Bodies in Winter

THIRTY-SIX

‘ Give me a fucking break,’ Adele snarled. ‘You weren’t Dante Russo’s lover. You were his whore.’

Finally energized, Ellen Lodge came halfway out of her chair. ‘You bitch!’ she shouted back. ‘What right do you have to judge me?’

‘Cut the crap. You’re knocking down twenty-four grand a year for a no-show job given to you by a man who rings your bell in the middle of the night. And, yeah, we already knew about your sugar daddy. But you probably figured that out, being as you’re a girl who takes care of number one.’

They both stood at that point, facing off across the hassock that held the tape recorder, their bodies now three feet apart.

‘Funny thing, Ellen, but you don’t look like you’re grieving, not for your husband or for Dante Russo. You look like you’re worried. But don’t be. If you’re a good girl, if you accept Russo’s death the way you accepted your husband’s, I’m sure that you’ll be well rewarded. Oh, by the way, Russo didn’t spend last Friday night in your bed, did he? You didn’t make one of those six-second phone calls just after he left? You didn’t set up Dante the way you set up your husband?’

Ellen Lodge was sucking on her cheeks, narrowing an already narrow face, and her lips were moving rapidly. I think she would eventually have spoken if I hadn’t stepped in for the second time.

‘Partner,’ I said, rising to my feet, ‘do you think I could speak to you for a minute?’

In the hallway, out of Ellen Lodge’s sight, Adele shrugged her shoulders. ‘How’d I do?’

I answered by leaning down and kissing her (very gently, of course) on the lips. She touched a finger to her lips, her expression quizzical, then reached out to lay her hand on my chest before turning abruptly. I watched her trip down the stairs and out the door, realizing that there might, in fact, be something I wanted more than to break this case. As I walked back into the sitting room, I found myself imagining ten days with Adele in Hawaii, a sort of honeymoon in the course of which neither sand nor surf would even be glimpsed.

Ellen was standing by the window. She’d pulled a curtain aside to look down at the street. I assumed she was watching Adele get into the Nissan.

‘So,’ she said without turning, ‘I take it that you’re the good cop.’

The tape recorder clicked off at that point and I replaced the cassette before answering. ‘You’ll have to excuse my partner. She’s a bit on the self-righteous side.’

I sat on the couch, in Adele’s place, and invited Ellen to resume her seat. She looked at me for a moment, her expression hard. I endured the glare.

‘Please, Ellen, bear with me for another few moments.’

But she wasn’t ready, not yet. ‘You think I don’t know how this works? For Christ’s sake, I was a cop’s wife. First, the bitch pounds on my brain for hours, then you ride to the rescue. Excuse me if I say that you don’t look like anybody’s white knight.’

‘And what do I look like?’

‘You look like a hard-ass cop who’d cut off his grandfather’s balls to get a confession.’ Satisfied, she finally sat down, then lit a cigarette. ‘Hope you don’t mind if I smoke.’

I waved her on, then asked, ‘When did Russo become your lover? Before or after Clarence Spott was killed?’ My tone was as gentle as I could make it.

‘Right before.’ She took another pull on her cigarette then flicked imaginary ash into an ashtray on the table alongside her chair. ‘And I’m not makin’ any apologies. I already told you what Davy was like. I needed something in my life and Dante was there.’

‘I understand that. You were stuck in a childless, abusive marriage and Davy wouldn’t let you escape. It’s natural to look for comfort under those circumstances.’ I might have added that comfort takes many forms: an embrace, a kind word, a birthday gift… or eliminating the discomfort at its source. Instead, I asked, ‘How did you meet him?’

‘Davy brought Dante around when they became partners.’

‘They were friends?’

‘Dante felt sorry for Davy. He was trying to help him.’

‘Then you believe your husband murdered Clarence Spott?’

‘Davy was convicted of manslaughter, not murder. If you remember.’ Ellen settled back in her chair, noticeably more relaxed now. True, she knew about good cop/bad cop, as did virtually every mutt I interrogated. But that didn’t mean she could resist its charms.

‘I know we spoke about this before,’ I said, ‘but I want you to describe your husband’s abuse.’ I nodded at the tape recorder. ‘For the record.’ When she hesitated, I added, ‘That’s why we started from the beginning. We just want to get your story down once and for all.’

As I’d hoped, the question triggered a response Ellen was unable to control. She’d been rehearsing her grievances for many years. Her injuries were her drug of choice, her dope, and like any junkie, she couldn’t get through the day without them. Even in her most relaxed moments, they hung just below the surface, ever ready to impede an attack of conscience.

I let her run on, nodding occasionally as she described a series of progressively gruesome incidents. Her husband, or so she told me, was given to sexual humiliation. By submitting, she was usually able to avoid his fists. But submission (and survival, too) had its own penalties. Over time, she’d built up a reservoir of self-hatred deep enough to drown in. And drown she did, falling into a depression that marked every hour of every day.

‘Suicidal ideation,’ she declared, her voice by then as soft as my own, ‘that’s what the shrinks call it. You think “suicidal ideation” describes my state of mind, detective?’

‘I think it lacks poetry.’

She looked at me, her gaze mild, and I had the distinct impression that she wanted to trust me, as she’d once trusted Davy Lodge, as she’d trusted Dante Russo. For just a moment, I felt hopeful. Maybe if I got past her anger, she’d finally come clean.

From suicide, Ellen Lodge again turned to her destroyed expectations. Everybody, she claimed, has a right to a life. Her husband had taken hers as surely as if he’d pulled the trigger when he’d jammed his gun into her mouth. She was no longer the person she’d been when she met David Lodge. She was not the person she would have become had she never met him. Instead, she was an embittered, childless, middle-aged woman scrabbling for economic survival. The two thousand a month she got from Greenpoint Carton didn’t cover her mortgage and taxes.

I watched Ellen’s reserves gradually ebb, watched her shoulders slump and her breathing slow, until the little hand on the dial finally pointed to empty and she came to a stop. By that time, I was ready.

‘Betrayal,’ I said, my voice so soft Ellen had to lean forward to catch my words, ‘I know what it is. My parents were junkies. They did coke, speed and whatever pills they could get their hands on. Percocets, Dilaudid, Codeine, Valium, Darvon, Ritalin, Demerol.’ I paused long enough to take a breath. ‘They got away with it because this was back in the Seventies when people were more tolerant of druggies, and because it’s almost impossible to fire civil servants, which both of them were. They missed a few days of work? They came in late? They snorted coke twice an hour to get through the day? Well, I remember one time my father was suspended for a week, and another time my mother was forced into rehab, and there might have been other punishments as well. I wouldn’t know about them because my parents mostly acted like I wasn’t there.’

I shifted my weight slightly, and crossed my legs. My eyes drifted to my hands, as if my revelations were so intimate I couldn’t look her in the face. ‘You know, when you’re a kid, you blame yourself for everything. That’s because if you’re not causing your own pain, you have no control at all. In some ways, it’s like having a gun put to your head. I mean, where are you gonna run to when you’re a five-year-old? To your relatives? My mother was from St Louis and my father’s parents were living in Arizona. Plus, my parents’ friends were druggies, too.’

When I finally raised my eyes to meet Ellen’s, her gaze was intense, but not skeptical. Encouraged, I again spoke.

‘OK, so you’re a kid and your parents barely know you’re alive and you blame yourself. What do you do?’

‘You try to become better.’

‘Is that what you did with your husband?’

The question produced a short, choppy laugh devoid of mirth. ‘Yeah, why not? I was only eighteen when I married Davy. I thought if I did better — if I cooked better, if I wore that lingerie he liked — things would improve. Ya wanna hear something really sad? I used to read sex manuals on how to please a man.’

‘Well, I didn’t go quite that far. But I started keeping my room clean, which was mostly what my parents complained about. I mean, by the time I was seven, my room would’ve passed a military inspection.’

‘And your folks?’

‘I got a couple of pats on the head, but then the novelty wore off and it was like it never happened. Ya gotta picture them here, Ellen. Most of the time, they used downers and I’d find them laid out like zombies on the couch. When they lucked into a few grams of cocaine, they’d suddenly come awake. I swear, it was like a resurrection. They’d pile the coke on a mirror, then place the mirror, dead center, on what was supposed to be the dining-room table. And that’s exactly where they’d remain, staring down at that pile until it was fully consumed. I’m tellin’ ya, I figured out, at a very early age, that the pile was a lot more important than I was. I wasn’t allowed anywhere near it.’