3 Quarters Page 11

  “Keep your enemies close,” Bobby said, “as Michael Corleone said.”

  “Actually it was Machiavelli who said it first,” Shine said. “But the guy you should talk to about Barnicle and your case is Tom Larkin. You know the cranky old house mouse from the seven deuce?”

  “Yeah, I had him on my must-see list.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Shine said. “Well, I hear that Larkin greedily hoards certain critical information about your case that he’s not putting out for general consumption. He knows something about everyone, old Tom does. He’s a paranoid old bugger. Precisely what he knows about you, if anything, and who he’s told it to, remains a mystery. But I hear rumors. I don’t believe in rumors, but I do believe in checking them out. And I’m willing to bet he talks to you. He always liked you, always believed in your innocence. And I know they never meshed very well when Barnicle was his commanding officer. Talk to Larkin; probe him, oil him, see what he knows.”

  “I will,” Bobby said. “Remember, John, I never had a chance to investigate my own case. I was inside the whole time without bail before trial. So, I intend to talk to everyone. That’s another reason I’m here. I wanted you to be one of the first to know that I think Barnicle and his people are somehow involved in Dorothea’s disappearance and my frame. If I have to get down and dirty with this prick, I don’t want to put you in the middle. So if I avoid you, or seem aloof, it’s only because I don’t want to contaminate you with any of this. It’s my problem. I’ll deal with it.”

  “You crazy?” Shine said, looking playfully offended. “You’re my friend. ‘The only way to have a friend is to be one.’ ”

  “Again with Emerson,” Bobby said.

  “He is my North Star,” Shine said. “I want to help you, Bobby. I mean, running a restaurant is fine, distracting, a livelihood. But I miss the juice of the job, working a case, mixing it up. You need me, you call me. Or else I’m insulted. In fact, anytime you want, you should come down to my house on Windy Tip. Hang out, swim, get some sun on your jailhouse face. Bounce things off me. I’d appreciate being needed now and then. ‘Make yourself necessary to someone.’ ”

  “Thanks,” Bobby said, shaking Shine’s hand goodbye. “I might take you up on that.”

  14

  As Bobby approached his car, he saw a familiar, impatient black man leaning against the front fender, looking as if Bobby owed him money.

  Bobby was no longer a member of NYPD, but years of fearing Internal Affairs cops had instilled a lingering paranoia in him. The uneasiness returned when he saw Forrest Morgan of LAB waiting for him, looking smug and cocky.

  “Hello, Forrest,” Bobby said.

  Morgan grunted. He was a big man, and Bobby recalled the first time he ever saw him, across the ring in the NYPD heavyweight championship ten years earlier. Morgan had looked as if he were hammered together in a blacksmith’s shop. His bald black head sat on top of an eighteen-inch neck, like a cannonball that wouldn’t fit into the barrel. In the decade since they fought the last of four ring wars—two wins each, all decisions—Morgan had only added about ten pounds, which he wore on his chest like armor plating. His dark polyester suit was shining cheaply in the sun.

  Bobby’s fights with Morgan had made Bobby a much better fighter. Some said they’d pounded each other into departmental legend. After fighting him, Bobby was never intimidated by anyone else, ever again.

  “We better talk,” Morgan said.

  “How’d you find me so soon?” Bobby asked.

  “You’re like a fucking homing pigeon,” Morgan said. “I knew as soon as you were set free you’d fly home to your trainer.”

  “You always were a thinking cop,” Bobby said.

  “Half the dirty cops in Brooklyn flock to this place to spend their dirty money,” Morgan said. “Why not you? I sit on this place at least once a month.”

  “Anything big?”

  “Not as big as you,” Morgan said. “Yet. I saw that little fracas with those two asshole cops. Daniels and Lebeche. Dirty as earthworms. That figures; you’re out one day and already you’re consorting with a couple felons waiting to happen.”

  ‘Jesus, Forrest, it’s always so sweet to see you.”

  “It ain’t nice to see you,” Morgan said. “Never was. Never will be. Reason I’m here is I know you know something I wanna know.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like when you went in the can, you were looking into a pension scam.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah,” Morgan said. “I figure, now you’re out, still insisting you’re innocent, you’ll be going right back to looking at this scam.”

  “And you want what I find,” Bobby said.

  “On a sesame-seed bun, extra pickle, special sauce,” Morgan said.

  “You had eighteen months to look where I left off.”

  “But, see, maybe it’s because I’m the wrong flavor that I don’t get assigned to big cases like this,” Morgan said. “Instead they got me doing integrity tests on rookie brothers. Going after black beat cops taking skim from weed dealers.”

  “And you can’t get any promotions doing that,” Bobby said.

  “That’s right,” Morgan said.

  “And you need some promotions to hike your own pension when you retire,” Bobby said.

  “My bride, my kids, would appreciate that,” Morgan said.

  “And you’d like to sort of stumble into something big,” Bobby said, nodding his head.

  “Well, I wouldn’t be a very honorable cop if I looked the other way, now would I?” Morgan said. “I also know that now that you’re out of the job, you don’t have the juice you need to investigate this sort of scam.”

  “And you’re offering to help me if I help you,” Bobby said.

  “I do know that you have a tendency to attract mutts. Like those two that John Shine just eighty-sixed. But I know and you know, they’re guppies. I want some big game fish, ones I can pose with for pictures. Front page, News and the Post type pictures. Hear what I’m saying?”

  “You’re looking out for you,” Bobby said.

  “Yes, I am,” Morgan said. “Only way this face is getting promoted in my bureau is by posing with something big.”

  “Why should I help you?”

  “Because if you don’t, maybe I’ll help the DA put you right back where you just came from,” Morgan said.

  “Still trash talking, Forrest? At your age?” Bobby turned away, smiling thinly, and noticed John Shine was watching their exchange through the front window of The Winning Ticket.

  “Just making myself clear, Bobby.”

  “Well, your mouth didn’t scare me when we fought, Forrest. It’s not gonna scare me now. I didn’t like the way IAB did business when I was on the job. With fear, entrapment, threatening to expose marital infidelities, intimidation. I like it even less now. So catch your own fucking fish, Forrest. You ain’t using me for chum.”

  Bobby pulled open the driver’s door and got into his Jeep.

  “One way or the other,” Forrest Morgan said. “I’m gonna know what you know. Just thought you should know it. I will see you around, Bobby.”

  “Not if I see you first,” Bobby said.

  15

  The encounter with Forrest Morgan made Bobby ten minutes late for his rendezvous with Tom Larkin. The old cop had written Bobby in jail to tell him that if he ever got out on an appeal, he should come see him. Said he had some information he wouldn’t dare put into a letter that would be screened by prison authorities. Bobby had regarded the letter as the ramblings of a well-meaning but out-of-touch old cop.

  But now Johnnie Shine said he’d also heard on the tom-toms that Larkin knew something he was keeping close to the vest. Things were getting interesting.

  After Bobby parked the Jeep on Forty-second Street in Brooklyn, outside Sunset Park, Bobby and Larkin shook hands and exchanged a few minutes of catch-up small talk. But Larkin soon noticed that Bobby was distracted, looking intensely at the passing tr
affic.

  “What the hell are you looking for?” Larkin asked.

  Bobby told Larkin about the tail. Larkin handed Bobby his blue uniform hat, squatted, and began exploring under the bumpers and fenders of Bobby’s Jeep.

  “Let’s have a look,” Larkin said.

  Larkin was sixty-one, a tall, lanky man who moved with a sturdy durable grace, as if he were made of bamboo. He looked a little like Abe Lincoln with a shave, all droopy, sad eyes and strong pronounced jaw. He rubbed his swollen jaw where his lower right molar was giving him hell. He’d already told Bobby he’d been at the dentist that morning and would have to go in for the second stage of a root canal the following Thursday. He dreaded it but was eager to have it finished. He felt foolish still getting major dental work done at his age, but there was finally a special lady friend in his life. Rose was a widow and Larkin’s first girlfriend since Eleanor died five years ago, after twenty-eight years of marriage. Rose had urged him to start taking better care of himself because she wanted to keep him around.

  “What’re you looking for?” Bobby asked.

  “A transmitter,” Larkin said. “We used them all the time when I worked Intelligence. You could even track a gypsy cabdriver on a Saturday night with a good bug.”

  “I hear you might have some new information for me,” Bobby said.

  “Yeah,” Larkin said, standing up and walking to the other side of the Jeep. “I think your lawyer, Gleason, even though he can be a colossal asshole, is onto something about them never really producing a body.”

  “Why’s that, Tom?”

  “You have to try to see a guy named Carlos Orosco at the crematorium in Evergreen Cemetery,” Larkin said, flaking off rust and caked mud from the wheel guards of the Jeep as he searched. “I think you’ll find what he has to say very interesting.”

  “Like what kind of interesting stuff?”

  “Like maybe it wasn’t Dorothea he found in the furnace that night,” Larkin said.

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “He can explain it a lot better and with more convincing details than I can,” he said. “He’s a guy you gotta get on the stand.”

  “Will he testify?”

  “I think so,” Larkin said. “You have to reassure him. Work him. I don’t have to tell you how to convince a witness to talk. I don’t even know if his testimony will help this late in the game. But you should talk to him.”

  From inside the park Bobby could hear the splashing and shouting of children in the big public swimming pool. Most of the shouts were in Spanish. When he was a kid, it was all Irish and Italian. Bobby remembered learning to swim here, the chlorine-and-cement equivalent of Coney Island. A city kid’s summer paradise.

  “I got my first hunch something was wrong when they closed your case too soon for my liking,” Larkin said. “Stopped investigating too fast. Like they were sealing a tomb instead of closing a case.”

  “Besides Carlos, you find out anything new that I should know?” Bobby asked, eager for information.

  “Mostly hunches,” Larkin said.

  “What hunches, Tom?” Bobby asked. He’d been locked away from a normal flow of information for so long he felt disoriented and ignorant about his own case.

  “Since they made me the house mouse, I’ve become pretty damned good with that PD computer. Surfing around, I’ve noticed some things about a few people that don’t seem kosher. Things that give me agita. I search for the cure in the old case files.”

  “Things that have to do with my case?” Bobby asked.

  “Maybe,” Larkin said, still rummaging under the car, his hands getting dirty. “I tried to get Brooklyn homicide to look into a few things. But I might as well have been asking to open up the freaking Kennedy assassination . . . .”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as you say your girl was from the Ukraine?”

  “Yeah,” Bobby said.

  Larkin just nodded. Then he shook his head, looked at the blue sky, and continued to search under the Jeep.

  “Is that significant?” Bobby asked.

  “It could be,” Larkin said, crab-walking toward the back of the Jeep. “But I won’t point fingers until I get more information. I need to see if my hunches pan out. Until they do, I refuse to speculate about something that might ruin someone’s reputation. I’m sure you’re sensitive to that.”

  “Big time,” Bobby said. “But you’ll let me know? I still gotta worry about my reputation.”

  “Of course,” Larkin said.

  As Larkin spoke, Bobby spotted a police patrol car creeping their way. It didn’t seem to faze Larkin to be seen with him. In fact, Larkin had wanted to meet in the Kopper Kettle, the diner where all the cops from the 72nd Precinct ate, half-price or free. Larkin nicknamed it the Keystone Kopper Kettle. Bobby had nixed that idea. But Larkin defiantly insisted they meet here near Sunset Park.

  Bobby always felt he could trust Larkin because he’d been a good friend of his father’s, was there with him as a member of the Stakeout Squad on the day Bobby’s father was killed in a shootout.

  “Here it is,” Larkin said, squatting in back of the Jeep, shaking his head and smiling. “The bastards!”

  Bobby helped the older cop to his feet. Larkin was holding a small white microchip transmitter with magnetic backing. It was the size of a quarter.

  “This is how they managed to follow you even after you ditched the tail,” Larkin said. “Jesus Christ, but they’re making these bugs smaller and smaller since I worked the Intelligence Unit. Here I am searching all over creation for it and the bastard has it in plain view, stuck to the bottom corner of your license plate.”

  The police patrol car pulled abreast, windows open, two young uniformed cops sitting in the front seats. The driver wore a name tag that read Caputo. The other cop’s name tag read Dixon. Both obnoxiously chewing gum, they looked out at Larkin and Bobby.

  “Hey, Larkin, they sent us up here looking for you; an emergency,” Caputo said, mocking the older man. “When you mopped the interrogation room before, you missed a spot of yom blood. Sounds like a job for Mighty House Mouse.”

  Dixon broke up laughing. Bobby glared at the two young cops. Larkin glanced briefly at them and then turned back to Bobby, as if the young cops didn’t exist.

  “The PD today is a catch basin for assholes who don’t know what else to do in life,” Larkin said as Bobby handed him a rag from the glove compartment. Larkin wiped his hands as the cop car sat parked next to them, the young cops smiling, radio crackling.

  “It’s become a mere paycheck factory for duncecaps who can’t do plumbing, carpentry, write a song, hit a ball out of the stadium, or pick a stock,” Larkin said. “These assholes don’t join NYPD to become lawmen. They only protect their own asses and serve only their own interests. Most of these clowns don’t even live in the city. They only join for the holidays, unlimited sick days, medical and life insurance, and the credit line. They love the money and the authority of the blue uniform, the nightstick, the siren, and the cherry light. They wallow in the bully power of the gun and badge. But they hate being cops. So all they ever talk about is getting out of the job on the pension.”

  “Hey, yo, pal,” said the cop named Dixon. “Yo, yeah, you, you’re fuckin’ Bobby Emmet, ain’t ya?”

  “Yo, yo-yo, he’s with me,” Larkin said. “Put it on the bulletin board, over the radio if you want. But speak with proper respect when you wear that uniform while addressing a citizen, duncecap. He’s paying your fucking mortgage.”

  Caputo, behind the wheel, leaned across the seat to get a look at Bobby and Larkin.

  The young cops laughed as the radio crackled and blared a “1052.” Bobby knew that meant a domestic dispute. “The non-Caucasians are doing their bit for population control again,” said Dixon. Then the cherry light ignited on the roof of the car and the siren roared. Before they drove off, Bobby attached the electronic tracking device to the back of the police car.

  “That’s what the commu
nity sees as its first hand of government,” Larkin said. “Immature, racist kids with guns and badges and a license to steal.”

  “Some of the older ones aren’t much better,” Bobby said. “The rookies learn it from someone.”

  Larkin took a small bottle of oil of cloves from his pants pocket and rubbed it on his back gums. “Jesus Christ, but this tooth is killing me,” he said. “I can’t wait for next Thursday when he finishes this goddamned root canal. I have to meet Rose at the cemetery that afternoon . . . .”

  “The cemetery?” Bobby said.

  “Well, I still visit Eleanor’s grave, and Rose visits her dead husband’s grave,” Larkin said. “Same hill. It’s where we met. And how I met Carlos. He used to tend the graves before he got promoted to the crematorium two years ago. Tell Carlos I sent you.”

  “I will,” Bobby said.

  “Meanwhile, I have my own hunches that I want to check out. And I gotta get back to work.”

  “Thanks, Tom,” Bobby said, shaking the older man’s long, firm hand.

  “You’re sure Dorothea said she was from the Ukraine?” Larkin said.

  “Positive,” Bobby said.

  Tom Larkin shook his head and looked at the sky again.

  “I hope my hunch is wrong,” he said, and strode like an old-fashioned flatfoot through the streets of his precinct back toward the station house.

  16

  The late afternoon shadows fell over the gothic archways of Evergreen Cemetery. The uniformed security guard at the gate asked Bobby which grave he was going to see. Bobby was momentarily stumped and then said, “Larkin, Eleanor.” The guard punched the name into a computer and waited about ten seconds before the name appeared on the screen. Bobby saw the small red eye of a security camera blinking above the guard.

  “You know where it is?” the guard said.

  “Yeah,” Bobby lied.

  The guard looked at his watch and said, “You got about twenty-two minutes till closing, mister. Between me and you, there’s a fifteen-minute grace period till six-fifteen.”