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  “Thanks, Mag,” Bobby said. “And thanks for believing in me.”

  “Know what bothers me, Dad?” Maggie said. “The blood. If it wasn’t Dorothea’s blood in your apartment and your car. And if it wasn’t her body in the crematorium, then whose was it?”

  “That’s the question that put me in jail,” he said.

  Maggie circled her finger up in the air as the computer search was completed. She read from the screen and seemed disappointed. “The white Taurus is a lease job,” Maggie said. “Leased to, get this, the Stone for Governor Campaign, Inc. The address is Fifteen Court Street, Brooklyn.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Bobby whispered with quiet surprise. It wasn’t a DA cop or a paparazzi or one of Lou Barnicle’s Gibraltar Security goons who had followed him from prison and all over the city.

  Maggie packed up her disks and her laptop and slung the backpack over her shoulders. They stepped out onto the sidewalk, and at the corner Bobby put his arm around his daughter’s shoulder. He noticed more than a few people giving him disparaging looks.

  “They think you’re a pedophile.” Maggie laughed.

  He took his arm from around his daughter’s shoulder and angrily shoved his thumbs into his belt. They’d stolen those few months of their lives, he thought, when he could still walk with his kid without him looking like a pervert sugar daddy.

  “Cheer up,” she said. “You’re free.”

  “Not yet,” he said.

  “Is there anything else I can do?” Maggie asked. “Anything on your checklist I can scratch off for you?”

  Bobby smiled and said, “Actually there is. Check the old newspaper clips. I need to know more about Cis Tuzio.”

  “The witch . . .”

  “Yeah,” Bobby said. “Where she lives. Where she shops. Where she went to law school. Where she socializes. Hobbies . . . .”

  “I’ll even find out where she buys those brooms she flies around on,” Maggie said with a smile.

  Bobby smiled again and gave her his new cellular phone number.

  “Dad, I don’t think you should drop me home,” she said. “The press’ll still be there, and you have better things to do.”

  He kissed Maggie on the cheek and checked his new watch, which told him it was almost three o’clock.

  “Go find her, Dad,” Maggie said. “Go find out what happened to Dorothea.”

  13

  “I can’t tell you how thrilled I am you’re out,” John Shine said. “You said you need to ask me about something?”

  “You were assigned to City Hall once,” Bobby said. “What do you know about this guy Stone? Gerald Stone, the councilman who’s running for governor? Is there a file on him?”

  “You don’t need a file,” said John Shine. “I busted him once. Doing ninety on the Brooklyn Bridge. Half-stoned. Bimbo with him. Claimed she was a campaign worker. Now he’s Mr. Family Values.”

  They were in a window booth of The Winning Ticket saloon on Third Avenue in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. Shine had bought the place with the winnings from a three-million-dollar New York State Lottery jackpot. Shine watched Bobby devour a chicken breast sandwich, sliding fries into the right corner of his mouth.

  Shine had ignored the first few remarks from the two half-drunk off-duty cops standing a dozen feet away at the bar of his restaurant. Bobby seemed almost oblivious when the bigger of the two drunken cops, the one wearing a Giants jacket, said, “I guess when you eat with the jigs in the joint, you rewrite the book of etiquette.”

  There were only a few men on the opposite side of the horseshoe bar and a couple at a booth near the back door, out of earshot of the boisterous cops. Bobby noticed just four tables of late-lunch customers in the main dining room, which was separated from the bar by a smoked-glass divider.

  “So Stone has an arrest record?” Bobby asked.

  “I didn’t say that,” Shine said. “The duty captain that night squashed the arrest. The captain was from Staten Island, where Stone was a councilman. It helps to have someone who can get you a zoning variance when you need one, so he let him sleep it off without logging the arrest. Pissed me off. But that’s life in the PD. The bimbo spent most of the night, behind closed doors, in the captain’s office. You get the picture . . . .”

  “Fuck the book of etiquette,” said the short, squat cop at the bar, talking loud enough for Bobby to hear. “Look how he rewrote the book of love. In blood. With a fuckin’ carving knife.”

  “Then charbroiled her,” said the tall one.

  “Pay no attention to them,” a furious Shine said. “ ’Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members.’ ”

  “Emerson,” Bobby said.

  Shine smiled and said, “You actually read the Emerson I sent you?”

  “Well, I sure had the time,” Bobby said, washing down the food with some orange juice. “I read it at least three times. I agree with a lot of what old Ralph Waldo had to say. The stuff that’s not outdated is right on. Some of it is transcendental babble. But, look, getting back to Stone . . .”

  “He was a Vietnam vet, and I never met one of them who didn’t inhale,” Shine said. “He liked broads back then. He’s politically conservative. He’s ambitious.”

  “Why would he single me out?” Bobby asked.

  “Big case,” Shine said. “High profile. Votes.”

  “There are other big cases,” Bobby said. “Why would he have someone tailing me?”

  The two cops at the bar were getting louder. “I hear his nickname upstate was Officer Bobby Bunghole,” said the tall cop and they both broke up laughing like a pair of cartoon magpies. Shine looked at Bobby across the butcher-block table and said, “You don’t have to listen to this garbage in my place. I can still personally eighty-six two Cro-Magnons like them, bad back or not.”

  Bobby stopped Shine when he started to get up to deal with the drunken cops.

  “I’m used to it, John,” Bobby said. “And believe me, I’ve heard worse. Think what the church said about Emerson after his speech about every man’s individual divinity at Harvard. He wasn’t invited back for years.”

  Shine laughed and settled back in his seat, his face a twisted grimace from the four herniated back disks he’d suffered several years before, wrestling on a rooftop with a crack addict.

  It didn’t seem to bother him that the perp later walked and made half a million dollars in a title fight. Or that Shine had been in a back brace ever since. He’d done what he was paid to do, and the injury was part of the job.

  Bobby had admired Shine, twelve years his senior, since the days he’d taught Bobby the ropes. Taught him how to win friends in the precinct streets by walking a beat with confidence rather than a swagger. How to finesse brass with a genuine inquiry about the welfare of his wife and kids. How to get a confession from a perp with a hero sandwich and a pack of smokes faster than a beating. How to maintain your dignity among the lying, cheating, corrupt cops by remembering you didn’t take this job to become rich or to maim people.

  “I’ve worked almost every detail on the job,” Shine had said one day long ago when Bobby was a rookie, as they drove in a sector car through the violent and racially strained streets of the 71st Precinct in Crown Heights. It was a lecture on policing Bobby would never forget. About how Shine had worked everywhere from Harbor to Aviation to Vice, the U.N., Narcotics, Bunco, Organized Crime. “I pulled duty at City Hall under Beame and Koch and Dinkins, worked presidential motorcades, walked a beat, did community relations,” Shine had said. “I learned in one of my first details, a post outside the United Nations, that you couldn’t hit anyone without the possibility of causing an international incident. Treat everyone like they were a diplomat and you wouldn’t get in trouble. From guarding mayors and presidents, you learn that the citizen should have just as much protection, because these guys work for the citizens. And as Emerson said, ‘Pay every debt as if God wrote the bill.’ ”

  Shine was a tall, elegant-lookin
g man with the long, strong tapered body of a swimmer and the clear-thinking, focused, predatory mind of a hunter. He had wrinkles around his eyes from many years of sun, sea, and laughing. But in the two years Bobby had been away, pain had bitten even deeper lines in his face.

  The NYPD brass hated him because he was a maverick, and women loved him for the same reason. But John Shine was rarely with the same woman twice. Ever since the death of his wife and kid early in his police career, whenever Bobby or anyone else asked him about remarrying, John Shine’s response was always the same: “I’ve already had the one great love of my life.”

  Bobby knew that Shine’s wife and kid had disappeared while sailing one stormy day off Montauk Point, and the cop had never forgiven himself for not stopping them from going out that day. A grieving sadness burdened the man. So it was good to see him active, Bobby thought, with a successful saloon partially filling the void in his life.

  “I hear even the guards wouldn’t take care of him up there,” the big cop at the bar said, referring to Bobby. “Knew he was a guy who ratted on his own kind . . .”

  Shine made another move toward the two obnoxious cops at the bar. Again, Bobby grabbed his hand, motioned with his eyes for him to sit back down in the booth.

  “Not worth it,” Bobby said.

  “These bastards . . .”

  “It’s good I know where I stand,” Bobby said softly. “Let them talk. Assholes might wind up saying something I need to know.”

  “I miss the action of the job, Bobby, but I don’t miss the ignoramuses,” Shine said.

  “Relax, John,” Bobby said.

  Shine took a small white tablet from a pill box and washed it down with a drink of plain ice water, grimacing.

  “You okay?” Bobby asked.

  “This back of mine is like living with a Siamese twin who hates my guts,” said Shine.

  “What do the doctors say?”

  “ ‘Get used to it.’ ” Shine chuckled dryly.

  “Why didn’t you ever put in for three-quarters?” Bobby asked. “If anyone ever deserved it, it’s you.”

  Bobby already knew that Shine had too much pride for what he had always called the “police hero fund.”

  “Because it’s for real heroes,” Shine said. “Not for guys like me who get knocked around a little by a high-risk job. Especially not for dust mites like them. I hear them talking about getting on three-quarters all the time, like it was a lifelong ambition.”

  Shine again nodded to the two cops who were bent over their piece of the horseshoe-shaped bar, laughing uproariously now, as the bartender pulled them two fresh mugs of beer.

  “Not for shitheads who abuse the system,” Shine continued, the rough street cop occasionally surfacing with the anger. “Three-quarters was designed for people who simply can’t work anymore. Guys paralyzed by a bullet in the spine; men crippled and maimed. Me, I can still work. I don’t need a cripple’s pension so long as I can fend for myself.”

  The big cop belched in John Shine’s general direction as he caught the tail end of his tirade.

  “They’re part of the Lou Barnicle crew?” Bobby asked, nodding toward the two giggling cops.

  “Not yet,” Shine said. “Farm team. But you don’t need me to tell you how it works. Soon as they get three-quarters, they’ll probably go to work for Barnicle. That’s the routine. Work ten, twelve years on NYPD, take the first injury you get, put in their three-quarters papers. If they’re lucky enough to get it, they go to work for Barnicle, and between the pension and the salary, and the SSI, if you work off the books, you’re making more than a deputy inspector.”

  “I was half-looking into this racket when I was framed for Dorothea’s murder,” Bobby said. “I think she’s still alive . . . .”

  “You know what the chances of that are, Bobby. Slim and none.”

  “I’m not so sure,” Bobby said. “But now, the day I get out of jail, a car from Stone’s campaign starts tailing me. You don’t think he’s personally involved in this pension scam, do you?”

  “That’s a stretch,” Shine said with a laugh. “But I can’t name one retired member of NYPD brass I ever worked under who isn’t collecting three-quarters. Almost every former deputy inspector. Going back to Chief Jackson, who worked a Rolling Stones concert at Shea Stadium and claimed he got too close to the massive speakers during ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ and it ruptured his eardrum. He was making a hundred and ten thousand a year when he put in his three-quarters papers. With special bonuses for every year over twenty years he served on the force, he was rubber-stamp approved for a one-hundred-and-seventeen-thousand-dollars-a-year pension, tax free, for life. All for being verbally assaulted by Mick Jagger.”

  “That’s obscene,” Bobby said.

  “Yeah,” Shine said. “But I’d say trying to link it to Gerald Stone is off the radar screen.”

  From the bar the big cop in the Giants jacket stopped laughing and roared: “The broad was some piece of fucking ass, though.”

  The fat little cop, dressed in a red jacket, white shirt, blue pants, who Bobby thought looked like a U.S. mailbox, nodded and said, “They say the broad was a foreigner, so I wonder what fuckin’ lingo she pleaded for her life in.”

  Bobby couldn’t stop Shine this time as he leaped from the booth to the bar, forgetting his pain, grabbing the big cop by his jacket, twisting him to a half-prone position, and yanking him across the floor of the bar toward the front door.

  The customers froze at the outbreak of the commotion; the bartender was literally shaking, two glasses clinking together in his hands. Bobby quickly rose and glared at the short, fat cop, who was making a tentative move toward Shine’s blind side. He took one look at Bobby Emmet and then made a quick dash out the back door, leaving his money on the bar and the fate of his drinking buddy in question.

  A waitress opened the front door for Shine, and he hauled the big cop out onto the sidewalk like the evening trash. He fought for air as Shine lifted him to his feet and rammed his back into a parking meter. The other cop now circled over to help up his big pal.

  “I ever see either one of you mutts in here again, I’ll slap your dirty mouths,” Shine said.

  He turned from them, walked inside, smiled, and winked at Bobby. The patrons returned to their lunches, the bartender and the waitresses went back to work.

  “You okay, John?” Bobby asked, half-amused. Shine didn’t give a shit who you were; he feared no one.

  “That’s the smegma they let wear badges today,” Shine said, as he groaned into his seat in the booth. “I’d rather pin a star on a fucking shoemaker.”

  “You haven’t lost a step,” Bobby said, smiling.

  “My back is exploding,” Shine whispered. “If that galoot had fought back, he would have killed me. Makes you wonder what the hell he’s going to do when he’s confronted by some ghetto kid who is fighting for his freedom and his life?”

  “No wonder they want out on three-quarters,” Bobby said.

  “Perfect Lou Barnicle candidates,” Shine said. “He’ll morph them into square badges, rent-a-cops, guarding colleges and shopping malls while they also collect three-quarters. As a matter of fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if that big ape parlays the bang I just gave him into a pension. End of tomorrow’s tour, he claims he wrestled with a perp on duty, messed up his back, takes a sick-out, pays off some corrupt quack for a bogus report, and puts in his papers.”

  “What do you think of Barnicle?” Bobby asked.

  “Unfortunately, he’s my neighbor down in Windy Tip—bay-front houses about a hundred yards apart,” Shine said. ‘The whole peninsula is balls deep in cops now. Retired, still on the job. See, it’s in the city, so you get the dirt cheap property taxes. But it’s got zero crime.”

  “And zero minorities,” Bobby said.

  “For god sakes, don’t start with that racist-closed-community routine,” Shine said. “Yeah, it’s a white neighborhood. Like East Hampton and Southampton, where all the mill
ionaire liberals flee in the summer. You don’t see them going down Coney do you? Yeah, Windy is white; just like Harlem is black. But it isn’t that sinister. Judges, politicians, businesspeople have summer homes there, too. Cops just happen to gravitate to it in flocks. I think it has to do with the sea. Cops like boats to get away from it all, to unwind from the job on the wild blue yonder. At least that’s why I originally bought there. And to be near my wife and kid . . . the ocean is their grave.”

  He quietly ate another pain pill and washed it down with his drink.

  “I have nothing against the place,” Bobby said. “But there is a mind-set there, a xenophobia, a fear of outsiders. Security gates, private cops—they do everything but take a blood test to let a visitor in. The people there are afraid of anyone who doesn’t wear blue for a living.”

  “There’s some truth to that,” Shine said. “Even the rookies spend summers there in rented bungalows, hanging out in a saloon Barnicle owns called Central Booking. Subtle, no? But Barnicle, as menacing as he tries to be, is really just a big windbag now. Full of himself. He had a rep on the job for being a bully, smashing guys’ faces into walls, shoving perps’ heads into toilets filled with shit and piss. Giving out crummy duty, passing good cops over for promotions. A fascist streak, unless you kissed his ass and licked his boots. He took a perverted delight in beating prisoners when they were handcuffed, and you already know my theory on cops who beat criminals . . .”

  “Yeah,” Bobby said. “They take petty criminals and turn them into cop killers. You taught me that the first week we worked together, John. But you let the Barnicle crew hang out here, too?”

  “Yeah, they drink at the bar, mostly. But Barnicle eats here at least three times a week in the dining room. In fact, about an hour ago, his lady friend, Sandy, called for a seven o’clock reservation. Oddballs. She always arrives first. Then he arrives twenty minutes later with the two goons, like the pope. They pay cash money, usually behave themselves. Sometimes they fight. About that cute kid of theirs. But Barnicle’s crew knows I don’t tolerate locker-room antics in my place. I figure the best way to know what these assholes are up to is to have them around.”