Bodies in Winter

TWENTY-SEVEN

I’d tossed in the last bit for two reasons: to sow confusion and to protect Ewa Gierek. Jarazelsky was another of those wild cards, his prison also his protection. Was he being a good boy, keeping his mouth shut? Or was he cooperating? Lodge’s murderers couldn’t answer either question with certainty. Maybe Pete had taken the heat for the warehouse burglary, but he was a rat in his heart, a rat who knew far too much.

The sequence, as I read it, went like this: Lodge recovers a memory implicating Jarazelsky and persuades Jarazelsky to confess, after which Jarazelsky warns his co-conspirators. As this takes place months before Lodge’s release, there’s plenty of time to prepare a welcome-home party for good old Davy.

So much the better, then, if those party-givers now suspected that the untouchable Pete Jarazelsky provided the details that led me to Greenpoint Carton Supply. As for Ewa Gierek, the boys would have to be wondering what sort of alcohol-driven pillow talk might have transpired between her and Tony. My fear was that they’d decide to limit their exposure as I drew near. What is it they say about killing? That it gets easier as you go along? First there was Clarence Spott, then Tony Szarek, then David Lodge, then DuWayne Spott. If the state managed to accumulate evidence of a conspiracy, Dante Russo and his pals would be looking at a first-degree murder indictment and a potential sentence of life without the possibility of parole.

I passed the afternoon working my various informants, finishing up at the apartment of Mejorana Delgado who supplemented her welfare and food stamps by snitching on her neighbors. Like my other informants, Mejorana repeated the crooked cop mantra. Everyone knew, or so she said, that Bushwick’s most notorious drug dealer, Paco Luna, was being protected by crooked cops who routinely closed down every independent operation. Though I listened patiently, I didn’t place all that much store in the information. Like Paul Rakowitz, Mejorana named no names. The important thing was that she knew the man called Bucky, whose real name was Maximo Chavez. Bucky was married to a woman named Nina Francisco who lived only a few blocks away.

‘But if you talk to her, you gotta be careful, detective. Nina, she got a temper that could scare off a pit bull.’