No Colder Place (8 page)

“That’s a pain.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Shame payday’s not till Thursday. Because of your horse tomorrow, I mean.”

I nodded. “Maribel. I’m telling you, that’s some horse. It’s you damn unfriendly northerners. Wouldn’t be like this back home. A word and a handshake, there.”

“I’m crying for you. But I might be able to help.”

“Help how?”

“I know a guy who’ll take your action.”

“Before he sees my cash?”

“Anytime.”

“No shit. Lead me to him.”

“Just go back to work. I’ll send him to you.”

“Here?” I acted surprised.

“Yeah,” he said. “Here.”

So I went back to work, and Sam Buck went on his way, and twenty minutes later Joe Romeo was standing by my side.

“How you guys coming?” was his greeting as he stopped on the scaffold, hands in his pockets, and scanned our work.

“Need some more ties,” DiMaio answered without turning around. He tossed one of the steel tabs he was talking about to the scaffold planking at Romeo’s feet. “And what is this shit? Might as well be using rubber bands. Get me some decent ties, Joe.”

“Other guys aren’t having trouble with ’em,” Romeo answered. “Other guys aren’t falling behind, either.”

DiMaio straightened up, turned. His face flushed; but after a glance at me, all he said was, “Christ, Joe, you gotta give us a day or two to get used to each other.”

Romeo fixed DiMaio with a narrow stare. “This is day two. Be used to each other by tomorrow. I don’t want you two fucking up my schedule.”

“Shit!” DiMaio started, but Romeo cut him off.

“See you a minute, Smith?” He motioned with his head, started down the scaffold. I cut DiMaio a look, then followed.

Romeo stopped where no one was working. I stopped too. He turned to me, rocked back on his heels, hands in his pockets again. He said, “I hear you’ve been talking about finding some action.”

I put suspicion on my face and in my voice. “Where’d you hear that?”

“I even hear you’re trying to get the men to drop their paychecks on some glue factory out at Santa Anita.”

I shrugged like a nervous man. “Subject of racetracks came up. We were just talking.”

“Talking, huh?”

I didn’t answer.

“Well,” Romeo said, “could be I can help you.”

I took a second, then said, “You?”

“Yeah, asshole,” he said. “Me.”

I didn’t say anything, as though I didn’t know what to say. He went on. “Here’s how it works. I’ll take any action you want. I don’t need to see the color of your money, because I know where to find you.” He smiled, showing me a row of white, even teeth. “You want to lay odds on the number of cars coming through that red light, I don’t care. But I don’t carry you. You lose, you pay, or you don’t work anymore. And I don’t mean just on this site, pal. You understand?”

I nodded my understanding. I doubted Romeo had the muscle to back up a threat like that, but a bet-hungry mason just up from Texas wouldn’t know that.

“And you don’t tell anyone who’s backing you,” he said. “Anyone wants to know where your action comes from, you tell me, and I find him, if I want to. Sometimes I don’t. My business, not yours. Got it?”

I let myself grin. “Jesus. This is great. The foreman. And here I thought you were going to ride my ass about my bad habit.”

Romeo didn’t smile back. “I love your bad habit, Smith. Guys like you lose more than they win. But remember this: I got a sweet thing going here. My crews don’t produce, it ain’t so sweet. First thing you are to me is a bricklayer. First time you call in sick on race day, you’re fired, you’re cut off, and you’re unemployable. We understand each other?”

I agreed, as I put fifty dollars on Maribel—running at eight to one—that we did indeed understand each other. Or, I amended silently as I headed back to where I belonged, at least we understood each other as much as any two people, one of whom is being paid to lie to the other, can.

I found a reason to stop by the field office in the trailer on the first floor at quitting time. Something about my insurance, some paper I didn’t know if the union needed, since I was from out of state. Something John Lozano didn’t have the answer to.

“Crowell could tell us,” he said, rising from his chair, slipping a pencil behind his ear. “They got a new girl over there, to keep the files straight. Come on, I’ll go over with you.”

“She’ll still be there? It’s after quitting time.”

“Oh, yeah. Crowell’s girls work eight-thirty to five-thirty. She’ll be there.”

And thrilled about it for sure, I thought. “I’ll go,” I said. “You don’t have to come. They won’t be able to tell me today anyway. Anything you want from anyone, you always have to come back tomorrow.”

“Ain’t that the truth,” he sighed. “Okay, go ahead. Let me know if you need me.”

Across the hall in the fluorescent-lit trailer, the new girl was standing behind a gray metal desk. She looked up, a file in each hand, as I opened the door. She was short and Chinese, wearing a green silk blouse and a set of flea-market glass beads with little painted fireworks on them that I’d bought for her last Christmas. She scowled evilly as I approached her.

“May I help you?” Completely contradicting her expression, her voice was well-modulated and ever so polite.

The other secretary, an older black woman, lifted her eyes from the computer screen in front of her, but must have decided to let Lydia handle this one. She went back to her work as I said, “I have some questions about insurance forms.”

“Talk to your Allstate agent,” Lydia muttered, not loud enough for the other woman to hear. Then she tossed her head and said, in a clear and syrupy sweet voice, “I’m not sure I can help you, but I’d be delighted to try.”

With an uneasy feeling that I’d be paying for this for a long time, I started to explain what I wanted. Lydia put on a face of such earnest anxiousness to be helpful that I had to cough to keep from laughing.

We could have gone on for a while, parrying and thrusting, before the other secretary caught on, but our stride was broken by a loud voice coming from the conference room to Lydia’s left.

“What the hell’s the difference?” The voice, one I didn’t know, was gravelly and annoyed. “Tell Lozano that Lacertosa has to put on two more crews, for chrissakes. Call Gilbert, get the steel here next week instead of August. If we have to do it, let’s just do it, Daniel, come on!”

That was said in a way so dismissive and disgusted as to sound unarguable to me, but another voice answered.

“John’s crews aren’t producing now, Dad. He doesn’t need more men, he needs men working harder.” That was Dan Crowell, Jr., which told me who the other voice was.

Lydia gave me a little smirk, so I guessed she knew who was on John’s crews.

“Then get on his case! That’s your
job
, Daniel. You heard what the problem is.” The gravelly voice softened; I sensed a reassuring smile in it. “Don’t worry, Mrs. Armstrong. We’ll give the bank what they need. Daniel, light a fire under Traco, maybe we can even have some windows in.”

“You can’t light a fire under those guys. They’re too big and too far away to give a damn. If we were using someone local—”

“We’re not, and there’s reasons for it! Call them, or I will. And you know what else? Let me call O’Brien. I got an idea about that stone trim, maybe we could get it in fast and save a bundle besides. Hold on a minute.”

I heard the sound of a chair scraping back. A large man, white-haired, fat in the gut where Dan Junior was still only soft, but with muscled arms, leaned through the conference-room door into the file cabinet—cluttered outer office. He looked me over and dismissed me, as though he’d already sized me up and knew he could handle whatever I was bringing, but later, after the more important work was done.

“Verna, get me the manloading chart for O’Brien. And see if you can find that new look-ahead schedule from Gilbert, the one for the next three, four weeks.”

The secretary opened a drawer in her desk and began flipping through files. Crowell turned to Lydia. “Everything all right?”

“Yes,” she said. “This is one of Lacertosa’s masons. He just needs some paperwork.”

Crowell nodded, eyed me again, then disappeared back into the conference room. A few seconds later Verna pushed back her chair and headed in there too, files in hand.

“Thanks,” I heard Crowell say. “Okay, Mrs. Armstrong. By September, we’re gonna have the dogs and ponies all in a row. You’ll be able to give the bank their show.”

“Thank you, Mr. Crowell.” That was a woman’s voice, deep and assured. She said something else, but I couldn’t follow it. I wanted to edge closer to the conference-room door, but Verna walked back through it and fixed her eyes on me.

“Well?” I said to Lydia, my eyebrows raised, as though I’d been waiting for her to respond to something I’d asked. “Do you think you have it?”

“I’ll have to look it up,” she answered sweetly. “What did you say your name was?”

I told her what my name was.

“All right,” she said, making a show of jotting down my name. The voices in the conference room had gotten back to normal, and I couldn’t make out what was going on anymore, though I was still intrigued. I hoped Lydia would give me an opening to hang around, but she didn’t.

All she said, smiling her helpful smile at me, was, “Come back tomorrow.”

six

i
’d arranged to meet Lydia for dinner at Pho Viet Hoang, a Vietnamese place in Chinatown we both liked. I had a nagging feeling as I left the site, trudged over the concrete floor, and down the wooden ramp into the brightness of the afternoon, that getting together on Lydia’s turf might not be a great idea right now. I was trying to think of a way around it, some more neutral ground to suggest, but I couldn’t come up with anything that she wouldn’t see right through. I resigned myself to the summer storm clouds and occasional lightning flashes that I knew would be the weather at our table, and decided that, like weather, it was inevitable.

As it turned out, though, it wasn’t. Dinner was at the Vietnamese place, all right. But Lydia and I were too busy to bother with issues like moral superiority and who owed what to whom. We spent the evening discussing the unearthing, in the elevator pit on the Armstrong site, of a body.

I wasn’t there when they found him, but Lydia was. She called me twice from the site. The first time, just before six, was to tell me she wasn’t sure she could make dinner, and to tell me why: The crew digging in the elevator pit seemed to have found a body; the cops were on their way.

“Jesus!” I said. “What?”

“What I said,” she replied calmly and quietly. I could hear agitated men’s voices in the background. “Mr. Crowell went out there with the workmen. He just came back. He told Verna to call the police. We’re waiting for them.”

“Whose?” I demanded. “Whose body? That crane operator—Pelligrini?”

“I don’t know. I have to go. I’ll see you later.” She said that fast and hung up, the new secretary calling to cancel a dinner date, trying not to jeopardize her new job.

I spent the next half hour pacing, sitting with a bottle of beer, standing to light a cigarette, pacing some more. If I’d come up with a single half-plausible excuse to go back up there I would have, in a flash, but there wasn’t one to be had, and I knew it. Having Lydia there in this sort of situation was the next best thing to being there myself—in some situations, a better thing—and I knew that, too. I thought about it the whole time I paced and smoked.

When the phone rang again, I yanked it up before the first ring was over.

“Smith,” I barked into it.

“Wow. Relax. It’s me. I’ll meet you in half an hour.”

“Who was it?”

“I’ll see you later.”

Dumb question, Smith. She can’t answer that one with people around. Ask it the other way.

“Was it Pelligrini?”

“Yes.”

“Jesus,” I said, but she’d hung up by then.

I don’t live too far from Chinatown; I was at Pho Viet Hoang inside of fifteen minutes. You can’t smoke there, but you can eat pastel shrimp chips dipped in a blistering red sauce and drink Vietnamese beer, which has a thin, acid bite and is served very cold. The whole place was cold; they were giving their air-conditioning a workout. I breathed in the tang of fish sauce and cilantro and stared at the door, as though I could make Lydia materialize faster that way. Maybe I did. She was there twenty-five minutes after she’d called.

I stood when she came in; that annoys her but I can’t help it. I touched her arm lightly and kissed her equally lightly. Her blouse was a stream of silk against the tips of my fingers.

“Give,” I said.

“Did you call Mr. DeMattis?” she asked as she sat.

“He wasn’t there. I left a message for him to beep me, before he talked to Crowell if he could.”

“You’re wearing that thing?” Her eyebrows shot up. “I thought you hated it.”

“I do. That doesn’t mean it isn’t useful. Come on, give. What the hell happened?”

“The crew in the elevator pit, putting in the sump pump,” she said. “Later you’ll have to tell me what a sump pump is.”

“It pumps out the sump,” I said. “What the hell’s the story?”

“I don’t know. He was about half unearthed by the time they told us we could go. Actually they were ready for us to go earlier, but I bought some time by staying until Verna’s husband came to get her. She was shaken up.”

“Your basic human decency is humbling. They’re sure it was Pelligrini?”

“Both Crowells identified him.”

“And he was in the pit?”

“Buried. Under about two feet of dirt. Isn’t there a floor at the bottom of the elevator pit, cement or something?”

“Concrete, you mean. No, it’s just a hole. Once the elevator’s in nobody ever goes there; it’s just to make space for the cables. They were just digging and there he was?”

“Basically. One of the workmen saw these white things where he was about to stick his shovel next. He brushed the dirt off them and they turned out to be fingers. According to him that was all he wanted to know. He beat it out of there and got Mr. Crowell.”