Robert Knightly - Bodies in Winter

‘Was,’ Adele corrected.

‘Was?’

‘Dave was a big guy. Now he’s dead.’

Russo’s chin rose a millimeter even as his tone became more confidential. ‘Dave was mostly OK when he was sober. But he couldn’t lay off the bottle, not for more than a couple of days. I tried to convince him to check into rehab, but askin’ for help wasn’t his style.’ When Russo paused, Adele simply nodded for him to continue. ‘Anyway, after I got my partner under control, we transported Spott to the house. Lieutenant Whitlock — he was the desk officer — told us to dump him in a cell, which we did. I was out front, talkin’ to Whitlock about whether we should get medical attention for the prisoner, when I found out he was dead. The last I saw of Dave, he was in the cell area with an officer named Szarek.’

‘The Broom.’

‘Yeah, the Broom.’

‘He’s dead, too.’

Russo shrugged. ‘I heard he ate his gun.’

‘Then you heard wrong.’ Adele put her forefinger to her temple and mimed pulling a trigger. ‘He put one in the side of his head.’

Adele was working herself up. That much was obvious. What was equally obvious was that she wasn’t looking at the situation from her subject’s point of view. Russo was holding his nose so high that he might have been sniffing for the carcass of a dead rat. But it was the disconnect between Russo’s tone and his expression that interested me most. The differences were so pronounced that he might have been two people. Not that I felt he was the victim of some obscure personality disorder. Russo’s mastery of the vocal part of his act was impressive — his voice remained honey-smooth and he would not be flustered — but he still needed work on the visual part. He was giving his hand away.

By then, I was sure that Russo was lying, and not without reason. The way he was telling the story, he’d immediately intervened on Spott’s behalf. That wasn’t true. Spott’s extensive injuries had been inflicted in the course of a prolonged beating. More than likely, he and Lodge had carted Spott off to some quiet corner of the precinct where David Lodge had administered a serious tune-up while his partner watched out for the sergeant.

Russo, of course, was in no position to admit to any of the above. He’d escaped punishment because the story he offered the bosses suited their interests, the same story he now offered to Detectives Corbin and Bentibi.

‘Ate his gun,’ Russo told my partner, ‘is just a figure of speech. Szarek and I were never friends.’ Russo’s lips expanded into a smile that didn’t come within a shouting distance of his eyes. ‘Anything else?’

‘Just a couple of items. You told me that you pulled Spott to the curb around three-thirty in the morning.’

‘That’s right.’

‘And he was the only one in the car?’

‘Right again.’

‘So, I was wondering what happened to the car? Did you search it?’

‘Gimme a break. My partner was bleeding, the prisoner was bleeding. No way did I have time to worry about Spott’s car.’

‘But you notified the sergeant that you were transporting a prisoner to the house, right?’

Russo shook his head. ‘What with all the blood, I thought my best move was to get inside and let the desk officer sweat the details.’

‘Well, did someone go back later? Was the car towed into the precinct?’

Russo’s chin finally came down. ‘Look, the way our snitches are tellin’ the story, David Lodge was blown away by DuWayne Spott who first swore to take revenge seven years ago. So you’ll have to excuse me if I don’t understand why you wanna know what happened to Clarence Spott’s car.’

‘It’s just that…’ Adele waved her hand, a circular gesture that might have meant anything. ‘I mean, all this happened on Knickerbocker Avenue. That’s the main drag in Bushwick, the shopping district, and there’s a subway stop at Myrtle Avenue, too.’

‘At three-thirty, everything’s closed up. And the subway — if it should happen to be on time, which mostly it isn’t — runs every twenty-five minutes.’

Adele smiled brightly. ‘What about CSU? Didn’t they process the Knickerbocker scene? Why didn’t they tow the car to their evidence yard?’

Russo’s chin resumed its customary jut and his smile vanished. ‘Detective, I have no idea what happened to Spott’s car. As you can imagine, the house was swarmin’ with bosses at the time. Internal Affairs was there too, and they had lots of questions.’

He should have let it drop at that point. The first rule of resistance, in a police interrogation room or on a witness stand, is never volunteer anything. But Russo needed to impress the two pissant detectives who’d come to question him. He couldn’t help himself.

‘They were gonna try to take me down with Lodge,’ he finally added, ‘but I lawyered up right away.’

‘How about your partner? Did Lodge get a lawyer?’

‘Hey, I was the PBA delegate. Helpin’ cops out is what I did. No way I’d let the cop-haters from IAB get their hands on Davy.’

When we left the precinct house at Knickerbocker and Myrtle a few minutes before noon, the snow had stopped. Although the sun wasn’t shining (as Adele had predicted), there were breaks in the lower cloud banks that revealed thinner and much brighter clouds high above. The temperature and the humidity were rising as well. Within a few hours, the snow, driven by liberal applications of rock salt, would turn into an icy, leather-destroying slush.

‘Anything to say?’ Adele asked as I started the Caprice.

‘You fucked up.’

‘Seriously?’

‘Definitely.’

‘How so?’

I finally turned to look directly at her. ‘You fucked up when you said Spott was originally pulled over on Knickerbocker Avenue. We didn’t get that from Linus Potter and it wasn’t in the papers. That means you saw the case file. I don’t think you wanted me to know that.’ I put the car in gear and pulled away from the curb. We’d only have time for a quick lunch and I headed for the Taco Bell a quarter-mile away.

‘So, what’s the harm? Who’s going to know?’

‘The harm is that you’re not going to stop. You’re like a junkie. The harm is that you led me to believe that you were gonna let Sarney get Lodge’s file. When you had it all the time.’

‘Are you very pissed off?’

‘No, not really. It’s too predictable.’ I might have added that once this case was disposed of, I intended finally to seek another partner, that I was drawing a line of my own. But there was no point to that, either. ‘Anything else in that file I should hear about?’

‘Nobody gave a statement, not Szarek, Russo or Lodge, for two weeks, so the investigators didn’t know where the original contact with Spott took place. By the time they found out, Spott’s car was long gone. It was never recovered.’

Adele had my complete attention now and I motioned her to continue.

‘Russo, he drew a pass for three reasons. He had no prior brutality complaints on his record, he was willing to testify, and he didn’t have blood on his uniform, not his partner’s or Clarence Spott’s. That supported his claim that he took no part in the original beating.’

‘It also means he didn’t kill Spott in that cell.’

‘You’re wrong there, Corbin.’

‘How so?’

‘A single blow from a blunt object rarely produces spatter. It’s the follow-ups that spread the blood.’

‘Explain that.’

Though my tone was anything but challenging, Adele frowned. ‘Slap your right fist into your left palm,’ she ordered. ‘Now do it again and imagine that your palm bled between the first and second impacts. You see? When Spott was struck, he naturally started to bleed. A second blow would have impacted this blood and scattered it. In the process, Lodge’s killer would have gotten blood on him.’