Bodies in Winter hc-1

by Robert Knightly

  Milton Street, from where I sat, was a prime example. Both sides of the block were lined with sturdy brick town houses fronted by trees whose branches swept over the road. Without doubt, the town houses had been constructed in the second half of the nineteenth century, their cost well above the lifetime salaries of ordinary factory workers.

  The town house to my right, the one in which Anthony Szarek had been living at the time of his death, was in perfect condition, its yellow brick free of soot, every sill in place and level. On the second floor, despite the cold, a lace curtain fluttered behind a tall window. Somebody was home.

  I got out of the car and buttoned my coat, grateful for the windless day, and for a gossamer-thin layer of gathering cloud. The weather was going to change and the way I figured, it could only get warmer. We were already at absolute zero and had been for more days than I cared to count.

  I rang the bell and waited patiently before a set of oak double doors. My informant had invited me to connect Szarek, Russo and Jarazelsky, a task Adele had already performed. But connection isn’t conspiracy, and my aim was simply to draw the ties that bind a little tighter.

  The man who opened the doors was tall and barrel-chested, wearing a dark suit and a red tie over a snow-white shirt. I flashed my shield and ID, then asked him to identify himself.

  He hesitated, his lips compressing slightly as he folded his arms across his chest. Finally, he said, ‘Mike Szarek.’

  Mike Szarek was Tony Szarek’s brother. He’d been interviewed by Detective Mark Winnman. Winnman had found Mike’s name in the deceased’s address book, then killed two birds with one stone by notifying the family and conducting his one and only interview at the same time.

  ‘You’re Anthony Szarek’s brother?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Can we go inside?’

  ‘I’m on my way to church, me and the whole family. You should come back later.’

  I put my hand out to prevent his closing the door. ‘This’ll only take a few minutes. We could do it right here if you want.’ When he didn’t respond, I told him that the circumstances surrounding his brother’s death were being re-examined, then asked him to describe his brother’s state of mind in the days leading up to his death.

  No human head is truly round, but Mike Szarek’s came close, an effect enhanced by a short, thick neck made even shorter when he hunched his shoulders. ‘The cops have already been here. Some detective whose name I don’t remember.’

  ‘Winnman.’

  ‘Yeah, Winnman.’

  I slid my hand in my pockets and smiled the most ingratiating smile in my repertoire. ‘Like I said, we’re taking another look at your brother’s death, going back over the details.’

  ‘You think it wasn’t suicide?’

  ‘We’re taking another look,’ I stubbornly repeated. ‘Nobody’s drawing any conclusions.’

  After a moment, Szarek’s shoulders relaxed and he again met my gaze, an indication that he’d decided to tell the truth, at least as he saw it. ‘What could I say? Like I told the other detective, me and Tony wasn’t all that tight. Not that we were enemies or anything. It’s just that I’m very active in the church. Tony, he never went to church, didn’t believe in it.’

  Szarek paused long enough to gesture at a Roman Catholic church on the far side of Manhattan Avenue, then continued. ‘And when Tony killed himself, he rejected God altogether. Now Tony coulda gone to Father Willenski, who’s also a psychologist, instead of committing suicide. That’s a mortal sin, suicide, and there’s no way to tell the Lord that you’re sorry once you pull the trigger.’

  ‘Mr Szarek, believe me, I didn’t come here to stir up bad memories. I just need to know if there were any specific events that led you to believe your brother was suicidal. Was he generally unhappy? Did he talk of killing himself? Did he make a suicide attempt in the past?’

  ‘Like I said, me and him, we weren’t so close.’

  ‘Who could help me then? Who knew him well enough to answer those questions?’

  Szarek frowned as it suddenly dawned on him that he’d walked into a trap. I needed the name of somebody close to the Broom. Mike would now have to furnish that name or be seen to deliberately obstruct my investigation. Myself, I didn’t figure the man had the heart to confront me. He was a good citizen at bottom. Going one-on-one with cops was not on his agenda.

  ‘You could talk to my sister, Trina Zito. Her and Tony got together once in a while.’ Mike Szarek smiled for the first time. ‘What could I say?’ he asked. ‘Trina’s the family disgrace. She married a wop.’

  I clapped him on the shoulder, one kidder to another. ‘It might’ve been a lot worse, Mike. You gotta look on the bright side. She could’ve married a Jew.’ I gave it a couple of beats, enduring Szarek’s quick frown. ‘Say, do you by any chance know a cop named Pete Jarazelsky?’

  Szarek’s head jerked back as though he’d been poked in the eye. He was pissed now, and probably freezing cold, even standing back in the doorway. ‘Jarazelsky’s in jail.’

  ‘I know that, Mr Szarek. I spoke to him recently. What I’m asking is if you knew him.’

  ‘Pete grew up in the neighborhood, like all of us, but he was a lot younger than me so I can’t say we were actually friends. But if we saw each other on the street, we’d nod hello.’

  ‘What about your brother? Did your brother know Jarazelsky well?’

  ‘They were both cops in the same precinct, so I guess they had to know each other.’

  TWENTY-FOUR

  ‘ Yeah,’ Trina Zito told me twenty minutes later, ‘Tony drank pretty much all day, every day. But he wasn’t unhappy and he went to work in the morning, so who am I to judge?’

  ‘Your brother sees it differently,’ I suggested.

  Trina’s husband, Fred, took that moment to put in his two cents. We were in the front room, seated on matching love seats. Though no more than a half-mile from Tony Szarek’s town house, the Zitos’ apartment was far more humble, five rooms in a frame tenement sided with textured yellow vinyl.

  ‘You don’t wanna pay too much attention to Mike,’ Zito told me. ‘He’s worried about his inheritance. The guy was on the balls of his ass when Tony died. Him, his wife and his three kids. If we hadn’t agreed to let ’em stay in Tony’s house until it’s sold, they’d be on the street.’

  ‘Tony died without a will,’ Trina explained. ‘Mike and me, we’re his closest relatives.’

  ‘Is the estate in probate court?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Fred declared, ‘and it’s taking forever as it is. If Tony was murdered, we’ll most likely never see a dime.’

  ‘You’ve discussed this possibility?’

  Trina Zito cleared her throat. ‘When the cops said it was suicide, I figured they must know. I mean, there was an autopsy and everything. But I’m not surprised that you turned up, either. See, my brother had his pension, plus he made a lotta money in business and he was pretty healthy, so he had no reason to kill himself.’

  ‘How big is his estate?’

  To her credit, Trina answered the question without hesitation. ‘What with the equity on the house and the bank accounts, we’re probably lookin’ at six hundred thousand.’

  ‘You said Tony was in business?’

  ‘Right, he was a partner in Greenpoint Carton Supply, on India Street.’

  I leaned back and crossed my legs. Trina’s tone was becoming more conversational and I wanted to put her at ease. ‘One thing I don’t get. If your brother drank from morning till night, how’d he run a business?’

  ‘That I couldn’t tell you, detective. We used to have Tony over to dinner every couple of months and he occasionally took us out to a restaurant, but he never talked about his work. I don’t even know the names of his partners.’

  ‘Do you know for certain that he actually had partners?’

  ‘He must’ve, because we don’t inherit his shares in the business. They revert to the corporation. That wouldn’t make a lot of sense if h
e didn’t have partners.’

  I nodded thoughtfully, then took Dante Russo’s photo from my shirt pocket. ‘You ever see this guy with Tony?’

  Even as she shook her head, Trina Szarek echoed her brother, Mike. ‘Me and Tony,’ she declared, ‘we weren’t that close.’

  ‘What about a man named Pete Jarazelsky?’

  Fred Zito popped to attention, running his fingertips back and forth over the dense stubble on his chin. ‘Don’t talk to me about Jarazelsky,’ he declared. ‘I own an auto parts store in Williamsburg and I once hired Pete to work for me on Saturdays. The scumbag robbed me blind. Every time my back was turned, something else went out the door. And the guy was a cop, for Christ’s sake.’

  I nodded agreement, then asked the same question I’d put to Mike Szarek. ‘If you and Tony weren’t close, who should I speak with? He must have been close to someone.’

  Fred and Trina looked at each other for a moment, then shrugged in unison. ‘Yeah,’ Trina admitted, ‘there’s someone alright.’

  ‘And who might that be?’

  ‘Ewa Gierek, his live-in lover. Ewa’s suing for half the estate.’

  ‘You know where she lives?’

  ‘In Flushing, with her brother.’

  Ewa Gierek was the whitest white woman I’d ever seen. Her porcelain skin was nearly translucent, her blue eyes pale and prominent, her hair so light that her lashes and brows were virtually invisible. A wintry landscape, to be sure, broken only by the scarlet lipstick on her small, Cupid’s-bow mouth and the blush worked into her cheeks.

  The image of Tony Szarek I’d been carrying up till then, of the pitiful Broom mopping his way through the last years of a stumble-bum career, vanished forever. Szarek was a few months short of his fifty-eighth birthday when he died. Ewa Gierek was no more than forty and might have been a good deal younger.

  ‘If I could just come in for a moment,’ I said. ‘I want to talk to you about Tony Szarek.’

  She nodded once and led me to a living room choked with oversized furniture: a leather sofa with rolled arms, two matching recliners, a pair of leather hassocks, a glass coffee table, a projection TV jammed into a corner. The wall opposite the sofa held four rows of glass shelves on which baseball memorabilia, mostly playing cards in lucite holders, had been arranged.

  ‘My brother, Ryszard,’ Ewa explained when I glanced at the display, ‘he is dealer of these baseball things.’ Her accent was heavy and she spoke slowly, pronouncing the words with care. ‘Even in Warsaw he is following Yankees. Crazy, yes? But he has made living from baseballs. This is good.’

  ‘Is your brother home?’

  ‘He is at convention in Chicago.’

  I was about to launch into my usual pitch, the one about reopening the case, taking another look at the facts, but decided against it. Instead, I took out Dante Russo’s photo and tossed it on the coffee table between us. ‘Do you know this man?’

  One thing about pale white skin, it’s a definite impediment to successful lying. Even as Ewa shook her head, her cheeks flared as though someone had lit a candle inside her mouth. Under other circumstances, where time wasn’t a factor, I might have let her falsehood stand. As it was, I pounced on her.

  ‘Listen, Ewa, and listen closely. I’m here because I think person or persons unknown, motivated by money, put a gun to Anthony Szarek’s temple and pulled the trigger. Can you hear me now? You’re suing for half of an estate worth six hundred thousand dollars. As the Feds like to say, that makes you a person of interest. Of course, there are other persons of interest, who also stand to benefit from Tony’s death, but they didn’t start out by lying. See, I already know that you and this gentleman are acquainted, so maybe you wanna take a closer look before I leave with the wrong impression.’

  By the time I finished, my voice had risen in volume and my tone was self-righteous, despite the little fabrication at the end. The display was meant to be intimidating, but Ewa’s eyes never left mine as she worked things out.

  ‘I know him,’ she finally admitted.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me that right away?’

  ‘Tony has always said to not talk about his business.’

  ‘Tony’s dead and buried, Ewa. It’s time to save yourself, and just maybe your inheritance, too. Now tell me his name, the man in the photograph.’

  ‘Dante… Dante something.’

  ‘And how well were Tony and Dante acquainted?’

  Once she got into the flow, Ewa was forthcoming, at least as far as I could tell. Although she was routinely ordered to make herself scarce whenever Russo visited the Milton Street house, she believed Russo and Szarek to be partners in Greenpoint Carton. She’d seen them at the warehouse, conferring with the man who handled the company’s day-to-day affairs. That man’s name was Justin Whitlock.

  I have an excellent memory, as do most good detectives, but it took me a minute to locate the name. Lieutenant Justin Whitlock had been the desk officer at the precinct on the night Clarence Spott was killed. Just as the Broom had placed David Lodge alone with the victim, Whitlock had provided Dante Russo with an alibi. Predictably, the job had made a scapegoat of Whitlock, forcing him into retirement.

  ‘Justin Whitlock,’ I asked, ‘is he a partner?’

  Ewa shrugged. ‘I know only that when I am calling Tony at job, Justin is usually one to pick up telephone. When I am at job, Justin gives orders to workers.’

  ‘Alright, I believe you. Tell me, did Tony ever mention a man named David Lodge?’

  ‘I don’t remember this name.’

  ‘Did he seem worried about anything, say in the three months before he died?’

  ‘Tony was party animal. Always out with friends. He worried about nothing.’ She stared at me for a moment, her head cocked to one side, her Cupid’s-bow lips so pursed they might have been found on the face of a doll. ‘Why you are not asking about the loving brother?’

  ‘Mike Szarek?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’ve already spoken to him.’

  I stood at that point, intending to express my gratitude for her cooperation and be on my way to the hospital. But Ewa had other ideas. She placed herself between me and the door, backing up until the knob was pressing into her back. All the while, she attacked Mike Szarek’s reputation. According to Ewa, he was a brute who’d been arrested twice for spousal battery. Moreover, he was a hypocrite of a Christian who hated and envied his successful, happy-go-lucky brother, even while receiving holy communion.

  ‘Every Sunday I am seeing his face at ten o’clock mass at St. Anthony’s. Never he is even looking in my direction. Always he walks out with nose in the air.’

  I endured the diatribe for several minutes, hoping some unrevealed tidbit would slip out, but it was just more of the same.

  ‘Ms. Gierek, I have to leave,’ I finally told her. ‘But don’t worry, I’ll be talking to Mike Szarek again.’

  Ewa turned far enough to unlock the door, then swung back to me. As I suspected, she had her exit lines ready.

  ‘You Americans,’ she said, pulling the door open, ‘you are narrow peoples, all the time lying flat, like a ruler. Only one sin do you see, sin of sex. There are seven deadly sins but you only think about lust. How many times do I see big fat man on television screen telling world about sin of sodomy? What about sin of gluttony? What about sin of greed? Of envy? Of hatred? To these, you Americans are blind.’

  I flashed a smile at that point as I slid by her into the hallway, thinking, Lady, when you’re right, you’re right.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  It began to sleet as I pulled out of North Shore Hospital’s parking garage, intermittent sprays of frozen rain that chittered across the hood and roof, filling a heavy silence. I turned right coming out of the parking lot, toward Northern Boulevard with its many traffic lights, instead of the much quicker Long Island Expressway. After passing thousands of hours behind the wheel of a patrol car, I’d come to accept the fact that some New York drivers view adverse weath
er conditions as opportunities to indulge already suicidal impulses. Better to be traveling as slowly as possible, just in case some moron lost control on a curve.

  Adele had been sitting in the lobby when I arrived at a quarter past four, a smallish figure in a bloodstained ski jacket. She rose on seeing me, but made no comment on my tardiness. When I asked her if she wanted to wait until I retrieved the car, which I’d parked in the garage, she merely shook her head.

  As we drove toward Queens, I found myself wanting to tell her everything I’d done that day, all in a rush, like a child, and I wanted to listen to her adventures as well. I had my partner back and my emotions were running high. Till then, I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed her grouchy attitude and condescending tone. One more reason to be walking down this road.

  But the signals from Adele were a deal more somber. She sat alongside me as we drove through the town of Manhasset, staring out through the windshield at curtains of sleet that drifted back and forth across the headlight beams like schooling fish. I watched her tighten a seat belt already tight enough to constrict her breathing, then raise her chin. For a moment, I was certain she’d speak. Instead, she brought her right arm across her chest, sling and all, then settled against the seat.

  I finally broke the silence as we approached the Queens-Nassau border. There was work to be done, after all, decisions to be made. I told Adele about Sarney’s call, the threats, the demand that I spy on her, the claim that the bosses were certain she was leaking to the Times.

  ‘If we can’t trust the phones — and we can’t — it’d be better if you stayed with me in Manhattan,’ I told her. ‘If we were in the same place.’

  Adele took a deep breath, holding the air down inside for a moment, finally releasing it with an audible hiss. Despite the swollen mouth, when she spoke, I understood her perfectly.

  ‘I thought he would come,’ she said.