Bodies in Winter (28 page)

I waved her on, then asked, ‘When did Russo become your lover? Before or after Clarence Spott was killed?' My tone was as gentle as I could make it.

‘Right before.' She took another pull on her cigarette then flicked imaginary ash into an ashtray on the table alongside her chair. ‘And I'm not makin' any apologies. I already told you what Davy was like. I needed something in my life and Dante was there.'

‘I understand that. You were stuck in a childless, abusive marriage and Davy wouldn't let you escape. It's natural to look for comfort under those circumstances.' I might have added that comfort takes many forms: an embrace, a kind word, a birthday gift . . . or eliminating the discomfort at its source. Instead, I asked, ‘How did you meet him?'

‘Davy brought Dante around when they became partners.'

‘They were friends?'

‘Dante felt sorry for Davy. He was trying to help him.'

‘Then you believe your husband murdered Clarence Spott?'

‘Davy was convicted of manslaughter, not murder. If you remember.' Ellen settled back in her chair, noticeably more relaxed now. True, she knew about good cop/bad cop, as did virtually every mutt I interrogated. But that didn't mean she could resist its charms.

‘I know we spoke about this before,' I said, ‘but I want you to describe your husband's abuse.' I nodded at the tape recorder. ‘For the record.' When she hesitated, I added, ‘That's why we started from the beginning. We just want to get your story down once and for all.'

As I'd hoped, the question triggered a response Ellen was unable to control. She'd been rehearsing her grievances for many years. Her injuries were her drug of choice, her dope, and like any junkie, she couldn't get through the day without them. Even in her most relaxed moments, they hung just below the surface, ever ready to impede an attack of conscience.

I let her run on, nodding occasionally as she described a series of progressively gruesome incidents. Her husband, or so she told me, was given to sexual humiliation. By submitting, she was usually able to avoid his fists. But submission (and survival, too) had its own penalties. Over time, she'd built up a reservoir of self-hatred deep enough to drown in. And drown she did, falling into a depression that marked every hour of every day.

‘Suicidal ideation,' she declared, her voice by then as soft as my own, ‘that's what the shrinks call it. You think “suicidal ideation” describes my state of mind, detective?'

‘I think it lacks poetry.'

She looked at me, her gaze mild, and I had the distinct impression that she wanted to trust me, as she'd once trusted Davy Lodge, as she'd trusted Dante Russo. For just a moment, I felt hopeful. Maybe if I got past her anger, she'd finally come clean.

From suicide, Ellen Lodge again turned to her destroyed expectations. Everybody, she claimed, has a right to a life. Her husband had taken hers as surely as if he'd pulled the trigger when he'd jammed his gun into her mouth. She was no longer the person she'd been when she met David Lodge. She was not the person she would have become had she never met him. Instead, she was an embittered, childless, middle-aged woman scrabbling for economic survival. The two thousand a month she got from Greenpoint Carton didn't cover her mortgage and taxes.

I watched Ellen's reserves gradually ebb, watched her shoulders slump and her breathing slow, until the little hand on the dial finally pointed to empty and she came to a stop. By that time, I was ready.

‘Betrayal,' I said, my voice so soft Ellen had to lean forward to catch my words, ‘I know what it is. My parents were junkies. They did coke, speed and whatever pills they could get their hands on. Percocets, Dilaudid, Codeine, Valium, Darvon, Ritalin, Demerol.' I paused long enough to take a breath. ‘They got away with it because this was back in the Seventies when people were more tolerant of druggies, and because it's almost impossible to fire civil servants, which both of them were. They missed a few days of work? They came in late? They snorted coke twice an hour to get through the day? Well, I remember one time my father was suspended for a week, and another time my mother was forced into rehab, and there might have been other punishments as well. I wouldn't know about them because my parents mostly acted like I wasn't there.'

I shifted my weight slightly, and crossed my legs. My eyes drifted to my hands, as if my revelations were so intimate I couldn't look her in the face. ‘You know, when you're a kid, you blame yourself for everything. That's because if you're not causing your own pain, you have no control at all. In some ways, it's like having a gun put to your head. I mean, where are you gonna run to when you're a five-year-old? To your relatives? My mother was from St Louis and my father's parents were living in Arizona. Plus, my parents' friends were druggies, too.'

When I finally raised my eyes to meet Ellen's, her gaze was intense, but not skeptical. Encouraged, I again spoke.

‘OK, so you're a kid and your parents barely know you're alive and you blame yourself. What do you do?'

‘You try to become better.'

‘Is that what you did with your husband?'

The question produced a short, choppy laugh devoid of mirth. ‘Yeah, why not? I was only eighteen when I married Davy. I thought if I did better – if I cooked better, if I wore that lingerie he liked – things would improve. Ya wanna hear something really sad? I used to read sex manuals on how to please a man.'

‘Well, I didn't go quite that far. But I started keeping my room clean, which was mostly what my parents complained about. I mean, by the time I was seven, my room would've passed a military inspection.'

‘And your folks?'

‘I got a couple of pats on the head, but then the novelty wore off and it was like it never happened. Ya gotta picture them here, Ellen. Most of the time, they used downers and I'd find them laid out like zombies on the couch. When they lucked into a few grams of cocaine, they'd suddenly come awake. I swear, it was like a resurrection. They'd pile the coke on a mirror, then place the mirror, dead center, on what was supposed to be the dining-room table. And that's exactly where they'd remain, staring down at that pile until it was fully consumed. I'm tellin' ya, I figured out, at a very early age, that the pile was a lot more important than I was. I wasn't allowed anywhere near it.'

THIRTY-SEVEN

M
ost of what I'd told Ellen, up to that point, was true, if greatly oversimplified. But the truth didn't matter to me, any more than I minded using my personal history to lure Ellen into making a statement against her penal interests. And, yes, Ellen Lodge was right about my grandfather. Which only put me on a par with any other good detective. The important thing was that I had Ellen's full attention as I began to play with the facts.

The long-term failure of my clean-bedroom strategy, I declared, hadn't discouraged me, not in the slightest. And why should it? A few pats are better than no pats at all. Just ask any dog.

I went on to describe how, in the course of about a year, I became a cleaning maniac, a master of the vacuum cleaner and the dust cloth, the mop and the broom. I was the scrubber of bathrooms, washer of windows, polisher of floors, king of the laundry. There was nothing I wouldn't do, no effort I wouldn't make, until the apartment was finally clean enough to withstand the scrutiny of a nineteenth century German housewife.

As I plunged into pure hyperbole, I became more and more animated. By degrees, my mouth expanded into the sort of comfortable smile that might be exchanged by two members of a support group over a post-session cup of coffee.

‘One time,' I finally declared, ‘I painted the entire living room while my parents watched re-runs on Comedy Central.'

‘You lie. There wasn't any Comedy Central thirty years ago.'

‘No, I swear. It took me five hours, but you want to know the most amazing part? My parents' eyes never left the screen. And they never laughed, not once. They were too stoned.'

Ellen's smile was both amused and ironic. ‘God,' she said, ‘when you look back, you feel like such an idiot.'

‘That's not the way it is for me. I don't blame myself, never. Hey, I haven't spoken to my mom in twenty years. When my father passed, I wasn't at his bedside and I didn't go to his funeral.'

I gave it a good five seconds, until the silence grew dense enough to notice, then went into the pocket of my jacket, removing the photo I'd taken from Marissa Aubregon's apartment, the one with Marissa perched on Dante Russo's lap. Working carefully, I unfolded the snapshot, smoothing the creases before leaning forward to lay it on Ellen's knees.

‘Betrayal is what it was about, Ellen. That's why you don't have to blame yourself. You can hate the ones who hurt you instead.' I paused long enough to let the message sink in, then asked, ‘You knew about this, didn't you?'

Ellen lit another cigarette with her disposable lighter, holding the end of the cigarette in the flame a moment too long as she weighed her options. I'd played my last card and we both knew it. She had to make up her mind now.

‘Yeah,' she finally whispered, ‘I did.' She dropped the cigarette into an ashtray and ran her fingers through her hair. ‘Ya know how I said that I always wanted a kid?'

‘I remember.'

‘Well, I told Dante, “You don't have to marry me. You don't have to pay child support. I just want to have your child.”'

‘And what'd he say?'

‘That he couldn't father a child and not take care of it. That he didn't think he'd be a good father. That he just wasn't prepared for the responsibility. Sometimes, when I brought it up, he'd get angry. Dante never raised a hand to me, not like Davy, but he could be very cold. And when he was really pissed, I just wouldn't hear from him, not until I called to apologize.'

‘So, it must have been hard when you found out that he fathered Marissa's child.'

The look in Ellen Lodge's eyes was so wistful, I turned away. As I'd predicted, the outrage she'd marshaled in the face of Adele's onslaught had vanished. Now she was moving, not into a confessional mode, as I'd hoped, but into an attitude of resignation.

‘She called me up. Marissa. I don't know how she found out about me and Dante, but she called and told me that Dante belonged to her, that she'd had his child.'

‘And when did this happen?'

‘Three weeks ago, maybe a month.'

‘What did you do?'

Ellen's gaze dropped to the tape recorder. She watched the spools turn for a moment. ‘Nothing,' she finally said. ‘I didn't even confront the bastard. Davy was about to be released from Attica and I was already in over my head.'

The overall impression Ellen gave, as she told her story, was of a beaten-down woman upon whose back the last straw, Russo's infidelity, had been heaped. But the relief that naturally follows a true confession, whether it be made to a priest or a detective, was entirely absent. What I sensed was a grim surrender, bolstered by an unexpected measure of true grit. Ellen may have spent much of her time wallowing in her grievances, but there was a tougher part of her, a rational, calculating self that had done hard things in hard times.

And then there was the content of her remarks. At one point, I almost felt sorry for Dante Russo. He was at the center of every misdeed from the very beginning. It was Dante who'd convinced her that Davy killed Clarence Spott, and it was at Dante's request that she'd advised her husband to plead guilty.

‘After he got sentenced, I hoped that would be the end of it,' she announced. ‘Then Davy started writing to me, telling me how sorry he was. I mostly threw the letters in the garbage.'

‘Mostly? Does that mean you answered some of them?'

‘I told him to stop writing to me and that I didn't expect to see him after he got out. As far as I was concerned, we were through. One time I wrote that if he came around, I'd go to his parole officer. “The minute I see your face,” I said, “I'm on the phone.”'

That approach was jettisoned six months before Davy's release, when Dante Russo came calling. Far from his usually reserved self, Dante was extremely agitated. David Lodge, he explained, had become delusional and now believed he was innocent. Worse still, he was threatening bodily harm to all those who'd testified before the Grand Jury.

At this point, Ellen quoted Russo verbatim: ‘“We tried to talk to the jerk, but it was no good. When the guy gets a bug up his ass, it's like he becomes a maniac.”'

Three weeks later, after submitting to a search of her bag and the scrutiny of a metal detector, Ellen had found herself seated across from her husband. A notice pasted on the yellowed Plexiglass screen separating them announced that visits were randomly monitored. Davy had pointed to his side of this notice when his wife mentioned Dante Russo, then had shaken his head.

Back home, Ellen began to write her husband and to accept his collect calls, only to find that the same principle applied. Letters and phone calls were also routinely monitored. Thus, the only facts Ellen had at her disposal were those supplied by Dante Russo. This was why she still believed her husband to be Clarence Spott's murderer on the morning of January 15th when she summoned him to the phone, then made a call of her own just after he left the house. The calls, of course, coming and going, were made and received by Dante Russo.

‘I thought they were going to . . . to confront him. Maybe even to threaten him. I never thought they were going to kill him.'

‘Did Russo actually say he killed your husband?'

When she nodded, I pointed to the tape recorder. The words would have to be spoken aloud.

‘Yeah,' she finally said, ‘he did. I had to push him to the wall, but he finally told me that he'd been there, that he'd pulled the trigger.'