Robert Knightly: Bodies in Winter

I glanced back at David Lodge as I approached the unmarked Caprice. He didn’t look any warmer at a distance than he did up close.

The inside of Sarney’s car was toasty-warm and I opened my coat to let in the heat. Sarney was sitting behind the wheel, alongside Adele. ‘Tell me what you’ve got so far,’ he demanded.

‘We put out an alert,’ Adele explained, ‘for a late model, four-door sedan, dark red.’

The we part wasn’t strictly true. Sgt Murrano had put out the alert after interviewing a pair of eyewitnesses. That was before we arrived.

‘That mean you got witnesses?’

‘Two so far. They live upstairs.’

‘Did you speak to them?’

‘Lou,’ I interrupted, ‘we arrived all of twenty minutes ago, but if you want an evaluation, here it is. The vic, David Lodge, was murdered by persons unknown who subsequently fled the scene. And what we’re doing, me and my partner, is investigating.’

Sarney flashed a grim smile. ‘The victim, David Lodge, you know who he is?’

‘That David Lodge?’ Adele asked. ‘The cop? I thought he was in jail.’

‘Apparently not.’

By this time, I’d realized who they were talking about. David Lodge was an obscure street cop working out of the Eight-Three who’d killed a pimp named Clarence Spott in a precinct holding cell. This was six or seven years ago, when I was a street cop myself, working out of the 34th in northern Manhattan. Needless to say, Lodge was the hot topic of conversation at the house, as he was in every precinct throughout the five boroughs. The way I remember it, he had few defenders because the killing was obviously deliberate. The consensus was that he’d crossed a line when he drove the sap into the back of Spott’s head and paid the price.

But there was another consensus, this one in the community at large, that drew a different line when Lodge was allowed to plead to Man-One instead of murder. Encouraged by self-righteous editorials in New York’s three major newspapers, a coalition of civil rights groups had conducted a massive protest in the park fronting City Hall. I’d worked that protest, assigned to temporary crowd-control by a desk lieutenant who didn’t like me all that much anyway. I was cursed at and taunted for three and a half hours. All the things that no mutt on the street would dare to say to a cop’s face were said to me. Though I was able to control my actions, my emotions ran wild, relentless as army ants. By the time it was over, I hated the faces on the other side of the barricades as much as they hated mine.

Score one for Lieutenant Sarney. He’d perceived the threat. Now he was here to protect his interests.

Adele broke the silence. ‘There were two shooters,’ she announced. ‘They drove down the block, jumped out of the car, and began to fire as they approached the victim. The brass is 9mm, laid down in a pair of converging tracks, and the casings are evenly spaced, at least for the most part. Given the number of rounds fired, the shooters probably used something exotic, a TEC-9, maybe, or an Uzi. A pair of ordinary handguns won’t hold enough rounds to leave that much brass.’ She paused long enough to gesture at the crime scene, then continued. ‘The victim was on the sidewalk when the first bullets hit him. There’s blood on the concrete and more blood on the railing where he jumped the fence. By this time, his thighs were pumping blood and his pressure must have been dropping because the best he could do was crawl toward the house. At least one of the shooters followed him into the yard. The fatal shot was fired into his head from no more than a few inches away.’

At the other end of the block, a woman burst from a house and began to run toward the crime scene. She was intercepted by a pair of newly arrived officers bearing paper bags that displayed the Dunkin Donuts logo. The cops spoke to the woman briefly, then waved to Vinny Murrano who walked over to join them. It was time to get moving again.

I opened the door and set a foot on the street. ‘Thanks for the warning, lou,’ I said. ‘We appreciate it.’

Though Sarney was barely into his forties, his noticeably rounded skull was entirely bald on top. When he was being serious, he liked to lower his chin, to present his subordinates with that shiny dome. He did it now, at the same time cocking his head to the right.

‘Don’t fuck around with this,’ he warned. ‘Cross the t’s, dot the i’s. And if anything unusual comes up — and I mean anything — I wanna know about it right away.’

Sarney was looking directly at me as he spoke, and I had the feeling that he was asking for a commitment. Certainly, he had the right. Sarney was my mentor, my rabbi. If not for his personal efforts, neither my promotion, nor my transfer to Homicide — an assignment I’d coveted from my earliest days on the job — would be in the works.

I smiled reassuringly and winked. ‘Ten-four, lou. Message received.’

We made a pair of stops before interviewing the witnesses. The idea was to alert the two sergeants on the scene, Murrano and Gutierrez, to the victim’s celebrity. Gutierrez thanked us for the tip, then went back to supervising his workers, one of whom was photographing the shoe impressions leading to the victim’s body.

Vinny Murrano was more informative. ‘That woman who ran down the block,’ he told us before we could deliver our message, ‘is Ellen Lodge, the vic’s spouse.’

‘You put her on ice?’ Adele asked.

‘I told her you’d be wantin’ an interview. Seems like she runs a day-care center out of her house and won’t be going anywhere until the parents come by to fetch the kiddies.’

A flurry of movement drew my attention away from the conversation. I turned just in time to see a cardinal land on a telephone wire across the street. The bird’s red feathers were puffed out against the cold, lending it an almost round profile, like an escaped Christmas ornament. It sang once, a complex song that seemed expectant to me, as though it anticipated a response. But when the only response was a gray morgue wagon turning onto the street, the bird flew into the upper branches of a sycamore thirty feet away.

When I looked back, Adele was explaining the significance of Lieutenant Sarney’s arrival. Murrano listened closely, then said, ‘So that’s what the wife meant when she told me her husband just got out of jail yesterday morning.’ He ran his fingers through his hair as though checking to make sure he hadn’t lost his most precious asset. In his mid-thirties, Murrano’s wavy brown hair was thick enough to be fur. ‘Anyway, I appreciate the heads-up. If there is something I can do…’

‘As a matter of fact,’ I quickly responded, ‘you could lend us Officer Aveda over there to start a canvas of the neighborhood. Sarney asked us to get back to him as soon as possible and it would definitely speed things up. Of course, I could always phone the lieutenant and ask for help. If you can’t spare anyone.’

Murrano’s narrow lips expanded into a wry smile. He should never have opened his big mouth and he knew it. ‘Anything else?’ he foolishly asked.

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘The way it looks right now, the shooters were waiting for the victim. That means they had to be within sight of Lodge’s house. Two men sitting in car? On a block like this? The locals would most likely notice, especially if the shooters were Black or Hispanic.’

‘Fine.’ Murrano waved us away before we could voice another request. ‘I’ll make sure the question is asked.’

The witnesses lived on the second floor of the two-family home Lodge had been crawling toward when the coup de grace was administered. They were Otto and Eva Hinckle, in their early seventies and retired from the work force. The story they told was simple. They’d been watching television in their living room when they heard a series of small explosions. Eva described these sounds as similar to popcorn in a microwave. Oscar suspected kids setting off fire crackers.