by S. J. Rozan
“And I don’t give a shit who! That clear enough for you? So help me, if you get me messed up in this—” He broke off, gave me a long, flat look. “That’s the point, ain’t it?” he said. “Ah, shit, Louie, you’re slowing down. Chuckie wants me messed up in this, this Pelligrini thing, don’t he? Fucking Chuckie, he knows everything about me, every damn time I scratch my ass. He knows I’m getting out of the business, and it burns him, don’t it? So he’s gonna get me. He won’t stop till they stick it to me over this, if he has to build the frame himself. Am I right?”
“No.”
“Yes. Fucking Chuckie.” His eyes caught the eyes of each of the other two men in turn, the bodybuilder and the sad man with the turquoise stud. The guy with the stud put a gentle hand on my arm.
“How well did you know Joe Romeo?” I said to Falco.
The bodybuilder stepped forward, a hopeful glint in his eye. The soft hand on my arm closed its grip, still gentle.
“Another loser,” Falco answered. “Maybe he was working with the kid.”
“Another dead man on that site,” I said. “Don’t you think someone besides Chuck is going to put this together soon?”
“Jesus.” Falco took a step toward me. So did the bodybuilder, smiling now. “What the hell is that, a threat?” Falco asked in wonderment.
“No,” I said. “But it might be useful to you if I could lay this whole thing to rest.”
“What whole thing?” Falco said. “The kid, and that loser Romeo, and whatever, it’s got nothing to do with me. You bring me into it, Smith, I’m telling you, it’s really gonna piss me off.”
“You’re already part of it.”
“No, and I don’t want to be.” He looked at me thoughtfully. “You want to be useful to me? Okay. What would be useful to me is you take a message to Chuckie, that he better leave me the hell alone. You feel like doing that?”
“I’d want something in return, before I tell Chuck anything from you.”
“Tell? Who said anything about tell? You’re just gonna take a message.” He nodded at the bodybuilder and the tall, sad man. “Bring him along, fellas. We’re gonna put this message in a way so Chuckie gets it.”
The sad man’s grip on my arm became an iron band. Something in his other hand pushed softly but unmistakably against my ribs. The bodybuilder, doing his best to keep a grin of gleeful anticipation from his face, pressed close on my other side. The sad man’s voice came softly in my ear.
“The gun has a silencer,” he said sorrowfully. He sounded like a man apologizing for bad weather, something he couldn’t do anything about but which he knew would inconvenience me. “I got a bullet in it would shred your liver. If I had to shoot you now and you went down, me and Mr. Falco and Shrimp here, we’d be gone before anyone noticed. Believe me, you’re better off coming with us.”
I didn’t believe him. I glanced around, saw the ferry slip yawning to receive us, saw the white water of our wake spreading and relaxing as it receded. I heard the screech of the gulls, diving and calling. In my ribs, the hard nose of the gun pressed a little closer.
Then I heard a shout, my name.
“Bill Smith! Hey! Bill!”
I turned, and the men with me turned too. In fact, the shout was so loud that half the deck turned. Lydia stood about twenty feet away, wildly waving her baseball cap, Coke can in her other hand. As I watched, a wave of Coke slopped up and out, splashing a couple of unvigilant and unappreciative tourists. “Stay there!” she called—as if I had a choice—and started plowing her way through the crowd. She spilled more Coke, and must have stepped on toes, too; she left a path of scowls and evil-eyed stares in her wake. Stumbling over a man trying to rise from a bench, probably to get out of her way, she reached us, still in sunglasses, a wide smile plastered all over her face. “My God, it’s you, isn’t it?”
“Mishika?” I asked. “Mishika Yamamoto?”
“What a hoot!” she exclaimed, throwing her arms wide, losing the rest of her Coke. By now half the travelers on deck were glaring and muttering in our direction. A man in a Coke-stained white suit yelled something at her. She ignored them all.
“I haven’t seen you since Max’s martini party!” she beamed. “How are you? ’Scuse me.” She smiled winningly around her, rose on tiptoe and kissed my cheek. “How’ve you been?” she chattered on, resettling her baseball cap. “Have you seen Max lately? I don’t see him much in the summer, he goes out of town, to this place he has. Have you been up there? Me neither. Hey, come over here. This’ll just take a minute,” she said to the three men who stood near me, momentarily dumbfounded, as the rumble of the ferry’s engine changed and the slip approached. “He’ll be right back,” she assured them. “But you have to meet my family.” She tugged at my left arm; the iron grip on my right became uncertain, loosened as I moved toward her, under the scowling, watchful eyes of dozens of other passengers. “Right over here. They came from Japan, like just last night. I’m showing them around. We went to the Empire State Building today, and Chinatown. Boy, do they have some weird people there! Be back in a minute,” she promised Falco and the others, smiling at them once more, and hurried me down the deck, blundering through the still-glaring crowd toward the cheerfully indulgent Japanese parents herding their well-dressed, excited children down the exit ramp and off the boat.
“Do you know,” Lydia said, “I don’t think I’ve actually been in Staten Island in years. I mean, gotten off the ferry.”
She buttered a half-moon of toasted english muffin, looked with interest out the diner window. Nothing was happening out there except a denim-dressed biker holding his Harley steady while a girl in a thin pink top climbed on behind.
We’d hoped for a cab at the ferry terminal as we issued down the ramp, keeping tight to the center of the crowd of commuters and the few stray tourists who had crossed the water with the idea of Staten Island as an actual destination. The tourists, including Lydia’s once and future Japanese relatives, stood looking befuddled in the gaping terminal, took a few tentative steps onto the streets outside, and spun around to take the next boat back to Manhattan. The commuters, meanwhile, snapped up the few waiting cabs. That meant we couldn’t get one, but it meant the same for Louie Falco and his pals. So Lydia and I jumped on the nearest bus and sat in the back, peering out the window until we were pretty sure we weren’t being followed. We got off at the Island Diner—an electric-blue neon palm tree blinking on the sign—and sat, now waiting to be picked up by the cab company we’d called.
“Go ahead,” I said, as she bit into her dripping english muffin. “Gloat.”
“Oh, no,” she answered. She put the english muffin down, sipped delicately at her Lemon Mist tea. “It was such a lovely night for a boat ride. I just want to thank you for the opportunity to come along.”
“Maybe they only wanted to talk some more,” I said. “Maybe Falco just wasn’t sure how to phrase the message for Chuck, and he wanted to think about it.”
“Mm-hmm,” she said. “Maybe they wanted to beat your brains out.”
I drank some coffee that had been on the burner much too long. “Maybe it would have served me right,” I said.
She answered thoughtfully, “It might even have helped.”
I wanted a cigarette, but the diner’s attitude on that was clear, so I drank some coffee instead. “I thought you didn’t like Coke,” I pointed out.
“I wasn’t planning on drinking it, just spilling it, so what’s the difference?”
“I just wanted to make sure you know I keep track of things like that.”
“You’d better.”
“I do,” I said. “And thanks.”
“For saving your life? Oh, you’re welcome. Anytime.”
“And,” I said, “for not listening when I said not to come.”
“Ah,” she said, “that. You know, maybe I shouldn’t ever listen to you. It might save us both a lot of trouble.”
“I’m never right?”
“Occasionally,
” she admitted. “Often enough that, when you get these really demented ideas, I wonder about you.”
“Demented how?”
“Oh, like you think Louie Falco killed Lenny Pelligrini so you’re going to just ask him about it. ‘Oh, sure, Smith, yeah, I did that.’ Honestly, what did you expect him to say?”
“I expected him to tell me he hadn’t done it.”
“Well, and there you go.”
“But that’s because I don’t think he did.”
She looked at me over her teacup, then put the teacup down. “You don’t?”
“No.” The waitress came along with more hot water for Lydia and a refill on the foul coffee for me. “Look,” I said. “Falco knew the Pelligrini kid back in the neighborhood. He’d have known where to find him outside the jobsite. If he wanted to kill him, why kill him there? Why bury him there?”
She tilted her head in thought. The blue neon from the palm tree outside the window glinted in her hair. “To make some kind of point of him, some example when he was found?”
“But he wasn’t supposed to be found. All the digging in that pit was supposed to be over.”
“Well, then, it was a good place to hide him.”
“But an inconvenient place to come kill him, if you don’t work there. And you’d have to be sure he’d be there late, or get there early, or something, so you have time to bury the body when no one’s around.”
“Hmmm.” She sliced the other half of her english muffin into two more perfect half-moons, munched on one. “You think it has to be someone connected to that site who killed him.”
“That’s the only way it makes sense.”
“But Mr. DeMattis said Falco is connected up there.”
“But we don’t know to what. And Falco’s a pro at this. If he wanted a body found, he’d put it somewhere it’d be sure to be found. If he wanted it not found, it wouldn’t be found.”
“So why did you even start with him?” she asked, frowning at me.
“Because I didn’t think he did it. Because I thought he might point me toward who did.”
“Why would he?”
“To get me out of his face? To get himself a little more elbow room for whatever it is he’s got going up there?” I shrugged. “To do a widow a favor?”
Lydia’s look suggested what I could do with that last one.
The waitress, a perky blonde high-school girl, quit flirting with a guy at the counter, came and refilled my coffee cup again.
Lydia said, “Bill? What is it Falco’s likely to be doing on that site, if he’s not involved in stealing the things Pelligrini was fencing?”
“I don’t know. But there are endless scams you can run at a construction site. Extortion. Racketeering. Money laundering. It could be that whatever Pelligrini had going was totally independent of what Falco’s into. Falco didn’t even seem to know about it.”
“Then,” she said, “we need to find whoever Pelligrini was working with, don’t we? I mean, they would be up there, on the site. They would know when he was coming and going. Isn’t that what we need to do?”
“Yes.”
She nodded. “What are you going to do about Falco?”
“I need to do something about him?”
“Well, he was about to beat you to a bloody pulp. He might consider he has unfinished business with you.”
I stared out the window, watched a cat wash its face on the porch of a house across the street. “No, I don’t think so,” I said. “He thinks I’m going to report back to Chuck. The threat will be as good as the reality would have been, to deliver the message. If I were him I’d keep an ear to the ground and see what happens. If his name doesn’t come up again connected to Pelligrini, I think he’ll back off.”
“And if it does?”
“You mean, if Chuck was right?” I swallowed the last of my coffee. “Like I said, I don’t think he is. But that’s the job, isn’t it? To find out.”
She gave me a long, quiet look, then went back to her tea. Just as she finished, a short chubby guy stuck his head in the diner door. He bellowed, “Anybody call a cab?” I left a few bucks on the table, Lydia slipped on her sunglasses and adjusted her baseball cap again, and we headed over the bridge and back toward the sparkling lights of Manhattan.
nineteen
the next morning I got to the site early. At a quarter to seven, the sky above New York was a pure, bright blue, not yet dimmed by the haze of daily living. The subway on the way up was cool and close to empty. The site was quiet, no dust raised yet, no trucks rumbling, no spilled coffee or running hoses to make new muddy puddles in yesterday’s dirt. Inside the fence, the steel and concrete, the bricks and conduit and sheet metal that would become a building, waited, silent.
I crossed to the ramp and headed for the Lacertosa trailer, to clock in and have a talk with John Lozano.
He was there; I’d expected him to be. Site super, and now foreman too: a lot of responsibility, a lot of paperwork. Long hours. He looked up from his desk as I came in, raised his eyebrows.
“You’re early,” he said. “Clock in if you want, but I don’t pay overtime on this job.”
“I know. That’s something I want to talk about.”
Lozano shook his head. “Can’t do it, Smith. Budget’s too tight. A lot of the men are unhappy about it. I’m sorry, but nothing I can do.”
“I’m not looking for overtime. I heard about the budget.” I pulled up a molded plastic chair that looked as though it had seen more than a few construction sites itself. “I want to talk.”
Lozano watched me sit. “You having trouble up there? You started slow, but I thought you were doing better. You and Mike are producing okay.”
“Mike is,” I said. “I’m not half as good as he is. But laying bricks is only half the reason I’m here.”
He cocked his head. “I don’t get you.”
“I’m an investigator,” I told him, watched his face. “Private. Not a cop, and I’m not working with them. But I have to ask you some questions.”
“Investigator?” Lozano’s forehead creased. He put down his pencil. “What do you mean? Working here? You’re supposed to be a bricklayer.”
“You’ve had trouble on this site,” I said. “You had it before I came here and you’ve had more, a lot more serious, since. My client wants to know what’s going on.”
“What, so he sends you here to lay bricks?” His frown deepened. He had known who I was when I’d walked into his office; now he didn’t know, found the ground shifting.
“No. That was my idea. The client doesn’t want to know how I’m handling it. They don’t know I’m here, on site.”
“What client? Who is it? What the hell are you supposed to be ‘handling’?”
“I can’t tell you who the client is, and I’m not sure about the rest. But I have some ideas. That’s why I came to talk to you.”
“Me? What the hell do I know? About what?”
“I’d like to ask you some questions.”
“What questions? Hey, listen, how do I even know this shit is true?”
“What’s the difference?” I asked.
He glared. The masonry foreman in him, the guy whose decisions were fast and final, kicked in. “You’re a damn bricklayer, is all I know. You’re here in my office, want to ask questions, I don’t even know about what, and you wanna know what difference it is if you’re telling the truth?”
I took out my wallet, showed him what I’d showed Mike DiMaio. “That help?” I asked.
“No. I still wanna know who you’re working for.”
“I’m not going to tell you. And to save you the trouble of asking, I don’t know if what I’m working on has anything to do with Lenny Pelligrini or Joe Romeo, either.” I didn’t mention Chester Hamilton; I didn’t see any reason to let Lozano know that that connection was, for sure, more than a rumor. “But at least one of those men had a scam going on this site: Pelligrini. And there’s at least one scam I know about on this site,
and you’re part of it, Lozano.”
“What are you—?”
“Save it,” I said. “I already talked to Donald Hacker.”
For a moment Lozano didn’t react. Then the masonry foreman, the one sure of himself and in charge, faded away. Lozano seemed to grow older as I watched. His shoulders drooped. He leaned back in his chair, ran his hand across his lined face. “Oh, God,” he said. His blue eyes stared bleakly at me.
“Don’t fight me on this,” I said quietly. “I can get it other places. I came to you to give you a chance.”
“A chance,” he repeated softly. “It’s over, huh?”
“I think it is,” I answered. “I want you to tell me about it.”
He kept his eyes quietly on me for a long moment, and neither of us moved. Then he got up and walked around me, closed the office door, came back to his battered desk chair. It creaked as he sat. “I didn’t mean for it to go on,” he said with a sigh. “Not even this long. It wasn’t supposed to. But the money … It didn’t seem like there was anything else I could do.”
“The money was that good?”
“Good?” He stared. “Hell, no. It’s because there wasn’t any money.”
“You lost me.”
“I don’t like it,” he said. “Using shit like we’re using here. I don’t like it on any job I’m on. Old days, even if the architect called for shit, I used to try to talk the boss into letting me do the right thing. Sometimes they’d go for it. At least I tried.” He gave a small, bitter smile. “Look at me now.”
“What do you mean, there wasn’t any money? Hacker says he’s getting paid.”
“He hadda get paid. If he didn’t, he’d of blown the whole thing as soon as we started.”
“And you weren’t?”
“Not me personally. Jesus, you think I’d do shit like this for money? When I’m gone from here people are gonna be wondering what asshole built this shitpile of a building. How much money you think that’s worth?”
“If you’re not doing it for money, then what?”
Rapping knuckles shook the plywood door. Lozano threw me a look, got up and answered it. It was a Teamster with a truckful of concrete block in the lot. Lozano signed his manifest, told him where to pull the truck. “I got two guys out there waiting,” he said. “Joey and Paolo. See them.” Then the Teamster was gone and Lozano turned back to me.
