Bodies in Winter

FIFTEEN

We spun our wheels for the next seven hours, running from relative to acquaintance to relative, never even close to finding DuWayne Spott. We did pick up little tidbits, however, teasers that confirmed the information Adele had gotten from the gang unit at OCCB.

Our first stop was at the apartment of DuWayne’s aunt, Mrs Ivy Whittington, in the Bushwick Houses. Ivy sat us down in her living room, insisted we take tea, then patiently answered our questions.

DuWayne, it turned out, had lived most of his life in the shadow of his brother’s violence, a mama’s boy until he reached adolescence.

‘Clarence was a handful,’ Ivy explained. ‘You could whip that boy from morning till night, didn’t do no good. No, sir. Clarence jus’ take that whippin’ and do what he gonna do.’

‘And DuWayne?’

‘Now DuWayne, he near about worshipped his big brother. Wanted to be just like the boy. Onliest thing, he was a sweet child. No kinda way did he have the heart for that life. Tore me up when the streets got him.’

Ivy’s prim living and dining rooms were smothered with lace doilies — the couch where Adele and I sat, the chairs facing us, the end tables, the polished tops of a dining-room table and a long sideboard. The doilies echoed the oversized lace trim on the collar and sleeves of Ivy’s tan dress, which she’d buttoned to the throat. A widow in her mid-seventies, her eyes swam behind thick-lensed glasses with amber frames large enough to hide her forehead.

I’d run across Ivy Whittingtons in the past, black women who’d seen everything there was to see, who’d suffered every kind of sorrow life has to offer. Always polite, they maintained their dignity with an iron will and their eyes gave nothing away.

‘See, what happened, after that cop murdered Clarence, the city offered Reba — that’s Clarence and DuWayne’s mama — a two hundred thousand dollar settlement. Reba’s lawyer, he says, “You hold out, Reba, you’ll get a lot more.” But Reba was always flighty. She took the deal and went off to Trinidad with Quentin.’

‘Quentin?’

‘Her new husband. Quentin’s from the Islands, a musician.’

‘And what about DuWayne? Did she cut him in?’

‘She gave the boy a little somethin’, but he just turned around and stuck it in his arm. See, the way it was, DuWayne couldn’t keep up with his brother. That’s why he started usin’ the drugs. So he wouldn’t have to face himself.’

At that point, I made my pitch. ‘I won’t insult you,’ I told her, ‘by saying that half the cops in New York are looking for your nephew. You’ve read the papers, watched the news. You know. But what I am gonna say is that if DuWayne surrenders, he’s gonna be a hundred times better off. I’m not asking you to tell us where he is, even if you know. Just talk to him, Mrs Whittington, put the facts out there. Does he really want to be in some apartment when a SWAT team breaks through the door?’

Ivy stopped me with a wave of her hand. ‘Is there a warrant out on the boy?’ she asked.

When I admitted there wasn’t, she smiled, exposing teeth so pearly-white they could not have been her own. ‘Now why,’ she asked, ‘would a damn SWAT team be lookin’ for somebody who ain’t wanted for nothin’?’

Though I didn’t have a ready answer, I persisted, explaining once again the benefits of voluntary surrender, finally offering my business card. Ivy held the card up to the light, as if examining it for flaws. ‘DuWayne and me don’t stay in touch,’ she finally said. ‘You wanna speak to DuWayne’s cousin, Kamia. She and DuWayne, they run with the same crowd.’

‘Does Kamia have an address?’

‘She does now. The Fire Department carried her over to the hospital, Wyckoff Heights, day before last. Matter of fact, I’m fixin’ to go over and visit. Kamia’s my first daughter’s girl.’

In the course of the afternoon, we interviewed Kamia (who’d overdosed on heroin), along with another five individuals, including one of Spott’s hookers. They insisted that David Lodge was not on DuWayne’s agenda. Sure, DuWayne might have made some kind of threat seven years ago when Lodge was sentenced, but that was just DuWayne shooting off his big mouth.

‘See, DuWayne, he keep his bitches in line,’ we were told at one point, ‘but he don’t wanna get it on with dudes. Hear what Ah’m sayin’? The nigga’s a punk.’

By seven o’clock, when the lieutenant summoned us back to the house, Adele and I were both ready to call it a day. Most of what we’d been told merely confirmed what we already knew. No one, for instance, remembered DuWayne even mentioning Lodge’s name in the last few months. DuWayne had all he could handle trying to maintain his perilous hold on the hustler’s life. What with all the dope he was shooting, he couldn’t take care of his women properly and his stable was on the verge of disintegration.

What had struck me, as the interviews piled up, was how eager people were to speak to us, even the street-wise who ordinarily wouldn’t give us the time of day. I judged their enthusiasm to be an indication of truthfulness. They were outraged by the media’s treatment of DuWayne Spott and they wanted to correct the record. As if DuWayne not killing Lodge somehow made him an innocent bystander.

But they couldn’t tell us the only thing we needed to know at that moment: Spott’s whereabouts. One acquaintance had seen DuWayne on Sunday, in the early afternoon, but nobody had run across him since then. Disappearing wasn’t like him, they insisted. DuWayne mostly kept a close eye on his women because they were all he had left.

‘Once on a time,’ Kamia explained from her bed, ‘DuWayne used to do deals. But like, for the last year, he jus’ into his dope. That’s what he livin’ for.’

I’d accepted Kamia’s statement with a nod, then asked if any other cops, maybe someone from the Eight-Three, had been to see her.

‘Uh-uh,’ she replied, ‘you the first.’

I’d asked the same question at each interview, and received the same response. If any effort was being made to locate DuWayne, aside from our own, they knew nothing of it.

When I brought this up to Adele on the way to the house, she merely shrugged. ‘I’m disappointed,’ she told me.

‘Because we’re the only ones looking for DuWayne?’

‘DuWayne’s already dead.’

‘That’s one possibility, but it doesn’t answer my question.’

‘I’m disappointed with you, Corbin. What’s happening here isn’t right.’

But I already knew that, and when my cell phone began to ring, closing off the discussion, I was grateful. I answered quickly, turning my face away from Adele who was still glaring at me. I was expecting to hear Bill Sarney on the other end, but it was my informant with his death-rattle whisper.

You’re too late, Harry. Four-Eight-Three Ingraham Street. In the back.

We drove in silence, down Wyckoff Avenue and across Flushing Avenue, the traditional dividing line between the workers and their workplaces, and into the industrial section of Bushwick. It was past seven, the sun long ago set, and most of the low-rise warehouses had shut down for the night. Though vibrant during the day, the short blocks were very quiet now, the single exception being a waste management plant busy dispatching a column of green refuse trucks on their nightly run to collect Manhattan’s commercial waste. Surrounded by a rusting chain-link fence, the intensely lighted yard seemed as garish as a Las Vegas hotel.

By contrast, the four hundred block of Ingraham Street was absolutely deserted. Pale orange light fanned outward from the only functioning street lamp, collecting in the mist and the slushy puddles at the curb. That it failed to reach the warehouses on either side of the street goes without saying, but Adele and I had no trouble locating 483 Ingraham. Almost dead center on the south side of the block, a single abandoned tenement rose two stories above its industrial neighbors. The tenement’s brick had been painted white decades ago, and its paint had now cracked into thousands of tiny shards. The shards cast leaf-like shadows that danced in the flashlight beams Adele and I played over the tenement’s facade. From where we stood on the sidewalk, the building was in compliance with city code. The windows had been replaced with sheets of plywood and the door sealed with cinder blocks upon which some helpful city worker had painted the number 483 in red letters.

Followed by Adele, I walked to the eastern corner of the building, to a narrow alley. Though the alley was no more than five feet wide, the walls on either side were covered with graffiti, mostly tags, but with a few figures as well. A purple dragon holding a bleeding woman in its mouth; a pit bull with a goofy expression and the physique of a superhero, and a black Jesus hanging from the cross.

Adele unbuttoned her coat, removed her automatic and laid it across her body with the barrel pointing at the wall. She took a step, but I reached out to stop her. ‘We’re going to have a look around,’ I said, ‘but we are not going to remove any item of evidence. Under no circumstances, no matter what. We leave the scene the way we found it.’

Adele’s smile widened and her eyes narrowed slightly, as a cat’s eyes narrow with pleasure when its back is stroked. Driven by warming temperatures, the mist had thickened, beading on Adele’s hair and on her shoulders and her dark lashes.

I took out my own weapon, let it drop to my side. Adele was already in the alley.