3 Quarters (19 page)

Bobby watched Gleason hurry down the ramp and then looked down at the address for Herbie Rabinowitz. Working for Gleason wasn't going to be easy.

“I
'll get whatever I can on Gibraltar and Barnicle,” Max Roth said, biting into his spelt toast in a booth of the Earth First restaurant on Thirty-fourth Street and Tenth Avenue. “But ever since your case, a lot of my sources have dried up. Especially in Brooklyn.”

“Because you went to bat for me,” Bobby said, sipping his herb tea.

“That had a lot to do with it,” Roth said. “But also because you were one of my best sources. I'd sometimes take stuff you gave me from the Manhattan DA's office that I wasn't going to use and swap it with someone else who'd stumbled across stuff they weren't using. That give-and-take is gone. But it's true the Brooklyn DA's office hates me for going to bat for you.”

“And Gibraltar is located in Brooklyn . . . .”

“Everyone in Brooklyn is paranoid these days because Diamond and Tuzio are so involved in the Stone campaign,” Roth said. “Which, as you already know, is directly hinged to your case. Anyone considered even remotely off agenda is given lie detector tests, fired, some of them smeared with press leaks.”

“But doesn't Gibraltar, like all PI firms, come under the jurisdiction of the New York Department of State?” Bobby asked.

“Good point,” Roth said, making a note in a reporter's notebook. “That's Albany. I still have some sources I can check with up there.”

“Those sources will dry up, too, if Stone gets elected.”

“Yeah,” Roth said, “but until then, I have a few markers I can call in.”

“Is my case really that politically connected?” asked Bobby.

“So much has happened politically in your absence that it made sense that you were set up because you were in the way,” Roth said. “Because you were sniffing in the right places about bad people at the wrong time.”

“Starting with that cesspool they call the Brooklyn DA's office,” Bobby said.

“Which looks like it might hold the key to the gubernatorial campaign,” said Roth. “Governor Johnson is in trouble; everyone knows that. Even his fellow Democrats are disappointed in him because he hasn't done dick about the economy, the erosion of the manufacturing base in the state, the loss of major corporations to Jersey, his inability to get the money we deserve out of the Feds.”

“His wife divorcing him over that bimbo scandal in office didn't help,” Bobby said.

“No, it didn't,” said Roth. “But it paved the way for a family-values Republican like Stone. Everyone agrees that a strong Republican candidate can beat Johnson in November. Democrats are even jumping on his bandwagon. Gerald Stone has a recognition problem, but he has that family-values platform and the war hero background. If he beats Jimmy Garfalo in the Republican primary a week from next Tuesday, he's a shoo-in come November.”

“I'm a little out of touch, but as I remember, Garfalo is the state senate majority leader,” Bobby said. “Lots of upstate support.”

“Yeah, but oddly enough, this is one Republican primary where the city could be the key,” said Roth. “And Sol Diamond, who's running Stone's city campaign, got a lot of mileage out of sending you away. Now that you're out, you're an embarrassment to Diamond's office. Which reflects on Stone and his law-and-order platform now that the campaign is in the stretch.”

“The primary is only twelve days from now.”

“Which means you could make these people desperate,” Roth said. “In the meantime, my editors are breaking my balls about an exclusive with you.”

“Gleason says I have to hold off for a few days,” Bobby said.

“No more,” Roth said.

“Please find out whatever you can about Gibraltar,” Bobby said. “Their personnel files, their tax returns, a client list. I'm convinced this place is dirty.”

“An exposé of a dirty private-eye firm staffed by ex-NYPD cops is a hell of a story, too,” Roth said. “Especially if they're tied in to your case
and
the Stone for Governor Campaign. Just remember I get first exclusive on the story.”

“Of course,” Bobby said, leaving a ten-dollar bill for the seven-dollar tab as the two men walked out of the restaurant onto Tenth Avenue.

“By the way, I am convinced that your boy Gleason is certifiably insane,” Roth said. “But there's no gainsaying his talent in front of a jury. Which sometimes makes me worry about the jury system. He's not one of my favorite people. You ever see the way he eats? No other known species on planet Earth survives on a diet quite like Izzy Gleason's. Still, if I were you, I'd rather have him than Moira Farrell, especially considering who she's working for now.”

“Who?” Bobby said.

“Yesterday, you left a message asking me to get an intern to do a ‘Where Are They Now?' computer search on all the principals of your trial,” Roth said. “Well, I did it myself. Good call. I came across Farrell's name. Odd bit of info. There've been no press releases, stories, or fanfare about it. It's just one of those little political factoids that go unnoticed by most people unless they're trying to make a specific connection. I was doing a cross-reference to the principals of your trial with the Board of Elections database, and Moira Farrell's name popped up.”

“Popped up where?” Bobby asked, furrowing his brow.

“Moira Farrell, your ex-defense attorney, once loyal Democratic-machine hack, is now a registered
Republican
and listed as the main Brooklyn fund-raiser for the Stone for Governor Campaign.”

“Is that a fact?” Bobby said, thinking about the white Taurus.

T
he little old lady stood in the doorway of the tree-shaded one-family brick home in the Bay Terrace section of Bayside, Queens, a neighborhood with one of the lowest crime rates in the city and a large population of Irish, Germans, and Greeks. Lately there had been a great influx of Koreans. It was also once home to W.C. Fields and Gentleman Jim Corbett, and now, for reasons no one understood, there were more nail manicure parlors on Bell Boulevard than on any other street in the city.

Bay Terrace was so quiet that Bobby had been afraid he'd wake up the whole neighborhood when he knocked on the door.

“Is Herbie here?” Bobby asked.

“What are you selling, sonny?” the woman asked.

“I'm not selling anything, ma'am,” Bobby said. “I'm just looking for Herbie. Herbie Rabinowi . . .”

Before Bobby could finish the last name, pinwheels danced before his eyes, his brain swelled with sudden panic, and nothing happened when he tried to breathe. He lurched, bucked, attempted to wrestle his powerful attacker, who had come silently from behind and slammed a giant arm around his neck. Bobby's resistance only tightened the vise. Then he felt something cold screw into his right ear. He was starting to enter a world of shadows and silence. The more he resisted, the darker and quieter the world became.

Control,
he thought with a last glimmer of consciousness.
Stop fighting the attacker.
He went limp in the big man's grasp and instantly felt the arm on his neck loosen a millimeter. He breathed in, feeling oxygen zigzag to his brain. The gun barrel remained pressed in his ear.
I can't believe it,
he thought.
Let down my guard. Guy obviously came up from the basement door leading to the areaway. Got behind me on the stoop. Stupid.
Bobby was angrier at himself than he was at the man who was a tricep flex away from crushing his windpipe.

“Who are you?” the man growled. “Talk fast. I'm in no fuckin' mood. If you're a wop or a cop, you're dead.”

“Watch your language like that, Herbie,” the little woman said. “And why do you have a gun in that man's ear? For what?”

“Izzy Gleason sent me,” Bobby croaked.

“Lunch,” the woman said. “Bring him in for lunch, Herbie. Izzy sent him.”

“Go inside, Aunt Ruth,” Herbie said, leading Bobby into the house. They stood in a foyer with a thick maroon-and-gold rug and sponge-painted walls. Overhead light came from a small imitation Tiffany fixture. The house smelled like cabbage.

Herbie Rabinowitz let go of Bobby's neck. Bobby straightened and turned around, half gasping. Herbie Rabinowitz, wearing a strapped T-shirt, was six foot six, with muscles flexing everywhere but his earlobes, a big angular face, and wide-set wild eyes. His hair was an explosion of coiled black springs on a head that would be a sniper's dream. On the top of his skull he wore a yarmulke, fastened with two large bobby pins. He switched his .44 caliber bulldog revolver from his left hand to his right and let it dangle at his side.

“I thought you were one of them,” Herbie said.

“ ‘Them' who?” Bobby asked, rubbing his neck, trying to get blood and air back into all the appropriate pipelines.

“The wops or the cops,” Herbie said.

“Not in this house with that language, Herbie,” said Aunt Ruth.

“Go inside, Aunt Ruth,” Herbie said. “Please. Or else I'll put you in a home.”

Aunt Ruth hurried off into the kitchen, mumbling.

“I wouldn't really do that to the old doll,” Herbie assured Bobby. “But a nursing home is the only thing in the world that woman is afraid of. She'd wrestle a skinhead in a phone booth.”

“Izzy sent me to get you,” Bobby said. “Pack a bag.”

“My cousin Izzy is a great guy,” Herbie said with a big goofy grin.

“He didn't tell me you were his
cousin,
” Bobby said,

“His father and my mother were stepbrother and -sister or some shit like that,” Herbie said. “Anyway, I knew he'd come through. I can't even go back to work at the dairy diner on Queens Boulevard. The wop leg-breakers came in yesterday. I was in the kitchen, cooking. I dropped ten grand on the Yankee–Red Sox game two nights before. I'm there, working, and they come in to collect, and right away they gotta get guinea-garlic tough on me. You know, one of them little broad-backed dagos, built like a jukebox, talking smartass with his big fuckin' mouth. I told him I'd have the money in a week.”

“Which was a lie,” Bobby said. “No?”

“Which was true. I went to the finance joint up the street; they were gonna front me fifteen large on the house. But this little, fat wop has to make with the mutz-a-rel dialogue, which I'm not real fond of. Especially when I'm working and he's putting the strong-arm on me. I was tolerant until this little greasy guido called me a deadbeat Jew bastard and that he'd put me in an
oven
. This little siggie-zip prick is gonna put me in an
oven?
So I picked him up by his balls and his collar and I ran him through the swingin' doors from the kitchen. The front door was blocked by two old ladies on walkers, so I heaved the dago bastard right through the fuckin' front window out onto Queens Boulevard. He body-surfed on the broken glass all the way to the gutter. Where he belonged. Like the pile of dog shit that he is.”

“Oh,” Bobby said.

“The second one with him, one of them elegant wops learns how to dress watching Scorsese movies, he fires a shot that misses. I grab ahold of him and I take the gun offa him, and I shoved the barrel so far down his friggin' throat he gagged and threw up and passed out choking on his own vomit. The gun was still sticking out of his mouth when he spread out on the floor. But the bullet he fired whizzed right past a uniformed cop who was eating a freeload meal. The cop jumps up and tells me I'm under arrest. These wops are in the place where I work trying to put the bull on me and I take care of them, and he wants to lock-me-the-fuck-up!”

“What'd you do?” Bobby asked, impressed by Herbie's recollection of detail.

“I knocked him out cold as a mack'rel,” Herbie said. “I took off my apron and left through the broken window. Now I got the cops and the wops after me. The bookies I can eventually work out a deal with because they're businessmen and they really do care more about the money than the bullshit respect they're always yappin' about in the movies. What respect? These bums don't even hold down a job and they talk about
respect?
Them, I can square root a deal with. But the cops, they make a habit of beating the shit out of me whenever they get me in cuffs. This was yesterday, and I know if I stick around, I'm not seeing a judge till Monday, and I ain't lettin' the cops beat the shit out of me for a whole weekend. Uh-uh. So I call Izzy, and he says I should lay lower than whale shit. Especially on Sabbath. There's something not too kosher about having the shit beat out of you by a bunch of ham-faced mick cops on the Sabbath. So I figure I'd hide till Monday. This is my aunt's house, but my mother left me half of it in the will. I don't live here, but they'll get around to looking for me here.”

“Has this happened to you before?” Bobby asked.

“I'm on a losing streak,” Herbie said. “Cold dice and slow horses, and the Yanks are in a slump. And I'm not big on cops. What can I say? It's not like I do drugs or anything. I'm actually a religious guy. But I gamble a little.”

“Look, my job is to keep you out of trouble until Monday when I surrender you for the pretrial hearing,” Bobby said. “So get packed.”

Herbie jammed his .44 in his belt and said, “Packed.”

“Unpack,” Bobby said. “I'm not going anywhere with you while you're packing a gun because I'm out on bail myself.”

“For what?”

“Murder,” Bobby whispered dramatically.

“Who the fuck
are
you?”

Bobby told him, and Herbie shook his head and laughed a big belch of a laugh that sounded like a backed-up toilet. “Leave it to cousin Izzy to send a murder suspect to keep me out of trouble.”