The Cold Room

by Robert Knightly

  Satisfied for the moment, I allowed myself to look directly into her eyes. Her corneas were clouded, as expected, but I could see, beneath the film on the surface, two pale blue circles, delicate as the petals of a flower. I raised the camera and took several quick shots, catching the photos as they were ejected. In her early twenties, the woman’s appearance was consistent with the first stages of decomposition. Purge fluid, dark as blood, had drained from her nose to form a two-dimensional mustache above her mouth. There was minor bloating evident in her cheeks as well, and some slippage of the flesh along her jaw line. My hope was that, later on, I could use the photos and my computer to create a recognizable likeness of the victim. Unless I got lucky with her fingerprints – assuming they could be taken – I would need something to show around and I didn’t intend to wait for a police artist to produce a sketch.

  I continued to photograph the body, to record the victim’s injuries, including deep abrasions on the point of her chin and the tip of her nose. The abrasions were fresh and flecked with bits of dirt and particles of vegetation. I collected samples of each, placing them in evidence bags, then took more samples from the area surrounding the body. As I continued, the process became mechanical and my thoughts began to focus on an obvious question. Why was the victim . . .?

  I considered this much for a moment before settling on the word eviscerated. I liked the clinical sound of its five syllables. I liked the distance it placed between me and the event.

  So, why was the victim eviscerated? The first explanation that sprang to mind, the most obvious, was that she was a dope mule, that she’d swallowed condoms filled with heroin or cocaine, and that her killer had refused to wait for nature to take its course. Perhaps she’d been the target of a drug rip-off, or perhaps she’d been unable to pass the condoms through some abnormality in her bowels. Either way, the product was retrieved.

  But that led to another question. If you were only after a few stuffed condoms, why would you remove all her organs, including the lungs and the heart which are tucked up under the rib-cage? To throw me off?

  I tried to imagine the dope dealers I’d busted having the imagination or the knowledge to attempt that kind of deception. Most of them, I was sure, would have dumped her in some alley, or tossed her from a roof into a garbage-strewn backyard. Proud as battle-scarred pitbulls, they would have displayed her as evidence of their ferocity.

  Of course, there was also a Jack the Ripper scenario out there. But the blunt-force trauma to her head didn’t fit. Slow strangulation would have been far more appropriate to a sadistic murderer. Plus, the killer hadn’t been fishing for souvenirs like Jack the Ripper. He’d taken everything.

  That last word – everything – triggered another thought. Some ten years before, a homeless man had turned up with a missing kidney and a fresh surgical incision. The man remembered nothing of the experience and the case was never cleared, but except for the obvious, there didn’t seem to be any other explanation for his injuries. Somebody had needed that kidney.

  There’s no lack of human beings who need organs. A kidney, a liver, a lung, a heart, a pancreas; recipients far outnumber donors. But gall bladders, colons, spleens? And what about her pink lividity? Where did that fit in? If she’d inhaled enough carbon monoxide to change the chemistry of her blood, why was she struck on the head?

  I walked back to the Crown Vic, retrieved a pad and a jug of water from the trunk. A moment later, I was seated in a patch of shade, with my back to the wall, simply enjoying the contrast between shade and sun as I raised the water jug to my lips. The water inside wasn’t more than a degree lower than my internal body temperature. Nevertheless, it might have been drawn from an icy stream in the Rocky Mountains. I felt instantly revived.

  I had a number of tasks ahead of me, but I was in no hurry. The ME would be a long time coming. I sat where I was for a good fifteen minutes, until I finally stopped sweating, and I might have stayed longer if Clyde Kelly hadn’t chosen that moment to make his presence felt. I didn’t see him at first, but I heard him coming, heard a steady clunk, clunk, clunk, despite the din up on the bridge. The clunking was due to a prosthesis attached to the stump of his right leg, a fact made apparent by his short pants when he finally appeared. Almost the color of tea, the prosthesis was twice as thick as his left leg, which happened to be fish-belly white.

  Short and thin, and well past middle-age, Kelly limped to the center of the intersection, then peered over the crime scene tape at the dirt mound and the body behind it. After a moment, he moved on, crossing to the north side of South Fifth Street where he hesitated before making his way back to where he’d originally stopped. Finally, he shaded his eyes before again looking out toward the body and the water beyond.

  At no time, despite the sirens and the choppers and the saw blades, did he so much as glance at the activity on the bridge. I got to my feet, imagining the effect my unkempt self would have on the little man standing on the far side of Kent Avenue. My shirt was out, my hair plastered across my forehead, my pants drawn skin-tight across my thighs. Worst of all, from his point of view, at six-three, I towered over him.

  The cop from hell. An amusing image, no doubt, but not the one I wanted to project. When he finally became aware of my approach, pivoting on his artificial leg, I displayed my badge, shot him my friendliest smile and gave a little salute. A pure waste of time. His eyes widened in panic and he turned to run.

  ‘Wait a second,’ I said, ‘I’m not gonna hurt you.’

  Clunk, clunk, clunk, clunk.

  I caught up with him before he reached the sidewalk, then gently took his arm. ‘Slow down, partner. I just want to talk to you.’

  He raised a hand as if to shield his head, revealing a prison tattoo on the web between his thumb and forefinger, an uneven black cross. For a moment, I was tempted to excuse his paranoia as the natural reflex of an ex-con, but I finally decided that no matter how many years he’d spent in the joint, his reaction to my appearance was extreme. I took a moment to examine the man before breaking the silence that followed. His shorts and t-shirt were well worn, though clean, his hair recently cut, his face recently shaved. Deep grooves marked the side of his face, running from the inside corners of his eyes down into the soft flesh of his throat. They made his long face seem even longer, an effect enhanced by the sagging skin at his jaw line. His broad nose was also long, while his dark eyes, beneath a pair of brows shaggy enough to cast a veil over his upper lids, betrayed his fear.

  ‘What’s your name, partner?’ I asked.

  ‘Clyde Kelly,’ he responded, his tone hoarse. ‘I ain’t done nothin’.’

  ‘I’m Detective Corbin. You have to excuse my appearance. I been workin’ out in the sun.’ I put my shield away. ‘You got ID, Clyde?’

  He looked up at me, his expression tracing a line midway between pleading and resigned. Returning his gaze, I realized that however bad he might have been in years gone by, whatever awful deeds he may have performed, time had taken its toll. He was an old man now, living an old man’s fearful life.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘I got a card.’

  He retrieved that card without my asking, pulling a photo ID issued by the Human Resources Administration from a leather wallet as creased and wrinkled as the skin beneath his arms. The HRA card revealed an address on Wythe Avenue, one block east of Kent, and his date of birth. Clyde Kelly was seventy-three.

  ‘You live by yourself?’ I asked.

  He shook his head. ‘Senior housing,’ he explained. ‘Everything’s like shared. The bathrooms, the kitchen, like that.’

  I think he was proud to have a fixed address, not to be among New York’s large population of homeless ex-cons. For my part, I was content to know that I could find him again if I needed him.

  ‘Look, Clyde,’ I said after a moment, ‘I got a little problem and I think you can help me.’ I took out my wallet, withdrew a clammy ten-dollar bill, and pushed it into his hand. ‘I don’t expect you to work for nothing
, of course.’

  He stared down at the bill without closing his fingers. ‘What do I gotta do?’

  ‘Well, see, this is a crime scene – which I think you already figured out for yourself – and I have to process it all alone.’ I gestured up toward the bridge. ‘Everybody else is busy.’

  Clyde nodded once, the gesture slow and steady. ‘I hear what you’re sayin’,’ he said, ‘and I’m not disrespectin’ you or nothin’, but what exactly do I have to do?’

  I smiled. An innocent bystander would have already inquired into the nature of the crime. ‘You have to help me, Clyde. It’s as simple as that. Now wait here a minute while I get my flashlight. I’ll be right back.’ I took a step, then halted. ‘You’re not gonna run, are ya?’

  ‘No,’ he replied, tapping his artificial leg, ‘my runnin’ days are over.’

  I led him down the block, in twenty-five-foot increments, until I was standing with my heels on the edge of the mound. Clyde became more and more upset as we advanced. With his eyes riveted to the ground, he grew increasingly clumsy, stumbling toward me each time I retracted the tape. His fingers were trembling noticeably by the time we completed the last segment.

  ‘What’s up, Clyde? You feel okay?’

  He stood where he was, his eyes on his feet, until I repeated his name. ‘Clyde?’

  After another long hesitation, his head finally came up. Though he took a quick swipe at his eyes, it was evident that he’d been crying.

  ‘I can’t make it in jail,’ he said. ‘I just can’t do it no more.’

  ‘Who said anything about jail?’

  But Clyde was beyond listening at that moment. ‘I didn’t kill her,’ he whispered. ‘I swear to God, detective. I didn’t have nothin’ to do with it.’

  ‘I already know that. I already know you didn’t kill her.’

  He wiped his eyes, then again looked at me, this time his expression wary. In typical cop fashion, I was messing with his head.

  ‘The victim was killed somewhere else, Clyde, then transported to this location. I know you couldn’t have done that. But the thing is, you have to tell me what you saw and when you saw it. You have to, Clyde. You have to.’

  Television advertisers claim that the average viewer must see a commercial at least seven times before the message penetrates. By that standard, Clyde was a quick study. He got the point after only three repetitions. He wasn’t going anywhere until he came clean.

  THREE

  Iled 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.’