Bodies in Winter hc-1

by Robert Knightly

  Mel Bentibi was the most even-tempered man I’d ever known. He simply could not be drawn to any extreme emotion, a trait that drove Adele crazy. ‘He plays the Zen monk,’ she once told me, to cover up the fact that he has the inner life of an eggplant.

  ‘Say, Harry, I’ve got a serious problem.’ Mel cleared his throat. ‘It’s Adele. She’s been injured.’

  ‘Yeah, how so?’ I smiled at that moment — a crooked smile, to be sure — while my heart tightened into a fist.

  ‘She was mugged.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Coming into the apartment in Bayside.’ Another hesitation. ‘The thing about it is that I’m in Dallas. You know, on business. I’m not gonna be able to get away before Tuesday morning.’

  ‘Can I assume that means your wife isn’t critical or dead?’

  ‘Please, Harry, don’t talk like that. Adele’s in North Shore Hospital, in Manhasset. Her doctors tell me she’ll be fine. They just want to hold her overnight for observation.’

  ‘Does she have her cell phone with her?’

  ‘No, they took it, along with her gun.’

  ‘They?’

  ‘Harry, I don’t know the details. The doctors told me that she’s under sedation.’

  I’d double-dated with Adele and her husband several times in the past. Though I’d found Mel to be terminally bland, I’d generally been able to deal with him. But at that moment, I lacked the patience to beg the jerk for a set of facts as likely as not to be wrong, and I simply hung up.

  It was eight-fifteen and North Shore Hospital was forty-five minutes away, even assuming light traffic on the dreaded Long Island Expressway. I threw on my coat and went out to my car, which was parked in front of the building. Once again, the Official Police parking permit on the dash had worked its magic and there was no ticket beneath the wiper blade. That was predictable, as was the Nissan’s failure to start. It was bitter cold and the car had been sitting for two days.

  I opened the trunk, removed a set of jumper cables, then attached one end of the cables to my battery. When an empty cab drove by a few minutes later, I raised both hands. In the left, I held the unattached end of the jumpers, in the right, a five-dollar bill. Within two minutes, the Nissan was up and running.

  As I crested the Williamsburg Bridge, I got on my cell phone, punching the O, then waiting for an operator to respond. A few minutes later, I was speaking to the desk lieutenant at the 111th Precinct in Bayside, Queens. Her name was Fujimori and she clucked sympathetically when I identified myself as Adele’s partner.

  ‘They hit her in the face,’ she told me, ‘with some kind of club, maybe a baseball bat.’

  ‘Once?’

  ‘Apparently. Are you familiar with the layout?’

  ‘I’ve been there.’

  ‘Alright, Bentibi was attacked after parking her car in the lot behind her apartment building. She got lucky when a porter came through the back door as the attack started and her assailant ran away with her handbag. Also, Bentibi has a defensive wound on her forearm, a large contusion. We’re assuming she managed to absorb some of the force of the blow.’

  I took a second to visualize the scene. The Bentibis owned a condo in a hi-rise building a few hundred yards from Little Neck Bay. The surrounding blocks were all residential, mostly single-family homes, and very quiet. Beyond that, Bayside had been an upper-middle-class enclave for a century, with the nearest subway five miles distant — not the happy hunting ground for street muggers who depend on mass transit for a quick getaway.

  ‘You get a lot of muggings in that part of town, lou?’ I finally asked.

  ‘I can’t remember the last one.’

  ‘How’d they escape?’

  ‘They had a car.’

  ‘You get a make, a plate number?’

  ‘Negative. Bentibi was too disoriented and the porter ran over to help her. He only glimpsed the vehicle.’

  ‘What about an ID? Either of them get a look?’

  ‘Your partner doesn’t remember what happened, but according to the porter, the bad guy had his face covered with a stocking mask. The most the porter’s willing to say is that Bentibi’s attacker was white.’

  We went back and forth for a few minutes, until I was about to thank her and hang up. Then she added, ‘They didn’t get Bentibi’s badge. She had it in her pocket. They got her weapon, but not her badge.’

  I think the statement was meant to console. If so, the kind lieutenant had wasted her breath. Though the emotions running through my little brain were decidedly mixed, sorrow was decidedly absent.

  The middle of Adele’s face was swathed in bandages, her mouth below the bandages and her eyes above, swollen and discolored. But she was awake and oriented. When I came through the door, her head swiveled a few inches and the sliver of eye visible between her purple lids came to rest on my face. My greatest concern, on the way over, was that I would find her afraid. But Adele’s gaze was steady and I had the distinct feeling that we were both explorers mapping an uncertain terrain.

  A few moments before, I’d cornered a resident at the nurses’ station. Neurology, she’d told me without looking up, had run a battery of tests and Adele’s brain was not damaged, at least not as far as they could tell. On the other hand, the injuries to bone and soft tissue were extensive. Adele’s nose had been virtually smashed and she would probably need further surgery, even though a plastic surgeon had ‘popped it into place.’

  I sat on the edge of an empty bed a few feet from Adele’s. ‘Next time you go for a nose job,’ I told her, ‘it’d probably be good if you picked a better surgeon. You’re gonna have to have that one done over.’

  Although Adele’s lips were as thick as hot dogs, they parted in a semblance of a smile. Encouraged, I stumbled on.

  ‘I know you’re already thinking that I came out here to offer my assistance because I pity you, or because I’m suffering from some kind of Sir Galahad complex. But when you get home, you’re gonna discover a phone message left by Harry Corbin before he found out what happened.’ Leaning forward, I tapped Adele’s knee, an unheard-of liberty. ‘The fact is that I was already on a righteous path when Mel called from Dallas. You have no claim to the moral high-ground just because you got your ass kicked.’

  Adele continued to stare into my eyes, until I straightened up and asked, ‘Are you stoned?’

  That brought a true smile and the merest of nods. They’d given her some sort of pain killer, undoubtedly an opiate, which was doing its work quite nicely. Never-Never Land, here we come.

  But Adele surprised me. In a series of excruciatingly slow movements, she worked her way to the edge of the bed and opened the drawer of a little nightstand, extracting a key ring which she handed over. As she would have needed her keys to get through the back door of her building and into her apartment, she’d probably been holding them when she was attacked.

  I slid the keys into my pocket, then looked into Adele’s eyes. Her lids were no more than a few millimeters apart, but her eyes glowed nonetheless, whether from the dope or the pleasure of seeing me, I couldn’t know. After a moment, her lips began to move, her mouth to open as she attempted to speak.

  She took a long time about it, working her swollen tongue behind her teeth as she struggled with the mechanics. When her words finally broke free, they were thick and rounded, the hard consonants slurred. Nevertheless, I understood her well enough.

  ‘Why did you come back?’

  ‘Why do you need to know?’

  Always respond to a question with a question, a rule of thumb familiar to police interrogators and mental therapists alike. But it wasn’t going to work here. Adele continued to stare at me, a bug-eyed lizard fixed on a crawling insect. I could answer, or I could be eaten. It was strictly up to me.

  ‘You’re my partner,’ I finally said, ‘and I have to defend you to the death or suffer eternal damnation. Call it cop culture, the mythology of the job, whatever. You don’t leave your partner’s back undefende
d, no exceptions.’ I shifted my weight on the bed, but maintained eye contact until I was sure Adele wasn’t going to be the first to speak. ‘Only there’s much more to it, which you already know.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like bodies in winter, like David Lodge’s body on a lawn in the middle of January. That brown grass, it looks nice and soft, but when you kneel down, it’s all frozen little knobs that get up between the bones of your knees. And then there’s the blood. Blood that fresh isn’t supposed to be hard, just like the sun isn’t supposed to be cold. You remember the sun that day, Adele, how bright it was, how cold it was? I felt like I was sucking that icy wind down into my bones.’

  That was it for me, as far as I wanted to go, and I lapsed into silence. A few minutes later, Adele pushed a red button attached to the sheet, releasing a jolt of whatever pain killer she was taking, then drifted off to sleep. I remained where I was for a short time longer, listening to the pulse of her IV pump as it forced a mix of antibiotics and saline into her veins. I knew there was work to be done, that the night would be long, that the faster I moved the better off I’d be. But I kept imagining the pain, not only from the blunt object that had crashed into Adele’s face, but from the surgeries to come. I’d seen injuries like hers many times and I knew she’d never look the same. Without doubt, she knew it as well.

  I finally took my weapon from its holster, slid it into the pocket of my coat and left. A nurse pushing a medication cart looked up as I came down the hallway, a pretty woman in a starched uniform. I returned her smile without hesitation. The way I saw it, I had only one problem. When my Nissan fired right up a few minutes later, I had none.

  I found three sets of files and a notebook, all neatly arranged on Adele’s dining-room table. Though I might have hung around long enough to study them at my leisure, I packed them into a briefcase and went out through the rear of the building, avoiding the doorman. It was now approaching eleven o’clock and I wanted to settle down with a pot of coffee in my own apartment as soon as possible. Still, I made a stop on the way, driving to Woodward Avenue where it passes behind Linden Hill Cemetery, to the edge of the ridge that gives Ridgewood its name. The cemetery was by far the largest green space in the neighborhood.

  I pulled the car to a stop along the curb, shut off the headlights and threw the transmission into PARK. Initially, I made no effort to organize my thoughts, content to stare out over a pair of auto Graveyards at a sliver of the Manhattan skyline nine miles away. The Chrysler Building was clearly visible, and the Met Life Building, somehow squat for all its two and a half million square feet. There were a dozen others, as well, that I didn’t recognize, a four- or five-block swathe advancing from west to east.

  Little by little, my thoughts slowed down, until I was left with the game I’d chosen to play, and with the stakes on the table. Adele had been viciously attacked and the most obvious suspects were Lodge’s killers. But it didn’t have to be that way. Chris Tucker’s outrage, when I confronted him in Sparkle’s, had been hot enough to singe the hairs in my nostrils. That he, or someone very much like him, had decided to teach Adele a lesson was entirely possible. And then there were the bosses. Sarney’s call had come only a couple of hours after the attack on Adele. Had Sarney known about Adele when he called me? Had there been a hidden message in what he’d said?

  I watched a police cruiser slowly climb the hill. It pulled to a stop alongside my car and the officer behind the wheel shone his six-battery flashlight into my face.

  ‘Hey, Harry, what’re you doing here? It’s Paul Aveda.’ Aveda turned the flashlight on himself, as if his word alone wasn’t good enough.

  ‘Sittin’ and thinkin’,’ I responded.

  ‘You don’t need a lift home, do ya?’

  ‘Paul, if I’ve ever had a more sober moment in my life, I can’t remember it.’

  ‘Ten-four, detective.’

  Aveda’s tail lights were still visible in the rear-view mirror when my cell phone began to ring. My first thought was of Adele, but that was wishful thinking. The vaguely female voice on the other end of the line had been generated by a computer. That was evident in the odd cadence and the staccato delivery.

  Sza-rek. Russ-o. Jara. Zel. Sky. Put their pieces to-ge-ther. It won’t be that hard, if you have the balls.

  The phone went dead at that point and I returned it to my pocket. Up ahead, framed by trees on either side of the road, the view was sliced by a set of telephone wires that crossed Woodward Avenue a hundred yards from where I sat. Adele and I often came here when the weather was good, to sit with the windows open, to eat a take-out lunch, to stare at Manhattan as if it was a fable passed down from one generation to the next. This was especially true on summer days when the towers shimmered in the distance like the after-image of a receding dream.

  But on that Saturday night, with the temperature in the mid-twenties and the wind crisp enough to blow New York’s soot into the Atlantic, it was more like staring through a jeweler’s window. The triangular lights on the Chrysler Building seemed ready to leap beyond its spire and the windows in the glass towers, lit only by the moon, were sharp enough to count.

  TWENTY-THREE

  The Brooklyn neighborhood of Greenpoint is similar to the neighborhoods of Ridgewood and Bushwick in many ways. Established in the middle of the nineteenth century, Greenpoint, too, was created to serve the needs of manufacturers fleeing overcrowded Manhattan. The Civil War ironclad, Monitor, was built in Greenpoint, at the Continental Iron Works, and one of the first kerosene refineries in New York, Astral Oil, opened for business in 1867.

  Both Continental Iron Works and Astral Oil were long gone by the time I drove into Greenpoint on that Sunday morning, replaced, along with most of the community’s manufacturing base, by warehouses offering service-sector jobs at appropriately lower wages. But Greenpoint was still vibrant, having undergone several major population shifts in the past fifty years. The first had begun after WWII, when a half-million Puerto Ricans poured into Manhattan’s two great barrios, East Harlem and the Lower East Side. By the early Sixties, the barrios were full and the Puerto Ricans began to move to neighborhoods in the outer boroughs. One of those neighborhoods was Greenpoint, where they came to dominate a section on the community’s northeastern edge.

  The second change came forty years later, after the fall of the Soviet Union. Free to emigrate for the first time in fifty years, Poles flooded Greenpoint’s already sizable Polish-American community. So many, in fact, that a good number of the Latinos, now a mix of Puerto Ricans, Dominicans and Mexicans, had been forced out by rising rents.

  I hadn’t come to Greenpoint, however, in search of pierogies or stuffed cabbage, or even the peppered vodka. The material I took from Adele’s apartment had included the case files of David Lodge and Tony Szarek, as well as Dante Russo’s personnel file and Adele’s notebook. I’d read the notebook first, but the only salient fact I uncovered was that Pete Jarazelsky had resided in Greenpoint until his conviction for burglary. As Adele had circled the address several times, it naturally caught my attention.

  Tying Jarazelsky to the Broom involved no great detecting skills either: Tony Szarek was living in Greenpoint at the time of his death. But the last connection eluded me for several hours.

  Because there was no entry in Adele’s notebook to guide me, I got to Dante Russo’s personnel file last. Russo was a sixteen-year NYPD veteran. His file included all of his evaluations, along with records of the tours he’d worked, the overtime he’d piled up, and his PBA Trustee status. If there’d been any civilian complaints against Russo, they would also have been included, as would commendations or departmental disciplines. But there were none.

  I found Russo’s evaluations to be universally bland. Dante Russo is an experienced officer who continues to exhibit good judgment in the field. This was true even in the year Clarence Spott was murdered. Russo’s eager cooperation (along, no doubt, with his PBA connections) had apparently resulted in a complete whitew
ash. His yearly evaluation made no mention of either Clarence Spott or David Lodge.

  It was all very interesting, this portrait of a careful, calculating cop, a cop who took as few risks as possible, a cop who should have gone out of his way to avoid partnering with a rummy like David Lodge. But it was also useless, and I was finally left with a PA-15, Russo’s original application for employment with the NYPD.

  Sitting there, I vividly recalled working on my own application. The PA15 required you to list every job you’d ever held, every school you’d attended, any contact with the police, the names and addresses of your parents and siblings, the names and addresses of third parties willing to recommend you, the address of every house or apartment in which you’d lived.

  I’d fretted over my application for weeks, running from place to place, making sure I had each date and address exactly right. At the time, I was afraid that I’d be rejected if I messed up on a single detail. Russo, apparently, had approached his own application with equal care. His PA15 was typed and there were no white-outs.

  Curious, I shifted to Russo’s personal recommendations. There were six in all, half from PBA board members — Russo had obviously been pointed toward a career with the union from the very beginning — and half from neighbors who claimed to have known Russo from his infancy. The neighbors were uniform in their praise of Dante’s virtues, his honesty and reliability, his love of God and country. They could make this claim because they’d once lived within two blocks of him in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Greenpoint.

  I got my first surprise of the day when I pulled over to the curb on Milton Street off Manhattan Avenue. For the most part, the housing in Greenpoint reflects the neighborhood’s working-class character, a necessity because Greenpoint was developed before the mass transit era. Factory employees had to live within walking distances of the factories they manned — not just the workers on the floor, but the professionals as well, the engineers, the accountants, the corporate executives. I’d seen the same phenomenon operating in Bushwick and Ridgewood, upper-middle-class enclaves shoehorned into working-class communities.