought of that right away, too. He didn’t go out with Senior to see, but when Mr. Crowell came back and told Verna to call the police, Junior asked, ‘My God, who is it? How long has he been there?’”

  “‘I didn’t dig him up, Daniel,’ Mr. Crowell said. ‘I didn’t see his face.’ Then we all waited.”

  “But the police did dig him up?”

  “Partly. They’ve probably got him all out by now, but they were being careful about it. In case they can make something from the forensic evidence.”

  “And who ID’d him, both of them?”

  “Yes. Although Junior, at first, didn’t seem so sure. But after other people said it was Pelligrini, he said probably it was.”

  The waiter brought our soup. The clear yellow broth gave off pungent trails of steam from thick white bowls, leafy coriander and green stems of lemongrass floating on top, strips of beef and noodles swirling together as I sank my spoon down. I was hungry. To look at her, so was Lydia. Lydia can twirl noodles on chopsticks the way the rest of us can do spaghetti on a fork. I watched her clear everything solid out of her soup bowl in the time it took me to coax a couple of strips of beef onto my spoon and into my mouth. Then she picked up her bowl in both hands and sipped at the broth.

  I asked her, “Why didn’t Dan Junior go out to look the first time?”

  Lydia put the soup bowl down. “Because Dan Senior said, ‘Stay here, Daniel,’ as he ran out the trailer door.”

  The chicken had just come, and with it fragrant bowls of steaming rice, when the beeper on my hip went off. The number the readout gave me was Chuck’s, at home.

  The phone at Pho Viet Hoang is up by the door, not a good place for the conversation I wanted to have with Chuck. I told Lydia who it was as I stood. “Don’t eat all that,” I said, pointing to the chicken as I headed out the door.

  “You wish,” she retorted to my back.

  There was a phone booth a block away, at Canal. It’s a busy corner, traffic and people coming and going, but it was better than being by the door at the restaurant, where everyone waiting for a takeout meal was looking around for something interesting to help pass the time.

  Chuck picked up on the first ring.

  “Couldn’t you find a noisier phone?” he asked when he knew it was me. “Where the hell are you, Grand Central Station?”

  “Worse. Canal and Mott.”

  “Great. What’s up?”

  “A lot,” I said. “Did Crowell call you?”

  “Yeah, as a matter of fact. Left a message to call forthwith. But since you called too, something told me to talk to you first, in case there’s something going on I could get sandbagged with.”

  “There is. They found Lenny Pelligrini’s body on the Armstrong site.”

  “What?”

  A horn blared behind me, but it didn’t mask Chuck’s half-shout.

  “That’s what I said, too,” I told him.

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “In the elevator pit.” I told him about the sump pump, about the white fingers in the dirt. “Probably whoever put him there thought no one would ever be back there again.”

  “Jesus.” Chuck’s voice was low. “Who did the ID?”

  “Both Crowells.”

  “Shit.” He was silent for a moment, then said again, “Shit. Okay, what else?”

  “Nothing else. Except the bad feeling you had about that site seems to have been accurate.”

  “I was a cop twenty years. My bad feelings, you could bet the ranch on. You think Joe Romeo had anything to do with it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But you got a bad feeling.”

  “I don’t know.” I paused, waited for a fire engine to race by, siren screaming. “I went in with a bad feeling about him, from you and Crowell. And I don’t like the guy. But nothing else says he’s connected to this.”

  “That could just be because you don’t know anything else yet.”

  “That’s true. Chuck, you looked into Pelligrini some, right? What do you have on him?”

  “Not a thing. He’s a choirboy, to hear everyone tell it. Ask me, to get dead, he must’ve seen something he shouldn’t, been in the wrong place at the wrong time, something like that.”

  “Maybe he was into a loan shark—Joe Romeo, just for an example—and couldn’t pay?”

  “You got to be in really big before they write off your debt and do you. And if they do, they leave you around where other people could get the message, not in some pit where no one’s going to find you. Look, I’ll go back over that ground, just to be sure, but that kid’s not the way to cut into this.”

  “Maybe you’re right. And the cops will be working that angle, anyway.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I guess it’s even possible that whatever happened to Pelligrini has nothing to do with anyone on that site except Pelligrini himself. Someone may have just found a convenient hole to shove a body in. How good is the security up there?”

  “Average, I guess. Since the trouble they had early, they tightened up a little, but I still think they only got one, maybe two guys at night, and they probably coop half the night between rounds. Can’t be that hard to get through that fence, either. Christ, I guess I better call Crowell.”

  “Listen, Chuck, there’s a reason I wanted to talk to you first, too.”

  “Yeah? What’s that?”

  “Crowell’s bound to wonder if Romeo was involved. They’re going to tell the cops they’ve been looking at him, and the cops will pull him in. If they get something, great. If they don’t, you’ll still need me up there.”

  “Yeah,” Chuck said thoughtfully. “Go on.”

  “Even if they do. There may be more going on. This Reg Phillips thing, Chuck. I want to see it through.”

  Chuck was silent while the light changed behind me and the roar of the traffic shifted from north-south to east-west. I waited for his answer, prepared to argue the point, to remind him that this was my case now, to be worked my way. But I didn’t have to.

  “So you don’t want me to blow your cover to Crowell,” Chuck’s voice came back. “And you don’t want Crowell blowing it to the cops. You want to show up for work tomorrow like usual.”

  “Right. If you can talk Crowell into it.”

  “What’s to talk them into? They don’t know about you. All I gotta do is make sure they want to keep me on the case. If I was them, I would, for the reasons you said. Crowell can send the cops to me if they want, I could lay it out for them. The kid might have a problem with it, but Senior’ll tell him what to do and he’ll do it.”

  “If you have to, tell them who I am. I just don’t want them to pull me.”

  “I don’t want to tell them. Especially if guys are getting whacked over the head and other guys are getting planted in the elevator pit. The more people know who you are, the more I got to worry your name is gonna be dropped where it don’t belong and heard by somebody got no business hearing it.”

  “Well, I like it better that way too. So what do you say? Unless I hear from you, I’ll just show up on the site tomorrow, as surprised as anybody when they tell me.”

  “Yeah, okay. We’ll try it. What about your girl?”

  “Hey, come on, Chuck—”

  “Yeah, yeah, your Oriental female partner. How’s that?”

  “They don’t say ‘Oriental’ anymore, Chuck.”

  “Oh, Jesus Christ up a Christmas tree. Listen, send me the instruction manual some other time, okay? Wh
at about her?”

  “Does anyone except old man Crowell know who she is?”

  “Maybe he told the kid, I don’t know. I bet not. He’s the type don’t tell you anything except on a need-to-know basis, and he’s the one decides if you got a need. At first, he wasn’t even gonna bring the kid along to see me. Must be tough on the kid, always running around trying to figure out what he was supposed to know that the old man never told him.”

  “The old man doesn’t trust him?”

  “No, it ain’t that. He just don’t think anyone else can do anything as well as he can, so he don’t see no reason to let anyone in on anything. I get the idea he wouldn’t have nobody working for him at all if he had the time to do it all himself.”

  “I know the type.”

  “Drive you crazy. Anyhow, if he didn’t think Junior had any reason to know about your—about Lydia—it wouldn’t of occurred to him to say anything. And I don’t think he’d of told anyone else.”

  “See if you can find out. If it’s not common knowledge, then I want her to stay too.”

  “You sure? Until we know what—”

  “Forget it. You’re going to tell me it could be dangerous for her.”

  “It could.”

  “I count on that.”

  “On what? Its being dangerous for her?”

  “Damn right. That’s how I keep her working with me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She lives for situations like this. I deliver.”

  Our table, I noticed as I re-entered Pho Viet Hoang, was clear of platter and rice bowls, nothing there but empty dinner plates and Lydia, both waiting for me. At least the dinner plates weren’t bouncing their feet and drumming their fingers as they stared around the restaurant.

  The sharp-faced waiter spotted me coming in and disappeared into the kitchen. The platter and the rice bowls made it back to the table just after I did.

  “Oh, it’s you,” Lydia said in sarcastic surprise as I sat down. “Where did you go to make that phone call, Brooklyn?”

  “We got to chatting about your good qualities,” I said. “That always takes forever.”