Bodies in Winter

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.

When a bullet is fired into human flesh, small drops of blood and minute bits of tissue are propelled backward, in the direction from which the bullet came. If the Broom had been holding the gun to his head, there should have been blowback on his hand, his wrist, the T-shirt. But there wasn’t, at least none I could see.

‘Anybody test for blood?’ I finally asked Adele. ‘On Szarek’s right hand and wrist?’

‘The assistant medical examiner who performed the autopsy. It was negative.’

‘What about gunpowder residue and nitrates?’

‘Those tests were also negative.’

The information was designed to set off alarm bells. No blowback? OK, I could live with that. No residue? I could live with that as well, though my suspicions would be aroused. But the absence of any physical evidence demonstrating that Szarek held the gun to his own head was a red flag that could not be dismissed.

I gathered the photos and passed them to Adele. ‘Two questions. First, how’d you get the photos? Second, did Lieutenant Bill Sarney authorize us to investigate Szarek’s death?’

‘I got the photos and the reports from a friend of a friend at the 94^th Precinct. The lead detective on the case, by the way, was a lazy asshole named Mark Winnman. Mark was happy to go along when the medical examiner reported manner of death as probable suicide.’

‘Did you bring up the lab findings with Detective Winnman?’

‘I did, and guess what? By the time the reports came in two weeks later, the case was closed. Winnman, he didn’t even read them.’

‘Just stuck ’em in the file and forgot about ’em? That how it went?’ When Adele responded with an amused smile, I continued. ‘But you didn’t answer the other question, partner. Did you tell Sarney you were gonna check out Szarek’s death before you did it?’

She shook her head.

‘How about afterwards?’

‘Afterwards, yes. I brought the photos and the lab reports to his attention.’

‘And how did he react?’

‘Badly.’

I took a moment to get my temper under control, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that partnering was a one-way street for Adele. ‘So what’s it gonna be?’ I finally asked. ‘Games all the way down the line? Because you’re acting here as if I don’t exist.’ I silenced her reply with a wave of my hand. ‘What you do reflects on me. I can’t say it any plainer than that. Your consequences are my consequences.’

Adele looked at me for a moment, her eyes progressively hardening, and I realized that her thirst for justice would always come before her loyalty to Harry Corbin. An instant later her words confirmed that insight.

‘Feel free to disown me,’ she declared, ‘whenever you find it convenient. In the meantime, are you ready for dinner? Because I’ve been waiting for you since five o’clock.’

But I wasn’t ready, not quite. I took three DD5s from my desk drawer, one each for Beauchamp, Jarazelsky and Dr Nagy, then wrote up meticulous summaries of each of their interviews. When I was finished, I carried them directly to Bill Sarney’s office. Sarney and I had reached a point in our relationship where, at least in private, I called him by his first name.

I took a chair without asking permission, careful to keep my tone casual as I summarized the fives I tossed on his desk. If Sarney wanted to raise the issue of Szarek’s case file, he’d have to do it himself.

He didn’t wait long, only until I shut up a few minutes later. ‘What’s going on with you, Harry?’ he asked. ‘Why would you expand your investigation to include an ex-cop who committed suicide without telling me in advance? You couldn’t have thought I’d be OK with that.’

Adele’s consequences were mine, just as I’d predicted, but I might have tried to shed them by disowning her. Hey, Bill, I’m not her father. What she does on her own time is her own business. I can’t be with her twenty-four hours a day. Instead, I made a promise I couldn’t keep. I told Sarney that it wouldn’t happen again.

‘I need some idea of where this is going, Bill. Otherwise, me and Adele, we have no choice. We have to follow wherever the trail leads. You can see that, right?’

Sarney grinned. ‘A couple of hours from now, just in time for the eleven o’clock news, an Inspector named Rita Meyers will make two announcements at a press conference. First, she’ll tell the reporters that the Ballistics Unit has matched the TEC-9 found in the Toyota with fourteen shell casings discovered at the Lodge crime scene. Then she’ll announce that a man named DuWayne Spott, whereabouts unknown, has been named as a person of interest. You understand, Harry, this is the first time a boss has appeared in connection with the case.’

I’d asked Sarney for a heads-up and he’d complied. I had no beef here. ‘So where does that leave me and my partner, Bill? Do we continue to investigate?’

‘Harry, you can color to your heart’s content, as long as you stay between the lines. Now, there’s one more thing. I’m not stupid. I know you can’t control your partner’s urge to self-destruct. But what I’d like you to do is keep an eye on her. If she jumps the tracks again, I wanna be the first to know.’

‘It’s not that easy, Bill. You’re asking me to spy on my partner.’

There was an edge to my voice, and I’m sure Sarney heard it. But he wasn’t intimidated. He leaned forward in his chair and lowered his chin until he was looking at me through his eyebrows. ‘Sometimes in life,’ he explained, not unkindly, ‘you gotta watch out for your own ass. If your partner understood that, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.’