Bodies in Winter (26 page)

Adele was still in the bathroom when my new cell phone began to ring. As the phone was still in my coat pocket, it took me a moment to retrieve it.

‘That you, Conrad?' I asked without saying hello.

‘Guess again, sport.'

‘Nydia, how nice of you to call.'

‘Lemme speak to Adele.'

‘Adele's in the shower, but I'll give her your regards. What's up?'

Nydia's hesitation was accompanied by a slow, indrawn breath. I imagined her looking over both shoulders for an eavesdropper. Finally, I broke the silence.

‘How'd you know Adele was here?'

‘Everybody in the house knows.'

‘Is the talk coming from Russo?'

‘That's what I called about. Russo, he's a missing person. He hasn't been to work, hasn't answered the phone. Yesterday, two of his PBA buddies went to his house. They found newspapers on the lawn dating back to Saturday and the mail box stuffed with envelopes. Needless to say, Russo didn't answer the bell.'

‘Did his PBA buddies go inside?'

‘Yeah, through a window. The closets and bureaus were full, his passport was in a desk drawer, and a basement storage room contained a matched set of monogrammed luggage.'

When she stopped abruptly, I said, ‘Thanks, Nydia.'

‘
De nada
, Harry. And that show you put on tonight? Well, I always knew you had balls. Only it's not gonna help you. The word in the house is that you and Adele are responsible for Russo's disappearance.'

‘Then why hasn't anybody been to see us?'

‘I don't know. Dante lived on Staten Island, in the One-Twenty, so it's not our case. Anyway, I gotta run. Just make sure to tell your partner I called. Tell her what she said tonight wasn't far off the mark. And tell her to watch her ass.'

‘What about my ass, Nydia? I have an ass, too.'

‘I know that, Harry. In fact, I've been watchin' it for a long time. The way I figure, if you keep on swimmin', you got another five years before it reaches the backs of your knees.'

Against all odds, the gambit Adele and I played in Sparkle's had paid off. If not for Nydia, it might have been days before we discovered that Russo was missing. As it now stood, Russo's disappearance could be used to harass Ellen Lodge and I dialed her number immediately.

‘Hey, guess what,' she declared when I told her that Dante had vanished, ‘I'm not the next of kin.'

The line was too good to be spontaneous, the news too important to be dismissed with a quip. What's more, Ellen had spoken without hesitation. That meant she'd had time to consider her response and how she'd deliver it. Still, I gave her credit for one thing. Feigning shock is beyond the scope of all but the most gifted actors. Ellen Lodge hadn't even tried.

‘I called to give you a heads-up,' I said, ‘but if you don't think you'll be next, there's nothing I can do. On the other hand, if you want out, I can put you in a safe place.'

My very predictable offer resulted in a pitifully theatrical hesitation. ‘I gotta think about it.'

‘Do you remember, Ellen, the first day I saw you, I gave you my card?'

‘It's in my drawer.'

‘Anytime, day or night.'

I now had two pieces of news to convey: Russo's disappearance and the widow's equanimity. Both were instantly forgotten, however, when the bathroom door opened to release a cloud of steam, shortly followed by Adele Bentibi in a white, terry-cloth robe. She was walking toward me, holding a roll of tape and a small pair of scissors in her right hand, a stack of gauze pads and a tube of antibiotic ointment in her left. Her arms were extended as she came, her face uncovered, her wounds clearly visible.

Adele's nose, once overly sharp, was now flattened in the center. There were two cuts beneath the lower orbits of her eyes, one on each cheek, and a vertical gash that ran from the inner corner of her left eye down along the side of her nose. These were not knife wounds. They were not clean and straight. Adele's cuts had been caused by the impact of a blunt object. They were jagged and irregular, their inflamed edges held together by dozens of micro-stitches that reminded me of ants swarming across slices of overripe fruit.

‘The dressings came off easily, but I'm having a little trouble putting them back on.' She smiled as I continued to stare at her, then said, ‘I've decided not to wear the splint over my nose. I only want to cover the cuts.'

I took her into the kitchen and positioned her beneath the overhead fluorescent light, far and away the brightest light in the apartment. Then I washed my hands thoroughly. Though I had a box of latex gloves (filched from the job), I worked with my fingers exposed, pressing a thin layer of antibiotic ointment into her wounds. I knew her wounds were still tender, but I felt no reluctance. I was far more aware of her eyes. With her chin tilted up, Adele was looking directly at me and for a moment I thought I could see all the way back to the twelfth century, that I could trace every voyage in the long wanderings of the Bentibi clan, that every calamity which befell them had also fallen across my shoulders.

It was the most intimate moment of my life. More intimate even than the sight of her naked when I undid her robe a few moments later. More intimate than when I entered her for the first time a short while later.

We didn't speak of Mel afterwards, though I remember thinking what a jerk he was to let Adele slip away and how I wasn't going to make the same mistake. That Adele was finished with him was obvious. I hadn't come between wife and husband. If Adele were more religious, she'd already have chanted the prayer for the dead over his memory, abandoning him the way her family had abandoned Europe in 1948. So long, scumbag.

But if Mel was in her past, our future – Adele's and mine – was far from certain, a point she made as I was drifting off.

‘I meant what I said, Corbin,' she told me. ‘I won't live a trivial life.'

After careful consideration, I said, ‘Do you think it's possible, in light of our changed relationship, for you to call me by my first name?'

‘Alright, Harold.'

Thus comforted, I fell into a dreamless sleep.

I was up at six o'clock, online and retrieving my emails. Now that I was doing this chore every day, I had fewer messages to deal with, and my eye was immediately drawn to the one from [email protected]. I clicked on the little envelope and a text message appeared.

When I re-entered the bedroom, Adele was sitting up with the bedclothes gathered about her waist. For some inexplicable reason, my eyes fell to her breasts which were small and set high on her chest, the swollen aureoles surrounding her nipples as smooth as butter.

‘Do I have to get dressed?' Adele finally asked.

I sat on the edge of the bed, looked into her eyes and saw that she was pleased. Everybody wants to be desired and Adele was no exception. Nor was I. As I recounted the phone calls from Nydia Santiago and our anonymous angel, she reached out with her uninjured arm to pull me down alongside her. The touch of her hand was so casually sensual that my eyes narrowed and I breathed in through my nose as though reaching for some un-nameable and ultimately intoxicating fragrance. When Adele laid her head on my shoulder, I remember thinking,
if this is what comes of acting virtuously, I'll be a good boy forever
. Then I looked down at Adele and realized that I wouldn't have all that much choice in the matter.

THIRTY-FOUR

O
ver breakfast the following morning, Adele and I settled on an unpleasant topic we might have discussed earlier. First, we had been tailed on the previous night by two mutts who we then humiliated. Second, the talk among the rank and file in the Bushwick Precinct was that Detectives Corbin and Bentibi should be stopped before they brought down the house. That made for an awful lot of suspects if one of us (or both of us) should meet a violent end.

I buttered a piece of toast, dipping it into the yolk of my egg. That we would have to move fast went unsaid, and our conversation drifted to Ellen Lodge. If we were to accomplish anything in the short term, she would have to come clean. Nevertheless, there were difficulties and no guarantee that I could overcome them.

‘Ellen Lodge?' I told Adele. ‘If you asked me yesterday, I would have told you that she was easy meat, that I was playing her like a violin. Now I'm beginning to think it's the other way round.'

‘Maybe someone convinced her that she was better off staying the course. Maybe the same person who told her that Russo disappeared.'

‘And who would that person be?'

‘Someone inside the conspiracy, someone she trusts. Maybe Justin Whitlock.'

‘Then who told Justin?'

The large dressing that covered the center of Adele's face had been abandoned in favor of three smaller dressings. Her bruises were now the color of French mustard, the swelling, except around her nose, greatly reduced. Her breathing had improved as well, and she was beginning to use her right arm. Nevertheless, fifteen minutes later, I had to help her into the body armor I insisted she wear, then into her coat.

The phone rang as I was about to unlock the door. I answered to find Bill Sarney on the other end of the line.

‘Can you talk?' he asked.

‘Better make it fast, Adele's in the bedroom. We're sleeping in this morning.'

‘Tell me what happened last night. In Sparkle's.'

I ignored the suspicious tone, taking care to keep my own voice casual. ‘It was my idea, Bill,' I explained, ‘to let her blow off steam. Otherwise, she was going to call that reporter from the
Times
, what's his name . . . ?'

‘Albert Gruber.'

‘Yeah, Gruber.'

‘She wants to call him?'

‘What could I say, the woman's pissed off. When I tried to tell her that her attack could have been a random mugging, I thought she was gonna shoot me.'

Sarney's breath hissed into the phone. ‘You think she'll listen to reason?'

‘Yeah, Boss, I do. And getting it off her chest helped a lot. You just give it a few more days, Bill, and I guarantee she'll come around.'

As Adele and I drove south along Avenue A toward the Williamsburg Bridge, I considered Dante Russo's fate. Was he dead? Or had he run without playing the last cards in his hand? When I put the question to Adele, she laughed at me.

‘Russo's most likely crab food by now,' she declared.

The thing about bodies is that they sink to the bottom when immersed in water. The thing about New York is that there's water within a few miles of almost any place you happen to commit a murder. True, bodies eventually rise when enough gas builds up in the abdominal cavity. But if Russo was in one of the rivers, or in the harbor, that wouldn't happen until next spring when the water temperature became high enough for bacteria to multiply.

We were on our way back to Ridgewood, to the homes surrounding Ellen Lodge's, to do another canvas. Our mission was simple: to connect Dante Russo and Ellen Lodge. It didn't take us long.

Twenty minutes after I parked the car, a chatty senior citizen named Emma Schmidt took one look at Dante Russo's photo and said, ‘That's the boyfriend.'

Emma's apartment, on the second floor of a three-story row house, was a virtual shrine to the Virgin Mary. Statues on the tables, prints on the wall, candles and rosaries everywhere. The red stitches of a framed sampler next to the window conveyed a simple message: PURITY.

‘Whose boyfriend?' Adele asked.

‘
Mrs
Ellen Lodge's boyfriend.' Emma pressed her bony knuckles against her hips and blinked rapidly as she spoke. ‘Her husband wasn't in jail yet when this one showed up. Brazen is what he was. Marchin' up to her door in the middle of the night.'

We'd interviewed Emma Schmidt during our initial canvas of the neighborhood, but had failed to ask the right question. Emma was one of those neighborhood guardians I mentioned earlier. In good weather, she spent much of her time sitting on a lawn chair in front of her house, gossiping with friends. Ellen Lodge, she informed us, had been the subject of their collective ire for so long, she'd ceased to be news.

The January thaw was in full swing. The temperature was in the lower fifties, the sun sharp-edged and molten yellow, the sky a deep uniform blue punctuated by streaming ribbons of cloud. A soft breeze carried the odor of earth stirring, of roots come to life, a promise of spring no less welcome for being an illusion.

We were standing directly in front of Ellen's row house, making ourselves as conspicuous as possible. From behind us, the January sun flared in the windows and softened the buttery-yellow facade; it glistened on the feathers of a dozen pigeons taking their ease along the edge of the roof. Except for their heads, which swiveled back and forth, turning at impossible angles in search of danger, the pigeons lay so unmoving they might have been decoys.

‘You ready, Corbin?' Adele finally said as we approached the door.

‘Shouldn't I be asking you that question?'

News of Russo's disappearance had forced Adele and me to overhaul our strategy and we'd made a number of significant changes. The first was that Adele would conduct the interview, at least initially, playing the bad cop for all she was worth. It was a part, we both agreed, that came naturally.

‘I see it's bad penny time,' Ellen Lodge said when she opened the door. Again, I was struck by the muddy circles beneath her eyes, by a distinct weariness in the way she held her jaw. Her tone was firm, though, echoing the sarcasm in her words, and she led us to her sitting room without protest, resuming her seat in the room's lone armchair. I slid out of my coat, helped Adele out of hers, then folded both coats before taking a seat at the far end of the couch.