FOURTEEN
When we left the precinct house at Knickerbocker and Myrtle a few minutes before noon, the snow had stopped. Although the sun wasn’t shining (as Adele had predicted), there were breaks in the lower cloud banks that revealed thinner and much brighter clouds high above. The temperature and the humidity were rising as well. Within a few hours, the snow, driven by liberal applications of rock salt, would turn into an icy, leather-destroying slush.
‘Anything to say?’ Adele asked as I started the Caprice.
‘You fucked up.’
‘Seriously?’
‘Definitely.’
‘How so?’
I finally turned to look directly at her. ‘You fucked up when you said Spott was originally pulled over on Knickerbocker Avenue. We didn’t get that from Linus Potter and it wasn’t in the papers. That means you saw the case file. I don’t think you wanted me to know that.’ I put the car in gear and pulled away from the curb. We’d only have time for a quick lunch and I headed for the Taco Bell a quarter-mile away.
‘So, what’s the harm? Who’s going to know?’
‘The harm is that you’re not going to stop. You’re like a junkie. The harm is that you led me to believe that you were gonna let Sarney get Lodge’s file. When you had it all the time.’
‘Are you very pissed off?’
‘No, not really. It’s too predictable.’ I might have added that once this case was disposed of, I intended finally to seek another partner, that I was drawing a line of my own. But there was no point to that, either. ‘Anything else in that file I should hear about?’
‘Nobody gave a statement, not Szarek, Russo or Lodge, for two weeks, so the investigators didn’t know where the original contact with Spott took place. By the time they found out, Spott’s car was long gone. It was never recovered.’
Adele had my complete attention now and I motioned her to continue.
‘Russo, he drew a pass for three reasons. He had no prior brutality complaints on his record, he was willing to testify, and he didn’t have blood on his uniform, not his partner’s or Clarence Spott’s. That supported his claim that he took no part in the original beating.’
‘It also means he didn’t kill Spott in that cell.’
‘You’re wrong there, Corbin.’
‘How so?’
‘A single blow from a blunt object rarely produces spatter. It’s the follow-ups that spread the blood.’
‘Explain that.’
Though my tone was anything but challenging, Adele frowned. ‘Slap your right fist into your left palm,’ she ordered. ‘Now do it again and imagine that your palm bled between the first and second impacts. You see? When Spott was struck, he naturally started to bleed. A second blow would have impacted this blood and scattered it. In the process, Lodge’s killer would have gotten blood on him.’
‘But there wasn’t a second blow?’
‘According to the ME, Spott was killed by a single blow that crushed the back of his skull. Russo – or anyone else – could have delivered it and come away clean.’
I slid to the curb in front of the Taco Bell, dropped my ON OFFICIAL POLICE BUSINESS placard onto the dash board and shut off the car. Though I hadn’t begun to complete the puzzle, I could now see a few of the pieces.
‘Something else,’ Adele said as we got out of the car. ‘The bosses scapegoated the desk lieutenant, Justin Whitlock. The theory was that Spott should have been transported to an emergency room, not dumped in a cell. Whitlock was run out of the job after a departmental hearing and a series of appeals. The way it reads in the file, he was lucky to keep his pension.’
I got on the horn to Bill Sarney after we finished eating, summarizing our interviews with Ellen Lodge and Dante Russo, then repeating the anonymous tip I’d received on my cell phone. If Sarney was unhappy with Russo’s treatment, he didn’t say so. He jumped right on the tip.
‘You think he was talking about DuWayne Spott?’
‘That would be my guess, lou, but it would’ve been a lot more helpful if he’d told us where to look. Adele got the names of a few relatives from the gang unit yesterday, but if DuWayne isn’t willing to make himself available, we’re not likely to find him. Not in the short term, anyway.’
When Sarney told me that we’d have to look anyway, I didn’t argue. Instead, I changed the subject.
‘I want to jam Pete Jarazelsky’s parole,’ I told him. ‘Jarazelsky’s a rat in his heart. He’d roll over on the Pope if he thought it was in his best interest.’
‘Keep goin’.’
‘First, Jarazelsky took protective custody after a bad beating, so he’s doing hard time. Second, he’s scheduled for release six months down the line. What I was thinking . . .’ I stopped suddenly as an idea caught my attention, a sequence of events which I filed away for later. ‘I was thinking it might be possible to contact Jarazelsky’s parole board, tell ’em we have strong reason to believe that Pete obstructed a homicide investigation and maybe they should reconsider their decision to release him.’
After a moment, Sarney told me that he’d ‘look into it’, then went on to other matters. The NYPD lab, he explained, had done a preliminary analysis of the blood evidence. All of the samples they’d examined contained Type A blood, matching Lodge’s blood type. DNA results would follow in forty-eight hours. The Toyota had also been examined. While no fingerprints had been found, blood, fiber and hair evidence were recovered. The blood was all Type A. The fibers were black wool and might have come from the masks worn by the shooters. The hairs, two of which were dyed, had been deposited by four different Caucasians.
I wasn’t overly concerned with any of this physical evidence. A comparison of two human hairs, unless they contain some obscure deformity, can never be said to match, not the way fingerprints match. The best that can be said is that a comparison doesn’t exclude the defendant. Fibers are better evidence, but unless very rare, just marginally.
Nevertheless, after hanging up, I dutifully relayed the information to Adele before describing the sequence of events that had caught my attention a few minutes before.
‘According to Nagy,’ I told her, ‘Lodge became certain of his innocence about six months before his release. Around the same time, Jarazelsky caught a bad beating and asked for segregation. Why can’t these two events be directly related?’
‘You mean Lodge beat the information out of Jarazelsky?’
‘Exactly.’
‘That presumes Jarazelsky knew the truth about Clarence Spott.’
‘Or some piece of it that convinced David Lodge that he was innocent.’ I smiled and shrugged my shoulders. ‘It’s only a theory, Adele, but it’s a theory that makes sense. Pete Jarazelsky takes protective custody after Lodge kicks his ass, then contacts one of his pals in the city. He explains the situation and measures are taken to eliminate the threat.’
‘Any idea who that pal would be?’
‘Dante Russo’s obviously a possibility, or Ellen Lodge, but it could be someone unknown to us. What we need to do is take a closer look at Jarazelsky himself, but what we’re actually going to do is waste our time searching for DuWayne Spott.’
FIFTEEN
We spun our wheels for the next seven hours, running from relative to acquaintance to relative, never even close to finding DuWayne Spott. We did pick up little tidbits, however, teasers that confirmed the information Adele had gotten from the gang unit at OCCB.
Our first stop was at the apartment of DuWayne’s aunt, Mrs Ivy Whittington, in the Bushwick Houses. Ivy sat us down in her living room, insisted we take tea, then patiently answered our questions.
DuWayne, it turned out, had lived most of his life in the shadow of his brother’s violence, a mama’s boy until he reached adolescence.
‘Clarence was a handful,’ Ivy explained. ‘You could whip that boy from morning till night, didn’t do no good. No, sir. Clarence jus’ take that whippin’ and do what he gonna do.’
‘And DuWayne?’
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br /> ‘Now DuWayne, he near about worshipped his big brother. Wanted to be just like the boy. Onliest thing, he was a sweet child. No kinda way did he have the heart for that life. Tore me up when the streets got him.’
Ivy’s prim living and dining rooms were smothered with lace doilies – the couch where Adele and I sat, the chairs facing us, the end tables, the polished tops of a dining-room table and a long sideboard. The doilies echoed the oversized lace trim on the collar and sleeves of Ivy’s tan dress, which she’d buttoned to the throat. A widow in her mid-seventies, her eyes swam behind thick-lensed glasses with amber frames large enough to hide her forehead.
I’d run across Ivy Whittingtons in the past, black women who’d seen everything there was to see, who’d suffered every kind of sorrow life has to offer. Always polite, they maintained their dignity with an iron will and their eyes gave nothing away.
‘See, what happened, after that cop murdered Clarence, the city offered Reba – that’s Clarence and DuWayne’s mama – a two hundred thousand dollar settlement. Reba’s lawyer, he says, “You hold out, Reba, you’ll get a lot more.” But Reba was always flighty. She took the deal and went off to Trinidad with Quentin.’
‘Quentin?’
‘Her new husband. Quentin’s from the Islands, a musician.’
‘And what about DuWayne? Did she cut him in?’
‘She gave the boy a little somethin’, but he just turned around and stuck it in his arm. See, the way it was, DuWayne couldn’t keep up with his brother. That’s why he started usin’ the drugs. So he wouldn’t have to face himself.’
At that point, I made my pitch. ‘I won’t insult you,’ I told her, ‘by saying that half the cops in New York are looking for your nephew. You’ve read the papers, watched the news. You know. But what I am gonna say is that if DuWayne surrenders, he’s gonna be a hundred times better off. I’m not asking you to tell us where he is, even if you know. Just talk to him, Mrs Whittington, put the facts out there. Does he really want to be in some apartment when a SWAT team breaks through the door?’
Ivy stopped me with a wave of her hand. ‘Is there a warrant out on the boy?’ she asked.
When I admitted there wasn’t, she smiled, exposing teeth so pearly-white they could not have been her own. ‘Now why,’ she asked, ‘would a damn SWAT team be lookin’ for somebody who ain’t wanted for nothin’?’
Though I didn’t have a ready answer, I persisted, explaining once again the benefits of voluntary surrender, finally offering my business card. Ivy held the card up to the light, as if examining it for flaws. ‘DuWayne and me don’t stay in touch,’ she finally said. ‘You wanna speak to DuWayne’s cousin, Kamia. She and DuWayne, they run with the same crowd.’
‘Does Kamia have an address?’
‘She does now. The Fire Department carried her over to the hospital, Wyckoff Heights, day before last. Matter of fact, I’m fixin’ to go over and visit. Kamia’s my first daughter’s girl.’
In the course of the afternoon, we interviewed Kamia (who’d overdosed on heroin), along with another five individuals, including one of Spott’s hookers. They insisted that David Lodge was not on DuWayne’s agenda. Sure, DuWayne might have made some kind of threat seven years ago when Lodge was sentenced, but that was just DuWayne shooting off his big mouth.
‘See, DuWayne, he keep his bitches in line,’ we were told at one point, ‘but he don’t wanna get it on with dudes. Hear what Ah’m sayin’? The nigga’s a punk.’
By seven o’clock, when the lieutenant summoned us back to the house, Adele and I were both ready to call it a day. Most of what we’d been told merely confirmed what we already knew. No one, for instance, remembered DuWayne even mentioning Lodge’s name in the last few months. DuWayne had all he could handle trying to maintain his perilous hold on the hustler’s life. What with all the dope he was shooting, he couldn’t take care of his women properly and his stable was on the verge of disintegration.
What had struck me, as the interviews piled up, was how eager people were to speak to us, even the street-wise who ordinarily wouldn’t give us the time of day. I judged their enthusiasm to be an indication of truthfulness. They were outraged by the media’s treatment of DuWayne Spott and they wanted to correct the record. As if DuWayne not killing Lodge somehow made him an innocent bystander.
But they couldn’t tell us the only thing we needed to know at that moment: Spott’s whereabouts. One acquaintance had seen DuWayne on Sunday, in the early afternoon, but nobody had run across him since then. Disappearing wasn’t like him, they insisted. DuWayne mostly kept a close eye on his women because they were all he had left.
‘Once on a time,’ Kamia explained from her bed, ‘DuWayne used to do deals. But like, for the last year, he jus’ into his dope. That’s what he livin’ for.’
I’d accepted Kamia’s statement with a nod, then asked if any other cops, maybe someone from the Eight-Three, had been to see her.
‘Uh-uh,’ she replied, ‘you the first.’
I’d asked the same question at each interview, and received the same response. If any effort was being made to locate DuWayne, aside from our own, they knew nothing of it.
When I brought this up to Adele on the way to the house, she merely shrugged. ‘I’m disappointed,’ she told me.
‘Because we’re the only ones looking for DuWayne?’
‘DuWayne’s already dead.’
‘That’s one possibility, but it doesn’t answer my question.’
‘I’m disappointed with you, Corbin. What’s happening here isn’t right.’
But I already knew that, and when my cell phone began to ring, closing off the discussion, I was grateful. I answered quickly, turning my face away from Adele who was still glaring at me. I was expecting to hear Bill Sarney on the other end, but it was my informant with his death-rattle whisper.
You’re too late, Harry. Four-Eight-Three Ingraham Street. In the back.
We drove in silence, down Wyckoff Avenue and across Flushing Avenue, the traditional dividing line between the workers and their workplaces, and into the industrial section of Bushwick. It was past seven, the sun long ago set, and most of the low-rise warehouses had shut down for the night. Though vibrant during the day, the short blocks were very quiet now, the single exception being a waste management plant busy dispatching a column of green refuse trucks on their nightly run to collect Manhattan’s commercial waste. Surrounded by a rusting chain-link fence, the intensely lighted yard seemed as garish as a Las Vegas hotel.
By contrast, the four hundred block of Ingraham Street was absolutely deserted. Pale orange light fanned outward from the only functioning street lamp, collecting in the mist and the slushy puddles at the curb. That it failed to reach the warehouses on either side of the street goes without saying, but Adele and I had no trouble locating 483 Ingraham. Almost dead center on the south side of the block, a single abandoned tenement rose two stories above its industrial neighbors. The tenement’s brick had been painted white decades ago, and its paint had now cracked into thousands of tiny shards. The shards cast leaf-like shadows that danced in the flashlight beams Adele and I played over the tenement’s facade. From where we stood on the sidewalk, the building was in compliance with city code. The windows had been replaced with sheets of plywood and the door sealed with cinder blocks upon which some helpful city worker had painted the number 483 in red letters.
Followed by Adele, I walked to the eastern corner of the building, to a narrow alley. Though the alley was no more than five feet wide, the walls on either side were covered with graffiti, mostly tags, but with a few figures as well. A purple dragon holding a bleeding woman in its mouth; a pit bull with a goofy expression and the physique of a superhero, and a black Jesus hanging from the cross.
Adele unbuttoned her coat, removed her automatic and laid it across her body with the barrel pointing at the wall. She took a step, but I reached out to stop her. ‘We’re going to have a look around,’ I said, ‘but we are not going
to remove any item of evidence. Under no circumstances, no matter what. We leave the scene the way we found it.’
Adele’s smile widened and her eyes narrowed slightly, as a cat’s eyes narrow with pleasure when its back is stroked. Driven by warming temperatures, the mist had thickened, beading on Adele’s hair and on her shoulders and her dark lashes.
I took out my own weapon, let it drop to my side. Adele was already in the alley.
SIXTEEN
We emerged, finally, into a back yard of packed earth dominated by an alianthus tree that rose to the tenement’s roof line. Moisture dripped steadily from the tree’s branches onto mounds of trash that virtually filled the yard. The trash appeared to be mostly industrial – bits of old machinery, crushed shipping pallets and cardboard boxes. Adele and I worked our way through puddles of filthy slush, toward the rear of the yard, until we could see the whole of the tenement’s back wall. In the center of the building, a narrow door had been closed off with cinder blocks, like the door in front, but some enterprising mutt had punched a hole in the cinder blocks large enough to slip through.
I went inside first, holding the flashlight well away from my body, shouting, ‘Police,’ as loud as I could. Abandoned tenements are haunted by the street’s ultimate bottom feeders, the terminally addicted and the truly insane, either of whom might pose a serious threat to life and limb. Especially if surprised.
But DuWayne Spott was one bottom feeder who would never again pose a serious threat to anyone. He was lying on his back, on a mattress, his coat beside him, the right sleeve of a Los Angeles Lakers sweatshirt pushed up almost to his shoulder. A thin belt, a tourniquet, circled his arm just above his elbow, while a disposable syringe rose from his forearm like an upraised finger. Though open, his unblinking eyes were fixed and dull, his chest neither rising nor falling.
Adele ran her flashlight over the stretch of concrete floor between herself and Spott, illuminating a dozen well-formed shoe impressions. Carefully avoiding them, she approached the mattress and squatted to verify the obvious. First, she placed her fingers to Spott’s throat, then laid her ear on his chest, finally nodded once. Then she began to manipulate Spott’s joints and muscles in an effort to measure rigor mortis. Typically patient and thorough, she worked his fingers, elbows and shoulders, his knees, hips and neck, his eyelids, mouth and jaw.
Bodies in Winter Page 10
