3 Quarters Page 19

  “You asked me to stay away from the trial,” his brother said, looking through the glasses. “I did. I’m as low profile on the job as you can get. Only the people in PAL know me. I don’t hang out in cop bars. I don’t play on cop teams. I don’t belong to any of the ethnic societies. So, I’m happy to say, I’ve never met either of those two stooges.”

  “Perfect,” Bobby said.

  “These the bagmen?” Patrick asked. “The guys who collect the three-quarters money?”

  “Let’s find out.”

  Zeke and Kuzak eased into a brand-new cream-colored Oldsmobile 98. Zeke got behind the wheel and slid out into light traffic. Bobby gave the Oldsmobile a good one-block lead, allowing three other cars to fill the space between them, and then began to tail. After the Olds made two rights Bobby knew that Zeke, the driver, was doing the “four-rights-to-spot-a-tail” routine. The same routine he’d used on Sandy. In counterpoint, after the Olds made the second right, Bobby made a U-turn and drove in the opposite direction until he came to the intersection where the Oldsmobile would wind up after the four predictable right turns. He waited at a hydrant until the Oldsmobile appeared. Thirty seconds later it went by. Bobby gave it another one-block lead and began the tail again.

  This time a confident and complacent Zeke didn’t even change lanes as he drove the Olds on the Brooklyn streets.

  Bobby stayed at a comfortable, unnoticeable distance on the tail until the Oldsmobile came to a stop outside a bar on Flatbush Avenue called The Gold Shield, a well-known cop haunt. Bobby knew from an old police-cocaine corruption scandal that groups of cops from The Gold Shield would rent “goom pads” about a mile away by the shore of Brighton Beach, where four cops would throw in one-fourth share of the monthly rent of an apartment. This entitled each cop to one or two nights a week in the pad with a “goomatta,” or “goom,” the Mafioso name for mistress. The cops furnished the apartments by flashing their badges, “tinning” furniture, dry goods, and appliance stores for freebies or major discounts in exchange for extra protection for their stores or looking the other way when the store owners fenced and sold hot property.

  The amount of money the married cops kicked in for rent and utilities was so small that their wives, at home with the kids in Long Island or in upstate Orange County, rarely caught on that they were having affairs. Some cops moved to the suburbs simply to relocate their wives a hundred miles away from their mistresses and their goom pads in the city. With an apartment, usually rented in a rookie bachelor’s name, there was no paper trail, hotel receipts, credit cards, or nosy clerks to expose them. Plus the chances of a wife driving two hundred miles round trip on a jealous hunch were slim.

  So, once a week, each married cop would tell the suburban wife he had to work a night shift and he’d go directly to The Gold Shield, where he’d meet his “goom” or pick up a cop groupie and go for a roll in the hay.

  “I’ll be across the street, a few car-lengths up the block,” Bobby told Patrick as he dropped him at a bus stop a half-block from The Gold Shield. He pointed to a hydrant diagonally across from the saloon where he would park the Mustang. “Put this on.”

  Bobby tossed him the reversible jacket, turned to the blue side. Patrick took off his sports jacket and tie. When he was done, Bobby put a Yankees hat on Patrick’s head and handed him a copy of the News.

  “Just observe, have a beer, listen,” Bobby said. “Don’t look too much. Read the News. Casual.”

  Patrick took a seat at the foot of a half-full, L-shaped bar, near the front window of The Gold Shield. The saloon was something out of the past: polished oak-wood trim, high tin ceilings, mirrors with peeling silvering. Sawdust was scattered on the floors, and the window was decorated with shamrocks and Irish tricolored flags. Mounted behind the bar were framed Daily News front pages of great police busts from yesteryear. There were also mounted plaques from the NYPD thanking the bar for running Police Widows and Orphans Fund benefits and donating beer for PBA picnics.

  Zeke and Kuzak were perusing the opposite wall, which was like a Police Hall of Fame, displaying old nightsticks decorated with brass nameplates of infamous old flatfoots and hundreds of gleaming facsimiles of gold shields of retired detectives. All were mounted in neat rows in handsome glass display cases. Zeke was pointing out some of the nameplates.

  Patrick ordered a mug of Bud from a reed-thin bartender with an NYPD ring and opened the Daily News from the back to the sports section, thumbing to Vic Ziegel’s column about the Yankees. He looked at the badge-shaped clock above the back bar and saw it was 12:12 PM. The bartender brought Patrick his foamy beer and took a five-dollar bill, rang up three dollars, and brought him back two singles change.

  Zeke and Kuzak walked from the wall display to the bar. Patrick noticed each man place three singles on the bar. The act was deliberate and almost ritualistic. Each ordered a mug of Bud. The skinny barkeep pulled the mugs of beer, placed them in front of Zeke and Kuzak. He grabbed the six singles, rang up $2.25 twice, and came back and placed a small stack of three quarters in front of each man.

  “Them Mets need relief pitching something terrible, don’t they?” the bartender said to Kuzak and Zeke.

  “The bullpen is like a paraplegic ward,” said Kuzak.

  Hanging behind the bar was a big brass nautical bell, salvaged from an old police boat and imprinted with the NYPD insignia. The bartender grabbed the rope on the clapper and rang it loudly three times. He paused, his hand still on the bell clapper for a moment, then rang it again four more times.

  Odd, Patrick thought. Same beer, different prices. Two sets of three quarters. Three rings of the bell and then four. After the bells, Lebeche and Daniels, the two cops who had robbed Martinez the drug dealer in Coney Island earlier in the morning, now off-duty and in civilian clothes, walked from the end of the bar and took positions on either side of Zeke and Kuzak. Patrick glanced over the News and saw Lebeche and Daniels in another precise, deliberate ritual; each lifted the small stack of three quarters from in front of Zeke and Kuzak and replaced the coins with dollar bills.

  Zeke and Kuzak didn’t flinch.

  “If the Mets don’t get some arms, they’re out of the race,” Zeke said to the bartender as if nothing else had transpired.

  “I think the race is already over,” the bartender said.

  Kuzak looked around the bar, glancing at Patrick, buried in Ziegel’s column. Patrick noticed peripherally as Lebeche and Daniels left through the back door, now each carrying two envelopes, one manila, one white.

  After a minute, Zeke and Kuzak left through the front door and walked out to the Oldsmobile. Through the window Patrick saw Daniels and Lebeche climb into the backseat of the Oldsmobile, while Zeke and Kuzak sat up front.

  Across the street, Bobby watched it all through the binoculars. Lebeche and Daniels, he thought. No surprise. He remembered them from The Winning Ticket and The Central Booking Saloon. Through the glasses, he watched them hand the letter-sized white envelopes to Zeke and the large manila envelopes over the seat to Kuzak.

  Patrick stepped out of The Gold Shield and jaywalked between the Oldsmobile and the car parked in front of it. He waited as a car passed on the street, pausing long enough to see Kuzak in the passenger seat ruffle through a stack of cash. Zeke sat in the driver’s seat, examining a sheaf of white forms. Patrick crossed the street and walked very casually to the corner and crossed the avenue and climbed back into the Mustang.

  “What’s in those big manila envelopes?” Bobby asked immediately.

  “Cash,” Patrick said, and then told Bobby about the difference in the price of beers, the rings of the bell, the two stacks of three quarters, how the two guys he made for off-duty cops picked up each little stack of three twenty-five-cent pieces.

  “Three quarters,” Bobby said, nodding his head. “You said they also had forms in the envelopes?”

  “Yeah,” Patrick said. “From what I could see.”

  “Medical disability retirement forms,” Bob
by said.

  Bobby gave him a quick scenario: The Gold Shield was a transfer station, a neighborhood saloon owned, run, staffed by ex-cops on three-quarters where three-quarters pensions were for sale. From there those who wanted to buy their way onto the rolls for a price could pass their money and forms to Zeke and Kuzak. They would take them to Barnicle, who must have an in at the police medical office. Barnicle was too smart to allow such a transaction to take place in The Central Booking, which he owned.

  “Jesus Christ,” Patrick said. “No wonder they set you up. Major money. And they knew you were on their ass.”

  The brothers watched as Daniels and Lebeche stepped out of the back of the Oldsmobile and did a high five.

  “They look like they just won the lottery,” Patrick said.

  “They did,” said Bobby.

  As the Oldsmobile pulled away, Bobby eased out onto the tail. In the next hour and a half Bobby and Patrick observed Kuzak and Zeke as they stopped into a bar named Komar’s on Sixth Avenue in Park Slope, another named LuLu’s in Marine Park, and the Blue Diamond Inn in Bay Ridge. In each case Kuzak and Zeke collected the white and manila envelopes from men who Bobby was certain were off-duty cops, because they all wore summer shirts outside their pants to conceal their service weapons.

  By 2:35 PM, Bobby had tailed them back to Gibraltar Security. Bobby and Patrick watched Kuzak carry the manila envelopes with the money into the windowless building, while Zeke carried in the six plain white business envelopes.

  “What do you figure they pay to get three-quarters?” Patrick asked his older brother.

  “The scuttlebutt has always been about fifty grand,” Bobby said.

  “About what a seasoned cop’ll get a year on three-quarters,” Patrick said.

  “You pay one year up front to get a lifetime payback,” Bobby said.

  “How much money you think is involved?”

  “If my math is right, they just collected about four hundred grand in an afternoon. Times that by fifty-two pickups a year and you’re talking millions.”

  “More than enough to kill someone for,” Patrick said.

  27

  Bobby and Patrick staked out Gibraltar Security for almost half an hour to see the next phase of the scam.

  Bobby’s cell phone rang; it was Maggie, with news about the 1982 Brooklyn Law School Yearbook arriving in the overnight mail.

  “Anything I should know?”

  “Moira Farrell and Cis Tuzio not only knew each other in school,” Maggie said. “They were both from Scranton, Pennsylvania. They became roommates at the same Brooklyn Law residence hall. Belonged to the same sorority. There’s a picture of the both of them at a party with their arms around each other, with the caption, ‘Best Friends Till the End.’ ”

  “You sure it’s them?” Bobby asked.

  “It has their names, Dad,” Maggie said. “Same names. Isn’t there something wrong with this picture, Dad?”

  “There sure is, kiddo,” Bobby said.

  Then Bobby saw Lou Barnicle emerge from his fortified headquarters with a briefcase handcuffed to his wrist, like a jeweler making a delivery.

  “Great work, Mag,” Bobby said. “Hold on to that book. I’ll call you later.”

  Bobby watched Barnicle climb into the back of the Oldsmobile 98. Zeke again drove, with Kuzak riding shotgun. Bobby tailed them as they moved north on Flatbush Avenue, the spine of Brooklyn that ran from the blue Atlantic sea to the cesspool of downtown Brooklyn.

  Downtown Brooklyn bore no resemblance to downtown Manhattan. It was an incubator of political corruption sandwiched between the million-dollar brownstones of Brooklyn Heights and a sprawling, street-crimeplagued shopping center known as Fulton Mall. But it was the white-collar crime in the patronage-staffed courts and politically stocked municipal buildings of the bureaucracy that handsomely fed the infamous “Court Street Lawyers” of Brooklyn. In those anonymous law offices of Court Street, corrupt cash passed hands much as it did in the counting rooms of the Atlantic City casinos.

  The beige Oldsmobile pulled into a spot on Montague Street, the restaurant row of downtown Brooklyn, in front of an eatery called The Broken Land. It’s what the word “Brooklyn,” or “Breukelen,” means when translated from the Dutch of those who first settled here. It could describe the place where I live now, Bobby thought. Bobby Emmet in the broken land.

  Bobby parked the rented Mustang up the block behind a Con Edison truck. A panhandler walked from the front of a bank, where he was mooching from ATM customers, to Bobby’s open car window.

  “Yo, man, spare a quarter?” asked the rummy, shaking his cup.

  “What for?”

  “Wine,” said the bum.

  Bobby laughed and gave him a dollar. “You’re probably the only honest man left around here.”

  “Thanks, brother,” said the rummy, and then he chased after another bank customer, rattling his change cup.

  Bobby watched as Lou Barnicle, with Zeke and Kuzak flanking him, stepped out of the Olds. Barnicle walked directly to the attractive woman with the trademark red hair and tight white skirt.

  “Jesus Christ,” Patrick said, “isn’t that redhead your . . .”

  “That’s her,” Bobby said. “It’s all starting to make sense now.”

  Moira Farrell, wearing red high heels, greeted Barnicle with a hug and a kiss on the cheek. Bobby’s stomach flopped. A tall, broad-shouldered man, in his mid-twenties and athletically built, stood at Moira Farrell’s side like a sentry, looking both ways.

  Bobby had hired Moira Farrell to defend him in his murder trial because she had a reputation for being one of the best-connected Court Street lawyers in Brooklyn, the epitome of the saying: “It’s better to know the judge than to know the law.” In practice, her defense was uninspired, lifeless, miscalculated. In her jury-selection voir dire, she had approved too many elderly and middle-aged female jurors, which was prejudicial to Bobby because he was accused of carving up his female fiancée. Bobby wasn’t helped by Moira Farrell’s provocative attire, the high heels and tight skirts that made plump housewives envious. Her Wonderbra and curvy ass might have won over a horny male jury, but many pundits in the press and on Court TV said she had probably offended the female jurors.

  “Jesus Christ,” Patrick said, “this dame is working with the enemy now.”

  “Maybe she was working with him all along,” Bobby said as he watched his former lawyer hook her hand through the free arm of Lou Barnicle, the man he was convinced had framed him for the murder of Dorothea Dubrow. Barnicle led Moira Farrell down a short flight of steps into The Broken Land, dismissing Kuzak and Zeke with a nudge of his shoulder. They both unbuttoned their sports jackets and got into the Oldsmobile to wait. Moira Farrell’s muscular male assistant went into The Broken Land behind his boss and Barnicle.

  “Quick, put on the white shirt, tie, and sports jacket,” Bobby said.

  As Patrick changed clothes, Bobby summoned over the panhandler. “Listen, my man, I’ll give you ten bucks if you go over and rattle that cup in the faces of those two guys in the parked Oldsmobile for a full minute. Just don’t point me out.”

  “I’ll do a soft-shoe if you want,” said the panhandler, who sauntered across the street and walked directly up to Kuzak in the driver’s seat, shaking his cup, and proceeded to do a soft-shoe. Kuzak and Zeke laughed, gave the bum change, as Patrick got out of the Mustang carrying the New York Times. He walked with a bounce to The Broken Land and hurried down the stairs and into the restaurant as Kuzak and Zeke were distracted.

  Patrick took a seat at the bar, where three other patrons sat spaced apart, watching baseball on ESPN. The restaurant was going through a post-lunch cleanup, and only two tables by the front window were occupied with diners. Patrick ordered a beer and watched Moira Farrell and Lou Barnicle at a small corner table in the rear. The restaurant was an ode to the long history of Brooklyn, the walls covered with old lithographs and photographs of the Fulton Ferry, the Brooklyn Bridge, Co
ney Island, Prospect Park, Ebbets Field, Park Slope, the docks, and the navy yard. A waiter brought Barnicle and Farrell their drinks.

  Moira Farrell’s assistant sat alone two tables away.

  Patrick saw Barnicle unfasten the handcuff from his wrist and place the briefcase on the leather banquette between him and Moira Farrell. She looked down, widened her eyes, and punched numbers into a cellular phone. She checked her watch as she spoke, nodded, and hung up.

  Patrick could see that Barnicle’s hands were now free, and he looked as though he was opening the combination lock on the briefcase, moving his lips as if reciting the combination numbers. Moira Farrell wrote down what he said in a small notebook she had taken from her purse. Patrick saw the lid of the briefcase swing into view. Moira Farrell reached down and removed a stack of white envelopes, counted them, and summoned over her assistant. He picked up the envelopes, as if this was a common practice, and stuffed them in an inside jacket pocket, then silently returned to his table.

  Now Patrick saw Farrell pick through the many large manila envelopes, choosing one from the middle as a sample. She opened it and looked inside, pulling her head back as if something might leap out and bite her. She finally smiled, with impressed approval. She lifted her cocktail glass, and so did Barnicle, and they toasted their continued success.

  Barnicle and Moira Farrell drank and talked for another four or five minutes as Patrick scanned the pages of the Times, his eyes resting on a three-paragraph story in the Metro section: “No Date Yet Scheduled in New Robert Emmet Murder Trial.” Patrick glanced from the small headline back to Moira Farrell. She looked at her watch again, clearly waiting for someone. Then a large man in an olive-colored summer suit came down the steps into the restaurant, shuddered in the air-conditioning, and walked past Patrick, directly to the table in the rear. Patrick thought he recognized him, but he couldn’t be sure. The man took a seat at the table and put one hand out, as if for inspection.