I don’t like to think of myself as a fuck-up, a label applied to me often enough in the past. But this was beyond fuck-up. This was actually subhuman.
‘You were very good in there,’ Adele continued. ‘The widow didn’t know whether she was coming or going.’
I responded by opening the trunk of the Caprice and searching through our evidence kit until I found a handful of sterile gauze pads. Then I tossed the keys to Adele.
‘If I don’t dry these shoes,’ I explained, ‘I’m gonna end up throwin’ ’em away.’
Though it took her a moment to shift gears, Adele didn’t argue. She slid behind the wheel, then unlocked the passenger’s door. Inside, I wasted no time. I took off my shoes and began to work the gauze into the leather. For all my good intentions, I succeeded only in transferring brown polish from the leather to the gauze pads to my fingers. The shoes remained as damp as ever, as did my socks and feet.
I was still holding my shoes a few minutes later when the cell phone in my jacket pocket began to ring.
‘Do you want me to get that?’ Adele asked.
Ignoring my partner’s sarcasm, I jammed my damp feet into my damp shoes and answered.
‘Corbin here.’
They’re gonna roll your boy tonight, Harry. Unless you find him first.
The phone went dead while I was still fumbling for a response. I put it back in my pocket, then repeated the message to Adele, doing my best to imitate my anonymous informant’s gravelly whisper.
‘The plot thickens, partner,’ she said. ‘Must be all that excrement pouring off the fan blades.’
It was still snowing hard enough to dot the windshield between swings of the wipers. Ahead of us, the rear end of a mini-van swung out as the vehicle tried to negotiate a right turn on the hard-packed snow. We were headed for the adjoining precinct, little more than a mile away, which was fortunate. City-wide, traffic would be a nightmare.
Adele finally broke the silence. ‘Can we assume,’ she asked, ‘that the “boy” we need to find is DuWayne Spott?’
I shoved my feet under the heater, consigning my loafers to their fate. Somehow, dry was looking better and better. ‘Either that or some devious miscreant wants to throw us off the track. But here’s a problem we need to deal with right now. Sarney told us to go ahead with the interview, but not to get in Russo’s face. What exactly did he mean by that?’
‘What do you think he meant?’
I replied without hesitation. ‘You ask a question. You accept the answer that you’re given.’
‘Corbin, are you suggesting that I’m argumentative?’
‘Perish the thought, partner.’
We met Dante Russo in the office assigned to the precinct’s Community Affairs Officer. Russo was alone and sitting behind a desk near the center of the room when we arrived. He motioned us to a pair of small armchairs, explaining that the CAO, Justin Moore, was over at Bushwick High School, delivering an anti-drug lecture to the freshman class.
‘Ya know what I’m sayin’, right? This is your brain. This is your brain on drugs. Meanwhile, the little humps know more about dope than he’ll ever know.’
As I sat down, I slid my chair toward the end of the desk, separating myself from Adele. The first thing I noticed, before Adele fired off a single question, was that Russo’s warm and friendly voice didn’t match his expression. He sat with his jaw thrust forward, staring down at us along the length of his long nose. The net effect was disdain, an impression reinforced by his full lips which were noticeably compressed.
‘So,’ he said, ‘what can I do ya for?’
Adele crossed her legs, attracting his rapt attention. ‘I don’t know if you’re aware of it,’ she told him, ‘but Clarence Spott’s case file is missing.’
Russo took a second to answer. ‘No, I wasn’t.’
‘Eventually, of course, we’ll get a copy from the DA, but for right now, we’re kind of dancing in the dark.’
‘What can I do to help?’
‘Well, why don’t you run down the events leading to Spott’s arrest?’
We got the official version, of that I was certain, the one that held Dante Russo blameless. Clarence Spott was a known drug dealer whose photo had been on display in the muster room for weeks. Russo had recognized him, stopped his car, finally ordered him to get out. Then, in quick succession, Spott called Lodge a pig, Lodge slapped Spott, Spott punched Lodge, Lodge reacted predictably.
‘I eventually managed to pull him off, but Dave’s a big guy and-’
‘Was,’ Adele corrected.
‘Was?’
‘Dave was a big guy. Now he’s dead.’
Russo’s chin rose a millimeter even as his tone became more confidential. ‘Dave was mostly OK when he was sober. But he couldn’t lay off the bottle, not for more than a couple of days. I tried to convince him to check into rehab, but askin’ for help wasn’t his style.’ When Russo paused, Adele simply nodded for him to continue. ‘Anyway, after I got my partner under control, we transported Spott to the house. Lieutenant Whitlock — he was the desk officer — told us to dump him in a cell, which we did. I was out front, talkin’ to Whitlock about whether we should get medical attention for the prisoner, when I found out he was dead. The last I saw of Dave, he was in the cell area with an officer named Szarek.’
‘The Broom.’
‘Yeah, the Broom.’
‘He’s dead, too.’
Russo shrugged. ‘I heard he ate his gun.’
‘Then you heard wrong.’ Adele put her forefinger to her temple and mimed pulling a trigger. ‘He put one in the side of his head.’
Adele was working herself up. That much was obvious. What was equally obvious was that she wasn’t looking at the situation from her subject’s point of view. Russo was holding his nose so high that he might have been sniffing for the carcass of a dead rat. But it was the disconnect between Russo’s tone and his expression that interested me most. The differences were so pronounced that he might have been two people. Not that I felt he was the victim of some obscure personality disorder. Russo’s mastery of the vocal part of his act was impressive — his voice remained honey-smooth and he would not be flustered — but he still needed work on the visual part. He was giving his hand away.
By then, I was sure that Russo was lying, and not without reason. The way he was telling the story, he’d immediately intervened on Spott’s behalf. That wasn’t true. Spott’s extensive injuries had been inflicted in the course of a prolonged beating. More than likely, he and Lodge had carted Spott off to some quiet corner of the precinct where David Lodge had administered a serious tune-up while his partner watched out for the sergeant.
Russo, of course, was in no position to admit to any of the above. He’d escaped punishment because the story he offered the bosses suited their interests, the same story he now offered to Detectives Corbin and Bentibi.
‘Ate his gun,’ Russo told my partner, ‘is just a figure of speech. Szarek and I were never friends.’ Russo’s lips expanded into a smile that didn’t come within a shouting distance of his eyes. ‘Anything else?’
‘Just a couple of items. You told me that you pulled Spott to the curb around three-thirty in the morning.’
‘That’s right.’
‘And he was the only one in the car?’
‘Right again.’
‘So, I was wondering what happened to the car? Did you search it?’
‘Gimme a break. My partner was bleeding, the prisoner was bleeding. No way did I have time to worry about Spott’s car.’
‘But you notified the sergeant that you were transporting a prisoner to the house, right?’
Russo shook his head. ‘What with all the blood, I thought my best move was to get inside and let the desk officer sweat the details.’