Bodies in Winter hc-1 Read online

  ONE

  10:00 AM, Tuesday, January 15; seven years later

  There’s something about bodies in winter that gets to me. I’m referring to bodies found out of doors on weekday mornings when an ambient temperature of twenty-one degrees is reinforced by a wind cold enough to crack the porcelain on your teeth. Mornings when a malevolent sun glares down from the bluest of innocent blue skies, when blood congeals into greasy black balls that resemble nothing so much as rabbit droppings on a suburban lawn.

  When I first saw David Lodge I wanted to cover him with a blanket, to comfort him, to preserve the heat of his body. I wanted to compensate him for having the misfortune to be murdered in January. He was lying at an angle in a tiny yard, his feet pointing out towards a low railing dividing yard from sidewalk, his head nearly touching the foundation of a modest, two-family house. The house was on Palmetto Street in the Queens neighborhood of Ridgewood.

  ‘He tried to crawl away. You see that, Corbin? The wall stopped him.’

  The voice belonged to my partner, Detective Adele Bentibi. Adele always called me by my last name. Not Harry, as I was generally known to my peers, but simply Corbin, with a heavy emphasis on the first syllable.

  ‘Show me.’

  Adele gestured to parallel smears of blood running across the brown grass. ‘He got hit, went to his knees and tried to crawl away. The head shot finished him.’

  We were standing on the street side of the railing, having made our way through and around an army of little paper flags that marked the resting positions of spent 9mm cartridges. The paper flags were numbered, one to thirty-three, and most had already blown over. Ahead of us, David Lodge was lying on his left side, one leg curled nearly into his chest. His left arm was bent beneath him, his right splayed out with the wrist twisted into a position so unnatural it could only have been produced by violent death.

  There was blood everywhere. On the sidewalk, the railing, the grass and especially on David Lodge. His wool trousers were saturated with blood, from mid-thigh to the tops of his black engineer boots. But it wasn’t blood loss that killed him, or at least I didn’t think so. Lodge had a small bullet wound in his right temple, a little forward of his hair line. Though I couldn’t see an exit wound from where I stood, a halo of spatter extending outward to stain the concrete foundation of the house guaranteed its presence.

  ‘How close was the shooter?’

  ‘Within a few inches of the vic’s temple.’ She pointed to a small object next to Lodge’s right ear. ‘You see the brass? The shooter had to be leaning down with the gun twisted to the right for the brass to end up that close to the body.’

  I think Adele would have liked nothing better than to jump the railing and examine each of Lodge’s many bullet wounds. But the yard enclosing Lodge’s body was no more than eight-by-ten feet and there was blood all through it. I could see a half-dozen shoe impressions from where I stood. Had they been left by Lodge’s killer? Or by the first cops on the scene who’d checked for a pulse and ID on the victim? Whichever the case, there was nothing to be gained by adding to the chaos.

  ‘Are we done here?’ I asked Adele. My toes were numb, as were the tips of my fingers, the tip of my nose and both ear lobes.

  Adele shrugged, the gesture without sympathy. For her, foul weather was something you ignored in your quest for excellence. Adele often spoke about excellence, about bringing excellence to life’s mundane tasks, and I could see it in her meticulous approach to small details. The larger tasks, on the other hand, the big picture, sometimes escaped her. Adele and her husband, Mel, for instance, were perpetually on the verge of separation. And then there was the simple fact that when it came to interviews and interrogations, she didn’t have a clue.

  A Crime Scene Unit step-van pulled up behind the cordon of vehicles on the north end of Palmetto Street, luring Adele’s attention away from the crime scene. She shielded her eyes from the sun, then announced, ‘Ray Gutierrez.’

  For a moment, I was caught up in the miniature suns reflected in her perfectly manicured fingernails. They formed shimmering white circles in the clear polish. But then her hand dropped to her side and she began to work her way toward the van, placing her feet carefully to avoid the scattered brass. I think she would have committed hari-kari before moving one of those casings so much as a millimeter.

  Sergeant Ramon Gutierrez was a short balding man with a round belly that strained the front of his white jumpsuit. His perpetually sour expression (or so he once told me over drinks) had been honed by years of trying to extract physical evidence from scenes contaminated by the very cops charged with protecting them.

  ‘Anybody approach the body?’ he asked.

  ‘The first uniforms on the scene.’ I gestured to Officers Pearlman and Aveda. They were standing just inside a yellow streamer that extended all the way across the street, talking to their boss, Sgt Vinny Murrano.

  ‘Anybody else?’ Gutierrez asked.

  A blaring horn drowned out Adele’s response. Thirty yards away, my own boss, Detective Lieutenant Bill Sarney, was parked at the curb. Impatient as always, he waved us over.

  ‘Bad news,’ I told my partner as we hastened to obey. Sarney was a hands-off supervisor who only showed up when a particular job was likely to attract the attention of the bosses.

  ‘Why bad?’ For Adele, the bosses’ scrutiny was an opportunity to prove her worth. For me, the facts on the ground told another, much sadder story. If the investigation produced results, the bosses took the credit. If the investigation went bad, the rank-and-file caught the blame. Given that my promotion to detective, second grade, along with a transfer to Homicide Division, was almost a done deal, I’d just as soon have passed under the radar screen.

  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.’

  TWO

  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.

  Foolishly, as both admitted, they went to the front window and looked out just in time to see a man wearing a ski mask and gloves fire a single shot into David Lodge’s skull.

  ‘The guy, the one who got shot, was trying to turn his head away,’ Oscar explained, ‘and the other guy was leaning way over with his gun turned around like this.’

  Oscar twisted his wrist to the right, exactly as Adele had done twenty minutes before. I glanced at her and she flashed me a quick smile. Adele loved to be right.

  ‘The gun was gigantic,’ Oscar continued. ‘It looked like a machine gun, only without the…’ He tapped his shoulder several times, then said, ‘The wood part.’

  ‘The stock?’

  ‘That’s right. And the other thing, the thing that holds the bullets?’

  ‘The magazine?’

  ‘Yeah, it was a foot long and it was in front of the trigger. And believe me, it caught my full attention. I was concentrating so hard on the guy with the gun that I didn’t even notice the other guy who was with him until the first guy ran back to the car. The second guy was also wearing a mask and gloves. And he had the same kind of gun.’

  ‘Describe the men,’ I said. ‘Were they short, tall, slim, heavy..?’

  Although the initial image the Hinckles carried, of cold-blooded murder, was indelibly imprinted in their memories, they disagreed on most of the smaller details. Height, weight, who got into the car first, who was driving, what the men wore besides gloves and masks. They didn’t remember any of these things clearly and their hesitant answers reflected their confusion. But they did agree on the dark-red color of the getaway vehicle, which was why Murrano had put out an alert.

  ‘Did you notice anything else about the car?’ Adele asked. ‘Maybe a logo?’

  Oscar shook his head. ‘When I was a kid, I could tell you the year, make and model of any car drivin’ down the street. Now they all look alike.’

  ‘How about damage to the exterior. Dents or rust?’

  Oscar and Eva stared at Adele for a moment, then shrugged. They just didn’t remember. Myself, I would have let it go at that point. In my experience, when you push friendly witnesses, they fill the blank spaces in their memory with false details simply because they want to please. Better to leave a business card, or come back a few days later, when stray recollections surface on their own.

  But Adele had other ideas. ‘Think hard,’ she told her witnesses. ‘Is there anything else you remember? I don’t care how insignificant.’

  The Hinckles e
xchanged the sort of pregnant look only possible between long-married couples. Then Eva crossed her arms over her chest before turning to Adele. A decision had been made.

  ‘I think they were black.’ Eva again looked at her husband, her expression this time defiant. ‘The way that gun was twisted around, it’s how black gangsters hold their guns. You know, in the movies.’ She gave her husband a poke. ‘And the way they walked back to the car, with that shoulder thing they do, and bouncing up and down? That swagger? That’s a black thing.’

  Oscar Hinckle was quick to reply. ‘I didn’t see nothin’ like that.’ He ran a finger across his snow-white mustache, the wiry hairs rippling beneath his touch like an animal seeking affection. ‘Those two guys, they were all business. They didn’t say one word to each other. They just got in that car and peeled the hell outta there.’

  THREE

  Ellen Lodge met us at the door of her single-family home and quickly ushered us through the living and dining rooms. Our progress was followed by eight, very silent children. Adele and I had been able to hear the children as we approached the front door, a muffled din we expected to become raucous when the door was opened. Instead, everything stopped the minute we came into view. The kids were toddlers, old enough to walk, old enough to have minds of their own. They pinned us with unwavering stares. Who were we? What were we doing here? Was something bad about to happen?

  A second woman, not introduced to us, knelt beside a bench covered with little bowls of paint. She was staring at us, too.

  We were finally led into a large kitchen and the door closed behind us. Like the outer rooms, the kitchen had been pressed into service. Two trays stacked with sandwiches on paper plates rested on a table in the center of the room. A bubbling crock pot on a chipped counter was flanked by packages of Oreo cookies.

  ‘I haven’t said anything to the kids, but they know somethin’s wrong. No sense makin’ it any worse than what it is.’ Ellen Lodge was a small, bony woman just entering middle-age. She had a noticeably slender neck, a droopy nose and lobeless ears set very close to the side of her head. Thick and wiry, her graying hair was cut short enough to be termed butch, especially in a conservative neighborhood like Ridgewood.