Bodies in Winter Read online

  The Sparkle’s owner, Michael Blair, had a Dewar’s and water awaiting me by the time I reached the bar. Blair was in his early fifties, a former detective from the Eight-Three who’d mortgaged his pension to buy the joint. He had pale blue eyes that darted suddenly to yours, as if he was trying to catch you in an unguarded moment. He hit me with one of those looks now.

  ‘I heard,’ he said as I found a stool, ‘you stumbled into the Lodge case.’

  Before replying, I raised the traditional toast to Sparkle, who stood behind the bar. Sparkle was a life-size manikin constructed from papier mâché. Long ago, before Blair purchased the bar, somebody had painted Sparkle’s face and hair so that she slightly resembled Marilyn Monroe, then dressed her in a sequinned gown. Lit by a spotlight mounted just ahead of her toes, Sparkle did, indeed, sparkle.

  ‘Bad news travels fast,’ I finally said. ‘Just as well.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘Because I came here looking for a heads-up.’

  This was an avenue closed to my partner. As I said, she’d never visited Sparkle’s, or any other cop bar, which was probably for the best. That indifference to the opinions of her peers, which I admired, would have gotten a cold reception at the Sparkle Inn.

  But that wasn’t true for me. I was the guy you could go to for a favor, even for a short-term loan, maybe enough to settle your bar bill. I was the guy you could talk to about the wife, the kids or the girlfriend. I was the guy who listened to your endless gripes and actually seemed to care. I was the guy who got along with everyone.

  ‘I was in the Precinct when Lodge killed the perp,’ Blair readily admitted, ‘only I didn’t catch the case. The man you need to talk to is seated at his usual table, but there’s no guarantee he’ll give you the time of day.’

  I glanced over my shoulder at the broad back and wide shoulders of a notoriously anti-social detective named Linus Potter. Potter’s neck was so much thicker than his small head that he appeared to be defectively manufactured. Perhaps that was why he usually parked himself in a corner and drank with his back to his peers.

  When I carried my drink to his table and set it down, Potter didn’t so much as glance in my direction. Nor did he budge when I took a seat. Only when I finally said, ‘I caught the Lodge case and I’m looking for some guidance,’ did he raise a pair of small blue eyes that looked right through me.

  I responded by folding my arms across my chest. Despite the hostile glare, Potter was an easy read. Once he realized that he couldn’t intimidate me, he’d either tell me the truth or tell me to go fuck myself. Indecision was not in Potter’s DNA.

  ‘It was a nothin’ case,’ he finally growled. ‘We got everything but a confession. And we woulda got that, too, except the hump was too drunk to remember what he did.’

  Potter went on to describe the evidence against Lodge in enough detail to convince me that his own memory was accurate. And that evidence was impressive. Nevertheless, as the details accumulated, I realized there was a weak link in this perfect chain. Anthony Szarek, the man Potter called the Broom, had provided Russo with an alibi and put Lodge alone with the prisoner. But who vouched for Tony Szarek, a cop unfit for any duty beyond running out for doughnuts and sweeping the floor?

  ‘This cop, Szarek, is he still on the job?’ I asked.

  ‘Retired three years ago.’

  ‘You have any idea where to find him?’

  ‘Matter of fact, I know exactly where to find the Broom.’ Potter’s smirk was positively gleeful. He’d been setting me up for this punch line all along.

  ‘And where’s that?’

  ‘Mount Olivet Cemetery. He ate his gun two weeks ago.’ Potter leaned forward to jab a thick finger into my shoulder. ‘What I heard, the Good Life didn’t agree with the Broom. You know the one I’m talkin’ about? The one that goes from the rented room to the fucking bar to the rented room to the fucking bar. All the days of our fucking lives.’

  I made one more stop, at a YMCA swimming pool on East Twenty-Third Street in Manhattan. The pool was managed by Conrad Stehle, my former high school swimming coach, now retired. Along with a few others, Conrad had given me permission to use the pool at night, when you can swim laps without plowing your head into the bony rump of a frolicking senior citizen.

  Not that I had anything against frolicking seniors. In fact, living long enough to become a senior citizen is definitely one of my aims. That’s because, for most of my adolescence, I didn’t expect to make twenty-one.

  I have little sympathy for lawyers and sociologists who blame criminal behavior on early childhood experience: ‘My client only shot that storekeeper in the face, leaving him to spend the rest of his life contemplating his scar tissue, because his mother was a junkie and he never had a chance.’

  The way I see it, there’s no point in looking back. If you blame your parents for your troubles, they can just turn around and blame their own parents, who will most likely blame their parents, who will most likely . . . What you end up with, if you go too far down this road, is an amoeba blaming a virus.

  ‘Yo, the mother-fucker messed with my genes. What could I do?’

  Personal responsibility is the key to improving your life. That’s my story and I generally stick to it. Still, there’s no getting away from the fact that my life could have taken another direction; that except for a few lucky breaks, I might have been the one in the hump seat, making my own pathetic excuses.

  My parents were cross-addicted to every intoxicating substance on the face of the planet, but they were educated and they were not poor. That was my first break.

  At age thirteen, I was spending most of my life on the street, dodging the hustlers and the gang bangers as best I could. When I was beaten unconscious at age fourteen, I learned to cultivate an expression that revealed the extent of my determination not to repeat the experience, and to carry a knife. These were necessary adaptations for someone who never considered the possibility of going to his parents, or his teachers, or the cops.

  I was halfway to feral by the time I reached high school. There was me and my few streetwise bro’s, and there was everybody else. That you could never trust the everybody else was a simple given. Along with the fool’s belief that doing well in school was for jerks. The way I had it, success was failure. Except in athletics.

  Three months into my freshman year, a notice pinned to a cork board in the hallway caught my attention. The swimming team was having try-outs on the following afternoon. Like most of the neighborhood kids, I’d been spending a good part of my summers at the Asser Levi pool on Twenty-Third Street. I was the fastest swimmer among my friends and had even done well against older kids. So, why not?

  Twenty-four hours later, carrying my bathing suit and the cleanest towel I could find, I walked into a locker room and met Conrad Stehle. That was my second break.

  Conrad got me through high school, berating me, cajoling me, whatever it took. During those years, I ate more dinners at his and his wife’s house than at my own. The funny part is that I never asked myself why he made the effort; I just assumed I was worthy. Even later on, when I realized just how stupid that was, I finally decided the question wasn’t important enough to ask. Conrad Stehle had turned a punk kid with a bad attitude into a high school graduate, a punk kid who’ll be forever grateful, and not only for the diploma. Conrad made me a swimmer, as well, long distance as it turned out. In my senior year, I was among the better high school swimmers in New York State. For a kid with few positive accomplishments, the cheap trophies I earned were shields that protected me from the street’s many temptations.

  But ‘among the better’ was not Olympic caliber, or even college scholarship material. When I emerged from high school with a diploma and a pair of empty pockets, I had to choose between work and the streets. My answer, guided by Conrad, was the United States Army.

  The army was good for Harry Corbin, especially the camaraderie, and I eventually came to feel about my platoon as I had about the oth
er members of my swimming team – the ‘us’ part of it at least as important as the trophies. Thus, by the time I was honorably discharged three years later, I was well prepared to join the ‘cop family’ Ellen Lodge had mentioned, the one that had walked away from her.

  SEVEN

  My third break was swimming itself. On a purely physical level, distance swimming demands that you learn to calm your mind. This is literally true. Stroke/­stroke/ breathe; stroke/stroke/breathe; stroke/stroke/breathe; stroke/stroke/ breathe. Every stroke is designed to pull you through the water with maximum efficiency, every breath to fill your lungs completely.

  Take this to the bank. Mental agitation of any kind interferes with these goals. When you’re angry, or even frustrated, your stroke becomes ragged and you wobble from side to side in your lane. Your lungs become tighter as well – a definite no-no when you get less than a second to breathe between strokes.

  All of this is compounded by the conditions. With your ear plugs in, you hear nothing beyond the splashing of your arms and legs. With your goggles on, you see clearly only when your face is in the water. A red stripe on the bottom of the pool, which you dutifully follow, becomes your visual universe. In the end, your attention turns inward simply because there’s no other place for it to go.

  I remember learning this lesson the hard way. Whenever my stroke was off, Coach Stehle would have me swimming laps until I was ready to sink to the bottom. Then he’d have me do a few more.

  Initially, I took the obvious course. I tried not to think about anything that might upset me. Fat chance. I was a confrontational child and I needed my enemies. But what I did learn to do, finally, was strip my thoughts of emotion. An image would come into my mind – of my parents, for example, huddled around a mirror striped with lines of cocaine while I foraged through the cupboards in search of dinner – and I’d observe it without any feelings at all. Or I’d imagine Ramon Arellano trying to intimidate me in the lunch room without further imagining myself driving a knife through the side of his throat.

  By the time I finished my junior year, I was pretty much addicted to swimming. The pool was the place where I could look at myself without arousing emotions like fear, rage and self-contempt. Not that I liked the angry fool I saw. But at least I didn’t hate him. Sure, he was a jerk who did everything he could to ruin his life. But he was my jerk and I could make of him what I would.

  In my senior year, I began to redefine myself. I didn’t want to be a jerk any more. I knew that going in. Putting a face to the new self I hoped to create was much more difficult. What did I hope to become? The question was never directly answered. Instead, as I swam my way through high school, then through a long tour in Berlin, I not only became less angry, I began to like my life, as it was and as I hoped it would be. I wasn’t asking for much. I had no grand ambitions. I just wanted an ordinary life, as free from the chaos of my childhood as possible.

  And so I continued to believe as I walked out of the locker room and stood by the edge of an empty pool fourteen hours after the murder of David Lodge. The air around me, cool enough to produce goose bumps, was saturated with humidity and the odor of chlorine. Though it’d been years since I’d loosened up before a workout, I hesitated long enough to draw a few deep breaths, gradually expanding my lungs. Then I dove into the water and began to swim.

  For the first few laps, as the muscles of my shoulders and back gradually stretched out, I didn’t think about much of anything. The water flowed over my face and body, holding me in an embrace at once tender and distinctly sexual. The sensations were luxurious, as always, and I basked in them, knowing they came with no strings attached. This was purely for me, purely about me. This was mine.

  Still, I knew where my thoughts were headed once I settled into a steady grind. In the army, I’d learned to smell trouble coming, to avoid it. No confrontations, especially with officers, that was the name of the game. And that meant no black-market bullshit, no cigarettes smuggled off the base, no drunken brawls, no pregnant frauleins.

  When I became a cop, it was more of the same. Be where you’re supposed to be and don’t jam up the sergeant. Write your traffic tickets, twenty-five parkers and five movers, every month without fail. Make certain that your monthly activity reports are complete and current.

  Bottom line: not being a pain in the ass to my superiors on the chain of command worked for me. I pretty much had the ordinary life I wanted. Maybe it was a bachelor’s life, untrusting and sometimes lonely, but half the kids I hung with in my adolescence had been to prison, and not a few of them were dead. So if my glass was a few inches short of full, I wasn’t complaining.

  The red stripe beneath me never shifted when I got down to business. The pull of the right and left sides of my body remained in sync even as I admitted that a new element had entered my ordinary life. I needed to examine that element and I decided that I would. As soon as I figured out what it was.

  But I was sure about one thing. Lodge’s face had been plastered all over the evening news and wasn’t likely to disappear anytime soon. The press would be watching the investigation; the bosses, too. When it comes to protecting the job, the big dogs at the Puzzle Palace are all white knights. And all willing to sacrifice a peasant or two, if that’s what it takes.

  I rechecked my position as I kicked out of a turn. By then, I was at the peak of my strength, in a swimmer’s high, my body running on full automatic. When my hands cut the water, I felt as if I was about to yank the other side of the pool toward me. An illusion, naturally, like the powerful sense that I could go on forever. I’d get tired soon enough, at which point the far end of the pool would shift into full retreat, growing more distant with every turn.

  Methodically, I reviewed the day’s events, evoking a series of images beginning with the body of David Lodge sprawled on the frozen ground and finishing with Detective Linus Potter’s nasty smile when he told me that Tony Szarek, the Broom, was dead. It was all so convenient: the ski masks, the river of brass, the carefully aimed coup de grace, the double-parked Toyota, the forbidding TEC-9, the widow’s evasive answers. Every element led toward DuWayne Spott.

  I’d come up against staged murder scenes a few times in the past. In each of those cases, the staging was an afterthought, a coda to a rage-motivated attack. The Lodge scene was a lot more elaborate. Clearly the scenario had been planned in advance. Just as clearly, it hadn’t been planned by DuWayne Spott. The purpose of staging is to lead investigators away from the guilty party or parties, not toward them.

  So what did all this mean to me? I was climbing out of the pool, a half-hour later, when I finally decided that I couldn’t answer the question. I just didn’t have enough information. Meanwhile, there were cold winds blowing out there. Sailing into them made no sense at all.

  I went to my locker for a towel and found the light on in Conrad Stehle’s small office. I wasn’t surprised. Conrad had been subject to periods of insomnia ever since his wife, Helen, died two years before. Typically, he refused to toss and turn between the sheets, opting to stroll the few blocks from his house to his office at the Y. Sometimes he swam laps in an effort to wear himself out, but usually he settled for doing a little paperwork in the hope that one of his buddies would happen along. As I included myself in that group, I stuck my head in the door.

  ‘Evening, Conrad.’

  ‘Ah, I thought that was you I heard thrashing around in the pool.’

  Conrad Stehle was closing in on seventy, a tall stocky man with the barrel chest of a true swimmer. He’d been a champion in high school, winning statewide tournaments six different times in three different categories. At one point, the now-defunct New York Herald Tribune had pronounced Conrad ‘a future Olympian’. Those dreams had come crashing down when he returned from the Korean War with a purple heart and lungs too weak to support active competition.

  I peeled off my goggles and cap, then fished out my ear plugs. ‘I caught the David Lodge case. Did you hear about it?’

 
Conrad’s green eyes widened slightly and he tilted his chin in the air. A bit of a cop buff, he liked nothing more than to discuss an investigation, and I sometimes used him as a sounding board. Lodge’s celebrity, of course, only sweetened the mix.

  ‘Just let me dry off,’ I continued, ‘and I’ll be right back.’

  Fifteen minutes later, when I returned, Conrad had a bottle of Cointreau sitting on his desk, along with two plastic cups. He poured an inch of the liquor into each cup, then passed one to me. ‘To crime and punishment,’ he said.

  ‘Amen to that, brother.’

  I clinked plastic, drained the cup, then drew an outline of the investigation thus far, including my numerous misgivings. Though I’d meant to be brief, I found myself explaining my reaction to Adele’s maneuver with the Lodge file, my pending transfer to Homicide, and my equally pending promotion.

  ‘The reassignment and the promotion, Conrad, they’re both at the absolute discretion of the bosses.’

  ‘And that’s what you wish to protect?’

  I shrugged. ‘I don’t care all that much about the promotion, although I could definitely use the money. But Homicide? Even as far back as the Academy, and we’re talking fifteen years here, I wanted to be a homicide detective. Now I’m only a few months away.’

  Ordinarily, Conrad had the listening skills of a psychiatrist, but my whiny complaints, on that night, evoked no more than a slight toss of the head as he removed a stubby cigar from his shirt pocket and ran it beneath his nose. He’d stopped smoking on the day Helen, a chain smoker since adolescence, died of lung cancer.

  ‘I don’t think you’re worried about this file. I think you’re worried that you can’t control your partner.’