Bodies in Winter hc-1 Read online

  Dr Vencel Nagy’s interview room was neat as a pin. The tiled floor gleamed, the small wooden table and the chairs to either side had been polished to a frenzy; a bank of vertical filing cabinets against the far wall might have been resting on a showroom floor. The individual responsible stepped to one side when I entered the room, in deference to the uniformed guard escorting me. A small black man, he clutched a spray can of furniture polish and a soiled gray cloth to the breast of his orange jumpsuit as if fearing a robbery. But my escort never even glanced at the prisoner as he led me through a door to our right and into Nagy’s windowless office.

  The contrast between Nagy’s office and his immaculate interview room could not have been greater. Not only did mismatched bookcases, crammed to capacity, stand against every wall, but the spaces between the bookcases were filled with dusty books stacked on top of each other. Towers of books sprouted from a threadbare Persian rug, as they did from Nagy’s desk where he’d created a wall of books. If I sat down, I’d no longer be able to see him, which might have been all to the good. Dr Vencel Nagy’s hands were jumping from his mouth to his ears to the fringe of snow-white hair along his scalp like cockroaches in search of a crevice. When he finally jammed them beneath his armpits, I was distinctly relieved.

  ‘Please, sit down,’ Nagy said after I introduced myself. In his sixties, his powder-white skin was criss-crossed by hundreds of fine wrinkles.

  ‘Do you think I might remove some of these books first?’ I shifted one of the stacks to the floor before he could answer, then stepped around another pile and dropped into a metal chair. I could see Nagy from this position, although it was like peering through a window.

  ‘So, tell me what you are traveling all this way to find?’ Nagy had a pronounced eastern-European accent. His vowels were thick, his consonants hard. His tone was that of a man used to having his questions answered.

  ‘To find out who killed David Lodge,’ I replied without hesitation.

  Nagy turned to his left, his gaze drifting to the ceiling, and laughed, a heh-heh-heh devoid of amusement. ‘With this I cannot help you,’ he eventually admitted. ‘David wasn’t the sort of convict who made enemies. He was very quiet, very self-contained.’ Suddenly, Nagy’s hands were on the move again, bouncing over his chest and shoulders before settling at his waist. ‘You don’t know how much I miss David. This idiot they have sent me? You’ve seen him?’

  ‘I have,’ I admitted.

  ‘David, for me, wrote up the charts, kept the files, answered the phones. This lunatic, he’s all day with the vacuum cleaner and the rags and the bucket. From a medication chart, he knows nothing. From filing, he can’t tell A from Z.’ Nagy paused long enough to slide his hands beneath his thighs. ‘So, other than identify Lodge’s killers, how can I help you?’

  ‘How close were you to Lodge? Was he open with you?’

  ‘We spoke together often. David was very smart, but somewhat obsessed.’

  ‘Obsessed with what?’

  ‘With his innocence.’

  Bang, a wild card, face up on the table. I saw it hit the top of Nagy’s desk, watched it quiver for a moment before settling down. ‘Were you Lodge’s therapist?’ I asked.

  Nagy’s head made another left turn and he again laughed at the ceiling. ‘Therapy is not what I do here, detective. Here I treat.. ’ He shook his head. ‘No, no, no. Treat is too grand. What I do is control a population of psychotics with various medications.’ He smiled, his nearly lashless eyes narrowing slightly. ‘Left to their own devices, you see, my patients tend to disrupt the prison routine.’

  ‘And the warden wouldn’t like that?’

  ‘No, she wouldn’t. But medications were not for David. He was under control.’ Nagy’s hands fluttered up to pat the sides of his face when he paused. ‘Do you know about the blackout? David’s blackout? Do I have to explain it?’

  ‘Are you talking about his claim that he didn’t remember killing Spott? I always figured that was so much propaganda.’

  ‘There you are wrong, detective. David could not remember.’ Nagy leaned forward. ‘Think of how this would be for you. Not remembering the event that turned your life on its head. Are you guilty? Are you innocent? How can you know? And how can you accept your punishment when you are not knowing?’

  I nodded, wanting nothing more, at this point, than for Nagy to continue. But the only things I encouraged were Nagy’s hands which did a ten-second dance, graceful as an aerial ballet, before he shoved them into his pockets.

  ‘For David,’ he finally continued, ‘the issue settled on the murder weapon, the blackjack. The blackjack belonged to him, true, but it had been sitting in his locker for months. Now, did he go to his locker that night, retrieve the weapon, then return to Spott’s cell? This is the question David asks.’

  ‘And what was his answer?’

  ‘First, David considered motive. Why did he want to kill Spott? Because Spott hit him? If this is the case, then killing is motivated by rage. But this is also very strange because if David was enraged, he could have killed Spott much earlier. David was not only having his gun and his nightstick with him, he is big enough to kill with his bare hands.’

  I smiled and leaned back. ‘I see what you’re getting at. Lodge murdering Spott in a moment of rage is inconsistent with his going to his locker for a specific weapon. Inconsistent, but not impossible.’

  ‘And there you are seeing David’s dilemma. Logic can never bring certainty.’

  ‘No, it can’t. But tell me, doctor, did anybody else at the precinct know about the blackjack?’

  Nagy’s lower jaw was large enough to produce a pronounced underbite. He thrust that jaw at me and raised a remarkably still finger. ‘This blackjack, it was a Kluugmann. It was collectible.’

  ‘Say that again?’

  ‘Kluugmann was a company that manufactured very high quality blackjacks and saps. They went out of business many decades ago and their products are collected. You can buy them at auction.’

  ‘So, Lodge showed his Kluugmann to all his buddies, then stuck it in his locker and forgot he even had it.’ Which was just what I would have done.

  ‘Now you are getting the deal. Would he even have remembered the weapon’s existence in the midst of a towering rage? A killing rage? This is what it boils down to with David.’

  I shifted to Lodge’s stay in Cayuga at that point, but the good doctor professed ignorance, again insisting that Lodge was generally reticent except when discussing the Spott murder. And Nagy merely shrugged when I told him that Lodge was a suspect in a prison homicide.

  ‘This does not surprise me. In here, they are saying you must learn to walk the yard like a man. This is the first task, to walk through the yard without projecting fear. David was able to do this.’

  ‘And that makes him a killer?’

  ‘I am only saying, detective, that I am not surprised by what you are telling me.’

  Nagy didn’t like being challenged, that was obvious. His head again turned to the left as his hands went into their little dance, touching, patting, pulling. By now it had become clear, even to me, that Nagy was suffering from an illness. Whether physical or psychological in nature was still up in the air.

  ‘Tell me,’ I finally said, ‘about Lodge’s thinking right before his release. Did he have specific plans? What was he looking forward to?’

  ‘Sometime in the last few months of his incarceration, David finally recovered a memory of the night Spott was killed. That was when he became convinced of his innocence.’

  ‘Did he say what it was that he remembered?’

  ‘No, only that it was a fragment, a piece of the puzzle. But this I will tell you. If he had other concerns, he did not discuss them with me.’

  ‘He never mentioned a man named DuWayne Spott?’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘What about a job, his wife, his old friends?’

  Nagy’s face twisted to the right, then the left, both motions so exaggerated it too
k me a moment to realize he was merely shaking his head. ‘David was an obsessive type. You can see this in his body-building. Six days every week, never missing a day. It was how his mind worked.’

  As I waited for Nagy to slow down, I played with the facts as I now understood them. A cold and sober David Lodge emerged, a Lodge obsessed with his innocence, a Lodge capable of murder. Without doubt, if Lodge was truly innocent, he’d present a formidable challenge to those who’d framed him. Killing Lodge was a rational response to that challenge, despite the risks.

  Suddenly, Nagy jumped to his feet and pointed a trembling finger at the door behind me. I was startled enough to reach for my weapon (which I’d surrendered in the reception area), but when I turned it was only Nagy’s assistant. He was standing motionless in the doorway, still clutching his can of polish and his rag.

  ‘I have told you twenty times already to stay out my office,’ Nagy shouted. ‘Never you are to come in here. Are you hearing me? Never.’ Nagy’s donkey jaw had risen almost to his nose and his glittery blue eyes were circles of indignation. ‘If you were not my patient, I would hit you with a chair.’

  TEN

  It was eight o’clock by the time I got back to Queens and the One-Sixteen. Jack Petro, a squad detective and a good friend, was standing fifteen feet away when I entered. He nodded sympathetically as I walked over.

  ‘This one a keeper, Harry?’

  Jack was asking me if the case would be transferred to Homicide or a task force at Borough Command. In the normal course of events, high-profile cases were routinely taken away from precinct detectives, a development I would have welcomed.

  ‘If that’s the plan, no one’s told me about it.’

  I looked over his shoulder and saw Adele seated at her desk thirty feet away. She was staring directly at me, her gaze sharp and contemptuous. She’d been awaiting my return for hours and now I was bullshitting with my buddy. How predictable.

  ‘My partner’s giving me the evil eye.’

  Jack’s smile dropped away and his expression became grave as he tossed me a snappy salute. ‘Time to report, soldier.’

  Like many of my peers, Jack professed not to know why I continued to partner with Adele Bentibi when I had more than enough seniority to demand a change. He knew that I’d once been on the verge of marching into Sarney’s office to do just that, even though it was clear that Adele was my perfect complement. Her strengths were crime scenes and physical evidence, while mine were interviews and interrogations. But partnering is about more than solving crimes and there’s no hell quite like spending all of your working hours with someone whose company you’d rather avoid, even if you’re physically attracted to her.

  Simply put, like everybody else, I found Adele insufferably opinionated, and the fact that her judgments were usually right meant next to nothing. Plus, I’d only agreed to work with her as a favor to Bill Sarney. Adele had come to the 116th Precinct with a reputation. ‘Difficult to get along with,’ that was how Sarney explained it, a little character flaw that I should overlook, at least temporarily.

  I don’t remember my attitude on the day I agreed to work with Adele. Perhaps I was resentful, the fair-haired boy imposed upon. Or maybe I took the assignment with good grace — I was definitely out to please at the time. But after three months, I was certain that I’d had enough. Adele was very abrupt, seeming to dismiss my opinions before I managed to state them. More to the point, she was blind to a number of deficiencies related to her poor communication skills. I could not convince her that an interview is not an assault, an interrogation not a cavalry charge.

  Eight hours a day? Day after day? I didn’t think so.

  ‘Martha Stewart with a badge’ was the way Nydia Santiago had described my partner, and I could see where Nydia was coming from. But she’d gotten it wrong. I found this out when Adele told me her story over dinner.

  I remember that it was the perfect night for a confidence. Adele and I had spent the prior ten hours in pursuit of a rapist named Joey Garglia, running from friend to relative to friend, sometimes threatening, sometimes cajoling. Finally, at six-thirty, Joey’s mother had called. Her son was sitting in her living room and he was ready to surrender.

  By any standard, it’d been a very good day, a day of hard work and real accomplishment which we were capping with a decent Italian meal and a couple of drinks. Though I wasn’t expecting much, the alcohol made me bold enough to ask an impertinent question.

  ‘So, tell me, Adele, what’s your story? How’d you become a cop?’

  My partner never did answer the second question, not directly, but her response to the first part was enough to change the way I understood her. Permanently.

  Adele could trace her family of Sephardic Jews back to the twelfth century when they lived in an area of northwestern Africa called the Maghreb. For centuries, she explained, their lives were reasonably stable, as were their relations with their Christian neighbors and Muslim rulers. Then the Almohad Dynasty had emerged at the head of a puritanical movement that tore the region apart. The aim was to purify Islam, a deed accomplished by the forced conversion of Christians and Jews; by the sale of Christians and Jews into slavery; by the slaughter of whole villages. Adele’s family had fled, ironically enough, to Spain, from which they were expelled by Queen Isabella in 1492, the year Columbus sailed his little fleet in search of India.

  I was munching on a crispy slice of bruschetta, and well into my second drink, when I finally realized that Adele wasn’t talking about a succession of parents and grandparents stretching back nine hundred years. Her ancestral legends were tribal. Still, I was completely absorbed. My concept of family was so far removed from Adele’s that we might have been different species.

  From Spain, the ‘family’ went to Istanbul, on the shores of the Black Sea, then to Baku, on the Caspian, then to Baghdad, Tunis, Cairo and back to Istanbul. Restless as gypsies, they were always on the move, always calculating the dangers around them.

  They were in Damascus in 1840 when things again came to a head. A Capuchin monk and his servant disappeared. A Jewish barber was tortured until he admitted the men were murdered because their blood was needed for Jewish rituals. More Jews were then arrested and tortured until the Ottomans, at the request of the British and French governments, ordered the surviving Jewish prisoners released.

  But the Damascus Affair was only the first of many similar persecutions that finally drove the Bentibis (by then, Adele was speaking of her actual family) out of the Islamic world. They’d gone to Belgium first, in 1948, then come to New York, settling along the southern end of Main Street in the Queens neighborhood of Flushing. Adele was the youngest child of the youngest child to make that journey.

  We were outside by the time I realized that Adele had answered my second question in her own way. Her voice hadn’t betrayed a hint of self-pity when she told her tale. Nevertheless, I now understood that, for Adele Bentibi, the job was about justice.

  And I understood something else, as well. I’d spoken to a number of cops, including Jack Petro, about my intention to seek another partner and it had almost certainly gotten back to Adele. In the family-like atmosphere of a New York City precinct house, secrets are rarely kept for any length of time. So, why had Adele, ordinarily so closed, suddenly confided in me? What message was she sending? I played with both questions before I decided that revealing herself was Adele’s way of asking me to continue the partnership. Partners, after all, tell each other everything.

  It was hot on the street, especially in contrast to the heavily air-conditioned restaurant, and foggy as well. As I stood out on the sidewalk with my hands in my pockets, the fog settled around my face and throat, hot and slick, like the breath of an animal. Adele was standing in front of me, her face turned up, her dark and slanted eyes for once soft and vulnerable. I stared down into those eyes for a long moment, the urge to take her into my arms, to taste her mouth, nearly overwhelming. And I was almost certain she’d respond, that I wouldn’
t be rejected. Adele was leaning forward, her weight on the balls of her feet, as if about to sprint, and she continued to stare into my eyes until I finally chickened out.

  ‘Goodnight, partner,’ I said, making a feeble attempt to keep my tone casual. ‘I’ll see you in the morning.’

  ‘Corbin,’ Adele said as I approached her desk, ‘look at these. Tell me if you see what I see.’

  I watched Adele lay eight crime scene photos, in two rows of four, on my desk.

  ‘Am I allowed to hang up my coat first?’

  ‘Of course.’

  The detective squad at the One-Sixteen covered most of the second floor of a three-story brick building on Catalpa Avenue. The layout was simple enough: a large room broken by the lieutenant’s office, a door leading to a corridor, a corridor leading past three interview rooms. There were ten desks in the main room, set back-to-back. They were all in use when the squad was fully staffed, but times were tough and the NYPD, once 42,000 cops strong, was down to 35,000 and still shrinking. Our own little squad had been making do with eight detectives for almost a year.

  When I came back to my desk, I settled down immediately. The photos were of Anthony Szarek as the Crime Scene Unit had found him two weeks before. The Broom was lying on his back, with his head propped up on pillows. A trail of spatter led from his left temple, across the bed and the floor, to a wall about eight feet away. The spatter caught my attention first, and I studied a series of photos depicting the blood trail closely, but found nothing out of place. I turned, then, to a close-up of the contact wound an inch from Szarek’s right ear. The starburst pattern was similar to the one I’d observed on Lodge and perfectly consistent with suicide.

  ‘Was he drunk?’ I asked without raising my eyes.

  ‘Very good. The Broom’s blood-alcohol level was. 32 when the trigger was pulled.’

  ‘That’s drunk enough to be unconscious.’

  ‘Yes, it is.’

  My gaze finally settled on the only photo I’d yet to consider. This one had been taken to illustrate the position of a. 38 caliber revolver, a Smith amp; Wesson, relative to Szarek’s hand and body. The weapon, a few inches from his fingers, was not out of place, and my eyes drifted eventually to his fingers, following them over his hand and wrist, then along his arm to the sleeve of his white T-shirt. It’s what I didn’t see that finally grabbed my attention.