Bodies in Winter

THIRTY-FOUR

Over breakfast the following morning, Adele and I settled on an unpleasant topic we might have discussed earlier. First, we had been tailed on the previous night by two mutts who we then humiliated. Second, the talk among the rank and file in the Bushwick Precinct was that Detectives Corbin and Bentibi should be stopped before they brought down the house. That made for an awful lot of suspects if one of us (or both of us) should meet a violent end.

I buttered a piece of toast, dipping it into the yolk of my egg. That we would have to move fast went unsaid, and our conversation drifted to Ellen Lodge. If we were to accomplish anything in the short term, she would have to come clean. Nevertheless, there were difficulties and no guarantee that I could overcome them.

‘Ellen Lodge?’ I told Adele. ‘If you asked me yesterday, I would have told you that she was easy meat, that I was playing her like a violin. Now I’m beginning to think it’s the other way round.’

‘Maybe someone convinced her that she was better off staying the course. Maybe the same person who told her that Russo disappeared.’

‘And who would that person be?’

‘Someone inside the conspiracy, someone she trusts. Maybe Justin Whitlock.’

‘Then who told Justin?’

The large dressing that covered the center of Adele’s face had been abandoned in favor of three smaller dressings. Her bruises were now the color of French mustard, the swelling, except around her nose, greatly reduced. Her breathing had improved as well, and she was beginning to use her right arm. Nevertheless, fifteen minutes later, I had to help her into the body armor I insisted she wear, then into her coat.

The phone rang as I was about to unlock the door. I answered to find Bill Sarney on the other end of the line.

‘Can you talk?’ he asked.

‘Better make it fast, Adele’s in the bedroom. We’re sleeping in this morning.’

‘Tell me what happened last night. In Sparkle’s.’

I ignored the suspicious tone, taking care to keep my own voice casual. ‘It was my idea, Bill,’ I explained, ‘to let her blow off steam. Otherwise, she was going to call that reporter from the Times, what’s his name…?’

‘Albert Gruber.’

‘Yeah, Gruber.’

‘She wants to call him?’

‘What could I say, the woman’s pissed off. When I tried to tell her that her attack could have been a random mugging, I thought she was gonna shoot me.’

Sarney’s breath hissed into the phone. ‘You think she’ll listen to reason?’

‘Yeah, Boss, I do. And getting it off her chest helped a lot. You just give it a few more days, Bill, and I guarantee she’ll come around.’

As Adele and I drove south along Avenue A toward the Williamsburg Bridge, I considered Dante Russo’s fate. Was he dead? Or had he run without playing the last cards in his hand? When I put the question to Adele, she laughed at me.

‘Russo’s most likely crab food by now,’ she declared.

The thing about bodies is that they sink to the bottom when immersed in water. The thing about New York is that there’s water within a few miles of almost any place you happen to commit a murder. True, bodies eventually rise when enough gas builds up in the abdominal cavity. But if Russo was in one of the rivers, or in the harbor, that wouldn’t happen until next spring when the water temperature became high enough for bacteria to multiply.

We were on our way back to Ridgewood, to the homes surrounding Ellen Lodge’s, to do another canvas. Our mission was simple: to connect Dante Russo and Ellen Lodge. It didn’t take us long.

Twenty minutes after I parked the car, a chatty senior citizen named Emma Schmidt took one look at Dante Russo’s photo and said, ‘That’s the boyfriend.’

Emma’s apartment, on the second floor of a three-story row house, was a virtual shrine to the Virgin Mary. Statues on the tables, prints on the wall, candles and rosaries everywhere. The red stitches of a framed sampler next to the window conveyed a simple message: PURITY.

‘Whose boyfriend?’ Adele asked.

‘Mrs Ellen Lodge’s boyfriend.’ Emma pressed her bony knuckles against her hips and blinked rapidly as she spoke. ‘Her husband wasn’t in jail yet when this one showed up. Brazen is what he was. Marchin’ up to her door in the middle of the night.’

We’d interviewed Emma Schmidt during our initial canvas of the neighborhood, but had failed to ask the right question. Emma was one of those neighborhood guardians I mentioned earlier. In good weather, she spent much of her time sitting on a lawn chair in front of her house, gossiping with friends. Ellen Lodge, she informed us, had been the subject of their collective ire for so long, she’d ceased to be news.

The January thaw was in full swing. The temperature was in the lower fifties, the sun sharp-edged and molten yellow, the sky a deep uniform blue punctuated by streaming ribbons of cloud. A soft breeze carried the odor of earth stirring, of roots come to life, a promise of spring no less welcome for being an illusion.

We were standing directly in front of Ellen’s row house, making ourselves as conspicuous as possible. From behind us, the January sun flared in the windows and softened the buttery-yellow facade; it glistened on the feathers of a dozen pigeons taking their ease along the edge of the roof. Except for their heads, which swiveled back and forth, turning at impossible angles in search of danger, the pigeons lay so unmoving they might have been decoys.

‘You ready, Corbin?’ Adele finally said as we approached the door.

‘Shouldn’t I be asking you that question?’

News of Russo’s disappearance had forced Adele and me to overhaul our strategy and we’d made a number of significant changes. The first was that Adele would conduct the interview, at least initially, playing the bad cop for all she was worth. It was a part, we both agreed, that came naturally.

‘I see it’s bad penny time,’ Ellen Lodge said when she opened the door. Again, I was struck by the muddy circles beneath her eyes, by a distinct weariness in the way she held her jaw. Her tone was firm, though, echoing the sarcasm in her words, and she led us to her sitting room without protest, resuming her seat in the room’s lone armchair. I slid out of my coat, helped Adele out of hers, then folded both coats before taking a seat at the far end of the couch.

Adele removed a small tape recorder from her coat pocket, started it up and laid it on a hassock midway between herself and her subject. Surprise number one and a big test. Plausible denial was now off the table. ‘Mrs Lodge, before we start, I want to make you aware of your constitutional rights.’

Ellen listened to Adele read from a printed card, controlling her impatience until Adele reached the part about representation by counsel.

‘What if I ask for a lawyer?’ she demanded. ‘Right this minute.’

‘Then my partner and I will leave.’ Adele’s reply was the only one she could make. With the tape running, plausible denial was off the table for us as well. ‘Now, do you understand these rights as I’ve read them to you?’

‘Yeah, sure.’

‘And are you willing to waive those rights?’

Ellen Lodge’s smile was a mere parting of the lips that revealed gritted teeth. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to go. ‘Fine, let’s just get it over with.’

‘Get what over with, Mrs Lodge?’

‘Whatever it is you’re doing here.’

‘But you know what we’re doing here, right?’

‘Why don’t you tell me?’

‘Because you already know. You knew when you set your husband up with that phone call.’ Adele waved off Ellen’s reply. ‘Like you said, Ellen, let’s just get it over with. Let’s get your story on the record.’