No Colder Place (6 page)

“You already said you don’t believe that.”

“So what? I didn’t hire you, I can’t fire you.”

“You could make me look bad.”

He laughed sourly. “Man, you don’t need me for that. And what’s the difference? Whoever sent you up here, they got you a union card, they got you a job, who cares how you look?”

“I can’t keep an eye on Joe Romeo if he’s keeping an eye on me.”

DiMaio gave me a long stare. Then he looked away, took a bite out of his sandwich, and didn’t speak again until he’d finished it. I went back to mine, too, and gave him the time he wanted.

“What about Reg?” he finally said, balling up the paper his sandwich had come wrapped in. He ripped open a package of M & M’s. “You come up here to keep an eye on Joe or whatever, and it just so happens someone clobbers Reg two hours after you get here?”

“That could still have been an accident.”

DiMaio gave a cold laugh.

“Or maybe it wasn’t,” I said. “But I don’t know anything about it.”

“It wasn’t, I’m telling you that. Reg’s too careful, and too quick, to crack his head open tripping over his own damn shovel.”

“Like I said, I don’t know. But even if it wasn’t, I don’t know if it has anything to do with me.”

“What the hell does that mean, ‘I don’t know’? Maybe you give a shit, maybe you don’t?”

“I didn’t say I didn’t care, Mike. But it only involves me if it involves Romeo. And I don’t know that.”

He threw back a handful of M & M’s. “But you think so.”

I resettled myself against the scaffold, trying to find a more comfortable position. Stopping work may have been a mistake: my arms and back were beginning to ache.

I said, “I don’t even know the guy. I expected to come up here and spend a couple of days just figuring out who everybody was.”

DiMaio didn’t say anything to that. He watched me closely. I guessed he had a right.

“I get suspicious when I see something like what happened to Phillips,” I said. “Especially when I’ve already been told there’s someone to be suspicious of. But that doesn’t make it true.”

I pulled my cigarettes from my back pocket, offered him one. He shook his head. I lit one and we watched each other. The sounds on the site began to change again, got a little louder, more urgent, as the lunch break ended.

“So you’re telling me you’re here to nail Joe,” DiMaio said, collecting the debris that had come from his lunchbox, stuffing things back in.

“No. I’m here to see if there’s anything to nail him on.”

“Same thing.”

I let that go.

“Joe’s a bookie, huh?” DiMaio spoke softly. He looked along the scaffolding, squinting as though the light had changed. “And Reg is a betting man.”

I watched him, asked, “Does he owe Romeo money?”

DiMaio shook his head. “I didn’t even know Joe was a bookie till you told me. I don’t know if Reg bets with him. But it would fit, wouldn’t it?”

“It might. Or a million other things might.”

DiMiao’s look was sharp but he didn’t answer. Six stories below, someone climbed into a truck, slammed the cab door.

“So what do you want from me?” DiMaio asked.

“Cover me.”

“What?”

“If I’m that bad, make me look good. To where Romeo won’t notice me, where he won’t be thinking about me.”

DiMaio stared upward, watched the boom of the crane swing slowly around. The empty hook on the end swayed against the hazy blue of the sky.

“Joe’s bad news,” he said. “Bookie or not, he’s a mean son of a bitch. I seen him get guys fired at the start of a job just to show other guys he can. Just to keep everyone pissing in their pants.”

“You don’t seem afraid of him.”

He shrugged. “It ain’t worth it. This’s a good job, but not good enough to kiss Joe’s ass for. He gets me fired, I pick up something else.” He fixed his eyes on mine. “I find out you’re lying to me, Smith, I swear—”

“I’m not,” I told him.

He pulled himself to his feet. “Yeah,” he said. “Okay. But there’s two things.”

“What are they?”

“One: You find Joe had anything to do with what happened to Reg, you’re gonna burn his ass, no matter what the client wants.” He put quotes around “client,” said the word as though he were talking about a mythical beast that I believed in and he didn’t, whose behavior was therefore my problem, not his.

I stood up and joined him. “And the other thing?”

“It turns out he didn’t, you’re gonna keep looking until you find who did.”

“That’s not the job I was hired for.”

“What the hell are you saying? You want to be paid? You need a fucking client before you give a shit about what happened to Reg?”

“No. I’m saying I already have a client, and something I’m supposed to be doing here. I don’t like to work two cases at once.”

“And I don’t like to bust my ass making some deadbeat look good.”

Our eyes met and held each other. “I could say yes,” I answered, “and then not do it.”

“Yeah,” he agreed. “But you won’t. You make a deal, you’ll follow through.”

“How do you know that?”

He looked from me to my end of the wall, the place where I’d been working. “From your bricks.”

four

i
pushed through the swinging etched-glass doors into the familiar liquor-and-grill smell of Shorty’s Bar. It was half past six, the day still so hot and close that Shorty’s air-conditioning hit me like a dive in a mountain lake. I’d already been home, showered, worked for a while on a group of Scriabin études I was learning, and had the first beer of the evening.

I had also called Chuck. I got him at home in Staten Island; he was sitting on his couch, working on a cold beer, the way I was.

“Hey,” he said in greeting. “So, how’s the bricks?”

“Heavy as lead,” I told him. “Heavier than they were last time I did this.”

“Yeah, I heard that, that they’re making bricks heavier these days,” he sympathized. “You gonna manage?”

“I’ll let you know. Listen, Chuck, something happened out there today. Did you hear about it?”

“I didn’t hear anything. I’m up to my eyebrows on the cases I’m actually working, as opposed to the ones I farm out to suckers.”

“I thought maybe someone from Crowell called you.”

“Why would they? It have something to do with Joe Romeo?”

“I don’t know.”

“What was it?”

I told him.

“Shit. The guy gonna be okay?”

“I don’t know that either. They might have a better idea by tomorrow. So Crowell didn’t call you, huh?”

“Uh-uh. Unless they thought Romeo was involved, they got no reason to.”

“I thought because I was in the middle of it.”

“You? They never heard of you.”

“Crowell?” I was surprised.

“Nuh-uh. I was gonna tell ’em. Then I thought, Why? You got better cover this way. Anybody happens to see something, phone message with my name on it, you know, it’s still got nothing to do with you. Old man Crowell, he knows I’m on the case. I told you, he don’t know how I’m working it, whether I got someone on the inside, or only outside guys digging, and he don’t want to know.” Chuck paused to drink some beer. “The kid, I told you, he don’t like it, but he does things the way the old man tells him. So no one up there knows anything except you’re an altacocker bricklayer who thinks bricks are getting heavier.”

“I thought Crowell Junior was just being cute on the scaffold this morning.”

“No, he really’s got no idea it’s you.”

“Good,” I said. “Thanks, Chuck. But here’s something else I’ve been thinking. I think you’d have to let at least the old man in on this one.” I told Chuck about an idea that had been growing in my mind since the middle of the day.

“Jeez, I don’t know,” Chuck said, when I was through. “You think we need to do this?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Well,” he said doubtfully, “you think she’ll go for it?”

“Lydia? I’m having dinner with her. I’ll ask her then. Can we do it?”

“I’ll call old man Crowell now. I’ll call you back.”

I finished my beer while I waited. Twenty minutes later, Chuck was back to me. “He says yeah, but only if you’re sure it’ll help. He’s worried about his bottom line.”

“How sure does he mean by sure?”

“This is a guy spends his time putting buildings up. You either got your steel or you don’t. The thing either stands up or it falls down.”

I thought about the études I’d been practicing, thought about searching for the right colors in an arpeggio, listening as the dominant voice shifts from one hand to the other, back and forth, a matter of trial, of interpretation.

“Tell him I’m never sure,” I said. “But I think so.”

After Chuck hung up I went back to the Scriabin. When it was time, I closed the piano, headed downstairs to Shorty’s.

Home was the high-ceilinged apartment I’d built out of what had been an unfinished attic in the ancient brick building Shorty O’Donnell owned on Laight Street, the building his bar was in. On the second floor, between me and the bar, was Shorty’s office, storage, and a place for him to crash on nights he couldn’t make it home to Queens. I’d built those rooms, too, in return for a cheap lease on the apartment upstairs. That was eighteen years ago, after I was ready to admit to myself that my marriage wasn’t going to make it to a third year and that camping in Shorty’s attic wasn’t just a temporary thing.

The bar was comfortably full, not crowded and not sparse. Dark wood and green glass lampshades soaked up the light, the same way the comfort of a familiar place kept talk low and easy. Shorty, busy behind the bar, managed to look up anyhow as the door opened, the way he always does, just to know who’s coming and going from his place. I returned his nod as I surveyed the room from the door, spotted Lydia in a booth against the wall. Maneuvering between the tables, saying hi to the guys I knew, saw here most nights, I reached her and slid in across the booth.

“Hi, honey, I’m home.”

She smiled as I leaned across the table to kiss her.

“You’re early,” I said. Lydia’s glossy hair was black and short and scented with freesia. I settled myself on the leather bench across from her. It was farther away than I wanted to be, but it was where I was. “Why didn’t you buzz me when you got here?”

“I didn’t mind waiting. I didn’t want to disturb you.”

At the piano, she meant. She’d know that’s where I was at the end of the day, where I try to be. She’s asked me to play for her a few times, but I haven’t, and she doesn’t push it. I’m grateful for that, because I know how much she hates unsatisfied curiosity.

She also hates waiting.

I met her dark eyes briefly, then turned away to find someone to bring me a drink.

Lydia leaned back against the booth and sipped at her own drink—seltzer with three limes—through a straw. “How was work?” she asked.

Kay, a waitress who’s been at Shorty’s almost as long as I have, came to smile at me and take my order. When she was gone I turned back to Lydia. “What makes me think I can stand in the sun six floors above Broadway in July and lay bricks all day, just because I did this when I was twenty?”

“I asked you that last night when you called.”

“Did I have a good answer?”

“No.”

“I’m not surprised. Work was fine. If I can move in the morning, I’ll go back.” My beer came; I drank some of it down. “Actually, it wasn’t fine. There’s a problem on that site.”

“Besides what you’re there for?”

“I don’t know. Something happened today. Could have been an accident, and I think that’ll be the official word.”

“But you don’t think it was?”

I looked over my beer at her. “No.”

I told Lydia about Mike DiMaio and Joe Romeo, and about the pile of sand soaked with Reg Phillips’ blood.

She asked questions as I went, about the men I’d met, the way the place had looked, who had said what to whom. She asked if Reg Phillips would be all right.

“I don’t know. I called the hospital before I came down here. They say ‘serious but stable.’ I don’t know what that means.”

She finished her drink. “Why don’t you think it was an accident?”

I signaled for Kay. “You want dinner?” I asked Lydia. She did, so we ordered, and Kay brought Lydia another seltzer. When that business was over, I went back to the other. “His hard hat,” I said. “When I got there, it was lying on the ground by his knee.”

“Which means?”

“A hard hat fits pretty snugly. It’s not going to fly off backwards when you stumble. If a guy trips hard and falls forward, his hat might fall off, but in the same direction he’s going.”

“So it should have been in front of him.”

“Somewhere. Up around his head.”

“Could it have rolled?”

“Not backward, if it’s going forward.”

She pursed her lips. “But if someone knocked it off, say in an argument, and then he fell …”

I nodded. “And then he fell. After someone slammed him over the head with a brick.”

“You think that’s what happened?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know enough about him, or anyone else up there, to know why anyone would.”

“It’s also not your job,” she pointed out. “Unless Joe Romeo did it.”

“Well, sort of.” I told her about Mike DiMaio, what he’d said and what I’d promised.

“Is that a good idea?” she asked. “He’s not your client. You already have a case.”

“
We
already have a case. And this may be part of it. We have to look into it at least far enough to know that.”

“Oh?” she said, slurping her seltzer. “‘We?’”

“Didn’t I tell you when I called last night that I wanted you working with me on this?”

“No. You said you wanted to have dinner with me.”

“You can’t tell me you don’t automatically suspect my motives when I say I want to have dinner.”

“No, I do. But that you want me to work for you is not the first thing that springs to mind.”

“Your problem. My motives, like my heart, are pure.”

“Your problem. So what’s my assignment, boss?”

I thought. “Well, I’d like to know a little about Reg Phillips. DiMaio says he gambles; maybe he’s into Romeo—or someone—for more than he could handle. But I don’t want to stick you with that; it’s just boring paperwork, and I know how you hate that.”