3 Quarters (22 page)

“Yeah,” shouted the other two as they raised their glasses.

“Love to,” Bobby said. “But I'm working today.”

“Too bad.”

“It certainly is,” Bobby said.

The Fifth Amendment
bobbed in the water as Bobby climbed up into the cabin. He took the helm and backed out of the dock into the river and pointed south on the Hudson. The junk-bond dealer and the three women waved good-bye. Bobby waved back. Maybe if things were different, he could think of mindlessly flirting with lovely women.

In fifteen minutes he was passing a fully dressed Statue of Liberty and the Red Hook docks of Brooklyn; he slid past the Sixty-ninth Street pier and Shore Road, glided under the Verrazano Bridge into the Narrows, and swung east past the man-made Hoffman and Swinburne Islands, formed from the accumulated bedrock unearthed to make way for the awesome skyscrapers of the Manhattan skyline. At one time these isolated islands had been used as quarantine centers for victims of tuberculosis and other communicable diseases. But Bobby remembered them from his Harbor Unit days as a place where on-duty water cops took babes, whom they had picked up from the decks of pleasure craft, for barbecues and bare-ass romps. Bobby had been invited along a few times, but had declined. Not that he wasn't tempted. But he would never risk his job, his gun, badge, reputation, integrity, and especially his marriage for an afternoon fling. Besides, it was just wrong. He'd never have been able to live with himself if some citizen drowned while he was muff-diving.

Beyond the Narrows, he cruised the Coney Island Flats, passing the lighthouse at Norton's Point at the tip of Coney Island. He chugged by Sea Gate, a once thriving private Jewish community now in sad decline, rounded the mythical Steeplechase Pier and the Cyclone and Wonder Wheel of the Coney Island amusement parks. He continued three miles east beyond Brighton Beach, the Little Odessa of Brooklyn, and Manhattan Beach and Kingsborough Community College before taking dead aim at the peninsula of Windy Tip, a secluded dot on the tip of the nose of Brooklyn. He cut the engines and drifted to about one hundred and fifty feet offshore, dropped anchor, and tied up to a white plastic mooring bubble.

Bobby had come to Windy Tip because he wanted to see where Lou Barnicle lived, where Sandy was raising her baby with his dirty money. He wanted to get the lay of the land of this private community where most of Barnicle's ex-cop employee goons lived and hung out, and wanted to bounce a few things he'd learned off John Shine.

Bobby used a pair of binoculars to locate John Shine's brand-new luxury two-story beach house with attic.
If you win the lottery, you might as well spend some dough,
he thought. He watched a cat chase a squirrel across the rooftop and into an attic window in a hunt Charles Darwin would have understood.

Bobby dove right into the thirty feet of water, in cutoff shorts and sleeveless T-shirt, and swam to shore in the tame, warm waters of Jamaica Bay.

He mopped his face, wrung the excess water from his hair. He walked through the warm, shell-studded sand toward Shine's house, scanning the brilliant beachfront. A few kids dug in the sand with plastic shovels and pails. Plump women sunbathed on large beach towels emblazoned with the names of Caribbean hotels. Three guys wearing NYPD T-shirts held beer bottles and tossed a Frisbee in a lazy, hazy triangle. In the distance he saw a group of guys and girls playing a game of volleyball in front of a squat cinderblock building, the local cop hangout called The Central Booking Saloon, owned by Lou Barnicle.

He was still walking toward Shine's house when he saw a familiar-looking blue Ford Explorer next to a BMW in a driveway a hundred feet down the common beach. Then he saw Sandy Fraser step out onto a sun-deck of the second floor of the house above the drive-way, in a yellow bikini, not looking as though she'd recently given birth. She had obviously seen Bobby from the window and now stepped out onto the deck, with her arms folded across her breasts, staring at him as if for salvation.

A toddler ran out onto the deck and grabbed at Sandy's leg. Bobby understood Sandy's fear—when you become a parent, fear for your own life takes a backseat to that for your child's.

“Bobby!” The man's voice from his right was unmistakable, and Bobby turned to John Shine, who was standing on his large back deck, wearing a faded NYPD T-shirt, beat-up tennis shoes, and a pair of baggy khaki shorts. Under the T-shirt his corsetlike back brace was visible. He grimaced only slightly when he walked down from his deck and along the beach to greet Bobby.

Sandy troubled him. Bobby needed to talk to her again, needed to find out what else she knew about Dorothea. Needed to help her before something bad happened to her and her baby. But he took John Shine's hand in his, shook it firmly, and Shine threw an arm over his shoulder and led him toward his house. Bobby looked back and saw Lou Barnicle step out onto the deck, dressed in shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt, wearing aviator glasses and gold chains around his hairy neck. Barnicle animatedly pointed to his watch and then pointed into the house, as if Sandy was late for something.

“Forget him,” Shine said. “The man has fearful followers but no true friends.”

“That another Emerson quote?” Bobby asked.

“No,” Shine said, laughing as he led Bobby up the wooden stairs from the beach to his deck. “But Emerson did say, ‘The only reward of virtue is virtue; the only way to have a friend is to be one.' Barnicle wouldn't understand that if it bit him on the ass, and even if he did, he'd ignore it. But if you want to be my friend, be one by coming inside. Like most white trash made good, I'm dying to show off.”

“How's he treat Sandy?” Bobby asked.

“She reminds me of Rapunzel trapped in the tower,” Shine said. “But I see her come and go on her own. She wears the best of clothes. Drives a new Explorer. Does busywork at the Gibraltar office a couple of days a week, where he can keep an eye on her. She swims, sunbathes, eats with him in the best restaurants. I never see any black eyes. The ambulance never shows up at the door. I've never heard a single domestic argument. You see any bruises?”

“She ever leave with the kid?” Bobby couldn't let go.

Shine pondered for a moment. “I've never thought about it. She has a nanny slash housekeeper who helps her with the kid. Looks like Ma Barker, for Christ sakes.”

“You think Sandy can come and go as she pleases with the kid?” Bobby asked.

“Christ,” Shine said. “If she was being held against her will, she could call the cops, Bobby.”

“On Barnicle? Which cop?”

“Well, she could get an attorney, no?”

“With what money? I'd bet she lives on an allowance. Maybe her jewelry is fake.”

“She could go to the DA.”

Bobby just stared Shine in the eye. “Diamond? Tuzio? This is still technically Brooklyn.”

“I think you're a little too paranoid,” Shine said. “Come on in; I'll show you around.”

Bobby looked again at the balcony, but it was empty, except for Barnicle, staring through the aviator glasses in Bobby's general direction, smiling.

Shine led Bobby up onto the deck, where he unlocked two Medeco locks on the sliding glass door. He opened the door and a mechanical barking dog exploded to life and a two-tone horn alarm blared before he turned the system off.

Bobby followed Shine into a large kitchen with butcher-block counters and hanging copper-bottomed pots. Copper-colored kitchen appliances blended into a rustic motif. Blue delft was racked on a teakwood hutch that matched a big, round teakwood dining table. A real Tiffany lamp hung over the center of the table, where a bowl of fresh fruit sat next to a cordless phone and a pair of ledger books.

“I only eat here when I have houseguests,” he said. “And that's only if she knows how to cook.”

“Still looking for love, eh, John?”

“Anyone can get laid,” Shine said. “Falling in love with the right woman takes more luck than the lottery. The odds are higher. I date, but I don't look for love. I've already had the one great love of my life. I firmly believe you get only one. Even if I'm wrong about that, I'd never set myself up for the pain of losing another one. It's just too overbearing.”

“Maybe your standards are too high,” Bobby said.

“I don't think anyone's standards or goals can be too high,” Shine said. “Setting them lower is to aspire to mediocrity. Come on, I'll show you around.”

He led Bobby into an immense living room with twelve-foot, oak-beamed ceilings and hanging fisherman's nets, rope ladders, and seascape prints.

The nautical motif included a coffee table and end tables set made from the hatches of old ships and a huge rusted anchor that leaned against a big, black potbellied stove. The floor was wide-plank oak with expensive Iranian area rugs spread around haphazardly. The deep, soft couches were scattered with throw pillows. A twenty-five-foot bay-front window looked out onto Jamaica Bay and the city beyond. One whole wall was lined with books, a special section dedicated just to different editions of Emerson's books and biographies and appreciations of his work.

Tony Bennett sang “I've Got the World on a String” from an elaborate stereo system. Bobby couldn't see the speakers, which meant they were probably buried in the ceilings and the walls.

They toured the handsomely decorated upstairs bedrooms, where four-poster beds, deep carpets, and heavy teak furniture promoted a sense of timelessness. Bobby heard mad scratching from the attic above.

“Squirrels,” Shine said. “I keep the small attic roof window open a crack to prevent spontaneous combustion, and they get in. I keep meaning to call an exterminator, but I hate killing the poor critters. And I have no time for the relocation traps. Eventually . . .”

Shine's office was more space age, replete with computer, fax and photocopy machines, and a multipaneled telephone system. The retired cop was enjoying showing off his house. Bobby had never known Shine to be materialistic, but in middle age, men with no children tend to take great pride in their possessions. The place was magnificent, Bobby thought.

Withdrawn, paranoid, laconic, Bobby wasn't being such a great friend to a guy who was showing him some genuine human hospitality. Bobby was out of jail, but jail wasn't out of him yet.

“You okay?” Shine asked.

“Sorry,” Bobby said. “I'm still decompressing. Your house is wonderful.”

“At the risk of being politically incorrect—house tours are for women. The only thing I wish I had was a finished basement. No one in Windy Tip has basements, because of the sand, so I can't take you downstairs to the bar for a beer and game of pool.”

“Then take me to the bar down the beach,” Bobby said.

“The Central Booking?” Shine said. “That's owned by Barnicle. His guys hang out there. In fact, there's a christening party going on there today. But the bar sec-don is still open to the public.”

“Even better,” Bobby said.

“It'll drive Barnicle nuts to see you walk in his joint,” Shine said with a salty grin.

“Good. Then by all means, let's go.”

On the way they passed Lou Barnicle's house again, but Sandy was nowhere to be seen. Her blue Explorer was still parked in the driveway, a plastic tricycle nearby.

“What do you know about Cis Tuzio's past?” Bobby asked.

“Not much,” Shine said. “Came up the political ranks. Good lawyer.”

“She friendly with Moira Farrell?”

“They obviously know each other,” Shine said. “But you could fit most of Brooklyn's Court Street lawyers at one bar mitzvah. In fact, they probably have on a few occasions.”

Bobby could hear the roar from inside the barnlike saloon from twenty feet away. Dark green screens covered the bay-front windows, and the alcohol-inflated blare of a party in progress poured out of Central Booking, which was a concrete-block-and-stucco affair with a sloping clay-tiled roof. Bobby and John Shine walked in through the screen door from the bright sun to the dark, cool barroom.

Bobby recognized at least two-dozen cops—both retired and on the job—wives or girlfriends, their kids, all celebrating a christening. A Catholic priest jovially worked the crowd. Many of these people had been at the Christmas party where Bobby had met Dorothea. He recognized Kuzak, Zeke, and two very young faces in the room, guys in their twenties, and tried to place them. Then he realized that it was the absence of police uniforms that kept him from immediately putting names to the cherubic faces: Caputo and Dixon, the two cops he'd encountered with Tom Larkin.

In the far corner of the room Bobby noticed men in business suits at a round table. A small, balding older man surrounded by large young men who Bobby was certain were cops.

“Come on, I'll buy you a drink,” Shine said.

Bobby followed Shine toward the bar, his eyes still on the rear round table. Shine put his arm around Bobby's shoulder and eased him up to the bar. The bartender dried his hands on a bar towel and shook Shine's hand; then he turned to Bobby and froze. Bobby recognized O'Brien right away. He was the cop whom Zeke and Kuzak had propositioned in the men's room about three-quarters at that long-ago Christmas party. The same O'Brien who ran out of the men's room after Bobby stepped out of the stall. The same O'Brien who put a quarter in the phone at The Anchor in Gerritsen Beach the night Bobby was drugged and charged with Dorothea's murder.