3 Quarters Page 15

  “I’m on a losing streak,” Herbie said. “Cold dice and slow horses, and the Yanks are in a slump. And I’m not big on cops. What can I say? It’s not like I do drugs or anything. I’m actually a religious guy. But I gamble a little.”

  “Look, my job is to keep you out of trouble until Monday when I surrender you for the pretrial hearing,” Bobby said. “So get packed.”

  Herbie jammed his .44 in his belt and said, “Packed.”

  “Unpack,” Bobby said. “I’m not going anywhere with you while you’re packing a gun because I’m out on bail myself.”

  “For what?”

  “Murder,” Bobby whispered dramatically.

  “Who the fuck are you?”

  Bobby told him, and Herbie shook his head and laughed a big belch of a laugh that sounded like a backed-up toilet. “Leave it to cousin Izzy to send a murder suspect to keep me out of trouble.”

  “Izzy says you have CIA training,” Bobby said, skeptically. “That true?”

  “Cousin Iz told you that?” Herbie said with a blush of pride.

  “Yeah,” Bobby said.

  “It’s true,” he said. “But I didn’t think he’d remember.”

  No wonder the Cold War lasted so long, Bobby thought.

  Herbie pulled on a zippered jacket and hid the .44 under a couch cushion, then went into the kitchen to kiss Aunt Ruth good-bye. She insisted they eat, and Bobby shrugged. He had a bowl of cold cabbage soup, a turkey-salad sandwich on seeded Jewish rye, a dill pickle, cole slaw, and a glass of Cel-Ray soda. Aunt Ruth was a traditionalist. Max Roth would have fainted.

  Bobby thanked her, and then he and Herbie walked to the Jeep. Herbie climbed into the backseat and lay down on the floor. When Bobby climbed into the driver’s seat, a blue Ford Explorer turned the corner and drove slowly past, as if someone was looking around through its black-tinted windows. He pulled away thinking maybe it was nothing, but nothing was nothing anymore in his life.

  “I have to get indoors before sundown,” Herbie said as Bobby drove the car over the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge. “Sabbath.”

  On the Manhattan side of the bridge, Bobby studied his rearview mirror and there, five or six car lengths behind him, was the dark blue Ford Explorer. Bobby didn’t mention it to Herbie, who remained on the floor in the back of the Jeep, grunting occasionally when the car hit a bump or a pothole.

  Bobby drove downtown to Fifty-first Street and, without signaling, made a sudden right-hand turn. After the turn he saw that the Ford Explorer also made a right after about twenty seconds. Bobby made two more unsignaled rights. The Explorer followed the circle. Bobby then accelerated through the intersection at First Avenue, knowing he’d be on a dead-end street. He quickly swung a U-turn and pulled to the curb. Bobby put the Jeep into park.

  “Stay down, Herbie,” Bobby said, and slid out the side door.

  As soon as the Ford Explorer made the left into the cul-de-sac, it came to a full stop, the driver obviously searching for the Jeep. Bobby reached the passenger door of the Explorer and yanked it open. Sandy Fraser screamed, “Bobby, it’s me!”

  Bobby climbed in next to her.

  “Okay, Sandy, maybe you’d like to explain,” Bobby said. “First, how’d you pick up my tail?”

  Sandy pointed to a Wackenhut microwave-beeper surveillance computer mounted into the console between the bucket seats. Orange letters zippered across an illuminated grid on a bright green, nine-inch screen. A flashing blip pinpointed the beep from the bug on Bobby’s Jeep, giving the exact location on a superimposed street map. Across the bottom of the screen the letters also spelled out the exact location: Fifty-second Street East of First Avenue.

  “You think they put only one bug on your car?” Sandy asked with a smirk. “Barnicle runs a snoop shop! This is a company car. The computer tracks you and prints out where you are at all times on the screen. Even if you lose me. I picked you up first outside a health-food restaurant near the Daily News . . . .”

  “Where’s the second bug?” Bobby asked.

  He’d never told her about the first bug that Tom Larkin discovered. First a car rented to the Stone for Governor Campaign, he thought, now Lou Barnicle was tailing him. They were obviously in cahoots. But how? Why?

  “It’s the letter O in ‘Cherokee’ on the side of your Jeep,” Sandy said. “I hear Barnicle and his stooges talking . . .”

  “Okay, Sandy. Thanks for the information. Now, why the hell are you following me?”

  “I thought about what you said yesterday,” Sandy said, still parked in the center of the dead-end street.

  “About Dorothea?” Bobby said.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I feel bad because if it wasn’t for me, you probably wouldn’t have gotten involved with her. In all this.”

  “You sent me the anonymous letter about the three-quarters racket, didn’t you?” Bobby asked.

  “I was three months pregnant; I was scared; I wanted out,” Sandy said. “I thought maybe you could have him arrested.”

  “Who, Barnicle?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What was it you wanted to tell me?”

  “It’s more than I thought it was,” she said. “It’s more than a few bad cops. It’s huge. Every Tuesday they collect hundreds of thousands of dollars. Sometimes over a million. And because of me, you started asking questions and that got you in trouble, and poor Dorothea . . .”

  “What about her?” Bobby said, making a mental note of the Tuesday collection day at Gibraltar Security.

  “She never told you the real truth about who she was, did she?”

  “No, I don’t think she did,” Bobby said.

  “Bobby, I’m afraid of these people,” Sandy said. “You see, Lou Barnicle isn’t the father of my baby. Just like Dorothea isn’t some ordinary immigrant student . . .”

  Bobby looked at her oddly, and then suddenly both doors of the Explorer were pulled open. Two uniformed cops, one standing on either side, stood facing them with guns drawn.

  “Nobody fucking move,” shouted the first cop.

  “Or I’ll blow your head off,” shouted the second.

  “What the hell is this?” Bobby demanded.

  “This car is reported stolen,” said the first cop. “There’s an all-points bulletin out on a Sandra Fraser . . . .”

  “I have the registration,” Sandy said. “Can I show it to you without you making me a DOA, chrissakes?”

  “Go ahead,” shouted the first cop. Sandy searched in her bag for her wallet.

  “Who the hell are you?” the other cop asked Bobby.

  “Saint Christopher,” Bobby said. “The woman was lost and I was giving her directions.”

  “Directions on what, wiseass?” the second cop asked. “How to suck your joint? How much she charge you?”

  “You must have me mixed up with your wife,” Sandy said, her nostrils flaring in anger.

  The first cop looked at the registration and walked to the rear of the Explorer, where he and the other cop conferred. One cop spoke into a handheld radio.

  “We need to talk some more, Sandy,” Bobby whispered. He told her to leave a message on the answering machine at Izzy Gleason’s office in Manhattan.

  “Barnicle and his crew want you dead, Bobby,” Sandy said. “I’ll be next. Or my kid. These people make adults like Dorothea disappear. How hard do you think it’ll be to hide a baby?”

  The two cops returned, one on each side of the car.

  “Ma’am,” the first cop said. “I think there’s just a mix-up. But we’d like you to come with us to the precinct. Your husband is looking for you. We have our orders to bring you in, and the captain will straighten all this out. You can ride with me, and my partner will drive your vehicle back to the station house.”

  She turned to Bobby and whispered, “See what I mean? He makes a few calls to people he knows on the PD, they put out an APB, and he finds me.”

  “Okay, buddy,” the other cop said to Bobby from the other side of the car. “
You can hit the road.”

  Bobby stepped out of the Explorer and watched Sandy walk to the patrol car with the first cop as the other cop climbed behind the wheel of the Explorer. Sandy looked at Bobby with a desperate longing.

  Bobby walked back to the Jeep and bent to examine the raised “Cherokee” letters embedded into the side of the car. The letter O had been pried off and replaced with a magnetic, round bug, just like the one on the license plate. Bobby pulled it off, placed it under the heel of his boot, crushed it. He got back into the Jeep. Herbie hadn’t moved from the floor of the backseat.

  “The cops are closing in,” Herbie said. “They wanna do their ‘Let’s-smack-the-shit-out-of-the-Hebe-on-Sabbath’ routine with me. Beat me over the head with an Iranian phone book . . .”

  “It was my problem, Herbie,” Bobby said. “Not yours.”

  Barnicle and Stone, Bobby thought Barnicle and Stone . . .

  22

  SATURDAY

  “I’ll say this for Herbie,” Bobby said to his brother, Patrick, as they sat outdoors on the deck of The Fifth Amendment late the next night, slicing into a pair of perfectly broiled sirloins, nibbling pasta and salad on the side, “he can cook like a fireman and he sure isn’t afraid of a little hard work.”

  “This is the best meal I’ve eaten since Dorothea . . .” Patrick began, and then caught himself in mid-sentence. “Sorry . . .”

  “Don’t worry,” Bobby said. “She’ll be with us again.”

  Bobby and Patrick ate in reflective silence for a moment, watching Herbie in the kitchen cooking and cleaning in a fog of smoke and steam. To thank Bobby for stashing him on board, after sundown, Herbie had spent three solid hours domesticizing The Fifth Amendment. He scrubbed the deck, polished the railings. Washed her portholes and swept and hand-shampooed the rugs. Herbie even fixed the shower so that it now sprayed like a hurricane.

  Herbie had given Bobby a shopping list, and by the time Bobby returned from the twenty-four-hour supermarket, Herbie had the kitchen so sparkling clean it could have passed a health department inspection without a bribe.

  Patrick had showed up a half hour later, after Herbie had prepared pasta shells with broccoli and cauliflower florets, wedges of plum tomatoes, garlic, and shredded carrots. He tossed together a tricolored salad of arugula, endive, and radicchio with virgin olive oil and balsamic vinegar, flavored with freshly minced garlic and lemon pepper. He served Bobby and Patrick a pair of sizzling medium-well steaks, all presented with the pride of a professional.

  “Where the hell did you learn how to cook?” Bobby asked.

  Herbie looked at him oddly and said, “You already know I have CIA training.”

  Bobby looked at him for a confused moment.

  “Culinary Institute of America,” Herbie said slowly. “Hyde Park, upstate New York. CIA is considered the best cooking school in the country. But they threw me out after eighteen months for selling school food cheap to local restaurants to cover bets.”

  “That CIA,” Bobby had said, blinking. It now made sense that he and Gleason were somehow related. Nothing was as it seemed.

  Herbie ate his own food standing up in the kitchen as he prepared a chicken soup from scratch for the next day. “Wait’ll you see what great chum the chicken soup scum makes when I scoop it off after it sits overnight,” Herbie said. “I’ll bag us a couple of striped bass . . .”

  When Patrick had arrived, the brothers had hugged, patting each other’s backs and looking into each other’s eyes, smiling. The Emmets weren’t big on tears. The old man had always said to save them for funerals. The last time they had cried was at his. Bobby had not yet wept for Dorothea because he refused to believe she was dead.

  After embracing, Bobby had held his kid brother at arm’s length. He saw his mother’s soft blue eyes and his father’s high, strong cheekbones, a short burst of dirty blond hair and a perpetual smile on his good-humored face. Patrick wore a PAL windbreaker that covered the .38 service revolver tucked into a pair of faded jeans.

  To break the silence, Bobby thanked Patrick for getting Gleason to take his case.

  “I just hope I didn’t create a Frankenstein,” Patrick said.

  “The Gleason payback promises to be the longest bitch on record,” Bobby said. “But it beats the shit out of time. Anyway, how’s the job?”

  “Fine,” he said. “In the PAL, I’m around kids, troubled kids with real-life problems most of the time. I have a badge and a gun, but I don’t chase bad guys across rooftops.”

  “Anyone breaking your balls about me?”

  “Some,” Patrick said. “I won’t lie to you. Enough people have done that to you. But nothing I can’t handle. Heard you already rattled Barnicle’s cage. True?”

  Bobby told him about his visit to Gibraltar Security.

  “I heard about most of it already,” Patrick said. “It’s on the tom-toms that you’re out looking to settle a score, blaming him. Careful, he still has a lot of friends on the job.”

  “Yeah, waiting to get out on three-quarters to work for him.”

  “I’d love to catch Barnicle at whatever his game is,” Patrick said. “Let me work with you on this in my time off, Bobby.”

  “No,” Bobby said. “I can’t let you risk going down with me if this doesn’t work out. Mom would never forgive me.”

  “I’ll never forgive you if you don’t I’m no trained investigator. But I still have a legal badge and gun. And the old man would have wanted it that way, too. Family sticking together was one of his biggest Irish cornball mottoes.”

  Bobby said, “His actual quote was, ‘A family has to stick together like shit to a blanket.’ ”

  “It might be crude, but I happen to agree with him. I’m your goddamned brother, Bobby. I’m not the little squirt you helped with his English homework and had to babysit for on Saturday nights when you’d rather have been out with the chicks. I’m a grown man, a cop, your blood. I’d die for you, like you would for me. Who else can you trust as much as me?”

  Bobby looked Patrick deep in the eyes and nodded. Family was a very small army that stood between you and the rest of the world, and when you were at war, you enlisted the troops. Unlike hired help, they took the battle personally. There was no other adult on earth Bobby could trust more. “Okay,” Bobby said. “You can start by finding out some stuff for me.”

  “Name it,” Patrick said with a smile.

  “There’s an assistant medical examiner named Franz in Brooklyn,” Bobby said. “He’s out of town until next week sometime. Find out when. Also what his hours are. What time he takes lunch. He’s a weird little guy, as I remember from my Brooklyn South days. Find out if he’s a Tuzio flunky. Is he a registered Democrat or Republican? Get some background on him.”

  “Okay, Charlie, I gotta get to work,” Patrick Pearse Emmet said. “But you need Number One Brother, you can beep me, or leave a short message. They relay it to me, and I’m there like the wind. Call yourself Charlie, for Charlie Chan, on any messages. I’ll use the name Sonny, for Number One Son. We don’t know who’ll be listening or intercepting.”

  “Okay,” Bobby said, impressed with Patrick’s savvy.

  “One more thing,” Patrick said as he rose to leave. “I’m not letting you go back to jail.”

  His kid brother was no kid anymore.

  That night, Herbie snored like a buffalo with a deviated septum. Bobby let him sleep in the big bed in the cabin, while he camped on the deck of the boat, in a large rubber dinghy, pulling a dark comforter over himself and staring up at the stars for the first time in a long while. The immensity of the night sky made his own problems seem smaller. He firmly believed that each individual, no matter what galaxy, what life-form, was responsible for its own destiny, its own private universe. He wasn’t as swayed as John Shine was by Emerson’s theories of the Oversoul and individual divinity. But he did believe each man was responsible for his own words and deeds.

  After a few minutes, he drifted into deep, bottoml
ess sleep.

  Then somewhere in the black hole of the night, Bobby heard a tinkle of steel and feet squeaking on the polished deck.

  Bobby’s heart beat quickly as he lifted his head up slightly to see a hooded figure slinking across the deck. Then the flash of a straight razor zipping open and the glint of the summer moon reflecting in its blade. He saw the figure hurry like an apparition toward the cabin from which came Herbie’s snoring.

  “HERBIE! YOU JEW BASTARD!” Bobby shouted as loud as he could, hoping to get the reaction that would save Herbie’s life.

  Herbie came to life like a rocket booster, fire and fury erupting, arms and legs exploding in a swinging, kicking fit. “Motheeeeerfuuuuuucker!” Herbie shouted, grabbing the attacker by the wrist and bending the arm sideways until cartilage popped and the razor fell to the floor. Clutching the attacker by the back of the hood, he smashed his right fist into the face like someone pounding a catcher’s mitt.

  Now Bobby caught a glimpse of a second hooded attacker in time to partly deflect a swinging oar. Bobby bent and crunched a left hook into the attacker’s rib cage and heard him groan so loudly it didn’t sound quite human. The guy collapsed to his knees, and Bobby bent to lift him to his feet and hit him Again. But as he did, Herbie came charging, holding the first attacker like a battering ram, heading right for the door. Bobby jumped out of the way, allowing one goon to escape.

  “Hold on to that fuck!” Bobby shouted. But Herbie was driven now by white-hot rage as he lifted the first attacker high above his head like a sack of coffee. He whirled in a demented circle while the second attacker abandoned his buddy and raced down the gangplank and dove into the water.

  “Hold on to him, Herbie!”

  But instead he flung the hooded man a good seven feet from the boat.

  “Shit,” Bobby said, turning to the opposite direction in time to see the other attacker scaling the ten-foot fence. He looked back out into the swift moonlit river, but there was no sign of the first thug.

  “They found me,” Herbie said. “Nowhere is safe from the wops and cops.”

  “They were after me,” Bobby said.