Robert Knightly: Bodies in Winter

‘Soon enough,’ she predicted, ‘he will come back to himself.’

A week later, Mel announced (through his lawyer, Carolyn Bemis) that he not only planned to sue for divorce on the grounds of desertion, but to contest every item of communal property, from the electric toothbrush in the bathroom to the potted geraniums on the balcony.

My concern, as I cut through the water, was for Adele. There’s nothing more trivial than an ugly divorce and Adele’s first instinct was to avoid the matter, to turn her back and walk away. But she and her husband’s financial affairs were completely interwoven, on top of which Mel had cleaned out their checking and savings accounts. Thus Adele had retained an attorney named William Melrose only a few days before. Melrose was urging her to counter-sue on the grounds of emotional cruelty.

‘You need to take the offense here,’ he’d counseled. ‘You have to stay one step ahead of the game.’

One step ahead of the game. If that was all it took, Adele might not fare too badly after all. Certainly, she’d been one step ahead of the job throughout the Lodge investigation. Adele had barraged Ginnette Lansky with self-righteous descriptions of the NYPD’s latest ethical failings, presenting a moral argument that acknowledged no blurring of the line between right and wrong. Her strategy was tailored to Lansky’s rigid personality, a matter of telling the subject what the subject wanted to hear. This was a technique learned from Harry Corbin, a technique that finally inspired, in Ginnette Lansky, a desire to secure Adele’s services far into the future.

It was a little past midnight when Adele and I stepped out onto Twenty-Third Street. Above us, a bank of low-hanging clouds played moon to Manhattan’s sun, reflecting back the light from a million sources. Adele and I headed south, toward a restaurant on Stuyvesant Street called Round the Clock. It was Saturday night, the sidewalks crowded, the mood on the street celebratory: a bitterly cold winter had finally been put to rest. In the distance a siren wailed, grew louder for a moment, then slowly receded without ever coming into view. Ahead, a pair of Latinos, short stocky men in white aprons, squatted outside the kitchen door of a Greek diner. They took quick puffs on their cigarettes, conversing in rapid-fire Spanish. As we passed, the younger of the two evaluated Adele with a searching, though not disrespectful, glance.

We were within a block of the restaurant when Adele turned to face me. She tugged at my lapels, pulling me down into a kiss. I think she was fearful. While life with Mel was far from fulfilling, it was certainly safe. If there was little to be gained, there was little at risk. But circumstances had now changed, and from time to time she looked to me for reassurance though it cut across the grain of her deepest instincts.

Once we had a table and cups of coffee before us, Adele put down her menu and tapped the edge of the table. Listen up, Corbin.

‘Linus won the grand prize,’ she told me.

‘Who decided?’

‘Kenneth Alessio, himself.’ Adele shrugged. ‘Potter had the most to offer.’

‘And he was the most culpable as well.’

Adele didn’t argue the point. After Potter came forward, the other conspirators had rushed to join him, including two previously unknown to us, Officers John Lacy and Judith Singer. As a group, they’d worked the angles common to generations of rogue cops. Paco Luna was protected, for a price, but other dealers were fair game. And what a game they’d played with those unprotected dealers, inspiring by their own savagery a willingness on the part of their victims to surrender whatever cash and product they possessed. And to forget the incident ever occurred.

‘I don’t like the taste in my mouth,’ Adele confessed. ‘Potter’s admitted to killing Dante Russo, then dumping his body into the East River. He’ll plead guilty to manslaughter.’

‘Just like David Lodge.’

‘Linus Potter,’ Adele countered, ‘was involved in three homicides, while David Lodge was framed. Somehow it seems unjust that they should receive identical sentences. As if the state was simply balancing the scales.’

Not surprisingly, the stories offered by the various conspirators (in proffers that could not be used against them in a court of law) were entirely self-serving. While all agreed that Dante Russo, still missing, was one of the shooters at the Lodge scene, none admitted to being the other. Potter named John Lacy. John Lacy named Potter. Judith Singer claimed that she was in the clear, both shooters being male, and that’s all she had to say on the subject. Jarazelsky might have cast the tie-breaking vote when he named Linus Potter, but Jarazelsky was too far removed from the actual events to be entirely credible.

Ellen Lodge was cursed with the same credibility problem. Once she realized that placing the blame on Dante Russo wouldn’t earn her any consideration, she again reversed course. In the new version, Linus Potter, fiend incarnate, had masterminded the drama’s every scene. He was author, producer, director, lead actor.

According to Adele, who’d interviewed Ellen Lodge in the company of her attorney, Ellen had told her story well enough, and she would have gotten the good deal if only she’d been consistent. But this was her third account and none of the ADAs working the Major Crimes Bureau believed she’d stand up to cross-examination if her testimony was placed before a jury.

That was good news for Detective Linus Potter, and might have been sufficient to put him in the winner’s circle, even without his ace in the hole. Nevertheless, Linus played the card for everything it was worth. Of all the living conspirators, his lawyer pointed out, Linus was the only one who’d dealt face to face with Paco Luna. Even better, he’d surreptitiously taped many of their conversations.

‘They all want Luna, Corbin,’ Adele explained. ‘The Brooklyn DA, the feds, the media and every civic group in Bushwick. If Alessio cuts a deal with Potter, he’ll make a lot of friends.’

That the Queens District Attorney, Kenneth Alessio, aspired to loftier political heights was no secret. He’d all but declared for the mayoral primary to be held a year hence.

I knew that Adele was disappointed and I should have kept my mouth shut because the question I asked only made it worse. ‘So, who’s gonna take the weight?’

‘Paco Luna.’

‘Seriously?’

‘The way it’s shaping up, Ellen Lodge and Linus Potter will both plead to man-one. Ellen will be sentenced to fifteen years, Potter to seven. The other two, Lacy and Singer, will plead to extortion. They’ll get two-and-a-third to seven.’

If the outcome was bittersweet, Adele’s midnight snack — a waffle mounded with strawberries and whipped cream — more than made up for it. As it was my normal dinner hour, I’d ordered the chicken stir-fry, a healthy enough meal diminished only by my refusing the waiter’s offer of brown rice.

In truth, Potter’s good fortune didn’t upset me. Everybody was being charged with something and that was enough. Besides, circumstances had moved me beyond Lodge and Russo and Potter and all the rest. My transfer to the boonies was strictly punitive, a point made early on when my new commander ignored me for three days. Equally cool, my peers generally observed a calculated silence when forced to work with me. At times, their eyes ran across my body as though searching for a wire. At times, the only thing that kept me going was the memory of that dance I’d danced with Bill Sarney’s wife, and the promise it implied.

I watched Adele cut through the last bites of her waffle, her movements deft. Adele was a precise eater. If she’d ever allowed a morsel to drop from her fork to her blouse, I wasn’t around to see it. I think this trait masked the size of her appetite — blessed from birth with the metabolism of a wolverine, most of the time she was trying to gain weight.