The cold room

THREE

I led Clyde over to the Yang Electrical building, figuring he’d be more comfortable away from the victim. The sun had drifted a bit to the south, leaving the sidewalk in front of Yang’s wall in shade, another consideration now that my re-hydrated body was again pouring sweat.

‘I admit it,’ Clyde said without prompting, ‘I done a lotta time upstate.’ He held out his arms for my inspection, revealing a pattern of gray lines that rippled over his forearms and biceps. Faded now, they were the last remnants of a dope habit that must have been ferocious.

But the point Clyde wanted to make had nothing to with scoring dope or reformation. His message was about prison. ‘You spend all those years gettin’ up at five o’clock,’ he told me, ‘it sticks in ya nerves. I can’t sleep no later than six. Don’t even matter if I got stinkin’ drunk the night before. It’s like something goes off in my head and I’m awake.’

The upshot was that he’d left his residence a little after six that morning, intending to stroll through the neighborhood while it was still cool enough to be outdoors. His amble had first taken him to a bodega on Bedford Avenue where he purchased a container of coffee and a buttered roll. From there, he proceeded to South Fifth Street, his intention to gaze across the East River at the finest view of midtown Manhattan that Brooklyn has to offer. Instead, he discovered a man pulling the body of a woman through the open doors of a windowless van. The man wore a gold warm-up suit with black stripes on the pants and sleeves, and he was very large. Fortunately, his back was initially turned to Clyde who quickly retreated, stepping around the corner until just a thin slice of his head was exposed. From this vantage point, he watched the man describe a semicircle, using the woman’s chin and chest for a pivot, before dragging her toward the water.

‘He yanked her through them weeds,’ Clyde told me, ‘like she was a bag of garbage, then started cuttin’ away the fence. That was when he spotted me.’

‘And what did you do next?’

‘Whatta ya think I did?’ He shot me an incredulous look before answering his own question. ‘I got my sorry ass out of there as fast as I could, what with my leg and everything.’

‘Where’d you go?’

‘Over on the other side of the bridge, there’s a hole in the fence. I ducked behind some machinery.’

‘Did the man come after you?’

The question produced a shrug. ‘If he did, I didn’t see him.’

‘And what time was this?’

‘Around six thirty.’

I think he expected me to respond in some way, perhaps with an accusation, but I held my peace. The crime hadn’t been reported until almost eleven.

‘Look, detective,’ he finally said, ‘all my life, the one lesson I learned is that minding your own business is how you stay alive. I mean, I seen guys shanked and I just kept on goin’. In the joint, you don’t have no other choice.’

He turned away from me to face the river. The tide was coming in now and the small boats out on the water were in the process of weighing anchor. I watched them for a moment, the chug of their engines, as they fired up, adding still another layer to the din that surrounded us.

‘Is that what you did?’ I finally asked. ‘You walked away?’

‘No, I called nine-one-one. I waited till later, but I made the call.’

‘Why, Clyde? Why did you wait and why did you make the call?’

‘I was gonna forget about it,’ he admitted. ‘I mean, she was dead, right, and I couldn’t bring her back to life. So why should I get involved? For all I know, she done somethin’ horrible and deserved what happened to her.’

‘That doesn’t answer my question.’

He looked up, perhaps for inspiration, at a sky the color of fat-free milk. ‘The only family I got is a sister, lives in New Jersey. She ain’t spoken to me in thirty years and her kids don’t even know my name. I’m not sayin’ I deserve nothin’ better.’ He shook his head. ‘No, all the wrong’s on my end. I accept that.’

He paused here, while he continued to stare up at the sky. Though I was tempted to prod him, I sensed that he was still working out his motives for reporting the crime, as well as his reasons for returning to the crime scene.

‘I’m seventy-three,’ he said when it became clear that I wasn’t going to speak first. ‘I got bad lungs and diabetes, and I got an infection in my liver keeps comin’ back. Meanwhile, I don’t have two nickels saved up for my funeral. When I go, they’re gonna put me in a box and ship me out to the boneyard on Hart’s Island. Ya know what they do out on Hart’s Island, detective? They dig a trench with a backhoe, then pile the coffins on top of each other. And those coffins, they don’t have names on ’em. They got numbers.’

Finally, Clyde turned to look directly into my eyes. I saw that his own eyes were dark and mournful, the eyes of a man who’d been traveling a hard road for a long time, a man who was now close enough to read the DEAD END sign at the end of that road. I saw, also, that he was going to tell me the truth.

‘I kept thinkin’ about her under the water, lyin’ in that fuckin’ mud, about the crabs and fishes eatin’ her. And it just got to me. I mean, the way he was draggin’ her. You could see that it was just a job to him, like he mighta been pourin’ a bucket of motor oil down a storm drain.’ Clyde paused there, his mouth twitching as though he was trying to work up his nerve. Finally, he said, ‘Okay, I know you ain’t gonna believe this, but when he was pulling her over the weeds, her chin came up so she was lookin’ directly at me. And what came into my mind, right there, was that she was askin’ me for help.’

I laid my hand on Clyde’s shoulder and gave it a gentle squeeze, thinking that cops weren’t the only ones to speak for the dead. ‘Would you recognize this man if you saw him again?’

‘My eyes,’ he responded, ‘they ain’t what they used to be, but I think so.’

‘Why don’t you begin by describing him?’

‘An ugly white dude, around fifty.’ Clyde framed his eyes with his fingers. ‘His eyes were like slits, like he had a hard time keepin’ ’em open. I didn’t get the color — he was too far away — but I’m sure about them slits. When he looked at me, it was like I was under a microscope.’

In fact, the man Clyde observed was eighty-one feet from Kent Avenue. I knew because we’d already measured the distance. That’s a long way off for a man in his seventies, but my witness did pretty well anyway, replying without hesitation. The shadowy figure to emerge from his description was middle-aged and over six feet tall, with thinning gray hair and tiny eyes made even tinier by a wide face pudgy with fat.

‘Like a Chinaman’s eyes,’ was how Clyde finally put it, ‘except they didn’t slant.’

But Clyde was less certain about the van. Most of his attention, he told me, at least until he was spotted, had been focused on the victim. Plus, he hadn’t driven a car in so many years that he couldn’t tell one model from another.

‘I want you to come back to the precinct with me,’ I finally told him, ‘to look at some pictures.’

‘Mug shots?’

‘Yeah.’

‘I don’t mind. I already figured you was gonna ask me.’

‘Great, but there’s a problem. We can’t leave here until someone shows up to take the body away.’

‘And that’s not gonna happen any time soon?’

‘Probably not, so what I want you to do is take a hike up to Broadway and get us some sodas and something to eat.’

‘You trust me to come back on my own,’ he said after a minute.

‘Clyde, it’s just like you said. Your running days are behind you.’

The first clouds made their appearance some four hours later. They came north from the harbor, long gray tendrils that swung back and forth like questing snakes. The clouds ushered in a gentle breeze, a breeze that became a wind as the clouds gradually took on the yellow-green color of a healing bruise. I led Clyde to the Crown Vic at that point. The air inside was stifling, but the clatter of hail on the roof forced me to keep the windows up.

The hail was followed by a deluge, as if somebody had run a knife across the underside of a water bed. For the next ten minutes, the lightning advanced on our position, until there was virtually no gap between the flashes and the resulting explosions. Clyde was sitting alongside me, his hands over his ears and his eyes squeezed shut. My own eyes were wide open. The hail and rain were pounding on the crime scene, destroying every bit of trace evidence. They pounded on the body of the victim as well, and what I wondered, as I struggled to draw oxygen from an atmosphere as thick as pudding, was whether her open gut would contain the water. Like a bath tub.

The rain stopped as abruptly as it had begun and the clouds receded to the north as if in fear of being left behind. Within minutes, the sun was out and the air again motionless. I exited the car, pausing for a minute to watch a thin mist rise from the hot cobblestones. Then I looked up at the bridge, my attention drawn by the silence. The helicopters were gone, the rescue workers as well, driven away by the weather no doubt. I wondered if there were any civilians still trapped in the subway cars, imagining their terror and the civil damages they would later seek. I was still pondering this question when a morgue wagon, closely followed by a city car bearing a death investigator, pulled up before the crime scene tape. The investigator rolled down the window a few inches. A short black man, he carefully scrutinized my sweat-soaked clothing, his distaste obvious.

‘You have a body for me, detective?’ he asked.

‘I have what’s left of a body after nine hours in the sun.’

‘Is that supposed to mean something?’ he said, staring me down. I turned away without answering.