Bodies in Winter Read online

  ‘And you want me to be there as well, to be seen with you?’

  ‘That’s right, Bill, and when I invite your wife to dance, I expect her to accept without hesitation.’

  As Sarney considered the demand, his grin began to widen. Again, I sensed a degree of admiration, as if by playing his game, I was somehow flattering him.

  ‘OK, I think I can make that dinner.’ He reached out to touch my arm, a gesture as intimate as it was unwelcome. ‘And if you wanna dance with Rebecca, it’s fine, as long as you don’t ask me to dance with Bentibi. That’s one gesture I don’t feel up to making.’

  This time, when I hit Sarney, his eyes rolled up in his head and he went over backwards, crashing to the floor. I stood over him for a moment, half-hoping he’d make some attempt to rise, but the man lay as unmoving as a corpse. I thought of Adele, then, waiting for me back in Rensselaer Village. When we’d finally uncovered Sarney’s contribution to the dramatics, her first instinct was to bury him. But she’d turned on a dime when I laid out my goal, and my plan to attain it. Her only moment of hesitation came after I announced my determination to confront Sarney alone.

  ‘I’m afraid you’ll lose control,’ she’d announced. ‘That you’ll do something you can’t take back.’

  ‘Are you saying that I shouldn’t lay a hand on him?’

  ‘No, I’m saying you should hit him twice, once for each of us, then get the hell out of his house.’

  Mission accomplished, I left without a backward glance.

  FORTY-THREE

  Though we continued to reside in Rensselaer Village, Adele and I were apart for days on end. Our hours were long, our working lives entirely separate. Adele was currently employed by the Queens District Attorney in the Major Crimes Bureau, while I’d been transferred to the 123rd Precinct on the southern tip of Staten Island and assigned to work the four-to-midnight tour. As often as not, by the time I returned home it was closing in on two o’clock in the morning and Adele was a shadow curled beneath the covers in a darkened room.

  We’d compensated for our separate lives in a number of ways, one of which unfolded before me as I came out of the locker room at the Y on Twenty-Third Street. Adele had taken up swimming and she now stood at the edge of the pool, poised to make that initial leap. The idea (which had been presented to me as a done deal) was for us to spend more time in each other’s company.

  If Adele had asked me beforehand, I would have told her that swimming is a solitary pursuit, perhaps the most solitary of all sports. But I hadn’t been asked and I now watched as Adele’s knees bent, as she leaned toward the pool, as her arms swung back, as she sprang up and out, as the muscles in her thighs and buttocks flexed hard before releasing an instant after she hit the water.

  After three months of co-habitation, I’d come to realize that I’d never penetrate Adele’s essential reserve, that she would always be mysterious. This wasn’t an impediment to our relationship; like most males, I have little interest in expressing my innermost feelings, assuming I have any worth expressing. For Adele, though, reticence was closely connected to her determination to avoid a trivial life. The idea, from her point of view, was not to restrict communication. She wished only that the messages we exchanged be non-verbal. It was more of a challenge that way.

  I watched Adele swim a few laps, my eye now critical. She was in good shape and she had stamina, but even allowing for her inexperience, I knew she’d never be a swimmer. For Adele, the water was an obstacle to be overcome through an effort of will. For born swimmers, on the other hand, there is no physical separation between flesh and water until the very end of a swim. And it’s the flesh that fails.

  My thoughts, when I finally got into the water that night, were not of whales and penguins. They were of my lover and her husband, Mel. I’d been wrong about Mel. He did have feelings, which he expressed in a series of phone calls that began while Adele and I were still working the David Lodge case. Of course he loved her. Of course he couldn’t bear the pain of their separation. He would do anything, make any changes to his habits and personality, in order to recapture her affections. Of course.

  Though utterly useless, Mel’s pleadings were sincere enough. Losing Adele had carried him back to the very pain that had originally shut him down.

  I remember raising the question of whether Mel’s frequent calls had crossed the line and become harassment. Adele had responded with a sly smile and a toss of her hair.

  ‘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 incid
ent 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.

  Smug as an overfed cat, Adele finally dropped her knife and fork on her plate, then wiped her mouth and laid her napkin on the table. ‘When I eat whipped cream,’ she told me, her expression studiously dead-pan, ‘I commonly become multi-orgasmic.’

  I acknowledged the straight line with a smile, then raised my hand. ‘Waiter,’ I called out. ‘Check, please.’