After a choppy half-hour, the kid took off, leaving me alone with thoughts I was unable to arrange in a sequence that reached any good end. Maybe the rumors would die away. Maybe Adele would back off. Maybe we’d resume our regular duties. But the bitterness would remain, of that I was certain. David Lodge would become the part of my career I avoided thinking about.
And I knew I could take his killers down. I had no doubt whatever. The bad guys’ blitzkrieg strategy was driven by necessity. They needed DuWayne Spott in the ground and the Lodge murder closed before the various discrepancies Adele and I had uncovered were closely scrutinized. And the emergence of the wild card, Vencel Nagy, had compounded the pressure. If it wasn’t done quickly, they must have known, it wouldn’t be done at all.
I stayed at it for another forty-five minutes, but I couldn’t settle into my stroke. For once, I was unable to separate the events from the emotions they aroused. And I didn’t even know who I was angrier with, Adele or Sarney. Because they were both right. Letting David Lodge’s killers off the hook went against every instinct. On one level, I was as outraged as Adele. But that didn’t make Sarney wrong. There were definitely times when you had to watch your own ass, when you had to acknowledge your place in the greater scheme of things. Otherwise, you paid the price.
I carried that last thought through a shower and the short walk to Rensselaer Village, where I picked up the phone and called Adele. When she answered after several rings, I told her about Mike Blair’s warning, repeating it almost word for word. Her reaction was predictable.
‘What,’ she asked, her tone amused, ‘must I do to make amends?’
‘How about telling me that you didn’t plant that story in the Times.’
The question was meant to surprise her and she didn’t respond immediately. Determined not to speak first, I listened to her breathe into the phone as she weighed her answer. Of one thing I was fairly certain: she wouldn’t lie to me.
‘Everybody loves you, Corbin,’ she finally said, ‘but you have the instincts of a shark.’
‘That’s not an answer.’
‘Look, what I do on my own time is my own business. I don’t have to account to you. After all, you’re a “cop’s cop”.’
‘Forget it, Adele. I’m not buying into the guilt trip. I didn’t start that rumor and I’m not spreading it around.’
‘Thank you.’
‘You’re welcome. Now, let me back up a little. You do know the story I’m talking about, right? Gruber’s story in the New York Times?’
‘I read it.’
‘Did you plant it?’
‘I don’t have to answer to you, Corbin. I’ve already said that.’
‘I’m your partner, Adele. You don’t hide something like this from your partner.’
But Adele wasn’t buying into any guilt trips, either. ‘I won’t be in next week,’ she announced. ‘I’ve got eight vacation days coming and I’ve decided to take them right away.’
‘And what if Sarney doesn’t allow you to take them?’
‘Corbin, sometimes you’re very naive. Sarney can’t wait to be rid of me.’
EIGHTEEN
I was sitting behind my desk at nine-thirty the following morning when Jack Petro entered the squad room carrying a box of donuts from Acme Cake, a commercial bakery located in the Eight-Three. Jack set the donuts on a filing cabinet, opened the box and shouted, ‘Breakfast is served.’ Within seconds, he’d drawn a crowd.
I paused long enough to fill a mug with coffee so thick it might have been used to caulk a boat, then joined Petro, Bill Sarney and two other detectives, Esteban Arroyo and Carl Stein. After a few minutes, Arroyo and Stein drifted off. Jack followed a moment later.
‘You guys wanna try teamin’ up?’ Sarney asked, his tone sincere as far as I could tell. ‘You and Jack?’
‘And after Adele’s vacation?’
Sarney looked at me for a moment, his gaze speculative, as though I’d caught him by surprise. Then he leaned forward and dropped his voice. ‘Bentibi’s on her way to a desk job at Borough Command. In fact, the only reason I let her take her vacation days was because I wanted to be rid of her as soon as possible.’
‘Ya know somethin’, lou,’ I said. ‘It’s just not right, punishing someone for doing the job they were trained to do.’
Again, Sarney’s look became quizzical. ‘What is it with you and this broad?’ he asked. ‘Because if you’re worried about leavin’ her to swing in the breeze, you should remember that she put the noose around her own neck.’ When I didn’t answer, he smiled and reached out to tap my shoulder. ‘Alright, she’s your partner, Harry, and I’m sorry I asked you to keep an eye on her. But Adele is history, and so is David Lodge. The way I count ’em up, those are blessings.’
Jack Petro waved me over to his desk as the door closed behind our commander’s retreating back. ‘You see the paper today?’
‘I haven’t.’
Petro took a copy of the Times from his briefcase. The story he wanted me to read was in the Metro section and by the same Albert Gruber who’d interviewed Vencel Nagy. This time Gruber had gotten to Ivy Whittington and Kamia Thompson, Spott’s aunt and cousin. Gruber used their words to create a portrait of a born loser, then asked the same question Adele and I had asked. How could a junkie-pimp like DuWayne Spott know when David Lodge was due for release or where he was going?
Gruber was an investigative reporter and could easily have found Ivy and Kamia on his own. But he could not have described the DuWayne Spott crime scene, as he proceeded to do, right down to the heater, the stolen electricity and the vomit, without help from someone who’d been there.
‘Being as I’m an experienced detective,’ Jack said when I looked up, ‘I can tell from your pained expression that you’re an innocent man. Can I also assume that you’ve heard the talk? About your partner?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Then what ya gotta figure is the further away you get, the better it’s gonna come out. This woman, she don’t know when to lay off. I’m tellin’ you this as a friend.’
He was right, of course. Adele had never understood the job, had never tried to understand. Somehow, she’d come to believe she could use the job to further her own ends. I was troubled by no such delusion, but Adele had one advantage, nevertheless. She could walk away and suffer only economic consequences. For me, the job was as close to family as I’d managed to get in my life. The thought of giving it up was not, at that moment, something I was willing to entertain.
Jack took off at that point, back to his own desk, leaving me to my thoughts. I sat there for a moment, annoyed with myself and with the situation, until my eye was attracted to a fax sitting on Adele’s desk. The fax was from Deputy Warden Beauchamp, the great white hunter, and listed David Lodge’s visitors during the four years of his incarceration at the Attica Correctional Facility. There were only two names on the list: Ellen Lodge and Linus Potter.
Prison, a felon with long experience once told me, is a lonely place. As time goes on, the letters and the visitors stop coming and you get the feeling nobody even remembers your name. But Linus Potter had been faithful, showing up in early December and again in late May or early June every year. Ellen Lodge was another matter. She’d visited her husband exactly once, five months before his release.
We had a good time that week, Jack and I, putting away a homicide on Tuesday and an armed robber a few days later. Both were gifts. The murderer was kind enough to slay his victim, a rival for his wife’s affections, in full view of three witnesses who knew him well. He surrendered peacefully when we knocked on his door an hour later. The stick-up man’s mistake was his target. The discount linen store he robbed was protected by three video cameras, each of which got a clear shot of his face.
An hour after viewing the tapes, Jack and I put a name to that face: Paul Rakowitz, a junkie-thief who’d been tearing up the Bushwick and Ridgewood precincts for several years. A day later, we ran him down in a shooting gallery on Troutman Street. He, too, surrendered peacefully.