Bodies in Winter hc-1

by Robert Knightly

  When a bullet is fired into human flesh, small drops of blood and minute bits of tissue are propelled backward, in the direction from which the bullet came. If the Broom had been holding the gun to his head, there should have been blowback on his hand, his wrist, the T-shirt. But there wasn’t, at least none I could see.

  ‘Anybody test for blood?’ I finally asked Adele. ‘On Szarek’s right hand and wrist?’

  ‘The assistant medical examiner who performed the autopsy. It was negative.’

  ‘What about gunpowder residue and nitrates?’

  ‘Those tests were also negative.’

  The information was designed to set off alarm bells. No blowback? OK, I could live with that. No residue? I could live with that as well, though my suspicions would be aroused. But the absence of any physical evidence demonstrating that Szarek held the gun to his own head was a red flag that could not be dismissed.

  I gathered the photos and passed them to Adele. ‘Two questions. First, how’d you get the photos? Second, did Lieutenant Bill Sarney authorize us to investigate Szarek’s death?’

  ‘I got the photos and the reports from a friend of a friend at the 94^th Precinct. The lead detective on the case, by the way, was a lazy asshole named Mark Winnman. Mark was happy to go along when the medical examiner reported manner of death as probable suicide.’

  ‘Did you bring up the lab findings with Detective Winnman?’

  ‘I did, and guess what? By the time the reports came in two weeks later, the case was closed. Winnman, he didn’t even read them.’

  ‘Just stuck ’em in the file and forgot about ’em? That how it went?’ When Adele responded with an amused smile, I continued. ‘But you didn’t answer the other question, partner. Did you tell Sarney you were gonna check out Szarek’s death before you did it?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘How about afterwards?’

  ‘Afterwards, yes. I brought the photos and the lab reports to his attention.’

  ‘And how did he react?’

  ‘Badly.’

  I took a moment to get my temper under control, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that partnering was a one-way street for Adele. ‘So what’s it gonna be?’ I finally asked. ‘Games all the way down the line? Because you’re acting here as if I don’t exist.’ I silenced her reply with a wave of my hand. ‘What you do reflects on me. I can’t say it any plainer than that. Your consequences are my consequences.’

  Adele looked at me for a moment, her eyes progressively hardening, and I realized that her thirst for justice would always come before her loyalty to Harry Corbin. An instant later her words confirmed that insight.

  ‘Feel free to disown me,’ she declared, ‘whenever you find it convenient. In the meantime, are you ready for dinner? Because I’ve been waiting for you since five o’clock.’

  But I wasn’t ready, not quite. I took three DD5s from my desk drawer, one each for Beauchamp, Jarazelsky and Dr Nagy, then wrote up meticulous summaries of each of their interviews. When I was finished, I carried them directly to Bill Sarney’s office. Sarney and I had reached a point in our relationship where, at least in private, I called him by his first name.

  I took a chair without asking permission, careful to keep my tone casual as I summarized the fives I tossed on his desk. If Sarney wanted to raise the issue of Szarek’s case file, he’d have to do it himself.

  He didn’t wait long, only until I shut up a few minutes later. ‘What’s going on with you, Harry?’ he asked. ‘Why would you expand your investigation to include an ex-cop who committed suicide without telling me in advance? You couldn’t have thought I’d be OK with that.’

  Adele’s consequences were mine, just as I’d predicted, but I might have tried to shed them by disowning her. Hey, Bill, I’m not her father. What she does on her own time is her own business. I can’t be with her twenty-four hours a day. Instead, I made a promise I couldn’t keep. I told Sarney that it wouldn’t happen again.

  ‘I need some idea of where this is going, Bill. Otherwise, me and Adele, we have no choice. We have to follow wherever the trail leads. You can see that, right?’

  Sarney grinned. ‘A couple of hours from now, just in time for the eleven o’clock news, an Inspector named Rita Meyers will make two announcements at a press conference. First, she’ll tell the reporters that the Ballistics Unit has matched the TEC-9 found in the Toyota with fourteen shell casings discovered at the Lodge crime scene. Then she’ll announce that a man named DuWayne Spott, whereabouts unknown, has been named as a person of interest. You understand, Harry, this is the first time a boss has appeared in connection with the case.’

  I’d asked Sarney for a heads-up and he’d complied. I had no beef here. ‘So where does that leave me and my partner, Bill? Do we continue to investigate?’

  ‘Harry, you can color to your heart’s content, as long as you stay between the lines. Now, there’s one more thing. I’m not stupid. I know you can’t control your partner’s urge to self-destruct. But what I’d like you to do is keep an eye on her. If she jumps the tracks again, I wanna be the first to know.’

  ‘It’s not that easy, Bill. You’re asking me to spy on my partner.’

  There was an edge to my voice, and I’m sure Sarney heard it. But he wasn’t intimidated. He leaned forward in his chair and lowered his chin until he was looking at me through his eyebrows. ‘Sometimes in life,’ he explained, not unkindly, ‘you gotta watch out for your own ass. If your partner understood that, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.’

  ELEVEN

  It was almost nine before we finally sat down to a meal, this one in a diner several blocks from the precinct. By then, Adele and I were observing a somewhat uneasy truce. Nothing had been resolved, of course, but there was no way, between Dr Nagy and Tony Szarek, we could sit across from each other and not discuss the case. We were cops, after all.

  So we began with something easy: trashing Detective Winnman’s reputation. According to Adele, not only hadn’t he read the lab reports, he’d failed to speak to Szarek’s family and friends, or to conduct a routine canvas of the building. From Winnman, we moved to the Broom, eventually conceding that suicide could not be ruled out, not absolutely, by the ME’s findings. Not that it mattered all that much. For the time being, our hands were tied. Sarney had already told Adele that if the Szarek case was reopened, she and I would not be the investigators.

  Gregorio, our waiter, showed up at that moment with a pair of Heinekens, which he set on the table. Though Gregorio also brought two glasses, Adele and I quickly pushed them to the side. They were still warm from the dishwasher, one of the hazards of ordering beer in a diner.

  ‘According to Sarney,’ I began, ‘there’s gonna be a press conference tonight, at which a boss named Meyers will tell the world that DuWayne is a person of interest, and that some of the shell casings recovered at the Lodge scene were fired by the TEC-9 found in the Toyota.’

  I watched Adele’s cheeks flame. ‘Ellen Lodge and Jarazelsky are both lying,’ she declared, her tone bitter and contemptuous, ‘and the job is buying into their lies. I went to OCCB this morning and spoke to Sgt Merkovich. DuWayne Spott isn’t a ghetto don, not even close. He’s a pimp and a low-level cocaine dealer. According to Merkovich’s snitches, there are only four men in his entire crew, most of them relatives or kids he grew up with. He couldn’t have known when Lodge was going to be released, much less where Lodge was headed. It’s simply impossible.’

  I broke a salted roll in half and buttered one end. ‘What was Sarney’s reaction when you told him about Lodge’s file being… How did that jerk from Archives put it?’

  ‘Unable to locate at this time.’

  ‘So, what’d Sarney have to say when you told him Lodge’s file was temporarily unlocatable?’

  ‘He said he’d make a formal request to the DA’s office for their copy, plus he’d contact CSU and the crime lab to see what they had in their own files.’

  ‘He offer a ti
me-frame?’

  ‘Nope. But there’s good news, too. We’ll have Ellen Lodge’s phone records tomorrow morning.’

  Our dinners arrived a few minutes later: meat, gravy, potatoes and a few broccoli spears that’d been stewing for the better part of the day. As I ate, I allowed myself to fall into the minds of the conspirators, a practice I commonly follow prior to interrogations. From their point of view, the news coming from Jarazelsky must have been devastating. Lodge’s recovered memory would be meaningless in a court of law. The only way he could prove his innocence was by persuading somebody else to confess.

  By this time I knew quite a bit about David Lodge, and not only from Nagy and Beauchamp. The newspaper stories had included extensive accounts of the events leading up to Lodge’s guilty plea seven years earlier. One item in particular had caught my attention. According to the ME, Clarence Spott had been severely beaten prior to being struck with the blackjack. That beating had occurred outside the precinct and had been delivered by David Lodge, who’d already been the subject of a dozen civilian complaints alleging police brutality.

  What would I do if I was one of the co-conspirators, say the man at the top of the pyramid, and I learned that Lodge was coming after me? What would I do to protect myself? What risks would I take? What level of fear would Lodge inspire, this large violent man who spent his days in Attica’s weight yards?

  The death of the Broom was one answer to those questions. Ellen Lodge and Pete Jarazelsky provided two more answers. Like Szarek, they were weak links, points at which a good detective places the splitting wedge before driving it home. Nobody would rely on them unless they were desperate.

  ‘Eva Hinckle called this morning,’ Adele said, ‘to report her newly surfaced memory. She was very definite. The ski cap rode up and she saw the back of the driver’s neck. He was black.’

  ‘Which proves what? Even if she’s right?’

  ‘Don’t you read the newspapers, Corbin? It proves that DuWayne Spott and his army of ghetto gangsters killed David Lodge.’

  Lieutenant Bill Sarney was a compulsive organizer and the walls of his office were dominated by a series of cork boards. As Adele and I sat before his desk the following morning, I found myself caught up in the notes and departmental notices pinned to the boards. What struck me was that the paperwork was absolutely square to the frame and the colored pins holding them had been placed at uniform heights.

  ‘Alright, guys,’ Sarney declared once we were seated. ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Nothing you don’t already know, lou,’ I replied. ‘Our day’s just gettin’ started.’

  Sarney’s tone was supremely casual, and his face gave nothing away. ‘Ah, but that’s the point, Harry. I want to know what you’re going to do with your day. That’s why I asked you to stop in.’

  Adele handed Sarney a printed document, Ellen Lodge’s phone records, which Adele had taken off the computer a few minutes before Sarney called us into his office. Two days ago, she pointed out, at 9:01 a.m., an incoming call from a pay phone was taken by someone at the Lodge residence. That didn’t surprise me; as a cop’s wife, Ellen Lodge would expect us to check her records. But a second, outgoing call did catch me off-guard. It was made to a cell phone at 9:06 and lasted a mere nine seconds.

  ‘My partner and I think,’ Adele told Sarney, ‘that we should begin with another visit to Ellen Lodge. We can ask her about the second call and return her husband’s personal effects at the same time.’

  ‘Fine,’ Sarney replied without hesitation. ‘What else?’

  ‘Dante Russo. He was Lodge’s partner on the night Spott was killed. We think he should be interviewed.’

  ‘You know who Russo is?’ When neither of us jumped to reply, Sarney nodded once, then continued. ‘Russo is the PBA’s Trustee for Brooklyn North. He knows everybody. So, please, unless you have enough evidence to secure an arrest warrant, don’t get in his face.’

  The Patrolman’s Benevolent Association represents every uniformed cop in New York City below the rank of sergeant, some 27,000 in all. That they have clout — in city and state government as well as with the job — goes without saying. Dante Russo was a Trustee, one of only twelve. This gave him clout within the PBA.

  Under ordinary circumstances, I would’ve made a call to an old partner now working in the personnel bureau and asked him for a peek at Russo’s service file. But that wasn’t going to happen here. We were going to play by the rules and that was all she wrote.

  TWELVE

  It was snowing when Adele and I left the precinct to re-interview Ellen Lodge. The snowflakes, large and virtually weightless, fell out of a pewter sky, drifting ever so slightly as they made their way to an already-covered sidewalk. The snow covered the streets and the radio cars parked at the curb as well. It softened the right angles of the shotgun tenements, gathering in the window frames, and rounded the knobby branches of Marino’s Maple, planted three decades before to honor an officer slain in the line of duty.

  When I finally took a step, the snow floated up, playful as baby powder, then settled back on the supple leather of my tasseled loafer where it proceeded to melt. ‘How bad is this supposed to be?’ I asked Adele.

  ‘You didn’t check the weather before you left home?’

  ‘I barely had time to shave.’

  ‘Well, don’t worry, it’s only a snow shower. It’ll be sunny by noon.’

  Adele got busy on her cell phone while I drove the few blocks to Ellen Lodge’s home. Like every PBA trustee, Dante Russo would no longer wear a uniform and have no assigned duties. His job was to move from precinct to precinct, conferring with delegates, handling union-related problems as they arose.

  Adele’s first call went to PBA headquarters where she was told that Russo still worked out of the Eight-Three and she should contact the desk lieutenant. From the desk lieutenant, she was shuttled to the precinct’s executive officer, then to the community affairs officer, before Dante Russo finally came on the phone.

  I half-expected Russo to make some excuse — if he wished, he could stall us for weeks — but after a brief conversation Adele hung up.

  ‘So, that’s that,’ she said. ‘Officer Russo will receive us at eleven.’

  ‘Guess he’s not afraid of us.’

  ‘Must be the Jarazelsky interview.’

  Adele was referring to a phone call Pete Jarazelsky had made from prison the night before. The call was to Christian Barrett, a talk-radio host who’d once declared that high rates of infant mortality among black and Latino Americans was God’s way of cleansing the ghettos. Ever the good soldier, Jarazelsky told Barrett that fear of assassination by former associates of Clarence Spott, including his brother, DuWayne, had been uppermost in David Lodge’s mind on the day he walked out of prison.

  The story was too big to be contained, coming as it did after Ellen Lodge’s New York Times interview. Every station had run with it on the morning news, every newspaper as well.

  ‘We’re being out-flanked,’ Adele observed as I pulled to the curb in front of Ellen Lodge’s house. ‘You know that.’

  ‘I know it’s worse than that. The final nail in DuWayne Spott’s coffin is about to be hammered home.’

  ‘And after that you’re off the hook?’

  ‘I was never on the hook, Adele, because I never took the bait. You want to do justice. I know that, partner. And I’m even willing to admit there’s nothing more satisfying in life than closing a cell door behind a violent predator. But crime goes on. Like death and taxes.’

  I managed to get my left foot out of the car before Adele spoke up. ‘The detectives are small and the job is big. Know thy place.’

  ‘That’s right, Adele. In the real world, the cockroach never crushes the shoe.’

  ‘The cockroach just crawls into its hole.’

  Funny thing about partners. After a while, they get to know each other so well, they even know when to shut up. That I wasn’t going to get in the last word was a foregone conclusion.
>
  I expected to find Ellen Lodge frantically coping with her toddlers, but there were no children in the rooms through which she led us, only games and mats and tiny tables stacked against the walls as though awaiting collection. Which, in fact, they were.

  ‘The parents pulled their kids,’ she told us. ‘After what happened, you can’t fault ’em. I’m waitin’ for Goodwill to come and pick up the junk.’

  Though her tone was edged with defiance, Ellen Lodge’s gray eyes seemed weary to me, weary and disappointed. I wondered if she’d expected her husband’s death to lift a burden, only to find the weight on her shoulders increased many times. I wondered, too, if I might take advantage of her vulnerable state, if I might exploit her misery. Sarney had ordered us to go easy on Dante Russo. He hadn’t said anything about Ellen Lodge. She was in play.

  Ellen led us across the lower floor of the house, then up a staircase to a sitting room where she dropped into an armchair. The chair and a matching couch were upholstered in an elaborate pattern of intersecting vines and blossoms. The colors were vivid, especially the scarlet roses which matched the ruffled curtains on the bay window. I stood there for a moment, taking it in, before deciding that the room was far too bright for Ellen Lodge. It was a room that spoke to the woman she wished to be. Or, perhaps, to a woman she once was.

  Adele and I took seats on opposite ends of the couch. I was going to conduct the interview and I didn’t want my subject distracted. First, I took Ellen Lodge over old ground. Had any memories surfaced? Anything about her husband’s immediate plans? Anything from his letters? How about his demeanor when he left the house?