Bodies in Winter (25 page)

‘Just like us?'

‘That's the way I'm hoping it'll go. If we're all heroes, how can we be enemies?'

We came through the door to find Nydia Santiago waiting for us on the sidewalk. Nydia didn't even glance in my direction. She jerked her chin at the middle of Adele's face and said, ‘Who did that?'

If Nydia's tone was demanding, Adele's was uncompromising. ‘Are there dirty cops in the Eight-Three?' she asked.

‘What?'

‘Because if there are dirty cops in the Eight-Three, they're the ones who did it. They punished me for picking up the rock they were hiding under.'

Over the last thirty years, police corruption scandals in New York have usually involved small groups of rogue officers who've been working together for years. They rip off dealers for drugs and money, put drugs back out on the street, sometimes even ride shotgun on large deals. Given the size of the NYPD and the latitude granted to ordinary patrol officers, the scandals have been relatively few and far between. But that wasn't the point Adele was making. Precincts in New York are quite small: Bushwick, for example, home to the 83rd, covers only two square miles and has well over a hundred officers working the streets. That's why it's impossible for rogue cops to operate anonymously. Other cops have to know.

Detective Nydia Santiago worked in the precinct, day after day, week after week, month after month. She had snitches of her own, naturally, snitches who'd undoubtedly repeated the same rumors Adele and I had so easily uncovered. I could see it in Nydia's eyes, that moment of reflection as she searched for a way to avoid the unpleasant truth.

I took out the small note pad I keep in my jacket pocket, wrote down the number of the cell phone I'd purchased earlier in the day, then tore off the sheet and offered it to Nydia.

‘If you want to get in touch with me, it'd be best if you didn't use my home number.'

Nydia stared into my eyes, her expression defiant. Then she snatched the sheet of paper from my hand and jammed it into her pocket. For a moment, I was certain that she'd speak, but she finally turned on her heel and marched back into Sparkle's without saying a word.

THIRTY-TWO

I
spotted the tail before I'd gone two blocks, not because I was especially alert, but because it's impossible to conduct a successful tail in a silver Jaguar. Not unless you want to be seen.

‘We have company,' I told Adele.

Adele glanced in the outside mirror on her side of the car, then looked at me. ‘Time to throw out the garbage.'

‘What?'

‘The garbage in the trunk, Corbin. Ellen Lodge's garbage. If you leave it where it is, the car will reek of it by tomorrow morning. And, of course, while you're disposing of the trash, you can take a closer look.'

We were on Wyckoff Avenue, a commercial street four lanes wide. I pulled to a stop, double-parking in front of an apartment building, then added the bags of trash in the Nissan's trunk to a mound of similar bags stacked at the curb. We'd only taken them in order to shake up Ellen and I certainly didn't intend to sort through the coffee grinds in my apartment. The Jaguar stopped about thirty yards away. Its headlights remained on and I could feel the bass notes projected by its many speakers rumbling in my chest.

‘Anything?' Adele said when I got back into the car.

‘Two guys in the front for sure. I couldn't see into the rear. The headlights were too bright.'

When in doubt, confront. I led the Jaguar across Flushing Avenue, to a deserted street lined with warehouses. Halfway down the block, I slammed on the brakes, then jerked the Nissan into reverse before stomping on the gas pedal.

Brakes and tires screaming, Jaguar and Nissan came to a halt within six feet of each other. Adele was the first one out the door. Without my noticing, she'd removed her arm from the sling and now held the .40 caliber AMT in her right hand.

‘Police,' she shouted. ‘Police, police.'

I came up on the driver's side of the Jaguar, my immediate goal to prevent the situation from escalating. I needn't have bothered. The two men inside were sitting absolutely still, their expressions at the same time insolent and bored. If they even heard the rap music pouring from the Jaguar's high-end sound system, they gave no sign.

Adele tapped on the passenger's window and made a little rolling motion with her left hand. Slowly, as though forcing his finger through increasing resistance, the man closest to her reached out to the controls on the door and let the window down. The music exploded onto the block, bouncing off the brick walls of the surrounding warehouses until it seemed to be coming from everywhere, so loud that I barely heard the trio of shots Adele fired into the dashboard, shutting down car and sound system both.

By the time the last echo died away, all eyes were on Adele and I felt the need to attract a bit of attention, just to remind the boys that I was still hanging around. So I kicked in the window on my side of the car, splattering the front seats and the men sitting on them with tiny shards of glass.

The man closest to me began to brush the glass off his lap. A Latino in his early twenties, he wore an Avirex leather jacket zipped to his throat. His soot-black hair was drawn into a pony tail that fell to his shoulder blades. The pony tail glistened as it moved, slivers of glass reflecting the pale amber light cast by a street lamp thirty feet away. ‘Wha' the fuck you doin'? I ain' committed no crime.'

‘How about driving while stupid?' Adele suggested.

‘Yeah,' I continued, ‘tailing somebody in a sixty-thousand-dollar car? You gotta be an idiot. Or did you want us to see you? Was that it? Were you disrespecting us? Because if I thought you were disrespecting us, I'd have to cuff you, take you into one of these alleys and teach you a lesson.'

‘We wasn't doin' nothin',' the man in the passenger seat declared. ‘We was just drivin' around.' He was the older of the two, wearing a down coat that reached his ankles and a knit cap that clung to the contours of his narrow head. A tattooed spider's web ran from the corner of his left eye to his temple, leaving me to wonder if the spider was hiding in his hair.

We pulled both men out of the car, cuffed them with their hands behind their backs, finally conducted a quick search of their persons and of the vehicle, finding nothing of greater interest than a stack of porno magazines under the front seat.

‘Take a message back to Paco Luna,' I said, as if the message sent by Adele wasn't already sufficient. ‘Tell him it's time to cut his losses. What's happening here is between cops. If he gets in the middle, he's gonna be crushed.'

Only a few days before, I'd have been able to bring these scumbags into the house, to isolate them, to demand answers. As it was, I had two choices. I could drag one or the other into that convenient alleyway I'd mentioned earlier, then convince him to cooperate. Or I could let them go.

But Adele was already removing her man's cuffs and I quickly followed suit. In fact, neither man had committed any crime greater than contempt of cop, for which they'd been adequately punished. As I drove off, I watched them in the rear-view mirror. They were circling the crippled vehicle, their hands in their pockets. Wondering, perhaps, how they were going to explain why they hadn't gone down with the car.

‘Tell me something, partner,' I finally said as we drove back to Manhattan. ‘Do you think it's possible that you overreacted? I mean by discharging your weapon into a defenseless automobile.'

‘No,' she said after a moment, ‘I don't. No more than I think either of those men would hesitate to kill me. Or you, for that matter.'

I drove down Flushing Avenue, then along Broadway under the El, and finally onto the Williamsburg Bridge. The moon was up and nearly full; I watched it flicker between the bridge's intersecting girders, winking on and off, lurid as a Delancey Street whore. On the Manhattan side of the river, the midtown office towers, so enticing from Woodward Avenue in Ridgewood, projected raw power from every lit window. I'd made this ride a thousand times, at sunrise and sunset, in every season, in every weather. I'd watched the twin towers burn and collapse from the center of the bridge, attempting to clear the traffic impeding a river of fire trucks, ambulances and police vehicles hurrying to the scene.

‘Are you feeling better, Corbin?'

Adele's eyes were shadowed now, her fatigue evident. Without thinking about it, I reached out to stroke the side of her face, the backs of my fingers trailing along her cheek just beyond the dressings. Her eyes widened momentarily, then she smiled one of those unreadable female smiles that men dread.

‘Are you thinking about Mel?' I asked.

‘I am not, Corbin, thinking about Mel.'

‘Then what?'

Her face sobered and she turned to look out through the windshield. ‘I won't live a trivial life, Corbin,' she declared. ‘I won't.'

Back in my apartment, I made a pot of coffee and got to work. I began with a detailed report of my interview with Ellen Lodge, which I emailed to Conrad Stehle. Then I opened my own emails, even the spam, but found nothing out of the ordinary. Vaguely disappointed, I shut the computer down, then punched Conrad's number into my new cell phone. When he answered on the second ring, I gave him my new number, explaining that I no longer trusted any phones listed in my name. Then I got down to business.

‘Did you get my emails?' I asked.

‘Yes, I did, Harry. And I say to you that they are very interesting.'

In his late sixties, Conrad had come to the United States from Germany shortly after Hitler's rise to power, his Marxist parents escaping hours ahead of a brown-shirt purge. Dieter and Loise Stehle never recovered from the experience, or so Conrad told me on more than one occasion. They pronounced themselves cowards for running; they convicted themselves of treason, of deserting the Fatherland in its moment of greatest peril. No matter that all of their comrades perished, and millions more besides. No matter that in saving themselves, they'd saved their two-year-old child. As far as Dieter and Loise were concerned, there were no mitigating circumstances. And no one left alive to forgive them.

The Stehles compensated, to a certain extent, by maintaining a strictly Germanic household. When Conrad walked into public school at age seven, he'd yet to speak a word of English. Sixty years later, he still retained a trace of his parent's tongue, not only in the sound of the words as he pronounced them, but also in his slightly stilted phrasing. The diffident tone, on the other hand, was pure affectation.

‘Look, Conrad, anything happens to me, I want you to print two copies of my notes. Send one to a
New York Times
reporter named Albert Gruber. Send the other to Reverend Azuriah Donaldson at the Bedford Avenue Baptist Church. Then delete the original emails.'

After a slight hesitation, Conrad said, ‘Don't allow your anger to cloud your judgment. Anger doesn't work here, any more than it worked in the pool.'

‘I'm just being prudent.'

‘Your request is prudent, yes. But you are still very angry. I can hear it in your voice. Your chest is tight and your esophagus constricted. If you were competing now, you would give out in the first hundred meters.'

The advice was well meant, but off-target. Conrad wasn't sensing anger, but keen anticipation. On one level, the trail we'd uncovered in Bushwick was no less than the stink of our enemy's fear. The sort of odor that might be given off by a rabbit inches away from the oncoming talons of a hawk.

THIRTY-THREE

A
n hour later, Adele and I shared an overcooked (in deference to Adele's injuries) pot of spaghetti and a Caesar salad. As we ate, we discussed what we'd done and what we hoped to do. The conversation held few surprises until Adele announced that she was preparing to avoid the NYPD altogether.

‘I got David Lodge's file from an ADA named Ginnette Lansky.' She picked at her salad for a moment, then added, ‘Ginnette heads the Major Crimes Bureau for the Queens DA.'

I shook my head. ‘You're living in a fantasy. They'll never do it.'

‘Do what?'

‘You're thinking you can talk the District Attorney into taking over the investigation.'

‘Which he has every right to do.'

Adele was correct. The DA, with his own staff of independent investigators, could open a grand jury investigation tomorrow. But why would the current holder of that office, Kenneth Alessio, want to go down that road? Most of his investigators were retired cops who'd be anything but eager to put heat on the job. Plus, he'd run a law-and-order campaign in the last election, where he was endorsed by the Patrolman's Benevolent Association.

‘You're playing an angle, right?' I finally asked. ‘Something you haven't yet told me?'

Except for the swollen lips, Adele's grin might have been described as impish. ‘Ginnette's father was murdered when she was fourteen, shot down in a robbery. She tells me that it changed her life.'

‘Now she's a crusader?'

‘You might say that Ginnette draws a sharp line between good and evil. You might say that outrage is her constant companion.'

‘So, you think she can talk Alessio into embarrassing the NYPD?'

‘I think she'll try.' Adele wiped her mouth, then folded her napkin and laid it beside her plate before looking up at me. ‘And when it comes to questions of basic justice, Ginnette is a very convincing woman.'

‘Does that mean she's been taking lessons from you?'

When my question produced nothing beyond a smile, I volunteered to clean up, and Adele announced that she was off to the shower. A few minutes later, I heard the water running. I knew she wouldn't be long. Rensselaer Village is cursed with a plumbing system that dates back to 1949 when the complex was built. In my apartment (and, I suspect, most apartments on the higher floors), it's simply impossible to maintain a constant water temperature in the shower, the water jumping from cold to scalding hot in a matter of seconds. This is not a condition that makes you want to linger and Adele didn't. Just as I finished clearing away the dinner things, I heard her scream. Whereupon the steady hiss of running water abruptly ceased.