The Cold Spot (9 page)

H
er parents refused to come up to New York and
Sheriff Bodeen insisted that Chase ship Lila’s body back to Mississippi. The man’s voice was empty of strength. He sounded halfway to being dead himself. Chase said he’d get it done after the service the Suffolk County Police Department wanted to have since she was killed in the line of duty. Sheriff Bodeen dropped the phone and started weeping. Hester got on and said more to Chase right then than she’d said during the five years he’d lived down the road from her in Mississippi.

It was all ugly. Chase listened and absorbed every curse and caterwaul. He promised to send her body back. He didn’t know how the fuck something like that was done, but he’d find out and get it accomplished. He knew he’d never see the Bodeens again. He tried to find it within himself to care—losing these people, his in-laws, Lila’s mama and daddy—but it just wasn’t there. He hung up and they were gone from him too.

He slept in
fits. He’d wake up from a deep sleep with a noise so loud in his head that he had to press his hands over his ears.

It was the sound Walcroft made after Jonah had shot him in the head. It went on and on, growing louder as it came down through the years to find him.

After the big
police production where they played taps and fired their rifles in the air, wearing their fancy gear and little white gloves, with a huge photo of Lila’s face on an easel beside her casket, Chase shook hands with the mayor and took the folded flag they shoved at him, and stood there while they all got in their photo ops. They talked at him for hours and he just nodded when he thought it was appropriate. Sometimes it was and sometimes it wasn’t. Sometimes they frowned at him or shook him by the arm.

A lot of cops came up and said how much they admired Lila. Students and teachers and lunch-room attendants took his hand and tried to make him feel better by talking about peace and paradise, telling him to put his faith in God’s wisdom and justice. Before it was all over Chase had given the flag away to somebody, he didn’t know who.

He had to
shift gears quickly, get back up to speed.

Two days later, when Lila’s body was on the plane heading back to her parents, he called Hopkins at home and said, “I want whatever you’ve got on the ice knockoff.”

Hopkins went, “The what?”

The Suffolk cops really
did
have a cush job. So cush they didn’t know the language of action. “The diamond merchant score. I need whatever paperwork you have. I want you to tell me everything. In detail.”

“Christ, no.”

“I have to know what happened that day. From the beginning.”

Hopkins started crying again. Chase hated the sound of it, but let him sob, knowing that in some way, great or small, Hopkins had been in love with Lila. He’d felt protective of her, responsible for her, and buoyed by her. Chase couldn’t fault the guy for that. He waited until Hopkins got a grip, blew his nose, and cleared his throat. Then he broke down again. Chase waited.

Finally Hopkins said, “We don’t allow that.”

Chase let it slide. “Who’s in charge of the case?”

“Detectives Murray and Morgan.”

“Out of your precinct?”

“Yeah. Listen to me, about Lila—”

Chase listened and Hopkins said nothing. He asked, “Well, what about her?”

“I mean, I just wanted to say—” The cop’s voice was tight, and he was about to let go again. He’d never swing a full twenty and make his pension. Chase wondered what Hopkins’s wife thought, having to listen to this, her husband weeping every time Lila’s name came up. “She was a good woman, a good cop, you know, I thought I should—”

Chase hung up and drove over to the station. He asked for Detectives Murray and Morgan and got pointed to the squad room.

Turned out they were two old-school hard-asses, thick and gray, who didn’t like to deal with civilians. They must’ve remembered Chase from the funeral and tried to commiserate with him in that silent
mano a mano
sharing-the-rough-times vibe bullshit. They’d been at this for so long they didn’t feel anything anymore, and could barely make the effort to pretend to. They didn’t bother to work hard at placating him, just acted as if they deserved to throw off attitude because they were the good guys. As if cops feel pain deeper than the rest of the world. They kept calling him Mister and making it sound like Fuck off, twinky. Chase wondered what it would do to other men who’d recently lost their wives, being forced to deal with these two heartless pricks.

He smiled pleasantly and thanked them for their time.

For two hours
he parked out front waiting until Murray and Morgan took off for lunch. Chase walked back inside the squad room, acted like he had a right to be there, and squirreled around Morgan’s and Murray’s desk drawers until he found the right files and a copy of the security tape.

Police precincts have the worst security in the world. It was no surprise their evidence rooms were always being ripped off from either the inside or the outside.

As he was walking away, a cop coming from the other direction gave him the stink-eye and said, “Can I help you with something?”

Chase said, “Nope,” trying hard to make it sound like Fuck off, twinky, and walked out.

A pro job
all the way. Four-man string. A diamond wholesaler in Hauppauge. Three inside and the driver not far from the Court building. Chase could imagine the crew having a nice chuckle over that.

He watched the clock in the corner of the tape. In and out in exactly three minutes. One guy watching the employees, another going after the cases in front, a third in the back room clearing out uncut stones. They wore ski masks and black clothing to eliminate any descriptive details. They carried heavy artillery, looked like Colt Pythons. Serious hardware.

He watched the tape again. One of the female employees mouthed off and a gunman shoved her hard against a wall, threatening her with the four-inch barrel in her face. A male employee jumped up and said something and got smashed across the nose for it. Blood spurted and he dropped to the floor, holding his face and rocking.

Only a couple of witnesses had seen the getaway car. They all agreed it was bone white—flashy for a wheelman—but nobody could name the model. Just that it had muscle to it and a loud engine when it tore out onto Vets Highway, squealing in the rain.

Across from the diamond merchant’s was a stationery store. Typical Long Island strip mall, a couple of major businesses on opposite corners tacking down the whole line of shops. At one end, farthest from the entrance to the parking lot, was the diamond merchant, at the other a pizza parlor. Chase remembered Lila talking about it. Fratelli’s, where they called everybody
paisano
and had wallpaper showing the Colosseum, the Leaning Tower, and gondoliers on the Venice canals.

Flipping through pages in the file, he came to Hopkins’s report, written in a quivering hand, relating how he and Lila had just finished taking an afternoon’s worth of depositions at the court and were driving past the shopping center when they decided to grab a late lunch.

The report was light on human details and heavy on that clear-cut but remote style relating fact after fact.

Chase ran it through his head, heard Lila saying, Son, I need me two slices with extra cheese and if you don’t wanna see the unfortunate sight of me growing light-headed and weak in the knees, you won’t hog the grating cheese.

Hopkins telling her, Christ, you sure do like pizza. Don’t you miss, like, grits?

So they drive in, and Lila spots the bone-white muscle car parked at the curb with its lights on and wipers going. She’s instantly aware, maybe even taken back to the night she met Chase. She decides to check it out, drives through the lot, Hopkins going, Hey, I thought you were ready to pass out from hunger?

Chase flipping pages, putting the pieces together.

The three inside men coming out together, still cool, following the plan. Only two o’clock in the afternoon, but it was dark as hell because of the heavy rain. Lots of water glare, cars coming and going with their lights on. It would’ve been tough to differentiate the police cruiser from the strip mall shoppers. Folks parking to shop at the bakery, single mothers washing clothes at the Laundromat next to the pizza parlor.

Lila pulling up, finally close enough to see the bagmen rushing to the car, knowing now exactly what was happening. Probably even grinning, thinking, Well it ain’t no Bookatee’s Antiques & Rustic Curio Emporium heist this time, that’s for goddamn certain.

Teeth clenched, eyes snapped shut, Chase going for the cold spot, letting it do its job. The ice running through his brain.

His eyes flashing open.

Hopkins catching on and reaching for the radio. Lila trying to park diagonally across the other car’s path, but they were too damn close now. The bagmen piling into their car, both engines shrieking. The rain a brilliant haze in front of the headlights, hard to see anything but halo effect and shadow.

Chase wanting to scream, Don’t do it, baby.

Lila throwing it into park, thrusting open the door, and crouching there, getting into position to fire. Hopkins bending low while he shouted into the radio.

The pages tight with tiny scrawls stating what the witnesses saw next. Hopkins unable to confirm because he was ducked down behind the dashboard.

The pro behind the wheel hanging his left arm out the window and firing three times through the driver’s door of the cruiser.

Well, look at that.

The driver had killed her.

N
ot much time left, he knew. The crew would have a
fence on hand, but they wouldn’t get any cash back from the score for at least a couple of weeks. They’d stick around and hole up somewhere nearby. The fence would probably be one of the mob-run outfits in the diamond district of Manhattan. It was a good guess anyway, something to think about.

Chase played the tape a dozen more times, slowing it down, studying every move, trying to see the things he wasn’t supposed to see. Watching the crew move so capably about the place, with no wasted effort, knowing every angle.

So why didn’t they take out the camera? Three minutes was tight but they could’ve spray-painted the lens in five seconds flat. It was pretty much standard operating procedure.

So what was he seeing that he was
supposed
to see? That they wanted everyone to see?

Chase went with his gut.

There was an inside person you were supposed to see acting like anything but an inside person.

That made it either the woman who’d gotten pushed around or the guy who’d gotten slugged in the mouth.

The file had their names and addresses. James Lefferts and Marisa Iverson.

He needed wheels.

Street racing had
come back into style, especially in Queens and Brooklyn, and the law was starting to tighten up. Word was that the drivers were now moving out to Jersey to do their dragging, keeping their merchandise in Manhattan and staying clear of the cops who patrolled Ocean Parkway, Grand Central, Kings Highway, the Palisades, and out around LaGuardia. Jersey cops would catch on soon, and then the kids would probably head out to Long Island and haul ass down Route 25a, the Meadowbrook, or the Wantagh.

Chase knew at least a couple of his kids were tooling around the city picking up extra cash doing some weekend racing. They’d asked him the best way to soup their cars for the fast burn, some of them hoping he could set them up with nitrous. He’d never run nitrous himself and thought it was insane to fuck around like that in New York. It was strictly a West Coast way to kill yourself.

Chase took the train into Manhattan and found the 24-hour parking garage closest to the Holland Tunnel. Security was lax at two
A.M.
Chase wandered right in past the college kid on duty in the entrance booth who had his face buried in a textbook, snoring so hard that the plastic windows of the little booth rattled.

It took Chase almost two hours of searching the place before he found what he wanted, up on the fourth level.

A 1970 yellow Chevelle. Cowl induction hood, dual exhaust, and fourteen-inch Super Sport wheels. A machine made of muscle.

He got the door open and popped the hood—454 Four Speed with a 360-horsepower engine. It had been cared for, souped pretty nicely but could still use a little fine-tuning. That wouldn’t take him long.

The VIN number had been filed down and burned away with an industrial acid. Same with the serial numbers on the engine block. There was no paperwork in the glove compartment. He was boosting a car that had probably already been boosted a half-dozen times since it came off the line.

He slid up to the semaphore arm and didn’t even have to run it. He just slowly eased down on the gas and the arm snapped across the Chevelle’s grille while the college kid kept dreaming about advanced calculus or subatomic particle theory.

Chase spent the
entire morning adjusting the engine, the brakes, and the suspension, making it all even sweeter. The thief before him had done a damn good job, but now she’d handle even better on the turns.

He switched out the plates and repainted the car a burnished black. While waiting for it to dry he sat in the corner of the garage sucking in the fumes and going back and forth on who might have been the inside person on the ice heist, the man or the woman.

Late afternoon he took the Chevelle out for a test run down Commack Road, ripping it into triple digits and hoping a cop would engage him, but no cruiser ever showed. He pulled it back into the garage and checked a couple of final calibrations. Then, when he’d done all that he could do with the time he had, Chase fell into bed exhausted and dreamed of Lila.

She appeared before
him on the bed, twining across his chest the way she usually had during the deep night, and said, “I told you the dead would find a way. You just have to listen to us. So hear me now, love. You gotta let this thing go. I don’t want you to follow through with what you’re planning. How do you expect me to rest easy knowing what’s on your mind? You remember what I say.”

He tried to answer her, but when he opened his mouth all that came out was Walcroft’s sound rattling loose from inside him.

He woke in the morning with the pillowcase soaking wet.

He’d been crying like hell in his sleep.

He wasn’t hard at all.

The phone rang. It was the principal of the school extending his condolences again. The staff and many of the students had taken up a collection and bought flowers for the funeral, and had Chase noticed them? The remaining fund would be given to the Policemen’s Benevolent Association in Lila’s name. The principal told him not to worry about returning anytime this semester. An extended leave of absence with pay was in effect. Was there anything that anyone at the school could do? The principal repeated himself and waited for Chase to say something.

Chase said, “I quit,” and hung up.