by S. J. Rozan
The heat of anger was in her voice, but her eyes stayed steady and cold. In the air stirred up by the air conditioner, the ivy moved gently. A sharp ray of sun broke through the clouds, found a cracked square of concrete in the empty courtyard.
“You called the News?” I asked.
“The real reporters all came swarming last night,” she said. “I told them not to bother. I wasn’t nice; I rarely am. I’ve found if I start strong, the word spreads. It saves trouble.”
“You’ve been in this position with reporters before?”
“The technique works with anyone, Mr. Smith. When you didn’t call until late this morning, I decided you were either very much out of touch with your colleagues, or lying. I called the News to find out which.”
“Then why did you let me in?”
“I just told you: I want to know who you really are.”
“If I don’t tell you?”
She smiled a cold smile; I got the odd feeling she’d been hoping I’d ask that. “The door behind you,” she said, “is locked.”
I turned to look at the door, turned back to her. I didn’t get up to try it. “Kidnapping?” I said.
“Hardly.” Her voice was cool, even. “Dana locked it on her way out. In ten minutes, unless I tell her not to, she’ll call the police. She’ll unlock the door as they drive up. I sponsor the Twenty-fourth Precinct’s PAL softball and basketball teams,” she said conversationally. “They won’t react well to a stranger lying his way in here and attacking me in my own office.”
“Attacking you?”
She shrugged her shoulders. “It’s a hard world, Mr. Smith. Who are you and what do you want?”
I looked again at the door. “I could break it down, I think.”
“I think not. My grandfather built solid buildings. And if you use physical force—on the door or on me—that will just add to my story when the police get here.”
“Your grandfather built this building?”
“I’ve been in real estate all my life, Mr. Smith or whatever your name is. Smith!” She curled her lip at the transparency of my alias. “My grandfather was burnt out of his house in Alabama by people with accents like yours. He came north, bought land, and began to build, solid buildings that would last. My father took over his business, and I took over my father’s.” Her eyes glinted like sunlight on polished stone. “I don’t know what your game is, but I guarantee you I can play it better than you can. That’s how a black woman in a white man’s world gets through the day. You have eight minutes.”
I shrugged. “This seems like a lot of trouble to go to just to find out who I am.”
“You’ve gone to a lot of trouble to get in here and ask questions,” she said. “Reporters have lied to me before, pretending to be other things. No one’s ever pretended to be a reporter. There’s never been a body buried under one of my buildings before, either. I don’t like those two things happening so close together. Who are you and what do you want?”
“Maybe I’m a reporter for some supermarket scandal sheet I knew you wouldn’t speak to.”
“Maybe you’d better get started with the truth; you’ve got seven minutes left.”
I met her eyes. Outside her plant-draped window, pools of rainwater sat on the broken and forgotten concrete.
“I’m a private investigator,” I said. “In a way, I work for you.”
I took out my license, handed it across the desk. She frowned at it, then frowned at me. “You don’t work for me.”
“I work for Crowell Construction,” I said. “On a job involving your site.”
“My site?” The frown deepened. “About the body?”
“I don’t know.”
She snapped my license down in front of her. “What does that mean? You don’t know what you’re working on?”
“The case I came in on was before that body was found. I don’t know if they’re connected. That’s what I came here to find out.”
“Here? From me?”
“Your building.”
“I own it. I’m not the person digging regularly in the elevator pit. Why did Crowell hire you?”
“There’ve been losses on the site,” I said. “Tools, equipment. They suspect someone, but he works for one of the subs, and they can’t just fire him without proof. There’d be union trouble.”
“Who?”
“A man named Joe Romeo,” I said. “A masonry foreman.”
“I’ve never heard of him.”
“That doesn’t mean he’s not stealing from you.”
“Not from me. From Crowell. I’m paying them to put this building up. If they run into trouble it’s their problem.”
“And they’re handling it by hiring us.”
She reached for the phone. “And I suppose if I call them they’ll confirm who you are?”
“No,” I said. “They don’t know me. I’m just an operative at the agency they hired.”
“Which is?”
I gave her Chuck’s name, the name of the agency. “Call Crowell if you want,” I said. “But I’d appreciate it if you’d talk to Dana first.”
“Dana—? Oh. You mean you don’t want to be arrested.”
The answer to that seemed obvious, so I didn’t give it.
She looked at her watch, smiled a frosty smile, and punched a single button on the phone. A few seconds; then, “Mr. Crowell, please. Senior.”
She must, I realized, be talking to Lydia.
Mrs. Armstrong waited; then her tone changed, and I listened to her talk to Dan Crowell, Sr. “There’s a man here in my office,” she said without preamble. “He claims to work for a firm called DeMattis Security, and he says they work for you.” She told Crowell Senior what else I’d said, about the trouble on the site, about Joe Romeo. She paused, listened.
“No, I understand that. But you did hire DeMattis Security, and for the reasons he claims?” Another pause, longer. Shadows moved across the courtyard, darkening puddles that would be there until morning. I began to reach for my cigarettes, thought better of it, put them back. “All right, but I wish you’d told me. No, of course it’s your business, but if we’re going to keep working together—All right, Mr. Crowell. We’ll talk later.” She hung up without saying good-bye.
She looked down at her watch, then at me, wordlessly. I could see the second hand sweeping around the dial; it seemed to me she was counting down the seconds, and although she didn’t smile, I thought she must be enjoying it. I didn’t move, met her gaze steadily. Finally, eyes still on me, she picked up the phone again, pressed a different button, and spoke. “Dana? No, it’s fine. No, I’ll let you know. Well, he is, but I can handle it. Thanks.” She replaced the receiver.
“All right,” she said. “Mr. Crowell confirms your agency’s been hired. He confirms why. Now I want to know why you tried so hard to come see me.”
“I was interested in the woman who didn’t flinch when they dug a body up off her site.”
“‘Didn’t flinch’?”
“Mr. Crowell’s new secretary was there. She told me that.”
I mentioned Lydia mostly to see if Crowell Senior had blown her cover to Mrs. Armstrong, but if he had, she didn’t tell me about it.
“And what did you expect?” she asked. “Should I have fainted? Averted my eyes? You’re from the South, aren’t you?”
“I was born in Kentucky.”
“Then you know that that flower-of-femininity bull is for white women only. Black women are expected to get down on their hands and knees and clean up the stink that makes white women pass out from across the room. That man was dead. I didn’t know him, I didn’t kill him. He has nothing to do with me. He was buried in a property I happen to own, and just my owning it is enough to give some people fits.”
“You think that’s why he was there?”
“What do you mean?”
“Because someone doesn’t want you owning that property?”
She gave me a scornful look. “Don’t be silly. You m
ean as a warning, some kind of stupid melodrama? Of course not. These days, if you don’t want a black woman owning a major property you just redline her loan application.”
I remembered the raised voices in the conference room in the trailer, the argument Lydia had said was not an argument, just an excited discussion of Mrs. Armstrong’s financial situation. “Has that happened to you?”
“Redlining?” she asked. “What if it has? There are other banks. Is that what you came here to find out? Whether I’m solvent?”
“I don’t know what I came here to find out. I’m an investigator. I’m supposed to be looking into a guy who’s supposed to be a crook. My second day on the job a body’s dug up. I’m fishing.”
“Have you caught anything yet?”
“Rumors. Stories. Are you going to help me?”
“Help you do what?”
“Figure it out. Whether there’s a connection between Joe Romeo and the dead man, Pelligrini.”
“No. I’m going to throw you out of my office.”
“If there is a connection, your site could have a wiseguy problem.”
“If there’s a problem, I’ll deal with it when it starts affecting me.”
“A body in the basement doesn’t affect you?”
“No. What affects me is anything that slows Crowell’s schedule. That’s it.”
“What’s the big deal?” I thought back, again, to the argument in the trailer. I went on, deliberately provocative. “A couple of days here or there. So the building opens a month later. You think that makes you look bad or something, like you’re not Super Black Woman?”
“I don’t give a damn when the building opens, and I don’t give a damn how I look. But the bank does.”
“One little building matters so much to them?”
Her eyes flashed. Gesturing around us, she said, “This is a little building. Ninety-ninth and Broadway is the start of something else. I’m looking at two other sites. I’ve already asked Mr. Crowell for preliminary construction budgets. Super Black Woman is going to be a force in this city, Mr. Smith. Now get out.” She picked up the receiver, pressed a button on the phone. She didn’t speak into it.
“Super Black Woman, and Crowell Construction?” I asked.
“Possibly. Why, is that too much for you to stomach, an upstart black woman working with a respected old Irish construction firm?”
“Hell, no. I’m half Irish myself. Black Irish,” I added, as I heard the snick of the lock behind me. The door opened, with Dana in the doorway. I stood. “Thanks for your time, Mrs. Armstrong. I hope, for your sake, that things on that site aren’t as bad as I think.”
“I hope for yours that you stick to what Crowell hired you to do, and keep out of things that aren’t your business.”
The courtyard behind her was completely shadowed now. Her eyes were still bright. I nodded good-bye and turned to where Dana held open the heavy door for me. I glanced at the door and the doorway as I moved through. She was right. I couldn’t have broken it down.
It was late afternoon when I left the Armstrong Properties office, and the rain seemed to have quit for good. When I got to the corner I looked down the hill, west, to the river; the dark clouds above the Palisades were streaked with a bright glow. If the sun broke through before it dipped much lower, there would be hope of a rainbow.
I checked my watch, decided it was close enough to the end of the workday, and called Lydia.
“Crowell Construction,” she told me pleasantly and professionally, answering the phone on the second ring.
“Hi, it’s me. Can you take personal calls?”
“Not as personal as you have in mind.”
“All I was going to offer you was a ride home.”
“Really? That’s totally different.”
“Different from what?”
“Every other man on this site. Where are you?”
“About eight blocks north of you. What’s wrong with the guys on the site?”
“I’m sure there’s nothing wrong with them. I’m sure they’re all red-blooded all-Americans and I’m supposed to find them boyishly charming. Should I come up there?”
“That would be good. So we aren’t seen together on the site. I don’t want the other guys getting jealous.”
“Excuse me?”
“Just walk up Broadway, on the east side. You’ll see the car. You get off at five-thirty?”
“Yes. What are you going to do between now and then?”
“Drink.”
I did, too. I found a bar on the next corner with brick-patterned asphalt on the outside, and a floor so old that patches of marble tile broke the worn linoleum like an ancient mosaic surfacing under shifting desert sands. The decor was dark brown paint, the lighting too old and dispirited to give it a run for its money. The scent of stale smoke layered the air, but the air conditioner worked and the beer was cold and that was enough for me. I had a Bud there, listening with half an ear to the buzzing of the Coors sign and the subdued, sparse talk of the other patrons, guys who were lucky or unlucky enough to be able to pass a weekday afternoon in a bar.
I thought about how I’d spent my afternoon, and my morning too, and the other mornings this week, about the bricks in a north-facing window bay on the sixth floor of a building down the street that wouldn’t be there if I hadn’t put them in. Each one of them, lifted and turned and placed by my hands, each now in some way part of me, part of the memories my hands had, my arms and my back, memories that would stay part of who I was long after I’d forgotten about the building and the work I’d done there.
I drank my beer and thought about that, about what it meant, wondered whether what it meant to me was the same as it was to Mike, to the Crowells, to Reg Phillips. There was no way to know, so I wondered.
When the beer was almost gone and the accompanying cigarette just a memory, I looked at my watch, drained my glass, and went out to meet Lydia.
The sun had made it, splitting a heavy cloud over the Hudson and pouring out a deep yellow light that glowed triumphantly off every west-facing surface it found. It lit glossy terra-cotta, bounced off windows, sparkled on the chrome on parked cars, and gave a delicate golden outline to Lydia’s head and shoulders as she leaned on my car reading a magazine.
“Hi,” I said, coming up to her, kissing her cheek. She smelled of freesia, and faintly of sweat. I took up a position next to her against the car. “Come here often?”
“Depends what’s parked here.”
“Oh.” I decided not to touch that. “What are you reading?”
“American Builder.” She showed me the magazine. The cover was an aerial photograph of a deep pit excavation surrounded by a tall construction fence. Three tower cranes cut the hazy sky; the background was mountains. “I borrowed it from the office. I thought I should try to learn something about what it is you big tough construction guys do all day.”
“You’re including me in that? ‘Big, tough’? I’m flattered, I think.”
“Think again.”
“Oh. Trouble?”
“Not that you’d notice. I love this job. I especially love the adorable way every man on that site has of hitting on me every time they open their mouths.”
I looked into her narrowed eyes. “There’s nothing I can say to that that would be right, is there?” I asked.
“No.”
“Umm … Can I distract you by getting in the car?”
“You can try.”
I tried it, unlocking the car, restraining myself from opening her door for her. She slid in and fastened her seat belt with a forceful click. I started to lower the windows and then changed my mind, switched the air-conditioning on.
We joined the traffic flowing up Broadway. “I’m sorry,” she said aggressively. “I suppose I shouldn’t take it out on you.”
I shrugged. “I got you into this.”
“Well, that’s true. And you’re a man.”
“I can’t help that.”
“Tha
t’s no excuse. Go ahead and open the windows.”
“You’d rather that than air-conditioning?”
“No, but you would. You always do.”
“Let me sacrifice my desires to yours this one time. It’ll help me regain some of the moral high ground.”
“No, it won’t, but okay, leave it on. You’re just lucky I’m such a professional.”
“I’m sure I am,” I agreed.
“Oh, I guarantee it. If I weren’t, I wouldn’t have been able to put my personal feelings aside to do the kind of serious snooping I did today.”
I glanced across the car at her. “You did serious snooping?”
“Someone has to.”
“Ouch.”
“Well, maybe you are, too. How would I know? It’s not like you keep me updated.”
“How can I, during the day?”
“Another bad excuse. You haven’t even asked me to have dinner with you tonight.”
“Would you have?”
“No. I want to work out.”
“After that?”
She sighed. “Not unless there’s something we don’t have time to go over now, okay? My mother’s cousins are coming over after dinner and I ought to be there to be nice.”
“Can you be nice, given the mood you’re in?”
“Why not? They’re not construction workers.”
“Oh.”
“Don’t start getting monosyllabic on me. I’ll tell you what I did today if you tell me.”
“I would have anyway.”
She suddenly grinned, and leaned back in the seat. “I know that. Do you know how hard it is to keep this up?”
I looked over at her again. “Keep what up?”
“The bad-tempered expression of righteous anger at my second-class status.”
“It’s a strain?” I asked. “Because if it is, you could stop. I wouldn’t mind.”
“And abandon the principles of militant feminism?”
“Just for twenty minutes?”
She gave the idea two seconds’ thought. “Okay,” she said, as I U-turned to head south. “But I get to come back to it at any time, without warning.”
“Fair enough,” I said. We rolled down Broadway. “So tell me about your snooping.”
“You mean I get to go first?”