Silent City: A Claire Codella Mystery

by Carrie Smith

  If you’re pushing a classmate into a toilet bowl at the age of 12, just imagine what you’ll be doing when you’re 18.

  No shit, Dr. Freud!!

  She turned to Muñoz. “Interesting. He comes home, peels down to his boxers, and keeps up with the school message boards.”

  “You think this Helen C. has something to do with his murder?”

  “Too early to tell. Let’s not skip ahead. Let’s get all the details first.” She turned to Banks. “This computer goes to the precinct.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Any evidence the murderer stripped the victim?”

  Banks shook his head. “There’s a suit jacket neatly draped on a chair by his bed, matching pants on a hanger on the closet door, and a pair of jeans and a T-shirt hanging on the handlebars of his spin bike. I’d say he undressed himself.”

  “But was he wearing the suit or the jeans and T-shirt?”

  Banks shrugged. “The suit, I’m guessing. The jeans could have been there for days—like mine always are.”

  “And you think he undressed himself why? Because murderers don’t know how to drape jackets neatly? If the victim went to the trouble of hanging his pants on a hanger, why didn’t he go the extra distance and put the hanger in the closet?”

  Banks shrugged. “You’re the genius, not me.”

  She turned back to Muñoz. “Are you a boxers or briefs guy?”

  Muñoz’s eyes got wide.

  Banks snickered. “Uh-oh. The cougar’s been caged up too long.”

  She rolled her eyes.

  Muñoz grinned with impressively white teeth. “Boxers,” he said. “Why?”

  “And you live alone?”

  “Hear that guys? She’s looking for some action,” said Banks.

  She flipped him a lethargic bird and turned to Muñoz. “How often you hang out in your boxers?”

  He shrugged. “Pretty often. My apartment gets hot. Like this one.”

  “And if someone rang your bell, you’d open the door in your boxers?”

  “Depends who was at my door.”

  “Let’s say it’s a guy you know.”

  “Sure.”

  “A guy you don’t know?”

  “Probably.”

  “A woman?”

  He considered. “I’d probably throw on pants.”

  “Not me,” said Banks.

  She turned to him. “Was the entry forced?”

  “Nope.”

  Her eyes shifted to the flickering flat-screen, which was tuned to MSNBC. If Banks was right about Sanchez undressing himself, then the murdered principal had been sitting here in his boxers, and at some point his doorbell must have rung or someone had knocked and maybe that was when he’d muted the TV, set his laptop on the hassock for the last time in his life, and opened the door. But who was at that door?

  Muñoz moved toward the windows and stooped to examine something on the bottom shelf of an end table. “Check this out, Detective Codella.”

  She stepped over. With her gloved hands, she picked up a New York Times Magazine. “Is This Man the Savior of PS 777?” asked the headline from last June, and below that question was a photo of Sanchez standing on the front steps of a school, arms crossed over a suit jacket, black eyes facing the camera.

  “Well, well, well. We’ve got ourselves a celebrity.” She opened to the five-month-old article.

  It’s a typical Monday morning at PS 777 on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. I’m five minutes early, and principal Hector Sanchez is still outside greeting children as they climb the front steps of the school. Students line up patiently to shake hands with the man who has made it clear they are his number one priority. Welcoming children into the building is Sanchez’s favorite part of the day. “You look into those eyes,” he tells me, “and you still see excitement. The desire to learn hasn’t been extinguished yet. And I don’t want to let them down.”

  Fear of letting the children down is what keeps Sanchez up at night, and it’s what drives him all day as he applies for grants, makes daily classroom visits to monitor the quality of instruction, and enforces new codes of behavior intended to build respect among students and end misconduct.

  Five months ago, Sanchez inherited a school in crisis. And like any leader promoted on a battlefield, he has improvised. “When I got here,” he tells me as we tour the now clean, well-lighted campus that serves 608 students in kindergarten through grade 5, “the bathrooms reeked. The halls were dark. The PA system was broken. How can you expect good behavior and high achievement in a place like that? The first thing we did was paint and clean and screw in light bulbs.”

  The new principal got a slap on the wrist for his trouble—he didn’t fill out the required paperwork and use custodial union labor (which might have delayed the paint job and the light bulbs for months). Instead, he charged the paint on his credit card, picked up a paintbrush, and enlisted willing parents and children to help. Needless to say, this maverick has his critics within the Department of Education, but the parents of PS 777 are solidly in his corner. In a school where more than 80 percent of third graders have failed the state reading and math assessments for five consecutive years, they believe Hector Sanchez is the school’s best and last hope. But does he face an impossible challenge?

  She returned the magazine to the shelf. “E-mail me a copy of that article, Muñoz.”

  Muñoz nodded. “What do you make of it?”

  “He was a savior and now he’s been crucified. Hard to miss the connection. Keep looking around, but put some gloves on first.”

  Beside the end table was a gold couch with crimson throw pillows. The wall above the couch was bare. “Do we know how long this guy was living here?” she asked no one in particular.

  “According to the super, about two years,” said Officer O’Donnell at the door.

  “Own or rent?”

  “It’s a co-op building.”

  “Anybody find his cell phone?”

  “No,” said a CSU investigator, “but there’s an iPhone charger on the kitchen counter.”

  “I want that phone. Find me that phone. It goes to the precinct along with the computer, any bills, and that New York magazine.”

  Her eyes settled on a framed photograph on the bookshelf. She moved closer, and the image surprised her. She’d seen it many times before, on a billboard mounted on the side of the bus stop shelter at West Eighty-Eighth Street and Broadway.

  Two Caucasian women and their young African American daughter smiled into the camera above a caption that read, We’re a Proud PS 777 Family. One of the women had neck-length, blond-streaked hair; high cheekbones; brilliant green eyes; a silky complexion; and sumptuous lips. “Look familiar?” she asked Muñoz.

  “Isn’t she that actress?”

  “That’s right. Dana Drew. She’s on Broadway right now. You ever see her on those billboards all over the Upper West Side?”

  “I live in Chelsea. I see them there, too.”

  Banks came over. “Lemme see. She was hot in Time’s Up! Did you see that?”

  “She’s a lesbian,” said one of his team.

  “Yeah, a really hot lesbian,” said Banks.

  Codella tuned out the predictable conversation that followed as she studied the photograph. The woman beside Drew could not have looked more different from the actress. Her brown hair was as short as Codella’s postchemo hair. Her expensive-looking button-down shirt could have belonged to a male hedge fund manager dressed for a night out in Tribeca. Whenever Codella passed that billboard, it was difficult not to wonder how the chemistry between the beautiful actress and her stylishly butch partner played out in private. What, she wondered now, was the photograph doing here? “This goes into evidence,” she told Banks.

  Fifteen minutes later, Rudolph Gambarin stepped through the door in a full Tyvek coverall and signed O’Donnell’s clipboard. “You’re back,” he observed matter-of-factly when Codella greeted him.

  “I’m back.”

&nbs
p; “I wasn’t sure you would be.”

  “No?”

  “I looked up your lymphoma. Burkitt’s. B-cell. Extremely aggressive.” It was the kind of tactlessly truthful statement few people would say to a cancer survivor, but Codella didn’t take offense. She had long ago concluded that Gambarin was a very high-functioning member of the Autism Spectrum Club. The need for tact never occurred to him, which made it fortunate that most of his so-called patients were dead.

  “Lucky for me the more aggressive the lymphoma, the more responsive it is to chemo.” She smiled blandly, but behind the smile and the casual answer was a tsunami of bad memories. She remembered the day last April when she had checked into the hospital for her first treatment. She had waited almost two hours in admissions for her bed to become available. When she finally got upstairs, she had quickly learned that her roommate was an anorexic woman of about fifty.

  The roommate had no visitors. Instead, she used her call button frequently to summon nurses’ aides, nurses, and doctors using a variety of pretexts like the need for a blanket, a question about her medications, or a complaint about the treatment she had received from a different aide, nurse, technician, or doctor. She spoke to each caregiver in a high, quavering child’s voice that had gotten under Codella’s skin even before she was hooked to her first IV bag. Codella had watched the chemotherapy drugs in that first bag drip down in evenly spaced intervals, slowly slide through the clear plastic tube, and enter her body to do their work while her fifty-year-old regressed anorexic roommate went on and on like a helpless child to whomever would listen.

  Codella had expected the chemo drugs to make her nauseous right away—everyone knew that chemotherapy made you throw up—but she hadn’t felt queasy at all that first night, which gave her a false sense of optimism. She must be stronger than other cancer patients, she had naïvely concluded, and her optimism had grown as each bag was finished and each new bag was hung from her chemo pole and hooked to her newly installed port.

  After five days of the twenty-four-hour drip, she walked out of the hospital, rode home with her neighbor Jean, and felt relatively normal for two more days—until her white blood count crashed to, as her doctor put it, “impressively low single digits,” and she spiked a one hundred and two fever and ended up back in the emergency room. And then she began to learn what “aggressive” chemo was all about.

  “CODOX-M/IVAC regimen?” Gambarin was asking now.

  “Hyper-CVAD. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.” Well, almost anyone, she amended, considering that repeated rounds of multiagent chemotherapy might be a fitting form of punishment for brutal killers of women and children.

  Gambarin nodded. “What have we got here?”

  “No blood. No weapon. No obvious contusions. No signs of a struggle. Just a curious New Testament tableau.” She gestured toward their Latino Jesus on the carpet.

  Gambarin pulled on nitrile gloves, moved closer to the body, and stooped. He didn’t speak or move for several seconds. Then he finally announced, “Judging from the position of his head, I’d say his neck was broken.” He pointed. “Third or fourth cervical vertebrae, I’m guessing. In which case, he probably died of asphyxiation, but I’ll have to confirm that.” He rose. He was thin and his knees were agile for a man in his midfifties. “I’ll be able to give you more information tomorrow. I’ll call you when I have something.”

  With that, he turned his full attention to his “patient,” clearly dismissing her.

  Codella stepped past O’Donnell into the fourth-floor lobby, ducked into the fire stairwell, and speed-dialed the head of her old department, Captain Matthew Reilly of the 171st Precinct.

  “Thanks for getting there so soon, Claire,” he said.

  “Who’s the new guy?” she asked.

  “Muñoz? He’s not really ready to catch a homicide, but Schugren and Blackstone were at a break-in and Murphy has a hit and run on West End and Ninety-Sixth. Fucking bad corner. Nothing they do on that corner makes it better. Portino wasn’t here yet. It’s been a helluva twenty-four hours. Muñoz was all I had.”

  What about Brian, she wanted to ask. Where was he? In the not so distant past, Brian Haggerty was the one Reilly would usually call on a case like this if she were not available. He was the best detective Reilly had now that she had moved to Homicide. But she stopped herself from asking. What did she care anymore? Better for her that he wasn’t here.

  Reilly seemed to read her mind. “Haggerty’s got a dead baby. He’s chasing down the mother’s boyfriend.”

  “Jesus.”

  “So I had to call McGowan, get him to loan you back.”

  “Don’t worry. Muñoz will be fine.” She stared through the open apartment door at the victim’s ribcage where she had observed dark curls of hair just below his navel. “But this situation is anything but fine,” she told her former commander. “Somebody decided to make a public school principal look like Jesus on the cross.”

  “Shit. What do you make of it?”

  “I don’t know yet. I’ll keep you posted. For now, send more uniforms to help Muñoz with the canvass. I’m going over to the school. Given what’s here, I think we should investigate on both fronts. We’ll need a lot of background checks, and I think we should put some low-profile security in place at the school—just on the off chance we’ve got a crazy teacher over there.” She didn’t mention Sandy Hook, the school in Newtown, Connecticut, where a single gunman with a thirty-round magazine had mowed down twenty children and six teachers. She didn’t have to. Now everyone thought about Sandy Hook when schoolchildren were involved.

  Reilly said, “I’ll send two officers, more if I can spare them. Portino can be your contact here. Ragavan will meet you at the school. He’s stepped up a lot, you know. You’d be proud of how he’s coming along since you left.”

  “Ragavan’s perfect,” she said. Anyone but Brian was perfect, she told herself, and now she recognized the futile overcompensation in her thoughts. She did want to see him. She wanted to hear his voice. She could see him now in her head passing her a Starbucks cup and saying, “Your daily latté, Detective.” Despite everything that had happened and although she wasn’t happy to admit it, the simple truth was that she missed him. “I’ll be in touch,” she told Reilly and hung up.

  When she reentered the apartment, Gambarin was measuring the victim’s core temperature. She waved Muñoz into the lobby. “You ever run a canvass, Detective?”

  “Sure.” He smiled. “In Narc you’re always looking for someone.”

  “Okay, but you never ran one for me, so let’s get a few things straight. I don’t tolerate sloppiness. I don’t leave stones unturned. Your team does it by the book. They record everything. You aren’t done until they’ve spoken to every human being in this building. And everything gets documented. Names, addresses, contact information. I want to know where they were, who they were with, and exactly who they saw come and go between yesterday afternoon and this morning. And I want a phone call the minute you find something that could possibly help us. Your team will be here soon. Spell out your expectations and make sure they’re addressed, because I’m holding you completely responsible for what happens here. Understood?”

  “Perfectly,” he said.

  “Good.”

  They went downstairs and traded cell numbers.

  Chapter 2

  Muñoz watched Codella head toward Frederick Douglass Boulevard. Then he sat on the front steps of Sanchez’s apartment to wait for his canvass team, closed his eyes, and expelled a long sigh of relief. Somehow the morning had not turned out as awful as he had expected. No one had called him New Dick this morning.

  “New Dick” was the nickname Detective Blackstone had christened him with four days ago. For three mornings in a row, Blackstone had greeted him with “Hey, New Dick” or “Look, New Dick’s here” in front of the other detectives. Muñoz had hoped the nickname would eventually be forgotten, and when Blackstone had patted his back yesterday afternoon and said,
“Have a drink with us, Muñoz,” he had assumed it was finally a relic of the past.

  “Sure, why not,” he had said, even though it meant delaying his other plans.

  At six thirty, he had pulled open the front door of the bar, inhaled the familiar odor of stale alcohol, and waited for his eyes to adjust. He had frequented more than his share of dark neighborhood bars, but neighborhood bars in Chelsea were very different from the St. James Pub. Here he felt no welcoming, interested stares. He felt no sense of relief. Why had he agreed to this? was his first thought as the door had closed behind him.

  Muñoz hadn’t seen the ambush coming until he heard Blackstone’s bombastic voice bellow, “New Dick!” above the music, the five sports channels on flat-screens, and the chatter of patrons well on their way to weeknight inebriation.

  In a schoolyard, Muñoz realized now, Blackstone would have been the boy with social aggression issues. In a street gang, he would have been the most violent gang leader. In a wolf pack, he would be constantly fighting to maintain the role of alpha male. He was a bully, and if you tried to fight a bully, you just gave him the satisfaction of knowing he’d gotten under your skin. If you pretended you didn’t care what your bully said, there was no guarantee he’d cease and desist either. Aggressors could smell fear and anxiety in their prey.

  Blackstone and his posse—Murphy, Schugren, Aceveda—were sitting at a table across from the bar. Muñoz took the empty chair next to Blackstone who immediately slapped his back and said, “What’ll it be?”

  “Heineken.”

  Blackstone made a dramatic show of snapping his finger at the bartender. Then he leaned closer to Muñoz and said, “So what do you think of our tame little precinct?”

  “It’s great.”

  “Better than cruising crack houses?”

  The odd choice of words caused Muñoz to look up. He met Blackstone’s eyes and the other detective didn’t look away, so he did.

  Then Blackstone asked, “Was there a lot of action for you in those crack houses?” and Muñoz thought he saw him wink at the other cops.