Bodies in Winter (20 page)

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

I
t 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 weather 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.

Adele was talking about her husband, Mel, who was currently in Dallas, and whose failure to alter his plans didn't surprise me. I wondered what foolish dreams Adele had been nurturing. Had she hoped Mel would suddenly develop an emotional life, that she would find herself at the center of that life? If so, she'd been victimized by unrealistic expectations. Somewhere along the line, Mel had cut a deal with himself. So that he would never be hurt, he would never feel anything at all.

‘Maybe,' I finally said, ‘you should stash Mel in a corner for now, get back to him later.' I leaned forward to pull down the windshield's visor on her side of the car, revealing a mirror on the underside. ‘After all, if we don't survive, Mel's not gonna matter a whole lot.'

Much to my relief, Adele abruptly shifted gears. She'd been humiliated twice in the last forty-eight hours, by the man who attacked her and by the man who should have been there to comfort her. Right now, she was feeling helpless and helpless was definitely not her thing. It was time to fight back.

Though her lips were as swollen as ever, her skin purple above and below her bandages, Adele's speech was fairly confident, the new mechanics more familiar now as she described her activities during the week we'd been apart. There was very little I hadn't already guessed. Adele belonged to a number of associations open to women struggling with New York's various male-dominated law enforcement agencies, including the Department of Corrections and the District Attorney's office. Besides offering emotional support, the associations also functioned as mutual aid networks and Adele had exploited these connections to secure the various files. The single surprise was that she'd gotten a peek at the IAB file created when Pete Jarazelsky was arrested for burglary. Closely held, IAB files are difficult to secure under the best of circumstances.

‘Jarazelsky,' she finally told me, ‘was caught inside the warehouse, so he had no defense. He was alone at the time, but IAB suspected that he was part of an organized ring.'

‘Did he roll over?' One thing about crooked cops, they usually start naming names before the cuffs go on. That would be especially true of a rat like Jarazelsky.

‘No, he lawyered up right away.'

‘You think Jarazelsky made the same mistake as David Lodge? You think he spoke to the PBA delegate, Officer Dante Russo, before he asked for that lawyer?'

‘Pete Jarazelsky and David Lodge had the same lawyer, Corbin. A man named Theodore Savio.'

Adele was rolling the words in her mouth, stumbling over the syllables in a way that reminded me of Ewa Gierek, whose existence I revealed a short time later. My description of Ewa's milk-white skin, her invisible brows and tender years, was amusing enough to draw a genuine smile, which pleased me. By that time we were in Adele's apartment and she was filling a suitcase with clothing, doing it one-handed. She didn't ask for my help and I didn't offer it.

The phone began to ring downstairs as Adele closed the latches on the suitcase. If she heard it, I couldn't tell. She opened the drawer on her night table, took out a box and flipped off the cover, revealing a small automatic pistol. The weapon was designed to be carried in a pocket or beneath a waistband. There were no front or rear sights to snag on fabric and the shrouded hammer was buried in the gun's frame.

Adele had shown the automatic to me when she'd first purchased it as a back-up weapon. Though it didn't look like much, the AMT held five .40 caliber rounds. And like all semi-automatic handguns, it could be fired as fast as you could pull the trigger.

The phone stopped in mid-ring and Adele smiled before handing the weapon to me. ‘Corbin, please, jacking a round into the chamber is beyond me at the moment.'

I took it a step further, ejecting the magazine to make sure it was full. When I handed the gun back to Adele, she tucked it into the sling covering her right arm. The weight caused her to wince slightly, the only concession to pain she'd made so far.

The sleet had turned to snow by the time we started out for Rensselaer Village and I stayed with Northern Boulevard, though I might have jumped on the Cross Island Parkway. I was in no hurry. It was Sunday night, the streets nearly empty, the snow outside thick enough to reduce the neon tubes defining the commercial landscape to smears of color that rippled across the windshield with each stroke of the wipers. A block away, the headlights of an orange sanitation truck cut across the intersection and I lifted my foot from the gas. The truck turned in front of us, exposing a rotary machine on its tail-end that spit circles of rock salt onto the asphalt. Though I kept as far from the truck as possible, pellets of salt cracked into Adele's side of the car as we inched by.

‘Those files, they're useful,' I said after another long silence. ‘But maybe not in the way you think. Remember, you can't admit you have them. Nor can we access financial records or obtain warrants of any kind.'