No Colder Place (21 page)

“Which of your brothers could possibly have taught you to swing a bat?”

“He doesn’t know that. And we talked about his work. And he brought up Reg Phillips. He’s really upset about that.”

“I know he is,” I said. “They’re close friends.”

“I asked him why.”

“Why what?”

“Why they’re friends. What they like about each other. I thought if he talked about his friend it might make him feel better.” She caught my look, cocked her head to one side. “Why, is that a peculiar thing to do?”

“It’s just not something men think about much,” I said. “Why they’re friends.”

“But you must have reasons, even if you don’t say them out loud.”

“Assuming men have reasons for anything. Generally I believe we’re thought to respond only to primitive Neanderthal-like urges—”

“Completely true, I’m sure. Shall I go on?”

“Please do. What did he say?”

“He said, Reg cares about his work. Not because he’s paid to, but because he’s made that way. That’s important to Mike, that people care about what they do. It frustrates him about most people he works with, and meets. It’s why he likes you.”

“You talked about me?” The air began to grow close and confining, as though the heavy thunderclouds from the mountaintop were rolling our way.

“He mentioned you. His new partner, one of the few guys up there, he says, who deep-down cares. He’s impressed because, he says, as rusty as you are—”

“And at my age, probably. Forget it; I don’t want to know. Anything else about Phillips?”

“No. Just how impressed Mike is, how he doesn’t think
he’d
have the energy to go back to school, and he’s sure he’s not smart enough anyway. …”

“Phillips is in school?”

“Night school. An engineering program. Didn’t Mike tell you that?”

“I think we’ve established that men don’t tell each other the same things they tell women. Where?”

“City College, I think. Why?”

“I’m not sure,” I said slowly. “Except that a guy who gambles
and
goes to school could rack up a big debt, it seems to me. I wonder how he’s paying for school.”

“It’s cheap up there, City College.”

“But it’s not free.”

“You want me to talk to Mike again?”

“Is that a straight question?”

“What else?”

“Well, the real answer is no, I’d be happier if you were never even on the same continent with him again. But I can’t say that, can I?”

“No.”

“Well, then, the other answer is yes, it might be useful, but not yet. Let’s save it for later. For now, are you interested in dinner?”

She shook her head. “I can’t. My brother Ted is making one of his rare Chinatown appearances, with his kids. Unless you really need me, I should go home.”

Unless I really needed her. Well, there wasn’t much chance of that.

No more than there ever was.

Our eyes met, almost by accident. The air was suddenly and very briefly charged, as though a lightning storm had broken over the mountaintop far above, close enough to be felt, but not close enough to change things in our forest grove.

“No,” I said. “I’m not going to do anything tonight except sleep. I’ll see you on the site in the morning.”

That was it, then. We couldn’t think of any reason why we shouldn’t lock up Lydia’s office, leave the forest grove for the heat and bustle of the street outside. A light kiss before she headed east, to the noisy chaos of family in the walk-up apartment on Mosco Street, and I went west. A few parting words in the gold of early evening, and each of us going in the direction we’d chosen, finding our own way to deal with the lingering sound of Joe Romeo’s scream and the image of the blue tarp.

thirteen

i
did start walking across town, west on Canal Street, but I didn’t go home. The subway stop came up first, the stop for the IRT that would take me uptown, to the Village, the West Side, the Armstrong site, and beyond, if I wanted to go.

As the subway flew north, the car I was riding in collected young people, mostly black and Latino, some Asian, some white. They wore baggy pants and big, unlaced sneakers, the boys in fade haircuts and the girls in gold earrings and dark lipstick. At 137th Street we all got off together. They streamed west through the park and up the steep hill, toward City College. They walked with more purpose than I: They had classes to get to. The sun’s horizontal rays haloed them from behind as they headed for the hilltop campus gate.

I reached the hilltop in my own time, took in the area as I waited for the light to change. The streets surrounding the City College campus were lined with run-down apartment buildings punctuated by a graffiti-walled grade school, bodegas, and a Chinese take-out place broadcasting waves of garlic and old sesame oil. To the beat of salsa music, five guys worked on two double-parked cars. This late in the day the grade-school yard was empty except for a flock of pigeons and a dozen dazed-looking seagulls, who stood on the wide expanse of asphalt facing west as though they expected a distant surf to roll in.

Directly across the street, a wrought-iron gate stood open. Beside it, on the right, zoomed a huge, slick, white-brick structure, stretched skin and sharp angles, deep shadows under four-story overhangs. The sun lit up its entire taut, western face. Left of the gate, a massive old building of rough gray stone and white terra-cotta hunkered into the sloping ground, and beyond it another one, similar. On them, the light picked out gargoyle faces and flower petals and the faceted edges of dressed stone.

Separating the buildings was a hundred years and a wide tiled path, and at the bottom of the path stood a campus map. I reached it, located the Engineering Department, and headed over.

Engineering was in a new building just outside the north campus gate. I walked under the gate’s wrought-iron arch, watching some crows in the tall old trees settle on one branch, give it up, try another. A hundred years ago, these gates enclosed a few stone buildings and a broad green field at the top of the bluff. That was all the college you needed then, everything you had to have to impart all the critical knowledge of the Western world. Today, buildings in every style that’s come and gone in the last century squat where the field used to be, and beyond it; the gates are only ornamental now, just reminders of a time when we were confident knowledge was finite, achievable, and benign.

The Engineering security guard wanted to know who I was and I told him. I asked who the head of the Engineering evening program was and he told me. He pointed me to the elevator, but I climbed the two flights to the faculty offices.

The man the guard said I wanted, Dr. Donald Cannon, turned out to be a round-faced, balding black man, and he was in, sitting behind a paper-covered desk in an office a secretary told me to go on into. The office was crowded with shelves of books, tables of papers and balsa-wood models, walls of thumbtacked posters for design competitions and grant deadlines. Although the building’s air-conditioning was on, the unit in Dr. Cannon’s office wasn’t. Both windows were thrown open, and the room was filled with soft evening air and the trilling of birds in the park behind the campus. Cannon’s desk was set so that he could look up and see trees and sky in one direction, or, in the other, the corridors and classroom doors of the program he ran. Through his window I could see my crows lined up on a tree branch; I wondered what that branch had that the others didn’t, and who decided.

Cannon wore gold-rimmed glasses and a guarded smile. He dropped his pen onto a pile of papers and asked what he could do for me.

“I’m interested in one of your students,” I told him. “Reg Phillips.”

“Reg,” he said. The smile faded a little; he gestured me to a chair. “You are … ?”

I told him as I sat.

“Private investigator?” What was left of the smile vanished entirely. “What’s your interest in Phillips?”

“Reg Phillips had an accident,” I said as, outside the window, a pair of sparrows darted behind some thick green leaves. Sitting where I was, I could see nothing of the dry, hot concrete and heat-softened asphalt of the Harlem neighborhood that surrounded us; the trees and the birds and the golden evening light could have been the Kentucky of my childhood.

Cannon nodded. “It’s a shame. He’s a promising student. Is there some question about it?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe not. I’d like to ask you a few questions; I won’t take up much of your time.”

“There won’t be any problem, will there? With his medical coverage?” Now I heard a controlled note of belligerence in Cannon’s voice. One of the crows inched over closer to the one next to it; the other one eyed him but didn’t shift away. “That was why he’d kept that job,” Cannon said. “For the insurance. He hasn’t got anything else.”

“How do you know that?”

“People don’t come to school here, especially in a night program, if they have anything else.” His glittering eyes challenged me to contradict him, to say something polite but untrue. I didn’t take him up on it; he knew who his students were and what their options had been.

“Then what choice did he have about keeping his job?” I asked. “How else would he have lived, school or not?”

The combative moment passed, but Cannon didn’t warm up. “We have other students here who work construction jobs in the spring and summer. They save up, quit, and take full semesters in the day program. They stay until the money runs out, then go out and look for another job. Phillips could have done that, but he isn’t that type.”

“What type is he?”

“He’s methodical. He’s taking two, sometimes three, courses a semester, year-round, while he’s working. It’ll take him longer to get through the program, but he’s not one to quit a job if he’s got one.”

“I heard he has another source of income,” I said. “I heard he gambles.” I wasn’t sure whether I should have led up to that a little better; but if I was looking for a reaction, I didn’t get one.

“He’s an adult,” Cannon said coldly. “He works hard all day and spends his evenings in a classroom instead of in a bar with his friends. If he enjoys putting a few dollars on a horse, why shouldn’t he?”

“A guy who has nothing?”

“A man,” he placed the barest emphasis on the word, “who seems pretty good, so far, at deciding what to do with what he has. Look, is this part of your investigation? What exactly did you come here to find out?”

I looked out the window at the honey-colored light on the leaves, tried to phrase it in a way that would tell Dr. Cannon we were on the same side. “I’m looking for a picture of the kind of man Reg Phillips is.”

He shook his head. “Actually,” he said, “what you’re looking for is a way to prove that what happened to him was his fault, so the insurance company won’t have to pay.”

His gaze was direct and unwavering, his face hard, like a soldier preparing to fight a battle he’s fought and lost many times before.

“No,” I said. “I’m not from the insurance company.”

“Then where are you from?”

I chose my words carefully. “What happened to Phillips may be part of another case I’m working on. Or it may not. I need to know, but I’m not here to take anything away from Phillips.”

“Good,” he said emphatically, responding to what I’d said, though clearly he hadn’t decided yet whether to believe it. “Because these students—men like Reg Phillips—work harder than you or I have ever worked, just to catch up to where we started from. They don’t need anyone—insurance companies, whoever—trying to block their way.”

Behind him a breeze made the branches nod. As they moved I caught a glimpse of the rooftops of Harlem and the Bronx stretching down and away, until they were lost in the smoggy July haze.

“Will he be a good engineer?” I asked.

My change of direction, my refusal to argue with his politics or his protectiveness, seemed to throw Cannon off balance.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, he will.”

“Tell me why.”

His look remained suspicious, but he said, “I told you he’s methodical. He doesn’t make decisions before he’s examined all the available data. But he’s creative, too. He can come up with solutions that work once there’s nothing more that can be known.”

“That’s what makes an engineer good?”

“Yes. He’s also resourceful. One of the concepts we try to teach—and some of the students never get it—is that, all other things being equal, the more problems a single solution can solve, the better solution it is. It’s what we mean by ‘elegance.’”

“And Phillips got it?”

“He not only understood it, he applied the idea to his course projects.”

“How do you mean?”

Cannon allowed himself a small smile. “Last semester, for a statistics class, he analyzed a decade’s worth of race results from five different tracks to see if he could come up with a system.”

“For doping out races?”

“Yes.”

“Did he?”

“No. He claimed that what he’d proven was that picking horses named after your maiden aunt was as useful a system as any other. Everyone got a pretty good laugh out of it. But it was as solid a project, in terms of methodology and presentation, as we’ve seen in that class.”

“And that was an example of—elegance?—because he was using something in his course work that he’d be doing anyway?”

Cannon nodded. “This semester he took a similar approach to a structures class. He’s doing an analysis of the building he’s working in. He’s going to see if he can work out the basis of the design from the results. Backwards, I mean; from what he can see on the site and find in the documents. Then he’ll check his assumptions with the building’s design engineer.”

“Interesting project,” I said. “How far had he gotten?”

“Pretty far, I think. He’s got the dead load figured; that’s straightforward. He’s making some live load assumptions, and checking them; then seismic. He’s moving along.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t know those terms. Except seismic—that’s earthquake, right?”

“Earth movement, that’s correct. Live load is essentially anything that moves or can be removed—people, furniture, wind, rain, snow.”

“And dead load?”