Robert Knightly: Bodies in Winter

‘Look for me,’ he’d told her, ‘around five.’

Or maybe it was four-thirty, or six-fifteen, or eight minutes past seven. Ellen wasn’t absolutely positive. What with the kids and all.

The Crime Scene Unit was still going strong when Adele and I walked out onto the street. They were measuring the distance between David Lodge’s body and each of the shell casings on the street.

‘You know, Corbin,’ Adele said, ‘the merry widow seemed very unsure of the details. In fact, she was only certain about one thing.’

‘That we simply must see Pete Jarazelsky?’

Adele tossed me one of those sharp unamused smiles she’s so good at, then said, ‘Got it on the first try.’

We split up at that point, Adele to check on the progress of the Crime Scene Unit. I watched her walk away, then drove off to look for Paolo ‘Wonder Boy’ Aveda, the uniformed officer who was canvassing the neighborhood. Wonder Boy was what his brother officers called him, though not to his face. They were jealous, of course, as people of little talent always are in the presence of the gifted. Three years into the job, Aveda knew everybody in the precinct, from the priests and the merchants to the mutts and the mopes. He had more snitches than I had friends, a rabbi in high places and a hundred credits toward a college degree. Soon he would be called to better things, by Narcotics, Organized Crime or even the vaunted Detective Bureau. That’s why I’d picked him in the first place.

I found Aveda two blocks to the south, the direction from which Lodge’s assassins had come. Glad to see me, he jumped into the Ford I was driving and stuck his hands into the flow of tepid air coming from the defroster.

‘I think,’ he told me, ‘if I touched my ears, they’d crack.’

After giving the car and himself a chance to warm up, Aveda went on to admit that the canvas wasn’t going particularly well. That was because most of the houses and apartments along Palmetto were empty, the parents off to work, the children either in school or day care.

But Aveda’s partial canvas hadn’t been entirely without results. Three elderly women had walked up Palmetto around nine, on their way back from the eight o’clock mass at St. Catherine’s. They’d seen nothing amiss.

‘These kind of old ladies,’ Aveda told me, ‘you find ’em all through Ridgewood. They’re the alarm system for their blocks. I couldn’t tell ya how many times I been called out because one of ’em saw something out of place.’

‘Something with the wrong color skin?’

‘You got it.’ Though Aveda was Puerto Rican and fairly dark, his tone was matter-of-fact. This was an issue he’d dealt with long before. ‘I also talked to three other people, a disabled guy with an aide who pushed him around the block in a wheelchair, and a woman who went shopping. Nobody saw anything out of place.’

We were parked before a line of modest row houses that stretched the length of the block. The houses were of brick and flat-roofed, with bow windows on the upper and lower floors. Under a noon sun, the yellow brick appeared warm to the touch, an illusion dispelled by the icicles dangling from cornices so uniform they might have been part of a single structure.

I was gathering the courage to suggest that Aveda and I face the cold implied by those icicles when my cell phone began to ring. Though I was hoping for rescue, I was nevertheless surprised when my partner told me that a pair of Bushwick cops had located the red sedan beneath the El on Broadway.

‘There was a handgun inside, a TEC-9,’ she explained. ‘We better get over there.’ Then she hung up.

Delray Webber, a patrol sergeant from the Eight-Three, was waiting for us at the intersection of Broadway and Linden Street when we arrived ten minutes later, along with a pair of uniforms who had the good sense to remain in their cruiser. Adele went off to get the names of those officers, along with a few details, in case they were needed to testify at some later date. Across the street, on the south side of Broadway, a maroon Toyota Camry was double-parked beneath the elevated tracks carrying the J line. Surrounded by ribbons of yellow tape fixed to the girders of the El, it looked to me like the featured vehicle on a used car lot. The one I couldn’t afford.

‘The officers noticed the car double-parked and ran a check,’ Webber explained. ‘When the vehicle came up stolen, they moved in for a closer look and found the gun. Then they called me.’

‘You know when the car was stolen?’

‘Last week, on the eighth.’

Webber led me to his patrol car, then pointed through the window. A TEC-9 was lying on the front seat next to Webber’s driver. In appearance, it was nothing short of ferocious. The fifty-round magazine was a foot long and the barrel was surrounded by a stainless-steel baffle. You couldn’t look at the weapon without imagining a gangster spraying bullets in all directions. But appearances are deceiving. Relatively cheap, the TEC-9 is a triumph of style over substance. It fires ordinary 9mm cartridges, one round at a time, just like the Glock parked at my hip, the main difference being that my Glock is far more accurate. True, the TEC-9’s magazine holds thirty-two rounds to the Glock’s fifteen, an advantage for street criminals with no training and no opportunity to practice. But that’s not why the mutts love them. No, mutts are attracted to TEC-9s because their own lives are a triumph of style over substance.

‘What I’m gonna do here,’ Webber explained, ‘is take this to the house, voucher it and send it on to the lab. Meanwhile, I called for a tow. They should be here in about fifteen minutes.’

‘I appreciate that, sarge.’

‘Good, because I got a rape on Troutman Street that needs lookin’ after, so if you’ll excuse me…’

For a moment, after Webber left, I stood where I was. The sun was still high enough to filter through the tracks above me, to throw bars of light over the red car across the street. Broadway is the dividing line between the neighborhoods of Bedford-Stuyvesant and Bushwick. Not only was the TEC-9 a weapon of choice in both, the J Train running above my head would carry you to any number of similar communities.

I spent the next half-hour, until the tow truck arrived, making careful notes of the Ellen Lodge interview while a succession of J Trains contributed to the layer of greasy soot coating every object beneath the El. As a rule, I don’t take notes in the course of an interview. Writing not only distracts the subject, it draws attention to those elements of the subject’s story that most interest me. Forewarned is forearmed, as they say.

With cooperating witnesses, like the Hinckles, it doesn’t matter all that much. With Ellen Lodge? Let’s just say that I wanted to get her story on paper in case a few inconsistencies turned up at some later date. Of course, I might have asked her to sign a statement, as I had with the Hinckles, but I had no desire to telegraph my suspicions.

Adele was looking over my shoulder, adding a generally critical comment from time to time. As she couldn’t do this without our bodies coming into contact, I didn’t mind the back-seat driving. My physical attraction to Adele had begun on the day we became partners, long before I really got to know her. I could invent any number of reasons to justify this attraction: her confidence and poise, her clear indifference to the opinions of her peers, her advanced policing skills. But that’s all in retrospect, more justification than explanation. I only knew that my desire for her, even a year later, was intense and immediate, and that the closer I got, the stronger it became.

The sad part was that I still hadn’t dredged up the courage to put a move on her, though there were times when I sensed that she was ready. I told myself that I was waiting until she and her husband finally split up, but I think it was more likely that I feared the consequences if my overtures were rejected. Adele’s tongue was rough enough to grind glass.