Bodies in Winter by Robert Knightly

Author:Robert Knightly [Knightly, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, Mystery
Publisher: Severn House Publishers
Published: 2009-09-29T04:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-THREE

The Brooklyn neighborhood of Greenpoint is similar to the neighborhoods of Ridgewood and Bushwick in many ways. Established in the middle of the nineteenth century, Greenpoint, too, was created to serve the needs of manufacturers fleeing overcrowded Manhattan. The Civil War ironclad, Monitor, was built in Greenpoint, at the Continental Iron Works, and one of the first kerosene refineries in New York, Astral Oil, opened for business in 1867.

Both Continental Iron Works and Astral Oil were long gone by the time I drove into Greenpoint on that Sunday morning, replaced, along with most of the community’s manufacturing base, by warehouses offering service-sector jobs at appropriately lower wages. But Greenpoint was still vibrant, having undergone several major population shifts in the past fifty years. The first had begun after WWII, when a half-million Puerto Ricans poured into Manhattan’s two great barrios, East Harlem and the Lower East Side. By the early Sixties, the barrios were full and the Puerto Ricans began to move to neighborhoods in the outer boroughs. One of those neighborhoods was Greenpoint, where they came to dominate a section on the community’s northeastern edge.

The second change came forty years later, after the fall of the Soviet Union. Free to emigrate for the first time in fifty years, Poles flooded Greenpoint’s already sizable Polish-American community. So many, in fact, that a good number of the Latinos, now a mix of Puerto Ricans, Dominicans and Mexicans, had been forced out by rising rents.

I hadn’t come to Greenpoint, however, in search of pierogies or stuffed cabbage, or even the peppered vodka. The material I took from Adele’s apartment had included the case files of David Lodge and Tony Szarek, as well as Dante Russo’s personnel file and Adele’s notebook. I’d read the notebook first, but the only salient fact I uncovered was that Pete Jarazelsky had resided in Greenpoint until his conviction for burglary. As Adele had circled the address several times, it naturally caught my attention.

Tying Jarazelsky to the Broom involved no great detecting skills either: Tony Szarek was living in Greenpoint at the time of his death. But the last connection eluded me for several hours.

Because there was no entry in Adele’s notebook to guide me, I got to Dante Russo’s personnel file last. Russo was a sixteen-year NYPD veteran. His file included all of his evaluations, along with records of the tours he’d worked, the overtime he’d piled up, and his PBA Trustee status. If there’d been any civilian complaints against Russo, they would also have been included, as would commendations or departmental disciplines. But there were none.

I found Russo’s evaluations to be universally bland. Dante Russo is an experienced officer who continues to exhibit good judgment in the field. This was true even in the year Clarence Spott was murdered. Russo’s eager cooperation (along, no doubt, with his PBA connections) had apparently resulted in a complete whitewash. His yearly evaluation made no mention of either Clarence Spott or David Lodge.

It was all very interesting, this portrait of

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.