No Colder Place (36 page)

Chuck was in. He kept us waiting no time at all, not even long enough to sit and leaf through a copy of
Security Industry Report
in the leather seats in his client waiting area.

“What the hell are you doing here?” he asked me as he ushered us through into his glass-walled office. “You should be at home, lying around flat on your back. You feel okay?” he inquired anxiously.

“I feel lousy, but I’ll be all right in a few days. I wanted to talk to you, Chuck. This couldn’t wait.”

“What couldn’t wait? On this case?”

I nodded, lit a cigarette—my third since the hospital—and reached for the marble-slab ashtray. Lydia and I sat in leather-and-chrome chairs facing Chuck’s mile-wide glass desk. Chuck busied himself at the espresso machine by the stainless-steel sink.

“Lydia? You want coffee? No? Smith, I know you do. Jesus, what about that Dan Crowell, Junior, huh? Some surprise that was.”

The machine hissed steam as I answered. “It sure was. Especially to you, I’ll bet.”

Chuck raised his eyebrows as he brought two thimble-sized espressos over, placed one in its saucer in front of me, sat with the other in the swiveling desk chair.

“Me, you, everybody,” he said. “The cops, the old man. Anybody wasn’t surprised?”

“I guess not. But he’s not what you were looking for, was he?”

“No,” Chuck said, sipping his espresso. “I was looking for Louie Falco, behind Joe Romeo. You know that.” He shook his head. “I gotta say it again, buddy, I’m sorry about that. I was so sure he was there. I was so damn sure.”

“Because you knew he was on that site,” I said.

He nodded. “I thought I did. I keep track of that son of a bitch—excuse my French, Lydia—and that’s what I heard: Falco has something going on the Armstrong site, connected up there. I was so damn sure it was true.”

“So sure,” I said, “that you set it up so you could get at him.” I drank some espresso, put the cup back on the glass desktop. After two days of hospital decaf, Chuck’s rich, bitter espresso tasted like the nectar of the gods.

“I don’t get you,” Chuck answered, with a look from Lydia to me.

“Yes, you do.” Behind Chuck, out over Queens, a silent helicopter drifted through the clear sky like a lazy fly. I said, “Here’s how it went. You heard Falco had something going up there. That made your mouth water. Then you met Dan Senior at some dinner, and you took the opportunity to casually ask him how it was going, get to know the guy. Just making small talk, am I right?”

Chuck didn’t answer, just took another sip of his espresso.

“So he told you,” I went on. “It wasn’t going so well. Equipment walking, that sort of thing. You heard that, I bet you could hardly stand it. You gave him your card, even suggested he bring you in to look into it. But he didn’t, did he?”

“Not right away,” Chuck agreed, putting his cup down, folding his hands across his belly. “Not until later.”

“Later,” I said. “After Lenny Pelligrini disappeared.”

Chuck nodded slowly.

“See, something’s been eating at me,” I said, “but it took me a little time to figure out what it was. Something I heard in the trailer the other night. But a lot went on in there, and I wasn’t in such great shape, so remembering wasn’t all that easy. Now I have it.”

Chuck just waited. I think he knew that I had it, too.

“It was Pelligrini,” I said. “Dan Junior said that after he disappeared, he tried to shake Junior down. That’s why Junior killed him. Okay, but then why did he disappear? Once they dug him up, I figured, like everyone else, that he’d been dead since he was first missing. But it turns out he wasn’t. So why did he disappear?”

Chuck said nothing. He could have given me some lie, some plausible explanation, something to deflect what I was thinking. What I was thinking couldn’t be proved anyway, so he could have tried to make me doubt it. But Chuck had been an honest cop. He didn’t even try.

“He disappeared because you told him to, Chuck.”

Chuck didn’t answer me. He didn’t look away. In the carpeted, insulated quiet of his bright, cool office, he waited for me to tell him what all three of us already knew.

“His mother asked you to talk to him,” I said, “and you did. But he wasn’t interested. Your side of the law’s not as attractive to a young kid as the other side, the side where you get to swagger and have pretty girls hanging off your arm. Louie’s side. The kid wasn’t interested in your advice, but he didn’t mind disappearing for a little while, for a few bucks. You paid him, didn’t you, Chuck?”

For a few moments, Chuck said nothing. Between Lydia’s chair and mine was about six feet of carpeted office; still I could feel her beside me, soft and calm, reassuring. I waited for Chuck to speak.

“Two thousand,” he said softly. “Lot of money, but a small price, if it would lead me to Louie.”

“You didn’t know about the stolen equipment, all the things the kid was involved in then, did you?” I asked.

“No.”

“What was the story you gave him, why he should disappear?”

Chuck regarded me steadily. “I told him something was about to go down, something his mother didn’t want him caught up in. The money was to carry him until he got something else, once he resurfaced.”

“But he wasn’t supposed to do that for a while.”

“No.”

“Because you knew what Crowell’s reaction would be, once he was gone.”

“How could I know?” Chuck shrugged. “But I hoped. I knew about the kid and Romeo, they had a couple of run-ins.”

“About what?”

“Seems the kid was trying to get Romeo to take him on, use him in whatever he had going, but Romeo wasn’t interested.”

“Same as the kid wanted from Falco.”

“Yeah. Yeah, the same.” Chuck sighed with a gravelly sound. “Anyway, I knew the Crowells were looking at Romeo—or the old man was; turns out Junior wasn’t looking at anything but how to save his own ass. But I figured, the kid disappears, Crowell’s got my card in his pocket, just maybe it’s the last straw. It worked, too,” he added, a soft, sad note in his voice. “Kid disappeared, Crowell’s on the phone to me next day.”

“It worked, except the kid tried to get something out of it besides your two thousand bucks.”

Chuck kept his eyes on me for a few moments longer. Then he pushed his chair back, stood. He turned to the window, put his hands in his pockets and watched a tug shoulder its way upriver.

“That’s what must’ve happened,” he finally said. “The kid must’ve figured he lucked out, that I took him out of it just before his golden goose got its head whacked off, without me knowing it was him. I was making that crap up, about something going down. I didn’t know…. But he couldn’t resist trying to put the squeeze on Dan Junior for a few more bucks, before things blew up.”

“So Junior killed him,” I said. Chuck’s broad back was a dark interruption of the bright and peaceful scene behind the glass. “And then Senior brought you in. Brought us in. And so Junior had Hamilton kill Romeo, to make us go away. And then Junior killed Hamilton.”

Chuck nodded, said, “Yeah,” so softly I almost couldn’t hear him.

“Because of how badly you wanted Louie Falco.”

Chuck still didn’t turn. “Because of how bad I wanted Louie,” he said. “Elena Pelligrini. She asked me to help.” He shook his head. “That kid,” he said. “So stupid. It would’ve happened like this, sooner or later.” Chuck’s voice was asking me for something, but I didn’t have what he wanted.

“Maybe,” I said. “Maybe.”

Chuck went on as if he hadn’t heard me. “Three men dead,” he said. “One lucky he’s not. Because of how bad I wanted Louie.” He stared in silence out the window, then said, his voice low, “And I wasn’t even right. The word I had was bad. That S.O.B. hasn’t got his filthy fingers in anything going on on that site. Not a goddamned thing.”

I lit another cigarette, inhaled deeply. The brightness of the window was making my head ache, or maybe it wasn’t that. The cigarette helped some. I spoke again.

“Yes, he does, Chuck.”

Chuck looked over his shoulder at me. “What are you talking about?”

I knocked some ash from my cigarette. “He’s the money,” I said. “He’s what’s carrying Denise Armstrong from one bank loan to the next.”

Chuck turned to face me. “What?” The single word was almost lost.

“I spoke to her. The rate’s high, but not much higher than your Visa card. She thinks she can handle it, because it won’t be for long. I think she’s crazy. I told her that. She asked me where I thought a black woman should have gone for an interim construction loan when the banks have turned her down.” I took in some more smoke, rubbed at my temple to ease the dull pain there. “I asked if she knew what kind of money she was laundering, doing this.”

“What’d she say?”

“As far as she’s concerned, she’s always laundering some white man’s blood money. She doesn’t see much difference, borrowing from Louie Falco or from Citibank.”

One side of Chuck’s mouth rose in a small, joyless smile. “She couldn’t come up with a black loan shark?”

“She tried. Falco’s rates were better.”

“Jesus,” Chuck said. “Jesus fucking goddamned Christ.” He ran his hand over the smooth skin of his head. “Don’t she know what that can turn into? Bloodsucker like Falco? First payment she misses, rates’ll double, next thing she knows it’ll take everything she’s got just to cover the vig. Jesus—”

“This is a little different,” I told him. “They have lawyers. They have a contract.”

“What are you talking about, lawyers? For a loan-shark deal?”

“Not a loan-shark deal,” I said. “He’s an investor.”

“Bullshit.” Automatically Chuck glanced at Lydia, but she didn’t react and he didn’t apologize.

“He’s getting out of the life,” I said, watched Chuck’s face. “He’s made his pile the dirty way, now he’s going legit. Import-export, investing, whatever. He told me that.”

Chuck stared at me. “You talked to Louie?”

“My case,” I said.

He shook his head slowly, came back to his chair and sat. “That legit stuff is a pile of crap,” he said.

“He said you knew it, too,” I answered. “That he was going straight.”

“Straight.” Chuck curled his lip as though there was a bad smell in the air.

“That’s why you were so hot to get him now,” I said. “When you heard he had something going on the Armstrong site. You were afraid he’d cover his tracks, wash the money, get so squeaky-clean no one would ever be able to get to him again. That’s why you started this whole thing.”

Chuck’s hands rested on his desktop, palms down, fingers spread. He looked up from them, said to me, “I thought it was all Louie. All that shit going on up there, I thought it was Louie. I didn’t know about Junior. But it was my last chance. I had to nail him now, before it was too late.”

I said, “It’s already too late.”

“It was my chance,” he said.

“You passed up your chances, Chuck. Years ago. When you looked the other way, when you walked away from it. When you could have brought him in, and you didn’t. Setting up the Pelligrini kid, and me, and the Crowells, to do it for you now—it doesn’t work like that.”

I stood, slowly. My head was pounding. Everything I’d said was true; we all knew it. But nothing Chuck had done was illegal, and nothing Chuck had done could be proved.

Chuck and I found each other’s eyes, he at his grand glass desk in his high-rent office, New York spread out behind him, me on my way downtown to my walk-up over Shorty’s, to my open windows and my piano.

I thought about a darkened living room, about Elena Pelligrini, who’d lost her son, who didn’t blame Chuck, who was grateful that he had tried to help and was waiting for his help now, to bring Louie Falco down.

I could see in Chuck’s eyes that he was thinking about her too.

Chuck said nothing. In the brightness of the July morning light streaming into the office, I found I had to turn away from what I saw in his face.

Lydia stood also, with a long look at Chuck. She turned to leave with me. She had said nothing the whole time we’d been here. She didn’t speak now, either, just walked beside me past the plaques and framed photos in the waiting area and out through the big glass entry door; but the soft, cool touch of her hand on mine told me everything I needed to know.

twenty-four

i
t was another week before I was up near the Armstrong site again. The late afternoon was hot and sticky, the air over New York cloudless but layered with haze. I stood outside the fence, watched the boom of the crane move majestically against the sky. I heard the whine of saw blades on steel, the thud of hammers, the shouts of men.

Crews had begun going back to work the day before. The bonding company that covered the Crowells was acting as general contractor. The weeklong shutdown had been costly, and getting back up to speed would be, too, but Denise Armstrong had held a press conference the day after the story hit the papers and the eleven o’clock news. She announced that this building, which was the start of a neighborhood renewal long overdue, would not be stopped, that construction would shortly resume, following the original, high-quality details laid out in the documents. She assured the press and the public that any shoddy construction already in place would be ripped out and rebuilt, and any residue of bad feeling or mistrust would be overcome by the forward motion and energy generated by the continuing work.

Privately I gave odds of two to one against brickwork coming out—just too damn expensive, and since it had been caught before it went above six stories, it might still be low enough, as Lozano had said, not to matter—but I gave fifty-fifty on the drywall, the plumbing connections. Lawsuits were multiplying like rabbits, and the criminal investigations were in full force, but the site seemed normal as I stood and watched the work. The controlled chaos of construction appeared, as always, both balletlike and random, the movement of men and materials at once self-explanatory and inexplicable.

I had my eyes focused on the brickwork on the north side, trying to make out progress through the scaffold netting, when a voice beside me spoke.

“Looks okay to you?”