Bodies in Winter (12 page)

I placed the photograph in her hand, forcing her to look at herself, posed on a strip of sand in her blue bikini, her youthful sexuality as innocent and unaffected as her smile. That her husband had kept that photo with him throughout his prison years was as inescapable as the fact that she was no longer the girl in the picture. She was smaller now, and frightened, a middle-aged woman who'd taken so many wrong turns she no longer believed there was a right one out there.

Ellen Lodge continued to stare down at herself and I continued to stand in front of her. Maybe she was waiting for me to go away. I can't be sure. But eventually, though she didn't speak, she looked up at me through gray eyes that seemed drained of emotion.

‘Any hour of the day or night,' I reminded her. ‘I'll be there for you. All you have to do is dial my number.'

THIRTEEN

‘
I
'm sorry, Corbin,' Adele told me as the door to Ellen Lodge's house closed behind us and we descended to the street, ‘for what I said about you wanting to be rid of the case.'

I didn't respond and Adele, apparently, decided that I was still angry. But I hadn't been angry in the first place. As I've already said, Adele had a sharp tongue and I'd learned to live with it. No, what had captured my complete and undivided attention was the ankle-deep snow beneath which my shoes had disappeared. I'd had these loafers for years, had polished and conditioned the leather until the shine appeared to come from within. More to the point, having long ago molded themselves to my feet and toes, they were far and away the most comfortable shoes in my closet.

I don't like to think of myself as a fuck-up, a label applied to me often enough in the past. But this was beyond fuck-up. This was actually subhuman.

‘You were very good in there,' Adele continued. ‘The widow didn't know whether she was coming or going.'

I responded by opening the trunk of the Caprice and searching through our evidence kit until I found a handful of sterile gauze pads. Then I tossed the keys to Adele.

‘If I don't dry these shoes,' I explained, ‘I'm gonna end up throwin' 'em away.'

Though it took her a moment to shift gears, Adele didn't argue. She slid behind the wheel, then unlocked the passenger's door. Inside, I wasted no time. I took off my shoes and began to work the gauze into the leather. For all my good intentions, I succeeded only in transferring brown polish from the leather to the gauze pads to my fingers. The shoes remained as damp as ever, as did my socks and feet.

I was still holding my shoes a few minutes later when the cell phone in my jacket pocket began to ring.

‘Do you want me to get that?' Adele asked.

Ignoring my partner's sarcasm, I jammed my damp feet into my damp shoes and answered.

‘Corbin here.'

They're gonna roll your boy tonight, Harry. Unless you find him first
.

The phone went dead while I was still fumbling for a response. I put it back in my pocket, then repeated the message to Adele, doing my best to imitate my anonymous informant's gravelly whisper.

‘The plot thickens, partner,' she said. ‘Must be all that excrement pouring off the fan blades.'

It was still snowing hard enough to dot the windshield between swings of the wipers. Ahead of us, the rear end of a mini-van swung out as the vehicle tried to negotiate a right turn on the hard-packed snow. We were headed for the adjoining precinct, little more than a mile away, which was fortunate. City-wide, traffic would be a nightmare.

Adele finally broke the silence. ‘Can we assume,' she asked, ‘that the “boy” we need to find is DuWayne Spott?'

I shoved my feet under the heater, consigning my loafers to their fate. Somehow, dry was looking better and better. ‘Either that or some devious miscreant wants to throw us off the track. But here's a problem we need to deal with right now. Sarney told us to go ahead with the interview, but not to get in Russo's face. What exactly did he mean by that?'

‘What do you think he meant?'

I replied without hesitation. ‘You ask a question. You accept the answer that you're given.'

‘Corbin, are you suggesting that I'm argumentative?'

‘Perish the thought, partner.'

We met Dante Russo in the office assigned to the precinct's Community Affairs Officer. Russo was alone and sitting behind a desk near the center of the room when we arrived. He motioned us to a pair of small armchairs, explaining that the CAO, Justin Moore, was over at Bushwick High School, delivering an anti-drug lecture to the freshman class.

‘Ya know what I'm sayin', right? This is your brain. This is your brain on drugs. Meanwhile, the little humps know more about dope than he'll ever know.'

As I sat down, I slid my chair toward the end of the desk, separating myself from Adele. The first thing I noticed, before Adele fired off a single question, was that Russo's warm and friendly voice didn't match his expression. He sat with his jaw thrust forward, staring down at us along the length of his long nose. The net effect was disdain, an impression reinforced by his full lips which were noticeably compressed.

‘So,' he said, ‘what can I do ya for?'

Adele crossed her legs, attracting his rapt attention. ‘I don't know if you're aware of it,' she told him, ‘but Clarence Spott's case file is missing.'

Russo took a second to answer. ‘No, I wasn't.'

‘Eventually, of course, we'll get a copy from the DA, but for right now, we're kind of dancing in the dark.'

‘What can I do to help?'

‘Well, why don't you run down the events leading to Spott's arrest?'

We got the official version, of that I was certain, the one that held Dante Russo blameless. Clarence Spott was a known drug dealer whose photo had been on display in the muster room for weeks. Russo had recognized him, stopped his car, finally ordered him to get out. Then, in quick succession, Spott called Lodge a pig, Lodge slapped Spott, Spott punched Lodge, Lodge reacted predictably.

‘I eventually managed to pull him off, but Dave's a big guy and—'

‘Was,' Adele corrected.

‘Was?'

‘Dave
was
a big guy. Now he's dead.'

Russo's chin rose a millimeter even as his tone became more confidential. ‘Dave was mostly OK when he was sober. But he couldn't lay off the bottle, not for more than a couple of days. I tried to convince him to check into rehab, but askin' for help wasn't his style.' When Russo paused, Adele simply nodded for him to continue. ‘Anyway, after I got my partner under control, we transported Spott to the house. Lieutenant Whitlock – he was the desk officer – told us to dump him in a cell, which we did. I was out front, talkin' to Whitlock about whether we should get medical attention for the prisoner, when I found out he was dead. The last I saw of Dave, he was in the cell area with an officer named Szarek.'

‘The Broom.'

‘Yeah, the Broom.'

‘He's dead, too.'

Russo shrugged. ‘I heard he ate his gun.'

‘Then you heard wrong.' Adele put her forefinger to her temple and mimed pulling a trigger. ‘He put one in the side of his head.'

Adele was working herself up. That much was obvious. What was equally obvious was that she wasn't looking at the situation from her subject's point of view. Russo was holding his nose so high that he might have been sniffing for the carcass of a dead rat. But it was the disconnect between Russo's tone and his expression that interested me most. The differences were so pronounced that he might have been two people. Not that I felt he was the victim of some obscure personality disorder. Russo's mastery of the vocal part of his act was impressive – his voice remained honey-smooth and he would not be flustered – but he still needed work on the visual part. He was giving his hand away.

By then, I was sure that Russo was lying, and not without reason. The way he was telling the story, he'd immediately intervened on Spott's behalf. That wasn't true. Spott's extensive injuries had been inflicted in the course of a prolonged beating. More than likely, he and Lodge had carted Spott off to some quiet corner of the precinct where David Lodge had administered a serious tune-up while his partner watched out for the sergeant.

Russo, of course, was in no position to admit to any of the above. He'd escaped punishment because the story he offered the bosses suited their interests, the same story he now offered to Detectives Corbin and Bentibi.

‘Ate his gun,' Russo told my partner, ‘is just a figure of speech. Szarek and I were never friends.' Russo's lips expanded into a smile that didn't come within a shouting distance of his eyes. ‘Anything else?'

‘Just a couple of items. You told me that you pulled Spott to the curb around three-thirty in the morning.'

‘That's right.'

‘And he was the only one in the car?'

‘Right again.'

‘So, I was wondering what happened to the car? Did you search it?'

‘Gimme a break. My partner was bleeding, the prisoner was bleeding. No way did I have time to worry about Spott's car.'

‘But you notified the sergeant that you were transporting a prisoner to the house, right?'

Russo shook his head. ‘What with all the blood, I thought my best move was to get inside and let the desk officer sweat the details.'

‘Well, did someone go back later? Was the car towed into the precinct?'

Russo's chin finally came down. ‘Look, the way our snitches are tellin' the story, David Lodge was blown away by DuWayne Spott who first swore to take revenge seven years ago. So you'll have to excuse me if I don't understand why you wanna know what happened to Clarence Spott's car.'

‘It's just that . . .' Adele waved her hand, a circular gesture that might have meant anything. ‘I mean, all this happened on Knickerbocker Avenue. That's the main drag in Bushwick, the shopping district, and there's a subway stop at Myrtle Avenue, too.'

‘At three-thirty, everything's closed up. And the subway – if it should happen to be on time, which mostly it isn't – runs every twenty-five minutes.'

Adele smiled brightly. ‘What about CSU? Didn't they process the Knickerbocker scene? Why didn't they tow the car to their evidence yard?'

Russo's chin resumed its customary jut and his smile vanished. ‘Detective, I have no idea what happened to Spott's car. As you can imagine, the house was swarmin' with bosses at the time. Internal Affairs was there too, and they had lots of questions.'

He should have let it drop at that point. The first rule of resistance, in a police interrogation room or on a witness stand, is never volunteer anything. But Russo needed to impress the two pissant detectives who'd come to question him. He couldn't help himself.

‘They were gonna try to take me down with Lodge,' he finally added, ‘but I lawyered up right away.'

‘How about your partner? Did Lodge get a lawyer?'

‘Hey, I was the PBA delegate. Helpin' cops out is what I did. No way I'd let the cop-haters from IAB get their hands on Davy.'

FOURTEEN

W
hen 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.'