Bodies in Winter

SIX

It was after ten by the time we finished up the last of the paperwork. The re-canvas had gone better — and slower — than we expected. Altogether, we’d spoken to nineteen honest citizens, each of whom had walked along Palmetto between eight-thirty and nine. None recalled seeing two or more individuals, black or otherwise, sitting inside a red Toyota.

By now, Sarney had obtained authorization for a trip to Attica. That was the good news. The bad news was that I was flying off to Buffalo alone. David Lodge’s autopsy was scheduled for nine o’clock the following morning and Sarney wanted Adele to be there. Myself, I was more than pleased with my end of the deal, but it was strictly Bill Sarney’s call. He’d nominated Adele to witness the autopsy, then arranged for her to interview a sergeant named Merkovich who worked out of the Gang Unit at OCCB. Spott’s crew, it seemed, was still in action, led by his brother, DuWayne.

I didn’t quibble with Sarney’s decision. By this time, David Lodge was the talk of the town and Sarney wasn’t the type to leave himself uncovered. But the scheduling of the autopsy did catch my attention. Typically, homicides were autopsied several days after the event. Somebody down at One Police Plaza had given the ME’s office a nudge. The question was why, if the big dogs were in such a hurry, they hadn’t offered any help to the lowly squad detectives who’d caught the case — or taken the case away altogether.

The phone began to ring as I was buttoning my coat. I watched Adele answer, then signal me to pick up the extension.

‘Would you repeat that, Sergeant Schniederman?’ she asked.

‘I said, “You’re not gonna believe this, but we’re temporarily unable to locate your file.”’

‘The Lodge file?’

‘Yeah, that one.’

‘Could it still be at the Eight-Three?’

‘Nope, we swept out the Precinct’s closed files two years ago.’

‘How many files would that be?’

‘I didn’t count ’em, detective.’

Adele took a deep breath. ‘What I’m trying to get at, sarge, is whether the Lodge file was the only file missing.’

‘If you’ll excuse me, detective, missing was not a word I used. Unable to locate was what I actually said.’

‘Then are you unable to locate all of the Eighty-Third Precinct’s files?’

‘Not at this time.’

That was as far as we got. Efforts were being made to recover the requested file, but results could not be guaranteed. So sorry, and good night.

‘Do you know how files get swept out?’ I asked Adele once she’d hung up. ‘You ever watch the process?’ When she shook her head, I continued. ‘Four guys arrive in a van during the late tour. They empty the filing cabinets into boxes, then transport the boxes to the archives.’

‘And?’

‘And nobody checks to be sure that every file is actually there. When the files are removed, the Property Clerk gets a list of the case files that are supposed to be in the drawers, a list compiled as each case is closed, not when the files are transported.’ I shrugged into my coat, already cold. At the time, I was driving an eight-year-old Nissan with a pronounced intolerance for temperatures below ten degrees. The Sentra would take forever to warm up, assuming it started in the first place.

‘How do you know this?’ Adele asked.

‘My second year on the job, I sprained my back so bad I had trouble sitting in a patrol car for more than an hour. The lieutenant was a merciful type. He let me work in the house for a couple of months, which was how I came to supervise one of these transfers. But the point is that Lodge’s file could have been yanked while it was still at the Eight-Three.’

‘Well, I don’t see how that’s a problem.’

I buttoned my coat, taking my time about it. ‘It’s not gonna be a problem, not for us, anyway. It’s gonna be a problem for Sarney when we inform him tomorrow morning.’

‘Don’t be so hasty, Corbin.’ Adele was still seated behind her desk. ‘The prosecutors are also holding a copy of the case file. They would have gotten it when the case was being prepared for the grand jury. I have a friend in the DA’s office, somebody I know from my group. What I’ll do is call her tomorrow and ask her to speak to her supervisor. Maybe we can drop in, get a quick look-see off the record.’

‘You wanna do this before you speak to Sarney?’

Adele rose from her chair and stretched before winding a silk scarf around her neck. The flaming-red scarf matched the red of her blazer almost exactly. ‘Of course.’

‘Sarney’s worried, Adele. I can hear it in his voice.’ I pulled on my gloves. ‘That’s why he asked us not to play any games.’

Adele folded her arms across her chest, her eyes narrowing as she gauged my resolve. For good detectives, bending the rules is a matter of instinct, and Adele’s suggestion was no big deal — certainly, we had every right to the file. But procedure required that we make a formal request through the NYPD’s Legal Bureau, then wait for the DA to comply, which might take days, or even weeks.

‘Look, partner,’ I finally said, ‘the simple truth is that Bill Sarney’s holding my marker. I owe the man.’

‘For a promotion to detective, second grade, that has yet to come through?’

I shook my head, taking care to keep my language simple. ‘I’ve been a guest in Sarney’s home. I attended the wedding of his daughter and the christening of his son. That’s why I can’t think of him as just another boss. And that’s why I’m going to honor my pledge to keep him informed.’

Adele didn’t respond right away, probably because my position caught her by surprise. ‘Alright,’ she finally said as she slid into her coat, ‘we’ll do it your way, Corbin. But time isn’t on our side here. If we don’t move quickly, the case is going to get away from us. Ellen Lodge has an agenda, and we both know it.’

I took that thought with me to the Sparkle Inn. Sparkle’s was more than the place where everybody knew my name. It was the place where everybody had, at one time or another, looked into that heart of darkness at the epicenter of a cop’s life. Fraternity and brotherhood are the words traditionally used to describe the herding instinct of cops. But it was a new age and several female detectives greeted me when I came through the door. They included, among their number, Nydia Santiago. Nydia had once described my partner as ‘Martha Stewart with a badge.’

The Sparkle’s owner, Michael Blair, had a Dewar’s and water awaiting me by the time I reached the bar. Blair was in his early fifties, a former detective from the Eight-Three who’d mortgaged his pension to buy the joint. He had pale blue eyes that darted suddenly to yours, as if he was trying to catch you in an unguarded moment. He hit me with one of those looks now.

‘I heard,’ he said as I found a stool, ‘you stumbled into the Lodge case.’

Before replying, I raised the traditional toast to Sparkle, who stood behind the bar. Sparkle was a life-size manikin constructed from papier mache. Long ago, before Blair purchased the bar, somebody had painted Sparkle’s face and hair so that she slightly resembled Marilyn Monroe, then dressed her in a sequinned gown. Lit by a spotlight mounted just ahead of her toes, Sparkle did, indeed, sparkle.

‘Bad news travels fast,’ I finally said. ‘Just as well.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘Because I came here looking for a heads-up.’

This was an avenue closed to my partner. As I said, she’d never visited Sparkle’s, or any other cop bar, which was probably for the best. That indifference to the opinions of her peers, which I admired, would have gotten a cold reception at the Sparkle Inn.

But that wasn’t true for me. I was the guy you could go to for a favor, even for a short-term loan, maybe enough to settle your bar bill. I was the guy you could talk to about the wife, the kids or the girlfriend. I was the guy who listened to your endless gripes and actually seemed to care. I was the guy who got along with everyone.

‘I was in the Precinct when Lodge killed the perp,’ Blair readily admitted, ‘only I didn’t catch the case. The man you need to talk to is seated at his usual table, but there’s no guarantee he’ll give you the time of day.’

I glanced over my shoulder at the broad back and wide shoulders of a notoriously anti-social detective named Linus Potter. Potter’s neck was so much thicker than his small head that he appeared to be defectively manufactured. Perhaps that was why he usually parked himself in a corner and drank with his back to his peers.

When I carried my drink to his table and set it down, Potter didn’t so much as glance in my direction. Nor did he budge when I took a seat. Only when I finally said, ‘I caught the Lodge case and I’m looking for some guidance,’ did he raise a pair of small blue eyes that looked right through me.

I responded by folding my arms across my chest. Despite the hostile glare, Potter was an easy read. Once he realized that he couldn’t intimidate me, he’d either tell me the truth or tell me to go fuck myself. Indecision was not in Potter’s DNA.

‘It was a nothin’ case,’ he finally growled. ‘We got everything but a confession. And we woulda got that, too, except the hump was too drunk to remember what he did.’

Potter went on to describe the evidence against Lodge in enough detail to convince me that his own memory was accurate. And that evidence was impressive. Nevertheless, as the details accumulated, I realized there was a weak link in this perfect chain. Anthony Szarek, the man Potter called the Broom, had provided Russo with an alibi and put Lodge alone with the prisoner. But who vouched for Tony Szarek, a cop unfit for any duty beyond running out for doughnuts and sweeping the floor?

‘This cop, Szarek, is he still on the job?’ I asked.

‘Retired three years ago.’

‘You have any idea where to find him?’

‘Matter of fact, I know exactly where to find the Broom.’ Potter’s smirk was positively gleeful. He’d been setting me up for this punch line all along.

‘And where’s that?’

‘Mount Olivet Cemetery. He ate his gun two weeks ago.’ Potter leaned forward to jab a thick finger into my shoulder. ‘What I heard, the Good Life didn’t agree with the Broom. You know the one I’m talkin’ about? The one that goes from the rented room to the fucking bar to the rented room to the fucking bar. All the days of our fucking lives.’

I made one more stop, at a YMCA swimming pool on East Twenty-Third Street in Manhattan. The pool was managed by Conrad Stehle, my former high school swimming coach, now retired. Along with a few others, Conrad had given me permission to use the pool at night, when you can swim laps without plowing your head into the bony rump of a frolicking senior citizen.

Not that I had anything against frolicking seniors. In fact, living long enough to become a senior citizen is definitely one of my aims. That’s because, for most of my adolescence, I didn’t expect to make twenty-one.

I have little sympathy for lawyers and sociologists who blame criminal behavior on early childhood experience: ‘My client only shot that storekeeper in the face, leaving him to spend the rest of his life contemplating his scar tissue, because his mother was a junkie and he never had a chance.’

The way I see it, there’s no point in looking back. If you blame your parents for your troubles, they can just turn around and blame their own parents, who will most likely blame their parents, who will most likely… What you end up with, if you go too far down this road, is an amoeba blaming a virus.

‘Yo, the mother-fucker messed with my genes. What could I do?’

Personal responsibility is the key to improving your life. That’s my story and I generally stick to it. Still, there’s no getting away from the fact that my life could have taken another direction; that except for a few lucky breaks, I might have been the one in the hump seat, making my own pathetic excuses.

My parents were cross-addicted to every intoxicating substance on the face of the planet, but they were educated and they were not poor. That was my first break.

At age thirteen, I was spending most of my life on the street, dodging the hustlers and the gang bangers as best I could. When I was beaten unconscious at age fourteen, I learned to cultivate an expression that revealed the extent of my determination not to repeat the experience, and to carry a knife. These were necessary adaptations for someone who never considered the possibility of going to his parents, or his teachers, or the cops.

I was halfway to feral by the time I reached high school. There was me and my few streetwise bro’s, and there was everybody else. That you could never trust the everybody else was a simple given. Along with the fool’s belief that doing well in school was for jerks. The way I had it, success was failure. Except in athletics.

Three months into my freshman year, a notice pinned to a cork board in the hallway caught my attention. The swimming team was having try-outs on the following afternoon. Like most of the neighborhood kids, I’d been spending a good part of my summers at the Asser Levi pool on Twenty-Third Street. I was the fastest swimmer among my friends and had even done well against older kids. So, why not?

Twenty-four hours later, carrying my bathing suit and the cleanest towel I could find, I walked into a locker room and met Conrad Stehle. That was my second break.

Conrad got me through high school, berating me, cajoling me, whatever it took. During those years, I ate more dinners at his and his wife’s house than at my own. The funny part is that I never asked myself why he made the effort; I just assumed I was worthy. Even later on, when I realized just how stupid that was, I finally decided the question wasn’t important enough to ask. Conrad Stehle had turned a punk kid with a bad attitude into a high school graduate, a punk kid who’ll be forever grateful, and not only for the diploma. Conrad made me a swimmer, as well, long distance as it turned out. In my senior year, I was among the better high school swimmers in New York State. For a kid with few positive accomplishments, the cheap trophies I earned were shields that protected me from the street’s many temptations.

But ‘among the better’ was not Olympic caliber, or even college scholarship material. When I emerged from high school with a diploma and a pair of empty pockets, I had to choose between work and the streets. My answer, guided by Conrad, was the United States Army.

The army was good for Harry Corbin, especially the camaraderie, and I eventually came to feel about my platoon as I had about the other members of my swimming team — the ‘us’ part of it at least as important as the trophies. Thus, by the time I was honorably discharged three years later, I was well prepared to join the ‘cop family’ Ellen Lodge had mentioned, the one that had walked away from her.