Bodies in Winter hc-1

by Robert Knightly

  ‘Well, I didn’t go quite that far. But I started keeping my room clean, which was mostly what my parents complained about. I mean, by the time I was seven, my room would’ve passed a military inspection.’

  ‘And your folks?’

  ‘I got a couple of pats on the head, but then the novelty wore off and it was like it never happened. Ya gotta picture them here, Ellen. Most of the time, they used downers and I’d find them laid out like zombies on the couch. When they lucked into a few grams of cocaine, they’d suddenly come awake. I swear, it was like a resurrection. They’d pile the coke on a mirror, then place the mirror, dead center, on what was supposed to be the dining-room table. And that’s exactly where they’d remain, staring down at that pile until it was fully consumed. I’m tellin’ ya, I figured out, at a very early age, that the pile was a lot more important than I was. I wasn’t allowed anywhere near it.’

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Most of what I’d told Ellen, up to that point, was true, if greatly oversimplified. But the truth didn’t matter to me, any more than I minded using my personal history to lure Ellen into making a statement against her penal interests. And, yes, Ellen Lodge was right about my grandfather. Which only put me on a par with any other good detective. The important thing was that I had Ellen’s full attention as I began to play with the facts.

  The long-term failure of my clean-bedroom strategy, I declared, hadn’t discouraged me, not in the slightest. And why should it? A few pats are better than no pats at all. Just ask any dog.

  I went on to describe how, in the course of about a year, I became a cleaning maniac, a master of the vacuum cleaner and the dust cloth, the mop and the broom. I was the scrubber of bathrooms, washer of windows, polisher of floors, king of the laundry. There was nothing I wouldn’t do, no effort I wouldn’t make, until the apartment was finally clean enough to withstand the scrutiny of a nineteenth century German housewife.

  As I plunged into pure hyperbole, I became more and more animated. By degrees, my mouth expanded into the sort of comfortable smile that might be exchanged by two members of a support group over a post-session cup of coffee.

  ‘One time,’ I finally declared, ‘I painted the entire living room while my parents watched re-runs on Comedy Central.’

  ‘You lie. There wasn’t any Comedy Central thirty years ago.’

  ‘No, I swear. It took me five hours, but you want to know the most amazing part? My parents’ eyes never left the screen. And they never laughed, not once. They were too stoned.’

  Ellen’s smile was both amused and ironic. ‘God,’ she said, ‘when you look back, you feel like such an idiot.’

  ‘That’s not the way it is for me. I don’t blame myself, never. Hey, I haven’t spoken to my mom in twenty years. When my father passed, I wasn’t at his bedside and I didn’t go to his funeral.’

  I gave it a good five seconds, until the silence grew dense enough to notice, then went into the pocket of my jacket, removing the photo I’d taken from Marissa Aubregon’s apartment, the one with Marissa perched on Dante Russo’s lap. Working carefully, I unfolded the snapshot, smoothing the creases before leaning forward to lay it on Ellen’s knees.

  ‘Betrayal is what it was about, Ellen. That’s why you don’t have to blame yourself. You can hate the ones who hurt you instead.’ I paused long enough to let the message sink in, then asked, ‘You knew about this, didn’t you?’

  Ellen lit another cigarette with her disposable lighter, holding the end of the cigarette in the flame a moment too long as she weighed her options. I’d played my last card and we both knew it. She had to make up her mind now.

  ‘Yeah,’ she finally whispered, ‘I did.’ She dropped the cigarette into an ashtray and ran her fingers through her hair. ‘Ya know how I said that I always wanted a kid?’

  ‘I remember.’

  ‘Well, I told Dante, “You don’t have to marry me. You don’t have to pay child support. I just want to have your child.”’

  ‘And what’d he say?’

  ‘That he couldn’t father a child and not take care of it. That he didn’t think he’d be a good father. That he just wasn’t prepared for the responsibility. Sometimes, when I brought it up, he’d get angry. Dante never raised a hand to me, not like Davy, but he could be very cold. And when he was really pissed, I just wouldn’t hear from him, not until I called to apologize.’

  ‘So, it must have been hard when you found out that he fathered Marissa’s child.’

  The look in Ellen Lodge’s eyes was so wistful, I turned away. As I’d predicted, the outrage she’d marshaled in the face of Adele’s onslaught had vanished. Now she was moving, not into a confessional mode, as I’d hoped, but into an attitude of resignation.

  ‘She called me up. Marissa. I don’t know how she found out about me and Dante, but she called and told me that Dante belonged to her, that she’d had his child.’

  ‘And when did this happen?’

  ‘Three weeks ago, maybe a month.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  Ellen’s gaze dropped to the tape recorder. She watched the spools turn for a moment. ‘Nothing,’ she finally said. ‘I didn’t even confront the bastard. Davy was about to be released from Attica and I was already in over my head.’

  The overall impression Ellen gave, as she told her story, was of a beaten-down woman upon whose back the last straw, Russo’s infidelity, had been heaped. But the relief that naturally follows a true confession, whether it be made to a priest or a detective, was entirely absent. What I sensed was a grim surrender, bolstered by an unexpected measure of true grit. Ellen may have spent much of her time wallowing in her grievances, but there was a tougher part of her, a rational, calculating self that had done hard things in hard times.

  And then there was the content of her remarks. At one point, I almost felt sorry for Dante Russo. He was at the center of every misdeed from the very beginning. It was Dante who’d convinced her that Davy killed Clarence Spott, and it was at Dante’s request that she’d advised her husband to plead guilty.

  ‘After he got sentenced, I hoped that would be the end of it,’ she announced. ‘Then Davy started writing to me, telling me how sorry he was. I mostly threw the letters in the garbage.’

  ‘Mostly? Does that mean you answered some of them?’

  ‘I told him to stop writing to me and that I didn’t expect to see him after he got out. As far as I was concerned, we were through. One time I wrote that if he came around, I’d go to his parole officer. “The minute I see your face,” I said, “I’m on the phone.”’

  That approach was jettisoned six months before Davy’s release, when Dante Russo came calling. Far from his usually reserved self, Dante was extremely agitated. David Lodge, he explained, had become delusional and now believed he was innocent. Worse still, he was threatening bodily harm to all those who’d testified before the Grand Jury.

  At this point, Ellen quoted Russo verbatim: ‘“We tried to talk to the jerk, but it was no good. When the guy gets a bug up his ass, it’s like he becomes a maniac.”’

  Three weeks later, after submitting to a search of her bag and the scrutiny of a metal detector, Ellen had found herself seated across from her husband. A notice pasted on the yellowed Plexiglass screen separating them announced that visits were randomly monitored. Davy had pointed to his side of this notice when his wife mentioned Dante Russo, then had shaken his head.

  Back home, Ellen began to write her husband and to accept his collect calls, only to find that the same principle applied. Letters and phone calls were also routinely monitored. Thus, the only facts Ellen had at her disposal were those supplied by Dante Russo. This was why she still believed her husband to be Clarence Spott’s murderer on the morning of January 15th when she summoned him to the phone, then made a call of her own just after he left the house. The calls, of course, coming and going, were made and received by Dante Russo.

  ‘I thought they were going to… to confront him. Maybe even to threaten
him. I never thought they were going to kill him.’

  ‘Did Russo actually say he killed your husband?’

  When she nodded, I pointed to the tape recorder. The words would have to be spoken aloud.

  ‘Yeah,’ she finally said, ‘he did. I had to push him to the wall, but he finally told me that he’d been there, that he’d pulled the trigger.’

  ‘Alright, now you said you thought “they” were going to confront Davy. Tell me who “they” are?’

  But, alas, other than Tony Szarek, who was dead, and Pete Jarazelsky, who was incarcerated, Ellen didn’t know the names of Dante’s associates, any more than she knew her lover’s fate. Dante, it seemed, like Davy Lodge, was a man who kept his own counsel.

  ‘Ya know, he didn’t even use my telephone. He made calls on his cell. I guess that should’ve told me something right there.’

  I turned off the tape recorder and got on my own cell phone at that point, phoning down to Adele, summoning her back to the fray. When she was standing beside me, I compressed the bad news into a single sentence: ‘Dante did it.’

  ‘All by himself?’

  ‘In the company of persons still to be named.’

  ‘But not by Ellen Lodge?’

  ‘Apparently not.’

  We still had a couple of choices open to us. Adele might have taken another shot at playing the bad cop or I might have again appealed to Ellen’s survival instincts by pointing out that the game was growing ever more dangerous. But it was nearly three o’clock and time was running short.

  ‘You wanna hook her up?’ Adele asked.

  ‘Fine, but I’m leaving the frisk to you.’

  ‘What’s going on here?’ Ellen demanded.

  ‘We’re placing you under arrest for conspiracy in the first degree.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘It means that you conspired to commit an A-One felony: the murder of your husband.’

  ‘But I didn’t. I didn’t know what was going to happen.’ When I failed to respond, she half-shouted, ‘Yesterday, you said you were gonna protect me.’

  Ellen’s gaze dropped to the tape recorder and its unmoving spools. There was a record now and she would have to live with it. I watched her reactions carefully, hoping against hope that she’d revise her strategy. Instead, her eyes narrowed as she rose to her feet and placed her hands behind her back. ‘Would it be alright,’ she asked, ‘if I brought along a little make-up? I wanna look my best when we do the perp walk.’

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  Despite the snow, I came up the block on foot, the closest parking space I could find two blocks away. It was much colder now and the wind was on the rise, pushing the heavy flakes in my direction, coating my head and shoulders before I covered fifteen feet. The snow screened me from view, so that I was almost on top of the One-Sixteen before the half-dozen cops huddled on the small porch fronting the entrance were aware of my presence. It was 3:45 p.m., a busy time in every precinct. The eight-to-four shift was coming in from the field, the four-to-midnight preparing to go out.

  I was walking with Ellen Lodge to my left, holding onto her elbow. Though Ellen’s coat was draped over her shoulders, hiding her cuffed wrists from view, I doubt that anybody was fooled into thinking she was a casual visitor. The chatter stopped dead when I was finally recognized, leaving only the soft wet sound of our footsteps in the slush and the steady moan of the wind.

  Inside, the reception area was crowded with cops, male and female, waiting to be mustered out. They were beginning their night’s toil and relatively energized, making small talk, joking, laughing. I’d worked hard to establish a good working relationship with these folks, knew most of them by sight and four or five by name. In their collective eyes I now found the sort of forlorn shock I associated with news footage of ordinary citizens informed that the guy down the block is a serial killer.

  And he seemed like such a nice man.

  The desk officer, a lieutenant named Draper, found his voice as we approached the stairs leading to the squad room.

  ‘Whatta ya got there, Harry?’

  I led Ellen up a few steps before replying. All eyes were turned to me, which was what I’d hoped for and why I’d sought an elevated position in the first place.

  ‘I’ve got Ellen Lodge,’ I said evenly, ‘under arrest for conspiring to murder her husband. His name is David Lodge, in case you haven’t heard.’

  ‘Hey, I don’t need the sarcasm.’ Draper turned to a patrol sergeant standing at his elbow. ‘What a jerk,’ he declared with a nod in my direction. ‘He don’t know who his friends are.’

  But we were already moving up the stairs and into the squad room where we found Jack Petro and Bill Sarney, along with a trio of four-to-midnight tour detectives gathered around a bag of donuts. Petro was sitting behind his desk with his mouth open. Sarney was on the other side of the desk, his coat draped over his arm, his customary fedora already jammed over his naked scalp.

  I watched Sarney’s face redden, his hands tighten into fists, his neck swell, his eyes bulge. Far from intimidated, it was all I could do to maintain a neutral expression as I repeated the message I’d offered to the desk officer: Ellen Lodge, wife of David Lodge, was under arrest for conspiring to murder her husband. Then I led Ellen Lodge to an interrogation room, removed her handcuffs, and told her to make herself comfortable. As I made my exit, she favored me with a string of curses, concluding her tirade with a demand that she be allowed to call her lawyer.

  ‘You betrayed me.’ Sarney’s small dark eyes were glittery with rage, his forehead a mass of wrinkles all the way to the center of his scalp. We were alone now, in his office. ‘You were on your way from nowhere to nowhere, running out the string on a nothing career, a step away from being a hairbag. I gave you homicide, Harry, and I got you promoted. Me, and nobody else. You hear what I’m sayin’? In your whole career, I’m the only one who recognized you for what you were. How is it that you can turn on me, now, when I really need you? For Christ’s sake, you were at my kid’s christening.’

  I started to speak, but Sarney waved me off. ‘And the worst part,’ he told me, ‘is that I personally vouched for you. I told Borough Command that you’d do the right thing. I took fucking responsibility. What am I supposed to say now?’

  ‘Tell them what you just told me,’ I suggested before he could go on. ‘Tell them you gave it a hundred per cent, but I played you anyway. I’m sure our conversations were recorded, just like Adele’s phones were tapped, so you should come off believable.’

  That brought him to a halt and he dropped down in his chair. ‘You fucked me,’ he warned, ‘and I’m not gonna forget it. Sooner or later, I’ll pay you back.’

  I might have responded directly, but my mind was on other things. The case against Ellen Lodge, which I was going to have to justify, was flimsy. There was Ellen’s recorded statement, complete with Miranda warning, and there was a documented call that might have been placed to anyone. Beyond that… nothing.

  ‘Do you think,’ I asked, ‘that we can get down to business? Because it’s gonna be a long night, even without the lecture.’

  Sarney’s mouth twisted into a bitter smile. ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘by all means. And this better be good.’

  But it wasn’t good enough, that was obvious, and by the time I wound it up, Sarney’s relief was apparent. ‘This is garbage,’ he finally declared. ‘Lemme see that tape.’

  ‘We’re talking about tapes, boss, as in more than one. But I don’t have them anyway. My partner has them.’

  ‘You’re sayin’ you can’t trust me with evidence, that maybe I’d flush those tapes down the toilet?’ He might have come after me at that point, if he was just a little bigger, a little younger. As it was, he settled for pounding the side of his fist into the blotter on top of his desk. Then he did it again.

  ‘If that’s your only comment, Boss, I’ve got paperwork to do.’

  ‘You got nothin’. I’m cutting her loose.’


  ‘Why?’

  ‘Show me one piece of physical evidence tying Dante Russo to the murder of David Lodge. Bring me an eyewitness. Better yet, prove that Ellen Lodge isn’t telling the truth when she says she didn’t know what was gonna happen to her husband.’

  I countered with my best argument. ‘Lodge admits she called Russo and she claims that Russo copped to the murder. Plus, she has a dual motive for wanting her husband dead. First, there was the money from Greenpoint Carton, which doesn’t sound like a lot until you see how she was living. Second, there was the simple fact that she absolutely hated her husband. Ya know, Ellen was pretty much in control for the whole six hours. She only flipped out when she spoke about Davy. Believe me when I tell you, lieutenant, that the widow did not hold anything back.’

  I sat down on the chair fronting his desk before continuing. ‘And don’t forget the lies. We did four interviews with Ellen Lodge. In the last interview she admits that every essential element of the first three interviews was untrue. So, why would a jury believe she’s telling the truth about the one little item that exonerates her?’

  When Sarney leaned forward to place his elbows on the desk, his swivel chair emitted a double screech that reminded me of a braying donkey. ‘Take this to the bank, Corbin: a good defense attorney is gonna get this case dismissed before it goes to trial, even if a grand jury indicts her. And those lies she told don’t mean shit. Everybody lies to the cops.’

  We continued on for another few minutes, going back and forth, until I finally conceded that while the evidence against Ellen Lodge justified an arrest, a conviction might be difficult to obtain. The admission brought a faint smile from Sarney, but I quickly erased it when I said, ‘But that’s only because of the cover-up.’

  Sarney looked out over my head. His office was little more than a glass-walled cubicle and I’d spoken loud enough for my words to be clear to anyone still remaining in the squad room.