The cold room

EIGHT

I got up and out on the next morning in time to catch the tail end of the eight o’clock mass at St Stanislaus in Greenpoint. Afterward, I passed out a dozen fliers to the exiting parishioners before chatting up Father Korda, who stood by the church door. Charm was my weapon of choice in these encounters, humble petitioner my stance. I told the priest, and anyone else who cared to listen, that I had good reason to believe that my victim was a Polish immigrant who’d lived in the neighborhood. Helping her was helping one of their own. I told the same story to Polish storekeepers on both sides of Manhattan Avenue. Murdered innocent, Polish immigrant. Her family was out there somewhere, awaiting closure. Her killer was out there, too, maybe getting ready to kill someone else.

Whenever possible, I tried to buy something. Breakfast at one diner, coffee and a buttered corn muffin at another. I had fifty copies of the flier printed at a card shop. I bought a package of light bulbs at a hardware store and a tube of toothpaste at a small pharmacy. At every moment, I projected an attitude of brotherly cooperation, one common humanity; we’re all in this together. My goal was to place my flier in the front window where it would be seen by pedestrians. I’d even brought my own tape.

I was mostly successful, but the going was necessarily slow. Still, by Thursday, I’d covered Greenpoint thoroughly and was out to Maspeth, a Queens neighborhood a few miles to the southeast. I’d gotten two hits by then. Both were false alarms, but ones I’d had to check out. This was a pattern that continued through the week and into the weekend. There were a lot of Nina Klaipeda’s out there, women whose daughters bore not the faintest resemblance to Plain Jane Doe.

On Thursday, Millard called me into his office to review the case. ‘Tough luck,’ he told me. ‘Your vic’s prints came back negative. And nobody’s reported her missing yet.’ When I shrugged in response, he leaned back in his chair. ‘So, whatta ya doin’? Tell me.’

A case review, at this point, was routine, and ordinarily I’d have progress to report. But there was nothing here and when I described my daytime activities, the effort rang hollow.

‘I’ve got two men out on vacation, Harry,’ Millard told me at the end. ‘You’re gonna have to pick up cases. C’mon guy.’

Later that night, I took the bad news to a YMCA swimming pool on Twenty-Third Street. The pool was managed by a man named Conrad Stehle, who’d given me and a few other serious swimmers permission to use it late at night. Conrad had been my high school swimming coach, way back when I was a budding juvenile delinquent. That I didn’t suffer the fate of so many of my peers by running afoul of the law was due almost entirely to his intervention. Before we met, my options were limited to my druggie parents or a motley collection of street urchins on the Lower East Side. Conrad offered a third possibility; I could, if I wished, spend my afternoons in his Murray Hill apartment. I don’t want to take this too far — I never thought of Conrad as my father, or his wife, Helen, as my mother. Instead, what they provided, and what I needed, was stability, a dependable world equally free of the chaos offered by my parents and the casual violence of the streets.

There was a second benefit to my relationship with Conrad, a benefit still with me twenty-five years later. Simply put, as I learned to swim competitively, water became my preferred element. With my goggles wet and every sound dampened by ear plugs, I was finally able to shut the world out, to turn my attention inward until I eventually became my own object, the insect under the glass. Double-stroke, then breathe. Turn, push off. After a while, you don’t have to look ahead to find the far wall, or even count your strokes as you cross the pool. Something inside you, the same something that makes your heart beat and your stomach digest, counts for you.

I swam for an hour on that night, concentrating my attention on the case. I knew, going in, that if Jane wasn’t identified, her murder would never be avenged. As I knew that, for the time being, I needed to continue my canvas, gradually expanding the search area, and hope for the best. Still, at some point, assuming I didn’t identify her first, the law of diminishing returns would kick in with a vengeance. It’s a very big city. Myself, I didn’t intend to give up if I crossed that line because there was another possibility out there, a wild card named Bill Sarney.

Now assigned to the Chief of Detectives office, Deputy-Inspector Bill Sarney had been in command of the One-Sixteen when Adele and I worked the case that put us on the outs with the job. Two-faced from the beginning, Sarney pretended to be my rabbi and my friend, all the while selling me out to Borough Command and his buddies at the Puzzle Palace.

It took me awhile, but when I eventually uncovered his game, I’d threatened to expose him to a sitting grand jury. The threat was potent enough to secure a promise that I’d eventually be transferred to Homicide — my long-term goal from the day I stepped through the doors of the Academy — and that we’d meet in public from time to time. About the PBA and its whispering campaign he could do nothing.

Working for the Chief of Detectives, Sarney had the kind of juice I’d need if I took the case in a different direction. Unidentified victims are not all that rare in New York, certainly not rare enough to attract attention from the press. True, the media occasionally takes up the cause of a Jane Doe, but cops who reach out to the media without the backing of the job’s Public Information Office pay a heavy price. Bill Sarney could get me that backing. All I’d have to do is beg.

Almost from the minute my hands cut the water, I’d been making an attempt to banish Adele from my thoughts. By then I knew she wouldn’t return, as promised, by the weekend. On Monday, her mother was scheduled to undergo an endoscopy, a procedure that requires the insertion of a tube through the mouth and into the stomach. Leya Bentibi was beside herself, not least because Jovianna insisted that she make a living will.

Adele could not simply desert her mother. Right? So there was nothing to consider. That’s what I told myself, and I almost made it stick. But then, as my stroke became ragged, an image of Adele rose, unbidden, to hang before my eyes. Adele was sitting in the lobby of North Shore Hospital, her face a mask of bandages, her ski jacket matted with dried blood. I’d come to pick her up after an overnight stay because her husband was in Dallas on a business trip that could not be interrupted for so mundane a task.

Adele had been sitting with her back straight and her head up when I entered the hospital, enduring the frank stares of all who passed her by. I fell in love with her at that moment, with her pride, her defiance. You could kill her, but you couldn’t break her. A few days later, when she came to me, when I felt her breasts against my chest and tasted her lips, I knew there was no going back. If I lost her, I’d pay a price until the end of my days. Twenty minutes later, after a quick shower, I tried to call Conrad on his cell phone. If I could talk to anyone, it was Conrad, who knew me better than I knew myself. But Conrad was somewhere off the coast of Alaska, on a cruise with his girlfriend, Myra Gardner. He was reachable only when the ship was in port, which it apparently wasn’t because I was transferred, after a single ring, to his voice mail. I started to leave a message, then abruptly hung up. There was no point.