Robert Knightly: Bodies in Winter

‘What’d you think? That you and your partner would go down with the ship together? Maybe holding hands? Well, Dave, it’s time for you to start using your head.’

Lodge draws a deep breath, then glances around the room. Gray concrete floor, green cinder-block walls, a table bolted to the floor, plastic chairs on aluminum legs. And that’s it. The room where he confers with his attorney is as barren as his cell, as barren as the message his attorney delivers.

‘Face the facts, Dave. Take the plea. It’s not gonna get any better and it could be withdrawn.’

‘Man One?’

‘That’s right, Manslaughter First Degree. You take the deal, you’ll be out in seven years. On the other hand, you go to trial, find yourself convicted of Murder Second Degree, you could be lookin’ at twenty-five to life. Right now you’re thirty-seven years old. You can do the seven years and still have a life left when you’re paroled.’

Though Lodge believes his lawyer, he still can’t bring himself to accept Savio’s counsel. At times over the past months, he’s literally banged his head against the wall in an effort to jog his memory. Drunk or sober, he feels no guilt about the parts he can vaguely recall. Yeah, he tuned-up Spott. He must have, because he remembers Russo driving to a heavily industrial section of Bushwick north of Flushing Avenue; remembers turning onto Bogart Street where it dead-ends against the railroad tracks, remembers yanking Spott out of the back seat. Spott had resisted despite the cuffs.

But Spott deserved his punishment. He’d committed a crime familiar to every member of every police force in the world: Contempt of Cop. You didn’t run from cops, you didn’t disrespect them with your big mouth, and you never, under any circumstances, hit them. If you did, you paid a price.

That was it, though, as much as Lodge remembered. To the best of his recollection he’d never entertained the possibility of murdering a prisoner. Never.

‘What if I’m innocent?’ he finally asks his lawyer.

‘What if there’s a million black people residing in Brooklyn who already think you’re guilty?’ his lawyer replies.

10:00 AM, Tuesday, January 15; seven years later

There’s something about bodies in winter that gets to me. I’m referring to bodies found out of doors on weekday mornings when an ambient temperature of twenty-one degrees is reinforced by a wind cold enough to crack the porcelain on your teeth. Mornings when a malevolent sun glares down from the bluest of innocent blue skies, when blood congeals into greasy black balls that resemble nothing so much as rabbit droppings on a suburban lawn.

When I first saw David Lodge I wanted to cover him with a blanket, to comfort him, to preserve the heat of his body. I wanted to compensate him for having the misfortune to be murdered in January. He was lying at an angle in a tiny yard, his feet pointing out towards a low railing dividing yard from sidewalk, his head nearly touching the foundation of a modest, two-family house. The house was on Palmetto Street in the Queens neighborhood of Ridgewood.

‘He tried to crawl away. You see that, Corbin? The wall stopped him.’

The voice belonged to my partner, Detective Adele Bentibi. Adele always called me by my last name. Not Harry, as I was generally known to my peers, but simply Corbin, with a heavy emphasis on the first syllable.

‘Show me.’

Adele gestured to parallel smears of blood running across the brown grass. ‘He got hit, went to his knees and tried to crawl away. The head shot finished him.’

We were standing on the street side of the railing, having made our way through and around an army of little paper flags that marked the resting positions of spent 9mm cartridges. The paper flags were numbered, one to thirty-three, and most had already blown over. Ahead of us, David Lodge was lying on his left side, one leg curled nearly into his chest. His left arm was bent beneath him, his right splayed out with the wrist twisted into a position so unnatural it could only have been produced by violent death.

There was blood everywhere. On the sidewalk, the railing, the grass and especially on David Lodge. His wool trousers were saturated with blood, from mid-thigh to the tops of his black engineer boots. But it wasn’t blood loss that killed him, or at least I didn’t think so. Lodge had a small bullet wound in his right temple, a little forward of his hair line. Though I couldn’t see an exit wound from where I stood, a halo of spatter extending outward to stain the concrete foundation of the house guaranteed its presence.

‘How close was the shooter?’

‘Within a few inches of the vic’s temple.’ She pointed to a small object next to Lodge’s right ear. ‘You see the brass? The shooter had to be leaning down with the gun twisted to the right for the brass to end up that close to the body.’

I think Adele would have liked nothing better than to jump the railing and examine each of Lodge’s many bullet wounds. But the yard enclosing Lodge’s body was no more than eight-by-ten feet and there was blood all through it. I could see a half-dozen shoe impressions from where I stood. Had they been left by Lodge’s killer? Or by the first cops on the scene who’d checked for a pulse and ID on the victim? Whichever the case, there was nothing to be gained by adding to the chaos.

‘Are we done here?’ I asked Adele. My toes were numb, as were the tips of my fingers, the tip of my nose and both ear lobes.

Adele shrugged, the gesture without sympathy. For her, foul weather was something you ignored in your quest for excellence. Adele often spoke about excellence, about bringing excellence to life’s mundane tasks, and I could see it in her meticulous approach to small details. The larger tasks, on the other hand, the big picture, sometimes escaped her. Adele and her husband, Mel, for instance, were perpetually on the verge of separation. And then there was the simple fact that when it came to interviews and interrogations, she didn’t have a clue.

A Crime Scene Unit step-van pulled up behind the cordon of vehicles on the north end of Palmetto Street, luring Adele’s attention away from the crime scene. She shielded her eyes from the sun, then announced, ‘Ray Gutierrez.’

For a moment, I was caught up in the miniature suns reflected in her perfectly manicured fingernails. They formed shimmering white circles in the clear polish. But then her hand dropped to her side and she began to work her way toward the van, placing her feet carefully to avoid the scattered brass. I think she would have committed hari-kari before moving one of those casings so much as a millimeter.

Sergeant Ramon Gutierrez was a short balding man with a round belly that strained the front of his white jumpsuit. His perpetually sour expression (or so he once told me over drinks) had been honed by years of trying to extract physical evidence from scenes contaminated by the very cops charged with protecting them.

‘Anybody approach the body?’ he asked.

‘The first uniforms on the scene.’ I gestured to Officers Pearlman and Aveda. They were standing just inside a yellow streamer that extended all the way across the street, talking to their boss, Sgt Vinny Murrano.

‘Anybody else?’ Gutierrez asked.

A blaring horn drowned out Adele’s response. Thirty yards away, my own boss, Detective Lieutenant Bill Sarney, was parked at the curb. Impatient as always, he waved us over.

‘Bad news,’ I told my partner as we hastened to obey. Sarney was a hands-off supervisor who only showed up when a particular job was likely to attract the attention of the bosses.

‘Why bad?’ For Adele, the bosses’ scrutiny was an opportunity to prove her worth. For me, the facts on the ground told another, much sadder story. If the investigation produced results, the bosses took the credit. If the investigation went bad, the rank-and-file caught the blame. Given that my promotion to detective, second grade, along with a transfer to Homicide Division, was almost a done deal, I’d just as soon have passed under the radar screen.