Bodies in Winter (21 page)

My remarks produced no more than a shrug. This was ground Adele had already been over and she simply changed the subject. ‘Irony,' she observed, the word coming out: eye-own-eee. ‘Tony Szarek's murder. If it has nothing to do with David Lodge.'

By this time, Adele knew the particulars of my day, knew that the Broom had a destitute brother who hated him and a young mistress who was suing for half of his estate. It was at least possible that one or the other (or even the good sister, Trina) had killed him. The ME's failure to discover traces of gunpowder residue on Szarek's hand had troubled me from the beginning. If his killer had simply touched the gun to Szarek's palm and the inside of his fingers after it was fired, the tests would have come back positive. Cops would know that.

But even if we'd made false assumptions, if we'd been drawn to the Broom by mere coincidence, examining his life had enabled us to connect Russo, Jarazelsky, Szarek and Justin Whitlock. The Broom's actual killer was now irrelevant.

‘They had no time to worry about the Broom,' Adele continued. ‘David Lodge was coming out of jail bent on revenge. He had to be taken down, no matter what the risks.' Adele reached out to lay the fingers of her left hand on my arm. Despite the bandages and raccoon eyes, her gaze was too intense for me to mistake her intentions. ‘The panic is still out there. All you have to do is stir the pot.'

‘Then what?'

‘Then somebody will come after you, Corbin, just like they came after David Lodge, just like they came after me.'

We were up on the 59th Street Bridge by then, the Island of Manhattan before us completely obscured by the snow. I watched Adele's hand drop to her lap and her gaze return to the accumulating snow on the roadbed. ‘Corbin,' she said.

‘What.'

‘Thank you.'

‘For what?'

That brought a little smile and a change of subject. ‘How much are we supposed to get?' Adele asked, pointing through the windshield. ‘How much snow?'

‘Three or four inches, nothing to worry about. We should be looking at temperatures in the upper forties tomorrow.'

I thought back to the day I'd ruined my loafers, the day we found DuWayne Spott. At the time, I'd been the one without a clue. Now my feet were encased in a pair of waterproof Timberland boots and Adele was wearing flat-heeled pumps. It was a neat reversal of our customary roles, and not at all unpleasant.

Adele and I began to discuss tactics and overall strategy as we drove south along Second Avenue, a discussion that continued as I carried her bags into my apartment, as I made up the bed in the spare room, as I prepared a dinner of soft-boiled eggs and buttered bread that Adele managed to get past her swollen lips. We stayed at it until nearly ten o'clock when Adele finally plucked a vial of pain killers, Percocets, from her handbag. The Percocets had been prescribed and filled at North Shore Hospital, a kindness negated by a thoughtless pharmacist who'd topped the vial with a child-resistant cap. Though it couldn't be opened with one hand, Adele kept trying until I took the vial from her fingers.

‘You know, Adele,' I said as I twisted the cap and shook out a round white tablet. ‘It's OK to ask for help. Remember, no woman is an island.'

I watched Adele rise to her feet and carry the tablet into the kitchen. By this time we'd pretty much settled on our strategy and my thoughts had taken a more playful turn. Adele's body, when in motion, had always contradicted her customary air of self-control. Far from willowy, her shoulders were relatively broad, her confident stride an unconscious echo of the fearlessness so obvious in her gaze. I followed that body into the kitchen where I almost got up the nerve to make the move I'd been dreaming about for many months. That I settled for a glimpse of the nape of her neck as she bent over the sink had nothing to do with Mel, or with a justifiable fear of the shape her rejection might take. No, the reason I didn't press my lips to Adele's neck sprang from a fear of acceptance. This wasn't about a weekend rendezvous, two days of give and take before everybody goes home, the party's over. In many ways, Adele had remained a mystery to me throughout our partnership, but there was no mistaking this piece of the puzzle. Adele Bentibi was commitment prone.

A half-hour later, Adele retreated to her room, already a little woozy, and I was off to the Y for a swim. Though I'd hoped to relax into an easy rhythm, I never did find my stroke and spent forty-five minutes thrashing around. I didn't think about Dante Russo as I thrashed, or any of the other actors, or even about Adele. Instead, my thoughts drifted to the day Roderigo Carrabal slashed my chest on the basketball court behind the Jacob Riis Houses. At the time, we were disputing an out-of-bounds call.

Carrabal was trying for my face, which I managed to jerk out of the way. As it was, the gash ran from one shoulder to the other, passing just beneath my collar bone, and required stitches on the inside as well as the outside.

The stitches were sewn into my flesh at Cabrini Hospital on 19th Street by a sour-tempered resident who greeted every flinch with a disapproving scowl. Still, the resident was a deal kinder than the two detectives who interviewed me later on. They smelled an easy collar and when I insisted that I couldn't identify my assailant, they finally smacked me in the head, one after the other, before they took off.

I began to stalk Roderigo Carrabal long before my wound healed. He was never out of my mind, not for a waking moment. I felt that I'd been put to a test. If I didn't pass, I'd be engulfed by the fear still crouched somewhere in my subconscious, held at bay only by the promise of revenge.

Roderigo wasn't much of a fighter as it turned out. When I finally caught him alone, he looked at the length of pipe in my right hand and began to beg in a mix of Spanish and English that left no doubt as to his sincerity. It didn't help him, though.

TWENTY-SIX

I
got on the phone at seven-thirty the following morning, to the NYPD's sick desk in Lefrak City where I explained that I was fighting a bad cold and would be out, probably for the next few days. The desk officer took my information without comment, then hung up. Ten minutes later, my phone rang. It was Bill Sarney.

‘What's up, Harry?' he asked. ‘I just got a call from the sick desk.'

I let my voice drop to a near whisper. ‘I gotta keep it down,' I said. ‘Adele's in the shower.' In fact, she'd come into my office and was standing ten feet away.

‘She's staying with you?'

‘Yup, I talked her into it. I didn't see any other way to keep track of what she was doing.'

‘And that's why you called in sick?'

‘Now you're gettin' it.'

After a brief pause, Sarney declared, ‘I like it, Harry, but I do have one question.'

‘And what's that?'

‘You nailin' the bitch?'

‘Nailing Adele? Shit, I'd rather get in bed with a crocodile. This is a woman who bites.'

When I glanced at Adele and found her smiling, my mood lightened for the first time in weeks. The sense was as much physical as psychological, a slight rising on the balls of my feet, a sharpening of my attention. No more conflict. Now I could focus.

‘Yeah, well speaking of biting, you have any idea what she's up to?'

‘Healing, Bill, is about all she can manage right now.'

‘Yeah, I heard she got mugged.' Sarney delivered the party line smoothly, just to make certain that we were all in agreement. When I didn't argue the point, he continued. ‘But I didn't think it was that bad. The lieutenant at the One-Eleven told me she only had a slight—'

‘Wait a second.' I put my hand over the mouthpiece and counted slowly to five. ‘Adele just turned off the water in the shower. We better make this quick. Look, all I know for sure is that she got her hands on the David Lodge file and she's been feeding bits of it to Gruber at the
Times
.'

‘This is not news, Harry.'

‘OK, the other thing is that she wants to go public with her injuries. You know, claiming that she was set up by other cops.' I paused again, this time only for a second, then said, ‘I gotta go, Bill. She's comin' out.'

Adele was still smiling when I followed her into the office where she took a seat before my computer. I remember that her pajamas, blue and silky, were airing on the carefully made single bed, and that a vaguely floral scent hung in the air. I breathed that scent eagerly as I squatted behind her chair and peered at the monitor on the desk. Generally, my apartment smelled faintly of the chlorine I brought home from the pool.

Prior to Sarney's call, Adele had been checking out the source of the email I'd received on the prior morning, the one that included Russo's photograph. In my ignorance, I'd hoped the return address would be of value in identifying the sender. No such luck.

‘A public library,' Adele told me, ‘in Brooklyn.' After a moment, she added, ‘Library computers are designed to serve people who can't afford their own computers, to give them open access to the internet.'

‘Which means?'

‘That anybody with a library card might have sent that email.'

I took the mouse from Adele and quickly accessed my new messages, hoping to hear from B.Arnold@midwood/BPL.lib. But I struck out there as well and shut down the computer.

‘Time to get moving.'

Adele stood and followed me into the living room. She was wearing a pair of neatly creased white slacks over a loose turtleneck sweater. I imagined her slowly drawing her right arm through the sweater's sleeve, inch by inch, noting that her bra had defeated her altogether. Helping Adele dress was her husband's job, of course, one of those in-sickness-and-in-health obligations you take on when you pronounce your wedding vows. Another humiliation for Adele, for whom going bra-less had never been a possibility.

I walked to the closet nearest the front door and lifted a Kevlar vest from a hanger. Like most detectives, I rarely wore body armor on the street, my job not being all that dangerous. But things were different now, and I needed to acknowledge the changed circumstances. Removing my shirt and sliding into the vest did just that. There's nothing like the weight of Grade II body armor to concentrate the mind.

I made one stop before heading off to Greenpoint, at a tiny store on 14th Street where I contracted for a pair of pre-paid cell phones, putting 300 minutes on each one. Then I returned to my apartment where I gave one to Adele. She took the phone from my hand, then rose on tiptoes to kiss me on the cheek. Though the kiss was very gentle, she winced before settling on her heels.

‘Take care,' she said.

A half-hour later, I was parked on India Street a hundred yards away from Greenpoint Carton Supply, munching on a fried egg sandwich and swilling coffee from a container large enough to hold a milk shake. The entire block was industrial, lined on both sides with sprawling two- and three-story brick buildings pocked with filthy windows. This was a world from which all pretense had been relentlessly scrubbed, a world devoid of corporate parks and instantly recognized logos. This was where you came to work, if you were a worker, or to make a profit if you were a boss; a place where you started early and you finished late and you never pretended, not for a minute, that there was anything glamorous about your day.

New York City is, in many ways, as dependent on Greenpoint and similar neighborhoods in every borough as on the multinational giants in Manhattan. In fact, if you stripped Rockefeller Center of every item supplied by warehouses like Greenpoint Carton, you'd have a bunch of executives in two-thousand dollar suits crouched on bare floors, staring at bare walls.

My purpose, at that moment, however, had nothing to do with New York's complex ecology. I needed to know whether Greenpoint Carton was a functioning business. That question was answered at nine-thirty when five box trucks, solid twenty-footers with beefed-up rear axles, pulled from a small yard on the northern side of the building. Headed out on delivery runs, each bore a stylized GCS logo on its front doors.

I'd been hoping that Greenpoint Carton would fail the test, that it would come up a pure front operation. Though I'd still be unable to conduct a financial investigation, the knowledge could be useful. But that wasn't the case and there was nothing to do but get off my lazy ass and go to work.

My initial impression, when I entered Greenpoint Carton Supply, was of an impenetrable maze. Brown cartons of every size, stacked on wooden pallets, rose to the second-floor windows in a seemingly random pattern. The cardboard smelled like fresh sawdust and reminded me of Sparkle's in the early evening.

All around me, workers zipped by on forklifts powered by cylinders of propane. I expected one of them to slow down long enough to ask me what I wanted. They didn't, though I was favored with a number of curious glances, and I finally wandered across the face of the building until I found a set of stairs leading up. Again, though I was in plain sight, nobody challenged me as I climbed to a second-floor balcony fronting a small office.

For a moment, before going inside, I watched the activity below me. There were four active fork-lifts moving through the stacks, lifting pallets, carrying them to the rear of the building, where two workers in heavy jackets and woolen caps cut the straps binding the cartons. They were putting together orders for delivery on the following day. When the trucks returned in the late afternoon, they'd be loaded before the workers punched out.

I finally turned to an open door leading into a deserted office. The office was as starkly functional as the rest of the warehouse: three battered wooden desks topped by gray blotters, dusty computers and telephones so grimy I couldn't name their color. Along the back wall, a row of three-drawer filing cabinets caught my attention and I walked over to them, trying the first drawer I could reach. It was locked.