Robert Knightly - The cold room

‘I’ve got two men out on vacation, Harry,’ Millard told me at the end. ‘You’re gonna have to pick up cases. C’mon guy.’

Later that night, I took the bad news to a YMCA swimming pool on Twenty-Third Street. The pool was managed by a man named Conrad Stehle, who’d given me and a few other serious swimmers permission to use it late at night. Conrad had been my high school swimming coach, way back when I was a budding juvenile delinquent. That I didn’t suffer the fate of so many of my peers by running afoul of the law was due almost entirely to his intervention. Before we met, my options were limited to my druggie parents or a motley collection of street urchins on the Lower East Side. Conrad offered a third possibility; I could, if I wished, spend my afternoons in his Murray Hill apartment. I don’t want to take this too far — I never thought of Conrad as my father, or his wife, Helen, as my mother. Instead, what they provided, and what I needed, was stability, a dependable world equally free of the chaos offered by my parents and the casual violence of the streets.

There was a second benefit to my relationship with Conrad, a benefit still with me twenty-five years later. Simply put, as I learned to swim competitively, water became my preferred element. With my goggles wet and every sound dampened by ear plugs, I was finally able to shut the world out, to turn my attention inward until I eventually became my own object, the insect under the glass. Double-stroke, then breathe. Turn, push off. After a while, you don’t have to look ahead to find the far wall, or even count your strokes as you cross the pool. Something inside you, the same something that makes your heart beat and your stomach digest, counts for you.

I swam for an hour on that night, concentrating my attention on the case. I knew, going in, that if Jane wasn’t identified, her murder would never be avenged. As I knew that, for the time being, I needed to continue my canvas, gradually expanding the search area, and hope for the best. Still, at some point, assuming I didn’t identify her first, the law of diminishing returns would kick in with a vengeance. It’s a very big city. Myself, I didn’t intend to give up if I crossed that line because there was another possibility out there, a wild card named Bill Sarney.

Now assigned to the Chief of Detectives office, Deputy-Inspector Bill Sarney had been in command of the One-Sixteen when Adele and I worked the case that put us on the outs with the job. Two-faced from the beginning, Sarney pretended to be my rabbi and my friend, all the while selling me out to Borough Command and his buddies at the Puzzle Palace.

It took me awhile, but when I eventually uncovered his game, I’d threatened to expose him to a sitting grand jury. The threat was potent enough to secure a promise that I’d eventually be transferred to Homicide — my long-term goal from the day I stepped through the doors of the Academy — and that we’d meet in public from time to time. About the PBA and its whispering campaign he could do nothing.

Working for the Chief of Detectives, Sarney had the kind of juice I’d need if I took the case in a different direction. Unidentified victims are not all that rare in New York, certainly not rare enough to attract attention from the press. True, the media occasionally takes up the cause of a Jane Doe, but cops who reach out to the media without the backing of the job’s Public Information Office pay a heavy price. Bill Sarney could get me that backing. All I’d have to do is beg.

Almost from the minute my hands cut the water, I’d been making an attempt to banish Adele from my thoughts. By then I knew she wouldn’t return, as promised, by the weekend. On Monday, her mother was scheduled to undergo an endoscopy, a procedure that requires the insertion of a tube through the mouth and into the stomach. Leya Bentibi was beside herself, not least because Jovianna insisted that she make a living will.

Adele could not simply desert her mother. Right? So there was nothing to consider. That’s what I told myself, and I almost made it stick. But then, as my stroke became ragged, an image of Adele rose, unbidden, to hang before my eyes. Adele was sitting in the lobby of North Shore Hospital, her face a mask of bandages, her ski jacket matted with dried blood. I’d come to pick her up after an overnight stay because her husband was in Dallas on a business trip that could not be interrupted for so mundane a task.

Adele had been sitting with her back straight and her head up when I entered the hospital, enduring the frank stares of all who passed her by. I fell in love with her at that moment, with her pride, her defiance. You could kill her, but you couldn’t break her. A few days later, when she came to me, when I felt her breasts against my chest and tasted her lips, I knew there was no going back. If I lost her, I’d pay a price until the end of my days. Twenty minutes later, after a quick shower, I tried to call Conrad on his cell phone. If I could talk to anyone, it was Conrad, who knew me better than I knew myself. But Conrad was somewhere off the coast of Alaska, on a cruise with his girlfriend, Myra Gardner. He was reachable only when the ship was in port, which it apparently wasn’t because I was transferred, after a single ring, to his voice mail. I started to leave a message, then abruptly hung up. There was no point.

By Monday, I was in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Brighton Beach, popularly called Little Odessa. Upwards of one hundred thousand Russians and Ukrainians, most of them immigrants, are packed into Brighton Beach, enough to spill over into the communities of Gravesend and Sheepshead Bay. On the little shops along the streets and avenues, the signs are most commonly written in Cyrillic, and more business is conducted in Russian than English. There are grocery stores in Brighton Beach, no larger than bodegas, which carry ten brands of pickled herring and a dozen of caviar.

The weather remained hot throughout and I was grateful for the deep shadow cast by the el on Brighton Beach Avenue as I made my rounds. My pitch to these Russian shopkeepers differed only slightly from my approach to the Poles of Greenpoint. I told the Russians that I was sure my victim came from Russia or the Ukraine, a white lie that netted me zilch, though I managed to post fliers in a number of businesses. Adele called me that evening, a few minutes before I entered the Nine-Two. Her mother’s endoscopy had revealed a small gastric ulcer that would be treated with antacids and a course of antibiotics. No surgery was foreseen, now or in the future. All concerned were relieved.

Besides a muttered, ‘Uh-huh,’ I made no comment. I was waiting for Adele to say that she was coming home. Instead, she turned the conversation to the case.

‘I set up that meeting with Dominick Capra. He says you should call in the morning and let him know where to meet you.’

It took me a moment to remember that Capra was an agent with the Immigration amp; Naturalization Service. ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I’ll call him.’

‘Corbin, don’t be so negative. He thinks he can help you.’

‘I’ll definitely call him. So, when are you coming home?’

Adele sighed and I knew the answer: no time soon.

‘I need to think,’ she told me. ‘I have to take a look at my life. I have to take a look at the fact that every day I go out to a job I hate. Do you remember when I told you that I didn’t want to live a trivial life? Well, that’s exactly what I’m doing. I’m not saying you, Corbin. You’ll never be trivial. You don’t have it in you. But I’m saying that I need time to think. Time and space.’

This carefully prepared speech presented a line of reasoning familiar to Harry Corbin. You’re perfect, darling, the story goes, but my life is fucked up in every other way. So I’ve decided to leave you. That way I won’t be conflicted.