No Colder Place (17 page)

Junior’s back was to the guy; he was struggling to hold two fighters apart. I flung the two-by-four, threw myself after it across the space between the rebar man and me. I tackled him around shoulders like sacks of concrete. We crashed to the mud, tangled together, steel, wood, arms and legs. I tried to get a purchase in the mud, slipped wildly. He did better. He hefted his bulk, twisted, and half pinned me in the dirt.

Voices shouted everywhere, sounds I couldn’t make out, the slap of running feet. Dirt clogged my eyes and my throat. I tried, failed, to wrench myself from under the weight of the guy. I blinked, couldn’t see, but didn’t need to. His breath reeked of beer and it was blasting my face.

My right arm was under me, under the weight of him, but my left was free. I sent a fist flying up toward the smell and the grunting, felt pain all the way back to my shoulder as I met his jaw.

He softened for a second, started to deflate. I pushed hard against his chest, tried to shove him away, but his groping hand found my jaw, my throat. He closed his fingers like a vise, forced my head back, back. My hand scrabbled over his, trying to pry a finger up, just one, to peel it back so the pain would loosen his grip, but I couldn’t do it. I choked, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t pull away from him, from the load of him and the crush of his hand.

Then suddenly his squeezing fingers went slack. Another moment, two, and he was just deadweight on me, like lying under a mattress. I shoved him off. He slid away and I lay in the dirt swallowing air, coughing and choking.

Sirens approached; I heard them faintly, then louder, over the yelling and the pounding of feet and my own coughing. I opened my eyes. Dark against the brightness of the sky, Lydia, my abandoned two-by-four tight in her hands, stood over the man who’d been crushing me. Mud crusted her new brown shoes. As I turned my head to look at the man she’d clobbered, he stirred, blinked blankly. He didn’t try to rise.

A thick, rough hand closed on my arm, dragged me up. I helped, clumsily finding my feet, staggering against my benefactor, who stumbled but stood his ground. The sirens came closer. Mike DiMaio, his nose bloody, the side of his face scraped and bruised, pulled me a few steps away, up against a load of plywood, out of the action. He loosened his grip on my arm as I focused my dirt-filmed eyes.

“What happened to you?” I asked him hoarsely.

He shrugged. “Some bastard was breaking up my wall. But Jesus, Smith. You saved Junior’s ass.” He pointed at Dan Crowell, Jr., who was pulling himself unsteadily up from the dirt, holding his hand to a gash on the side of his head. Then he pointed to Lydia. “And she saved yours.”

“The one I was trying to save was yours,” I pointed out. “You could’ve been killed protecting your goddamn bricks.”

He gave me a scornful look. “I could take any three of these fuckers,” he answered.

“How many were there?”

He wiped blood from under his nose. “Four.”

DiMaio turned to Lydia, who held the two-by-four lightly in one hand now, looking sharply around as if she were ready for more action. “You did good work with that stick,” he said.

Lydia flashed him a smile that competed with the July sun. “Thank you,” she answered graciously.

“Thanks,” I said to her myself.

Her eyes met mine. “Mr. Smith, isn’t it? From yesterday in my office?” she asked. “Are you all right?”

“Uh-huh,” I answered. “Fine.”

The sirens could be heard everywhere now. Heads snapped around. Shouts started, different ones. Everything began to happen in reverse.

Men from above charged down the scaffold stairs, leapt to the dirt, didn’t bother with the ramp. Fights ended abruptly as the men off the buses shoved their opponents away, turned, made for the street. Panting construction workers stood, empty-handed, as the chaos the men had brought with them swirled toward the gate.

“Leave them!” Dan Crowell, Sr. bellowed as some masons started to chase after the running men. “Let them go!” The chasing stopped, and everyone watched as men poured from the building, sped from the site, disappeared up, down, across Broadway.

That’s where people’s eyes were, on the fights ending, the men racing away. That’s why, until the scream, no one looked up. No one saw Joe Romeo thrown over the rail, off the scaffold, no one knew until we all saw him, arms waving frantically and uselessly, as he hurtled toward the dirt. He slammed into the ground, bounced, hit again, and settled sickeningly still, lying in the dirt too limp, too given over to it, like a doll or a rag or an old stick of wood, not like something that lived.

eleven

j
oe Romeo was dead. Fallen or pushed from the fourth-floor scaffolding, the police wouldn’t commit, investigation ongoing, findings preliminary at this time. But any of the men who’d been working on the scaffolding knew. All the scaffold platforms wrapping this building had midrails and safety netting, all secure, all checked weekly by Crowell and daily by the safety officer for any subs with crews on the platforms. The cops couldn’t find anyone who’d been there, no one who could say he’d seen what happened, but Joe Romeo had worked on scaffolds all his life, summer, winter, rain, ice. No one had seen it, but everyone knew.

It wasn’t long after the scream, not long after Romeo’s body had settled in the dirt, that the police cars reached the site. The buses were still there, parked where they’d stopped, but the men who’d come off them were all gone, or almost all. Dotting the site were some who’d picked the wrong fight, like the guy Lydia had hit with the two-by-four, guys who’d been too dazed or hurt to run when they had the chance. The cops rounded them up, looked over Romeo’s body, called for the ambulances.

The men from the crews milled around, not knowing what to do, not knowing what they wanted to do. Everyone waited, for instructions, for something. Cops spoke to the site supers and the supers to the men, telling everyone to stay until the cops had taken their stories. Then they could go; there wouldn’t be any more work on this site today.

Paramedics arrived, looked at the injured men, piled some of them on stretchers, but mostly not. Dan Crowell, Jr., with the gash on his head, was one of the ones bandaged and taken to St. Luke’s, for observation.

Once the cops arrived I faded away, blended back in with the milling men, waited my turn to be interviewed. Out of the way, I squatted against the fence, rubbed my shoulder, sore and getting stiff. I felt the sun beat on my face and hands, saw it pushing its way to the ground through dust-thickened air. I scanned the faces of the cops, looking for any that were familiar; if any of these guys knew me, it would require a little conversation on the side to head off trouble. But there was no one. Beeping, Dan Junior’s ambulance backed out the gate. I watched as Lydia walked up the ramp toward the field office with two detectives and Dan Crowell, Sr.

Senior was sure to blow her cover now, sure to tell the cops about hiring Chuck—it would be foolish not to, now that Joe Romeo was dead and his death a police matter. But Lydia wouldn’t mention me, and Crowell didn’t know about me, so I stayed where I was. It might be time to give all this up, get me off this site, with Romeo dead and the trouble here being what it was, but that was Chuck’s call. Until he made that decision, I was just another mason here, just another guy who’d been in a fight.

And before he made that decision, I wanted to talk to him.

And maybe to a couple of other people.

A shadow fell across me; I squinted up, saw Mike DiMaio between me and the sun.

“Hey,” I asked him, “how’s your bricks?”

“Fine, no thanks to you,” he answered. He lowered himself to the patch of dirt beside me.

I checked my back pocket for cigarettes. The pack was crushed but still there. I found a couple that were intact, offered him one and he took it; we smoked together in the sunlight and dust, watched cops and paramedics and construction workers move around. A blue tarp, the same as the one DiMaio and I had been using to cover the day’s work, draped Joe Romeo’s body. I could see the edge of it from where I sat.

“You really on your way up the scaffold to save my ass?” DiMaio finally asked, inspecting the burning tip of his cigarette as though it were something new.

“Uh-huh,” I said.

He nodded at that. “Well, do me a favor?”

“What’s that?”

“Next time, get there in time to do me some good.”

I considered this request. “What’ll I do about Crowell Junior, next time?”

“Let that little Chinese girl take care of him. You’re lucky she was looking out for you.” DiMaio’s tone was casual, his words nothing extraordinary; but he was drawing deeply on the cigarette, and his eyes, moving here and there, kept away from the blue tarp.

“She was just looking for a fight,” I said. “I think she’s that type.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I thought she swung that two-by-four pretty good. Think she plays softball?”

“Shortstop,” I said. In answer to his questioning look I asked, “What else is she going to play, at her size? Did you really get your face messed up like that fighting over bricks?”

He touched his swollen nose gingerly. “Yeah.”

“Why?”

“Why?” He looked at me incredulously. “Because I’m a big fan of yours, Smith, and I wanted to be like you, only I figured I’d never be big, but if I worked on it I could get to be ugly. What the hell do you mean, why?”

I pulled on my cigarette. “Never mind.” A carpenter slung his tool belt over his shoulder, trudged across the site as the cop who’d been with him wandered off to find somebody else. “Mike, tell me something: what the hell just happened here?”

“You got nothing to do today but ask dumb questions, Smith? Coalition came and broke up the joint. You never saw this before?” He shook his head, answering his own question. “I forgot, this isn’t really what you do. Well, that’s what happened.”

“‘Coalition’?”

“Full-employment coalition.”

“Looking for … ?”

“Ah, shit. What they say, they’re looking for local hires on the job, get some black and Spanish guys into the trades, into the unions.” He spat on the dirt. “It’s bullshit.”

“It is? What are they really looking for?”

“They’re looking to get paid off. You grease the coordinators before you start work, they don’t come.”

“Coordinators? That’s what they’re called?”

DiMaio nodded.

“And that’s all you have to do? Pay them off?”

“Well,” he said, shifting, looking away, across the site, “well, it’s better if you hire a few local guys, too. That way you could point to them, when the coordinators come around. You say, ‘I already got some, so fuck off.’”

“So they
are
looking to get men hired.”

“No!” He sighed. “Look, it ain’t like I don’t see their point. Yeah, it’s hard for those guys to get into the unions; yeah, maybe they’re not gonna get a job this good somewheres else. But you saw those guys here.”

I rubbed my shoulder. I’d more than only seen them.

“Those bastards,” he went on, “the ones who come here, they don’t want to work. They get twenty bucks each and all the cheap shit they can drink to pump them up. This is a goddamn shakedown. The men out there really looking for work, this isn’t doing them any goddamn good.”

“But men do get hired out of it.”

“Yeah,” he admitted. “Yeah, okay. They lose any edge they might have, if you hire and pay ’em off, both. Then you can be pretty sure you’ll never see ’em.”

“And Crowell didn’t do that?” I asked. “At the beginning?”

“Well,” he said, “that’s what don’t figure. I heard they did.”

“Heard from where?”

“It goes around. Guys like to know this isn’t gonna happen, when they sign on. Word was Crowell’d already dealt with the coordinators and taken on men. Ray, you know, the big black bricklayer? And some other guys.”

“Sort of an unofficial quota, to keep the peace on your site?”

“I guess.”

I asked, “What about Reg Phillips?”

DiMaio bristled. “What, just because he’s black?”

“Is it a stupid question?”

He knocked some crusted dirt off the leg of his pants. “Nah, I guess not. But you’re wrong. Reg’s been a mason tender for years. Maybe he started from some shit like this, I don’t know. But he was one of the first guys Lozano hired for this job, because he knew him. Knew he did good work.”

I mashed the end of my cigarette out against the sole of my boot. “I wonder where you find them,” I said. “These coordinators.”

He gave me a long look. “What are you thinking?”

I stared across the site, didn’t answer.

“Let me put that another way,” he said. “How come since you come here investigating Joe Romeo, Reg Phillips is in the hospital, some crane operator is dug up from the elevator pit, and now Joe Romeo’s dead?”

“Mike,” I said, “I wish I knew.”

He was silent for a long time, staring across the site. “You think this was an accident, what happened to Joe?” he finally asked.

“You mean an accident, like he slipped and fell?”

He shook his head impatiently. “No, that’s bullshit. You know how hard it is to fall off shit like this?” He waved his hand at the back rails and the orange netting of the scaffolding that wrapped the building. “No, I mean an accident like he got into a fight with one of them drunk fuckers and he heaved him over. Someone from one of those buses that he didn’t know from Adam. You think it was like that?”

“You think it wasn’t?”

“You’re the fucking detective!”

Surprised by the force of his words, I didn’t answer.

DiMaio stared up at the building, the steel skeleton rising inside the new brick skin. “I want to know what happened to Reg,” he said. “I want to know why he’s lying up there in St. Luke’s with a tube up his nose. But I’ve never been in the middle of shit like this before. Christ, I’m just a fucking bricklayer. A fucking body buried in here, and now Joe—” He stopped.

I looked at him curiously. “Mike, are you trying to tell me to be careful?”

“Shit. I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe I’m trying to tell you that if you get your fucking self killed, I don’t want it to be my fucking fault.”