3 Quarters (11 page)

Bobby pointed at the items on the desk and said, “The phone and the watch I can use. Not the gun.”

“I wanted you to know it's here for when you need it,” Gleason said.

“If
I need it.”

“Oh, you'll need it all right,” Gleason said.

A twelve-inch color television sat on top of the fridge. Bobby turned it on and heard baseball scores.

“That all we came here for?” Bobby asked. “I got things to do.”

“No, to get my messages,” Gleason said.

“Your messages?” Bobby said. “You can get them from a pay phone with your remote number.”

“I always forget the fuckin' number.”

“I'll reset it,” Bobby said examining the answering machine. “To the same number as your door. Three-seven-eight. Okay?”

“It's too complicated,” Gleason said. “The outgoing message on this machine tells clients to call me at the Chelsea Hotel. The only people I tell to leave messages for me here are
broads
. I don't like them calling me at the hotel, in case I'm there with another broad. So I come by every once in a while and push the play button. That I know how to do. See . . .”

Gleason hit the play button on the answering machine. There were calls from all the local newspapers and TV and radio news stations, including an earlier one from Max Roth. They all wanted Gleason to set up interviews with Bobby Emmet. Gleason jotted down the names and numbers.

“I already called Associated Press to do a media alert that I'm holding a two-thirty
PM
horseshit photo-op press conference in front of the Brooklyn district attorney's office,” Gleason said. “When Roth calls you, tell him you need a few days before you give him the exclusive.”

Bobby nodded. Then he heard his daughter Maggie's voice.

“Hello, Mr. Gleason, this is Maggie Emmet. First, I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for getting my father out of jail. Second, I'm
looking
for him. If you get this message, will you please tell him that he better call me or he's coming off my Christmas card list. He knows the number. Oh, yeah, tell him I love him to death, too. Thanks.”

“Sounds like a good kid,” Gleason said. “Be careful they don't try to get to you through her.”

Bobby looked at Gleason with haunted dread. “That's crossed my mind.”

‘These are ruthless motherfuckers we're dealing with,” Gleason said and lit another cigarette.

Bobby pulled open the only interior door in the office to reveal the executive bathroom.

He tugged the glow-in-the-dark knob of the light cord, and a bare incandescent bulb popped to life in the high ceiling. The bathroom had old, cracked ceramic fixtures—a bowl, sink, and small shower stall. Everything was spotless. There was a pile of clean white towels on top of a wicker hamper. The medicine cabinet above the sink was filled with deodorant, shaving cream, razors, aftershave lotion, toothpaste, soap. He nodded approval.

“You might have a sleazy reputation, but I don't ever remember you without a shave, a haircut, and a crease in your pants,” Bobby said.

“Believe it or not, like you, I do want my daughters to be proud of me . . . again,” Gleason said softly. “They will be; just watch me. Just watch . . .”

Gleason pulled out a large wad of cash from his front right-hand pocket and peeled off five one-hundred-dollar bills, placed them on the desktop next to the watch, the gun and the cell phone. He weighted the bills with a set of office keys.

“Just so you know,” Gleason said, “I already applied for a private investigator's license for you, saying you were going to be my chief investigator. Any more questions?”

Bobby put the .38 back in the drawer and locked it. He picked up the money and the watch. It was 1:01
PM.

“Izzy, I'm in a hurry, but answer me this.”

“Yeah?”

“If you got this kind of dough,” he said, waving the five one-hundred-dollar bills and pointing at the overhead lights, “why can't you get a fucking bulb fixed?”

“Look, you don't like the fuckin' lighting, fix it yourself. I gotta put a broad on a bus. Then I'm gonna do a press conference in time for the six o'clock news. I'm gonna cash in on your sorry ass big time.”

Gleason made a move for the door, and Bobby Emmet called to him.

“Izzy,” Bobby said softly.

Izzy Gleason turned to him.

“Thanks,” Bobby said.

“Give it time and you'll take that back,” Gleason said, and then he was gone.

The line echoed in Bobby's head. He wasn't at all sure that Gleason was legit. He still couldn't trust him. Everything in Gleason's past told Bobby the man was a devious bag of shit. Bobby seriously considered the idea that Gleason could be working for the guys who framed him. Guys who failed to have him killed in the joint who now wanted him on the outside, where they could whack him. Gleason could be getting paid to set him up by this anonymous “angel” who put up his bail. Who was this benefactor, anyway? Gleason had stashed Bobby in a boat on a remote marina, an easy place to waste someone. Gave him a car that could already be bugged or wired. Which could account for the white Taurus—that Gleason didn't seem overly concerned about. Even this office could be monitored. Gleason had been a mouthpiece-for-hire for killers all his life; what would one more corpse in his career be? And what about this Venus, whom Gleason claimed didn't speak a word of English? She could probably recite the Constitution backward in English and Spanish. Was she part of some setup, too?

Bobby felt dirty inside and out. Just doing business with Gleason called for a shower.

Alone now as a free man for the first time, Bobby listened to the TV blare a commercial for a limousine service. Then the anchor did an introduction about Bobby being released from prison and segued to old file film footage of himself being led away from the courtroom in handcuffs after the guilty verdict. And there was Moira Farrell, his first lawyer, with her thick mane of red hair, sapphire eyes, and legendary short, tight skirts, which the media loved but had failed to seduce the jury.

The scene shifted to a live interview in Moira Farrell's plush law office. “First, let me say I'm delighted that Bobby Emmet is out of jail and has won a new trial,” Farrell said. “And, no, I have not been contacted or consulted by his new attorney. I wouldn't have time these days to involve myself in a criminal trial anyway, since I'm much too busy with other important, exciting matters in my life right now. But I do wish Bobby the very best in his new trial.”

Something was wrong, Bobby thought. Not once did she say she thought he was innocent.

Farrell's interview was followed by one with Cis Tuzio, who was now Brooklyn's chief assistant district attorney. “Robert Emmet had better enjoy his short-lived freedom, because he is going straight back to jail like a boomerang,” Tuzio said. “This is a classic example of junk justice, a case in which a man violated his position as a police officer and canceled his subscription to the human race when he butchered his lover and
cremated
her. The evidence is overwhelming. This office will not rest until he is back behind bars.”

The anchorman said Izzy Gleason, Bobby Emmet's new attorney, was scheduled to hold a two-thirty press conference in front of the Brooklyn district attorney's office in downtown Brooklyn.

The anchor then switched to a story about gubernatorial candidate Gerald Stone chairing a national panel on “The American Family in the 21st Century.” Bobby stared at the square-jawed, perfectly groomed candidate with the toothpaste-ad smile. The time was superimposed on the lower left-hand corner of the TV screen: 1:05
PM.
Bobby had time for a five-minute shower.

He carried his canvas bag into the bathroom and removed a pair of clean jeans, a sweatshirt, underwear, socks, and a pair of sneakers. He laid them out on top of the wicker hamper. All worn and ragged. He definitely needed new clothes.

He turned on the shower, the nozzle blasting a forceful spray from the great plumbing system of the immense building. He'd been dreaming of this for a long, long time. He got under the spray, then worked up a big lather with the fresh bar of soap, his jail muscles bulging and jumping as he reached around to his back. He vigorously shampooed his close-cropped hair, brushed his teeth under the showerhead, scouring his gums, tongue, the roof of his mouth. He let the very hot water boil him for a good three minutes, his pores oozing eighteen months of prison and scandal.

With his face held directly into the spray, he shut his eyes. He saw the televised faces of Farrell, Tuzio, and Stone, along with Lou Barnicle. Then he willed them all away with a turn of the water faucets. He stepped out and quickly towel-dried and dressed.

He had a much more important face to see.

B
obby wanted to walk the twenty city blocks uptown to see Maggie. But his face was all over the news. So he took the Jeep Cherokee, stopping into a costume store called Incognito on West Thirty-seventh Street.

He bought a simple dark fake beard and mustache, a pair of thick, black-rimmed glasses, and a straw fedora hat. The Korean owner let him put on the disguise in front of a small mirror. Bobby was satisfied that it altered his appearance. He paid forty-seven dollars, breaking one of Gleason's hundred-dollar bills, and laughed aloud at his reflection.

He drove uptown in stop-and-go traffic and parked the car in an illegal spot on Fifty-sixth Street near Madison Avenue. He put the Police Parking Permit card in the window. That made it legal.

By 1:26
PM
Bobby was waiting for his daughter in the mall of Trump Tower.

Around the corner, on Fifty-sixth Street, he'd passed three TV news crews from local stations, who looked as if they were staking out the residents' entrance of the building for reaction shots or interviews with either Bobby or his ex-wife or Maggie. Security guards had them penned off to the side and wouldn't allow them into the lobby. Bobby had stopped long enough near one of the remote TV news vans to hear the crew talking about his release.
These bastards have been following me since the day I first started dating Connie,
he thought.
They haunted our marriage, made a circus out of the divorce, and a tabloid Olympics out of my trial. They'll never go away
. He took a small victorious delight in the fact that they did not recognize him.

He'd entered the Trump Tower mall, dialed Maggie's number, and told her he was downstairs in the mall in a silly disguise. She told him to wait in front of Harry Winston's jewelers, that she would take an elevator to the basement and transfer to an elevator to the mall to avoid the TV crews.

“Daddy!” Maggie shouted as she ran from the elevators across the waxed marble floor of the mall. Behind her was Connie Mathews Sawyer and her new husband, Trevor Sawyer. Bobby scooped his daughter up in his arms, kissing her once on the lips, realizing she was probably too old for that now. He felt a little funny holding a blossoming fourteen-year-old in his arms, so he put her back on the floor, held her at arm's length, and looked in her moistening eyes.

Maggie was now part girl, part young woman, with long, flowing blond hair, a single-strap metal brace across her front teeth, big earrings in pierced ears, a wad of bubble gum, breasts under a T-shirt, and a sprinkle of Irish freckles across her nose and cheeks. Her skin was as flawless and soft as it was when she was in her crib. Her big, wet green eyes were now dripping mascara.

Bobby bent to her, whispered in her ear, “No tears. I'm home. I promise you, I am never going back. Today we can talk about anything except jail, okay?”

Maggie nodded silently, choked-up.

Connie Mathews Sawyer and Trevor Sawyer stood looking at Bobby in disbelief.

“Trick or treat,” Connie said, laughing at his disguise.

Bobby nodded at Connie with an old, sad fondness, glad she was looking so well. She shimmered with a halo of money.

“Jesus, you could use some new clothes, Roberto,” Connie said.

“The shopping isn't great in the north country,” Bobby said.

Trevor Sawyer stepped forward, awkwardly extended his right hand to Bobby. “Welcome back,” Trevor said. “Good luck . . . .”

“Thanks, Trevor,” Bobby said, shaking Trevor's small hand. He'd touched warmer hands in coffins.

“You're going to need it,” Trevor added.

Bobby didn't know if it was a warning or a threat.

Trevor was a short, balding man who would have been more relaxed wearing a traditional dark suit and tie with cordovan shoes. But Bobby knew that Connie chose his clothes. Today he was wearing an expensive Italian linen sports jacket, a white Calvin Klein dress T-shirt, fluff-dried Levi's 501 jeans, and oxblood glove-leather loafers with no socks. He looked like a cross between some of the Wall Street and showbiz types he'd busted in big coke deals as a DA cop.