Chin - 04 - No Colder Place

by S. J. Rozan

  In the crowded chaos of the lot on Varick Street, my Acura’s always up front, right by the gate, never parked in. I pay extra to the management for that, and more to each of the attendants to keep an eye on it. I need this car; like the phone, I’m out of business without it. I keep it in good shape, do whatever minor work it needs, but for big work, I don’t mess with it.

  I take it to Joanie.

  The rain let up gradually as I crossed the bridge and merged onto the expressway heading for Queens. It had practically stopped by the time I pulled through the Middle Village intersection and onto the lot at Wisnewski’s Foreign Auto.

  I’d bought the car here, at Harry Wisnewski’s dealership. Harry has two kids. His son Greg had never shown any interest in the business, and was now a middle manager with an electronics firm; but Harry’s daughter Joanie was a natural with cars. She’d hung around her dad’s place after school and on weekends, learning to set the timing on spark plugs, rotate tires, and fix electronic ignitions until, after she’d made it clear she wasn’t going to college, Harry gave her a job in the service department. Now, ten years later, she headed it.

  I maneuvered past a waiting Audi with a cracked rear window and edged the Acura up to the five-bay repair garage, parked there, and made my way through the fine falling mist to Joanie’s office.

  The office was empty, but I could hear Joanie through the open door connecting to the garage.

  “Andy! Start it up again.” The whine and roar of an engine; then, “Oh, shit! Okay, turn it off.” Joanie had that broad Queens accent that made every r a w: “Stawt it up.”

  I came through the connecting door, leaned on the door frame, and was spotted by a mechanic, who waved me away. “No customers in the shop. Wait in the office, someone’ll be with you.”

  That made the boss look over, shifting her eyes to me from the belly of the Mazda eight feet up on the lift she was standing under. Her thin face lit up in a smile, showing gleaming, even teeth Harry had paid a fortune for.

  “Hey!” she greeted me. Then, to her mechanic, “He’s okay. Unless you’re working for insurance companies now?” she called to me. “Like investigating repair shops to see if they let customers near the cars?”

  I held my hands up innocently. Joanie glanced up at the Mazda again. “Petey, see what you can do with this stupid thing. I swear, if it don’t shut up I’m gonna shoot it.” She wiped her hands on a greasy rag, tossed it onto a workbench, and sauntered over to me.

  Her Mets T-shirt and her jeans were streaked with grease; her shoulder-length brown hair was streaked with blonde, and sprayed to stand out and frame her face the way shutters frame a window. Her nails were short, but they were crimson, and so were her lips. Filigreed gold earrings gleamed on each ear.

  “New cars,” she said to me as she approached. “Like the new ballplayers. Crybabies. Spoiled. This one goes ping every time it turns left before it’s warmed up in the morning. Is that the stupidest thing you ever heard?”

  “Must be good for business.”

  She grinned as she led the way into her office. “It’s great for business. Buys me season tickets to the Mets so me and Larry and the kids can go watch the crybaby ballplayers. What are you doing here? Didn’t I just check you out like a month ago?” She looked through the plate glass window for my car, as though she could diagnose its problem through the drizzle. “You having trouble with the ABS? I told you—”

  “The car’s fine,” I said. “I have a great mechanic.”

  Joanie grinned again. She dropped into her desk chair and kicked the door to the garage shut. “You want to smoke, don’t blow up my place.” She didn’t wait for me to say anything, took out her own Virginia Slims and a gold lighter with an enameled Mercedes insignia. “So what are you doing here, on a lousy day like this, if there’s nothing wrong with the car?”

  “I need your help.”

  “Really?” She seemed pleased at the thought. “What, you looking for a second car or something?”

  “I’m looking for a frontloader.”

  Joanie raised her eyebrows. “What the hell do you need a front-loader for?”

  “I don’t need one. I just need to know where to get one.”

  “Why? Hey, is this like for a case?”

  “Just like.”

  “Cool.” She pursed her painted lips in thought. “Well, there’s some heavy-equipment dealers on the Island I could get you in touch with.”

  “I need a used one. As a matter of fact,” I added, pulling on my cigarette, “I need a hot one.”

  She stopped, her cigarette halfway to her mouth. “Oh, now, wait a minute. I’m just an honest mechanic.”

  “I know, Joanie, but I also know if it has wheels and an engine you’ll know where to find it.”

  She smiled with pride, then covered it fast with another draw on her cigarette and a disapproving tone.

  “You got that right. But only legit. I got a reputation to think of. My father’s, too.”

  “My lips are sealed.”

  She looked through smoke at me. “Of course,” she said, “Dad’s a used-car salesman, so what kind of reputation has he got, anyway?”

  “Good point.”

  “Well,” she said, “construction equipment’s not my specialty, you know.”

  I shrugged. “Wheels and an engine.”

  She took a long drag on her cigarette. I did the same with mine. Outside, even the drizzle had stopped. The cars and puddles in the lot gleamed silver as the sun tried to reach them from behind a thin veil of cloud.

  “If it wasn’t you, I wouldn’t do this,” she told me.

  “Okay,” I said. “For the record.”

  “Right,” she grinned. “For the record. Okay, I can think of one guy.” She squashed her filter into an ashtray with the BMW logo on the bottom. “Sometimes I get parts there for old models. He’s got all kinds of weird stuff on the lot. He might know.”

  “Tell me who he is, I’ll call him.”

  “I don’t know,” she said doubtfully. “He’s kinda weird. He plays it real close, you know? And I’m not even asking for hot parts when I go. If he knows where to get hot equipment, why’s he gonna tell you about it? He don’t know you.”

  “I’ll think of something.”

  “I gotta go over there in the next couple days anyway, to see if I could find a drive shaft for a ’seventy-two Triumph. I don’t know why that guy don’t just junk that car.” She sighed. “Anyway, I’ll ask him and I’ll call you.”

  “No. I don’t know what I’m looking at here, which means I don’t know how dangerous it is. I don’t want to get you messed up in it.”

  “Oh, you come out here to pick my brains but you don’t want to get me messed up?” Her bright eyes sparkled. “Forget it, big boy. Here’s a deal: We’ll go over there right now.” She stood. “What do you say?”

  I thought about it. “You just introduce me and walk away. You don’t even know what I want. You don’t know what it’s about.”

  She shrugged. “Sure. As long as you tell me what it’s about on the way over.”

  “Deal.” I stood too.

  Joanie stuck her head into the garage, hollered over the growl and shudder of an engine. “Petey! I’m going to Sal Maggio’s. Back in two hours!” She slammed the door shut again and we left the office to walk across the lot.

  We took her car.

  The visit to Sal Maggio’s yard in industrial Greenpoint didn’t produce anything, at least not that I could see. The clouds that had hovered weighty and dark in the morning settled now, thin and exhausted, to rest as fog and mist on the treeless streets. Long, low blocks of red brick or yellow stucco warehouses, punctuated by forlorn wood-frame two-families, shrank behind chain-link fence topped by razor wire along streets laid out without a grid. Joanie steered her Trans Am through the potholed asphalt with the confidence of a company commander taking a jeep through ground hard-fought-over but long since abandoned by any fighting force.

  Maggio�
�s Auto Salvage, I saw as she pulled over a broken sidewalk and through a wide gate, was wrapped with chain-link and razor wire too, but where other blocks were filled solid with buildings, this one was void, just gravel piled with the twisted steel skeletons and rusting hulks of cars that had once carried families to the shopping center or sat silently in lover’s lane. A chained dog barked fiercely as we parked. We crunched between the puddles and across the gravel toward a broken-down trailer with crumbling concrete steps leading up to the door.

  “That rain didn’t cool anything off, did it?” Joanie said as we passed piles of hubcaps, stacks of hoods and trunks, and, on the right, a tower of stripped car frames and the crane that put them there.

  I agreed with her as a bead of sweat trickled down my back. The door to the trailer opened and a man stepped out.

  “Hey, Sal,” Joanie called with a wave. We stopped just beyond the reach of the dog’s chain. He lunged at us anyway.

  “Joanie.” The man nodded. Seeing him, the dog cut the barking and settled into a low growl.

  Maggio was thin, and looked hard but worn, like the crooked steel frames and dented metal plates piled in his yard. His scraggly black hair was plastered to his neck by sweat. He had clear gray eyes. He might have smiled just a little, seeing Joanie, but I was looking at him through the mist, so maybe I was wrong.

  “I came to find parts for a Triumph,” Joanie said as Sal Maggio came down the stairs to join us.

  He said to Joanie, “Same one, or a different one?”

  “Same one. The guy’s sentimental about it, he says.”

  “Guy’s a jerk.” Maggio dismissed Joanie’s customer with the contempt of a man who spends his days among the remains of other people’s sentimental attachments. He looked at me, waiting.

  “This is Bill,” Joanie said. “He wants to ask about something. He won’t tell me what but he needs a salvage guy who knows the business. I was coming here anyway, so I brought him. You guys talk, let me go look.”

  “Yeah,” said Maggio, still looking at me. “You know where?”

  “Sure I do,” Joanie said.

  She rounded the trailer to the left, leaving me and Maggio and the growling dog. “Nice kid,” Maggio said.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Knows her shit, too.”

  “Yes, she does.” The salvage yard felt like a steam bath. “I’m looking for a frontloader,” I told Maggio.

  “Not my usual line,” he said. “You need parts, or you need one that works?”

  “One that works,” I said. “A John Deere D4007.”

  “That’s damn specific.”

  “I’m looking for a specific one.”

  His gaze didn’t lift from me; his lips flattened into a thin line. “Oh,” he said. “Yours?”

  “No. A friend’s.”

  “You think it’s here?”

  “No. I’m hoping you have some idea where I could look.”

  “Hot, right?” he said, not really a question. “That’s why you didn’t tell Joanie.”

  “It’s not her problem.”

  “Mine either.”

  “But it’s mine,” I said.

  “You want the thing back?”

  I shook my head. “It was insured. I’m just curious where it went.”

  “Why?”

  I told him the truth: “I’m not sure. I may be interested in the guy who took it there.”

  “Your interest professional?”

  “I’m not a cop.”

  “That wasn’t the question.”

  “Yes, it’s professional.”

  “And this guy,” he said. “The one you’re interested in. He have a name?”

  “Maybe. The one to try would be Joe Romeo.”

  He was silent, his stare hard and long. It was the same stare the dog was giving me. Finally he said, “I don’t want trouble.”

  “No one does.”

  “Wrong. Some people love it. Not me. I like to drink cold beer and take cars apart.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “I try to keep out of the way of people like you.”

  “I don’t blame you. But this means a lot to me.” I took my wallet out of my pocket, slipped five twenties out of it so he could see how much it meant.

  He didn’t reach for the money. Fixing his eyes on mine, he said, “Why did she bring you here?”

  “Because,” I said, “she said you can look in a lot of places, but if you really need to find something, go to Maggio’s.”

  “She said that?” His eyes briefly flicked in the direction Joanie had gone. I almost thought I saw the ghost of a smile.

  “Yes.”

  He was silent. “I don’t know if I can find it,” he said.

  “You don’t have to find it.”

  “I thought it meant a lot to you.”

  “Not to find it. Just to know where it went.”

  He and the dog watched me. Then he reached for the twenties. I let him have them.

  There wasn’t much more to that, only an exchange of phone numbers and the promise, from me, of more cash if there was a reason for it, although he hadn’t asked. I wandered through the misty yard in the direction Joanie had gone. I found her on the top of a six-foot pile of junk, throwing clanking steel parts over her shoulder, looking for a drive shaft for a ’72 Triumph. She didn’t find one.

  nine

  by the time I nosed my car off of Joanie’s lot it was pouring again. Like an excitable child, the rain carried on wildly to make sure it was noticed, pounding the roofs of cars for emphasis, throwing itself against windshields to get attention. I fumbled through the tapes in the glove compartment, found Britten’s Cello Suites, good music for a dark day. With the slow, sad, single notes of the cello floating inside the car and the infinite rain whipping around outside it, I drove back into Manhattan.

  I didn’t head downtown, though; I didn’t go home. I swung around on the FDR to the Battery, where it joins up with what’s left of the West Side Highway, and headed north.

  The rain had stopped again by the time I reached the neighborhood I was aiming for, just above 110th Street, a few blocks north of the construction site. Maybe it felt it had already pretty well covered everything there was for a good storm to do up here, earlier in the day.

  I parked and walked a few blocks through shiny puddles and steaming air to the address I was looking for, an old two-story on Broadway. At the turn of the century, buildings like this were called “taxpayers”: small shops on street level and offices above, built fast to be rented out to shoemakers and luncheonettes and dentists just to cover the property taxes, until the value of their lots rose enough to make it worthwhile to knock them down and build something serious. Ornate terra-cotta fronts vied with each other to attract tenants; the buildings’ sides and backs were the simplest brickwork imaginable.

  A lot of these taxpayers are gone now, replaced by their original builders, or by their sons and daughters. And a lot still stand, with OTB offices on street level and kung fu schools upstairs, a century older and shabbier. Investing in real estate, even in New York, has always been a gamble.

  The Armstrong Properties building was beautiful. The glazed white terra-cotta had been carefully cleaned, the wooden window frames sanded smooth and painted a deep green. The Armstrong office was behind a wide storefront window; from the street I could see two secretaries answering phones and typing and, on a table between filing cabinets, a model of the building I’d been working in all week. The plant-filled office looked bright and cheerful in the wet, gray afternoon.

  One of the secretaries, a light-skinned black woman with freckles scattered across her high cheekbones, looked up as I came in. She asked whether she could help me.

  “Bill Smith, Daily News,” I said. “Mrs. Armstrong’s expecting me.”

  That she was was the result of one of my earlier phone calls, when I had concocted a story I thought would work.

  The freckled secretary, cool and professional, picked up her phone a
nd buzzed her boss. They exchanged a few words; then she stood, showed me to the private office in the back.

  Denise Armstrong stayed seated behind her well-kept and well-organized old oak desk and watched me walk into her office and sit across from her. She was a tall, mahogany-skinned black woman, wearing navy slacks and a crisp white cotton shirt with thin red stripes. Her short, graying hair was shaped around her head like a cap.

  “I appreciate your time, Mrs. Armstrong,” I told her, as the secretary closed the door behind us. “You must be pretty well fed-up with reporters by now.”

  “I am.” She leaned back in her desk chair, the old-fashioned, solid-looking kind that tilted back on its stem so southern lawyers in suspenders could put their feet on their desks. She held me with her gaze, direct and frosty.

  I smiled. She didn’t.

  “Well,” I said, “like I said on the phone, I’m not on the crime beat, though it was the body story that got my attention. It’s your building I’m interested in. Good stories in a building going up. I’m thinking there may be a piece here I could do.”

  “I don’t think there is, Mr. Smith.”

  Through the window in back of her, I could see the courtyard made by this building and the ones behind. It was a small, irregular, unloved space, only there because the law required it, a sacrified concrete plain whose job it was to give the buildings around it some breathing room. In front of the window hung glass shelves filled with potted ivy, pale star-shaped leaves and glossy plump ones trailing down the window, softening the view.

  “You never know,” I began. “If I could ask you a couple of questions—”

  “You can’t.” She snapped her chair forward, folded her hands on the desktop. “There’s no story in the building you can do because you don’t do stories. You’re not a reporter. I let you in because I want to know who you are and why you used that lie.”