Bodies in Winter

EIGHTEEN

I was sitting behind my desk at nine-thirty the following morning when Jack Petro entered the squad room carrying a box of donuts from Acme Cake, a commercial bakery located in the Eight-Three. Jack set the donuts on a filing cabinet, opened the box and shouted, ‘Breakfast is served.’ Within seconds, he’d drawn a crowd.

I paused long enough to fill a mug with coffee so thick it might have been used to caulk a boat, then joined Petro, Bill Sarney and two other detectives, Esteban Arroyo and Carl Stein. After a few minutes, Arroyo and Stein drifted off. Jack followed a moment later.

‘You guys wanna try teamin’ up?’ Sarney asked, his tone sincere as far as I could tell. ‘You and Jack?’

‘And after Adele’s vacation?’

Sarney looked at me for a moment, his gaze speculative, as though I’d caught him by surprise. Then he leaned forward and dropped his voice. ‘Bentibi’s on her way to a desk job at Borough Command. In fact, the only reason I let her take her vacation days was because I wanted to be rid of her as soon as possible.’

‘Ya know somethin’, lou,’ I said. ‘It’s just not right, punishing someone for doing the job they were trained to do.’

Again, Sarney’s look became quizzical. ‘What is it with you and this broad?’ he asked. ‘Because if you’re worried about leavin’ her to swing in the breeze, you should remember that she put the noose around her own neck.’ When I didn’t answer, he smiled and reached out to tap my shoulder. ‘Alright, she’s your partner, Harry, and I’m sorry I asked you to keep an eye on her. But Adele is history, and so is David Lodge. The way I count ’em up, those are blessings.’

Jack Petro waved me over to his desk as the door closed behind our commander’s retreating back. ‘You see the paper today?’

‘I haven’t.’

Petro took a copy of the Times from his briefcase. The story he wanted me to read was in the Metro section and by the same Albert Gruber who’d interviewed Vencel Nagy. This time Gruber had gotten to Ivy Whittington and Kamia Thompson, Spott’s aunt and cousin. Gruber used their words to create a portrait of a born loser, then asked the same question Adele and I had asked. How could a junkie-pimp like DuWayne Spott know when David Lodge was due for release or where he was going?

Gruber was an investigative reporter and could easily have found Ivy and Kamia on his own. But he could not have described the DuWayne Spott crime scene, as he proceeded to do, right down to the heater, the stolen electricity and the vomit, without help from someone who’d been there.

‘Being as I’m an experienced detective,’ Jack said when I looked up, ‘I can tell from your pained expression that you’re an innocent man. Can I also assume that you’ve heard the talk? About your partner?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Then what ya gotta figure is the further away you get, the better it’s gonna come out. This woman, she don’t know when to lay off. I’m tellin’ you this as a friend.’

He was right, of course. Adele had never understood the job, had never tried to understand. Somehow, she’d come to believe she could use the job to further her own ends. I was troubled by no such delusion, but Adele had one advantage, nevertheless. She could walk away and suffer only economic consequences. For me, the job was as close to family as I’d managed to get in my life. The thought of giving it up was not, at that moment, something I was willing to entertain.

Jack took off at that point, back to his own desk, leaving me to my thoughts. I sat there for a moment, annoyed with myself and with the situation, until my eye was attracted to a fax sitting on Adele’s desk. The fax was from Deputy Warden Beauchamp, the great white hunter, and listed David Lodge’s visitors during the four years of his incarceration at the Attica Correctional Facility. There were only two names on the list: Ellen Lodge and Linus Potter.

Prison, a felon with long experience once told me, is a lonely place. As time goes on, the letters and the visitors stop coming and you get the feeling nobody even remembers your name. But Linus Potter had been faithful, showing up in early December and again in late May or early June every year. Ellen Lodge was another matter. She’d visited her husband exactly once, five months before his release.

We had a good time that week, Jack and I, putting away a homicide on Tuesday and an armed robber a few days later. Both were gifts. The murderer was kind enough to slay his victim, a rival for his wife’s affections, in full view of three witnesses who knew him well. He surrendered peacefully when we knocked on his door an hour later. The stick-up man’s mistake was his target. The discount linen store he robbed was protected by three video cameras, each of which got a clear shot of his face.

An hour after viewing the tapes, Jack and I put a name to that face: Paul Rakowitz, a junkie-thief who’d been tearing up the Bushwick and Ridgewood precincts for several years. A day later, we ran him down in a shooting gallery on Troutman Street. He, too, surrendered peacefully.

The murderer, Paolo Baez, admitted his guilt without hesitation, pride in his macho deed so evident his confession sounded more like bragging. ‘Yo, and put this in,’ he demanded, ‘the maricon begged like a woman.’

Paul Rakowitz had a different take on his situation. He was a horse trader, give some to get some. ‘I don’t see any reason,’ he told us, ‘why we can’t do business here.’

‘Keep talkin’, hump.’ Jack could afford an attitude because Rakowitz was dead meat. In addition to the video, three witnesses had picked him out of a line-up.

‘OK, what I’m sayin’ is this. I’m, like, connected.’ After a brief pause, he added, ‘In Bushwick.’

Jack patted his belly. ‘Best get to the point,’ he declared, ‘because we’re fast approachin’ dinner and my tummy’s startin’ to rumble.’

‘Like, I help out sometimes. You know, the cops.’ Rakowitz was cadaver-thin, the pupils of his blue eyes mere pin heads. He had huge hands, though, which he opened and closed as though trying to raise a collapsed vein. ‘You should talk to a Sergeant named Molinari. First thing out of his mouth, he’ll tell ya Paulie’s a straight-up guy.’

At that point, Jack left the room to call Molinari, leaving me to mind the prisoner. Rakowitz had committed a violent felony in our precinct and there was no disputing that he belonged to us. But an accommodation might still be made if he was crucial to some larger investigation in the adjoining Brooklyn precinct. At the very least, Molinari was entitled to a heads-up.

The interrogation room we occupied was small and nearly featureless. At one time, the walls might have been a pale beige — at least that would’ve been my guess — but neither walls nor ceiling had been painted in so long, they really didn’t have a color. Above our heads, a single fluorescent tube buzzed in an industrial fixture. The top of the rusting fixture was piled with layers of gray dust that rose and fell like sand dunes.

This was home to me, a setting so comfortable I looked forward to being here for hours at a time. As a matter of principle, I never gave up on an interrogation. As long as a suspect would talk to me, I’d keep going until I got a confession or my superior ordered me to relent.

Jack returned after only a few minutes. As he glanced in my direction, he tugged on his shirt cuff, telling me the story he would present was basically true.

‘Bad news,’ he declared as he sat down. ‘Molinari says you’re a piece-of-shit junkie and justice would best be served if I kicked your ass before turning the key in your cell door.’

Rakowitz was all indignation. ‘I’m not disrespectin’ you,’ he announced, ‘but this I find hard to believe. I helped those guys out just last month with a burglary on Flushing Avenue. Speed King Auto Parts. Ask him.’

‘Hey, listen to my words. Molinari’s not gonna protect you. You understand?’ When Rakowitz merely nodded, Jack shook his head. ‘I want you to say it out loud. Say, “Sergeant Molinari will not protect me, so Detectives Petro and Corbin are the only friends I have in the world.”’

Jack waited until Rakowitz copped to his utter dependence, then said, ‘So tell me what you wanna trade, Paulie. What you got to give and what you hope to get.’

‘OK,’ Rakowitz said, leaning out over the table again, his voice dropping in pitch and volume. ‘You ever heard of Paco Luna? They call him Demente.’

Paco ‘Demente’ Luna was Bushwick’s resident drug lord, a man with a reputation so vicious he’d become well-known to law enforcement in the surrounding communities. That a miserable street junkie like Paulie Rakowitz could not deliver Paco Luna was a simple given.

‘Talk’s cheap,’ Jack replied. ‘You need to be a bit more concrete here.’

‘Well, did ya ever wonder how come he’s got no competition? Luna’s Puerto Rican, but there’s lots of Mexicans and Dominicans livin’ in Bushwick. Usually, you go into a mixed neighborhood, you get to choose your product.’

‘And that’s not the way it is?’

‘Fuck no. You don’t deal with Luna’s people, you don’t get high in Bushwick. Now I’m not sayin’ nobody else tried to set up. I’m sayin’ they don’t last long.’

‘Paulie,’ Jack said, ‘you gotta look at the facts here. We got you for a violent felony. You can’t buy your way out by givin’ up some street dealer.’

‘That ain’t the point. It ain’t about Luna.’

‘Then what’s it about?’

‘It’s about how he’s, like…’ When Rakowitz ran his hand across his forehead, it came away slick with sweat. ‘Luna’s protected, OK? He’s got cops watchin’ his back.’ Another pause while his eyes scanned the tiny room as though searching for hidden witnesses. ‘Hey, think about it. Luna’s been runnin’ the show in Bushwick for the last fifteen years. Nobody lasts that long unless they got connections. I mean, it’s like obvious, right?’