Robert Knightly - Bodies in Winter

Twenty minutes after I parked the car, a chatty senior citizen named Emma Schmidt took one look at Dante Russo’s photo and said, ‘That’s the boyfriend.’

Emma’s apartment, on the second floor of a three-story row house, was a virtual shrine to the Virgin Mary. Statues on the tables, prints on the wall, candles and rosaries everywhere. The red stitches of a framed sampler next to the window conveyed a simple message: PURITY.

‘Whose boyfriend?’ Adele asked.

‘Mrs Ellen Lodge’s boyfriend.’ Emma pressed her bony knuckles against her hips and blinked rapidly as she spoke. ‘Her husband wasn’t in jail yet when this one showed up. Brazen is what he was. Marchin’ up to her door in the middle of the night.’

We’d interviewed Emma Schmidt during our initial canvas of the neighborhood, but had failed to ask the right question. Emma was one of those neighborhood guardians I mentioned earlier. In good weather, she spent much of her time sitting on a lawn chair in front of her house, gossiping with friends. Ellen Lodge, she informed us, had been the subject of their collective ire for so long, she’d ceased to be news.

The January thaw was in full swing. The temperature was in the lower fifties, the sun sharp-edged and molten yellow, the sky a deep uniform blue punctuated by streaming ribbons of cloud. A soft breeze carried the odor of earth stirring, of roots come to life, a promise of spring no less welcome for being an illusion.

We were standing directly in front of Ellen’s row house, making ourselves as conspicuous as possible. From behind us, the January sun flared in the windows and softened the buttery-yellow facade; it glistened on the feathers of a dozen pigeons taking their ease along the edge of the roof. Except for their heads, which swiveled back and forth, turning at impossible angles in search of danger, the pigeons lay so unmoving they might have been decoys.

‘You ready, Corbin?’ Adele finally said as we approached the door.

‘Shouldn’t I be asking you that question?’

News of Russo’s disappearance had forced Adele and me to overhaul our strategy and we’d made a number of significant changes. The first was that Adele would conduct the interview, at least initially, playing the bad cop for all she was worth. It was a part, we both agreed, that came naturally.

‘I see it’s bad penny time,’ Ellen Lodge said when she opened the door. Again, I was struck by the muddy circles beneath her eyes, by a distinct weariness in the way she held her jaw. Her tone was firm, though, echoing the sarcasm in her words, and she led us to her sitting room without protest, resuming her seat in the room’s lone armchair. I slid out of my coat, helped Adele out of hers, then folded both coats before taking a seat at the far end of the couch.

Adele removed a small tape recorder from her coat pocket, started it up and laid it on a hassock midway between herself and her subject. Surprise number one and a big test. Plausible denial was now off the table. ‘Mrs Lodge, before we start, I want to make you aware of your constitutional rights.’

Ellen listened to Adele read from a printed card, controlling her impatience until Adele reached the part about representation by counsel.

‘What if I ask for a lawyer?’ she demanded. ‘Right this minute.’

‘Then my partner and I will leave.’ Adele’s reply was the only one she could make. With the tape running, plausible denial was off the table for us as well. ‘Now, do you understand these rights as I’ve read them to you?’

‘Yeah, sure.’

‘And are you willing to waive those rights?’

Ellen Lodge’s smile was a mere parting of the lips that revealed gritted teeth. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to go. ‘Fine, let’s just get it over with.’

‘Get what over with, Mrs Lodge?’

‘Whatever it is you’re doing here.’

‘But you know what we’re doing here, right?’

‘Why don’t you tell me?’

‘Because you already know. You knew when you set your husband up with that phone call.’ Adele waved off Ellen’s reply. ‘Like you said, Ellen, let’s just get it over with. Let’s get your story on the record.’

Removing and folding our coats was as much a signal as reading Ellen her rights. We were in control. We would proceed at a pace that we alone determined. The interrogation would be over when we said it was. This may seem absurd in light of our professed willingness to vacate the premises on demand, but I was almost certain that Ellen Lodge intended to stay the course, no matter how painful.

Adele began with the same general questions I’d asked on the days following Lodge’s murder. The responses she drew echoed the party line. Ellen had offered her husband a pillow on which to lay his head, not because she loved, or even liked him, but out of the goodness of her heart. On the day of his release, she’d been too busy to talk when he showed up late in the afternoon and their dinner conversation had amounted to nothing more than chit-chat. On the next morning, she’d awakened him to answer the phone, after which he’d quit the house.

Adele’s fingers drummed on the arm of the couch as she absorbed this recitation, occasionally shaking her head in disbelief. Ellen continued on, doggedly. From time to time, as she considered her answers, she focused on the turning spools of the little tape recorder as though to draw strength.

‘OK,’ Adele said when Ellen finally grew silent, ‘now that we’ve got the bullshit over with, let’s talk about the letters. Tell us what you did with them.’

‘I threw them out, because-’

‘I don’t need a reason. Tell me what was in them. Tell me what your husband had to say.’

‘He wrote me that Clarence Spott’s people were out for revenge. He wrote me that he was scared.’

‘Did he mention Spott by name?’

That brought a moment of hesitation. What had she said at that first interview? But then she recalled her lines. ‘I don’t remember exactly. I think he did. I can’t be sure.’

‘My partner went up to Attica, Mrs Lodge. He was there for maybe three whole hours. In that time, he met a corrections officer, a deputy warden and a prison psychiatrist who say that your husband left Attica believing he was innocent, that the only revenge he was concerned about was the revenge he expected to wreak on the people who framed him. Explain how your version and their versions can be so different.’

‘What about Pete Jarazelsky? He’ll tell you Davy was afraid for his life.’

‘Oh, right, Jarazelsky. As it turns out, what you told us — that Pete and your husband were good buddies — was an outright lie. Not only didn’t they watch each other’s backs, we have reason to believe that Davy beat Jarazelsky to a pulp.’

Adele was perched on the edge of the couch now, within six feet of Ellen Lodge who was pushed as far back in her chair as she could get. I didn’t blame Ellen. Between the look in Adele’s eye, her various wounds and the body armor, she seemed truly ferocious, even in profile.

‘Explain it,’ Adele again demanded. ‘Explain how these versions can be so utterly different.’

‘I can’t.’ Ellen’s eyes dropped to the tape recorder.

‘So, then it’s just a question of who I should believe: three disinterested professionals or a woman whose finances are tied up with Tony Szarek’s, Justin Whitlock’s and Dante Russo’s? Put yourself in my position, Ellen. Who would you believe, if you were me?’

Though it was clear that Ellen Lodge didn’t want to answer the question, Adele forced a response by repeating herself twice more. ‘If you were me, who would you believe?’

Finally, Ellen said, ‘You can believe who you want, but I’m telling the truth.’ This time her eyes never left the tape recorder. This was what she had to say, no more, no less. But the effort seemed to cost her as she began to pick at a loose thread in the arm of the couch.