No Colder Place (18 page)

“Okay,” I said, “fair enough.”

He looked at me suspiciously.

“Look, Mike,” I said. “This is what I do for a living. It’s what I’ve always done. I don’t have to do it, but I do. That makes it my choice and it makes whatever happens my fault.”

He asked, “You had that kind of choice?”

The question threw me. “What?”

“You feel like you had a choice?” he asked again. “I didn’t. I was born to lay bricks. I tried other shit, didn’t do me any good. You done other things besides what you do now?”

“Yes.”

He nodded. “Like the navy, right? But here you are. Your old man do what you do?”

“No. Not even close.”

“Mine does, and his old man did too. It’s in the genes or something, I don’t know. It ain’t like I asked to be doing it. But anything else I tried, it’s like the work don’t stay, you know what I mean? You do it, so what? But bricklaying, forget about it. You go home at the end of the day, there’s something
there
. You
did
something. You die, or you get too old to remember, doesn’t matter, what you did is still there.” He shook his head. “But the rest of this shit…” He looked at me again. “You had a choice?”

I looked up at the building too, at the bricks I had worked on, next to DiMaio’s. “I don’t know,” I told him. “I don’t know.”

Chuck didn’t blow my cover, not that day.

His BMW wheeled screeching around the corner and double-parked on Broadway about half an hour after I’d seen Lydia, the detectives, and Crowell Senior disappear into the dimness of the building. Suit jacket open, Chuck rounded the car, quick-walked across the dust and mud through the gate. He stopped for a minute to peer at the buses, at the painted-out names and the silent interiors; then he trotted up the ramp and inside.

I saw all this from above, from the sixth-floor scaffolding where I had gone to collect my tools. The cops had come, finally, for DiMaio and me, one for each. The one who’d talked to me, as far as he knew, was just talking to a mason who’d tried to tackle a big guy, was put out of commission by the big guy, and was saved by Crowell’s Chinese secretary.

“You gotta be kidding,” the cop said, when I told him that. Beads of sweat cut gleaming paths through the fine layer of dust coating his pudgy cheeks, came to rest in his mustache. “That cute little piece, with the short hair? Nice ass on her. She give you her number?”

“Not even her name.”

“Maybe I oughta go see her next,” he said, leering, guy to guy. “Make sure your story checks out.”

“You’d better do that,” I agreed. “I could be lying.”

“Yeah,” he said. The tip of his tongue moistened his heat-chapped lips at the prospect. Then, quickly turning cop-tough, he demanded, “So, what, you see anything when this guy fell off from up there, or what?”

“No.”

He seemed not to know what to make of the shortness of my answer. He considered for a moment whether it was a challenge, an affront to his authority or to the dignity of the NYPD, but he didn’t take it up.

“Yeah. Well, okay,” he said gruffly. “I got your name, I’ll call you if I need anything else.” He spoke as though the investigation of Joe Romeo’s death were under his personal supervision. “You can go now.”

“Thanks.”

“I’m gonna go to the office. See if I can find that girl.” He smiled a wolf’s smile.

“Do that,” I said. I stood, headed for the hoist. “But stop by the paramedics on the way.”

“Why?”

“For a sling,” I told him. “For your ass. You’re going to need it.”

Chuck’s car was still double-parked where he’d left it when I walked out the gate. I gazed at it for a few moments, then headed south on Broadway.

Chuck was probably carrying his cellular phone. If I called him from the corner, he’d be cool enough not to give me away even if he was in the middle of discussing Lydia and Joe Romeo with the police. We could set up something for later; he’d know I was available, know what I was planning.

I came to the pay phone on the corner, looked at it, passed it by.

At home I showered, pulled on clean clothes, made a few phone calls. I left the mason’s bag behind, headed for the subway, to go talk to some people.

My first stop was not my first choice, but it was the way things played out. It was something that needed to be done, a piece to be followed up, and now was even a good time. Now Joe Romeo’s death would be distracting everyone, would be the biggest thing on everyone’s mind. It would have shaken people up. That could be good for me.

The architectural office of Bernard Melville Associates was on Nineteenth Street in Chelsea, in a neighborhood where the large, bright loft spaces that used to hold button factories and handbag assembly lines had been subdivided for architects, graphic designers, photographers, as the manufacturers had moved south or overseas or just folded up their tents over the course of the last fifteen years.

I hadn’t been invited up to the office. I was meeting the man I’d called around the corner, in a coffee shop on Sixth Avenue. The air smelled stale when I walked in, the floor was dirty, and the food didn’t look any better. Maybe that’s why he’d chosen this place: maybe we could be sure of not being seen here, because no one who worked in the neighborhood, no one who was likely to know him, would be coming here.

I looked around from the door, spotted him already there at a table against the mirrored wall, as edgy and out of place as when I’d last seen him, on the Armstrong site. Donald Hacker. The architect’s rep, the young, skinny guy who walked around twice a week with Dan Crowell, Jr. and didn’t have much to say. He was hunched over a bowl of greasy soup, looking miserable. His eyes swept up to meet mine quickly, as they probably had met the eyes of every man who’d walked in here in the last ten minutes. I nodded. Now he could stop looking up nervously every time the door opened. I was the one.

I moved to his table, sat across from him. He twitched as I pulled my chair in, as though he were about to jump up and run away, but he didn’t. He didn’t say anything, either.

Well, I could start us off. “I’m Smith,” I said.

He nodded. “I figured that.” His words came out weak and gravelly, caught in his throat. He coughed, said in a voice he tried to make stronger, “What do you want?”

“I just want to talk,” I said. “Relax.”

A waitress came over, asked me pretty much the same question Hacker had just asked, though the subject was different and the answer didn’t matter to her one way or the other.

“Just coffee,” I told her. Nothing else seemed like a good idea here. Coffee might not be, either, but chances were I’d survive it, and Hacker seemed to need some sense that the universe was not about to end, that things were close to normal. Coffee was a normal thing to order in a coffee shop.

“Talk about what?” Hacker said, staring into his soup after the waitress was gone. “What do you want to talk about?”

“What I said on the phone. The Armstrong site. The construction inspections.”

“Who are you, anyway?”

“I told you that, too. I’m a private investigator.”

“Can you prove that?” he suddenly demanded, looking up, fear creating courage. He was trying to catch me out, to find a way to stop what was about to happen.

I was tempted to ask him what he’d do if I couldn’t, but instead I reached for my wallet, showed him what I’d shown Mike DiMaio when he’d asked the same question. I decided they were close in age, these two men, a year on either side of thirty; I wondered how Hacker felt about the work he did.

The waitress brought my coffee as Hacker was looking over my license. He handed it back to me fast, glanced around the room as though he was worried someone else might see it also, might know why I was there.

“Tell me about it,” I said. “Let’s get it over quickly. It’ll be easier that way.”

“About what?” he tried. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“If that were true you wouldn’t have agreed to meet me. You want me to start?”

He shrugged, stared back into his soup, so I started.

“Your office,” I said. “I mean, Bernard Melville’s office. How long have you worked there?”

“Six years,” he muttered without looking up.

“Well, you landed a good job. I checked around; you people have a good reputation. Clients come to you looking for a quality job. That’s what I understand Denise Armstrong wanted, on the Ninety-ninth Street site. Quality.”

Hacker’s pale face, it seemed, was getting paler, but he still didn’t speak.

“I’ve been around a little,” I went on. “I can read architectural documents. I’ve read yours.”

I tried my coffee. It was terrible: weak and bitter.

“And it’s true,” I said. “Everything Mrs. Armstrong could have asked for in terms of quality, especially in materials. Sound insulation in the interior partitions. And heavy-gauge brick ties, for example. They’re in the documents.”

Hacker swallowed, sipped water from a scratched plastic glass. He didn’t look at me.

“But they’re not on the job,” I said. “Are they?”

“Sure,” he said, too quickly. “Everything the specs call for.”

“I’ve seen the job, Hacker.”

“Well …” he said. “Well, of course, there’ve been field changes. You’re not in construction, you don’t know how we do it.” I heard a touch of contempt in his voice, but he still didn’t look at me. “A lot of times we make changes during construction. It’s normal.”

“It’s normal,” I agreed. “And it’s documented.”

He flushed red, neck to forehead, like a container filling up.

“So if I went to your office,” I said, “if I looked in the files, I’d find the memos where the architect agreed to the substitution of this for that? Agreed to leave something out of the job entirely? I’d find those, if I looked?”

“Of course,” he insisted. “All that stuff. It’s all in the …” He didn’t even finish. That little burst of lying energy was all he had in him. He slumped back in his chair. “Oh, God,” he said, in a voice so soft I barely heard him.

I sipped some more of the rotten coffee and put the cup down. “When I came here,” I said, “I didn’t know if you were crooked, or stupid. The cheater or the cheated. Now I know. Are they paying you? Or is it blackmail?”

He sat motionless, his eyes on the water glass. He was silent so long I began to think he hadn’t heard me. I was about to speak again, to demand an answer, when he said, in a quiet but clear voice, “Both.”

He still wasn’t looking at me, but that was all right. He sounded as though something had shifted in him, like a machine that grinds its gears until it suddenly coughs itself back into running order. “They paid me,” he said quietly. “At first. At first it wasn’t anything important, either. The brick ties; common nails instead of galvanized ones. Never anything big, anything structural.” He looked up suddenly, met my eyes for the first time. “Not even now, I mean. Not the concrete or the steel. Not the rebar. Nothing that mattered.” He looked away again. “Just this little shit. Small, picky stuff. What the hell difference would it have made?”

“It seems to me those things are the difference between quality and mediocrity.”

“Oh, come on,” he snapped. “You sound as pompous as my boss. You really think those nails will rust through before someone knocks that damn building down in thirty years? You think heavy-duty ties will keep the walls from moving when the subway goes by? It’s expensive stuff, that’s all. It makes guys like my boss look like they know what they’re talking about. Or think they do.”

He drank some more water, this time looking as though he wanted it. “No contractor in his right mind would use half the stuff we spec.”

“Who told you that?”

“It’s obvious.”

“Not to me.”

“Well, they said so,” he said smugly.

“Who?”

He hesitated. “They did.”

“Who’s ‘they,’ Hacker?”

He looked up at me. “Do I have to?”

“Why the hell do you think I’m here, Hacker? You think I’m interested in you, come to track you down? You think if I lock away a punk like you, that’ll be enough to make me happy?”

“Lock me—” His face lost all the belligerence, all the smugness, sagged into the miserable look it had had when I’d first walked in.

I didn’t think I actually could lock him away based on what he’d done; taking a bribe to ignore deviations from the documents might be something you could get fired for, maybe even sued, but it didn’t sound like a crime to me. That was speculation, though, and I didn’t see any reason to share my speculating with him.

“What’ll happen to me?” he asked quietly.

“That depends on how well you cooperate.” Clichéd question, clichéd answer; but it worked.

“Well, shit, how hard can it be to figure out?” he muttered, then said, “The contractors. It was their idea.”

“Crowell, you mean?”

He looked at me contemptuously. “Of course not. The subs, the subcontractors. Old man Crowell’s a real straight-arrow type. He’d never go for this shit.”

“What about Junior?”

Hacker shook his head. “
He’s
the one who’s stupid. That’s the only reason the whole thing worked.”

“What do you mean?”

“He comes around with me, twice a week, up on the scaffold, through the building, but he doesn’t see a damn thing. He’s an accountant.”

“What’s that, some sort of architect’s insult?”

His look was uncomprehending; then he caught on. “No, no, that’s what he does. That’s what he went to college for. He doesn’t even like construction. He just came into the business because his father needed someone.”

“He told you that?”

“Sure. The old man looks like a brick shithouse, but he’s sick. Someone said he’s got leukemia or something, but I don’t know. I do know he can’t keep going on the way he’s been. He needs help.”

I thought of Crowell Senior, red-faced, clinging to the ramp railing, breathing hard but yelling orders.

“So he brought Junior in?” I asked.

“Well, he didn’t put it that way. The old man didn’t. Not that
he
needed help. That Junior needed a good job with a future. Security. That the business would take care of Junior for the rest of his life.”

“So Senior was doing Junior a favor, taking him into the business?”