by S. J. Rozan
“I think I showed remarkable restraint in not coming after you.”
“I think you showed remarkable restraint in not eating all the chicken.”
I lifted the cover from the platter and spooned chicken chunks and hot peppers onto her plate. It turned out she hadn’t eaten any of the chicken, just sent it and the rice back to the kitchen to keep warm as soon as I’d left. “You and I are both going to stay on the job, if that’s all right with you,” I told her.
“That’s what Mr. Crowell wants?”
“Chuck hadn’t spoken to him yet. But it’s what I want, and Chuck agreed. Unless the cops find out by morning that Joe Romeo buried Pelligrini in the pit, so Crowell doesn’t need us anymore.”
“How likely is that?”
“Who knows?”
“And everyone will be working there as usual tomorrow morning? Even with a body dug up from the basement?”
“Nothing but nuclear war would stop work on a site like that. Delays are too expensive.”
I lifted a sautéed onion from the platter to my plate. A thought occurred to me. “When I was in your office? That meeting in the conference room—was that the client?”
“The developer.” Lydia nodded. “Mrs. Armstrong. Denise.”
“Was she there when they found the body?”
“Yes. She went out with Mr. Crowell both times, to see the fingers and then to see if she could identify him once the cops had his face uncovered.”
“She must have a strong stomach.”
“You mean, for a woman?”
“Even if I did, I wouldn’t admit it. No, I mean for a civilian, for someone who doesn’t deal in bodies much.”
“Well, I guess you’re right. She didn’t flinch. Which can’t be said for Dan Junior, by the way.”
“He flinched?”
“Turned green. I thought he was going to be sick.”
“You were there?”
“Of course I was there. Not the first time, when Verna and I weren’t sure what was going on and it would have looked weird if I’d gone running out there. But when they were looking for people to identify him.”
“You must have a strong stomach too.” Our eyes met. I touched her hand, just softly. She moved her eyes away, tossed her head, but left her hand where it was.
“For a woman,” she said. “And right now I’m starving.”
Lydia’s appetite grows when she’s angry or upset. I took my hand away. She shook out her napkin and laid it on her lap. We both started on the chicken.
It was perfect, something sharp in the sauce behind the heat of the peppers. I ate and asked Lydia, “Do you have any idea what that was about, that argument when I was there?”
“I’m not sure it was an argument.”
“Senior seemed annoyed at Junior.”
“I think that’s just how he talks to him. He talks to Verna a little bit that way, too.”
“If he talks to you like that I’ll have to take him out behind the barn.”
“Oh, he doesn’t. He’s very polite to me. It’s the people he knows best he’s like that with, I think. Maybe even the people he likes best.”
“Nice guy.”
“He can be. He’s very nice to Mrs. Armstrong. And,” she added, “to me.”
“She’s the client, he can’t afford not to be. You, if your theory is correct, he probably doesn’t like.” I ignored her look, went on. “Which brings us back to what the argument was about, or whatever it was.”
“Well,” she said, with a sigh that seemed to have more to do with me than the Crowells, “I’m not sure. But it seems that Mrs. Armstrong is having money troubles. The bank that gave her the construction loan won’t give her another one, or something. They seem to think the progress on the building isn’t fast enough.”
“So Crowell Senior is going to rush things along? That’s what it sounded like.”
“To meet some deadline. If the bank sees a certain percent complete by whenever it is, six weeks from now, I think, they’ll give her the next loan.”
“Crowell thinks he can do it?”
“He sounded like it.” She paused for a piece of chicken. “Junior has a problem with it.”
“Like what?”
“‘You can’t get the steel here that fast. We don’t have the crews, anyway, even if you could.’ Stuff like that. He seems to think Senior’s getting carried away.”
“What was Senior’s answer?”
“‘Then we’ll put on more crews. Come on, Daniel, we’ve done this before.’”
“A can-do guy, huh?”
“I think he wants to be a hero. You know, save the day for Mrs. Armstrong, that kind of thing. Junior, on the other hand, would just as soon never see her again.”
“He said that?”
“Not to me. But he dropped a passing remark to Verna that I happened to hear about how glad he’ll be when this one is over and they don’t have to deal with Mrs. Armstrong anymore. I asked Verna about it, as though I were just trying to figure out who’s who on my new job. She said Mrs. Armstrong is a little bit difficult—more ‘hands on’ than most clients, is that the phrase?”
“You pick up jargon so beautifully. Even your accent is good. So she’s around a lot, Mrs. Armstrong?”
“‘In their face’ is how Verna put it. Probably making it even more imperative that Mr. Crowell perform like a hero for her.”
“You make it sound as though that’s a bad instinct in a man.”
“Me? Don’t be silly. You know I love it when big strong men rescue helpless damsels in distress. Hot sauce?” She smiled brightly.
“Absolutely not.” I took the hot sauce out of her hand, placed it safely on the table. “There’s other stuff that went on today,” I said. “Not as dramatic as a body. But if we’re going to keep working this case, or these cases, it’s stuff you should know about.” Not as dramatic; but easier to talk about. And it was better, always, to keep talking. I filled her in on my day as we finished dinner.
“So Joe Romeo is a bookie,” Lydia said, while the waiter took away the empty platter and bowls and brought us another pot of tea. The tea, like the beer and the waiter, was thin and sharp. I wasn’t crazy about it, but Lydia was. She claimed it was bracing and cleared the head.
“Looks that way. We’ll see what happens when Maribel wins.”
“Will she win?”
“Definitely. She’s a great mudder and it’s going to rain out there tonight.”
“‘Mudder’? Is that like ‘sump pump’?”
“Uh-huh. It’s a guy thing.”
She sipped her tea disdainfully. “So when he pays you tomorrow, or you pay him if this fabulous horse doesn’t mud so well, you’ll have what you need for Crowell.”
“Not enough. I’ll know it’s there to be had. But they’ll need more than my word if they want to be able to get rid of him without union trouble.”
“Pictures? Tapes?”
“Maybe. At least a notebook full of times and places.”
“This could cost you a lot of money, if you pick the wrong horses and teams and things.”
“Expenses. Goes on the report.”
“The client covers your bad bets?”
I nodded.
“And the winnings?”
“Well, now, I don’t know. If Crowell profited from my gambling, that would be illegal, wouldn’t it?”
“And if you do?”
“Also bad. But if I used the money for a good cause, like buying my partner a pair of emerald earrings—”
“It still wouldn’t make up for the aching back she gets filing stupid paperwork all day, or the way her blood pressure goes up when those big macho construction men make kissy noises at her. Find a charity to give it to. It’s better for your karma.”
“My karma needs help?”
She smiled, got up from the table, and turned to leave without giving me an answer. I took that for a bad sign.
seven
as I came down from my
place into Laight Street at seven the next morning, I could see dark clouds massing on the Jersey side of the Hudson, jostling each other in place, hungrily eyeing Manhattan. By the time I emerged from the subway a block from the Armstrong site, they were on the move. The hot air was weighty and damp, the kind of day when everything’s heavy and you sweat just standing still. Not a good day for bricklaying.
I reported to the site, punched my time card in John Lozano’s office, and was as speechless as anyone when he told me the lost crane operator, Pelligrini, had been found in the elevator pit.
I stared. “What?” I said.
“No, it’s true.” His tired blue eyes searched my face, prepared to deal with whatever he had to, whatever this brought up in me.
“Wait, I don’t get it.” I shook my head. “He used to work here, this guy? What the hell happened, he fell in there or something? How long has he been—Jesus. While we were working here, he was in there? What the hell happened?”
“I don’t know. Mr. Crowell told me about it when I came in today. He didn’t fall in there, Smith. Someone killed him and buried him there.”
“Killed him?” My eyes widened. “Oh, Christ! Who? How?”
“The cops don’t know who, Mr. Crowell says. I heard he was shot, but I don’t know, Mr. Crowell didn’t say so. You okay with it?”
“Okay?” I echoed.
“I had one of the laborers quit on me already this morning. Says with what happened to Phillips day before yesterday, now this, it’s a bad-luck site. If I’m gonna lose more men, I gotta know.”
I shook my head slowly. “No, I need the job. I’ll stay. The cops were here? What do they say happened?”
“They say Pelligrini was in the elevator pit,” he said with a small smile. “They may be back later asking questions, showing around Pelligrini’s picture, stuff like that. I want the men to cooperate, if they do.”
“Me?” I put into my tone the mix of innocence and defensiveness I knew he’d be hearing all morning. “I don’t know anything.”
“No one’s saying you do,” he said patiently. That was an answer he’d be giving all morning. “Just answer their questions if they come around, okay?”
“Well, yeah,” I agreed. “Sure.”
He nodded, someone else came in to punch the clock and hear what I’d just heard, and I headed for the hoist, to start the day.
DiMaio wasn’t there yet, at the bay where we were working. I pulled the plastic cover off of yesterday’s bricks and swung inside to check the detail drawing to make sure I understood the pattern I was working on today.
When I had it set in my head, I climbed back through the window opening and started laying out my tools. DiMaio appeared behind me on the scaffold a minute later.
“Not sure it’s worth it,” he said.
“Why? You think it’ll rain?” I glanced at the darkening sky.
He nodded.
“What happens if it does?” I asked.
“If it looks like it’ll pass, they’ll keep us here. If it’s gonna be all day they’ll close down. And speaking of nice normal things like rain, they found a body here last night, Smith. What do you know about that?” We were standing facing each other on the scaffold; DiMaio hadn’t moved around me to where his own work was. A gust of wind pushed between us.
“Just what you do, Mike,” I told him evenly.
“And what’s that?”
“What Lozano told me. It was some crane operator who used to work here. They don’t know who killed him, how long he’d been there, or how he got there.”
“And that’s all you know about it?”
“That’s all.”
It wasn’t all.
In the middle of the night, I’d spent some time on the phone with a detective friend of mine, Mike Doherty at the Ninth Precinct, who was working the graveyard shift this week. This case was way out of his territory, but cops don’t have much trouble finding out what other cops are doing, if they have a reason to want to know. Or can offer a reason that the cop who supplies the information can pretend he believed, if anyone asks.
“I checked around on your boy Pelligrini,” Doherty told me when he called at one in the morning, lunchtime for him. “Nobody ever heard of him.”
“No?” I said groggily, trying to wake up. “He was clean?”
“Either that, or whatever he was into was so small or so new that no one was on to him yet.”
“You don’t know who’d want him gone?”
“No one I could find.”
“Chuck DeMattis said Pelligrini and this Joe Romeo I’m after had bad blood between them. You know anything about that?”
“No.”
“Can you find out?”
“Hey, Smith, you want a lot for a guy with nothing to trade.”
“Come on, you’re buying gratitude and goodwill.”
“From a P.I.? Where’s that gonna get me?”
“Okay, how about a first-round draft pick?”
“How about a date with your partner?”
“I love guys who can be funny at one in the morning.”
“Hey, listen.” The tenor of his voice changed. “How’s DeMattis? He doing all right?”
“Seems fine.” An undertone I heard in his question made me ask, “Why? Shouldn’t he be?”
“No, it’d be good if he was. I like the guy. I never believed any of that shit anyway.”
“What shit?”
“From when he retired.”
“I don’t know about this.”
“Oh. Ah, crap. Well, forget I—”
“Hey, don’t even try it. I’m working for the guy. Is there something I’m supposed to know?”
“No, not really.” Doherty sighed. “He retired suddenly. Guy does that, there’s talk, that’s all. Doesn’t mean anything.”
“About?”
“It was all bullshit.”
“About?”
“Ah, nothing. He’d just been assigned to some big investigation, drugs-and-guns task force kind of thing, and he up and quit. Looked bad, that’s all.”
“How close was he to retirement?”
“Eight months past his twenty years.”
Twenty years is when a cop’s pension starts, if he wants out.
“Then he was due.”
“Oh, yeah, sure. But most guys plan, not just turn in their badge out of the blue. So guys with nothing else to do started wondering out loud. It was crap.”
“Wondering about what?”
“Target of the case was this guy Louie Falco. Big shot from DeMattis’s old neighborhood. Their mothers go to church together. You can imagine the shit that went on.”
“I can. But you don’t buy it?”
“DeMattis? Christ, no. Goddamn White Knight, clean as a whistle.”
“Did I.A.D. do an investigation?”
“Never even considered it. I’m telling you, it never got past the gossip stage. Hey,” he said. I heard a sheet of paper rattle through the phone.
“Hey what?”
“Shit. Maybe, probably nothing. But I’m looking here at Pelligrini’s particulars.”
“I thought you said he had none.”
“Almost none. But he does have an address.”
“Most guys do. What about it?”
“He’s from the old neighborhood too.”
“What, Chuck’s?”
“Yeah.”
“What neighborhood?”
“Howard Beach.”
“Christ, Doherty, every Italian in New York’s from Howard Beach.”
“That’s what I mean. It doesn’t mean anything.”
I propped the phone on my shoulder, lit a cigarette. “What came of that case?”
“The task-force thing? Nothing. Petered out, like most everything.”
“You’re full of good cheer.”
“I’m a hardworking cop on the night shift, give me a break.”
“And I’m a hardworking bricklayer. If you don’t have anything else fo
r me, get off the phone so I can get back to sleep.”
“This from a guy who woke me this afternoon to ask for a favor?”
“Is it my fault you’re on nights? If you had the brains to retire and get a private license—”
“I’d have it easy like you, getting up at six in the morning to lay bricks with guys half my age. No, thanks, I’ll stick it out till my pension kicks in. Peace, buddy.”
“The same. Thanks.”
I hung up the phone, pulled on my cigarette. The faint glow from the streetlamp in the alley edged into the room around the lowered shade, as though if it were quiet enough about it I wouldn’t notice.
I’d grown up in so many places there was no one left in my life from my past—no old neighborhood, no kids I’d played with now grown to adults, no one whose family knew my family. I thought about that, about what it might be like to have those connections. The connections Chuck had: guys you’d known all your life, young guys who grew up hearing your name. I thought about calling Chuck; then I pressed the cigarette out, turned over, shut my eyes. It was, after all, one in the morning.
And it was my case.
So I did know more than I told DiMaio I knew. But not in the way he meant, not in the way he was wondering about me. He gave me a long look, and I met it, and we both turned to our brickwork.
Work on the site lasted about an hour. The wind built up momentum, but it didn’t bring any relief from the hot, heavy air. Stronger up here than at street level, it tugged at the orange safety netting hung along the scaffold, flapped the edges of the blue tarp I’d pulled off the bricks. Black-bottomed clouds skidded into place above us, circling like an army laying siege. A ballooning plastic bag tumbled through the air over Broadway. It took a free-fall dive, spun up again, and snagged on the boom of the crane before it shook itself free.
DiMaio and I, because we were behind, kept going as long as we dared, eyeing the sky as huge, round, single drops began pelting the dusty boards. I waited for the word from him; he kept on working right up until the rain swept out of the sky in sheets.
“Shit!” DiMaio yelled, striking off a joint as a slanted wall of water passed over us. “That’s it. Get the tarp!” He dumped his tools into his bag.
I threw down my own tools, yanked the blue plastic from under the bricks I’d used to hold it down in the wind. We dropped it over the new work and fought to tie it down, weighted it with more bricks. Rain crashed down on us; I was soaked through by the time the tarp was ready to stay. I pulled my tools together, heaved my bag through the window opening, and swung through after it, almost losing my grip on the thin wet steel of the scaffold. DiMaio was right behind me. We retreated into the building; rain chased us three or four feet in, didn’t bother to come farther.
