Bodies in Winter (10 page)

From Spain, the ‘family' went to Istanbul, on the shores of the Black Sea, then to Baku, on the Caspian, then to Baghdad, Tunis, Cairo and back to Istanbul. Restless as gypsies, they were always on the move, always calculating the dangers around them.

They were in Damascus in 1840 when things again came to a head. A Capuchin monk and his servant disappeared. A Jewish barber was tortured until he admitted the men were murdered because their blood was needed for Jewish rituals. More Jews were then arrested and tortured until the Ottomans, at the request of the British and French governments, ordered the surviving Jewish prisoners released.

But the Damascus Affair was only the first of many similar persecutions that finally drove the Bentibis (by then, Adele was speaking of her actual family) out of the Islamic world. They'd gone to Belgium first, in 1948, then come to New York, settling along the southern end of Main Street in the Queens neighborhood of Flushing. Adele was the youngest child of the youngest child to make that journey.

We were outside by the time I realized that Adele had answered my second question in her own way. Her voice hadn't betrayed a hint of self-pity when she told her tale. Nevertheless, I now understood that, for Adele Bentibi, the job was about justice.

And I understood something else, as well. I'd spoken to a number of cops, including Jack Petro, about my intention to seek another partner and it had almost certainly gotten back to Adele. In the family-like atmosphere of a New York City precinct house, secrets are rarely kept for any length of time. So, why had Adele, ordinarily so closed, suddenly confided in me? What message was she sending? I played with both questions before I decided that revealing herself was Adele's way of asking me to continue the partnership. Partners, after all, tell each other everything.

It was hot on the street, especially in contrast to the heavily air-conditioned restaurant, and foggy as well. As I stood out on the sidewalk with my hands in my pockets, the fog settled around my face and throat, hot and slick, like the breath of an animal. Adele was standing in front of me, her face turned up, her dark and slanted eyes for once soft and vulnerable. I stared down into those eyes for a long moment, the urge to take her into my arms, to taste her mouth, nearly overwhelming. And I was almost certain she'd respond, that I wouldn't be rejected. Adele was leaning forward, her weight on the balls of her feet, as if about to sprint, and she continued to stare into my eyes until I finally chickened out.

‘Goodnight, partner,' I said, making a feeble attempt to keep my tone casual. ‘I'll see you in the morning.'

‘Corbin,' Adele said as I approached her desk, ‘look at these. Tell me if you see what I see.'

I watched Adele lay eight crime scene photos, in two rows of four, on my desk.

‘Am I allowed to hang up my coat first?'

‘Of course.'

The detective squad at the One-Sixteen covered most of the second floor of a three-story brick building on Catalpa Avenue. The layout was simple enough: a large room broken by the lieutenant's office, a door leading to a corridor, a corridor leading past three interview rooms. There were ten desks in the main room, set back-to-back. They were all in use when the squad was fully staffed, but times were tough and the NYPD, once 42,000 cops strong, was down to 35,000 and still shrinking. Our own little squad had been making do with eight detectives for almost a year.

When I came back to my desk, I settled down immediately. The photos were of Anthony Szarek as the Crime Scene Unit had found him two weeks before. The Broom was lying on his back, with his head propped up on pillows. A trail of spatter led from his left temple, across the bed and the floor, to a wall about eight feet away. The spatter caught my attention first, and I studied a series of photos depicting the blood trail closely, but found nothing out of place. I turned, then, to a close-up of the contact wound an inch from Szarek's right ear. The starburst pattern was similar to the one I'd observed on Lodge and perfectly consistent with suicide.

‘Was he drunk?' I asked without raising my eyes.

‘Very good. The Broom's blood-alcohol level was .32 when the trigger was pulled.'

‘That's drunk enough to be unconscious.'

‘Yes, it is.'

My gaze finally settled on the only photo I'd yet to consider. This one had been taken to illustrate the position of a .38 caliber revolver, a Smith & Wesson, relative to Szarek's hand and body. The weapon, a few inches from his fingers, was not out of place, and my eyes drifted eventually to his fingers, following them over his hand and wrist, then along his arm to the sleeve of his white T-shirt. It's what I didn't see that finally grabbed my attention.

When a bullet is fired into human flesh, small drops of blood and minute bits of tissue are propelled backward, in the direction from which the bullet came. If the Broom had been holding the gun to his head, there should have been blowback on his hand, his wrist, the T-shirt. But there wasn't, at least none I could see.

‘Anybody test for blood?' I finally asked Adele. ‘On Szarek's right hand and wrist?'

‘The assistant medical examiner who performed the autopsy. It was negative.'

‘What about gunpowder residue and nitrates?'

‘Those tests were also negative.'

The information was designed to set off alarm bells. No blowback? OK, I could live with that. No residue? I could live with that as well, though my suspicions would be aroused. But the absence of any physical evidence demonstrating that Szarek held the gun to his own head was a red flag that could not be dismissed.

I gathered the photos and passed them to Adele. ‘Two questions. First, how'd you get the photos? Second, did Lieutenant Bill Sarney authorize us to investigate Szarek's death?'

‘I got the photos and the reports from a friend of a friend at the 94
^th
Precinct. The lead detective on the case, by the way, was a lazy asshole named Mark Winnman. Mark was happy to go along when the medical examiner reported manner of death as probable suicide.'

‘Did you bring up the lab findings with Detective Winnman?'

‘I did, and guess what? By the time the reports came in two weeks later, the case was closed. Winnman, he didn't even read them.'

‘Just stuck 'em in the file and forgot about 'em? That how it went?' When Adele responded with an amused smile, I continued. ‘But you didn't answer the other question, partner. Did you tell Sarney you were gonna check out Szarek's death before you did it?'

She shook her head.

‘How about afterwards?'

‘Afterwards, yes. I brought the photos and the lab reports to his attention.'

‘And how did he react?'

‘Badly.'

I took a moment to get my temper under control, but I couldn't shake the feeling that partnering was a one-way street for Adele. ‘So what's it gonna be?' I finally asked. ‘Games all the way down the line? Because you're acting here as if I don't exist.' I silenced her reply with a wave of my hand. ‘What you do reflects on me. I can't say it any plainer than that. Your consequences are my consequences.'

Adele looked at me for a moment, her eyes progressively hardening, and I realized that her thirst for justice would always come before her loyalty to Harry Corbin. An instant later her words confirmed that insight.

‘Feel free to disown me,' she declared, ‘whenever you find it convenient. In the meantime, are you ready for dinner? Because I've been waiting for you since five o'clock.'

But I wasn't ready, not quite. I took three DD5s from my desk drawer, one each for Beauchamp, Jarazelsky and Dr Nagy, then wrote up meticulous summaries of each of their interviews. When I was finished, I carried them directly to Bill Sarney's office. Sarney and I had reached a point in our relationship where, at least in private, I called him by his first name.

I took a chair without asking permission, careful to keep my tone casual as I summarized the fives I tossed on his desk. If Sarney wanted to raise the issue of Szarek's case file, he'd have to do it himself.

He didn't wait long, only until I shut up a few minutes later. ‘What's going on with you, Harry?' he asked. ‘Why would you expand your investigation to include an ex-cop who committed suicide without telling me in advance? You couldn't have thought I'd be OK with that.'

Adele's consequences were mine, just as I'd predicted, but I might have tried to shed them by disowning her.
Hey, Bill, I'm not her father. What she does on her own time is her own business. I can't be with her twenty-four hours a day.
Instead, I made a promise I couldn't keep. I told Sarney that it wouldn't happen again.

‘I need some idea of where this is going, Bill. Otherwise, me and Adele, we have no choice. We have to follow wherever the trail leads. You can see that, right?'

Sarney grinned. ‘A couple of hours from now, just in time for the eleven o'clock news, an Inspector named Rita Meyers will make two announcements at a press conference. First, she'll tell the reporters that the Ballistics Unit has matched the TEC-9 found in the Toyota with fourteen shell casings discovered at the Lodge crime scene. Then she'll announce that a man named DuWayne Spott, whereabouts unknown, has been named as a person of interest. You understand, Harry, this is the first time a boss has appeared in connection with the case.'

I'd asked Sarney for a heads-up and he'd complied. I had no beef here. ‘So where does that leave me and my partner, Bill? Do we continue to investigate?'

‘Harry, you can color to your heart's content, as long as you stay between the lines. Now, there's one more thing. I'm not stupid. I know you can't control your partner's urge to self-destruct. But what I'd like you to do is keep an eye on her. If she jumps the tracks again, I wanna be the first to know.'

‘It's not that easy, Bill. You're asking me to spy on my partner.'

There was an edge to my voice, and I'm sure Sarney heard it. But he wasn't intimidated. He leaned forward in his chair and lowered his chin until he was looking at me through his eyebrows. ‘Sometimes in life,' he explained, not unkindly, ‘you gotta watch out for your own ass. If your partner understood that, we wouldn't be having this conversation.'

ELEVEN

I
t was almost nine before we finally sat down to a meal, this one in a diner several blocks from the precinct. By then, Adele and I were observing a somewhat uneasy truce. Nothing had been resolved, of course, but there was no way, between Dr Nagy and Tony Szarek, we could sit across from each other and not discuss the case. We were cops, after all.

So we began with something easy: trashing Detective Winnman's reputation. According to Adele, not only hadn't he read the lab reports, he'd failed to speak to Szarek's family and friends, or to conduct a routine canvas of the building. From Winnman, we moved to the Broom, eventually conceding that suicide could not be ruled out, not absolutely, by the ME's findings. Not that it mattered all that much. For the time being, our hands were tied. Sarney had already told Adele that if the Szarek case was reopened, she and I would not be the investigators.

Gregorio, our waiter, showed up at that moment with a pair of Heinekens, which he set on the table. Though Gregorio also brought two glasses, Adele and I quickly pushed them to the side. They were still warm from the dishwasher, one of the hazards of ordering beer in a diner.

‘According to Sarney,' I began, ‘there's gonna be a press conference tonight, at which a boss named Meyers will tell the world that DuWayne is a person of interest, and that some of the shell casings recovered at the Lodge scene were fired by the TEC-9 found in the Toyota.'

I watched Adele's cheeks flame. ‘Ellen Lodge and Jarazelsky are both lying,' she declared, her tone bitter and contemptuous, ‘and the job is buying into their lies. I went to OCCB this morning and spoke to Sgt Merkovich. DuWayne Spott isn't a ghetto don, not even close. He's a pimp and a low-level cocaine dealer. According to Merkovich's snitches, there are only four men in his entire crew, most of them relatives or kids he grew up with. He couldn't have known when Lodge was going to be released, much less where Lodge was headed. It's simply impossible.'

I broke a salted roll in half and buttered one end. ‘What was Sarney's reaction when you told him about Lodge's file being . . . How did that jerk from Archives put it?'

‘Unable to locate at this time.'

‘So, what'd Sarney have to say when you told him Lodge's file was temporarily unlocatable?'

‘He said he'd make a formal request to the DA's office for their copy, plus he'd contact CSU and the crime lab to see what they had in their own files.'

‘He offer a time-frame?'

‘Nope. But there's good news, too. We'll have Ellen Lodge's phone records tomorrow morning.'

Our dinners arrived a few minutes later: meat, gravy, potatoes and a few broccoli spears that'd been stewing for the better part of the day. As I ate, I allowed myself to fall into the minds of the conspirators, a practice I commonly follow prior to interrogations. From their point of view, the news coming from Jarazelsky must have been devastating. Lodge's recovered memory would be meaningless in a court of law. The only way he could prove his innocence was by persuading somebody else to confess.

By this time I knew quite a bit about David Lodge, and not only from Nagy and Beauchamp. The newspaper stories had included extensive accounts of the events leading up to Lodge's guilty plea seven years earlier. One item in particular had caught my attention. According to the ME, Clarence Spott had been severely beaten prior to being struck with the blackjack. That beating had occurred outside the precinct and had been delivered by David Lodge, who'd already been the subject of a dozen civilian complaints alleging police brutality.