by S. J. Rozan
“Bidets,” I said. “With a lifetime supply of Perrier.”
He snickered. “Yeah. Anyway, the developer’s some black lady named Armstrong. Otherwise they might be having trouble up there, putting up even half a yuppie building in that neighborhood.”
“But they’re not?”
“Nah, the neighborhood seems happy enough. Crowell says they went out of their way to hire locals. And the building’s supposed to be pretty classy. Good-quality materials, all that shit. Armstrong lady wants it that way. What the hell, she owns it, she can do whatever she wants. ’Course, from the way old man Crowell’s sitting here telling me what a great job it is, you’d think he owned it and designed it himself, besides building it with his own hands.”
“Old man Crowell?”
“That’s why they call it Crowell. Dan Crowells Senior and Junior. Family business. Senior’s been doing this all his life, though he don’t get up into the buildings much anymore. Truth is, he’s sick. Leukemia, something like that. I mean, he looked okay when he came to see me, but nobody, but maybe him, seems to think he’s gonna live more than another year or two.”
“He told you that?”
“Not a chance. I checked them out between when they called me and when they got here.”
“What made you do that?”
“I always do that. Clients never tell you the stuff you really need to know. You gotta find it out for yourself. You must have that same problem.”
“All the time,” I said. “So the old man’s sick?”
“Seems that way. And whatever he’s got, it keeps him moving kind of slow, so he stays in the office pretty much now. Between you and me, I think it drives him crazy that he can’t get around the way he used to, up and down the scaffold, showing the guys how you stick a rebar in the concrete, how you hammer a nail. That he has to depend on the kid to do it.”
“Crowell Junior’s the hands-on guy?”
“Coupla years out of college, was working somewhere else. Now I guess he thinks he’s taking over. Looks a little soft to me for that kind of work, but like everything else these days, construction’s more filling out forms and less pounding nails than it used to be.”
“And they both came to see you?”
“Yeah, sure. Though I got the idea Junior didn’t think much of the plan. While the old man’s talking, Junior sits here rolling his eyes, coming up with reasons not to hire me. I didn’t like it.”
“That he didn’t want to hire you?”
“No, that he was disrespecting the old man like that, in front of me. I mean, it’s not like I’m their old family friend.”
“In that case, it would be worse.”
“Yeah, true. Anyway, he ticked the old man off, too.”
“But the old man did want to hire you,” I said. “Which is why I’m here.”
“You’re here ’cause you ain’t bright enough to stay away. But yeah, Crowell’s got a problem. They been having trouble. Times this tight, they had to shave their bid pretty close to get this job. When you do that you don’t wink at shit you might’ve let go if you had a little margin to throw away.”
“What kind of trouble?”
“At the beginning, some small stuff—you get it on construction sites sometimes. Some tools walking, some deliveries shorted. Then early on, someone stole a frontloader.”
“Stole it?”
“Just drove the damn thing off the site at four in the morning. Security guy was snoozing. They canned him, of course. Anyway, Crowell owns their own equipment, they don’t lease, so they took the loss.”
“But they must have been insured.”
“Oh, yeah. It was more of a pain in the ass than anything else. But something like that, it takes planning. So it started the Crowells thinking, and maybe watching the site more carefully than most.”
“And what happened?”
“Nothing like that again. Small stuff keeps going on, equipment and tools disappearing. Like anywhere; you almost can’t stop it. But now that they’re looking, they see a guy they don’t like the looks of. Name of Joe Romeo. Masonry foreman. They got a feeling he’s into some bad shit.”
“Like what?”
“Shylocking, bookmaking. Also they think maybe drugs, nothing big, just some weed, but they don’t want it around.”
“The thefts?”
“Probably not. They don’t put it past him, but his movements don’t correlate.”
“I love it when you talk dirty, Chuck.”
He glanced at me over the rim of his espresso cup, but let it go. “Anyway, Crowell’d like to get rid of Romeo, but the union takes things like that personal, unless you got serious proof. And Crowell don’t want no union trouble. A strike’d kill the schedule, Crowell loses a fortune, which on this job they don’t particularly have. This Armstrong lady got no use for bad publicity either; it’s her first big building, Crowell tells me, and being black and a lady, there’s a lot of people out there just waiting for her to fall on her ass. So Crowell’s been sort of lying low on the whole thing.
“Then about two weeks ago, this one crane operator don’t show up for work. Don’t call, nothing. They call him, can’t find him. They lose half a day with the crane, everybody’s behind, guys are sitting around with their thumbs up their asses while they wait for another operator to haul his butt in from Queens. Crowell’s busting a gasket. Romeo and this operator, Pelligrini, been seen in each other’s company. Someone up there says they weren’t getting along so well, the last couple days. Now, maybe it’s one thing, maybe it’s another, but Crowell’s fed up. They want Romeo out of there.
“So they come to me. Because, see, I met Crowell Senior at some testimonial dinner for some guy the other week. You know how it is, you gotta keep schmoozing, you wanna stay in business. At this thing, Crowell’s already complaining about his equipment and shit walking. I ask him does he want someone to look into it, he says no, it ain’t worth it. But I give him my card, just in case. He says yeah, he heard of me, I’m famous.” Chuck spread his hands, palms up. Being famous is something that just happens to some guys.
“So this Pelligrini thing,” he went on, “I guess that’s the last straw. They come to me. They’re telling me, start from Pelligrini, go undercover, see what I can dig up. But come on, I know every guinea in New York. Can you see me undercover in a room full of wops? Now, Crowell don’t care how I work the case. The old man says he don’t need to know. I get the feeling he don’t want to know, in case I find a way to deal with Romeo that ain’t exactly kosher. The kid don’t like it. ‘You got to have more control,’ he tells the old man. ‘You can’t not know what’s going on.’ The old man tells him to put a sock in it, that Chuck DeMattis knows what he’s doing. ‘DeMattis’ll take care of Romeo,’ he tells him. ‘You worry about getting the building built.’ So I think about it for a while, and I figure as long as Crowell’s letting me do this any way I want, I’ll give you a call.”
“What about your operatives?” I asked. “You have about two hundred guys who work for you.”
“I got fourteen, and between you and me, buddy, they’re the Stick-Up-the-Ass Squad. College boys. They’re good investigators, make a good impression on clients, can follow a hell of a paper trail, but send ’em undercover to drink with a mason? Hah.”
He stopped for some more espresso. “You, it’s different,” he said. “We could set you up, just some guy, nobody knows the difference. Whaddaya say?”
“I’ve been to college, Chuck.”
“Yeah, me too, but on us it don’t show.” Chuck said this as though he were reassuring me that neither of us looked our age.
“Well,” I said, “what’s the gag?”
“Depends. I was thinking we find out where Romeo drinks, whatever, you move in on him, get to be his new best friend.” He winked.
“And the point?”
“Get close, find out something Crowell can use to gently suggest to Romeo that he go away. Crowell’s not looking to lock Romeo up, j
ust to lose him.”
“Will drinking with him get me close enough?”
“You could get closer?”
I sipped some more espresso, watched the city shimmer beneath the hot blue sky. “What are we really talking about here, Chuck? Guys walk away from their jobs for a lot of reasons. You really think this Pelligrini guy not showing up for work has something to do with Joe Romeo?”
“Me, it’s nothing from nothing.” Chuck shrugged. “But old man Crowell, he had a hunch.”
“Just a hunch?”
“That’s what he said. Between you and me, I think you’re right: This Pelligrini thing’s got nothing to do with anything. But that ain’t really the point. It sort of lit a fire under them, Crowell, when Pelligrini disappeared, and now they decided they wanna take care of this Joe Romeo situation before it gets out of hand.”
I finished my espresso, looked into the grounds coating the sides of the cup. “Lot of Italians in this conversation, Chuck,” I said.
“Just two, besides me.”
“Uh-huh. How many Italians do you need before you find one who’s connected?”
“Is that one of those lightbulb jokes?”
“If it is it’s probably not funny.”
Chuck crossed one ankle over his knee, pushing back his chair to give himself room. “This guy Romeo,” he said. “His name came up before. He’s not connected, because nobody’ll have him. Oh, he’s got guys behind him, especially for the shylocking operation, guys he goes to. And he works with some bookie out of Vegas, what I hear. But no one local wants him. That’s a bad sign in a bad guy. I don’t think Crowell knows this, at least they didn’t say. But you might be doing the world a service if you could roust him.”
And this was why I worked with Chuck, why I’d come here at all to this high-priced, high-profile place with the endlessly ringing phones and the framed People magazine article spotlighting “Ten Top Private Eye Firms for the Nineties.” Behind the press releases and the late-night club-hopping and the winks and accommodating grins, the reasons Chuck had become a cop in the first place, so long ago, were still alive.
I lit a cigarette. Chuck shoved a slab of black marble across the desk for me to use as an ashtray.
“I used to work construction,” I told him. “I can lay bricks.”
“You’re shitting me.” Chuck’s eyes opened wide. “You don’t even speak Italian.”
“Who do you think lays bricks in Dublin?”
“You been to Dublin?”
“No.”
“They got a lot of crooked walls there, my fine Irish friend. Is that an offer?”
“Why not? I’d rather work with the guy than drink with him, I think. And it’s easier. What if he drinks in some dive on Staten Island?”
“You’re all gonna be sorry you said shit like that when we secede, you know.” Chuck’s tone was completely serious. A man’s home is his castle.
“As long as you issue me a passport. So what about it?”
He steepled his fingers and tapped them to his lips, considering. “Well, okay. But I got a bad feeling about that site.”
I grinned. “Aren’t you going to back me up?”
“With everything I got, buddy. We’ll do all your background shit from here, just call. You want me to send someone onto the site to babysit you?”
“No way. And do me a favor, let me do the background stuff myself. I don’t want to have to get a sign-off from your bookkeeper every time I need a license run.”
He frowned. “Just hand you off the case?”
“You and I don’t do things the same way, Chuck.”
I pulled on my cigarette, tapped gray ash onto the black marble. Framed in the window behind Chuck, a twin-engine plane made its way south over the East River. It was silent and the line of its flight was unvarying; it might have been pulled by a string.
“Now you put it that way,” Chuck said slowly, “maybe it’s a good idea. For the same reason Crowell don’t want to know.”
“You think I might do something you wouldn’t approve of?”
Chuck raised his eyebrows. “You could think of something I wouldn’t approve of? But anyway, maybe it’s better. You’re right, we do things differently. And I’m up to my ass in other things around here. Truth is I got no time for this, only I didn’t want to turn Crowell down. Could be a good paying customer for the long term, you know what I mean? But this’ll work out good. Your case, you work it. Only I don’t know how Crowell’s gonna feel about it.”
“Don’t tell them. I’ll report to you, you report to them. I’ll be working for you, Chuck. I have no problem with that. I just don’t want to be part of the DeMattis team.”
“If you’re sure that’s how you want it. But whatever, I got all these geeks back there, costing me overhead whether they’re running licenses or reading the racing form. You could avail yourself.”
“I have other things I’d rather avail myself of.”
“Ah.” Chuck smiled. “Your Chinese girl?”
“Woman,” I corrected him. “Licensed P.I. Independent operator with a four-year apprenticeship, four years solo in the field, and a one-room office in Chinatown. And not mine.”
“Whose fault is that?”
“Mine.”
“You want my advice? As a happily married man?”
“No.”
“Okay, here goes. You know that old joke, where the punchline is, ‘Be patient, jackass’?”
“Uh-huh.”
“That’s my advice.”
“Thanks, Chuck. Can we get back to work?”
“Sure. Where were we?”
“You were about to give me the case. Let’s talk fee. When it’s over, I’ll send you a bill.”
“If that’s how you want it.”
That was how I wanted it, and that’s how we did it. Chuck handed me the file, told me I’d have a union card by tomorrow. We worked out a cover we thought would fit, and I went home to wait. On the way I stopped at a builder’s-supply place on the Lower East Side and bought three different trowels, a hard hat, and a pair of heavy leather gloves. I sent Chuck the bill.
two
the scaffold I was on bounced slightly, its delicate bracing cutting the view across Broadway into triangular puzzle pieces as I made my way from the hoist and along the west side of the building to find my crew.
It was true, what I’d told Chuck: that I could get closer to Joe Romeo by being where he was eight hours a day than by trying to edge into his after-hours life; and that masonry work was something I could do. Being assigned to Romeo’s crew seemed like a natural if Chuck could arrange it. It had taken him a few days, construction work being so slow in New York right now, but he’d arranged it, with a two-hundred-dollar-savings bond in the name of the newborn son of a mason on the crew, and a case of Glenfiddich for the guy at the union hall who sent that guy, this morning, to a garage foundation in Queens and me to upper Broadway.
It was true, and I could do it, and it might even be the best way to work the case. But there was something else, another reason I wanted to be here, where small dust clouds billowed six floors below me as men crossed the site and headed for the time clocks, where the deep-throated growl of an engine starting up was blanketed by the pounding screech of a jackhammer, where I felt a trickle of sweat wander down my back as I carried my gear and my lunchbox along the rough planks of the scaffolding in the early morning.
Restless. Not the right word, but the best I had. It didn’t cover the small, sad jolt—not fear but like it—of waking in the early morning; or the long, pointless hours not of sleep but of nothing else, in the night. Sometimes, playing the piano could ease the tightness in my back. Sometimes, I could feel myself calming as I sat on the porch of my upstate cabin at the end of the day, drinking Maker’s Mark and watching the thick gold sunlight linger on the tops of the tallest trees and then gently slide away, leaving them in darkness. But I’d been at the cabin for a week when I checked in with my service in New York
and found Chuck had called me. Usually I don’t even call in from upstate; I did it because the shadows of the old trees around my cabin, the music, even the bourbon, none of it was helping, not this time.
I’d come in because Chuck had called, because I needed to work. And mason’s work, hard and sweaty and resulting, at the end of each day, in something that hadn’t been there before, something solid and undeniable, was the right kind of work.
The three other guys on the crew were already there when I got to where I was supposed to be. The one who wasn’t was Joe Romeo.
“I’m Smith,” I said to them as they lounged with their backs against the courses of brick they’d laid yesterday, one of them smoking, another finishing a cup of black coffee. “I’m new on this crew.”
“Replacing Nicky, huh? I heard he got something closer to home. Mike DiMaio.” The coffee drinker pushed himself to his feet, offered me his hand. I had my gloves on already; I didn’t take them off to shake with him, didn’t want him to know my hands weren’t as roughed-up and scarred as the hands of a middle-aged mason were likely to be. DiMaio was young and stocky and short, maybe five-four. He had a thick pale mustache and bristling, brush-cut sandy hair. “You’re with me,” he said. “I guess that means we gotta get started. Shit.” He grinned, picked up his gloves, crushed the empty cup. He pitched it over the unfinished wall back into the building. I heard it skid across the concrete floor. DiMaio pointed to the other men. “This is Sam Buck. He’s gonna sit on his ass as long as he can ’cause that’s the kind of work he likes. And this here’s Angelo Lucca.”
Buck, a shaggy-haired dark guy with narrow shoulders and thick muscles on his upper arms, said, “Fuck you, DiMaio,” without particular interest. He stuck his cigarette in his mouth and shook my hand without rising. Lucca, also dark and bigger than either Buck or DiMaio, wrapped a wide hand around the scaffold steel and hauled himself up. “Good to meet you.” He grinned, toed Buck with a mortar-stained boot. “Come on, Sam. Joe’s gonna be around soon.”
