business many decades ago and their products are collected. You can buy them at auction.’
‘So, Lodge showed his Kluugmann to all his buddies, then stuck it in his locker and forgot he even had it.’ Which was just what I would have done.
‘Now you are getting the deal. Would he even have remembered the weapon’s existence in the midst of a towering rage? A killing rage? This is what it boils down to with David.’
I shifted to Lodge’s stay in Cayuga at that point, but the good doctor professed ignorance, again insisting that Lodge was generally reticent except when discussing the Spott murder. And Nagy merely shrugged when I told him that Lodge was a suspect in a prison homicide.
‘This does not surprise me. In here, they are saying you must learn to walk the yard like a man. This is the first task, to walk through the yard without projecting fear. David was able to do this.’
‘And that makes him a killer?’
‘I am only saying, detective, that I am not surprised by what you are telling me.’
Nagy didn’t like being challenged, that was obvious. His head again turned to the left as his hands went into their little dance, touching, patting, pulling. By now it had become clear, even to me, that Nagy was suffering from an illness. Whether physical or psychological in nature was still up in the air.
‘Tell me,’ I finally said, ‘about Lodge’s thinking right before his release. Did he have specific plans? What was he looking forward to?’
‘Sometime in the last few months of his incarceration, David finally recovered a memory of the night Spott was killed. That was when he became convinced of his innocence.’
‘Did he say what it was that he remembered?’
‘No, only that it was a fragment, a piece of the puzzle. But this I will tell you. If he had other concerns, he did not discuss them with me.’
‘He never mentioned a man named DuWayne Spott?’
‘Never.’
‘What about a job, his wife, his old friends?’
Nagy’s face twisted to the right, then the left, both motions so exaggerated it took me a moment to realize he was merely shaking his head. ‘David was an obsessive type. You can see this in his body-building. Six days every week, never missing a day. It was how his mind worked.’
As I waited for Nagy to slow down, I played with the facts as I now understood them. A cold and sober David Lodge emerged, a Lodge obsessed with his innocence, a Lodge capable of murder. Without doubt, if Lodge was truly innocent, he’d present a formidable challenge to those who’d framed him. Killing Lodge was a rational response to that challenge, despite the risks.
Suddenly, Nagy jumped to his feet and pointed a trembling finger at the door behind me. I was startled enough to reach for my weapon (which I’d surrendered in the reception area), but when I turned it was only Nagy’s assistant. He was standing motionless in the doorway, still clutching his can of polish and his rag.
‘I have told you twenty times already to stay out my office,’ Nagy shouted. ‘Never you are to come in here. Are you hearing me? Never.’ Nagy’s donkey jaw had risen almost to his nose and his glittery blue eyes were circles of indignation. ‘If you were not my patient, I would hit you with a chair.’
TEN
It was eight o’clock by the time I got back to Queens and the One-Sixteen. Jack Petro, a squad detective and a good friend, was standing fifteen feet away when I entered. He nodded sympathetically as I walked over.
‘This one a keeper, Harry?’
Jack was asking me if the case would be transferred to Homicide or a task force at Borough Command. In the normal course of events, high-profile cases were routinely taken away from precinct detectives, a development I would have welcomed.
‘If that’s the plan, no one’s told me about it.’
I looked over his shoulder and saw Adele seated at her desk thirty feet away. She was staring directly at me, her gaze sharp and contemptuous. She’d been awaiting my return for hours and now I was bullshitting with my buddy. How predictable.
‘My partner’s giving me the evil eye.’
Jack’s smile dropped away and his expression became grave as he tossed me a snappy salute. ‘Time to report, soldier.’
Like many of my peers, Jack professed not to know why I continued to partner with Adele Bentibi when I had more than enough seniority to demand a change. He knew that I’d once been on the verge of marching into Sarney’s office to do just that, even though it was clear that Adele was my perfect complement. Her strengths were crime scenes and physical evidence, while mine were interviews and interrogations. But partnering is about more than solving crimes and there’s no hell quite like spending all of your working hours with someone whose company you’d rather avoid, even if you’re physically attracted to her.
Simply put, like everybody else, I found Adele insufferably opinionated, and the fact that her judgments were usually right meant next to nothing. Plus, I’d only agreed to work with her as a favor to Bill Sarney. Adele had come to the 116th Precinct with a reputation. ‘Difficult to get along with,’ that was how Sarney explained it, a little character flaw that I should overlook, at least temporarily.
I don’t remember my attitude on the day I agreed to work with Adele. Perhaps I was resentful, the fair-haired boy imposed upon. Or maybe I took the assignment with good grace — I was definitely out to please at the time. But after three months, I was certain that I’d had enough. Adele was very abrupt, seeming to dismiss my opinions before I managed to state them. More to the point, she was blind to a number of deficiencies related to her poor communication skills. I could not convince her that an interview is not an assault, an interrogation not a cavalry charge.
Eight hours a day? Day after day? I didn’t think so.
‘Martha Stewart with a badge’ was the way Nydia Santiago had described my partner, and I could see where Nydia was coming from. But she’d gotten it wrong. I found this out when Adele told me her story over dinner.
I remember that it was the perfect night for a confidence. Adele and I had spent the prior ten hours in pursuit of a rapist named Joey Garglia, running from friend to relative to friend, sometimes threatening, sometimes cajoling. Finally, at six-thirty, Joey’s mother had called. Her son was sitting in her living room and he was ready to surrender.
By any standard, it’d been a very good day, a day of hard work and real accomplishment which we were capping with a decent Italian meal and a couple of drinks. Though I wasn’t expecting much, the alcohol made me bold enough to ask an impertinent question.
‘So, tell me, Adele, what’s your story? How’d you become a cop?’
My partner never did answer the second question, not directly, but her response to the first part was enough to change the way I understood her. Permanently.
Adele could trace her family of Sephardic Jews back to the twelfth century when they lived in an area of northwestern Africa called the Maghreb. For centuries, she explained, their lives were reasonably stable, as were their relations with their Christian neighbors and Muslim rulers. Then the Almohad Dynasty had emerged at the head of a puritanical movement that tore the region apart. The aim was to purify Islam, a deed accomplished by the forced conversion of Christians and Jews; by the sale of Christians and Jews into slavery; by the slaughter of whole villages. Adele’s family had fled, ironically enough, to Spain, from which they were expelled by Queen Isabella in 1492, the year Columbus sailed his little fleet in search of India.
I was munching on a crispy slice of bruschetta, and well into my second drink, when I finally realized that Adele wasn’t talking about a succession of parents and grandparents stretching back nine hundred years. Her ancestral legends were tribal. Still, I was completely absorbed. My concept of family was so far removed from Adele’s that we might have been different species.
From Spain, the ‘family’ went to Istanbul, on the shores of the Black Sea, then to Baku, on the Caspian, then to Baghdad, Tunis, Cairo and back to Istanbul. Restless as gypsies, they were always on the move, always calculating the dangers around them.
