No Colder Place (7 page)

“Your concern is touching, and also suspicious.”

“I’ll do a background on Phillips. Chuck will spring for that, I think.”

“Remind me again which one Chuck is. Have I met him?”

“Once, a couple of years ago at that barbecue at his old partner’s place on Staten Island.”

“Oh, God, I remember that. One of your worst ideas, to take me there.”

“You wanted to go,” I protested, wounded. “You
asked
to go.”

“You should have stopped me. As a friend.”

“At the time, you said if I were a friend I’d take you.”

“You should have driven away and left me standing on the curb. An afternoon in the broiling hot sun inhaling charcoal smoke and lighter-fluid fumes and being leered at by drunken cops. Yuck. Which one was Chuck DeMattis?”

“Bald, a little chubby, handing out beers all around, knew everybody’s name. You’d better remember him; he remembers you.”

Lydia squeezed a lime into her seltzer. “Everybody there looked like that description,” she pointed out. “I was the only person there who looked like me.”

“True,” I said. “Which is why you excited the admiration of all around you.”

Lydia shot me a look; I returned an innocent smile.

“Okay,” she said, choosing professionalism. “And you’re working for Chuck on this?”

“More or less. I’ll keep him filled in if anything happens, but it’s my case now. He says he doesn’t really want to know.”

Lydia furrowed her brow as she finished her seltzer.

“What?” I said.

“I’m not sure. I just never met a cop before who didn’t want to know.”

“He’s not a cop anymore. And he has a reputation to protect.”

“And you don’t?”

“Only with you and your mother, where it’s already so low—”

At that moment Kay returned, bringing Lydia’s spinach salad and my corned beef and cabbage.

“I don’t believe you’re eating that in this heat,” Lydia said, pointing her knife at my steaming plate.

“What do you mean? This is very important food. Beef for protein. Salt to replace what you lose when you sweat, for those of us who do that. And cabbage, for your Vitamin Cabbage, a critical part of any diet.” I speared some pink corned beef and a translucent cabbage leaf together on my fork. “And, of course, potatoes—”

“Don’t go on. We have some metabolic differences and I’d like to keep it that way. So if you don’t want me digging into Reg Phillips’ background, what is it you do have in mind for me?”

I knew what sort of answer she was expecting, but I decided it was in my own best interests not to give it. I gazed at her thoughtfully. “You looking for a job?”

“I’m waiting for you to give me one.”

“No, I mean a real job. Like, for example, as a secretary.”

“Me?”

“None other.”

“What are you, nuts?”

“Why? You can type. Answer the phone. Lick stamps. It’s perfect.”

“You’re crazy.”

“Chuck asked me if I wanted someone on the site. I told him no. I may have changed my mind.”

She slowed down, gave me a strange look. “You want someone watching your back?”

“No. I’m not sure how anyone could, unless it was another bricklayer working right next to me, and that would mess up my chances of blending in with the scenery. I don’t think I need that, anyway. No, here’s what I’m thinking: Whatever’s going on up there, what Joe Romeo’s doing or whatever else, it’ll be easier to pick it up if we come at it from two directions. The talk in the trailers is different from the talk on the scaffold. I’d like you to be in there, listening.”

She gave me a long look. “I hate it,” she said, “that you get to be up there in the middle of things and I have to be stuck behind some stupid desk typing somebody’s stupid letters.”

“I know,” I said.

Her look went on for a while. Finally she said, “Are you sure you can get me in?”

“I already called Chuck and asked. Crowell Senior okayed it, as long as it gets results.”

“You promised that?”

“No. But I said it had a better shot than anything else.”

“All right,” she said, after one more long look. “But I wouldn’t do this for just anybody.”

“I know,” I said again. “I owe you big.”

Lydia said, “You have no idea.”

We finished dinner. I filled Lydia in on everything else I thought, had seen, had sensed about the site and the people there. I had coffee; she had tea and a slice of peach pie. I kissed her good night, put her in a cab for Chinatown, and went upstairs to bed. I was sound asleep a couple of hours before I usually turn in. I had to report to work at seven-thirty in the morning, and I wasn’t twenty anymore.

five

t
hrough the dust and heat of the next morning, Mike DiMaio and I spoke very little. We had both called the hospital before work, so we both knew how Reg Phillips was doing: still serious but stable, still in a coma, swelling apparently going down. My back was sore and my shoulders ached, so I was slower than the day before, though I tried to find a rhythm I could stay with; and DiMaio, who didn’t seem to be watching me, threw me a pointer every now and then that pulled me through some difficult spot.

At coffee break we stayed by ourselves, near our work, but didn’t talk much. At lunch, we joined the other masons in the shade of the finished wall.

“Hey, look, it’s Mikey and his hero partner,” one of the guys called as we neared them on the scaffold. “We thought you was gonna keep him all to yourself now, Mikey, him being a hero and all.”

“Nah, I just figured he had a tough enough day yesterday without having to deal with you jerks.” DiMaio dropped himself onto the scaffold, opened his lunchbox. I put myself up against a pile of bricks near him. There were about a dozen guys there altogether, perched on mounds of brick or sprawled on scaffold planking. I introduced myself to the ones I hadn’t met yet. The ones I had, Angelo Lucca and Sam Buck, sat together in the deepest shade. Buck was already halfway through his sandwich.

“That was quick thinking yesterday,” a sandy-haired guy named Tommy told me as he shook my hand. “I’m sure Reg is gonna appreciate it.”

That drew a moment of awkward silence as everyone’s thoughts went to the unspoken “if.” I took a bottle of juice from my lunchbox, uncapped it. “Not really thinking,” I said. “While I was laid off I worked on an EMS team. Some things get to be instinct.”

“I don’t know,” someone else volunteered. “I was a medic in the army, I never got used to it. Always had to think, ‘What do I do now?’”

“Christ, Frankie, way you think, you probably killed more guys than the enemy,” Angelo Lucca said.

Frankie grinned cheerfully. “Luckily, wasn’t no war on. I never left San Francisco.”

“Jesus, you did your service at the Presidio? Son of a bitch. I was bit to shit for three years by every mosquito at Fort Bragg.”

That started a discussion about the military, a game of one-upmanship whose subject was the worst base to serve on, worst weather, worst drill sergeants, fewest girls. A couple of these guys, near my age, had been drafted; most were too young for that, but some of them had enlisted, looking for excitement, the American way.

“Hey,” somebody said in the middle of it. “What about you, Smith? Your age, you must’ve been in Vietnam.”

They all quieted, waited to hear what the veteran had to say.

I shook my head, taking in the last bite of roast beef on rye. “Navy,” I said. “They kept moving us around the South China Sea, but we never got close.”

“Too bad.” Some guys made sympathetic noises. What good was a war if you didn’t get to fight it?

“You was in the navy, isn’t that right, Mike?” someone asked.

DiMaio nodded. “Lousiest years of my life,” he said. “Tried to get away from bricklaying, look where it got me. You like the navy, Smith?”

“I hated the damn navy,” I said. “Three years busting my butt doing work you can’t see, then doing it over.”

“Yeah. And now you’re gone, some other dumb jerk is doing the same shit. Ship didn’t care, didn’t even know you was there.”

“And what, you think this building cares?” That was Sam Buck, from the shadows. “You think it sees you coming in the morning, says, ‘oh goody, Mikey’s here’?” He cackled as he lifted a can of Coke.

“Shove it, Sam,” said DiMaio, not looking at Buck. He crumpled the wrapping from his sandwich; his face was flushed with more than the heat.

“Hey, come on, don’t get DiMaio started,” the sandy-haired mason, Tommy, called out. “He comes over here to break your ass, Buck, I’m gonna have to get up and get out of the way, and I’m tired.”

“I’m not breaking anybody’s ass,” DiMaio muttered. He popped the top on his own Coke can, took a long gulp. “I don’t give a shit.”

No one who says that ever means it, and it was too hot for a fight. I lit a cigarette, rubbed out the match on the scaffold boards. “There was one good thing about the Navy,” I said, as though I’d been musing on the subject. Eyes turned to me. “There was always a poker game going, or if there wasn’t, a crap game. You could always find action on shipboard. Only thing, in those days ship-to-shore was a bigger deal than now, especially halfway around the world. Three years I didn’t bet on a horse.” I shook my head in wonder. “I missed out on Secretariat. Can you believe that?”

The only black mason on the crew, a huge muscled man named Ray, grinned at me. “You troubled that way, Smith? Ponies your weakness?”

“Hey, I do all right. I have a system.”

That brought an even bigger grin from Ray, and a few from some other guys too.

“Believe what you want,” I said. “I have a natural-born sense for horses. Learned it from my grandmother.”

“Yeah?” one of the younger guys asked. “Who do you like?” Men turned to look at him. Ray, still smiling, shook his head.

I ignored the doubters, looked at the kid as though weighing whether or not to let him in on a good thing. “Well,” I finally said, “there’s a filly running at Santa Anita tomorrow could pay your rent. You got any spare cash, I’d recommend Maribel, in the third. It’s a beautiful horse.” I felt Mike DiMaio’s eyes on me, but I didn’t look his way.

“Yeah?” Frankie said. “How much you got on Maribel yourself?”

With a disgusted toss I threw the wrappings from my sandwich in the general direction of the barrel inside the window opening. “Me? I’ve got a problem.”

Frankie laughed. “Oh, I get it. You could spend Joey’s rent, but you’re not gonna crack open your own wallet for this great horse, huh?”

“I sure as hell would. I’d put the rent on her in a minute, if I could find anybody up here in your great state of New York who’d take my bets. You boys don’t take easily to outsiders.” Shaking my head over the unfairness of it all, I said, “I don’t suppose … ?” I looked around, was met with smiles and shrugs.

I shrugged too, and sighed. “Well,” I said, looking at DiMaio, “I guess there’s nothing to do but get back to work. Right, Mikey?”

Without waiting for an answer, I picked up my lunchbox and gloves, threw my cigarette over the scaffold, and headed back to my bricks.

As I got to the other end of the building, to my side of our bay, I heard DiMaio come up behind me. “Santa Anita,” he muttered, moving past to where his own work was. “So you’re a handicapper, huh, Smith?”

“Every man has his vices, Mike. Some of us play the horses. Some of us are hot-tempered sons of bitches who’d start a fight on a six-story scaffold—”

“Hey—”

“Tell me something.” I smiled as I buttered a brick, placed it carefully, laid a level on it.

“Yeah, what?”

“Am I really that bad?”

“What, as a bricklayer?”

“Uh-huh.”

Pulling on his gloves, he looked over at my work. “Nah,” he said. “Clean, neat, and straight. Just goddamn slow.”

Slow or not, I’d laid what I thought were some pretty clean courses by the time afternoon coffee break rolled around. I went inside then, partly to use the can, partly just to be wandering around, to see who else was wandering around.

DiMaio was right about the portable john. It stank, but business was business, so I used it anyway. Gratefully stepping back out of it, I lit a cigarette and let my eyes wander over the wide horizontal spread of bare concrete and the tall steel columns moving across it in stately procession like trees in a formal garden. I watched the comings and goings of men, each focused on his own narrow task, the combination of all these small jobs somehow making a half-block-wide, forty-story building rise around us.

I remembered having the eerie feeling, on a construction job I’d worked years ago, that none of us were actually building this building: that the jobs we were doing were rituals to invoke the magic, to invite the gods, the way priests lit candles and burned incense. The building would grow and become what it was meant to be if we did these jobs, but the work wasn’t making it happen. The building just needed to see the work, the way the gods needed to see the candles: as an expression of faith.

I’d said that to Phyllis when I’d gotten home that night, but the apartment was hot and the baby was crying and she’d said she had no patience for my bullshit. It surprised neither of us when we separated as that hot summer turned to fall. We were divorced by spring, but we tried for seven years after to be civil to each other, at least in front of Annie.

Then Annie died in a car crash. She was supposed to be spending the weekend with me, but I was in Chicago on a case. I’d promised to make it up to her, another weekend. She’d said it was okay. I didn’t think much about faith after that.

I started heading back to my work through the cool of bare concrete and exposed steel. From across the floor the skinny figure of Sam Buck approached me, ambling just about as aimlessly as I was.

“Smith,” he said in greeting, as our paths brought us face-to-face. “Hey, you got a cigarette?”

Why not? I thought. An opening’s an opening. “Sure.” I tapped a few up from the pack, he chose one, and I gave him a light from the tip of mine.

“So,” he said, drawing in smoke, streaming it away, “you really looking for action?”

“I’m so desperate I’d bet on the goddamn Yankees,” I said. “I’m just holding myself together till payday. I met this guy downtown, he’ll take my bets, but he won’t carry a stranger. To start, he wants to see cash.”