3 Quarters Page 16

  “Me,” Herbie insisted.

  Bobby’s father had a saying, “Sometimes, to argue with them is to educate them.” Bobby knew the hit was intended for him. But if Herbie believed he was the target, it would keep him as alert as a human rottweiler.

  “Maybe you’re right, Herbie. I better find you a new place to stay come morning.”

  But Bobby was feeling exhilarated; he was now controlling the situation. He had sent a shiver through the nervous ranks of his enemies. They have come looking for you, he thought. You have smoked them out. They are certain to make mistakes. Control the situation. Force them to make mistakes. Make them lead you to Dorothea.

  23

  SUNDAY

  As he drove crosstown, the clock on the Jeep dashboard flashed 9:45 AM. Bobby checked in with Maggie on the cell phone, but Connie answered, “You get laid yet?”

  “Mom, you’re on my line,” came Maggie’s voice.

  “Oh, Jesus,” said Connie, clearly embarrassed.

  “Way to go, Con,” Bobby said. He heard Connie hang up and Maggie laughing.

  “You didn’t hear that,” Bobby said, and laughed as he drove from the Seventy-ninth Street Boat Basin through the empty streets of Manhattan. Herbie Rabinowitz was on the floor in the back of the Jeep.

  “Hi, Dad,” Maggie said. “I miss you.”

  “Same here,” Bobby said, and he gave his daughter a vague update, telling her he’d learned some encouraging news about Dorothea that made him believe she was alive.

  “I’m looking forward to our trip to Coney Island,” she said.

  “Maybe next weekend,” Bobby said as he approached the underground garage of the Empire State Building, checking his rearview mirror to be sure no one was tailing him. The street behind him was Sunday-morning empty. “This is going to cut off in a minute because I’m going underground. I just wanted to tell you I love you and I was thinking about you.”

  “Real quick, Dad,” Maggie said. “I was going through the press-clips file I have on your case last night, like you asked. There was a story in the New York Times back at the time of the trial, about that awful woman named Cis Tuzio? Like a biography . . .”

  “ ‘Woman in the News’?” Bobby said, vaguely remembering reading it.

  “Yeah,” Maggie said. “In the middle of the story it says that she graduated from Brooklyn Law School in 1982.”

  “Yeah?” Bobby said. “And . . .”

  “Well, then I read another story in Brooklyn Bridge magazine about your old lawyer, Moira Farrell,” Maggie said.

  “Yeah,” Bobby said.

  “She graduated from the same school, the same year,” Maggie said.

  “You sure? I never made that connection.”

  “Coincidence, huh?”

  Bobby was impressed that his kid had put this together.

  “Maybe not,” Bobby said. “Maybe they knew each other . . . .”

  “Cis Tuzio was born and raised in Scranton, Pennsylvania,” Maggie said. “It doesn’t say where Moira Farrell was born.”

  “Try to get a yearbook from the school,” Bobby said.

  “I already E-mailed the school with Mom’s FedEx number asking them to send it ASAP,” Maggie said. “It costs twenty dollars for a back issue.”

  The phone began scratching madly as the Jeep entered the underground garage. “This is breaking up, gotta go, Mag. I love ya.”

  “Love ya, too, Dad.”

  “No self-respecting hit man would be caught dead looking for you in Gleason’s office,” Bobby assured Herbie. The big man walked directly to the TV, turned it on, took a beer from the fridge, and plopped into the recliner. A Stone for Governor Campaign commercial came on on New York 1.

  “You got a shower,” Bobby said. “You can sleep in the recliner; just keep the door locked and the snoring down to a lion’s roar, and you’ll be okay till Monday.”

  “Family values are the answer to a whole host of our society’s ills,” said Stone in the commercial, addressing a group of senior citizens. “If we return to the values that your generation believed in, we will see a reduction in crime, drug addiction, teen pregnancy, soaring high school dropout rates, welfare families, and therefore taxes. We won’t have to cut Medicaid or Social Security if a return to family values takes care of most of the problems of our youth.” There was wild applause from the seniors on the soundtrack and then the deep resounding voice-over of a narrator: “Join the family; join Stone for Governor.”

  “You see,” Herbie said. “Politics is just organized crime with campaign buttons.”

  There were two calls on the answering machine. The first one was from Moira Farrell, asking Gleason to congratulate Bobby on his release. “Bobby, if you hear this, don’t be a stranger, darling,” Moira Farrell said in her sexy, purring voice. “Drop up to the office sometime for a drink. I’d like to personally welcome you home. Bye for now. You know the number.”

  Eventually he would take her up on the invitation.

  The second message was from Tom Larkin, asking Bobby to call, which he did pronto.

  “I don’t like talking on a PD phone,” Larkin said after they exchanged hellos. “But I wanted to tell you I’m looking into an old kidnapping case that I think could be related to your girl Dorothea’s disappearance. It happened too long ago for it to be on computer, so I’ll have to go to the main file room, search the archives. Could take a while. Be patient.”

  “I appreciate it, Tom,” Bobby said. Since Larkin had steered him there, Bobby told him about Carlos and the pacemaker in the crematorium.

  “Carlos told me about the teeth but not the pacemaker,” Larkin said.

  “He didn’t think it was significant,” Bobby said. “It was an afterthought.”

  “Jesus,” Larkin said in a hushed whisper. “This is getting good, juicy. I might be able to answer some questions with that piece of information. I gotta go. One more thing. I know I asked you this a couple of times. But you’re positive it was the Ukraine Dorothea said she was from?”

  “Certain,” Bobby said.

  “Not Romania, Georgia, Bulgaria, Russia, or . . .?”

  “Dorothea Dubrow said she was from the Ukraine, Tom,” Bobby said, a tinge of annoyance in his voice. “Tell me why that’s so important?”

  “God bless,” Larkin said and hung up abruptly. The old cop came from a time when people actually wished God’s good graces on one another. Bobby felt bad for getting annoyed with him.

  Bobby shook his head again and then left Herbie in the office with a tub of the chicken soup he’d made the day before. “I’ll be back for you in the morning,” Bobby said. “Don’t you leave here. Don’t answer phones. You have food, sodas, whatever you need. Just lie low.”

  “Enjoy your day,” Herbie said. “Thank you for all your kindness. Shalom.”

  “Shalom,” Bobby said and double-locked the door behind him.

  24

  An hour later, Bobby stood on the fly deck of The Fifth Amendment, put the key in the ignition, pushed in the buttons of the two parallel start switches, which brought the twin diesel engines to life. Because they hadn’t been used in so long, he let them warm up for a good fifteen minutes, while he watched the gulls wheel and surveyed the quiet boat basin. As he grabbed the dual-lever engine and throttle controls, he saw three women wearing large sunglasses and minuscule string bikinis emerge from inside a Chinese junk moored in the neighboring slip about twenty feet from The Fifth Amendment. They each sat dramatically on deck chairs draped with thick towels, as if they were auditioning for a part in a movie.

  Gleason had told Bobby that a junk-bond dealer with a sense of humor had bought that boat at the height of the greedy eighties and named it Armage. The women were young, gym-muscled, parlor-tanned, and blond-dyed. They looked over at a bare-chested Bobby in his cutoff jeans, whispered among themselves as he unhooked the stern line from the dock cleat and then untied the bow line. They waved to him and smiled, and three sets of white teeth beamed against their
chestnut tans. Bobby smiled and waved back. His libido was alive and well. The junk-bond dealer, mid-fifties, nut brown, good shape, the hair on his chest a whiter gray than the silver mane on his head, walked up from below and handed out flutes of champagne. He winked at Bobby and shrugged. Bobby nodded.

  “Drop in some time when you’re feeling bored,” said the man.

  “Anytime,” said the woman wearing the white bikini that didn’t consist of enough fabric to wipe her full, pouted lips.

  “Yeah,” shouted the other two as they raised their glasses.

  “Love to,” Bobby said. “But I’m working today.”

  “Too bad.”

  “It certainly is,” Bobby said.

  The Fifth Amendment bobbed in the water as Bobby climbed up into the cabin. He took the helm and backed out of the dock into the river and pointed south on the Hudson. The junk-bond dealer and the three women waved good-bye. Bobby waved back. Maybe if things were different, he could think of mindlessly flirting with lovely women.

  In fifteen minutes he was passing a fully dressed Statue of Liberty and the Red Hook docks of Brooklyn; he slid past the Sixty-ninth Street pier and Shore Road, glided under the Verrazano Bridge into the Narrows, and swung east past the man-made Hoffman and Swinburne Islands, formed from the accumulated bedrock unearthed to make way for the awesome skyscrapers of the Manhattan skyline. At one time these isolated islands had been used as quarantine centers for victims of tuberculosis and other communicable diseases. But Bobby remembered them from his Harbor Unit days as a place where on-duty water cops took babes, whom they had picked up from the decks of pleasure craft, for barbecues and bare-ass romps. Bobby had been invited along a few times, but had declined. Not that he wasn’t tempted. But he would never risk his job, his gun, badge, reputation, integrity, and especially his marriage for an afternoon fling. Besides, it was just wrong. He’d never have been able to live with himself if some citizen drowned while he was muff-diving.

  Beyond the Narrows, he cruised the Coney Island Flats, passing the lighthouse at Norton’s Point at the tip of Coney Island. He chugged by Sea Gate, a once thriving private Jewish community now in sad decline, rounded the mythical Steeplechase Pier and the Cyclone and Wonder Wheel of the Coney Island amusement parks. He continued three miles east beyond Brighton Beach, the Little Odessa of Brooklyn, and Manhattan Beach and Kingsborough Community College before taking dead aim at the peninsula of Windy Tip, a secluded dot on the tip of the nose of Brooklyn. He cut the engines and drifted to about one hundred and fifty feet offshore, dropped anchor, and tied up to a white plastic mooring bubble.

  Bobby had come to Windy Tip because he wanted to see where Lou Barnicle lived, where Sandy was raising her baby with his dirty money. He wanted to get the lay of the land of this private community where most of Barnicle’s ex-cop employee goons lived and hung out, and wanted to bounce a few things he’d learned off John Shine.

  Bobby used a pair of binoculars to locate John Shine’s brand-new luxury two-story beach house with attic. If you win the lottery, you might as well spend some dough, he thought. He watched a cat chase a squirrel across the rooftop and into an attic window in a hunt Charles Darwin would have understood.

  Bobby dove right into the thirty feet of water, in cutoff shorts and sleeveless T-shirt, and swam to shore in the tame, warm waters of Jamaica Bay.

  He mopped his face, wrung the excess water from his hair. He walked through the warm, shell-studded sand toward Shine’s house, scanning the brilliant beachfront. A few kids dug in the sand with plastic shovels and pails. Plump women sunbathed on large beach towels emblazoned with the names of Caribbean hotels. Three guys wearing NYPD T-shirts held beer bottles and tossed a Frisbee in a lazy, hazy triangle. In the distance he saw a group of guys and girls playing a game of volleyball in front of a squat cinderblock building, the local cop hangout called The Central Booking Saloon, owned by Lou Barnicle.

  He was still walking toward Shine’s house when he saw a familiar-looking blue Ford Explorer next to a BMW in a driveway a hundred feet down the common beach. Then he saw Sandy Fraser step out onto a sun-deck of the second floor of the house above the drive-way, in a yellow bikini, not looking as though she’d recently given birth. She had obviously seen Bobby from the window and now stepped out onto the deck, with her arms folded across her breasts, staring at him as if for salvation.

  A toddler ran out onto the deck and grabbed at Sandy’s leg. Bobby understood Sandy’s fear—when you become a parent, fear for your own life takes a backseat to that for your child’s.

  “Bobby!” The man’s voice from his right was unmistakable, and Bobby turned to John Shine, who was standing on his large back deck, wearing a faded NYPD T-shirt, beat-up tennis shoes, and a pair of baggy khaki shorts. Under the T-shirt his corsetlike back brace was visible. He grimaced only slightly when he walked down from his deck and along the beach to greet Bobby.

  Sandy troubled him. Bobby needed to talk to her again, needed to find out what else she knew about Dorothea. Needed to help her before something bad happened to her and her baby. But he took John Shine’s hand in his, shook it firmly, and Shine threw an arm over his shoulder and led him toward his house. Bobby looked back and saw Lou Barnicle step out onto the deck, dressed in shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt, wearing aviator glasses and gold chains around his hairy neck. Barnicle animatedly pointed to his watch and then pointed into the house, as if Sandy was late for something.

  “Forget him,” Shine said. “The man has fearful followers but no true friends.”

  “That another Emerson quote?” Bobby asked.

  “No,” Shine said, laughing as he led Bobby up the wooden stairs from the beach to his deck. “But Emerson did say, ‘The only reward of virtue is virtue; the only way to have a friend is to be one.’ Barnicle wouldn’t understand that if it bit him on the ass, and even if he did, he’d ignore it. But if you want to be my friend, be one by coming inside. Like most white trash made good, I’m dying to show off.”

  “How’s he treat Sandy?” Bobby asked.

  “She reminds me of Rapunzel trapped in the tower,” Shine said. “But I see her come and go on her own. She wears the best of clothes. Drives a new Explorer. Does busywork at the Gibraltar office a couple of days a week, where he can keep an eye on her. She swims, sunbathes, eats with him in the best restaurants. I never see any black eyes. The ambulance never shows up at the door. I’ve never heard a single domestic argument. You see any bruises?”

  “She ever leave with the kid?” Bobby couldn’t let go.

  Shine pondered for a moment. “I’ve never thought about it. She has a nanny slash housekeeper who helps her with the kid. Looks like Ma Barker, for Christ sakes.”

  “You think Sandy can come and go as she pleases with the kid?” Bobby asked.

  “Christ,” Shine said. “If she was being held against her will, she could call the cops, Bobby.”

  “On Barnicle? Which cop?”

  “Well, she could get an attorney, no?”

  “With what money? I’d bet she lives on an allowance. Maybe her jewelry is fake.”

  “She could go to the DA.”

  Bobby just stared Shine in the eye. “Diamond? Tuzio? This is still technically Brooklyn.”

  “I think you’re a little too paranoid,” Shine said. “Come on in; I’ll show you around.”

  Bobby looked again at the balcony, but it was empty, except for Barnicle, staring through the aviator glasses in Bobby’s general direction, smiling.

  Shine led Bobby up onto the deck, where he unlocked two Medeco locks on the sliding glass door. He opened the door and a mechanical barking dog exploded to life and a two-tone horn alarm blared before he turned the system off.

  Bobby followed Shine into a large kitchen with butcher-block counters and hanging copper-bottomed pots. Copper-colored kitchen appliances blended into a rustic motif. Blue delft was racked on a teakwood hutch that matched a big, round teakwood dining table. A real Tiffany lamp hung over the c
enter of the table, where a bowl of fresh fruit sat next to a cordless phone and a pair of ledger books.

  “I only eat here when I have houseguests,” he said. “And that’s only if she knows how to cook.”

  “Still looking for love, eh, John?”

  “Anyone can get laid,” Shine said. “Falling in love with the right woman takes more luck than the lottery. The odds are higher. I date, but I don’t look for love. I’ve already had the one great love of my life. I firmly believe you get only one. Even if I’m wrong about that, I’d never set myself up for the pain of losing another one. It’s just too overbearing.”

  “Maybe your standards are too high,” Bobby said.

  “I don’t think anyone’s standards or goals can be too high,” Shine said. “Setting them lower is to aspire to mediocrity. Come on, I’ll show you around.”

  He led Bobby into an immense living room with twelve-foot, oak-beamed ceilings and hanging fisherman’s nets, rope ladders, and seascape prints.

  The nautical motif included a coffee table and end tables set made from the hatches of old ships and a huge rusted anchor that leaned against a big, black potbellied stove. The floor was wide-plank oak with expensive Iranian area rugs spread around haphazardly. The deep, soft couches were scattered with throw pillows. A twenty-five-foot bay-front window looked out onto Jamaica Bay and the city beyond. One whole wall was lined with books, a special section dedicated just to different editions of Emerson’s books and biographies and appreciations of his work.

  Tony Bennett sang “I’ve Got the World on a String” from an elaborate stereo system. Bobby couldn’t see the speakers, which meant they were probably buried in the ceilings and the walls.

  They toured the handsomely decorated upstairs bedrooms, where four-poster beds, deep carpets, and heavy teak furniture promoted a sense of timelessness. Bobby heard mad scratching from the attic above.

  “Squirrels,” Shine said. “I keep the small attic roof window open a crack to prevent spontaneous combustion, and they get in. I keep meaning to call an exterminator, but I hate killing the poor critters. And I have no time for the relocation traps. Eventually . . .”