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  Then suddenly they were no longer a family, and it hurt each of them in a lasting, mournful, physically painful way. Bobby thought there should be graveyards for dearly departed marriages, where the forever-wounded could go and have a good cry every once in a while over a marker. The end of a marriage was a burial of a part of your life you would never have back again.

  But it wasn’t this.

  Jesus, this, this was worse, Bobby thought. Having steel walls between him and his kid was beyond separation. This was like a death between them, a living death that lingered and breathed and could never be mourned away.

  Gray morning light now leaked into the cellblock.

  “Rumor on the tom-toms upstairs is you might be getting a new trial,” said a voice through the bars. It was Morrison, a big, flabby, hound-faced guard who worked Bobby’s tier.

  “Fat chance,” Bobby said.

  “That’s why the savages are up in arms,” Morrison said. “Love to kill them a cop in the joint before you get to leave.”

  “Rumors,” Bobby said, glad for the conversation, even though Morrison could often be a sardonic pain in the ass. “Just the press assholes trying to fill holes in their pages and broadcasts. Rumors . . .”

  Bobby’s trial, like his marriage, had been a media circus. And ever since, on a slow news day, the press boys always tried to bring the circus back to town: “Hey, what’s up with John Gotti?” “What about Robert Chambers?” “Is Son of Sam still alive?” “What about the asshole who shot John Lennon?” “Hey, let’s do a Bobby Emmet update.”

  “Way I hear it, that Izzy Gleason fella came through security a few minutes ago to see you,” Morrison said.

  “Izzy Gleason is the sleaziest shyster in New York,” Bobby said. “Why would he be here to see me?”

  “If the shoe fits,” Morrison said, giggling, as he continued his patrol.

  Bobby closed his eyes and in his mind’s eye saw the despicable little lawyer with the red hair and blue eyes, always chewing on a candy bar or sucking on a cigarette, his body as spastic as a puppet’s. Over the years, Bobby had often opposed Gleason, investigating and building cases against some of the most dangerous felons in the city, only to watch the notorious lawyer get many of them off with his brilliant, histrionic courtroom antics. Judges, cops, and DAs hated Gleason, but juries loved him because a trial with Izzy Gleason was like a day at the circus.

  And now he was coming up to visit him?

  Nah, Bobby thought, hitting the floor again to do another set of push-ups.

  Gleason was just getting off a one-year bar association ethics committee suspension. And Bobby had heard gossip that for his first time at bat in his comeback, Gleason wanted to get Bobby Emmet, his old nemesis from the Manhattan DA’s cop shop, out of prison. But he had thought it was just another Gleason attempt to get his name back in the papers. Didn’t think the little piglet was serious.

  Goddamned press would have a field day with me and Gleason, Bobby thought. The same shit would be dragged through the papers again for Maggie and for Connie and her new husband, who was a decent enough fella but a world-class rich bore. And it wouldn’t be easy for Bobby’s kid brother, Patrick, the “good” cop in the family. Patrick Pearse Emmet would have to put up with the same old hypocritical shit. The precinct locker-room taunts, the anonymous interoffice notes, the graffiti on the bathroom walls.

  Just what I need, Bobby Emmet thought, more sleazy publicity from the man whose past clients included a mass murderer on the Staten Island ferry who had been demanding Staten Island’s secession—from the United States; a Westies gang crew charged with burying a city sheriff alive in a mountain of Sanitation Department rock salt after he padlocked their saloon; the owner of a pet cemetery that was really used as a burial ground for mob hits.

  And these were just the ones Gleason got off.

  Bobby hated everything Sleazy Izzy Gleason—or the Wizard of Iz, as the tabloids called him—stood for. But he couldn’t help liking him personally. He could be a generous, comical, self-effacing little sleazoid. The man was a conscious caricature of himself. He’d learned his trade as a Bronx assistant district attorney and was an amazing trial lawyer, with a loud, abrasive, flamboyant style. He thought nothing of exploiting every hole card—race, sex, age, religion—in order to win. In at least three trials for which Bobby had done the investigation and which ended in hung juries, Bobby was certain that Gleason had been sleeping with a female juror who fell for his apparently irresistible combination of Irish blarney and Jewish moxie.

  Bobby Emmet and Izzy Gleason were oil and swamp water.

  At exactly 7:30 AM, after a very long sleepless night, as he reached rep number thirty-seven in his nineteenth set of pre-breakfast push-ups, Bobby Emmet’s cell door slid open and Morrison stood in the corridor, announcing, “You got a visitor, and you smell just about ripe enough for the rotten company.”

  Bobby strode in front of Morrison, up the tier, getting a good “fuck you” rhythm going with his swinging arms and his powerful legs. He let each work boot heel hammer the concrete with a definitive clack as he moved, his big shoulders back, swollen chest out, head high on the thick neck, large fists opening and closing, making the veins and the muscles in his forearms pop and flex. It was a macho performance, a jailhouse show of force. He let all six foot two, 210 pounds, be known. He was his only weapon. He locked his eyes between half-open and half-closed, seeing all, revealing nothing.

  “Hope you believe in mixed marriages, baby, cause I gone marry your ass, pig muthahfuckah,” said one black con, who’d reached through the bars, doing sexual pantomimes with his fingers. “You gone to be my Maytag, wash my bloomers and my socks and tell me bedtime stories, baby.”

  From a cell on the other side of the tier came a long stream of spit, hitting Bobby on the neck with a hot, foul lash. Bobby ignored it, letting it drool down past his sweaty shoulder, over his bulging left pectoral. Control, he thought. These people don’t exist. They are mutts. Skells. You are Bobby Emmet, father, cop, citizen, honorable man. You have what they don’t have—dignity. A dignified man has . . . control. Walk on, he thought, there will come another day.

  “I gettin” out in three week, Emmet,” said a messily tattooed white con who stood in his cell, waving his half-chubbed dick through the bars. He’d spent so much time in jail he spoke with the inflections of the black ghetto. “Heah wha’ I sayin’, Emmet. Firs’, I’m a unna pork you in the car wash. Then when I out, I’m a unna find me that little-titty daughter a yours and I’m a unna make her lick on me. School uniform. K-Y jelly . . .”

  The veins popped in Bobby’s temples, a blinding rage twisting in his head. He felt himself being sucked close to the edge, almost ready to go hurtling into the rage of what he called muttdom. Instead he swallowed, felt the other con’s saliva drool down his chest as he balled and unballed his fists, didn’t let one click of his boot heels vary. Control, Bobby Emmet thought again. There will come another day.

  Morrison the hack never said a word, just kept walking behind Bobby as he passed the last cell, where Bobby saw an enormous dark-skinned white guy with nappy hair who looked like Bluto from the Popeye cartoons. Bluto stood at the cell bars, just staring. He never said a word. He’s one to worry about, Bobby thought, and turned right, where he faced another steel door. Worry about the ones who say nothing.

  Only now, when he was out of view of the other cons, did Bobby Emmet pause to lift his shirttail from his pants and use it to wipe the saliva from his neck and chest. The smell of the other man’s spit reeked of tooth decay, cigarettes, mucous, and bile. It was a minor indignity compared to what the system had done to Bobby. The system he once believed in.

  “Prisoner with visitor,” shouted Morrison, and the loud klunks of the tumblers in the mechanical locks being unfastened echoed through the cellblock.

  3

  “We’ll be the biggest fuckin’ thing since Butch and Sundance.”

  “More like Laurel and Hardy,” Bobby said f
rom his rigid plastic chair.

  Izzy Gleason’s copper-colored hair set off his squinty, red-rimmed, baby blue eyes. He wore a dark blue pin-stripe suit that couldn’t have cost less than two thousand dollars. Bobby figured Gleason had bought one in every flavor with his share of dirty drug money.

  “Look, Izzy,” Bobby said from the prisoner’s table as Gleason continued to pace. “I’m already doing fifteen to life and—”

  “I’m gonna get you a new trial,” Gleason screamed, cutting Bobby off in a high-pitched voice that sounded like an IRT subway squealing into Union Square. “With more cameras than Allen Funt.”

  “In a new trial with you, somehow they might wind up strapping us both into Old Sparky, pull the switch,” Bobby said. “Besides, me and you, we’re enemies, Izzy, remember? The DA investigator and the bionic mouth for the defense. How would it look if you represented me? I must have helped put a hundred of your clients in places like this!”

  “You’re forgetting the other two hundred who you collared who should be in here, but who I got off because I’m the best fuckin’ trial lawyer in the city of New York,” Izzy Gleason said, taking another bite of a Clark bar, the chocolate damming the spaces between the teeth.

  “You’ll ruin your teeth,” Bobby said, shaking his head.

  “Caps,” Gleason said, chomping the candy bar with the perfect teeth that looked like small tombstones.

  “Who paid for them,” Bobby asked, “that nasty little Albanian hit man from Inwood you walked on that triple homicide at the titty bar?”

  “No, he paid for my divorce lawyer,” Gleason said. “Now I’d like to use him to whack the divorce lawyer for all the good he did me.”

  “You’re freakin’ nuts,” Bobby Emmet said.

  “I’ll tell ya what’s fuckin’ nuts,” Gleason said, circling the table, now lighting a cigarette, ignoring the NO SMOKING sign and Morrison. Gleason took a deep drag of the cigarette, inhaling like a man attached to a life-support system. The smoke puffed out in small clouds as he spoke, like dialogue bubbles in a comic strip. “I’m back from being suspended from the bar for a year. You’ve been in jail for a year and a half . . .”

  “Seventeen months and four days,” Bobby Emmet corrected.

  “Whatever,” Gleason said, blowing a long blue stream of smoke directly at Bobby, who fanned it away. “But in that time, I did a lot of thinking. I need a second act. See, I’ve had a great first act. Been on TV in all the big trials, on the cover of magazines, did all the talk shows, made all the money. Spent all the money. Romanced tall women. Some of them, with my help, wound up good-looking. Then it all went in the dumper. I lost both my houses, Riverdale and Westhampton. It didn’t matter that me and the wife hadn’t slept in the same bed for the last ten years. She waited for her best shot and flattened me when I got caught with my pants down in public . . . .”

  “You’re such a great lawyer that you couldn’t hold on to one house?” Bobby asked.

  “The IRS glommed the second one,” Gleason said with a shrug and a puff of smoke. “Then I got suspended for helping that damsel in distress . . . .”

  Bobby took a deep breath and said, “You stayed in the same Plaza hotel room with your female client for three days when you were supposed to be in court with her.”

  Bobby knew the details because he’d done the initial investigation and was the one who’d found Gleason with his missing client, a woman who was accused of castrating her sleeping husband with a pair of bolt cutters.

  “How did I know the judge would get that pissed off?” Gleason said.

  “You didn’t think we’d look for you? Didn’t think the judge was gonna report you to ethics for not showing up at his trial? Fucking up his calendar and his Caribbean vacation while you were out banging the defendant? The only way he got you and the lady—a man-hating, ice-blooded wannabe killer, I might add—both back in the courtroom was with bench warrants! This woman cut off her husband’s nuts in his sleep, Izzy!”

  “I was helping her detox,” Gleason said. “I couldn’t put her on the stand drunk any more than I would go to sleep around her and a pair of sharp scissors . . . .”

  “You took advantage of a client with a drinking problem,” Bobby said.

  “Hey, I was drinking pretty good at the time, too,” said Gleason. “But I was helping to wean her off. And I got her off, didn’t I? The booze and the attempted murder rap. And then she went back to her husband and his fuckin’ loot! Maybe I was wiggling her, but then she stiffed me! And my wife got everything I owned. Add insult to injury, a year later I’m suspended. And the headlines were awful. But, Bobby, what a body this broad had. Literally to die a slow death for . . . .”

  “Which her husband almost did,” Bobby said. “But forget her body. What do you have in mind now, Izzy?”

  “I need you to listen to me,” Gleason said, pacing, smoking, chewing candy with his mouth open, his metabolism running on turbo, legs kicking, heels scraping, arms flailing. Bobby was certain Gleason never used illegal drugs because he’d tailed him in the past. Sugar, caffeine, nicotine, and alcohol were his drugs of choice.

  But when you compounded all this with raging testosterone and a few missing chromosomes, he appeared like someone on high-octane cocaine. He wasn’t completely, clinically insane, Bobby thought. But he was more than a half a bubble off plumb. And then there was his problem with women. Gleason was intoxicated by them—big women, small women, skinny, zaftig, white, black, brown, yellow. Worse than booze, the guy was nuts for women. With the exception of his wife, he was, by all reports, very nice to them.

  A different guard tapped on the glass door, and Morrison got up and stepped outside to talk to him, leaving Bobby and Izzy alone.

  “Okay, I’m listening,” Bobby said.

  “I need a middle act,” Gleason said, taking a puff of his butt and leaning in close to Bobby, talking in a rushed, urgent torrent now. “I’m forty-eight, and except for some pin money, I’m broke. I know I’m considered a rummy and a clown. A has-been. I can read the papers. So can my two daughters. Thank God they’re away at school most of the time. But the joke’s over. It’s humiliating, Bobby, and it’s a long road back. I’ve had a long time to think, look around. When I do, I see that you’re in here. Now, I know you never did what they say you did. I can relate to how much you loved that dame of yours.”

  “I still love Dorothea,” Bobby said. “I don’t talk about her in the past tense. Yet . . .”

  “Good,” Gleason said. “Because I need you to either prove she’s alive or that someone else killed her.”

  “You’d probably defend that guy, too,” Bobby said.

  “Don’t get moral on me, asshole,” Gleason said, angry, pointing at him with what was left of the candy bar, the cigarette smoke surrounding him.

  “I’m sorry,” Bobby said. “That was uncalled for.”

  “I’m here to help me, sure, but I can get you out of this shit bowl,” Gleason said. “If you let me. See, I happen to think your lawyer, Moira Farrell, went in the tank on you . . . By the way, were you banging her?”

  “No,” Bobby said. “Jesus Christ . . .”

  “Too bad, because she sure fucked you,” Gleason said. “Worst courtroom defense I’ve seen since Mike Tyson’s. I mean there was never even a body, no corpus delicti, and they convicted you . . .”

  Bobby thought about the glamorous red-haired lawyer who wore the tight skirts and high heels and who had made great press copy but a terrible impression on his mostly middle-aged female jury. The trial had been like a slow-motion hallucination.

  “Give me your pitch, Izzy,” Bobby said softly. “I want to get the hell out of here.”

  The door opened again and Morrison leaned in and said, “Gleason, you got a fax coming into the administration office. And a phone call, too.”

  “Okay,” Gleason said to Bobby. “Let me go get this, and we’ll talk. Think about this, asshole. I’m your only chance . . . .”

  At 7:40 AM, Nydia Var
gas Perez served her husband a cup of black coffee and a slice of dry toast. Dr. Hector Perez had already showered, shaved, brushed his teeth, changed into a fresh suit. He sipped the coffee with trembling hands, his mouth still dry with fear. She’d asked how the convention had gone the night before. He told her it had been dull, but that a bunch of doctors had sat up late in the lounge discussing how one-man patrol cars lead to police stress, ulcers, sick leaves, and overtime abuses. He hadn’t wanted to disturb her when he got home around 1 AM, so he sacked out on the couch.

  Nydia barely listened as she rushed into the bathroom and retched with morning sickness. Perez tried to comfort his wife, but all he could think of was the dead woman.

  After splashing her face and catching her breath, Nydia walked her husband to the door, kissed him good-bye, and was surprised at the enthusiasm of his embrace. “I adore you,” he said, as he rubbed her rotund belly. “Te adoro . . .”

  Then, crossing the Ninth Street Bridge over the infamous Gowanus Canal, named after an ancient Indian chief and now often used to dump whacked Mafia chieftains, Dr. Perez drove his Lexus 300 down to the Red Hook projects, where he had been born and raised. It was just a ten-minute ride but a social continent away from his brownstone block in Park Slope. The Red Hook projects were the second-largest public housing complex in the nation, marooned between the Gowanus Expressway and the moribund Brooklyn waterfront. The area was a forgotten urban asteroid, lost in its own orbit of deep shadows and high unemployment, fatherless children, rampant drugs, and the crackling automatic weapons of the night.

  It bothered Dr. Perez that this wasteland felt more like home than his brownstone.

  He knew from a lifetime of experience that the projects’ trash was compacted at exactly 8:15 AM every morning and quickly hauled away to prevent roaches, mice, and rats from feeding on it and the homeless from tearing it apart in search of redeemable bottles and cans. If he shoved the pillowcase with the blood evidence down the building trash chute into the compacting room by 8:05 AM, it would be compressed with a ton of other garbage and on its way to the Staten Island landfill by noon, never to be seen again.