No Colder Place (22 page)

“The weight of the structure on itself: the concrete, the steel, the brick. It’s what the building can’t escape, the loads it imposes on itself by what it is.”

I thought about that, about loads from the outside; loads from the ground, supposedly solid and still, that you stand on; loads from within.

I asked, “How was Phillips doing this analysis?”

“Mostly from the documents. The size of the steel beams, for example, is shown on the drawings. Beams of a given size have a weight that can be calculated, and a capacity for doing certain kinds of work—carrying walls, acting as stiffeners, whatever it is. Phillips’ project is to decide on what basis the engineer sized the beams in the southeast corner differently from the ones in the northwest corner; that sort of thing. It’s a pretty ambitious attempt.”

The scent of honeysuckle rode in on the breeze as I considered the project Reg Phillips was working on. “Professor,” I said, “could he have found something? Some flaw in the building design, something that suggested maybe it wasn’t safe?”

Cannon pursed his lips, furrowed his brow. “No,” he said at last. “I don’t think so. For one thing, there are so many checks on a building like that, here in the city: The Building Department has to review the drawings; there are inspectors at many points; and there’s nothing special about the design of that building. It’s not unusually complicated or innovative. If there were design errors, they’d have been spotted long before construction started.”

I nodded. “Is there anything else you can tell me about Phillips?” I asked. “Does he have any enemies that you know of?”

Cannon’s mouth turned down. He took off the gold-wire glasses and dropped them on his desk. “Are you telling me you think what happened to Phillips wasn’t an accident?”

“I don’t think anything. I’m just gathering information. To see if what happened to him could be connected to the other thing I’m working on.”

“Can you tell me what that is?”

“No.”

He nodded, as though he’d expected that. The golden light began to disappear from the branches of the old trees, cut off by the sharp-edged shadow of the building. “Well, there isn’t much more I can tell you, either,” he said. “Phillips seems to be well liked, but I don’t follow the students’ social lives closely. He doesn’t cut classes and he gets his work in on time. He’s a good student and I’d like to see him succeed.”

“All right,” I said. “I appreciate your time. If you think of anything that might help, will you give me a call?”

I stood to go, handed him a card.

“Listen.” The tenor of his voice changed, softened. “You don’t know how he’s doing, do you? The hospital won’t tell me much, because I’m not family. Do you know if he’ll be all right?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “My job is just to find out about him. He sounds like a good guy to me. I’m hoping he makes it.”

“I am too,” Cannon said.

The crows on their branch shifted position a final time, settled in for the night. Cannon and I nodded to each other, and I turned and left.

I was almost at the subway when the beeper on my hip went off again. I lifted it and checked the readout; the glowing red phone number was Chuck’s, still at the office. I backtracked half a block to a phone booth and called him.

“Hey,” he said in greeting. “Hell of a day, huh?” Chuck’s words were as hearty as ever, though I thought I could hear a soft layer of weariness behind them.

“You’re telling me.”

“I heard you were a hero again, though,” he said. “Old man Crowell’d probably give you a medal for saving Junior’s ass, if he knew it was you.”

“He doesn’t?”

“Nope. Your girlfriend told me about it when we had a minute alone, but she didn’t say anything to the old man. She didn’t want him to start noticing you. She’s pretty smart. I’d keep her if I were you.”

“I’ll remember that if it ever comes up,” I said, not willing, right now, to get onto the subject of Lydia. “Chuck, what’s going on?”

A guy with a beeper on his hip, too, and a pit bull on a leash, glared impatiently at the phone I was on. I nodded at him, keeping my face wooden. Chuck said, “What do you mean?”

“Well, I could mean, we have two men dead and another cracked over the head—doesn’t that mean something’s going on? Or I could mean, since one of the dead men is the one we were watching, maybe we don’t care anymore even if there
is
something going on, so why are you willing to pay for Lydia to stay on the job?”

The guy with the pit bull, hearing me say “dead” so much, backed off a little.

“You too,” Chuck said.

“Stay on the job? Why?”

“Ah,” Chuck said. “Well, because we got a situation. You busy, or you got time for a drink?”

“I have time.”

“Good. Where are you?”

“Way the hell uptown.”

“At the site?”

“No.” I didn’t elaborate.

“Oh. Well, can you get down here? There’s a bar in the building, the Vault. Okay with you?”

I told Chuck the Vault was just fine with me, and hung up the phone. I briefly thought about calling Lydia, but the guy with the pit bull had been just about as patient and polite as his type of guy is likely to be, and I was too tired to fight with him over a pay phone.

It would have been good to talk to Lydia, because some things were beginning to build on each other in my head, things that seemed to fit where I was trying to put them, but there were still some parts that didn’t have places, and some places that didn’t have parts. I wanted to go over it with her, to see if she could help me get at what I wasn’t seeing, what I was seeing that I wasn’t understanding. But I could call her later, when Chuck and I were through.

The subway going downtown was emptier than the ride up. I had room to stretch my legs and think. I mostly thought about Reg Phillips, and Joe Romeo; and about the Crowells, Senior and Junior, and Donald Hacker, and John Lozano. And Chuck.

It was dark when I came out of the subway. I walked east across midtown, through streets that didn’t seem to have cooled down much just because the sun was gone. The cars and the buses moved sluggishly, dispiritedly, as though the air were harder than usual to push through and they just didn’t have the heart for it.

I reached Chuck’s building and found the Vault, called that because someone, in the grip of inspiration, had set a nine-foot, case-hardened bank-vault door into the black-glass sheathing. I spun the wheel and the door swung aside. Cold air and loud conversation spilled out into the street, was gathered up and swept back inside with me, as the door closed again.

I stood just inside, let my eyes wander the place, let my ears get used to the swirling chatter of talk and the pounding beat of music I couldn’t really hear, just feel. The sharp cold air sidled up close around me, tried to erase the memory of the hot July streets like a one-night stand offering to help me forget the woman who’d broken my heart. It never works, but I was willing to try.

I didn’t see Chuck, so I headed for the bar. The crowd, well dressed and young, cheery and on the make, parted for me, closed up again behind me. Some of the women glanced my way: new material, worth inspecting. Older than they, weary, and never handsome, even when I was young, I didn’t pass inspection, and they turned their backs and let me through.

Chuck was at the bar, gin-and-tonic in hand, talking animatedly with two other guys while the bartender racked glasses and occasionally chimed in. The subject was the Yankees and nobody was saying anything that wasn’t being said in every other bar in New York at the same moment.

I inserted myself between one of Chuck’s companions and the guy behind him, a three-piece suit who was forced by my presence to move a step closer to the silk-bloused young woman he was trying to get to know. I thought he owed me for that. I ordered a Brooklyn Lager; Chuck spotted me as I did.

“Hey,” he said, waving his drink, climbing down off his bar stool. “See you later, fellas.” The other Yankee fans dismissed him from the discussion and turned to argue with each other.

Chuck waited while I collected my beer, and he paid for it before I could. He steered me to an empty table by the black-glass window. The tabletops were also black glass.

“Crowded in here,” I said as I dropped myself into a chair.

“Always,” Chuck said. “That’s why I like it. Crowded and noisy. Bad place to try to listen in.”

“This conversation we’re about to have is one you don’t want anyone listening in on?”

He nodded. “You got it. It’s maybe a little delicate.”

I watched a car roll by in the street outside. The black glass obscured everything, but sharpened things, too, took the softness off headlights, made strolling people into hard-edged shadows. “Go ahead,” I said.

Chuck crossed one leg over the other, got comfortable in his chair. “Well, what you said before, about Romeo, you’re right,” he told me. “He was our subject, now he’s dead. You might expect we’d be through with this case.”

“I might.”

He smiled ruefully. “But I turned up something. The kind of thing, when I was on the Job, it would’ve burned my tail if some private cop had something like this, didn’t turn it over. But now I’m the private cop, I got a client …” Chuck frowned into his drink. “Seems someone was shaking down Crowell Construction.”

I took that first swallow of beer, always the best, and put the bottle back onto the table. “How do you know that?”

“Source I got. Street scum, and he don’t know no more than that. But you can see it’s a problem.”

“Maybe,” I said. “You have any idea who?”

He shook his head. “This guy, he’s telling me it could be someone Pelligrini knew about. But that could be just an idea of his.”

“Shaking them down over what?”

“I don’t know. Could be some labor scam, could be something else. If I knew, I’d know more what to do; maybe we wouldn’t have a problem.”

“And our problem is, if this comes out it could implicate the Crowells in Pelligrini’s death?”

“And Romeo’s,” Chuck said. “He’s the type, it could have been him.”

“I’m not sure I see why it’s a problem. Just because they’re the client? We didn’t marry them—love, honor, and obey for better or worse. Sounds to me like they should be checked out, and soon.”

“Yeah,” he said. “But lookit. They came to me, right? To start this whole thing?”

“And?”

“Well, it don’t seem likely they’d bring a P.I. into a situation where they’d already killed one guy and were thinking about doing another.”

“Not likely, no,” I conceded.

“Right. So the fact that they come to me makes it look like maybe it wasn’t them, right? But you think a homicide cop would buy that?”

“Buy the idea that someone was shaking these guys down, two guys turn up dead on their site, and they had nothing to do with it?”

“Yeah.”

“No.”

“Right. So that’s the problem.”

I pulled a cigarette from my jacket pocket, looked around. “Can I smoke in here?”

“I don’t know. Something about near the bar, not near the bar. Go ahead, try it.”

I lit up. No one reacted.

“It’s circumstantial,” I said. “If they didn’t do it, there won’t be anything else. They probably won’t even get arrested, and they’d never get convicted.”

“Yeah,” he agreed. “Assuming there’s not a whole pile of other circumstantial shit, and you don’t get some judge and jury in a bad mood.” He poured back some gin-and-tonic. “But here’s what I’m thinking. Suppose they didn’t do it, but suppose I give what I got to the cops. The cops poke around, maybe the Crowells get cleared. But that project’s down the toilet. The Crowells will be so busy with cops and lawyers they won’t have time to run it, and no bank’ll touch it as long as they’re on the job. You’ve seen construction projects go belly-up before. A lot of rusting steel, a lot of guys out of work in a bad time. Not to mention that Armstrong lady all messed up. I don’t like it. Not if I’m not sure.”

“So you want me and Lydia to stay, and make sure?”

“One way or the other. That they did it, or that some other guy did.”

No one had yet objected to the cigarette, so I kept smoking it.

“And you’re paying for this?”

Chuck opened his hands. “What’s it gonna cost me? A few hundred bucks? Another day or two. Don’t bother with the Pelligrini end, there’s nothing there, I did that before. But somebody up there must have seen something, even if he don’t know it. I’m not saying you gotta be able to prove anything, just see what the odds are, whether it’s worth wrecking something this big for this.”

I dropped my cigarette to the floor and pressed it out under my foot. “Did you talk to the Crowells?” I asked. Outside, two sharp shadows stopped on the clouded street, gestured at each other, waved their arms. Maybe in joy, maybe anger; I couldn’t tell.

“About this?” Chuck sounded surprised. “No. In case they did do it, I don’t want them knowing we’re on to them.”

“But they know Lydia’s still on the case, even though their Joe Romeo problem is solved?”

“Sure.”

“What do they think she’s doing there?”

“Doing the cops a favor.”

“And what do the cops think?”

“Same thing.”

“And they’re not surprised you’re paying for it?”

“The Crowells? Hell, no. They know I used to be on the Job. They think this is a chit I could call in later. Could be that, too. And like I said, how much could it cost me? Seems like a good investment.”

I finished my beer, wanted another cigarette, but didn’t light one. The shadows outside, arms around each other’s shoulders, moved on.

“Okay,” I said.

“Great,” said Chuck, with a relieved smile. He drained his drink. “Keep me filled in, okay? The minute you got something you think could lead to a yes or a no, that’s all I want.”

“Okay.”

“Great,” he said again. “Hey, I gotta get home. You want a ride? I got the car in the garage.”

“No thanks. I think I’ll stay and have another beer, try to cool down a little before I head out.”

“Yeah,” he said, “good idea. Just remember, you’re the one’s got to get up early in the morning and go lay bricks.”

“I don’t see how I could forget.”