Robert Knightly - The cold room

‘That’s what I’m supposed to find out, being as I’m the detective assigned to the case. I’ll let you know when I succeed.’

Adele laughed, then sighed. ‘I’ve got a train to catch.’

‘And I’m on my way to work. Let’s both have a good time.’

‘Yes, Corbin, let’s do that.’

The 92nd Precinct is located on Meserole Street, near Union Avenue, in a two story building erected in 1904, a year after the completion of the Williamsburg Bridge, the second bridge to span the East River. The upper story of the building is of red brick, the lower of limestone blocks. Though not massive by New York standards, the blocks are large enough to impress, especially around the double-doors at the Nine-Two’s main entrance where they tilt gradually up to form a true arch. There are other nice touches as well. The fanlight window over the entrance way is dark with age, its rippled panes now more reflective than transparent. Directly above, a weathered terracotta medallion bears the shield of the NYPD, while a pair of wrought-iron stanchions flanking the doors are capped with Kelly-green globes.

I’d stood outside the Nine-Two for a good fifteen minutes on the day I first reported for duty. That was on a mid-April afternoon, with a spring breeze riffling my hair. By then, I pretty much knew my fate. One of the cops I’d taken down nine months before, Dante Russo, had been a trustee in the Policemen’s Benevolent Association, the union that represents every uniformed officer below the rank of sergeant. For some reason, the fact that Dante was a psychopath who deserved his fate had escaped his PBA buddies. The idea, now, was to punish the messenger by repeating the same lie wherever he went: Harry Corbin is an Internal Affairs Bureau snitch.

Within a couple of days, spread by the PBA delegates in the precinct, the accusation would be common knowledge in the Nine-Two, and even those cops wise enough to distrust the grapevine would shun me. Knowing, as they did, that guilt by association was another weapon in the PBA’s arsenal.

But if I was reluctant to take up residence at the Nine-Two, I was comforted by the building itself. The limestone, grayed by urban soot, and the brick, faded from blood red to rosy pink, had endured for a century, uniting the generations even as Williamsburg’s ethnic deck was reshuffled every couple of decades. To me, as I crossed the street and walked through its doors, it appeared ready to endure indefinitely into the future.

Not so the interior. Maybe limestone and brick can withstand long years of neglect, but interiors have to be aggressively maintained. That the Nine-Two’s had not was obvious at a glance. A waist-high rail separating the public from the precinct’s inner sanctum was without a finish, the raw wood now entirely exposed. Two paths had been worn into the oak floor, one leading from the door to the duty officer’s desk, the other to a gate set in the rail. Cracked in a dozen places, the institutional-green paint on the walls and ceiling was overlaid with a greasy, nicotine-yellow film. Worst of all, the interior space on both the Nine-Two’s floors had been divided and subdivided many times in order to house other units like Traffic and the School Crossing Guards.

By the time I showed up that spring, the Nine-Two was housing a large contingent of traffic officers, a street narcotics team, Brooklyn North’s Vice unit and two shifts of squad detectives. All were expected to share the second floor, which had been divided into a haphazard assortment of cubbyholes and small offices. My own space, into which a pair of battered metal desks had somehow been squeezed, was about the size of a prison cell.

It was almost seven o’clock when I finally walked into the Nine-Two on the day after the murder. The precinct was quiet, as it usually is on a Monday evening. Sergeant Jackson Bell, the duty officer, was speaking with a pair of uniformed officers, both female. He stopped in mid-sentence when I appeared in the doorway, his glance flicking from the two cops to me. The women then turned to check me out and a very staged silence followed, a silence that could only have been more comical if they’d raised strings of garlic to ward off a hungry vampire.

I looked from the two uniforms, whose names I didn’t know, to Sergeant Jackson Bell, holding their eyes for just an instant longer than necessary before continuing on my way.

Every precinct has its secrets, and every precinct guards those secrets, however grand or humble they may be. From this point of view, Sergeant Bell’s attitude wasn’t entirely unreasonable. If I was an IAB snitch, there was always the chance, perhaps even the likelihood, that I’d been assigned to scrutinize some individual, or group of individuals, in the Nine-Two. Perhaps even Sergeant Bell himself.

The corridor I followed to Lieutenant Drew Millard’s office took a series of doglegs past the cubbyholes occupied by my co-workers on the four-to-midnight tour. Only one was occupied, by a detective named Robert Bandelone who waved me into the room.

‘I heard you caught a homicide yesterday.’

‘Yeah,’ I replied, ‘around noon.’ I’d worked with Bandelone for a short time when his partner was out with the flu. Already promoted to Detective Second Grade, I knew him to be obsessed with obtaining First Grade status. If he thought the case was a grounder, he wouldn’t hesitate to invite himself in as my partner. On the other hand, if he decided that he was looking at one of those mysteries cops dread, mysteries involving many hours of labor with little chance of a pay-off down the road, he’d keep his distance.

‘You come across anybody who might be good for it?’

‘No such luck, Bobby. What I got is a seventy-three-year-old witness, I don’t think he can see his hand in front of his face, and an unidentified white female with no organs and a hole in her head.’ I smiled. ‘Would you believe time of death could be anywhere from a few days to a few months ago?’

‘That bad, huh?’ Bandelone had a habit of patting his bald scalp, very gingerly, with the fingers of his right hand, a gesture I found hopeful. He did it now, while I watched.

‘She was dressed like a hooker, so who knows? Maybe I’ll get lucky when I ask around.’

‘You have a photo?’

‘Wait a second.’ I opened my briefcase, removed the Polaroid I’d taken of my victim’s face at the scene on the prior afternoon and laid it on Bandelone’s desk. He stared down at the milky eyes and bloated cheeks for a moment before handing it back. Behind a pair of wire-rimmed glasses that he pushed up onto the bridge of his nose, his dark eyes appeared almost fragile.

‘You think anybody’s gonna recognize that?’

‘What could I say, Bobby? Eventually I’m gonna see what a sketch artist can do with it, but for right now it’s all I have.’

There were times when I felt sorry for my commanding officer. Born into a cop family that traced its roots to an ancestor who’d joined the New York Metropolitans shortly after the Civil War, Drew Millard seemed to pass most of his time playing catch-up. Ranger Millard was the ancestor’s name. He’d risen from obscurity, in the course of a career that spanned three decades, to the rank of Inspector, roughly equal to today’s Chief. That was just before Teddy Roosevelt forced Ranger to surrender his badge in the wake of a corruption scandal.

Notoriously brutal, Ranger had worn shoes even a hard man would have difficulty filling. Meanwhile, his direct descendant was soft in body, mind and spirit. Drew’s gut was flabby, his blue eyes pale, his soft ass shapeless. Wheedling was the tactic he normally used to motivate his detectives, often beginning his sentences with a nearly fawning, ‘C’mon, guy’.