3 Quarters Read online

  “These the guys you think set you up later, maybe?” Gleason asked, mumbling through his burger.

  “I think so,” Bobby said. “Anyway, I go out to the party room, where a band is playing, and I walk directly to John Shine to let him know what I heard. To get a read from him, because he’s not your ordinary numb-nuts beat cop. He was my training officer and has better radar than an air-traffic controller. Maybe he thinks it’s a bullshit scam, not worth a full investigation. I want to bounce it off him. But when I start telling him, he’s distracted, transfixed, like half the guys at the party. Because here comes Sandy from the medical office, looking hot as one of Victoria’s Secrets herself. But she’s laughing and talking and walking with this . . . this goddess! This Dorothea, dressed in a clinging minidress. The lead singer fumbled the words of the song. I mean, this wasn’t an entrance. It was an event. Dorothea didn’t mean it to be; it just came with the genes. She was out of place, like Sophia Loren walking into a laundromat. Half the women in the room would have liked to shoot her on the spot for felonious perfection.”

  “Or bedded her,” Gleason said. “How many broad cops you figure are moes?”

  “John Shine bet me I couldn’t get a date with her,” Bobby said, ignoring Gleason. “I had a few cocktails in me, was feeling my beer balls. I was missing Connie and Maggie something terrible. I knew the worst this dream-in-a-dress could do was say no. The divorce was much worse than any rejection this woman could give me. Plus I would have regretted not trying for the rest of my life. And John bet me; he was egging me on.”

  “I told ya, I know who John Shine is,” Gleason said. “One of the toughest cops I ever cross-examined. Confident, unflappable, straight. A defense lawyer’s nightmare. Know why? Because he’s one of those rare cops who always tells the fuckin’ truth on the stand.”

  “Johnny Shine ruined his health on the job,” Bobby said, “screwed up four disks in his back, wrestling with a crack dealer. He was always in pain. But he never complained, kept working. He helped get me my transfer to the Harbor Unit. Then I made detective and transferred to the Manhattan DA’s squad. We sort of lost touch. But sometimes the world is perfect. Three years ago, Shine won the goddamn New York State Lottery for three million bucks. He retired from the job, opened up a saloon out in Bay Ridge, but didn’t forget where he came from. Later, he loaned me money for my defense. He offered to help pay for an appeal, but I couldn’t let him throw good money after bad.”

  “So Shine made you a bet about Dorothea . . .”

  “Yeah, so I forgot all about why I was there, about Kuzak and Zeke and O’Brien and the pension-racket rumor. I walked right up to Sandy and asked her to introduce me to Dorothea. She did, and we danced a fast one, a slow one, and sat out the next one at the bar together,” Bobby said as they slowly walked to the Jeep, his eyes searching the area for the elusive white Taurus. “I asked her out to dinner the next night. She asked what I had in the fridge. I told her leftover pasta. She said she’d love some of that, so we stopped at a liquor store and she bought a bottle of expensive French wine . . .”

  “Oy!” Gleason shouted, fumbling for a smoke. “A first nighter!”

  “I took her home, we drank half a glass each, skipped the pasta, made love all night, and she never left. I gave her my keys when I went to work in the morning, and when I came home, she had unpacked two of her suitcases. She said she had been staying with Sandy, was taking courses at the School of Visual Arts in photography a few days a week. Other than that, she was vague about her life, her background, family, friends. Said Sandy was her only friend in New York. I liked the idea that she was a loner. I was needy. Greedy. Possessive. I didn’t want to let her out of my sight. I was afraid someone was going to kidnap her, take her away from me. Not only did I fall in love with her right away, I wanted to. I needed to replace Connie. I didn’t ask questions about who Dorothea was—until later. It didn’t seem to matter. She was beautiful, sweet, smarter than me, better educated, better read . . .”

  “Didn’t you bother, between rolls in the hay, to ask her who the hell she was?” Gleason asked. “At least proof her for age?”

  Bobby paused and stared at Gleason, shook his head, and climbed back into the Jeep, which was parked over by a rank of public telephones. Venus sat in the backseat mouthing the new English words. “Baby, bottle, bird . . .” Gleason handed her a plain salad and water. “Here’s your shrubbery, hon, mangia,” Gleason said.

  “Gracias,” said Venus, who began picking at the salad.

  “Your welcome-o,” Gleason said.

  Bobby looked from one to the other, shaking his head, then started the car and pulled back out onto the highway.

  “Whenever I did ask Dorothea her background, she’d change the subject—politics, law, history, literature, art, music, fashion, dance, movies, theater, opera, cities, countries I never even heard of,” Bobby continued as they moved back into southbound traffic. “Dorothea spoke flawless English and French, some Italian and Spanish, and her native Ukrainian, Russian, Polish, and a few others. She said her mother had been brilliant and taught her all the languages and about world politics and the arts. But she also said her mother had lived a terrible, sad life. As an outcast. That she had died the year before. I guessed the mother was some kind of political dissident back in the old country. I could never get Dorothea to elaborate.”

  “You were too busy hiding the salami,” Gleason said.

  “She was too busy pleasing me, in a lot of ways,” Bobby said, shooting Gleason a disgusted glance. “Dorothea even sat down and read a baseball rulebook because she knew I was a fan. What woman does that? She read through all my old copies of Ring magazine because I liked boxing. She even knew how to fix a car, Gleason. A car! I can just about change a friggin’ flat, and she can get under the hood, elbow deep in grease. She was the most complete woman of the world I’d ever met. She could put together a gourmet meal in twenty minutes, with veal and mushrooms and pasta and a salad of greens that I didn’t even know grew on planet earth but she found growing wild in Prospect Park on some nature walk she read about on the Key Food bulletin board! The second day she was with me, I went to work, came home, and she had her hair in a babushka, was wearing one of my shirts tied at the waist—a woman in a man’s shirt drives me crazy—”

  “Oh, yeah!” shouted Gleason, interrupting Bobby. “Especially if they wear red heels and thong panties and they bend over to pick up forty-seven cents you just happen to drop on the floor.”

  “ . . . She came in and she’d redecorated my entire apartment. It looked like something out of a magazine. My bachelor stuff, same eclectic clutter, rearranged and presented like one of her perfect meals. She took me over to little restaurants in Little Kiev in Alphabet City and ordered piroghis, lamb, borscht, caviar, vodka. She took me to the Ukrainian festival on Seventh Street, into these little Ukrainian saloons where men played cards and bet horses and spoke in whispers as if the KGB was outside the door. She showed me around my city! I was overwhelmed, swallowed whole. Then one day she took me into St. Peter’s Church on Seventh Street, a gorgeous Ukrainian cathedral, and in front of the altar she looked me in the eyes and whispered, ‘Ya tebe kohayu. ’I told her I loved her, too. I asked her to marry me. If I could have, I would have copyrighted her.”

  “I would have fuckin’ adopted her,” Gleason said, clearing his throat, growling.

  “She said she would marry me,” Bobby said, checking in the rearview mirror. “That Taurus is back.”

  Gleason turned and looked. “So? Just drive. Keep talking, I’m listening.”

  “Anyway, I could never get her to commit to a date,” Bobby said. “I never doubted her story that she was raised by her outcast mother in the Ukraine. Or that after her mother’s death, she came to New York a few months before I met her, on a possible exchange program. That she fell in love with New York and decided to stay. When I pressed her for more details or a marriage date, she simply got undressed and would make love to me and wh
isper passionately in my ear in a different language every time. I was becoming multilingual in sex!”

  “Jesus, the most exotic I ever got was a Panamanian stripper from Washington Heights who used to call me ‘Poppi’ in the sack,” Gleason said.

  Venus leaned forward and said, “Qué?”

  “Nada, sweetheart,” Gleason said, waving his hand. “Nada . . .”

  Venus smiled and sat back and listened to her tapes.

  “She stole me, heart and soul, body and mind, inside out,” Bobby said, not even hearing Gleason. “When I was with Dorothea, the world didn’t seem dirty or corrupt at all. She was the perfect antidote to the job.”

  “Did she work, get mail, make long-distance phone calls?” Gleason asked.

  “Not when she was with me.”

  “Where did a broad from a commie country get money?”

  “She seemed to have plenty of money,” Bobby said. “I didn’t ask from where or how much. I thought that would be impolite. Especially since she wouldn’t take any of mine. She offered to pay half the rent, bills, but—”

  “You turned her down? Someone finally found one broad willing to pony up her half of life’s fuckin’ nut, and you turned her down?”

  “Yeah,” Bobby said.

  “You set men back twenty fuckin’ years,” Gleason said. “The idea, dickhead, is to clone a broad who actually pays her own freight.”

  “My daughter, Maggie, who is more protective of me than I am of myself, liked Dorothea right away,” Bobby said. “She thought she was perfect for me, and Maggie has a built-in bullshit detector, a human polygraph. Besides my daughter, Dorothea was my lifeline to humankind at its very best, as it’s supposed to be. When they charged and convicted me of killing her, I was in a prolonged trance, too stunned at the horror of Dorothea’s supposed murder to even comprehend the gravity of being charged with it. I was in jail for six months before I accepted that she wouldn’t be coming to visit me.”

  “Okay,” Gleason said. “I get the picture. You had a storybook ten-week romance with a mystery dame, and you got Shine in your corner. Who else can you count on?”

  Bobby told him more about the old cop named Tom Larkin, sixty-one years old, facing mandatory retirement in two years. Because of his age he was now the “house mouse” or “the broom” at the 72nd Precinct in Brooklyn, the glorified porter who swept up around the precinct. Since becoming the house mouse, Larkin had also become something of a computer wizard, surfing the Net and tapping into the NYPD and other law-enforcement databases on the sly. After years in the Stakeout Squad and then the Intelligence Unit, he was one of those nosy old coots who had a dossier on almost everyone on the force. Knew where skeletons were buried, who was banging whom, who took extra days off, who was claiming court appearances that were canceled. He was a human database.

  Tom Larkin wasn’t muscle, but he was smart, ballsy, and loyal. Larkin had also been there the day Bobby’s father was killed in the line of duty.

  “Good, we might need an old fuck like him,” Gleason said.

  Of course, Bobby also counted in his younger brother, Patrick, who ran the Brooklyn Police Athletic League, working with ghetto kids in sports and recreation programs. Bobby never let Patrick come to the trial as a spectator because he didn’t want the press or the brass to make a show of him. Didn’t want to contaminate him with his scandal.

  “Your brother wrote me the letter asking me to look into your case,” Gleason said. “Since you gave him power of attorney, he could sign all the documents for me. I know what you said on the stand. Now tell me again. What happened that night?”

  “I was in this bar, called The Anchor, in Gerritsen Beach, ass end of Brooklyn, drinking beer with some guys I knew worked for Gibraltar Security. Kuzak and Zeke weren’t there. Anyway, I’m working these guys when I see the young cop, O’Brien, the one I used to work with at Brooklyn South, walk in. He’s the one from the Christmas party. He sneers at me, like he knows something. Now, I always remember this guy O’Brien as a weasel, dumb as a lost cow with a broken bell, one of those guys who became a cop because he got the shit beat out of him for his lunch money every day in the schoolyard and now he needed a gun and a badge to get even with the world.”

  “Carries his dick in his holster,” Gleason said.

  “Something like that,” Bobby said. “So I’m asking these guys from Gibraltar what exactly goes on behind the black marble, windowless walls of their compound. The place looks like Hitler’s bunker, with video cameras scanning the street, razor wire on the roof, gates and alarms. You’d think they had nuclear secrets in there. Then O’Brien buys me a drink, which he never did in ten years of knowing him. The bartender was an old doof, name of Cleary, retired charter fisherman from Sheepshead Bay, who conveniently died in a fall down a flight of stairs before we could subpoena him to trial. So, anyway, I take the beer, a glass of tap. I buy the next round, trying to oil these guys . . . and, man, suddenly, blanko!”

  “The bartender, the dead fuck, he Mickey-Finned ya,” Gleason said. “Rohypnol, probably. Nicknamed roofies. The ‘date-rape drug.’ I almost defended a guy who raped a series of women with Rohypnol. Slip that into someone’s drink and good night, Nurse; good morning, Doctor, or undertaker. That rock star, Kurt Cobain—it put him in a coma once. My daughters talked me out of defending this rape suspect because they knew a girl who had been raped with Rohypnol. Ten times stronger than Xanax. Really, really bad shit.”

  “I have no idea what the hell it was,” said Bobby. “But, man, next thing I know I’m being woken up in the early morning in my car by cops, brass, Brooklyn DA investigators. Twirling cop-car lights, flashlights, forensic flashbulbs. I’m parked in Evergreen Cemetery, outside the crematorium, covered in blood. My whole car is soaked in blood. I ask what the fuck is going on, and Cis Tuzio is on the scene herself with a Brooklyn DA detective named Hanratty. She tells me that a body had been illegally cremated in the crematorium last night. Plus, she says, homicide police did a search of my apartment and found it covered in blood. They find a bloody knife in my car. With my prints. They lock me up on suspicion of murder. Say I killed Dorothea in my apartment and transported her to the cemetery in my car, cremated her, and fell asleep.”

  “Didn’t you tell Tuzio or the cops about this O’Brien and Cleary guy who Mickey-Finned you?” Gleason asked.

  “Of course I told them I’d been drugged,” Bobby said. “But when they went to The Anchor, everyone denied I was ever there that night. I couldn’t prove it.”

  “Then they booked you?”

  “Yeah,” Bobby said. “It took less than twelve hours to do a positive blood match between the blood in my apartment, my car, and the crematorium. My head was spinning. I never knew what the hell happened. Still don’t. And I went over it every night for the past eighteen months.”

  “Sure you don’t want a Kit Kat?” Gleason asked, eating one himself.

  Bobby blinked and looked in the rearview mirror. The Taurus was obviously going to follow them all the way into the city. The cat-and-mouse was starting to give him a restless edge. It made him know he had no time to waste. He was out, which meant he had to dive right back in.

  “This newspaper pain-in-the-ass, this Max Roth, can he be trusted?”

  “He doesn’t like you,” Bobby said. “But he likes me. We go back to my Brooklyn College days, before I transferred to John Jay College after I joined the PD. I helped him with stories over the years.”

  “You mean you leaked him stories,” Gleason said. “Your office was a sieve, and your leaks won him awards. I know. Some of them were won on my clients’ convictions. The awards got him a fuckin’ column. He owes you at least a six-pack of blow jobs . . . .”

  Bobby took no offense, knowing that in the tabloid trade a positive story was referred to as a “blow job.”

  “He has integrity,” Bobby said.

  “ ‘Integrity’ is just a word sandwiched between ‘incest’ and ‘intoxication’ in the dictionary,”
Gleason said. “But we need a newspaper guy. His readers are my jury pool. Can you trust this shifty, ink-stained suckass?”

  “Yeah,” Bobby said, refraining from telling Gleason what names came to his mind when he looked at him. “But he’s no suckass.”

  “Okay, so you got your brother, a kid, an ex-wife, some nosy old fuckin’ flatfoot, a retired-cop-slashsaloon-keeper, and Roth,” Gleason said. “That’s the whole fan club? You’re not too popular.”

  “Neither are you, Sleazy Izzy,” said Bobby, realizing they had just entered the city of New York. He saw a sign for the Triboro Bridge and another for the Henry Hudson Parkway.

  “That’s why we’ll make a great team,” said Gleason. “We got nowhere to go but up.”

  “This isn’t a team. This is another bad marriage.”

  “What’s your first move?”

  Bobby looked in his rearview mirror, saw that the Taurus was following him onto the Henry Hudson. At the last possible moment Bobby made a hard left and veered across three lanes of traffic for the ramp to the Triboro. Horns honked at him and the Taurus braked suddenly, doing a squealing half spin. Bobby slowed and in the rearview he made out the numerals 682. New York State JDF-682.

  Bobby looked over at the Taurus, gave it the finger, and headed over the Triboro.

  9

  A half hour later Bobby knocked on the big door, feeling the reinforced steel reverberate through his knuckles. After fifteen seconds he rang the bell and then knocked again. He stood outside the polished black marble cube of a building on Gerritsen Avenue, the main boulevard of this low-key, etherized section of Brooklyn. A small brass sign was bolted into the gleaming stone: GIBRALTAR SECURITY