No Colder Place (33 page)

Still nothing from Junior; well, hell, then, let me try it.

“It’s over, Crowell,” I said, in a voice that sounded weak to me but got everyone’s attention. “The materials scam and everything that grew out of it. Pelligrini, Romeo, Hamilton. Falco’s part in it. We know. DeMattis knows. Give it up.”

A lot of that was wild fabrication. I wasn’t sure how the murders tied in and I still had no idea how Falco did. But all I was selling here was the thought that there was no percentage in killing Lydia and me.

Senior said, “What the hell are you talking about?” He peered intently at me. “You’re that mason, one of Lozano’s men, came in that day to look at the drawings. What’s going on?” He gestured at Lydia with the gun, to move over and stand next to me; easier to cover us both that way. Then he half turned, to face Junior.

“Daniel? What in goddamn blazes is this about?”

Again, Junior didn’t answer, so again, I did.

“The scam kind of got out of hand, didn’t it?” I said softly, calmly. Keep things even, bring the temperature down, get everyone’s adrenaline level back to normal. Especially the guy with the gun. “It wasn’t supposed to last long, just bring in a few bucks until times got better. But Reg Phillips found out about it by accident, right? And something had to be done about him. And Pelligrini? That’s what happened to him, too? There isn’t—”

“Pelligrini didn’t know shit about that!” Dan Junior raised a tight fist. “You shut the fuck up!” He rushed across the room toward me. I scrambled to rise, to meet him, although I doubted I had the strength to handle even Dan Crowell, Jr.; but I didn’t have to. Lydia took a quick side step, yanked him hard in the direction he was going. He crashed into the file cabinet I was leaning on, shaking my world with nausea and pain. With a moan, he slipped to the floor.

“Hold it!” Senior roared. Everyone stopped moving, everyone turned to him.

“You two,” he said, coldly and deliberately, “shut up. Don’t move, don’t talk.” We didn’t need the wave of the gun to tell us which two he meant. “Daniel! Get the hell up and explain to me what’s going on here. What are these people doing here? What scam is he talking about? What the hell do you know about what happened to Phillips and Pelligrini?”

Lydia and I exchanged looks. Her eyes were confused. Mine probably were, too. What did Senior mean, “What scam”? Why was he asking Junior what Junior knew?

Junior stood slowly, holding a hand to his head. The bandaged gash he’d gotten in the coalition fight had opened, started to bleed again.

He looked at his father’s red, furious face, at his glowering eyes and tight mouth. Junior lowered his hand, straightened his back, and spoke.

“Joe Romeo hit Phillips over the head with a brick. I shot Pelligrini and buried him in the pit. Some son of a bitch I paid five thousand dollars to, threw Romeo off the scaffold, and then I shot that son of a bitch. That’s what happened to them.”

twenty-one

l
oud air-conditioner rumbling and soft breathing, and the pounding of my own heart; that was everything I could hear in Dan Crowell, Sr.’s office, as Lydia, Senior, and I stared at the man who’d just admitted to three murders.

He stood, soft body straight, facing his father, seeing no one else. The set of his shoulders and the line of his jaw showed me a Dan Crowell, Jr. I hadn’t seen before, not even from the man standing over me with a gun, threatening to kill me.

“What?” Senior choked out finally, still red, still unmoving.

“What the hell else was I going to do?”

“Do? About what? Daniel, what do you mean?”

“Oh, Christ, Dad! Someone had to keep this damn business afloat. Someone had to run around cleaning up after you.”

“Cleaning …” Senior frowned, showed a confusion that might have had as much to do with the tone of Junior’s words as with their meaning. He spoke slowly to his son. “What the hell are you talking about? What did you do?”

“What I had to do. You’re coming on like a Mack truck, like always, promising this, sure about that, but there’s no goddamn money and the business is going down the tubes.”

“No.” Senior shook his head in bafflement. “What are you talking about? There was enough.”

“Enough? Partial payments to the subs? Invoices six months behind to every goddamn supplier we have?”

“The subs know I’m good for it. In times like this they won’t walk, where are they gonna go? And suppliers can wait. They always do.”

“They were calling every three days! They hired collection agencies!”

“And I told you, when that happened, to give the calls to me! I can handle them. This is the way I’ve always done business, Daniel.”

“No. You used to do business smart. There was always a cushion, something for the future. You were always spread around. Now all our eggs are in this one damn basket. You underfigured the fucking job, so you could look like a hero to Mrs. Armstrong, and even the price you gave her, she doesn’t have. Mrs. Armstrong’s sinking, broke, and you’re bound and determined we’re gonna go down with her!”

Senior was silent, his angry eyes boring into his son. Junior met that look without flinching. I wondered, suddenly, how many times in his life he’d been able to do that before.

“This was for the future, Daniel,” Senior said. “Your future.”

“The way you’re going, there won’t be a future.”

“Mrs. Armstrong’s not broke.”

“The bank—”

Senior shook his head dismissively. “The new bank loan’ll come through when we’re fifty percent closed in. She has what she needs to take her through till then.”

“Bullshit she does. Where’d she get it?”

“What’s the difference where she got it? It’s there. Things are tight, but we’ll make it.”

“She’ll make it, you mean.”

“We’ll make it, Daniel. Crowell Construction has a partnership agreement with Armstrong Properties. Contingent on this project being successful.”

Junior took a moment to answer. “Partnership? What the hell are you doing, setting up a partnership?”

Senior hesitated a moment, then demanded, “You mean, because I’m dying?” He spoke as though the hostility of his words could hide the pain behind them.

Junior’s face reddened, but he answered. “Yeah. Yeah, that’s what I mean. You’ve got to face facts, Dad. What makes you think you’ll be around to carry out any partnership?”

“I won’t. But you will.”

“I—”

“You will, and you need this, Daniel. She’s good. Smart, tough, ballsy. If this project’s a success, people will be lining up to finance whatever she wants to do next. The contractor hooked up with her will be set up for life.”

“Set up for life?” Junior repeated. He sounded like a man who was sure he was missing something, as though he thought that—looked at in a different light—what he was saying and what was being said to him would connect in some different, reasonable way.

“
If
this one’s a success,” Senior said. “That’s the key. That’s why I was cutting this so close. I had to show her, Daniel, show her that Crowell could do it. I knew it would make things tight now, but it was an investment. It was for your future.”

Junior said nothing, but I thought I saw the steel in his spine start to give way, saw the softness in his body start to drag his shoulders down.

“It was under control, Daniel,” Senior told his son. “I don’t know what you thought, but it was under control.”

Beside me, Lydia moved just slightly, touched my shoulder. Could I stand? she was asking. Could I be part of it, if this was the time to make our move?

I wasn’t good for much, right now, but whatever Lydia started, whatever she needed, I’d try. I nodded, a movement so small and brief that Dan Senior never should have caught it.

But he did. The gun, which had never wavered, rose slightly, its meaning clear. His eyes met mine; he didn’t have to speak. He looked for a moment at Lydia, then back at his son. “Why are they here?” he said. “Daniel, what did you do?”

I could imagine those words in that tone being spoken to a young boy standing in front of a broken window, a crumpled fender.

“I—” Junior started, and then again: “I—Why the hell didn’t you tell me?”

“Tell you what?”

“About the partnership! About why you were cutting things so goddamn close, why you lowballed the price, why there wasn’t any money! Why didn’t you tell me?”

Senior looked genuinely puzzled. “I would have,” he said, “if I’d thought you needed to know.”

Junior looked into his father’s eyes. He didn’t speak.

Then something happened in his own eyes, a slow dulling, an extinguishing. Rust on once-bright metal; dust and ashes smothering the mirrored surface of polished stone. He let out a breath, a long, soft exhalation. Looking at no one, speaking in a monotone, he began once more, and laid out the materials scam, the subs’ part and his own. Senior listened silently, nothing showing on his face.

“Phillips,” Junior said, stared down at his hands. “Phillips found out. He was doing some school project. He asked could he look at the drawings and the spec. You told him yes.”

He stopped, looked at his father, looked for something.

Senior nodded, and said, “You said you didn’t think it was a good idea, laborers in the trailer. You said the same thing when this guy here came in. I couldn’t figure out what your problem was.”

“Yeah,” Junior said. I might have expected bitterness; all I heard was defeat. “He’s an honest guy, Phillips,” Junior went on. “He came to me, when he saw it. It wasn’t part of his school thing, the materials we were substituting, but he was working with the shit we were giving him every day, and he had his face buried in the drawings for a week. He saw it, and he came to me because he thought it was the subs. He thought it wasn’t right. I told him thanks, and I’d take care of it. That bought me a little time, but he would have figured it out when he realized no one was getting fired and the shit the men were working with never changed.”

“So you had Joe Romeo try to kill him?” Senior’s voice was unbelieving.

“No. I told Romeo to buy him off. He couldn’t, they argued, and what happened, happened.”

“And then—”

“And then I was in!” A spark, more desperation than anger, ignited in Junior’s eyes. “Jesus, I was up to my ass! On one side I had Romeo squeezing me; on the other side I had these fucking private eyes you goddamn had to hire, looking for some way to squeeze Romeo. I had to get rid of him.”

Senior moved his eyes slowly then, to Lydia and me. His face was unreadable, hard, and the look he gave us was long. He turned back to his son.

“The coalition riot—?”

“It was a good idea,” Junior said, raising his chin. “In fact, it was a great one.”

The room was silent then, for a long time. Behind the pounding in my head I heard the echo of Joe Romeo’s scream.

“You were the man who paid Chester Hamilton,” I said, surprised to hear my own voice.

“How the hell do you know—”

“I was there.”

Junior paled. “Where? When?”

“When you shot him,” I said. “I was there.”

He faltered, seemed unsure where to look. “What did he—?”

“Tell me? Just about everything, except your name; but what he was paid to do, where he met you, what you looked like. I put it all in my report to DeMattis.”

More fabrication, and Lydia knew it, but standing quiet by my side, she showed nothing. Let him think the game was really up.

I said, “You shot him because you were afraid we’d find him. You didn’t know I already had. The same as you killed Romeo because you thought if he were gone, we’d go away.”

Senior stared at his son, spoke slowly. “That’s what you said. The day Joe died, you said, ‘Well, at least one good thing, we can get rid of those private eyes now.’ You never wanted DeMattis here in the first place.”

“I couldn’t afford it! When you came back from that dinner with DeMattis’s card in your pocket, saying you talked to him, you liked him, he suggested maybe we bring him in to look into the equipment that walked—Jesus, you don’t know what that did to me!”

“And you talked me out of it.”

“Until Pelligrini disappeared, and you got this asshole idea that it was Joe! And all of a sudden, we got DeMattis on board, and you don’t even make him tell you what the hell he’s doing. Did you know he had a guy on the scaffold?”

Senior looked over at me, shook his head slowly.

“Pelligrini,” I said. The pain in my head was exhausting me, and the soft blackness, the sleepiness, was closing toward me from the edges of my vision again. I knew I had to fight it, though I wasn’t sure, anymore, why. But talking seemed to keep it at bay, so I spoke again. “Pelligrini knew, too? He was shaking you down?”

“Not until after he disappeared. Before that, he was in, he was solid.”

“After he disappeared? He was still alive?”

“Damn right. Alive and wanted to do business. For a shitload of money, he’d keep quiet. Quiet! So we met, here, in the fucking basement. After that, he kept quiet.” He looked at his father. “You should have told me,” he said softly. “About the pump. I didn’t know.”

Senior met his son’s eyes, then looked away, without an answer.

“In,” Lydia said suddenly, beside me. “But not in the materials scam. You said he didn’t know about that. The equipment that was stolen, then, that Pelligrini was fencing—that was you too, wasn’t it?”

“Daniel?” Senior’s voice wavered, as though he were standing on ground that was no longer solid. “Our equipment? You stole that?”

“Yeah, sure.” Junior’s words carried exasperation and disgust, but who it was for, I didn’t know. “I set it up, Pelligrini stole it and fenced it. That was going pretty well, until you had to bring on another guard, tighten things up around here. Shit.” He shook his head.

“Falco,” I said, although speech was getting harder. “That’s where Falco comes in. That’s his connection, the stolen equipment. He must have been your receiver, the guy behind the fence.”

Dan Junior said, “Who?”

“Oh, Jesus, come on,” I said. “How much worse can it be? One way or another you killed three men, but you won’t admit to doing business with a wiseguy?”