Bodies in Winter (33 page)

Potter's mouth expanded into a tight and bitter smile. His eyes began to shift again, back and forth, from pure hate almost to the point of regret.

‘You'll have to excuse my partner,' I said. ‘She tends to over-analyze. But it does seem to me you have a pair of viable options, Linus. And one that's not viable. Let's take the last option first. You could walk out the door right now and hide behind your lawyer. That would buy you a couple of weeks of freedom. But you don't really want that, not after the way you've been humiliated tonight. You realize, of course, that once the story of what happened here gets around, you won't be able to leave your house. Knowing, as you will, that everybody else knows, too.'

Once again, Mike Blair spoke up. Again, he made a plea for calm. This time, Linus Potter responded first. ‘Shut up, Mike,' he said. Then he jerked his chin in my direction. ‘The viable options,' he said. ‘Let's hear 'em.'

‘The first one's called redemption. I'm not armed, Linus. The shooting board took my weapon. If you wanted to, you could show me the error of my ways right this minute. And when you think about it, killing me, killing my partner, even killing good old Mike – it wouldn't make all that much difference. You're already on the hook for life without parole. Plus, if you redeem your honor, it'll do wonders for your self-esteem.'

Potter shifted his weight to allow the right side of his unbuttoned jacket to fall to the side. ‘And what's the downside?' he asked.

‘The downside is that Adele's pointing a gun at the back of your head, so you're gonna have to be really quick.'

The information had no discernible effect on Linus Potter. ‘What's my other option?'

‘The freak's not gonna like this one, Linus, not one bit. The other option is confession, which is good for the soul, but not for the freak. Ellen's still holding out. Jarazelsky's in the dark. That gives you the option of being first. Now I know you've employed this line yourself, so I'm not gonna belabor the point. But if you want, we'll take you down to the DA, right now, and you can cut that good deal.'

‘You and your partner, you want to take me to the DA?'

‘Yeah.'

‘Like I'm some kind of fucking trophy.'

‘I told ya the freak wouldn't like it.'

Potter laughed. ‘In my whole adult life,' he declared, ‘nobody has ever talked to me like this. It takes some gettin' used to.' He settled back in his seat and called out, ‘Hey, Mike, you think you could bring me that one last beer? The beer I been practicing all my life to drink?'

Blair waited for me to nod, then drew off a mug of Guinness. He brought it over to the table, careful to remain out of the line of fire, and set it down. Potter turned far enough to raise the mug in Sparkle's general direction, then drank it dry.

‘Make up your mind, Linus. Which way do you wanna go?'

Linus answered by rising to his feet, then turning to face Adele and the gun she now held with both hands. Though he was seeing her weapon for the first time, his expression didn't change. ‘You gonna shoot me, Adele?' He spread his own hands apart. ‘I mean, I'm not threatening anyone here.'

After a moment, Potter took a step forward, then another, each step measured and deliberate. When they were ten feet apart, Adele cocked the revolver, the sharp click seeming almost obscene in my ears. Linus came to a stop at that point and I hastened to take myself out of the line of fire, circling to Potter's right. If Potter took another step, I was certain that Adele would kill him.

Potter let his hands drop to his sides as he looked past me to Mike Blair. On the way, our eyes met for just a moment. The rage and the hate were gone now, discarded like a Halloween mask. In their place, I registered layer upon layer of pain, a bone-deep sorrow that revealed everything the freak wanted to hide. Mike Blair stared directly into those eyes for several seconds. I don't know what he saw, or even if he recognized anything beyond the immediate threat. But Mike's tone, when he commented, was far from compassionate.

‘If she blows your fucking brains out,' he declared, ‘I'm gonna claim you made a try for your weapon.'

Potter flinched, the rebuke sharp enough to sting. He had no friends here. Slowly, he let his head come round far enough to face me.

‘More than I don't wanna go to prison, I don't wanna die,' he explained with an apologetic shrug of his massive shoulders. ‘Would ya believe that?'

‘How about more than you want revenge?'

‘Yeah,' he said, ‘more than that, too.'

I came up behind him, then reached across his body to jerk his automatic out of its holster. As I backed away, I looked over at Adele. What I saw in her eyes was disappointment.

‘Besides,' Potter said, ‘I swear, I was hardly involved.'

‘Just an innocent bystander?'

He winked. ‘Harry, you're hell on wheels.'

FORTY-TWO

M
y first instinct was to put the whole business behind me. After all, the bad guys were knocking on the DA's door, each begging for an opportunity to testify against the others, and against Paco Luna whose operation was being systematically attacked by a task force that included the FBI and the DEA. About this outcome, I argued to myself, there was nothing not to like.

I made that rationalization last a couple of weeks, but it was like the first time you try to give up cigarettes. Somehow, the cravings just won't go away. In this case, what I craved was an answer, and not even the mini-honeymoon Adele and I were thoroughly enjoying was enough to sooth the itch.

‘I have to do something about it,' I finally told Adele.

‘Corbin,' she replied, ‘are you taking this personally?'

I watched the knowing smile on her lips gradually expand, then came back at her with the wickedest shot in my arsenal. ‘Ya know, Adele, if you weren't a girl, I'd hit you with this pillow.'

The proof was easy enough to gather, no more than the afternoon it took to track Justin Whitlock to an apartment on Avenue S, in Brooklyn. But I wasn't satisfied with the proof, not even close. I wanted to know why, and that took a while, forcing us once again to dip into Adele's old-girl network. As it turned out, we were well into the month of March by the time I fired up the Nissan and started out for Port Washington on the north shore of Long Island.

Bill Sarney was living the good life. His three-story colonial had wings at either end, one newly constructed, by the look of the still-raw brick, and a cobblestone driveway that swept up to the front of the house. Despite the fog, the paint job on an S-Class Mercedes parked in that driveway gleamed as though lit from within.

The money for all this high living came from Bill Sarney's wife, Rebecca, a senior partner at some Wall Street law firm with too many names to remember. I'd met Rebecca the few times I'd been out to the house, and I only had two memories of her. The first of her small and graceful hand, offered with the palm down, the second of her clear devotion to her husband and her two children.

The front door opened as I walked up the flagstone path, and Bill Sarney stepped onto the porch. He was wearing gray wool slacks, freshly pressed, and a pale blue shirt that fit tightly over the small bulge of his belly.

‘Rebecca took the kids to her sister's,' he explained as I walked past him. ‘We've got the place to ourselves.'

He closed and double-locked the door behind us, then led me through the living and dining rooms, to that newly built wing on the side of the house which he'd turned into a billiard room. I smiled appreciatively. The green felt on the table was so smooth it might have been combed fur.

‘You want something to drink?' he asked. ‘A beer, maybe?'

‘Sure, a beer would be fine.'

Sarney opened a small refrigerator, removed two bottles of Bass Ale, poured them into a pair of tall glasses bearing unidentified crests. I got a shield on my glass, flanked by two standing lions who seemed about to break into song.

‘So,' he asked, ‘how're they treatin' ya, Harry?'

‘No worse than expected.' I hesitated for a moment, then changed the subject. ‘You hear about Tony Szarek?'

That caught his attention. His chin came up for a change and he looked directly into my eyes. ‘No,' he admitted.

‘Szarek was killed by his girlfriend's brother, a man named Ryszard Gierek. It was funny, Bill, how it went down. For reasons he took to the grave, Szarek told his lover that she was his sole heir when he didn't even have a will. Some kidder, that Tony.'

‘How'd you know,' he asked, ‘about the Szarek arrest?'

‘I got a pipeline into the task force, but that's not the point. What I'm talking about is the irony. When Szarek's death came up suspicious, me and Adele, we assumed that it was linked to the David Lodge killing. That got us trying to connect Lodge, Jarazelsky, Russo and Szarek, which we eventually did. Meanwhile, after drinking himself into unconsciousness, Tony was capped by a Polish immigrant who collects baseball memorabilia.'

Sarney smiled, drawing his thin lips into a crooked grimace that seemed more pained than happy. ‘I take your point,' he conceded, ‘but that's how it goes sometimes. You try your best to draw a straight line between where you are and where you want to be, only the world doesn't cooperate.'

I ignored the implications. ‘And Bucky Chavez, that was another one,' I said. ‘Another irony.'

Maximo ‘Bucky' Chavez, who had us connecting dirty cops in the Eight-Three with Paco Luna's drug operation, had re-emerged a few days after my confrontation with Linus Potter. Subjected to an intense grilling, Bucky had finally admitted that he'd seen nothing more than a ‘white man in a suit' enter Paco Luna's town house. The rest – the part about a cop from the Eight-Three – was the product of his naturally dishonest imagination. And there was nothing suspicious about Chavez's disappearing act, either. After a three-dollar hit on the number 437 netted him $1500, Bucky had quit Brooklyn to hang out with his ‘outside woman' in Jersey City. Nina Francisco, he'd explained, would only have thrown the money away on something foolish. Like clothes for the kids.

‘What's with the ironies?' Sarney asked. ‘You and Bentibi writing a book?'

‘Nope, in fact Adele got a job. She's starting on Monday.'

‘What kind of job?'

‘She's going to work for Alessio, the Queens DA, as an investigator for Major Cases.'

Again, I caught Sarney off guard. He turned away from me and walked to a window framed by pale yellow curtains. For a long moment, his gaze remained fixed on a slice of yard dominated by an ancient fruit tree. The tree was gnarled and twisted, its bark slick with dew, its every branch dotted with thick green buds that seemed about to explode.

‘Well,' he said without turning, ‘it looks as if Bentibi managed to land on her feet.'

‘Yeah, she did. Just like you. But there's one more irony out there, and we need to discuss it.' I laid what remained of my beer on a coaster and took a few steps in Sarney's direction. I think by then he knew I had an agenda, and what that agenda was. One thing for sure, I hadn't come to beg forgiveness, which is what I'd told him in the course of a long phone call.

‘When I first heard about Greenpoint Carton from Tony Szarek's sister,' I continued, ‘I didn't think that much of it. A retired cop owns a little business? No big deal. But when I found out that Justin Whitlock was managing that business? The same Justin Whitlock who alibied Russo in the Clarence Spott homicide? I tell ya, that got the old sap rising.'

Sarney finally turned around to face me. His features were composed, even relaxed, except for his eyes. They were focused on me with the intensity of a blow torch. ‘When Justin Whitlock came up clean,' he admitted, ‘it surprised everyone.'

But that, of course, was the irony. Justin Whitlock was exactly what he appeared to be: a hard-working manager who kept the inventory up and the deliveries flowing, who cashed his check at the end of the week and went home to his wife.

‘Justin still works at Greenpoint Carton, making that commute from Gravesend every weekday. Personally, I don't see why he does it. Him and his wife, they own a nice little co-op, with no mortgage, in a nice little neighborhood. Plus they both have pensions and social security. Justin could just lay back and enjoy the remaining years, but . . .'

‘Is there a point here?' Sarney finally interrupted.

‘Only that Justin Whitlock told me, if I should run into you, to remember to say hello for him.' I smiled. ‘Hello, Bill.'

When Sarney didn't reply, I turned to a cluster of photographs on the wall to the right of the window: Sarney shaking hands with Rudolph Giuliani, with Michael Bloomberg, with George Pataki, with Hillary Rodham Clinton, with two police commissioners, with a host of lesser lights. Arranged in what appeared to be a perfect rectangle, the tight grouping was impressive, even though I knew the photos had been snapped at expensive fund-raisers attended (and occasionally sponsored) by his wife's law firm.

‘Where do you want to go, Bill?' I finally asked.

‘What do you mean?'

‘You're a captain, now, and there's no more civil service exams for you. If you're gonna move up, you're gonna have to do it by appointment. So my question is real simple. How big are your dreams? How high do you hope to rise? Inspector? Deputy Chief? Chief? How about Chief of Detectives? You stay another ten, fifteen years, it's not impossible.'

‘Funny thing,' Sarney replied after a moment, ‘but I somehow don't feel the slightest need to discuss the issue with Detective Harry Corbin.'

I nodded to myself, then turned and took a step in Sarney's direction. We were now standing a couple of yards apart. ‘You remember those tips Adele and I received?' I asked. ‘There were five of them in all.'