Robert Knightly: Bodies in Winter

There was a second reason for my timidity as well, a compelling reason that played in my head with the intensity of a police siren. Without ever intending to, I’d made a career of short-term relationships, enduring a string of failures so long I’d managed to convince myself that short-term was the best I could do. Adele, on the other hand, was all about commitment.

David Lodge was right where we’d left him, on his back, staring up at the wide blue sky. The Crime Scene Unit was through with him, the morgue wagon still waiting. I walked through the open gate, squatted down and went through his pockets, gathering his personal effects. They didn’t amount to much: a watch, a comb, a wallet and thirty-eight cents in miscellaneous coins.

Adele was standing alongside me, her hands on her hips. ‘A contact wound, Corbin. You see the pattern?’

The skin around the entrance wound on Lodge’s right temple was split into lines that radiated outward from the wound. This star-shaped pattern could only have resulted from the barrel of the gun being in contact with Lodge’s temple when the fatal shot was fired. The chain of events was simple and easily recognized. When the trigger was pulled, heated gases had poured from the barrel. These gases had bounced off the bony plates of Lodge’s skull, then ricocheted back to split his flesh from the inside.

‘So what?’ I asked.

Adele’s hand swept over the street behind us. ‘All that brass, it’s too extravagant. You close your eyes, you see a pair of coked-up kids pulling the trigger with their eyes closed. You see gang kids. But from in here, it looks like a professional hit. It looks like the perps were cool, calm and collected.’

‘That mean you think the TEC-9s were overkill?’

She nodded twice, then squatted down beside me. ‘Like the Toyota double-parked beneath the El, the weapon left behind, Lodge’s nice clean room and the car being stolen a week in advance.’ She paused briefly before adding, ‘And the widow’s tale.’

Like I’ve already said, Adele was nothing if not meticulous.

In quick succession, we released the body and conferred with Officer Aveda and Sgt Gutierrez. Aveda’s diligent efforts had turned up two additional witnesses. Each of them, attracted by the gunfire, had seen the red car as the shooters made their escape. But no identifications were forthcoming. The men in the car were still wearing their ski masks.

We found Gutierrez inside the CSU van, along with his assistants. They were chomping on slices of pizza.

‘Same old same old,’ Gutierrez told me. ‘We’ll put the evidence in the pipe, see what shakes out.’

‘That mean you didn’t find the perps’ wallets while we were gone?’

‘’Fraid not, but we collected enough blood to keep the lab rats busy for the next two months.’

Gutierrez was referring to the very faint hope that some of the blood evidence had been contributed by one or both of the perps.

‘I’m not holdin’ my breath,’ I told him, ‘any more than I’m expecting fingerprints to show up when you dust that Toyota. But I do appreciate the effort.’

To my left, the morgue attendants were hoisting David Lodge onto an unzipped body bag. Protected by the cold from the onset of rigor mortis, his limbs were surprisingly supple. Lodge was a big man, well over six feet, and at first I was sure the attendants were going to drop him. But they finally made an effort that brought his sagging butt off the ground far enough to clear the edges of the body bag.

Both men sighed audibly when they let the body down. The three minutes of work they’d done for their three hours of pay had exhausted them. Nevertheless, their timing was exquisite. The first reporters arrived as they zipped up the body bag. The reporters were met by Aveda and his partner, Jake Pearlman, who kept them at bay long enough for David Lodge to be loaded into the morgue wagon. And long enough for me and my partner to get away without so much as a ‘No comment.’

There were chores to be done. The first of these was accomplished by Adele who examined the contents of Lodge’s wallet on the ride back to the house. She found twenty-two dollars in bills, a photo ID issued by the Department of Correctional Services, an appointment card for a one o’clock meeting with Parole Officer Paris Blake. She also found a photo of Ellen Lodge taken at least fifteen years before. Ellen was posed on a strip of sand, her back to a roiling ocean, an attractive young woman with a sassy smile.

Our basic plan was to complete as much paperwork as possible before we returned in the evening to re-canvas the neighborhood. A numbered complaint, called a UF-61, would have to be generated first, then each of the interviews written up on supplementary complaint forms, called DD-5s. The complaint number on the UF-61 would forever identify the case file. This was important because it had become clear that Adele and I were going to need the case file for the homicide Lodge committed almost seven years before. Though the file had long ago been swept from the Eight-Three to an archive maintained by the Property Clerk Division in Long Island City, it wouldn’t be difficult to retrieve once we had the file number in hand. Adele was about that task, calling up Lodge’s rap sheet on a squad computer, when Lieutenant Sarney walked into the room.

‘My office,’ he said to me without so much as nodding to Joe Mangone, who was pecking away at a keyboard three feet to Adele’s left, or to Lemuel Henderson who was at his desk, taking a victim’s statement from an elderly woman who’d lost her pocket book to an opportunistic mope. ‘You too, Adele. I want a full update.’

Adele began with a precise summary of our activities, both at the crime scene and on Broadway, in Bushwick. Sarney listened, nodding from time to time, until Adele began to explain why the blocks around Palmetto Street had to be re-canvassed.

‘If the car wasn’t within sight of Ellen Lodge’s house,’ he interrupted, ‘then where was it?’

‘On Fresh Pond Road or Myrtle Avenue where there’s more traffic. Or maybe they just kept moving.’ Adele played with the buttons of her red blazer for a moment, then looked up at Sarney. ‘The important question here is how they knew Lodge was going to leave the house when he did.’

Sarney looked at me, but when I remained silent, he quickly assumed the role of devil’s advocate. ‘Maybe,’ he noted, ‘the shooters made a few passes and got lucky. Maybe they kept circling the block until he came out.’

Adele settled herself against the seat. ‘You want me to believe that two ghetto gangsters, out to avenge the death of their boss seven years ago, roamed through a white neighborhood like Ridgewood until they just happened on their target? Gimme a break.’ She rushed on before Sarney could respond. ‘But even if they did, it only brings up another question. How did they know he was staying with his wife? Was that also a lucky guess?’

Sarney was a smart boss, smart enough to endure the foibles of his children. That Adele Bentibi was fabulously opinionated was something he just had to live with. He grinned and raised his hands, palms out. ‘No mas, no mas.’

As for me, I was already bored with the debate. The widow had presented us with a motive and we would have to check it out. Though the re-canvas was obviously important, it was unlikely to turn up a suspect. Even if a dozen people recalled seeing two black men sitting in a car, it would be just another piece of the puzzle.

‘Whatta ya say we go over this again,’ Sarney continued. ‘In case I have to do a press conference.’

This time Sarney took notes. I watched him carefully, looking for signs of my own fate. Under ordinary circumstances, nothing draws the bosses to a microphone like a celebrity homicide. But Lodge’s celebrity was another matter. The official pronouncement at the time of his sentencing was that he’d dishonored the job and was punished appropriately, a judgment clearly designed to put an end to the matter.