Robert Knightly - Bodies in Winter

‘Like I said, me and him, we weren’t so close.’

‘Who could help me then? Who knew him well enough to answer those questions?’

Szarek frowned as it suddenly dawned on him that he’d walked into a trap. I needed the name of somebody close to the Broom. Mike would now have to furnish that name or be seen to deliberately obstruct my investigation. Myself, I didn’t figure the man had the heart to confront me. He was a good citizen at bottom. Going one-on-one with cops was not on his agenda.

‘You could talk to my sister, Trina Zito. Her and Tony got together once in a while.’ Mike Szarek smiled for the first time. ‘What could I say?’ he asked. ‘Trina’s the family disgrace. She married a wop.’

I clapped him on the shoulder, one kidder to another. ‘It might’ve been a lot worse, Mike. You gotta look on the bright side. She could’ve married a Jew.’ I gave it a couple of beats, enduring Szarek’s quick frown. ‘Say, do you by any chance know a cop named Pete Jarazelsky?’

Szarek’s head jerked back as though he’d been poked in the eye. He was pissed now, and probably freezing cold, even standing back in the doorway. ‘Jarazelsky’s in jail.’

‘I know that, Mr Szarek. I spoke to him recently. What I’m asking is if you knew him.’

‘Pete grew up in the neighborhood, like all of us, but he was a lot younger than me so I can’t say we were actually friends. But if we saw each other on the street, we’d nod hello.’

‘What about your brother? Did your brother know Jarazelsky well?’

‘They were both cops in the same precinct, so I guess they had to know each other.’

‘ Yeah,’ Trina Zito told me twenty minutes later, ‘Tony drank pretty much all day, every day. But he wasn’t unhappy and he went to work in the morning, so who am I to judge?’

‘Your brother sees it differently,’ I suggested.

Trina’s husband, Fred, took that moment to put in his two cents. We were in the front room, seated on matching love seats. Though no more than a half-mile from Tony Szarek’s town house, the Zitos’ apartment was far more humble, five rooms in a frame tenement sided with textured yellow vinyl.

‘You don’t wanna pay too much attention to Mike,’ Zito told me. ‘He’s worried about his inheritance. The guy was on the balls of his ass when Tony died. Him, his wife and his three kids. If we hadn’t agreed to let ’em stay in Tony’s house until it’s sold, they’d be on the street.’

‘Tony died without a will,’ Trina explained. ‘Mike and me, we’re his closest relatives.’

‘Is the estate in probate court?’

‘Yeah,’ Fred declared, ‘and it’s taking forever as it is. If Tony was murdered, we’ll most likely never see a dime.’

‘You’ve discussed this possibility?’

Trina Zito cleared her throat. ‘When the cops said it was suicide, I figured they must know. I mean, there was an autopsy and everything. But I’m not surprised that you turned up, either. See, my brother had his pension, plus he made a lotta money in business and he was pretty healthy, so he had no reason to kill himself.’

‘How big is his estate?’

To her credit, Trina answered the question without hesitation. ‘What with the equity on the house and the bank accounts, we’re probably lookin’ at six hundred thousand.’

‘You said Tony was in business?’

‘Right, he was a partner in Greenpoint Carton Supply, on India Street.’

I leaned back and crossed my legs. Trina’s tone was becoming more conversational and I wanted to put her at ease. ‘One thing I don’t get. If your brother drank from morning till night, how’d he run a business?’

‘That I couldn’t tell you, detective. We used to have Tony over to dinner every couple of months and he occasionally took us out to a restaurant, but he never talked about his work. I don’t even know the names of his partners.’

‘Do you know for certain that he actually had partners?’

‘He must’ve, because we don’t inherit his shares in the business. They revert to the corporation. That wouldn’t make a lot of sense if he didn’t have partners.’

I nodded thoughtfully, then took Dante Russo’s photo from my shirt pocket. ‘You ever see this guy with Tony?’

Even as she shook her head, Trina Szarek echoed her brother, Mike. ‘Me and Tony,’ she declared, ‘we weren’t that close.’

‘What about a man named Pete Jarazelsky?’

Fred Zito popped to attention, running his fingertips back and forth over the dense stubble on his chin. ‘Don’t talk to me about Jarazelsky,’ he declared. ‘I own an auto parts store in Williamsburg and I once hired Pete to work for me on Saturdays. The scumbag robbed me blind. Every time my back was turned, something else went out the door. And the guy was a cop, for Christ’s sake.’

I nodded agreement, then asked the same question I’d put to Mike Szarek. ‘If you and Tony weren’t close, who should I speak with? He must have been close to someone.’

Fred and Trina looked at each other for a moment, then shrugged in unison. ‘Yeah,’ Trina admitted, ‘there’s someone alright.’

‘And who might that be?’

‘Ewa Gierek, his live-in lover. Ewa’s suing for half the estate.’

‘You know where she lives?’

‘In Flushing, with her brother.’

Ewa Gierek was the whitest white woman I’d ever seen. Her porcelain skin was nearly translucent, her blue eyes pale and prominent, her hair so light that her lashes and brows were virtually invisible. A wintry landscape, to be sure, broken only by the scarlet lipstick on her small, Cupid’s-bow mouth and the blush worked into her cheeks.

The image of Tony Szarek I’d been carrying up till then, of the pitiful Broom mopping his way through the last years of a stumble-bum career, vanished forever. Szarek was a few months short of his fifty-eighth birthday when he died. Ewa Gierek was no more than forty and might have been a good deal younger.

‘If I could just come in for a moment,’ I said. ‘I want to talk to you about Tony Szarek.’

She nodded once and led me to a living room choked with oversized furniture: a leather sofa with rolled arms, two matching recliners, a pair of leather hassocks, a glass coffee table, a projection TV jammed into a corner. The wall opposite the sofa held four rows of glass shelves on which baseball memorabilia, mostly playing cards in lucite holders, had been arranged.

‘My brother, Ryszard,’ Ewa explained when I glanced at the display, ‘he is dealer of these baseball things.’ Her accent was heavy and she spoke slowly, pronouncing the words with care. ‘Even in Warsaw he is following Yankees. Crazy, yes? But he has made living from baseballs. This is good.’

‘Is your brother home?’

‘He is at convention in Chicago.’

I was about to launch into my usual pitch, the one about reopening the case, taking another look at the facts, but decided against it. Instead, I took out Dante Russo’s photo and tossed it on the coffee table between us. ‘Do you know this man?’

One thing about pale white skin, it’s a definite impediment to successful lying. Even as Ewa shook her head, her cheeks flared as though someone had lit a candle inside her mouth. Under other circumstances, where time wasn’t a factor, I might have let her falsehood stand. As it was, I pounced on her.

‘Listen, Ewa, and listen closely. I’m here because I think person or persons unknown, motivated by money, put a gun to Anthony Szarek’s temple and pulled the trigger. Can you hear me now? You’re suing for half of an estate worth six hundred thousand dollars. As the Feds like to say, that makes you a person of interest. Of course, there are other persons of interest, who also stand to benefit from Tony’s death, but they didn’t start out by lying. See, I already know that you and this gentleman are acquainted, so maybe you wanna take a closer look before I leave with the wrong impression.’