‘If we can’t trust the phones — and we can’t — it’d be better if you stayed with me in Manhattan,’ I told her. ‘If we were in the same place.’
Adele took a deep breath, holding the air down inside for a moment, finally releasing it with an audible hiss. Despite the swollen mouth, when she spoke, I understood her perfectly.
‘I thought he would come,’ she said.
Adele was talking about her husband, Mel, who was currently in Dallas, and whose failure to alter his plans didn’t surprise me. I wondered what foolish dreams Adele had been nurturing. Had she hoped Mel would suddenly develop an emotional life, that she would find herself at the center of that life? If so, she’d been victimized by unrealistic expectations. Somewhere along the line, Mel had cut a deal with himself. So that he would never be hurt, he would never feel anything at all.
‘Maybe,’ I finally said, ‘you should stash Mel in a corner for now, get back to him later.’ I leaned forward to pull down the windshield’s visor on her side of the car, revealing a mirror on the underside. ‘After all, if we don’t survive, Mel’s not gonna matter a whole lot.’
Much to my relief, Adele abruptly shifted gears. She’d been humiliated twice in the last forty-eight hours, by the man who attacked her and by the man who should have been there to comfort her. Right now, she was feeling helpless and helpless was definitely not her thing. It was time to fight back.
Though her lips were as swollen as ever, her skin purple above and below her bandages, Adele’s speech was fairly confident, the new mechanics more familiar now as she described her activities during the week we’d been apart. There was very little I hadn’t already guessed. Adele belonged to a number of associations open to women struggling with New York’s various male-dominated law enforcement agencies, including the Department of Corrections and the District Attorney’s office. Besides offering emotional support, the associations also functioned as mutual aid networks and Adele had exploited these connections to secure the various files. The single surprise was that she’d gotten a peek at the IAB file created when Pete Jarazelsky was arrested for burglary. Closely held, IAB files are difficult to secure under the best of circumstances.
‘Jarazelsky,’ she finally told me, ‘was caught inside the warehouse, so he had no defense. He was alone at the time, but IAB suspected that he was part of an organized ring.’
‘Did he roll over?’ One thing about crooked cops, they usually start naming names before the cuffs go on. That would be especially true of a rat like Jarazelsky.
‘No, he lawyered up right away.’
‘You think Jarazelsky made the same mistake as David Lodge? You think he spoke to the PBA delegate, Officer Dante Russo, before he asked for that lawyer?’
‘Pete Jarazelsky and David Lodge had the same lawyer, Corbin. A man named Theodore Savio.’
Adele was rolling the words in her mouth, stumbling over the syllables in a way that reminded me of Ewa Gierek, whose existence I revealed a short time later. My description of Ewa’s milk-white skin, her invisible brows and tender years, was amusing enough to draw a genuine smile, which pleased me. By that time we were in Adele’s apartment and she was filling a suitcase with clothing, doing it one-handed. She didn’t ask for my help and I didn’t offer it.
The phone began to ring downstairs as Adele closed the latches on the suitcase. If she heard it, I couldn’t tell. She opened the drawer on her night table, took out a box and flipped off the cover, revealing a small automatic pistol. The weapon was designed to be carried in a pocket or beneath a waistband. There were no front or rear sights to snag on fabric and the shrouded hammer was buried in the gun’s frame.
Adele had shown the automatic to me when she’d first purchased it as a back-up weapon. Though it didn’t look like much, the AMT held five. 40 caliber rounds. And like all semi-automatic handguns, it could be fired as fast as you could pull the trigger.
The phone stopped in mid-ring and Adele smiled before handing the weapon to me. ‘Corbin, please, jacking a round into the chamber is beyond me at the moment.’
I took it a step further, ejecting the magazine to make sure it was full. When I handed the gun back to Adele, she tucked it into the sling covering her right arm. The weight caused her to wince slightly, the only concession to pain she’d made so far.
The sleet had turned to snow by the time we started out for Rensselaer Village and I stayed with Northern Boulevard, though I might have jumped on the Cross Island Parkway. I was in no hurry. It was Sunday night, the streets nearly empty, the snow outside thick enough to reduce the neon tubes defining the commercial landscape to smears of color that rippled across the windshield with each stroke of the wipers. A block away, the headlights of an orange sanitation truck cut across the intersection and I lifted my foot from the gas. The truck turned in front of us, exposing a rotary machine on its tail-end that spit circles of rock salt onto the asphalt. Though I kept as far from the truck as possible, pellets of salt cracked into Adele’s side of the car as we inched by.
‘Those files, they’re useful,’ I said after another long silence. ‘But maybe not in the way you think. Remember, you can’t admit you have them. Nor can we access financial records or obtain warrants of any kind.’
My remarks produced no more than a shrug. This was ground Adele had already been over and she simply changed the subject. ‘Irony,’ she observed, the word coming out: eye-own-eee. ‘Tony Szarek’s murder. If it has nothing to do with David Lodge.’
By this time, Adele knew the particulars of my day, knew that the Broom had a destitute brother who hated him and a young mistress who was suing for half of his estate. It was at least possible that one or the other (or even the good sister, Trina) had killed him. The ME’s failure to discover traces of gunpowder residue on Szarek’s hand had troubled me from the beginning. If his killer had simply touched the gun to Szarek’s palm and the inside of his fingers after it was fired, the tests would have come back positive. Cops would know that.
But even if we’d made false assumptions, if we’d been drawn to the Broom by mere coincidence, examining his life had enabled us to connect Russo, Jarazelsky, Szarek and Justin Whitlock. The Broom’s actual killer was now irrelevant.
‘They had no time to worry about the Broom,’ Adele continued. ‘David Lodge was coming out of jail bent on revenge. He had to be taken down, no matter what the risks.’ Adele reached out to lay the fingers of her left hand on my arm. Despite the bandages and raccoon eyes, her gaze was too intense for me to mistake her intentions. ‘The panic is still out there. All you have to do is stir the pot.’
‘Then what?’
‘Then somebody will come after you, Corbin, just like they came after David Lodge, just like they came after me.’
We were up on the 59th Street Bridge by then, the Island of Manhattan before us completely obscured by the snow. I watched Adele’s hand drop to her lap and her gaze return to the accumulating snow on the roadbed. ‘Corbin,’ she said.
‘What.’
‘Thank you.’
‘For what?’
That brought a little smile and a change of subject. ‘How much are we supposed to get?’ Adele asked, pointing through the windshield. ‘How much snow?’
‘Three or four inches, nothing to worry about. We should be looking at temperatures in the upper forties tomorrow.’
I thought back to the day I’d ruined my loafers, the day we found DuWayne Spott. At the time, I’d been the one without a clue. Now my feet were encased in a pair of waterproof Timberland boots and Adele was wearing flat-heeled pumps. It was a neat reversal of our customary roles, and not at all unpleasant.
Adele and I began to discuss tactics and overall strategy as we drove south along Second Avenue, a discussion that continued as I carried her bags into my apartment, as I made up the bed in the spare room, as I prepared a dinner of soft-boiled eggs and buttered bread that Adele managed to get past her swollen lips. We stayed at it until nearly ten o’clock when Adele finally plucked a vial of pain killers, Percocets, from her handbag. The Percocets had been prescribed and filled at North Shore Hospital, a kindness negated by a thoughtless pharmacist who’d topped the vial with a child-resistant cap. Though it couldn’t be opened with one hand, Adele kept trying until I took the vial from her fingers.