No Colder Place (35 page)

Given all that, though, the interview went smoothly, only two or three threats to pull my license, only one—from Bzomowski—to throw me in jail the minute I got out of the hospital. It was a chess game and we all knew it. I would give them everything I had, except some sources—in this case, Maggio—that they would half-heartedly try to squeeze out of me. I would testify if the case came to court, though the way it looked, it wouldn’t: Dan Junior’s lawyer, at the request of his client, was already working on a plea bargain, all charges against the old man to be dropped in return for Junior-tells-all. And I would keep my license with the provisional warning that I wouldn’t be this lucky if I ever crossed their paths again.

Then—five years from now in Bzomowski’s case, ten in Mackey’s—I’d be drinking in some cop watering hole and some cop I knew would tell me that a detective buddy of his had put in his twenty years, resigned, and gotten himself a private license, guy was pretty good, did I have any business I didn’t want I could throw his way, get him started off? And I’d say sure, no problem; I’d finish my beer and leave my card. In between that and this it wasn’t likely I’d see these guys again.

So when Bzomowski and Mackey decided we were through, and my hospital room was empty again, my mind went back to Chuck. I tried to loosen the reins, let my thoughts wander, see if whatever it was I was uneasy about would surface. I knew who’d killed Pelligrini, Romeo, Hamilton; I knew who’d attacked Reg Phillips. I knew about Falco, as far as he went with Chuck; I knew that was what Chuck hadn’t been telling me. Chuck had admitted it, even apologized for it.

So what was my problem?

Falco’s connection, that was one of the things still bothering me. I let it rise to the top, watched it and considered it, but didn’t try to pin it down. Like working on a piece of music I didn’t understand, I made myself stop trying to get it to be what I wanted, and just look and work with it and see what it was.

Chuck had told me Falco was connected on that site. That’s why he’d been so eager to take this job on when it came, because it might be his way to shut down Falco at last.

But Dan Crowell, Jr. said he didn’t know him. No point in lying about that. He would have been better off saying,
Yeah, the Mafia made me do it
. Bzomowski and Mackey would have eaten it up; that’s the kind of stuff that can make a cop’s career, if he can bring it home.

So what then? Falco behind someone smaller, Lozano maybe, or one of the other subs? I didn’t see it. Not enough money to be made. Behind the guy buying the stolen equipment? Not close enough. Not on the site.

Maybe Chuck was wrong.

I let that idea float around for a while, a new variation, a disharmony that changed the nature of the piece completely.

Chuck had said Falco was tied in here, but he’d gotten that from someone he referred to as “street scum.” Maybe he was just wrong. Maybe there was no connection. It wasn’t as though you needed one to explain any of these things, anything that had happened.

I followed the new idea, to see what would happen if it were true, if Falco were out of the picture. What I found out was that I was still uneasy, that something else was still eating at me. I tried some more to figure out what it was, but I got nowhere. I’d just decided to forget it, to let the question stay where it was, moving vaguely in the shadows in my head, maybe see if sleep would make a difference in my outlook, when the bedside phone rang.

“Hi,” I said, figuring it was Lydia, wanting her to think I was feeling good.

“For a man who’s just caused an enormous amount of disruption which he almost didn’t survive himself, you’re remarkably cheerful,” a woman’s voice told me drily.

“Mrs. Armstrong. How are you?”

“Probably better than you, though it’s likely I’ve had less sleep,” she answered.

“Every cloud has a silver lining. To what do I owe the honor?”

“Damage control,” she said bluntly.

“Are you at the site?”

“Yes,” she said. “I have been since the police called me last night, about the same time the EMS took you out of here. This is the first chance I’ve had to be alone, and I don’t know how long it will last.”

“And you’re calling me? I’m flattered.”

“Don’t be. The amount of trouble you’ve caused here will take me months to undo.”

“I didn’t cause it,” I pointed out, though probably uselessly. “I just uncovered it.”

“In as public and dramatic a way as possible.”

“Is that why you’re calling? To complain? Because if it is, call tomorrow, okay? Or maybe next month.”

“It’s not. I’m calling, as I said, for damage control. I want to know what you told the police.”

“Everything. Did you expect me not to?”

Blowing right past my question, she said, “Specifically, did you tell them it was I who led you to Chester Hamilton?”

“Specifically,” I said, “no, I didn’t.”

She seemed to breathe a sigh of relief. “May I ask why not?”

“It didn’t seem necessary. I don’t like to confuse cops with more facts than they need.”

“Well, in any case, thank you,” she said, making it clear by her tone that she didn’t believe my answer. “I appreciate your discretion.”

“It’s my alter ego,” I said. “When I’m not being public and dramatic. Now may I ask you why you care? Even if it got out, the public-relations problem you’d have if the world knew you could find your way to a guy like Chester Hamilton couldn’t possibly hold a candle to the problems you have right now.”

“No. But it would create problems of its own.”

“Your source,” I said, guessing. “He doesn’t want his cover blown.”

“Can you blame him?”

“No,” I said. “He could probably get himself killed if something like that got out. Very altruistic of you, very protective. To spend your brief time alone calling me to look after your source.”

“Am I hearing sarcasm from you, Mr. Smith?”

“Or is it that you’re not through with him? Is it that you need him for something else, this source?”

“In fact I do. He’s indispensible to me in other ways. You know, Mr. Smith, I almost regret the relationship you and I have established.”

“You mean the fact that we ever met?”

“No, I mean the way we dislike each other. Under other circumstances I think we might have worked well together.”

“Maybe. If you ever want to try it out, give me a call.”

I hung up and closed my eyes into a drugged sleep with the thought in mind that there was one prospective client I didn’t ever have to worry about taking on. In a cushioned, slightly hazy state that I knew was hiding a hell of a headache, I drifted off without being able to think of a single circumstance under which Denise Armstrong would call me.

And she didn’t. I called her.

Toward evening, nurses and doctors came and went, orderlies did the same, then the nurses came back with something to stick in my arm and something they told me was dinner. I was hungry, which was good, they said. I was also desperate for a cigarette, which I didn’t mention, because they wouldn’t have said it was good. They were pretty sour, those nurses. If they’d had a cigarette, they probably wouldn’t have given it to me anyway, I mused dreamily as I ate. Not generous. Not like Louie Falco, offering me a Cuban cigar on the Staten Island Ferry, even though the breeze would make it burn faster than a cigar that good should. Not that I was a cigar aficionado. I could take them or leave them, though if Falco were here right now offering me that cigar, I’d take it. I’d—

If Louie Falco were here right now, offering me that cigar.

That legit Cuban cigar.

A small electric jolt ran up my spine as the rest of the pieces fell into place.

I swallowed the dregs of my coffee—decaf, this was a hospital—and grabbed for the phone. I called Denise Armstrong’s office.

She was there, late in the workday though it was. I asked her. She told me.

I put the phone down, lay back on the pillow. I closed my eyes to shut out the drab brightness of the hospital walls. In my head, the Scriabin études began to play, effortlessly, clearly, their crystal notes and dark chords leading inevitably from one to another, back again, around. Listening, I went with it, felt the rightness of it, the completeness and the truth. I marvelled at how something so obvious and so right could have remained hidden for so long. I ached to get back to my piano, to try it for myself.

I wanted a cigarette more desperately than ever. I wondered if there was any way I could get out of the hospital tonight.

I decided there probably wasn’t, so I settled for calling Lydia. She’d called me late in the afternoon, to see how I was. I’d been better and told her so, we’d talked for a while, and that had been pretty much that. She’d offered to come back up here to visit, but she was all the way down in Chinatown, I could hear her mother in the background, probably complaining about me, and I was sleepy anyway. I’d told her not to bother.

“Even though the sight of your gorgeous face would act as a balm on my wounds, a salve to my injuries, a tonic to my system—”

“I don’t know that I want to be a tonic to your system,” she’d told me. “I’ll come collect you in the morning, if they let you go.”

“They will,” I’d said, even then aching for a smoke. “If they know what’s good for them.”

“I think they’re supposed to worry about what’s good for
you
.”

“And who worries about what’s good for you?”

“My mother. She’d doing it right now. See you in the morning.”

That’s how that had gone, but that was before the puzzle was complete, all the connections made, the links and variations and reverberations clear to me. I didn’t like it, but I believed it, and I called Lydia to talk it over with her.

She wasn’t there.

Out, about, somewhere. Probably having a good time. Maybe with DiMaio. Certainly none of my business.

All right, then. Deal with it all in the morning. Nothing to be done now, Smith. Nothing except sleep.

So I tried to sleep.

To my surprise, I succeeded.

twenty-three

i
n the morning, Lydia came to take me home.

“Not home,” I said, as we stepped out onto the sidewalk in the shadow of St. Luke’s. The air was clear, the day starting out hot but dry. The perfect blue of the cloudless sky was the color Lydia’s eyes would be, if she had blue eyes.

“In your condition, where else do you expect to go?” she asked me.

“I’m in great condition,” I told her. “Fit as a fiddle, strong as a bull, happy as a clam—”

“And dumb as a post. You need to go home and rest.”

“Will that make me smarter?”

“Unlikely.”

“Then let’s not bother.”

“You know,” she said, “I’m getting a little tired of this.”

“Of what?”

“This macho, stand-aside-ma’am, Bill-Smith-is-a-tough-guy stuff. This is something new with you, since you started being a construction worker.”

I drew a cigarette from my pocket. “I don’t—”

“You do so. I had to come running twice in the last few days to save you from some stupid situation you wouldn’t have gotten into if you’d made me part of it in the first place!”

She said all that on one breath, eyes flashing. Thrown, I took out a match, put it to my cigarette.

“And don’t think I don’t know what you’re doing with that cigarette,” she snapped. “You’re buying time to try to think up some wise-guy answer, some dumb joke that’ll make me not mad anymore. Well, forget it.”

I took the cigarette from my mouth, squashed the dumb joke I’d been about to make. “You really are mad, aren’t you?”

“Mad? Bill, I could have been killed in that trailer last night! And so could you have! Not to mention how much more time you’d have spent in a hospital if I hadn’t been there on the ferry.”

She stood in the building’s massive shadow, feet planted, shoulders squared, jaw set angrily, and she was right. I didn’t have any answer for her except the truth. I knew she wouldn’t want to hear it, but I said it anyway.

“I didn’t want you to get hurt.”

At that she turned away. I saw her draw in a breath, shake her head; then she turned back.

“No,” she said. “It can’t work like that. If I’m your partner, I’m your partner, Bill. If I’m not, then … then this isn’t working.”

“I—”

“The Crowells,” she said suddenly. “What you’re doing to me, it’s exactly what the Crowells did to each other. Each one did all the thinking to make things turn out well for the other one. And look how that ended up. You don’t want us to end up like the Crowells, do you?”

“Hmm. Which one do I get to be?”

“Don’t be funny!”

“I’m sorry,” I said quickly. “I’m …” I lifted my hands, dropped them helplessly. We stood facing each other, wordless, as people walked in and out of the building, as traffic passed and stopped.

Then she smiled, an unexpected smile that seemed to bring a blessedly cool mountain breeze to stir the city air between us. “I don’t believe I’m standing here on the sidewalk yelling at a sick man,” she said. “Let’s go. I said what I wanted to say; you know how it has to be.”

“I’ll try,” I said.

She held my eyes a moment longer. Then she stepped into the street and raised an arm to hail a cab.

“Where is it you want to go?” she asked.

“Chuck’s.”

She looked over her shoulder at me as a cab swerved across three lanes of traffic and bounced to a halt at our feet. “We’re going to see Mr. DeMattis?”

The cab stopped, we got in, I gave the cabbie Chuck’s East Side address, and I told her why.

As the cab charged downtown and across, and I finished, Lydia turned to peer out the grimy window at the sweaty pedestrians and short-tempered July drivers all around us.

“Are you sure?” she asked me.

“Just about. Maybe Chuck can explain it differently. I want to give him a chance.”

He couldn’t. I knew he couldn’t. It had taken me too long to catch on, but when I finally had, I’d gotten it right.

The cavelike, tomb-still coolness of Chuck’s granite lobby drew us in, earned my gratitude after the lurching cab’s smell of curry, the hospital’s sharp antiseptic scent and never-ending stream of offstage noises, and the melted-asphalt aroma and honking horns in between. Neither Lydia nor I spoke on the swift elevator ride up to Chuck’s skybox office.