Chin - 04 - No Colder Place

by S. J. Rozan

  “You really should turn off the ringer before you go to bed,” he scolded me. “That’s what I’m here for.”

  “I forgot. Anyway, who the hell was that, at this hour?”

  “Please. This is the third time she’s called. Twice late last night, and then now. What did you do, stand her up?”

  “Who?”

  “A lady named Denise Armstrong. And I mean a lady, too.”

  Denise Armstrong. Oh, Jesus. Go see Chester Hamilton, she’d said. Report back to me before the police get involved. I’ll be waiting to hear from you.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I guess I did, in a way.”

  “Well, she left a phone number. She certainly sounds awake and alert. I’d recommend another hit of coffee before you call her.”

  “Thanks, Tommy,” I said, but I didn’t have the time to act on his recommendation, and it probably wouldn’t have helped anyway.

  I dialed the number he gave me, Denise Armstrong’s office. She answered herself; I was glad, though a little surprised, to see that she didn’t demand that her office staff come in at six A.M. just because she did.

  “Mr. Smith!” she snapped into the phone when I told her who it was. “What in the hell did you do?”

  “Slept? Made coffee? It depends what you mean.”

  “Don’t even try to be cute with me. Chester Hamilton is dead. Don’t tell me you didn’t know that.”

  “No, I did. How do you?”

  “The police called me, just after midnight last night. They wanted to tell me they’re pretty sure he was the one who brought those men to my building.”

  “Did you tell them you knew that already?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Did you shoot him?” The question sounded as cold and direct as any she might ask in a business negotiation.

  “No,” I said. I didn’t know how convincing a denial that single word was, or how convinced she was by it, but she went on without missing a beat.

  “Did you speak with him?”

  “Yes.”

  “And?”

  “Not much,” I said. “We didn’t get far.”

  “How far?”

  “Only one thing: He just about admitted he and his men were hired to come wreck your site.”

  A short silence was the only evidence that she was digesting what I’d said. “It wasn’t a true job action?”

  “Looks that way.”

  “Did he tell you who hired him? Did he say why?”

  “No. Do you have any ideas?”

  “Of course not. Why would I?”

  “Well,” I said, “it seems to me, one reason to do a thing like that would be to send a message. If that’s what happened, most likely the message would be for you. So what did it say?”

  “I have no idea.” Her voice was icy, her words stiff.

  “Someone’s unhappy,” I said. “I suggest you think about who, and why.”

  “And I suggest,” she said, “that you tread very carefully, especially where my affairs are involved. Have you spoken to the police?”

  “Why would I?”

  “Because you saw him. You might have gone to them, running scared, thinking about your license and your reputation.”

  “And my neck,” I said, “as possibly”—definitely—“the last person to see Hamilton alive. Which is a more and more risky position to be in, the longer I wait to come in.”

  “So you haven’t spoken to them.” Under the cold control, I thought I heard relief. “If you do, how will you explain how you found him?”

  “You don’t give a damn, as long as I don’t tell them it was you.”

  “I’d like to point out that in the discussions I had with them last night, I didn’t mention you.”

  “As a favor to me, no doubt. Let me ask you something.”

  “What is it?”

  “What would you have done if I’d said I’d shot him?”

  “I hadn’t decided,” she said. “But you can be sure I would have found a way to handle it.”

  I was sure.

  After we hung up, I looked at the time and the piano, tried to tell myself that fifteen minutes’ practicing, ten, would be worth it, but I knew it wasn’t true. Sore as I was, it would take me a half hour just to loosen up enough to feel comfortable reaching for the notes. The Scriabin was still there, in my head, and I sensed—heard—that it was almost at the point of understanding I’d been reaching for; but it needed focus, complete attention, the kind that only comes when time is meaningless, when five minutes or five hours or whatever you need is what you can have. If I wanted to get to Broadway and Ninety-ninth to start my shift, I didn’t have that now.

  I was on the site before Mike DiMaio this morning, so I was the one to pull off the tarp and wave over the guy with the mortar. The sky was clear and the sun, even this early, was direct and hot. I’d checked the detail drawing on the column inside and was laying out my tools when DiMaio came up.

  “Hey,” he said, stopped on the scaffold, studied me. “You’re back.”

  “Shouldn’t I be?” I asked, maybe more sharply than I meant to.

  His response was a half-second slow, surprised about something in me, reacting to that. “I don’t know.” He moved past me, slung his bag onto the board between us, spread his own tools out. “I thought you was here because of Joe.”

  “I was.”

  “Then what now? He’s dead, your client is gonna keep paying your bill to be here? Or that was bullshit from day one?” He grinned, showing me he thought it probably wasn’t bullshit; we knew each other better now than when I’d started a few days ago.

  “No,” I said, reining it in, my tone more reasonable. “But I’m not finished.”

  “Not finished doing what?”

  “Building this wall.”

  DiMaio glanced at the brickwork, seemed not sure how to take what I’d said. “I’m the bricklayer,” he told me, pulling on his gloves. “You’re the guy I cover for.”

  “That’s true,” I said. It hit me how tired I was, though the day was new. “I’m the guy who came here to do one thing and got caught up in other things, so many I don’t know what the hell is going on. But I don’t think I’m finished.”

  He picked up a trowel, turned over some mortar on the board between us.

  “Reg?” he asked.

  “I said I’d do it.”

  DiMaio’s steady gaze held me for a few moments; then he nodded, turned, picked a brick from the pile the mason tender had placed, the pile we hadn’t used yesterday. He balanced it in his hand as if taking its measure.

  “If it was Joe,” he said, “how are we gonna find out now?”

  “Not ‘we,’” I said. “You’re the bricklayer. I’m the guy you cover for.”

  I didn’t like it as soon as I’d said it, but I didn’t apologize. DiMaio’s eyes flashed, but he said nothing.

  “Listen,” I said, working at it, “how is he? Phillips.”

  He looked at me, considering. “I was over there yesterday,” he said. “They say he’s doing better. He seems to wake up some, tries to talk. Not while I was there, though.”

  “But that’s good,” I said. “I’m glad to hear it. Listen, Mike, I hear he’s in school.”

  “Yeah, nights at City College. I didn’t tell you that?”

  “No.”

  “I must not’ve thought of it. Sorry.”

  “You should have.”

  He bristled. “Hey, you wanna know something, you gotta ask. My mind don’t work like a detective’s. I’m a bricklayer. I only think to answer questions if someone asks them.”

  “It could be important.”

  “Well, you know about it now. Shit, Smith. What the hell is your problem today?”

  I met his eyes, clear and blue, and had the sudden, uncomfortable feeling that I could see right through them, see right into who he really was. Solid and real. Like a brick wall, made from things you could see, nothing hidden, nothing fake, nothing weak and buried inside that could bring
the whole thing crashing down one unexpected day.

  He was looking into my eyes too.

  I lifted my hard hat, wiped my face, settled the hat again.

  “I’m sorry, Mike,” I said. “Bad day yesterday. Let’s get to work, okay?”

  I picked a brick off the pile, felt the morning heat loosening my shoulders.

  “What are you thinking?” DiMaio asked, a little less belligerent, backing off too. “You think someone up there, City College, could have something to do with what happened?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m not thinking anything. I just want to get through the day without thinking much at all. Maybe something I already know will float to the top that way.”

  “Yeah.” DiMaio nodded. He crouched, sorted through a bucket of plastic weeps until he found one he wanted. “I know what you mean. Just do your bricks, then, when you go home, the problem you had that morning’s all figured out. Like you had nothing to do with it.”

  He straightened up and we got to work. I hefted bricks, spread mortar, sweated and drank coffee and struck clean joints. The sounds on the site—shouts, growling engines, the whine of a diamond-blade saw—were punctuated by the syncopated tap of DiMaio’s brick hammer and the creaking of the scaffold boards as men came and went. The July sun moved slowly through the morning, wrapped us in heat like a blanket. My arms were tired but they didn’t ache, not like when I’d first come here, and my movements had more rhythm now, more flow. I focused on what I was doing, this brick here, set like this, reach for the mortar, straighten, another brick. There were connections here too, movements and objects that went together, were related in ways you couldn’t see at first. The Scriabin études ran in my mind, first this piece, then that. They and the bricks and the bright dusty heat became my day.

  John Lozano came around that morning, up on the scaffold to look at our work. “We’ll be bringing on a new foreman in a day or two,” he told us. “Until then it’ll be me.”

  “Good,” DiMaio said, grinning at Lozano, speaking to me. “Softy like Lozano, you and me can kick back, relax a little.”

  “Don’t even think about it,” Lozano said. “I was a masonry foreman eleven years.” His blue eyes and his mouth smiled the same kind smile. He made notes on his clipboard, moved on.

  “It’ll take him a few days to find a new foreman?” I asked as DiMaio and I went back to work. “With jobs being so scarce?”

  “Nah. He could have someone here by afternoon, if he wanted. Most likely he thinks by him coming up here for a few days himself it’ll calm the men down.”

  “The men like him?”

  “Lozano?” He seemed surprised at the question. “Yeah, sure. Nice guy. Fair.”

  “You’ve worked with him before?”

  “Couple of times. Wants the work done good, but always cuts you a break if he can. You gotta work for somebody, you want to work for a guy like him.”

  By eleven, when we broke for lunch, the site was busy with rumors—the murder of a coalition leader last night, maybe the one whose men had torn our work apart. No one knew, but that didn’t stop the speculating, the muttering, the diatribes against a city going straight to hell. There were a few dissenting voices, DiMaio’s among them, about the meaning of it all, but no one disagreed with the general assessment of the murdered man.

  “Fucking bastard,” Angelo Lucca said, and everyone nodded, offered expletives of their own. “If that was him, I’m glad he got it. Screw the son of a bitch.”

  “I don’t know why the city can’t do nothing about bastards like that,” the sandy-haired mason, Tommy, said. “What the hell is wrong with this place?”

  “Shit, Tommy,” said DiMaio, through the remains of his sandwich. “They don’t hold up the city. They hold up guys like Crowell. The city probably don’t even know where to find ’em.”

  “City don’t know shit. Asshole place, this city.”

  DiMaio shrugged. “I don’t know. There’s always work, even in times like this. And pretty girls. What else do you need?”

  Someone snorted. Tommy said, “Yeah, I seen you yesterday, DiMaio, with that new girl of Crowell’s. You living dangerously, or what?”

  “DiMaio likes that,” Lucca said. “Girls as likely to brain him as the other way around.”

  “Hey, fuck off.” DiMaio reddened. “I never hit a girl in my life.”

  “Yeah, well, you keep seeing that Chinese girl, you’re gonna have to start. In self-defense.”

  “That true?” I asked DiMaio, sipping my coffee. “You like dangerous women?”

  DiMaio shook his head. “I just like ones who know what they’re doing, that’s all.” He added, “Maybe if you guys didn’t act like assholes they wouldn’t treat you like you were.”

  “Oh, shit, look at this!” Sam Buck cackled. “You a women’s libber now, DiMaio? You gonna demand equal rights, girls on the scaffold?”

  “Might be better company than some of you jerks.” DiMaio stood. I stood with him, and lunch break was over.

  I made it to the end of the workday, moving slowly in the afternoon, and by then I’d had it. I punched out, sank onto a subway seat, felt the rumble of the tracks and the sharp chill of the air-conditioning, and wished that the trip were longer. All I wanted was to go home, shower, sleep.

  I managed the first two, then left my place again before the desire for the third wiped out any other plans I had.

  Because I did have plans.

  I called Lydia at the Crowell office, told her where I was going.

  “Good idea,” she said. “Anything special you want me to do?”

  “Everything you do is special,” I told her.

  “If you’re counting on the fact that I have to be polite to you on the phone because I’m in the office—”

  “Absolutely not. It’s light-headedness from lack of sleep. I’m not responsible for my actions.”

  “Call me later if you have anything worth saying.”

  “I’ll call you even if I don’t.”

  “That, I’m sure of,” she said, and hung up.

  I went to get the car and drive out to Queens, wondering whether Lydia would be in when I called her later, and if she wasn’t, where she would be.

  Howard Beach is a neighborhood of low-rise brick apartment buildings and small, close-set one-family houses with ground-floor garages and handkerchief lawns, of aging strip malls and new giant discount superstores. People here know their butchers and their dry cleaners; kids work at the supermarket or the McDonald’s after school and often grow up to go into the family business. Sometimes, in Howard Beach, the family business is organized crime.

  I drove slowly down a street whose aluminum-sided houses with their iron-railed front porches had been part of New York’s exuberant expansion in the fifties and sixties—baby-booming optimism rolling acres of neighborhood over field and swamp. The streets and the buildings and the early residents were all older now, exuberance muted, optimism turned a little grim, but kids still played in the streets and some of the first-planted trees spread broad limbs across the sidewalk.

  The house I was looking for stood at an intersection in a residential area, a short section of sunlit white picket fence and a rosebush barricading the lawn at the corner so neighborhood kids wouldn’t cut across it on their way from here to there. I parked, straightened my tie, headed up the walk. In my dark blue suit, I wasn’t likely to raise any eyebrows coming here today; and even if it hadn’t been necessary, it seemed only right.

  A boy, maybe fifteen, answered my knock. A cousin maybe, or a younger brother. Awkwardly, not sure what his duties were, he tried to reach open the screen door for me, still holding the knob of the other one.

  “I’m a friend of Lenny’s,” I said, to make it easier for him. “From work.”

  “Oh,” he said, exhaling gratefully. “Yeah. C’mon in.”

  The living room was carpeted in dark gold, its brocaded curtains drawn, light provided by end-table lamps. On a burnt-orange-and-go
ld sofa, a plump woman sat, dressed all in black, as was the thinner woman beside her. They looked up as I entered, the heavy one seeming dazed and uncertain, the other determinedly, protectively, in control.

  “This’s a friend of Lenny’s,” the boy told them. He looked to me as if for further instructions.

  “Bill Smith,” I said. “I’m a bricklayer, on the Broadway job. I’m really sorry about Lenny.”

  “Thank you,” the heavy woman said. Her voice was husky. She held out a hand to me; I took it in both of mine, gave it a squeeze. “Please,” she said, “sit. Anna, please get Mr. Smith a coffee. You’ll stay and have coffee? Or whiskey. Tony—”

  “Coffee’s fine, thanks.”

  She nodded and stopped speaking when I spoke, watched me as I sat on an armchair upholstered in nubbly, burnt-orange fabric.

  “I’m Lenny’s mother,” she suddenly said, as though it had just occurred to her I might not know that. “This is my sister, Anna Mannucci. And Tony, my nephew.”

  Anna Mannucci rose and smiled at me, her eyes fierce, silently warning me not to upset her sister. “I’ll get the coffee.” She left the room. Tony stood, looking uncomfortable but willing to do his duty, if he only understood it.

  “Did you know my Lenny well?” Mrs. Pelligrini asked the question sadly, as if the answer couldn’t possibly matter now.

  “No. Just from the job. But when you work with a guy … well, you know,” I finished. “I just wanted to pay my respects.”

  “That’s very kind,” she said.

  “Actually,” I said, “I know a couple of other guys who knew him. Chuck DeMattis, for one.”

  I’d thrown Chuck’s name out the way you throw stones in a pond, just wanting to see what the ripples would be. I wasn’t really expecting any; the name I thought I’d get a reaction from was Louie Falco’s, and I was planning to try that next. I wasn’t prepared for Mrs. Pelligrini’s eyes to open wide, for her to lean forward, to say, “Chuckie? You’re from Chuckie?”

  “I work for him, on and off,” I said, hoping she didn’t notice I’d been thrown off my stride. “Things he needs, if I can.” I wondered if that made sense, would keep things moving.

  “Is he going to help me? Chuckie’s going to help?”