3 Quarters Read online

  PRAISE FOR DENIS HAMILL AND

  3 QUARTERS

  “Hamill knows of what he writes—the city and the good and bad characters that thrive here . . . . As good a tale of New York as it gets.”

  —New York Post

  “3 Quarters supplies a full measure of first-rate thrills.”

  —People

  “Denis Hamill gives New York the justice it deserves. 3 Quarters is a page-turning life on the dark side of this city as only Denis Hamill can portray it.”

  —Winston Groom, author of Forrest Gump

  “No one does tough New York better than Denis Hamill. 3 Quarters is the real thing: lyrical, muscular, authentic, and right on the money. Hamill has created a terrific new mystery character.”

  —Robert B. Parker

  “3 Quarters is as scary and breathtaking as a midnight walk across the Brooklyn Bridge. Denis Hamill is one of the true stars of New York.”

  —Peter Blauner, author of Slow Motion Riot and The Intruder

  “3 Quarters is a fast-moving story of corruption and violence in which the cops and wiseguys and lawyers of New York City come vividly to life. Denis Hamill is a writer of talent in the tradition of Richard Price and Jimmy Breslin. He had a good time writing this book and offers one to his readers as well.”

  —Bob Leuci, author of The Snitch

  Thank you for downloading this Atria Books eBook.

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  This book is for Janet, for bringing a candle into my darkened room. Love always.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I’d like to thank the brilliant Esther Newberg for getting this idea to Dona Chernoff, whose scalpel was sharp and true.

  Thanks and love to my kids—Sean, Katie, Neil—for their patience while I was MIA.

  1

  THURSDAY

  Dr. Hector Perez felt sick at the sight of all the blood.

  Blood was money for Dr. Hector Perez, the currency of his calling, not something that terrified him, physically or mentally. Until now.

  But then he had never awakened, head pounding, mouth a bucket of glue, soaking in the puddled blood of a beautiful, nude, strange young woman before.

  He looked at his gold watch: 5:54 AM. Then he looked back at the woman whose jugular vein had been severed, blood still pulsing like a backed-up sink. His clinical eye noticed that it was an arterial purplish red near the deep gash. But as it oxidized in the air and the cells died, the blood turned a brighter, maraschino red on the starched white sheets and pillowcases that were embroidered with the white-on-white legend: Hotel St. Claire. The colors were perversely mesmerizing.

  The fuzzy tingling of his arm trapped beneath her body and the soggy warmth of the blood had awakened him. And now he was transfixed by her gaping wound and her half-open blue eyes. Her hair was long and naturally blond, her makeup perfect except for specks of caked blood. His own blood began pounding in his temples, shooting scalding adrenaline through him.

  His eyes finally broke contact, and he panned the hotel room: Pigeons cooing on the windowsill. Morning traffic clamoring from the city outside. His clothes scattered all over the floor. Syrupy blood on his skin.

  Fucking shit is for real, Perez thought. I’m in bed with a dead woman. Murdered. Did I bang her and then fall asleep? Did she cut her own throat? Did someone else come in when I passed out? What did she give me? Chloral hydrate drops, an old-fashioned Mickey Finn? Or was it that new date-rape drug the kids called “roofies,” Rohypnol? Hits you like a plane crash. Jesus Christ . . .

  I should be home in bed with Nydia, Perez thought. Rubbing her swollen belly . . . .

  Perez pushed himself to a half-seated position and yanked his arm free, recoiling in horror at the flash of gleaming steel. His numb, tingling fingers were stuck to the bloody steel handle of a straight razor.

  “No!” Perez shouted in the hotel room and immediately used his left hand to cover his mouth. He glared down at his other hand, which clutched the sticky handle of the razor. A grisly murder weapon gripped between fingers that Perez had spent the last ten years training to save human life.

  Only one life still worth saving in this room, he thought, mine. As he quickly stood from the bed and backed away from the lifeless woman, his mind worked in freeze-frame stop-action, imagining the forensic photos. Then he thought of the detectives and criminalists who would nibble the room to death for clues.

  His clothes were strewn about the floor as if he’d undressed quickly. He saw the room key on the night table on top of the cashier’s receipt. He did not touch the receipt but was relieved when he read that the room was rented to a Karen Anders. She’d paid $316.85, cash.

  Perez carefully used a Kleenex to fasten the chain lock on the hotel room door. Then he took a towel from the bathroom and began wiping every conceivable place he might have left a fingerprint—countertops, TV knobs, remote control, light switches, minibar, champagne glasses, doorframes. Even her earrings. He then walked into the bathroom and used the same towel to wash the blood from his arms and legs and torso and genitals. He washed the straight razor, watching Karen Anders’s blood swirling down the drain. He did not shower because he did not want his hair to be discovered in the drain. He pulled the plastic shower curtain down from the bathroom rod and carried it out to the bedroom area and laid it out on the floor.

  Ever conscious of the telltale DNA in hair evidence, he used his pocket comb to rake through her pubic hair to remove any trace he might have left of his own. He removed the pillowcase where his head had lain. Then he pulled the fitted sheets free from the corners of the bed. As he tugged the sheet from under the dead woman, she did a half-roll onto the bare blood-soaked mattress. Perez placed the bloody sheets and the pillowcases onto the shower curtain and folded it neatly around them. He then stuffed the plastic-wrapped blood evidence into the clean pillowcase, careful not to soil his hands again.

  Then Dr. Perez pulled on his underwear, trousers, shirt. He carefully checked the woman’s pocketbook, which was filled with vaginal sprays, mouthwash, dozens of rubbers, a vibrator, butt plugs, handcuffs, and a few other sex toys.

  None of his own money or credit cards were missing, everything was intact. He checked her wallet, careful to thumb through it with the Kleenex. No driver’s license, credit cards, voting card, Blue Cross card. No identification at all. He decided to remove the five one-hundred-dollar bills, to make it look like a robbery. The only other money consisted of seventy-five cents, three shiny quarters that lay in her half-open right hand. And Dr. Hector Perez didn’t know why he noticed such a ridiculous detail—but he was struck that all three quarters looked freshly minted yet were each dated 1991. Odd, he thought and swallowed, trying to summon saliva to his parched mouth. He had no time to contemplate such trivial minutiae. He left the coins alone.

  He checked his watch again: 5:57 AM. Jesus! Nydia would be waking up in an hour. To make breakfast. Practice her Lamaze breathing. Sweet, sweet Nydia . . . How could he do this to her?

  If he drove quickly enough, against the morning rush-hour traffic, he might still be able to cross the Brooklyn Bridge to his new Park Slope brownstone, slip in, hit the couch, and pretend that he got home late. If he could pull that off, his alibi would be solid.

  Then later, on the way to work, he could dump the bloody evidence. He knew exactly where to get rid of it, too, where no one would ever discover it. But first he had to get home before Nydia awakened.

  Get away, he told himself.

  Dr. Hector Perez removed the convention n
ame tag from the lapel of his jacket. Then he picked up the pillowcase with the bloody sheets and the towel he had used to wash himself clean. He made one more inventory of the room, certain that no trace of him was left. He opened the door with a Kleenex and popped his head out into the hallway. Way down the corridor he saw the cart of a Hotel St. Claire maid, but no one was visible.

  He stepped out into the hall, hurried to the fire stairs, and, head bowed, took the five flights to the basement and left through an employees entrance, like just one more Hispanic hotel worker.

  Perez again checked his watch: 6:01 AM.

  2

  Bad night in the steel drum.

  “Gonna install a tollbooth in your hole and charge for joyrides, you cop motherfucker,” came a long shout from down the deafening cellblock. The other cons responded with the ceaseless banging of the steel.

  As the cellblock cons continued their all-night jive, Bobby Emmet finished push-up number five hundred and twenty-one and realized that that was one for every day he’d been inside. One for every day he was separated from his fourteen-year-old daughter, Maggie. One for every day he did not know of the true fate of Dorothea Dubrow, the woman he adored, the woman he was convicted of murdering, for which he had been sentenced to fifteen to life.

  Bobby Emmet, once proud chief investigator for the Manhattan district attorney’s office, was now a cop in the can, pig in a steel blanket: Wallkill State Correction Facility, his fifth joint in eighteen months. Had been here, what, three weeks? Took the mutts three days to learn he was an ex-cop. Then the threats, taunts, and the banging of the steel started. Solitary, twenty-three-hour-a-day lockdown, one daily hour of exercise for a walk to the “car wash” for a shower.

  His only recourse was the exercises, dropping to his hands and tippy-toes and starting another set of pushups, fifty reps at a clip until he’d done a thousand, every morning for the last year and a half. At the rate of a thousand push-ups a day, Bobby figured out that if he did only the minimum fifteen years of his sentence, he would do 5,475,000 jailhouse push-ups. Ditto sit-ups. In the past year and a half he’d done 521,000 of each.

  Soon they’d slide breakfast under the cell door.

  Before lunch he’d do a thousand sit-ups. And, before dinner, five hundred towel chins, done with his single white towel looped through the upper bars. If the animals banged the steel all night, he did more exercises, squats and isometrics, backward push-ups on the edge of his eighteen-inch concrete bunk to build the triceps and shoulders and forearms. Then more sit-ups and push-ups until sheer muscular exhaustion let him collapse into mindless sleep.

  Last night, the exercises had helped him keep control. The mutts had been extremely hostile, banging on their cell doors, slamming shivs, spoons, cups, shoes, skulls, anything heavy, against their eight-by-five concrete-and-steel cell doors. They worked in organized, rotating shifts. One crew would scream for an hour about how they were gonna take Bobby’s bunghole. Then that crew would take a nod and another would pick up the banging and the mockery, screaming about Emmet the Faggot who was gonna get his throat cut in tomorrow’s lockout and how they would all take turns fucking him in the neck. Then that chorus would nod and another crew would pick up the banging rant about castrating Bobby and mailing his balls home to his teenage daughter.

  By morning, he’d also done an extra six hundred sit-ups, four hundred leg raises, two hundred towel chins. Keeping count always kept his mind off the screaming and the banging of the steel. When he was busy counting exercises, he maintained an inner control. He never let the mutts make him lose count. And in doing his extreme daily workout regime for eighteen months, his body had become rock hard, rippling and in control.

  Still, it had been the worst night since Bobby Emmet had arrived in Wallkill. He didn’t mind the threats so much, even though he knew threats were often carried out. Solitary confinement had not prevented the determined cons in various joints from getting to Bobby during his one-hour-a-day lockout. To date he’d been stabbed twice, had his arm broken once, and received a concussion, all while he was being escorted by uniformed prison hacks to the car wash.

  He could deal with the threats, the assaults, and the tedium. The part that bothered him was the banging of the steel. The endless vibrating, tooth-rattling, mind-numbing banging of the steel that reminded him all night long that he was living like one of them, one of the mutts, one of the skells he had spent a career taking off the street and vacuum-packing into steel drums like this.

  The banging of the steel was the heartbeat of prison life. And Bobby Emmet could never get used to it like the other cons because, unlike them, he did not belong here. The mutts not only accepted the banging, they almost viewed it as a defiant celebration of the life that led them here. This was the tune to which they danced; what the Buddhists called the “om” of their universe.

  Yet there was a silver lining to all this; as long as Bobby was bothered by it, he knew he was different. Not one of them. Not a skell, rapist, cold-blooded killer; not a human predator or a scavenger. Bobby had always worked, prided himself in never walking away from a job until it was finished. He was more interested in the intrinsic value of a job well done, done to the very best of his ability, than in the extrinsic monetary rewards. Or the glory of medals or pomp and circumstance. Bobby had always taken pride in protecting the law-abiding taxpayers who maintained a semblance of civilization.

  But the noise also endlessly reminded Bobby of what separated him from his daughter, Maggie. And from those who had framed him for killing Dorothea Dubrow. Both of whom he would have laid down his life for. That impotence, that frustration, that bottled-up rage banged home all night long. It was the worst physical burden of doing time.

  He wondered how he would tell the story to a stranger. Would he say that while in the midst of investigating a corrupt private-snoop firm owned and staffed by ex-NYPD cops, Bobby had been framed for murder? That he’d worked for the Manhattan DA’s office? But it was the Brooklyn DA who’d convinced a jury that Bobby had killed Dorothea with a kitchen carving knife in his Brooklyn apartment and then in the night reduced her body to ash in the crematorium of a local cemetery. Even though he had spent every dime he could borrow to hire Moira Farrell, one of the best trial lawyers in Brooklyn, he was tried and convicted of killing Dorothea Dubrow. The whole thing, from arrest to conviction, took a mere seven months, which he spent in solitary at Riker’s Island.

  Since they never found a body, just a pile of ash, Bobby Emmet refused to believe that Dorothea was even dead. But he knew that while he was in jail, he would never be sure about what happened to her.

  Stop, he thought. Stop thinking about death and Dorothea and life in here. He watched the feelers of a large cockroach appear from a crack in the concrete near the ceiling, saw it probe the sour air of the cell. He closed his eyes and conjured Maggie . . . .

  An equally torturous emotional horror was not being able to see his daughter, now fourteen years old. She’d visited Bobby twice, at different jails during the winter and spring school breaks, but he didn’t want her to come anymore. Didn’t like the way the other cons gaped at her now pubescent body. Didn’t want her to see him here in this roach-and-vermin-infested shit hole.

  The separation after the divorce from Maggie’s mother three years ago had been hard enough on the kid. It had devastated all three of them. He and his former wife had once truly loved each other, but life together was never going to work. Connie Mathews Sawyer, his ex-wife, was third-generation rich. The Mathews name was a regular staple of the society pages. Big, inherited cosmetics-industry money. Bobby came from the proud, macho, self-reliant big dreams of the working class. “I’ll make my own money, and I’ll never take a dime from your old man,” was Bobby’s constant refrain whenever Connie said she wanted to move away from Brooklyn, to a big estate near the family compound in Connecticut. Maybe Bobby made less money than his father-in-law’s chauffeur, but no way was he going to live on what he considered a Mathews family fr
eeload.

  Instead, they’d bought a small house in Brooklyn and got a normal mortgage at the Dime Savings Bank like everyone else. Bobby’d told Connie that if she wanted to go to work after Maggie was born, to help pay off the mortgage, that was okay with him. Just no handouts.

  They’d married young, against the wishes of Connie’s father, who boycotted the wedding. The gossip pages of the daily tabloids had a field day, with headlines like “THE COP AND THE HEIRESS” or “LIPSTICK AND NIGHTSTICK.”

  Bobby got a kick out of the press at first but soon found them hanging out outside his Brooklyn house, pissing off his working-class neighbors. They’d shoot pictures day and night, concoct fictitious domestic squabbles, spreading their lies in the papers and on tabloid TV. Maggie’s first step and first tooth made news.

  Bobby started hating reporters almost as much as criminals. The publicity made his job increasingly difficult. He had his balls broken constantly on the job, and he transferred from the Harbor Unit, to PAL, to Brooklyn South Narcotics, and finally to the Manhattan DA’s detective squad.

  The marriage was exciting at first, a raucous, rebellious, randy love affair, blessed with a beautiful daughter. But eventually, as they neared their thirties, the marriage proved to be a bad mix of two good people from different worlds, and the parting was a sad, sorrowful, painful truce. They had driven the marriage as far as it could go before running out of gas. All that remained was Maggie, and they weren’t selfish enough to want her to carry a pair of unhappy parents on her back in order to call it a family. So they junked the marriage, promising to remember the good times, still bonded for life by their daughter, who reluctantly moved with Connie to Connecticut and then later to Trump Tower in Manhattan with her new stepfather.

  Bobby and Connie would always remember that the last time they made love, on the night they received their divorce papers, it had been the best ever, each taking enough of the other to try to last a lifetime.