Bodies in Winter (7 page)

All of this is compounded by the conditions. With your ear plugs in, you hear nothing beyond the splashing of your arms and legs. With your goggles on, you see clearly only when your face is in the water. A red stripe on the bottom of the pool, which you dutifully follow, becomes your visual universe. In the end, your attention turns inward simply because there's no other place for it to go.

I remember learning this lesson the hard way. Whenever my stroke was off, Coach Stehle would have me swimming laps until I was ready to sink to the bottom. Then he'd have me do a few more.

Initially, I took the obvious course. I tried not to think about anything that might upset me. Fat chance. I was a confrontational child and I needed my enemies. But what I did learn to do, finally, was strip my thoughts of emotion. An image would come into my mind – of my parents, for example, huddled around a mirror striped with lines of cocaine while I foraged through the cupboards in search of dinner – and I'd observe it without any feelings at all. Or I'd imagine Ramon Arellano trying to intimidate me in the lunch room without further imagining myself driving a knife through the side of his throat.

By the time I finished my junior year, I was pretty much addicted to swimming. The pool was the place where I could look at myself without arousing emotions like fear, rage and self-contempt. Not that I liked the angry fool I saw. But at least I didn't hate him. Sure, he was a jerk who did everything he could to ruin his life. But he was my jerk and I could make of him what I would.

In my senior year, I began to redefine myself. I didn't want to be a jerk any more. I knew that going in. Putting a face to the new self I hoped to create was much more difficult. What did I hope to become? The question was never directly answered. Instead, as I swam my way through high school, then through a long tour in Berlin, I not only became less angry, I began to like my life, as it was and as I hoped it would be. I wasn't asking for much. I had no grand ambitions. I just wanted an ordinary life, as free from the chaos of my childhood as possible.

And so I continued to believe as I walked out of the locker room and stood by the edge of an empty pool fourteen hours after the murder of David Lodge. The air around me, cool enough to produce goose bumps, was saturated with humidity and the odor of chlorine. Though it'd been years since I'd loosened up before a workout, I hesitated long enough to draw a few deep breaths, gradually expanding my lungs. Then I dove into the water and began to swim.

For the first few laps, as the muscles of my shoulders and back gradually stretched out, I didn't think about much of anything. The water flowed over my face and body, holding me in an embrace at once tender and distinctly sexual. The sensations were luxurious, as always, and I basked in them, knowing they came with no strings attached. This was purely for me, purely about me. This was mine.

Still, I knew where my thoughts were headed once I settled into a steady grind. In the army, I'd learned to smell trouble coming, to avoid it. No confrontations, especially with officers, that was the name of the game. And that meant no black-market bullshit, no cigarettes smuggled off the base, no drunken brawls, no pregnant
frauleins
.

When I became a cop, it was more of the same. Be where you're supposed to be and don't jam up the sergeant. Write your traffic tickets, twenty-five parkers and five movers, every month without fail. Make certain that your monthly activity reports are complete and current.

Bottom line: not being a pain in the ass to my superiors on the chain of command worked for me. I pretty much had the ordinary life I wanted. Maybe it was a bachelor's life, untrusting and sometimes lonely, but half the kids I hung with in my adolescence had been to prison, and not a few of them were dead. So if my glass was a few inches short of full, I wasn't complaining.

The red stripe beneath me never shifted when I got down to business. The pull of the right and left sides of my body remained in sync even as I admitted that a new element had entered my ordinary life. I needed to examine that element and I decided that I would. As soon as I figured out what it was.

But I was sure about one thing. Lodge's face had been plastered all over the evening news and wasn't likely to disappear anytime soon. The press would be watching the investigation; the bosses, too. When it comes to protecting the job, the big dogs at the Puzzle Palace are all white knights. And all willing to sacrifice a peasant or two, if that's what it takes.

I rechecked my position as I kicked out of a turn. By then, I was at the peak of my strength, in a swimmer's high, my body running on full automatic. When my hands cut the water, I felt as if I was about to yank the other side of the pool toward me. An illusion, naturally, like the powerful sense that I could go on forever. I'd get tired soon enough, at which point the far end of the pool would shift into full retreat, growing more distant with every turn.

Methodically, I reviewed the day's events, evoking a series of images beginning with the body of David Lodge sprawled on the frozen ground and finishing with Detective Linus Potter's nasty smile when he told me that Tony Szarek, the Broom, was dead. It was all so convenient: the ski masks, the river of brass, the carefully aimed
coup de grace
, the double-parked Toyota, the forbidding TEC-9, the widow's evasive answers. Every element led toward DuWayne Spott.

I'd come up against staged murder scenes a few times in the past. In each of those cases, the staging was an afterthought, a coda to a rage-motivated attack. The Lodge scene was a lot more elaborate. Clearly the scenario had been planned in advance. Just as clearly, it hadn't been planned by DuWayne Spott. The purpose of staging is to lead investigators
away
from the guilty party or parties, not toward them.

So what did all this mean to me? I was climbing out of the pool, a half-hour later, when I finally decided that I couldn't answer the question. I just didn't have enough information. Meanwhile, there were cold winds blowing out there. Sailing into them made no sense at all.

I went to my locker for a towel and found the light on in Conrad Stehle's small office. I wasn't surprised. Conrad had been subject to periods of insomnia ever since his wife, Helen, died two years before. Typically, he refused to toss and turn between the sheets, opting to stroll the few blocks from his house to his office at the Y. Sometimes he swam laps in an effort to wear himself out, but usually he settled for doing a little paperwork in the hope that one of his buddies would happen along. As I included myself in that group, I stuck my head in the door.

‘Evening, Conrad.'

‘Ah, I thought that was you I heard thrashing around in the pool.'

Conrad Stehle was closing in on seventy, a tall stocky man with the barrel chest of a true swimmer. He'd been a champion in high school, winning statewide tournaments six different times in three different categories. At one point, the now-defunct New York
Herald Tribune
had pronounced Conrad ‘a future Olympian'. Those dreams had come crashing down when he returned from the Korean War with a purple heart and lungs too weak to support active competition.

I peeled off my goggles and cap, then fished out my ear plugs. ‘I caught the David Lodge case. Did you hear about it?'

Conrad's green eyes widened slightly and he tilted his chin in the air. A bit of a cop buff, he liked nothing more than to discuss an investigation, and I sometimes used him as a sounding board. Lodge's celebrity, of course, only sweetened the mix.

‘Just let me dry off,' I continued, ‘and I'll be right back.'

Fifteen minutes later, when I returned, Conrad had a bottle of Cointreau sitting on his desk, along with two plastic cups. He poured an inch of the liquor into each cup, then passed one to me. ‘To crime and punishment,' he said.

‘Amen to that, brother.'

I clinked plastic, drained the cup, then drew an outline of the investigation thus far, including my numerous misgivings. Though I'd meant to be brief, I found myself explaining my reaction to Adele's maneuver with the Lodge file, my pending transfer to Homicide, and my equally pending promotion.

‘The reassignment and the promotion, Conrad, they're both at the absolute discretion of the bosses.'

‘And that's what you wish to protect?'

I shrugged. ‘I don't care all that much about the promotion, although I could definitely use the money. But Homicide? Even as far back as the Academy, and we're talking fifteen years here, I wanted to be a homicide detective. Now I'm only a few months away.'

Ordinarily, Conrad had the listening skills of a psychiatrist, but my whiny complaints, on that night, evoked no more than a slight toss of the head as he removed a stubby cigar from his shirt pocket and ran it beneath his nose. He'd stopped smoking on the day Helen, a chain smoker since adolescence, died of lung cancer.

‘I don't think you're worried about this file. I think you're worried that you can't control your partner.'

‘Yeah, there's that, too. But I'm sure of one thing: if I play it by the numbers, I can't get hurt.'

‘And those numbers include keeping Lieutenant Sarney informed?'

‘At all times, Conrad. At all times.'

I left Conrad's office with a happy heart, and carried my good mood back to my apartment where I called Adele. It was a quarter to twelve and I knew she'd be watching the first half-hour of the Letterman show. Letterman was better, she'd told me, than a sleeping pill.

‘Adele,' I said when she picked up the phone, ‘the Broom is dead.'

‘The broom?'

‘Patrol Officer Anthony Szarek, retired.' I detailed my conversation with Linus Potter, laying heavy emphasis on the timing of Szarek's suicide, just two weeks before Lodge's scheduled release, and Szarek's devotion to alcohol.

‘So what does this mean to us, Corbin?' Adele asked when I finished.

‘According to Potter, Tony Szarek holds the case against Lodge together by putting Lodge alone with the victim. But who speaks for Tony Szarek?'

‘Nobody,' Adele replied without hesitation, ‘and now he can't speak for himself. But I'm still asking the same question. What does this mean to us?'

‘Szarek was a drunk. He was the weak link.'

‘I'm not disagreeing with you, Corbin, but it's getting late.'

‘And you want me to come to the point?'

‘Please.'

‘The point is that the shit's hit the fan, and I intend to maintain a low profile until I see if it's aimed in my direction.'

‘This isn't like you, Corbin.'

‘I don't care. Everything goes across the lieutenant's desk, every move we make. That way, the bosses can't protect themselves without protecting us. Remember, it's not just us. Sarney's also at risk here.'

‘Yes,' Adele finally admitted, ‘I could hear it in his voice.'

EIGHT

I
know what I expected as I approached the Attica Correctional Facility in my rented Plymouth: soot-stained granite walls, ancient and forbidding, topped by coil upon coil of gleaming razor wire. But Attica's walls weren't soot-stained, or topped by wire, or made of granite. They were poured concrete and they appeared, from a distance on that day, as white as the fields of snow surrounding them. The effect was more Camelot than Tower of London, an illusion compounded by octagonal guard towers set into the walls like rooks at the corners of a chess board. Imposing in themselves, the towers were large enough to accommodate fully enclosed rooms behind their battlements, rooms to which the guards undoubtedly retreated on frigid winter days. These rooms were topped by funnel-shaped roofs covered with festive orange tiles.

From inside the Plymouth, with the heater running on high, it was a beautiful day. The sun at my back fired the edges of the undulating dunes with a wavering line of pure silver. The sky ahead was intensely blue and seemed to grow directly from the prison walls. Even the few sunlit clouds, though clearly in motion, could have been details in a painted backdrop.

But I wasn't going to be able to stay inside the car, enjoying the picture-postcard scenery, a fact of life that became painfully obvious when I finally turned into a parking lot surrounded by snow banks higher than my head. The temperature outside was minus six degrees, the sun no warmer than an uncooked egg yolk, the winds strong enough to stir up mini-tornados of snow. I was wearing a really nice wool coat, a coat suitable for a Broadway show or an uptown dinner. But when I stepped from the car – bravely, I thought – my coat afforded me all the protection of a terrycloth robe.

By then, thanks to a long delay while airport security cleared my weapon, I knew a lot more about David Lodge. The wait had left me plenty of time to read New York's three daily papers, each of which had uncovered a different piece of the investigation Adele and I were conducting.

A
Times
reporter named Gruber had somehow wangled an interview with Ellen Lodge. Her husband, she'd told Gruber, had claimed, on more than one occasion, to fear a revenge-motivated attack. According to Ellen, ‘He was wired when he left the house. I could see that.'

Eva Hinckle made an appearance in the
Daily News
where she described Lodge's murderers as ‘black males'. According to the reporter covering the story, Carl Gonzalez, Eva was certain because (as she only now remembered) the ski mask worn by one of Lodge's assailants had slipped as he got into the red car, exposing the back of his neck.

The
New York Post
hadn't gotten to any of the witnesses. Instead, a ‘highly placed source within the NYPD' had told a reporter named Ted Loranzo about the location of the abandoned Toyota and the TEC-9's recovery. The main focus of Loranzo's story was the relationship between the TEC-9 (which Loranzo described as a ‘machine pistol') and gangster rap. Profusely illustrated with photos culled from album covers depicting black men holding TEC-9s, the text made no effort at subtlety. The police, Loranzo told his readers, were concentrating their efforts on friends and associates of Clarence Spott.