Bodies in Winter

TWENTY-SIX

I got on the phone at seven-thirty the following morning, to the NYPD’s sick desk in Lefrak City where I explained that I was fighting a bad cold and would be out, probably for the next few days. The desk officer took my information without comment, then hung up. Ten minutes later, my phone rang. It was Bill Sarney.

‘What’s up, Harry?’ he asked. ‘I just got a call from the sick desk.’

I let my voice drop to a near whisper. ‘I gotta keep it down,’ I said. ‘Adele’s in the shower.’ In fact, she’d come into my office and was standing ten feet away.

‘She’s staying with you?’

‘Yup, I talked her into it. I didn’t see any other way to keep track of what she was doing.’

‘And that’s why you called in sick?’

‘Now you’re gettin’ it.’

After a brief pause, Sarney declared, ‘I like it, Harry, but I do have one question.’

‘And what’s that?’

‘You nailin’ the bitch?’

‘Nailing Adele? Shit, I’d rather get in bed with a crocodile. This is a woman who bites.’

When I glanced at Adele and found her smiling, my mood lightened for the first time in weeks. The sense was as much physical as psychological, a slight rising on the balls of my feet, a sharpening of my attention. No more conflict. Now I could focus.

‘Yeah, well speaking of biting, you have any idea what she’s up to?’

‘Healing, Bill, is about all she can manage right now.’

‘Yeah, I heard she got mugged.’ Sarney delivered the party line smoothly, just to make certain that we were all in agreement. When I didn’t argue the point, he continued. ‘But I didn’t think it was that bad. The lieutenant at the One-Eleven told me she only had a slight-’

‘Wait a second.’ I put my hand over the mouthpiece and counted slowly to five. ‘Adele just turned off the water in the shower. We better make this quick. Look, all I know for sure is that she got her hands on the David Lodge file and she’s been feeding bits of it to Gruber at the Times.’

‘This is not news, Harry.’

‘OK, the other thing is that she wants to go public with her injuries. You know, claiming that she was set up by other cops.’ I paused again, this time only for a second, then said, ‘I gotta go, Bill. She’s comin’ out.’

Adele was still smiling when I followed her into the office where she took a seat before my computer. I remember that her pajamas, blue and silky, were airing on the carefully made single bed, and that a vaguely floral scent hung in the air. I breathed that scent eagerly as I squatted behind her chair and peered at the monitor on the desk. Generally, my apartment smelled faintly of the chlorine I brought home from the pool.

Prior to Sarney’s call, Adele had been checking out the source of the email I’d received on the prior morning, the one that included Russo’s photograph. In my ignorance, I’d hoped the return address would be of value in identifying the sender. No such luck.

‘A public library,’ Adele told me, ‘in Brooklyn.’ After a moment, she added, ‘Library computers are designed to serve people who can’t afford their own computers, to give them open access to the internet.’

‘Which means?’

‘That anybody with a library card might have sent that email.’

I took the mouse from Adele and quickly accessed my new messages, hoping to hear from B. Arnold@midwood/BPL. lib. But I struck out there as well and shut down the computer.

‘Time to get moving.’

Adele stood and followed me into the living room. She was wearing a pair of neatly creased white slacks over a loose turtleneck sweater. I imagined her slowly drawing her right arm through the sweater’s sleeve, inch by inch, noting that her bra had defeated her altogether. Helping Adele dress was her husband’s job, of course, one of those in-sickness-and-in-health obligations you take on when you pronounce your wedding vows. Another humiliation for Adele, for whom going bra-less had never been a possibility.

I walked to the closet nearest the front door and lifted a Kevlar vest from a hanger. Like most detectives, I rarely wore body armor on the street, my job not being all that dangerous. But things were different now, and I needed to acknowledge the changed circumstances. Removing my shirt and sliding into the vest did just that. There’s nothing like the weight of Grade II body armor to concentrate the mind.

I made one stop before heading off to Greenpoint, at a tiny store on 14th Street where I contracted for a pair of pre-paid cell phones, putting 300 minutes on each one. Then I returned to my apartment where I gave one to Adele. She took the phone from my hand, then rose on tiptoes to kiss me on the cheek. Though the kiss was very gentle, she winced before settling on her heels.

‘Take care,’ she said.

A half-hour later, I was parked on India Street a hundred yards away from Greenpoint Carton Supply, munching on a fried egg sandwich and swilling coffee from a container large enough to hold a milk shake. The entire block was industrial, lined on both sides with sprawling two- and three-story brick buildings pocked with filthy windows. This was a world from which all pretense had been relentlessly scrubbed, a world devoid of corporate parks and instantly recognized logos. This was where you came to work, if you were a worker, or to make a profit if you were a boss; a place where you started early and you finished late and you never pretended, not for a minute, that there was anything glamorous about your day.

New York City is, in many ways, as dependent on Greenpoint and similar neighborhoods in every borough as on the multinational giants in Manhattan. In fact, if you stripped Rockefeller Center of every item supplied by warehouses like Greenpoint Carton, you’d have a bunch of executives in two-thousand dollar suits crouched on bare floors, staring at bare walls.

My purpose, at that moment, however, had nothing to do with New York’s complex ecology. I needed to know whether Greenpoint Carton was a functioning business. That question was answered at nine-thirty when five box trucks, solid twenty-footers with beefed-up rear axles, pulled from a small yard on the northern side of the building. Headed out on delivery runs, each bore a stylized GCS logo on its front doors.

I’d been hoping that Greenpoint Carton would fail the test, that it would come up a pure front operation. Though I’d still be unable to conduct a financial investigation, the knowledge could be useful. But that wasn’t the case and there was nothing to do but get off my lazy ass and go to work.

My initial impression, when I entered Greenpoint Carton Supply, was of an impenetrable maze. Brown cartons of every size, stacked on wooden pallets, rose to the second-floor windows in a seemingly random pattern. The cardboard smelled like fresh sawdust and reminded me of Sparkle’s in the early evening.

All around me, workers zipped by on forklifts powered by cylinders of propane. I expected one of them to slow down long enough to ask me what I wanted. They didn’t, though I was favored with a number of curious glances, and I finally wandered across the face of the building until I found a set of stairs leading up. Again, though I was in plain sight, nobody challenged me as I climbed to a second-floor balcony fronting a small office.

For a moment, before going inside, I watched the activity below me. There were four active fork-lifts moving through the stacks, lifting pallets, carrying them to the rear of the building, where two workers in heavy jackets and woolen caps cut the straps binding the cartons. They were putting together orders for delivery on the following day. When the trucks returned in the late afternoon, they’d be loaded before the workers punched out.

I finally turned to an open door leading into a deserted office. The office was as starkly functional as the rest of the warehouse: three battered wooden desks topped by gray blotters, dusty computers and telephones so grimy I couldn’t name their color. Along the back wall, a row of three-drawer filing cabinets caught my attention and I walked over to them, trying the first drawer I could reach. It was locked.

‘Whatta ya think you’re doin’?’

Though startled, I straightened up slowly before turning to face the man who’d addressed me.

‘I’m looking for Justin Whitlock.’

‘Well, you found him. And my question still stands. What the fuck you think you’re doing in my file cabinets?’

Whitlock had that ex-cop look about him. In his mid-fifties, he was thirty pounds overweight, with a crepey neck that hung in soft folds and a red nose coarsened by one too many visits to the bottom of a bottle.

‘You gonna play the outraged citizen, lieutenant?’ I pushed a stack of invoices to one side, flashed my shield and sat on the edge of the desk. Though I was on Whitlock’s turf, I was determined to dominate the space.

‘I want you out of here.’

‘Without even knowing why I came?’

Whitlock folded his arms across his chest and shifted his weight from one foot to another before cocking his head to the side. As this was a posture commonly assumed by superior officers annoyed by their subordinates, I failed to react appropriately.

‘Of course,’ I told him, ‘if you already know what I’m doing in your office at nine-thirty in the morning, your demand is entirely reasonable.’

‘Cut the bullshit, detective. You got no right to come in here without my permission.’

‘If you wanna call the cops, Justin, I got the phone number of a good one. His name is Dante Russo and he works out of the Eight-Three. What I hear, he’s got serious juice with the PBA.’

Again, Whitlock shifted his weight back and forth as he attempted to deal with the situation. I had a badge and a gun and I wasn’t leaving. What, if anything, could he do about it?

‘I’m gonna call my lawyer,’ he finally said.

‘That wouldn’t be Ted Savio, would it?’ The question produced an unmistakable flinch. I’d tossed the dart blindfolded and hit the bull’s-eye. For a moment, as his narrow eyes bulged and his ears turned bright red, I thought Whitlock was going to attack me. But then he calmed enough to ask the question he should have asked in the beginning.

‘What do you want?’

‘I want to know who got the Broom’s piece.’

‘What?’

‘Tony Szarek’s shares in Greenpoint Carton reverted to the company when he died. That has to be good news for somebody.’

‘Well, it’s not good news for me. All I do is work here. I’m a manager, not an owner.’

I covered my surprise with another question. ‘And who manages you, Justin? Now that Tony Szarek’s dead.’

Whitlock’s face tightened down. ‘You’re fishing,’ he declared, ‘but I’m through biting.’

‘You won’t tell me who your bosses are? Why not, Justin? What have you got to hide?’

When he failed to reply, I decided to get moving. There was a lot to do and not much time to get it done. I straightened abruptly, then sauntered through the door onto the balcony before turning for a goodbye salute.

‘Oh, yeah, before I forget. Pete Jarazelsky told me to make sure I gave you his regards.’