Silent City: A Claire Codella Mystery

by Carrie Smith

  A text message came back. In a meeting. Call you in an hour.

  Barton texted again. Leave the meeting. Call me NOW.

  What is it?

  She couldn’t risk transmitting more information. She was no fool. How many careers had been ruined by indiscreet texts, e-mails, and tweets? She waited. Three minutes later her cell rang. “What’s up?” The voice sounded concerned.

  “Are you alone?”

  “Yes. What is it?”

  “You’re not going to believe it.”

  “Tell me,” he said.

  “Hector Sanchez is dead.”

  He didn’t say a word, but she could hear the silent smile spread across his face on the other end of the line, and she smiled too. “I’ll call you back as soon as I can,” he said.

  Chapter 11

  Codella’s breath fogged the mid-November air as she stood on the school steps and speed-dialed Vic Portino.

  “You’re back. I didn’t know you were back, Detective,” he said. “How does it feel?”

  “No complaints yet, Vic.”

  “And already they send you back to us. Ironic, huh?”

  “I suppose you could say so.” She remembered McGowan’s call this morning. It’s your old stomping ground, Codella. He could have sent any Manhattan North detective to that crime scene. Sending her wasn’t just ironic. It was a loud and clear message. Go back where you came from. “Did you get the list I e-mailed you?”

  “Yeah. I got it right here.”

  “Start with the teachers and staff. Run as many through as you can. Flag anyone with a record, anything that makes you suspicious.”

  “It’s a pretty long list.”

  “I know. Just do what you can while we get a team assembled. We need something to go on.”

  She ended the call, turned up her collar, and walked toward her car. But she did have one thing to go on. Apparently, Sanchez had left the school yesterday to visit a student in one of the most dangerous housing projects in West Harlem. She had to trace his steps, and she wasn’t going to do it alone.

  When she pulled up to Sanchez’s building, she saw him. He was standing on the front steps next to a uniformed officer guarding the taped-off entrance to the building. She stared at his curly blond hair and his pouty lips around a cigarette, and her emotions fluctuated like the weather at the confluence of opposing fronts.

  She got out and slammed her door and watched him notice her. He flicked his cigarette to the ground. For several seconds, neither one of them moved. Then he slowly approached her. He stopped three feet away, and his watery blue eyes swept over her body from head to toe. Surface capillaries spread out like spider webs across the sclera of his eyes.

  He’d had a late night, she thought, and too much to drink—but didn’t he always have too much to drink? And then she remembered the last time they’d stood alone together, outside the St. James bar, when he had pulled her against him and held her head between two hands and looked into her eyes as if he’d wanted to absorb her whole being into his. He had whispered her name over and over again. He’d said, “You feel it, too. Don’t you?” He never said what it was, but she knew. And then he had clumsily kissed her. His lips had tasted like vodka and beer nuts. She had tried to push him away.

  “What the fuck are you doing? You’re drunk, Brian. Go have some coffee. You have absolutely no idea what I feel,” she had said.

  She’d had almost a year now to think about his words and to scrape past her denial and admit that he had known what she was feeling. She had wanted to wrap her arms around him that night as much as he’d wanted her to. In the intervening months, she had tried to explain away her desire. Yes, she had felt something that night, but only because—unbeknownst to her—the lymphoma had invaded her body and started to make her unwell, and everyone feels vulnerable and needy when they’re unwell. In the end, however, she had admitted to herself that her feelings for Brian had taken root long before the lymphoma. He had only needed a few too many drinks to be honest about his feelings; she had needed cancer to be honest about hers.

  She studied him now. He smiled warily. They were like two animals circling each other, she thought. She wanted to say, I missed you. Then she wanted to ask, Why didn’t you come and see me? And finally she let her anger take over and she wanted to say, Fuck you. Why are you here?

  He should have been with her ten months ago when her test results had come back and she had had to meet the oncologist—Dr. Abrams—for the first time. The day before that appointment, her neighbor Jean had paid her a visit. Jean’s apartment shared a wall with Codella’s living room, and their front doors were right next to each other on the third floor. Jean and Codella had become acquainted because they saw each other so often: coming and going, at the garbage bins near the service elevator, or emerging simultaneously to retrieve their New York Times early in the morning after they heard the familiar plop when the delivery person flung it toward their doors.

  Jean was a freelance journalist and had documented her own breast cancer story in an article for New York magazine a few years earlier. Now she wrote a syndicated women’s health column. “Who’s going with you tomorrow?” she had asked with a forthrightness Codella wasn’t used to hearing from others since she was usually the one who demanded the information.

  “No one.” Codella had shrugged.

  “No one?”

  “It’s fine. I don’t need anyone.”

  “Yes, you do,” Jean had insisted. “You can’t be alone at that appointment. I’ll go with you.”

  Codella had protested, but her protests hadn’t been all that strenuous. She had been terrified, she realized now, although she was in denial. Most single people, it occurred to her much later, would have called their mothers to come and be with them at a crisis moment like that. She had thought several times about her mother in the days leading up to the appointment, days when she knew something was terribly wrong with her but didn’t yet know just how wrong. In those prediagnosis days when she and Brian were not speaking, she had been more tempted than ever to seek her mother’s comfort and protection. In the end, however, she had clung to reality and to her personal code of ethics: her mother had never been protective, and you didn’t call on someone after twenty years of self-imposed silence only because you didn’t have anyone else to lean on. Codella had no siblings to help her either—at least none that she knew about, though it was quite conceivable her father had contributed countless children to the population of Providence, Rhode Island, considering his prolific extramarital adventures.

  As a police detective, she was trained to ask questions, listen to people, and evaluate their responses. But in the oncologist’s office, she had not managed to apply these critical skills of her trade at all. She had absorbed only intermittent words, as if she were someone in a foreign country trying to understand a language she had studied only briefly. Aggressive non-Hodgkin’s B-cell lymphoma, she had heard. Hyper-CVAD, she had heard. Mostly, she had been aware of an intense ringing between her eardrums, as if a roadside bomb had just detonated at close range.

  Jean had asked most of the questions in her clear, calm voice. “Tell us about hyper-CVAD.”

  “It’s an aggressive chemotherapy treatment administered incrementally over several days.”

  “So Claire will be staying in the hospital during the chemotherapy?”

  “Yes. These are highly toxic dosages, and patients need to be monitored continually for adverse reactions.”

  “How long are the treatments?”

  “Four to five days,” he said.

  “And how many treatments is Claire likely to need?”

  “The typical protocol is to start with six rounds, alternating between the A-cycle drugs and the B-cycle drugs. That is going to be my recommendation here.”

  “Can she work during the treatments?”

  He had smiled slightly. Maybe, she realized now, he had actually been wincing. “Most people aren’t up to that.”

  “W
hen will her treatments begin?”

  “I’d like to admit her the day after tomorrow.”

  “So soon?” These were the first words Codella had uttered herself.

  Abrams had looked at her directly. “You have a fast proliferating B-cell lymphoma. It could be a form called Burkitt’s, which is very rare in this country. We’re still doing additional stains on the tissue samples to confirm that. Aggressive B-cell lymphomas move fast, so we need to hit yours very hard and very quickly. The good news,” he smiled in a gentle way that Codella would come to find reassuring, “is that because these cells are multiplying so quickly, they are less stable than other cancer cells. They can actually respond very well to the drugs. Our job is to level everything we can at them and knock them out thoroughly right away. That’s our best chance of curing you.”

  “So this is curable?” Jean had asked the question Codella was too afraid to ask.

  “A complete cure is our goal,” Abrams had said definitively but without a promise. And Codella had held onto that. She had not used her investigative skills to find out more about Burkitt’s lymphoma. She knew instinctively that she would not like or be reassured by anything she read. She knew Jean would be scouring the Internet in the privacy of her apartment next door, and she told Jean not to share what she learned. It was better not to know.

  She had expected Brian to visit her as soon as he’d learned she was in the hospital. She had imagined him visiting countless times during the first few chemo treatments. In her fantasies, he entered her room silently and curled up beside her on the bed, careful not to get tangled up in her chemo lines. He stroked her head and whispered, “Don’t worry. We’ll get through this together.” But he hadn’t come. He hadn’t helped her. Jean had been the one at her side, not her friend and partner of seven years, not the man who supposedly loved her, and she wasn’t going to forgive him for that. She looked at him now. “You haven’t changed a bit.”

  “You have,” he answered, but there was no malice in his tone. “You look—” He hesitated. “Good. Healthy. Maybe a little too thin.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Checking in with Muñoz.”

  “He doesn’t need your help. He knows what to do.”

  Haggerty smiled. “How are you feeling?”

  “Better than you probably wish I were.” The words, like an impulsive slap, were delivered before she could stop them.

  “That’s not true,” he protested, and his gentle, contrite tone made her feel guilty for her sarcasm. But why should she feel guilty?

  “Excuse me.” She stepped around him quickly and entered the building, careful not to land in the same sticky spot as earlier this morning. She ignored the tightness in her stomach as she dialed Muñoz. “Where are you?”

  “Seventh floor.”

  “Get down here as soon as you can.”

  When he appeared in the lobby, she asked, “When did Detective Haggerty get here?”

  “About an hour ago.”

  She stopped short of saying, You should have called me. “Follow me.” She led him out of the building, down the stairs, to the car.

  Haggerty followed them. “Where are you taking Muñoz?”

  “I need some backup. It’s urgent.”

  “Let me have your back. Muñoz can keep going here.”

  She hesitated. Jackie Robinson Village wasn’t the kind place you went to without a good backup. Anything could happen in a place like that. She and Brian had been there once to track down a witness who didn’t want to be tracked down, and when the elevator doors had opened, five or six gang members had greeted them. Codella had pressed the close button immediately, but their welcoming party was already holding open the doors.

  Brian had pulled out his service revolver and aimed it squarely at the closest face. “I’m only going to say this once. Back off right now. I’ll give you to five to let go of the door.” They didn’t let go of the doors until the count of four, and in those seconds, Brian had counted calmly and slowly and his steady aim had not wavered. That was the kind of backup you needed, and she had no idea what Eduardo Muñoz was capable of. She looked at his towering figure. She was going to take a chance. “Get in,” she told him.

  Muñoz folded his large body into the front passenger seat while Haggerty stared at her. “Claire.”

  She remembered the last time he’d said her name, in that hoarse, drunk whisper. She stiffened. “Call me if you get something relevant here.” And not before, she wanted to add.

  She opened her car door, climbed into the driver’s seat, and started the engine. She resisted the overwhelming impulse to punch the steering wheel. She wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of seeing that he could unnerve her. “We’re taking a ride,” she told Muñoz calmly as she pulled out.

  “Where to?”

  “I’ll ask the questions for now. What did you find out in there?”

  “The building’s one of those reclaimed city properties where you get low-interest mortgages, but you can’t resell at market value. There are a hundred and twelve units.”

  “You talk to any neighbors? They know anything?”

  “The guy on his floor—the one who called about his barking dog this morning—didn’t get home until after ten last night, and the dog was barking like crazy even then.”

  “So Sanchez was probably already dead. I’ve been wondering about that dog. Why didn’t the murderer just kill it too? Why leave it there to howl and draw attention? Anyone see him come home last night?”

  “Not that I spoke to, but his neighbor one flight up—Cameron Swain—knew him pretty well. She had the keys to his apartment. She walks his dog while he’s at work. She saw him yesterday a few minutes after five.”

  Codella turned. “In his apartment?”

  Muñoz nodded.

  “What was he wearing?”

  “The jeans and T-shirt. Not the suit.”

  “Interesting. What did they talk about?”

  “Dog treats.”

  “Dog treats? That’s it?”

  “People with dogs have conversations like that,” he said.

  “You’re into dogs?”

  “Me? Not really. I could be, I suppose.”

  “I like dogs, but I don’t like to think of a dog cooped up in my one bedroom. Where was this neighbor last night?”

  “Out with friends.”

  “What else?”

  “His laptop was still in its case on the vestibule floor.” He paused. “I’m sorry I didn’t call to tell you Detective Haggerty had arrived. I guess I should have.”

  “Forget it.” She pressed the accelerator harder, and they flew up Amsterdam through green light after green light until the fourteen-story redbrick towers of Jackie Robinson Village loomed in front of them and the bittersweet taste of Haggerty in her mouth faded away.

  “That’s where we’re going?” Muñoz shook his head with a wry grin that she couldn’t decipher.

  “You’ve been here before?”

  “Yeah, I’ve been here. I was a narc, remember?”

  The public housing project was a sprawling eyesore that dominated three city blocks and provided shelter to chronic welfare recipients, violent felons on parole, the formerly homeless, and the drug and alcohol dependent. Ordinary citizens of Manhattan had the good sense to stay clear. Even the NYPD preferred to circle the perimeter from the safety of their blue-and-white patrol cars.

  Codella swerved into the complex. “Sanchez left school yesterday at three thirty. His assistant principal, Marva Thomas, said he was coming here to make a home visit to a student who’s missed a lot of school. I need to know who he talked to, what he said, when he left, and where he went from here. We’ve got to trace his steps from the time he left that school until he was killed. That’s why we’re here.” She pulled into a handicap space. “And you’re my bodyguard,” she added with a smile.

  They walked to tower nine and stepped into an ancient elevator. The lighting was dim. The wal
ls were covered in graffiti. The black buttons were worn from decades of repeated use. The car jerked and the cables above made strange squeaking noises as they slowly ascended. Codella couldn’t help but consider how ironic it would be if she’d survived six brutal rounds of chemo and two episodes of C. diff only to plummet to her death as soon as she’d reclaimed her life.

  Finally the doors opened and they stepped onto the ninth floor. Overamplified bass from powerful speakers reverberated from somewhere. She stared down the long, narrow corridor toward an imaginary vanishing point. Most of the frosted glass ceiling lamps had long ago been broken, leaving bare bulbs to cast a harsh, uneven light. A half-empty beer bottle, cigarette pack, and lighter lay on the floor just to the left of the elevator.

  Muñoz pointed to them. “Looks like a sentry’s left his post.”

  Two feet from the bottle, an inch-long cockroach lay on its back. Its legs were jerking in futile motions. “Come on,” she said, “let’s do this and get the hell out of here.”

  Apartment 905 was halfway down the hall. Codella was about to knock when Muñoz caught her arm. “Who we looking for here?”

  “Shalon Williams and her daughter Vondra.”

  “Let me do this.” He pushed her back from the door and knocked gently. “You in there?” he said with his face right up to the doorframe. “Hey, baby, you in there?” He knocked again. “Hurry up! Lemme in.”

  The deadbolt turned. The door opened five inches, and black eyes peered up at Muñoz. A male voice demanded, “Who the fuck are you?”

  “Who the fuck are you? I be lookin’ for Shalon.”

  “She be somewhere else right now.”

  “Open up, bro. I don’t wanna advertise myself to the world.”

  “I got no time for you.” Black Eyes tried to close the door.

  “Wait!” Muñoz held the door open.

  “You a copper?” said Black Eyes.

  Muñoz ignored the question. “What’s that crazy smell, bro? You cookin’ in there?”