‘Hey, Harry, how’s it going?’ Bill Sarney asked.
‘It’s goin’ alright, Bill. How’s by you?’
‘Me, I got a headache.’
‘And its name is Adele Bentibi.’
‘How’d you guess?’
Sarney was using that hearty, cheerleader voice he generally deployed before asking a favor. It was a voice I’d responded to in the past, as I’d responded to the occasional dinner we shared, or being invited to his home. We were friends and allies, Bill Sarney and Harry Corbin, and I had no reason to doubt his sincerity at that moment. But sincerity was no longer a relevant concept, for either one of us. Sarney had long ago decided that his interests and the interests of the job would never be at odds. That was his line, his personal line, and I’d stepped across it when I phoned Adele. I had no choice now, except to play him. Nailing Lodge’s killers would be hard enough without telegraphing my intentions.
‘So what’s that bad girl done now?’ I asked.
‘We know she’s the one leaking to the Times.’
‘Know?’
‘Yeah, we’re sure.’
It was my turn to chuckle manfully. ‘I could ask if you maybe tapped her phones, Bill, or somehow got your hands on her phone records, but I think I’m just gonna leave that dog lie. In the meantime, I haven’t spoken to Adele in a week.’
That was at least technically true. Though I’d called her only a few minutes before, we hadn’t actually conversed.
‘Harry, look, we think it would be a good idea if you contacted her.’ Sarney’s tone dropped a half-octave as he shifted to that gossipy tone he used when he was passing on insider secrets. ‘Let me level with you here. The bosses think those stories in the Times are not gonna be a problem. They’re worried about what your partner-’
‘Former partner,’ I corrected. ‘With the emphasis on the former.’
‘Yeah, your former partner. The bosses wanna know what she’s gonna do next. Like, specifically, if she’s gonna go public. You can’t blame them, Harry. They’re scared because she doesn’t give a shit about her badge or her reputation. They got nothin’ to hold over her head.’
TWENTY-TWO
I nitially, I refused Bill Sarney outright. If I remember correctly, I was pretty indignant. He was talking about my partner, after all. Turning my back on her was one thing. Loyalty didn’t require me to go down with the ship, not when the captain had drilled a hole in the hull. But cops didn’t spy on their partners, not in the cop world I inhabited, not in any cop world I could imagine. If word got out, I explained to my boss, I’d be branded a fink. And I’d deserve it, too.
But in the end, I allowed myself to be persuaded. Sarney’s argument was succinct. He told me that what had happened to me was nothing more than bad luck. Most cops, even those who rise to the top, never have to make the kind of choice that was being shoved down my throat. Nevertheless, I was forced to decide, as he’d been forced to present the options. If I didn’t go along, not only would I not be promoted, my and Adele’s fate would be one and the same.
‘So what you’re saying,’ I finally asked, ‘is that I’ll be branded a snitch unless I actually become a snitch?’
‘Yeah, that’s pretty much the way of it. The bosses have a job that needs doing and nobody except you to do it.’
After finishing dinner, I took out a yellow pad and settled down on the living-room couch. My goal was simply to list the various assumptions Adele and I had made in the course of the Lodge investigation, to subject each to a second evaluation. But I was still unable to concentrate and I found myself parked in front of the television thirty minutes later, watching the Knicks stumble through a dreary first half.
Down by eleven, the Knicks were heading into the locker room when my phone began to ring. I muted the TV and picked up the receiver, expecting to hear Adele’s voice. I got her husband, Mel, instead.
Mel Bentibi was the most even-tempered man I’d ever known. He simply could not be drawn to any extreme emotion, a trait that drove Adele crazy. ‘He plays the Zen monk,’ she once told me, to cover up the fact that he has the inner life of an eggplant.
‘Say, Harry, I’ve got a serious problem.’ Mel cleared his throat. ‘It’s Adele. She’s been injured.’
‘Yeah, how so?’ I smiled at that moment — a crooked smile, to be sure — while my heart tightened into a fist.
‘She was mugged.’
‘Where?’
‘Coming into the apartment in Bayside.’ Another hesitation. ‘The thing about it is that I’m in Dallas. You know, on business. I’m not gonna be able to get away before Tuesday morning.’
‘Can I assume that means your wife isn’t critical or dead?’
‘Please, Harry, don’t talk like that. Adele’s in North Shore Hospital, in Manhasset. Her doctors tell me she’ll be fine. They just want to hold her overnight for observation.’
‘Does she have her cell phone with her?’
‘No, they took it, along with her gun.’
‘They?’
‘Harry, I don’t know the details. The doctors told me that she’s under sedation.’
I’d double-dated with Adele and her husband several times in the past. Though I’d found Mel to be terminally bland, I’d generally been able to deal with him. But at that moment, I lacked the patience to beg the jerk for a set of facts as likely as not to be wrong, and I simply hung up.
It was eight-fifteen and North Shore Hospital was forty-five minutes away, even assuming light traffic on the dreaded Long Island Expressway. I threw on my coat and went out to my car, which was parked in front of the building. Once again, the Official Police parking permit on the dash had worked its magic and there was no ticket beneath the wiper blade. That was predictable, as was the Nissan’s failure to start. It was bitter cold and the car had been sitting for two days.
I opened the trunk, removed a set of jumper cables, then attached one end of the cables to my battery. When an empty cab drove by a few minutes later, I raised both hands. In the left, I held the unattached end of the jumpers, in the right, a five-dollar bill. Within two minutes, the Nissan was up and running.
As I crested the Williamsburg Bridge, I got on my cell phone, punching the O, then waiting for an operator to respond. A few minutes later, I was speaking to the desk lieutenant at the 111th Precinct in Bayside, Queens. Her name was Fujimori and she clucked sympathetically when I identified myself as Adele’s partner.
‘They hit her in the face,’ she told me, ‘with some kind of club, maybe a baseball bat.’
‘Once?’
‘Apparently. Are you familiar with the layout?’
‘I’ve been there.’
‘Alright, Bentibi was attacked after parking her car in the lot behind her apartment building. She got lucky when a porter came through the back door as the attack started and her assailant ran away with her handbag. Also, Bentibi has a defensive wound on her forearm, a large contusion. We’re assuming she managed to absorb some of the force of the blow.’
I took a second to visualize the scene. The Bentibis owned a condo in a hi-rise building a few hundred yards from Little Neck Bay. The surrounding blocks were all residential, mostly single-family homes, and very quiet. Beyond that, Bayside had been an upper-middle-class enclave for a century, with the nearest subway five miles distant — not the happy hunting ground for street muggers who depend on mass transit for a quick getaway.
‘You get a lot of muggings in that part of town, lou?’ I finally asked.
‘I can’t remember the last one.’
‘How’d they escape?’
‘They had a car.’
‘You get a make, a plate number?’
‘Negative. Bentibi was too disoriented and the porter ran over to help her. He only glimpsed the vehicle.’
‘What about an ID? Either of them get a look?’
‘Your partner doesn’t remember what happened, but according to the porter, the bad guy had his face covered with a stocking mask. The most the porter’s willing to say is that Bentibi’s attacker was white.’