3 Quarters Page 26

  “No,” Bobby said, “I didn’t.”

  “I didn’t think so,” Franz said with a silly high-pitched laugh that made him sound like a gradeschooler, and then he click-clacked down the remaining steps.

  Bobby recoiled as they passed through another door into a scrub room outside the morgue. He handed Bobby a pair of surgical gloves and a surgical mask. They both donned the protective gear to ward off airborne bacteria from the exposed corpses inside. Bobby then followed Franz into the sprawling, brightly lit lab of antiseptic stainless-steel sinks, linen hampers, and scattered gurneys. Bobby scanned a row of autopsy tables equipped with overhead Luma-Lite lamps, dangling microphones, and Stryker saws and instrument tables where handsaws, files, forceps, scalpels, and other stainless-steel tools of the death trade were neatly arranged. The lab was lined with several glass-enclosed offices, covered with vertical blinds. The two men crossed the autopsy area, where space-suited medical students were working on cadavers. One medical student looked up from a corpse, through the window of his headgear, and seemed to recognize Bobby. He nudged another student. The two of them stared like celebrity hounds. Bobby hoped the body wasn’t the remains of Tom Larkin.

  Franz then entered his small, cramped office and took a seat behind his desk. He wheeled himself in his office chair to a Mr. Coffee that rested on top of a low file cabinet and poured himself a cup.

  “Coffee?”

  “No thanks,” Bobby said.

  Franz sprinkled in a half packet of Sweet’n Low and wheeled himself back behind his desk. “Did you know that every little pink packet of Sweet’n Low in the world is made right here in Brooklyn?”

  “You don’t say?” Bobby said. “So, why don’t you think I killed her?”

  “A voice from the grave,” Franz said with his high-pitched laugh. “You’re here about the teeth, no?” Franz sipped the coffee, pushed the steam-fogged glasses a little higher on his little sweaty snout.

  “Yes, I am,” Bobby said.

  “About a year and a half late,” Franz said, the smell of the onions still drifting from him.

  “Oh?”

  “I turned the teeth over to the district attorney’s office,” Franz said. “Funny how they were never used in evidence.”

  “ ‘Funny’ is the wrong word,” Bobby said. “I spent a year and a half behind bars.”

  “Oh, I know, I know, I know,” he said. “I don’t usually follow most of the homicides that come through here, anymore than a baggage handler follows what happens to a piece of luggage. I don’t mean to sound insensitive, but you get numb to the endless conveyor belt of domestic violence, drug killings. Children I always remember because every one is an innocent. Yours I remember, too, and not just because it made headlines.”

  “Why, then?”

  “Because, how often do we get ashes here?” he asked, blurting the silly high-pitched laugh again.

  “Not really ashes,” Bobby said. “It’s bone dust.”

  “Ah, you’ve done your homework,” Franz said, impressed, sipping his coffee. He added a little more Sweet’n Low.

  “Who did you give the teeth to?” Bobby asked.

  “Cis Tuzio herself. An unpleasant woman.”

  “Do you have a voucher for it?”

  “Yeah,” Franz said. “The teeth were never returned. I was told they were lost.”

  “Convenient,” Bobby said.

  “They said it made no difference because Dorothea Dubrow had no available dental records to compare them to,” Franz said.

  “My attorney might be subpoenaing you,” Bobby said, standing to leave. “That okay with you?”

  “Anytime,” Franz said. “I’d like nothing better. Because those teeth spoke to me like they still had a tongue attached to them. Spoke to me with a New York accent.”

  Bobby leaned on his desk and tried to find the eyes behind the thick kaleidoscopic glasses. “Explain all that to me, Mr. Franz,” Bobby said very softly. “Please . . .”

  “Was your girlfriend a smoker?”

  “She hated cigarettes,” Bobby said. “She was a health nut.”

  “And she was supposed to be from the Ukraine, no?”

  “That’s right.”

  Franz wheeled himself to the file cabinet under the Mr. Coffee and pulled out a drawer, removed a file, and opened it as he rolled himself back behind the desk.

  “The DA’s office might have lost the teeth,” Franz said, perusing the official documents in the folder. “But I didn’t lose the lab tests. Judging by the high tar and nicotine content in the teeth, the person who belonged to those teeth was a heavy smoker. American cigarettes, because of the ammonia additives that American tobacco companies use to boost addiction levels. She would probably have lived in New York most of her forty years, judging by the amount of fluoride in her teeth. It’s the same type of fluoride we use here. I haven’t been able to find anywhere else in the world besides New York that uses the same chemical formula of fluoride as was found in those teeth.” He paused and giggled and put on a mock accent, “Yo, dem teet’ tawk wit’ a New Yawk accent.”

  Franz started to giggle with the high-pitched voice again. “New Yawk, New Yawk, helluva town,” he blurted, and began giggling some more and then stopped abruptly when he saw that Bobby Emmet was deadly serious.

  “Dorothea didn’t smoke,” Bobby said. “She was twenty-five, and she had lived in New York for less than a year.”

  “Then they better arrest you for killing someone else,” said Franz, and then he started to nervously laugh some more, putting his hand to his mouth to stop himself.

  “Can I get a Xerox of these tests?”

  “My pleasure,” Franz said.

  37

  FRIDAY

  Gleason was supposed to meet Bobby aboard The Fifth Amendment the next morning at nine. He arrived at 10:12 AM.

  “Sorry I’m late,” Gleason said. “I got caught in an argument with the broad . . . .”

  “Alana?”

  “My candy jones was driving her crazy, so I cut down to two Hersheys a day,” he said. “Detoxing. Now she says if I don’t see a shrink about gnawing the inside of my face, she’s gonna split. I ain’t seein’ no doctor. So I started smoking three packs a day again. You mind?”

  He lit a Kent 100 before Bobby answered and threw the match overboard into the morning wind.

  “As long as it’s out here on deck,” Bobby said, watching the flight of the match. “Speaking of doctors, I have to tell you about Franz, the first deputy chief ME in Brooklyn.”

  Gleason blew out a lungful of smoke, took a Daily News from his back pocket. It was folded to the Max Roth column about Tom Larkin’s death. He said, “Tell me about this, too.”

  Bobby told him about Franz first, handing Gleason the photocopy of the lab report on the teeth, about how the little man had said the teeth were from a woman in her forties, a New Yorker and a smoker. Gave him all the little details about American cigarette ammonia additives and New York City’s unique fluoride formula.

  Gleason leafed through the file, walked to the edge of the Silverton, grabbed the railing, and took a drag of the cigarette.

  “I checked on the pacemaker thing,” Gleason said. “Tuzio was savvy enough to log it as evidence. No suppression there. It was up to her to use it; she chose not to. But it doesn’t explain why Moira Farrell never used it. It did fall into the category of exculpatory evidence.”

  Bobby went through the whole Tuzio-Farrell connection that went all the way back to their high school days in Scranton.

  “Collusion,” Gleason said. “Conspiracy. Jesus, I can make a dog and pony show out of that alone.”

  “It could mean the judge, too,” Bobby said. “Max Roth was in the Brooklyn courthouse yesterday doing some research, which showed that both Farrell and Tuzio once clerked for Judge Mark White, who presided over my trial and sentenced me.”

  “My next press conference is gonna be a fuckin’ doozy,” Gleason said, slapping the rolled file folder
against his palm. “I might hold this one on the fuckin’ Brooklyn Bridge. They’ve tried to sell the public every thing else. Tell this Franz guy I want to depose him on Sunday if he’s available. Same with Carlos Orosco from the crematorium. I need a few hours each of their time.”

  “I can arrange that,” Bobby said.

  Then Bobby told him about Larkin. About the message on the answering machine asking him to meet him in the Kopper Kettle.

  “Well, you already know what he said . . .

  “I do?” Gleason looked confused.

  “You know, about the Kate Clementine kidnapping case,” Bobby said as if familiarizing Gleason about what he already knew. “Some missing architect? The Ukraine? I don’t have to tell you what he said, you heard it yourself, Izzy . . . .”

  “When the fuck did I hear it?” Gleason said. “The only thing I heard the last few days was Alana sayin’, ‘No checks, no sex!’ And ‘stop cussing and stop eatin’ candy and stop smokin’.’ What the hell you mean I ‘heard it’?”

  “Didn’t you check the messages on the machine in the office the other night?” Bobby asked.

  “I told you, I have no fuckin’ idea how that machine works,” Gleason said.

  “Well, someone was using the remote code to check the messages the other night when I went there to get the gun,” Bobby said, walking to the edge of the boat and looking downtown on the calm river.

  “It wasn’t me,” Gleason said. “If you check the outgoing message on the machine, it says that if you need to get in touch with me for professional reasons, to call my Chelsea Hotel number. Clients don’t call me at the office. I have them call the Chelsea because there’s a switchboard. Human beings who answer the phones when I’m out. I told you I have no fuckin’ idea how to work them machines. Especially from the outside.”

  “Then who the hell was checking the messages?” Bobby wondered out loud.

  “Who else did you give the remote code to?”

  “I didn’t give the code to anyone,” Bobby said. But he suddenly thought of one person who might know it.

  “Whoever had the remote answering-machine code knew Larkin was gonna connect the dots for you,” Gleason said. “This person also knew where and when you were gonna meet him. And got there first. Me, alls I remember about the Kate Clementine case was that some crazy relative abducted her or something. It’s going back a while. One thing for sure: ‘Clementine’ ain’t no fuckin’ Ukrainian name.”

  “I have some people to see,” Bobby said.

  “I’ll check and see if Tuzio ever logged the teeth,” Gleason said as he squinted downriver, the wind flattening his hair. “If she didn’t, then we got us a suppression of evidence case to go with the conspiracy. The pacemaker is interesting, but without a body or medical history there is no way to know if Dorothea ever had one. Only your testimony to the contrary. Which without corroboration is meaningless. The teeth are different. That evidence is clearly exculpatory and corroborative, because even though there is no body, we have an expert witness ready to say these teeth came from a forty-year-old woman. A lifelong New Yorker. Which contradicts the prosecution’s description of Dorothea Dubrow as a twenty-five-year-old native Ukrainian who was only in this country less than a year.”

  Sometimes, in moments of lucidity like this one, Bobby felt safe in Izzy Gleason’s hands.

  “I’ll keep in touch,” Gleason said, and hurried off The Fifth Amendment.

  At noon, Dr. Benjamin Abrams sat on a bench, feeling the sun beat on his face. He had arrived five minutes earlier and taken a seat at the bus stop on the corner of Flatbush Avenue and Avenue U, across from the Kings Plaza Shopping Center, just as he did every Monday and Friday. Immediately after sitting down, he put on the special glasses, plunging himself into inky darkness.

  They were wraparound glasses with light-tight frames that softly bit into the skin and bone surrounding his eyes, the lenses made with pure black glass that blocked out all view. Although they looked to others like sunglasses for the blind, they were designed so that the wearer could see absolutely nothing.

  Dr. Abrams never dared trying to peek or to alter the glasses. He had no desire to know his blackmailer’s identity. As long as he went along with the blackmailer’s simple requests, his life would proceed smoothly. No hassles, no interruptions, no angst. He would never be dragged into court for murder. Never subject his wife or daughter, Rebecca, to the humiliation. Never have to do a day of jail time. All he had to do was sign those silly “91” pension forms when they came in and report here to this bus stop twice a week with his little black doctor’s bag. He was always approached by the same soft-voiced gentleman, who escorted him into a car that always smelled new, where he was buckled into a deep leather seat.

  Today was exactly the same as all the other Fridays and Mondays. The man pulled up to the bus stop, walked to Dr. Abrams, led him into the car, buckled him in. They drove in silence for another fifteen minutes. Abrams was unsure which direction, as the driver always made a series of turns.

  Then he was escorted by the driver into a building, led along a very narrow corridor, through a low door and down an even more cramped, very steep stairwell into this comfortable, soundproof subterranean bunker-living quarters.

  The twenty-by-twenty-foot underground room was equipped with a bathroom, shower, kitchenette, a living room area, a stereo, a TV with a special chip to block out normal programming but hooked up to a VCR, a bookcase filled with books. There was a stationary bicycle and a StairMaster. The room was stuffy, but a steady whir of fresh air blew through a tiny duct in the kitchen area.

  Off the living room area was a small alcove with a full-sized bed, neatly made. In another corner was an overstuffed armchair.

  When the blackmailer was safely in his armchair, with a spotlight behind him to shroud him from view, he would tell the doctor that he could remove his blindfold glasses. When he did, Abrams would always find Dorothea Dubrow sitting on the sofa, staring at him with the same sad dark eyes.

  “Hello, Doctor,” she said. “Today I am feeling cold. Is the sun out?”

  Dr. Abrams placed a thermometer in her mouth. He’d recognized her from the photographs that came out at the time of the trial. Dr. Abrams knew that Bobby Emmet was accused of killing this poor woman, who had been held captive here for the past eighteen months. But precisely because of what these same people had done to Emmet, Dr. Abrams would never mention a word of her existence to anyone. He had no desire to know who was behind all of this. Life and freedom were too precious. Suppose they did the same to his own daughter?

  Besides, every time he examined Dorothea Dubrow she was in generally good health. The three-milligram Haldol tablets that he prescribed for her kept her as docile as a parlor cat. There were never any signs of abuse. She obviously ate well and did exercise. He always gave her a multivitamin shot, to be certain she did not become malnourished. Her beautiful teeth were regularly brushed and flossed. There was no sign of rape or mistreatment at all. The blackmailer even provided her with sunlamps to keep her from growing too pale. But today she was trembling, her teeth chattering.

  He checked the thermometer: 102.6. Not deadly, but not good.

  Dr. Abrams checked her pulse, her heartbeat, her reflexes. She obeyed all his polite commands with a mannequin’s pasty smile. The drugs and so much time down here had made her listless and accustomed to a simulated one-note life that was like a human dial tone.

  But none of that bothered him. She was still a basically healthy woman. She was the least of his troubles. She was alive, unlike the butchered woman in the videotape that the blackmailer held over his head.

  “She has a fever,” Dr. Abrams told his blackmailer, who sat in his shadowy chair behind the shield of light.

  “Will she be okay?”

  “She has to be kept warm,” Dr. Abrams said. “Give her Tylenol and lots of juices. I want to keep tabs on her. Contact me immediately if she gets any worse.”

  “There’s a possibili
ty we might have to travel soon,” the man in the shadows said. “Is she up to that?”

  “Check with me first,” Dr. Abrams said. “Any change in environment could exacerbate the fever.”

  “All right,” the blackmailer said.

  “I’m finished here,” Dr. Abrams said as he closed his small doctor’s bag, patted Dorothea Dubrow on the shoulder, and put the wraparound glasses back on. “Remember to keep her warm.”

  “Is the sun shining today, Doctor?” Dorothea Dubrow asked, her teeth chattering.

  He was startled to hear the question again. Then he said, “Yes, yes, it is.”

  “Feel it for me,” she said.

  Then the blackmailer led Dr. Abrams blindly up the stairs.

  38

  The room was ripe with too many flowers.

  The wake was only one night, in Walter B. Cooke’s in Bay Ridge, the most popular funeral parlor for those few cops who still lived in Brooklyn. The PBA had made all the arrangements for the wake and burial.

  The undertakers had done a good job on Tom Larkin, repairing the ruined neck and adding color to his gaunt, dead cheeks. Old-time retired cops filed past the coffin, kneeling, blessing themselves, saying silent prayers. Larkin had been the only one of his contemporaries to keep working. Most got out after twenty years or less, depending on whether they got three-quarters, and called it a career. Larkin, who was still on the job when he died, called it a life.

  Bobby greeted Rose Morse, the woman who had been dating Tom Larkin, as she sat in stunned bereavement. Larkin was the second man in her life to die in the past five years. “Good men are harder and harder to find as a woman gets older,” she said to Bobby as she clutched his hand. “I’ll never find another one like him . . . .”

  Bobby was fumbling for words. “He was crazy about you,” Bobby said. “You gave him a last dance he didn’t even know he had in him.”

  That sent her cascading into tears, and Bobby felt terrible. Some other women in the funeral parlor came to her side to comfort her with Kleenex, hugs, and soothing words.