Bodies in Winter

THIRTY-SEVEN

Most of what I’d told Ellen, up to that point, was true, if greatly oversimplified. But the truth didn’t matter to me, any more than I minded using my personal history to lure Ellen into making a statement against her penal interests. And, yes, Ellen Lodge was right about my grandfather. Which only put me on a par with any other good detective. The important thing was that I had Ellen’s full attention as I began to play with the facts.

The long-term failure of my clean-bedroom strategy, I declared, hadn’t discouraged me, not in the slightest. And why should it? A few pats are better than no pats at all. Just ask any dog.

I went on to describe how, in the course of about a year, I became a cleaning maniac, a master of the vacuum cleaner and the dust cloth, the mop and the broom. I was the scrubber of bathrooms, washer of windows, polisher of floors, king of the laundry. There was nothing I wouldn’t do, no effort I wouldn’t make, until the apartment was finally clean enough to withstand the scrutiny of a nineteenth century German housewife.

As I plunged into pure hyperbole, I became more and more animated. By degrees, my mouth expanded into the sort of comfortable smile that might be exchanged by two members of a support group over a post-session cup of coffee.

‘One time,’ I finally declared, ‘I painted the entire living room while my parents watched re-runs on Comedy Central.’

‘You lie. There wasn’t any Comedy Central thirty years ago.’

‘No, I swear. It took me five hours, but you want to know the most amazing part? My parents’ eyes never left the screen. And they never laughed, not once. They were too stoned.’

Ellen’s smile was both amused and ironic. ‘God,’ she said, ‘when you look back, you feel like such an idiot.’

‘That’s not the way it is for me. I don’t blame myself, never. Hey, I haven’t spoken to my mom in twenty years. When my father passed, I wasn’t at his bedside and I didn’t go to his funeral.’

I gave it a good five seconds, until the silence grew dense enough to notice, then went into the pocket of my jacket, removing the photo I’d taken from Marissa Aubregon’s apartment, the one with Marissa perched on Dante Russo’s lap. Working carefully, I unfolded the snapshot, smoothing the creases before leaning forward to lay it on Ellen’s knees.

‘Betrayal is what it was about, Ellen. That’s why you don’t have to blame yourself. You can hate the ones who hurt you instead.’ I paused long enough to let the message sink in, then asked, ‘You knew about this, didn’t you?’

Ellen lit another cigarette with her disposable lighter, holding the end of the cigarette in the flame a moment too long as she weighed her options. I’d played my last card and we both knew it. She had to make up her mind now.

‘Yeah,’ she finally whispered, ‘I did.’ She dropped the cigarette into an ashtray and ran her fingers through her hair. ‘Ya know how I said that I always wanted a kid?’

‘I remember.’

‘Well, I told Dante, “You don’t have to marry me. You don’t have to pay child support. I just want to have your child.”’

‘And what’d he say?’

‘That he couldn’t father a child and not take care of it. That he didn’t think he’d be a good father. That he just wasn’t prepared for the responsibility. Sometimes, when I brought it up, he’d get angry. Dante never raised a hand to me, not like Davy, but he could be very cold. And when he was really pissed, I just wouldn’t hear from him, not until I called to apologize.’

‘So, it must have been hard when you found out that he fathered Marissa’s child.’

The look in Ellen Lodge’s eyes was so wistful, I turned away. As I’d predicted, the outrage she’d marshaled in the face of Adele’s onslaught had vanished. Now she was moving, not into a confessional mode, as I’d hoped, but into an attitude of resignation.

‘She called me up. Marissa. I don’t know how she found out about me and Dante, but she called and told me that Dante belonged to her, that she’d had his child.’

‘And when did this happen?’

‘Three weeks ago, maybe a month.’

‘What did you do?’

Ellen’s gaze dropped to the tape recorder. She watched the spools turn for a moment. ‘Nothing,’ she finally said. ‘I didn’t even confront the bastard. Davy was about to be released from Attica and I was already in over my head.’

The overall impression Ellen gave, as she told her story, was of a beaten-down woman upon whose back the last straw, Russo’s infidelity, had been heaped. But the relief that naturally follows a true confession, whether it be made to a priest or a detective, was entirely absent. What I sensed was a grim surrender, bolstered by an unexpected measure of true grit. Ellen may have spent much of her time wallowing in her grievances, but there was a tougher part of her, a rational, calculating self that had done hard things in hard times.

And then there was the content of her remarks. At one point, I almost felt sorry for Dante Russo. He was at the center of every misdeed from the very beginning. It was Dante who’d convinced her that Davy killed Clarence Spott, and it was at Dante’s request that she’d advised her husband to plead guilty.

‘After he got sentenced, I hoped that would be the end of it,’ she announced. ‘Then Davy started writing to me, telling me how sorry he was. I mostly threw the letters in the garbage.’

‘Mostly? Does that mean you answered some of them?’

‘I told him to stop writing to me and that I didn’t expect to see him after he got out. As far as I was concerned, we were through. One time I wrote that if he came around, I’d go to his parole officer. “The minute I see your face,” I said, “I’m on the phone.”’

That approach was jettisoned six months before Davy’s release, when Dante Russo came calling. Far from his usually reserved self, Dante was extremely agitated. David Lodge, he explained, had become delusional and now believed he was innocent. Worse still, he was threatening bodily harm to all those who’d testified before the Grand Jury.

At this point, Ellen quoted Russo verbatim: ‘“We tried to talk to the jerk, but it was no good. When the guy gets a bug up his ass, it’s like he becomes a maniac.”’

Three weeks later, after submitting to a search of her bag and the scrutiny of a metal detector, Ellen had found herself seated across from her husband. A notice pasted on the yellowed Plexiglass screen separating them announced that visits were randomly monitored. Davy had pointed to his side of this notice when his wife mentioned Dante Russo, then had shaken his head.

Back home, Ellen began to write her husband and to accept his collect calls, only to find that the same principle applied. Letters and phone calls were also routinely monitored. Thus, the only facts Ellen had at her disposal were those supplied by Dante Russo. This was why she still believed her husband to be Clarence Spott’s murderer on the morning of January 15th when she summoned him to the phone, then made a call of her own just after he left the house. The calls, of course, coming and going, were made and received by Dante Russo.

‘I thought they were going to… to confront him. Maybe even to threaten him. I never thought they were going to kill him.’

‘Did Russo actually say he killed your husband?’

When she nodded, I pointed to the tape recorder. The words would have to be spoken aloud.

‘Yeah,’ she finally said, ‘he did. I had to push him to the wall, but he finally told me that he’d been there, that he’d pulled the trigger.’

‘Alright, now you said you thought “they” were going to confront Davy. Tell me who “they” are?’

But, alas, other than Tony Szarek, who was dead, and Pete Jarazelsky, who was incarcerated, Ellen didn’t know the names of Dante’s associates, any more than she knew her lover’s fate. Dante, it seemed, like Davy Lodge, was a man who kept his own counsel.

‘Ya know, he didn’t even use my telephone. He made calls on his cell. I guess that should’ve told me something right there.’

I turned off the tape recorder and got on my own cell phone at that point, phoning down to Adele, summoning her back to the fray. When she was standing beside me, I compressed the bad news into a single sentence: ‘Dante did it.’

‘All by himself?’

‘In the company of persons still to be named.’

‘But not by Ellen Lodge?’

‘Apparently not.’

We still had a couple of choices open to us. Adele might have taken another shot at playing the bad cop or I might have again appealed to Ellen’s survival instincts by pointing out that the game was growing ever more dangerous. But it was nearly three o’clock and time was running short.

‘You wanna hook her up?’ Adele asked.

‘Fine, but I’m leaving the frisk to you.’

‘What’s going on here?’ Ellen demanded.

‘We’re placing you under arrest for conspiracy in the first degree.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘It means that you conspired to commit an A-One felony: the murder of your husband.’

‘But I didn’t. I didn’t know what was going to happen.’ When I failed to respond, she half-shouted, ‘Yesterday, you said you were gonna protect me.’

Ellen’s gaze dropped to the tape recorder and its unmoving spools. There was a record now and she would have to live with it. I watched her reactions carefully, hoping against hope that she’d revise her strategy. Instead, her eyes narrowed as she rose to her feet and placed her hands behind her back. ‘Would it be alright,’ she asked, ‘if I brought along a little make-up? I wanna look my best when we do the perp walk.’