She stopped there, her whole body quivering with tension. When I didn’t respond, she said, ‘As far as I’m concerned, David Lodge got exactly what he deserved. No matter who actually killed him.’
THIRTY-ONE
Adele waited patiently while I checked the car, smacking my palm against the windows, opening doors then jumping back. If she thought my display of anxiety amusing, she kept it to herself, entering the car without hesitation when I gave the all-clear. Though it was past dark, the temperature seemed to be rising and I kept the window lowered as I pulled away from the curb.
‘You don’t have to do this,’ I said. ‘You know that, right?’
‘It was my suggestion.’
‘True enough, but you still don’t have to.’
She turned to face me, the smile on her face, as far as I could tell, entirely genuine. Adele was looking forward to the encounter and I wasn’t really surprised. We were going to Sparkle’s, to confront the lies being spread by the PBA. And though the odds against either of us gaining from the confrontation were very steep, Adele’s need for combat was very strong.
Our grand entrance, ten minutes later, was electric. Every eye turned in Adele’s direction; Sparkle, herself, appeared to pay homage. It was a little before six, prime time for cop bars, and Sparkle’s was fairly crowded. Nydia Santiago was there, along with her main girlfriends, squeezed around a small table against the far wall. At the sight of Adele’s damaged face, Nydia’s expression hardened and she drew a breath sharp enough to hear across the room. Women cops are very sensitive to the physical dangers that go along with the job. Hardly shocking when they’re the most likely to be among the injured if things get out of control on the street.
Far more numerous, the male cops reacted less dramatically. They appraised Adele, their looks vaguely suspicious, then turned to me with reproachful eyes. I was their friend and I’d not only thrown them a curve, I’d greased the ball.
Most human beings have a set of rules they hold dear and cops are no different. The first cop rule is silence. Thou shalt not speak ill of another cop, not to an outsider, not under any circumstances. Call it the blue wall of silence; call it omerta, NYPD style.
The silence rule, like all hard-and-fast rules, works better if you don’t examine it too closely. By displaying Adele’s injuries, we were forcing the cops in the room to open their eyes and they clearly didn’t like what they saw.
I followed Adele to the end of the bar where five feet of rail miraculously cleared at our approach. Mike Blair, his expression grim, poured a Dewar’s for me, then asked Adele what she was having.
‘A screwdriver,’ she announced, ‘and a straw to drink it with.’
‘The straw was overly dramatic,’ I said as Mike went off to make Adele’s drink. ‘You had a cup of coffee before we left the apartment. I don’t remember anything about a straw.’
When Mike Blair returned with Adele’s drink, I raised my glass to Sparkle, who beamed down approvingly, then let my eyes sweep the room. Everybody in the bar knew me, but nobody wanted to look in my direction. Not even my good buddy Jack Petro, who refused to make eye contact until I finally called his name and waved him over.
Jack came reluctantly, his conflicted loyalties apparent in his worried look. Which came first? Loyalty to the job? Or loyalty to your best cop buddy? A toughie, no doubt.
‘Harry, Adele,’ he said without offering his hand to either of us. ‘How’s it goin’?’
‘Not too bad.’ I finished my scotch and signaled for another. When Mike Blair carried the bottle to where we stood, I told him, ‘Hang out for a minute, Mike. Adele’s got something she wants to tell you.’
Adele launched into her statement before either man could object. ‘David Lodge was a cop. A little on the rough side, but no worse than hundreds of cops who go out on the job every day. He was set up to take the fall for Clarence Spott’s death and he was murdered upon discovering the truth.’ She paused to sip at her drink, pulling the orange juice and vodka up through the straw before placing the glass on the bar. ‘When you thought David Lodge’s killer was a black pimp, you were ready to form a lynch mob. Now I’m telling you that his killers are cops and you turn your backs. I think you are pathetic.’
As overkill was Adele’s standard mode of communication, I wasn’t surprised by the punch line. But Jack Petro flinched as though slapped, while Mike Blair stood open-mouthed, the Dewar’s bottle cradled against his chest. Petro finally broke the silence.
‘This ain’t right,’ he said to me, echoing Ellen Lodge.
‘What isn’t right, Jack? Taking down cop killers? Is that what’s not right?’ I was much taller than Jack, and in far better shape. When I stepped in close to him, though I hadn’t meant to intimidate, he took a step back. ‘The story’s gonna come out, no matter what happens to me or my partner, and when it does the job’s collective eyes are gonna be blacker than Adele’s. That means that you, Jack Petro, when you’re out on the street, are gonna feel the public’s contempt, you and every other cop. But that’s not my fault and it’s not my partner’s.’
‘What are you telling me, Harry, that you suddenly got religion? Because me and you, we go back a long way and I don’t recall you wearin’ a halo in the past.’
The question caught me off-guard, a quick jab slipped beneath my glove. But Jack had it backwards. If I’d known what was coming when I got out of bed on the morning David Lodge was murdered, I’d have pulled up the covers and gone back to sleep. As it was, I’d been more than ready to pass the moral buck to my superiors. True, Adele hadn’t put a gun to my head, but she’d definitely set the example. I would never have found the courage to butt heads with the job if she hadn’t been out there. Nor, truth to tell, would I have gotten very far without the files she’d gathered on her own.
I didn’t explain any of that to Jack or Mike, but my attitude softened. ‘Adele got lucky,’ I said. ‘Someone came out of her building as she was being attacked and her assailant ran away. But suppose he hadn’t been interrupted? What do you think might have happened?’ I shook my head. ‘It won’t work, Jack. Even if you truly believe the world is better off without the Spott brothers, you can’t justify the attack on Adele, not unless you’re prepared to stop thinking of yourself as a good guy.’
‘The “good guy” was a little weak, Corbin,’ Adele said as we crossed the bar and pushed through the door.
I took a quick glance over my shoulder. Bye-bye, Sparkle. ‘I’ve known Jack for a long time. Trust me, once you get past the cynical attitude, he’s a romantic. The rest of them, too. They think they’re on the side of the angels.’
‘Just like us?’
‘That’s the way I’m hoping it’ll go. If we’re all heroes, how can we be enemies?’
We came through the door to find Nydia Santiago waiting for us on the sidewalk. Nydia didn’t even glance in my direction. She jerked her chin at the middle of Adele’s face and said, ‘Who did that?’
If Nydia’s tone was demanding, Adele’s was uncompromising. ‘Are there dirty cops in the Eight-Three?’ she asked.
‘What?’
‘Because if there are dirty cops in the Eight-Three, they’re the ones who did it. They punished me for picking up the rock they were hiding under.’
Over the last thirty years, police corruption scandals in New York have usually involved small groups of rogue officers who’ve been working together for years. They rip off dealers for drugs and money, put drugs back out on the street, sometimes even ride shotgun on large deals. Given the size of the NYPD and the latitude granted to ordinary patrol officers, the scandals have been relatively few and far between. But that wasn’t the point Adele was making. Precincts in New York are quite small: Bushwick, for example, home to the 83rd, covers only two square miles and has well over a hundred officers working the streets. That’s why it’s impossible for rogue cops to operate anonymously. Other cops have to know.
Detective Nydia Santiago worked in the precinct, day after day, week afte
r week, month after month. She had snitches of her own, naturally, snitches who’d undoubtedly repeated the same rumors Adele and I had so easily uncovered. I could see it in Nydia’s eyes, that moment of reflection as she searched for a way to avoid the unpleasant truth.
I took out the small note pad I keep in my jacket pocket, wrote down the number of the cell phone I’d purchased earlier in the day, then tore off the sheet and offered it to Nydia.
‘If you want to get in touch with me, it’d be best if you didn’t use my home number.’
Nydia stared into my eyes, her expression defiant. Then she snatched the sheet of paper from my hand and jammed it into her pocket. For a moment, I was certain that she’d speak, but she finally turned on her heel and marched back into Sparkle’s without saying a word.
THIRTY-TWO
I spotted the tail before I’d gone two blocks, not because I was especially alert, but because it’s impossible to conduct a successful tail in a silver Jaguar. Not unless you want to be seen.
‘We have company,’ I told Adele.
Adele glanced in the outside mirror on her side of the car, then looked at me. ‘Time to throw out the garbage.’
‘What?’
‘The garbage in the trunk, Corbin. Ellen Lodge’s garbage. If you leave it where it is, the car will reek of it by tomorrow morning. And, of course, while you’re disposing of the trash, you can take a closer look.’
We were on Wyckoff Avenue, a commercial street four lanes wide. I pulled to a stop, double-parking in front of an apartment building, then added the bags of trash in the Nissan’s trunk to a mound of similar bags stacked at the curb. We’d only taken them in order to shake up Ellen and I certainly didn’t intend to sort through the coffee grinds in my apartment. The Jaguar stopped about thirty yards away. Its headlights remained on and I could feel the bass notes projected by its many speakers rumbling in my chest.
‘Anything?’ Adele said when I got back into the car.
‘Two guys in the front for sure. I couldn’t see into the rear. The headlights were too bright.’
When in doubt, confront. I led the Jaguar across Flushing Avenue, to a deserted street lined with warehouses. Halfway down the block, I slammed on the brakes, then jerked the Nissan into reverse before stomping on the gas pedal.
Brakes and tires screaming, Jaguar and Nissan came to a halt within six feet of each other. Adele was the first one out the door. Without my noticing, she’d removed her arm from the sling and now held the. 40 caliber AMT in her right hand.
‘Police,’ she shouted. ‘Police, police.’
I came up on the driver’s side of the Jaguar, my immediate goal to prevent the situation from escalating. I needn’t have bothered. The two men inside were sitting absolutely still, their expressions at the same time insolent and bored. If they even heard the rap music pouring from the Jaguar’s high-end sound system, they gave no sign.
Adele tapped on the passenger’s window and made a little rolling motion with her left hand. Slowly, as though forcing his finger through increasing resistance, the man closest to her reached out to the controls on the door and let the window down. The music exploded onto the block, bouncing off the brick walls of the surrounding warehouses until it seemed to be coming from everywhere, so loud that I barely heard the trio of shots Adele fired into the dashboard, shutting down car and sound system both.
By the time the last echo died away, all eyes were on Adele and I felt the need to attract a bit of attention, just to remind the boys that I was still hanging around. So I kicked in the window on my side of the car, splattering the front seats and the men sitting on them with tiny shards of glass.
The man closest to me began to brush the glass off his lap. A Latino in his early twenties, he wore an Avirex leather jacket zipped to his throat. His soot-black hair was drawn into a pony tail that fell to his shoulder blades. The pony tail glistened as it moved, slivers of glass reflecting the pale amber light cast by a street lamp thirty feet away. ‘Wha’ the fuck you doin’? I ain’ committed no crime.’
‘How about driving while stupid?’ Adele suggested.
‘Yeah,’ I continued, ‘tailing somebody in a sixty-thousand-dollar car? You gotta be an idiot. Or did you want us to see you? Was that it? Were you disrespecting us? Because if I thought you were disrespecting us, I’d have to cuff you, take you into one of these alleys and teach you a lesson.’
‘We wasn’t doin’ nothin’,’ the man in the passenger seat declared. ‘We was just drivin’ around.’ He was the older of the two, wearing a down coat that reached his ankles and a knit cap that clung to the contours of his narrow head. A tattooed spider’s web ran from the corner of his left eye to his temple, leaving me to wonder if the spider was hiding in his hair.
We pulled both men out of the car, cuffed them with their hands behind their backs, finally conducted a quick search of their persons and of the vehicle, finding nothing of greater interest than a stack of porno magazines under the front seat.
‘Take a message back to Paco Luna,’ I said, as if the message sent by Adele wasn’t already sufficient. ‘Tell him it’s time to cut his losses. What’s happening here is between cops. If he gets in the middle, he’s gonna be crushed.’
Only a few days before, I’d have been able to bring these scumbags into the house, to isolate them, to demand answers. As it was, I had two choices. I could drag one or the other into that convenient alleyway I’d mentioned earlier, then convince him to cooperate. Or I could let them go.
But Adele was already removing her man’s cuffs and I quickly followed suit. In fact, neither man had committed any crime greater than contempt of cop, for which they’d been adequately punished. As I drove off, I watched them in the rear-view mirror. They were circling the crippled vehicle, their hands in their pockets. Wondering, perhaps, how they were going to explain why they hadn’t gone down with the car.
‘Tell me something, partner,’ I finally said as we drove back to Manhattan. ‘Do you think it’s possible that you overreacted? I mean by discharging your weapon into a defenseless automobile.’
‘No,’ she said after a moment, ‘I don’t. No more than I think either of those men would hesitate to kill me. Or you, for that matter.’
I drove down Flushing Avenue, then along Broadway under the El, and finally onto the Williamsburg Bridge. The moon was up and nearly full; I watched it flicker between the bridge’s intersecting girders, winking on and off, lurid as a Delancey Street whore. On the Manhattan side of the river, the midtown office towers, so enticing from Woodward Avenue in Ridgewood, projected raw power from every lit window. I’d made this ride a thousand times, at sunrise and sunset, in every season, in every weather. I’d watched the twin towers burn and collapse from the center of the bridge, attempting to clear the traffic impeding a river of fire trucks, ambulances and police vehicles hurrying to the scene.
‘Are you feeling better, Corbin?’
Adele’s eyes were shadowed now, her fatigue evident. Without thinking about it, I reached out to stroke the side of her face, the backs of my fingers trailing along her cheek just beyond the dressings. Her eyes widened momentarily, then she smiled one of those unreadable female smiles that men dread.
‘Are you thinking about Mel?’ I asked.
‘I am not, Corbin, thinking about Mel.’
‘Then what?’
Her face sobered and she turned to look out through the windshield. ‘I won’t live a trivial life, Corbin,’ she declared. ‘I won’t.’
Back in my apartment, I made a pot of coffee and got to work. I began with a detailed report of my interview with Ellen Lodge, which I emailed to Conrad Stehle. Then I opened my own emails, even the spam, but found nothing out of the ordinary. Vaguely disappointed, I shut the computer down, then punched Conrad’s number into my new cell phone. When he answered on the second ring, I gave him my new number, explaining that I no longer trusted any phones listed in my name. Then I got down to business.
‘Did you ge
t my emails?’ I asked.
‘Yes, I did, Harry. And I say to you that they are very interesting.’
In his late sixties, Conrad had come to the United States from Germany shortly after Hitler’s rise to power, his Marxist parents escaping hours ahead of a brown-shirt purge. Dieter and Loise Stehle never recovered from the experience, or so Conrad told me on more than one occasion. They pronounced themselves cowards for running; they convicted themselves of treason, of deserting the Fatherland in its moment of greatest peril. No matter that all of their comrades perished, and millions more besides. No matter that in saving themselves, they’d saved their two-year-old child. As far as Dieter and Loise were concerned, there were no mitigating circumstances. And no one left alive to forgive them.
The Stehles compensated, to a certain extent, by maintaining a strictly Germanic household. When Conrad walked into public school at age seven, he’d yet to speak a word of English. Sixty years later, he still retained a trace of his parent’s tongue, not only in the sound of the words as he pronounced them, but also in his slightly stilted phrasing. The diffident tone, on the other hand, was pure affectation.
‘Look, Conrad, anything happens to me, I want you to print two copies of my notes. Send one to a New York Times reporter named Albert Gruber. Send the other to Reverend Azuriah Donaldson at the Bedford Avenue Baptist Church. Then delete the original emails.’
After a slight hesitation, Conrad said, ‘Don’t allow your anger to cloud your judgment. Anger doesn’t work here, any more than it worked in the pool.’
‘I’m just being prudent.’
‘Your request is prudent, yes. But you are still very angry. I can hear it in your voice. Your chest is tight and your esophagus constricted. If you were competing now, you would give out in the first hundred meters.’
The advice was well meant, but off-target. Conrad wasn’t sensing anger, but keen anticipation. On one level, the trail we’d uncovered in Bushwick was no less than the stink of our enemy’s fear. The sort of odor that might be given off by a rabbit inches away from the oncoming talons of a hawk.
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