Finally, Clyde turned to look directly into my eyes. I saw that his own eyes were dark and mournful, the eyes of a man who’d been traveling a hard road for a long time, a man who was now close enough to read the DEAD END sign at the end of that road. I saw, also, that he was going to tell me the truth.
‘I kept thinkin’ about her under the water, lyin’ in that fuckin’ mud, about the crabs and fishes eatin’ her. And it just got to me. I mean, the way he was draggin’ her. You could see that it was just a job to him, like he mighta been pourin’ a bucket of motor oil down a storm drain.’ Clyde paused there, his mouth twitching as though he was trying to work up his nerve. Finally, he said, ‘Okay, I know you ain’t gonna believe this, but when he was pulling her over the weeds, her chin came up so she was lookin’ directly at me. And what came into my mind, right there, was that she was askin’ me for help.’
I laid my hand on Clyde’s shoulder and gave it a gentle squeeze, thinking that cops weren’t the only ones to speak for the dead. ‘Would you recognize this man if you saw him again?’
‘My eyes,’ he responded, ‘they ain’t what they used to be, but I think so.’
‘Why don’t you begin by describing him?’
‘An ugly white dude, around fifty.’ Clyde framed his eyes with his fingers. ‘His eyes were like slits, like he had a hard time keepin’ ’em open. I didn’t get the color — he was too far away — but I’m sure about them slits. When he looked at me, it was like I was under a microscope.’
In fact, the man Clyde observed was eighty-one feet from Kent Avenue. I knew because we’d already measured the distance. That’s a long way off for a man in his seventies, but my witness did pretty well anyway, replying without hesitation. The shadowy figure to emerge from his description was middle-aged and over six feet tall, with thinning gray hair and tiny eyes made even tinier by a wide face pudgy with fat.
‘Like a Chinaman’s eyes,’ was how Clyde finally put it, ‘except they didn’t slant.’
But Clyde was less certain about the van. Most of his attention, he told me, at least until he was spotted, had been focused on the victim. Plus, he hadn’t driven a car in so many years that he couldn’t tell one model from another.
‘I want you to come back to the precinct with me,’ I finally told him, ‘to look at some pictures.’
‘Mug shots?’
‘Yeah.’
‘I don’t mind. I already figured you was gonna ask me.’
‘Great, but there’s a problem. We can’t leave here until someone shows up to take the body away.’
‘And that’s not gonna happen any time soon?’
‘Probably not, so what I want you to do is take a hike up to Broadway and get us some sodas and something to eat.’
‘You trust me to come back on my own,’ he said after a minute.
‘Clyde, it’s just like you said. Your running days are behind you.’
The first clouds made their appearance some four hours later. They came north from the harbor, long gray tendrils that swung back and forth like questing snakes. The clouds ushered in a gentle breeze, a breeze that became a wind as the clouds gradually took on the yellow-green color of a healing bruise. I led Clyde to the Crown Vic at that point. The air inside was stifling, but the clatter of hail on the roof forced me to keep the windows up.
The hail was followed by a deluge, as if somebody had run a knife across the underside of a water bed. For the next ten minutes, the lightning advanced on our position, until there was virtually no gap between the flashes and the resulting explosions. Clyde was sitting alongside me, his hands over his ears and his eyes squeezed shut. My own eyes were wide open. The hail and rain were pounding on the crime scene, destroying every bit of trace evidence. They pounded on the body of the victim as well, and what I wondered, as I struggled to draw oxygen from an atmosphere as thick as pudding, was whether her open gut would contain the water. Like a bath tub.
The rain stopped as abruptly as it had begun and the clouds receded to the north as if in fear of being left behind. Within minutes, the sun was out and the air again motionless. I exited the car, pausing for a minute to watch a thin mist rise from the hot cobblestones. Then I looked up at the bridge, my attention drawn by the silence. The helicopters were gone, the rescue workers as well, driven away by the weather no doubt. I wondered if there were any civilians still trapped in the subway cars, imagining their terror and the civil damages they would later seek. I was still pondering this question when a morgue wagon, closely followed by a city car bearing a death investigator, pulled up before the crime scene tape. The investigator rolled down the window a few inches. A short black man, he carefully scrutinized my sweat-soaked clothing, his distaste obvious.
‘You have a body for me, detective?’ he asked.
‘I have what’s left of a body after nine hours in the sun.’
‘Is that supposed to mean something?’ he said, staring me down. I turned away without answering.
FOUR
We were in the master bedroom of our Manhattan apartment, Adele Bentibi, my live-in lover, and I, enjoying a meal of hummus, tabbouleh salad, stuffed grape leaves and lamb shawarma. Adele was wearing a blue T-shirt and gym shorts, while I wore only a pair of faded cargo shorts. I freely admit that Adele was quite attractive in this outfit, not to mention erotic, but it wasn’t sex that brought us to the bedroom. The air conditioner in the window to our left was the only air conditioner in an apartment that received eight hours of direct sunlight on midsummer days. Although the unit was running full out, and had been for the past week, the room was still noticeably warm at ten o’clock in the evening.
Adele was propped up on one elbow, staring down at me. Nine months before, she’d been assaulted with an aluminium bat as she left her parked car. The blow had been meant to kill her, but had succeeded only in flattening the center of her rather prominent nose. Adele’s first instinct was to ignore the defect, no surprise as she was far too vain to admit to her own vanity. But then her breathing became impaired and she was more or less forced into an operating room. The result was a smaller, rounded nose that softened a thin face made thinner by sharp cheekbones and a pointed chin. Myself, I was indifferent to the change, but I remember catching Adele standing before the mirror in the bathroom one day, examining herself closely. Her dark eyes, when she finally acknowledged my existence, were filled with humor, her thin smile impish. Adele liked what she saw in the mirror, a guilt-free result that could only have come about through medical necessity.
‘Do you think,’ Adele asked as she cut through a stuffed grape leaf with the edge of her fork, ‘that Kelly will make a credible witness?’
‘Assuming I come up with somebody for him to ID, I think he will.’ Though Kelly had examined more than a thousand mug shots at the precinct, he’d failed to make even a tentative identification. ‘Especially if some defense lawyer is stupid enough to ask him why he didn’t report what he saw right away.’
We were analysing the case, our discussion continuing through dinner and while we did the few dishes. I wasn’t dealing, we agreed, with a street criminal who acted on impulse, as street criminals so often do. The effort to prepare the victim for disposal had been thorough and systematic. Nevertheless, there were flies in this ointment. The head wound, for example; blunt force trauma is usually inflicted in a moment of passion. And the pink lividity was another problem. If she’d inhaled enough carbon monoxide or cyanide to alter her blood chemistry, why crack her skull?
But the practical benefits of discussing the case with my former partner were beside the point. Nine months before, Adele had been my partner, working the case that put me on the outs with my peers. She’d taken a terrible beating, had come from an emergency ward to confront the man who’d beaten her. Detective Linus Potter had looked directly into Adele’s eyes, then surrendered peacefully, knowing that if he resisted, she would kill him.