3 Quarters (25 page)

“By the time Rollo sells these guns and the rest of the dope, we'll have the hundred grand we need to get the fuck outta this thankless job,” Lebeche said. “Away from these fuckin' animals.”

As Daniels drove toward the parking-meter lot next to Nathan's, they passed Walters, who stood with his girlfriend on the corner. Lebeche, Daniels, and Walters exchanged a long last stare before the police cruiser headed along Surf Avenue toward Nathan's.

“All right,” Lebeche said to Rollo after he gave him the guns and the Boardwalkbrown heroin to sell that night. “What the fuck did you have for lunch?”

“Clams on the half-shell,” said Rollo. “And a diet Coke.”

“Bet's a push,” Daniels told Lebeche.

B
obby had told Patrick to make himself available for a little bit of surveillance of the goons from Gibraltar Security on Tuesday, the day Barnicle's guys collected the money in the three-quarters pension racket. Bobby wanted to see for himself.

Using a divorce client's credit card, Gleason rented Bobby a new Mustang. If any of Barnicle's crew ran the plates, they'd be traced to a dentist from Queens.

Bobby had the disguise he'd bought in the costume store in a plastic bag with him. In Brooklyn he'd also stopped at an Army and Navy store and bought a floppy-brimmed Irish walking hat, a Yankee hat, a hooded sweatshirt, some dark sunglasses, a reversible zippered jacket that was navy blue on one side and tan on the other, and a pair of binoculars. He called Patrick and told him to dress in a sports jacket, white shirt, chinos, and loafers.

Of the original $500 Izzy Gleason advance, Bobby had $128 left. At the newsstand on Ninth Street he bought a copy of the upscale
New York Times
, the working-class-based
Daily News
, the right-wing and sports-oriented
New York Post,
and an
Irish Voice
. In a multiethnic, economically tiered city, people often identified you by what you read.

Bobby picked up Patrick in the Mustang and drove directly out to Gibraltar Security.

“Remember that assistant medical examiner you asked me about?” Patrick said.

“Franz?”

“Yeah,” Patrick said. “He gets back Thursday. He works nights. Four to Twelves.”

“Good,” Bobby said. “I need to talk to him about the teeth in the crematorium furnace.”

Parking a hundred yards up the block from Gibraltar, the brothers watched the front door using the binoculars, listening to an all-news station and waiting. Watching. Waiting.

“I'm going down to see Mom in Miami for Thanksgiving and her birthday,” Patrick said. “She'll be sixty-eight. Imagine that? I sure wish you would come.”

“If this business is finished, I will,” Bobby said. “I don't want to see her until I'm completely exonerated. Then I want to bring Maggie, too. Shit, maybe we'll take the boat down. Stay awhile.”

“She never really got over Dad,” Patrick said.

“No, she didn't,” Bobby said. “She begged me not to go on the job, too.”

“She actually moved down there because
I
joined,” Patrick said. “She said she didn't want to live in the city that killed her husband and now was going to kill her sons. Then when you went into jail . . .”

“I'm surprised it didn't kill her.”

“Let me ask you something,” Patrick said. “You knew him better than I did, so what would the old man do in a situation like this one we're involved in?”

“You mean
I'm
involved in,” Bobby said.

“If you're involved, so am I,” Patrick said.

“He'd do what we're doing,” Bobby said, smiling at his kid brother. “He'd study the enemy and use information to attack their weakest points.”

“He'd kick ass and take names?”

“He would have done that
after
they were dead,” Bobby said.

“I'm glad he was my father,” Patrick said, laughing.

“Why?”

“Because he gave me a terrific big brother.”

Bobby looked at him and felt a wave of emotion rush over him. But he remembered what the old man had said about saving tears for funerals. Which reminded him of what had led up to their father's.

Patrick had been about eight when it happened. The check-cashing joint on Nostrand Avenue had been stuck up on the first of the month for the previous five months. Tom Larkin and Bobby's father, Sean Emmet, were part of the notorious “Stakeout Squad” of the late seventies and early eighties that had later been branded as a hit squad by the press and civil libertarians. That sweltering August afternoon, Sean Emmet, Larkin, and another cop named McCarthy had taken their positions behind a newly installed two-way mirror in the check-cashing joint, waiting for the same defiant, brazen stickup artist to appear. Larkin and Sean nudged each other when they finally saw the perp, but McCarthy didn't see that the woman in a flowing dress and sunglasses who'd entered had an Adam's apple bigger than his own. McCarthy lit a cigarette in boredom before Larkin and Emmet could alert him. The flame became visible through the two-way mirror and the “woman” lifted a sawed-off shotgun from under the dress and blew a hole through the mirror before even announcing the stickup. McCarthy never got to blow out his match. He died instantly.

As Larkin fired through the shattered mirror, Sean Emmet kicked open the door leading to the store and came out firing. The perp in woman's clothes also had a .45 automatic and shot a fusillade of bullets at Emmet, one catching him in the right thigh. From the floor, Emmet returned fire with a pump-action twelve-gauge shotgun, blowing the perp into eternity. As they waited for the ambulance, the damage from the .45 Teflon slug that had dum-dummed up Emmet's thigh, severing his femoral artery, swiftly drained his life. Sean Emmet bled to death before he reached Kings County Hospital.

Bobby's mother begged him never to join the police force. He'd never had any intention of being a cop until that day, when, at the age of seventeen, “the job” took his father from him. Somehow he thought he could get his father back by joining Sean Emmet's beloved NYPD that had given an immigrant and his children the dream of America. Bobby put his name on the NYPD waiting list a week after the Emerald Society Bagpipers followed his father's coffin out of Holy Name Church in Windsor Terrace. He was called up three years later.

“This them?” Patrick asked, looking through the binoculars and handing them to his brother.

“Yeah,” Bobby said as he saw Kuzak and Zeke walk out the door of Gibraltar Security. “You ever meet either of these two guys?”

Patrick took the binoculars and studied Zeke and Kuzak as they moved along the sidewalk to the parking lot next to Gibraltar.

“You asked me to stay away from the trial,” his brother said, looking through the glasses. “I did. I'm as low profile on the job as you can get. Only the people in PAL know me. I don't hang out in cop bars. I don't play on cop teams. I don't belong to any of the ethnic societies. So, I'm happy to say, I've never met either of those two stooges.”

“Perfect,” Bobby said.

“These the bagmen?” Patrick asked. “The guys who collect the three-quarters money?”

“Let's find out.”

Zeke and Kuzak eased into a brand-new cream-colored Oldsmobile 98. Zeke got behind the wheel and slid out into light traffic. Bobby gave the Oldsmobile a good one-block lead, allowing three other cars to fill the space between them, and then began to tail. After the Olds made two rights Bobby knew that Zeke, the driver, was doing the “four-rights-to-spot-a-tail” routine. The same routine he'd used on Sandy. In counterpoint, after the Olds made the second right, Bobby made a U-turn and drove in the opposite direction until he came to the intersection where the Oldsmobile would wind up after the four predictable right turns. He waited at a hydrant until the Oldsmobile appeared. Thirty seconds later it went by. Bobby gave it another one-block lead and began the tail again.

This time a confident and complacent Zeke didn't even change lanes as he drove the Olds on the Brooklyn streets.

Bobby stayed at a comfortable, unnoticeable distance on the tail until the Oldsmobile came to a stop outside a bar on Flatbush Avenue called The Gold Shield, a well-known cop haunt. Bobby knew from an old police-cocaine corruption scandal that groups of cops from The Gold Shield would rent “goom pads” about a mile away by the shore of Brighton Beach, where four cops would throw in one-fourth share of the monthly rent of an apartment. This entitled each cop to one or two nights a week in the pad with a “goomatta,” or “goom,” the Mafioso name for
mistress
. The cops furnished the apartments by flashing their badges, “tinning” furniture, dry goods, and appliance stores for freebies or major discounts in exchange for extra protection for their stores or looking the other way when the store owners fenced and sold hot property.

The amount of money the married cops kicked in for rent and utilities was so small that their wives, at home with the kids in Long Island or in upstate Orange County, rarely caught on that they were having affairs. Some cops moved to the suburbs simply to relocate their wives a hundred miles away from their mistresses and their goom pads in the city. With an apartment, usually rented in a rookie bachelor's name, there was no paper trail, hotel receipts, credit cards, or nosy clerks to expose them. Plus the chances of a wife driving two hundred miles round trip on a jealous hunch were slim.

So, once a week, each married cop would tell the suburban wife he had to work a night shift and he'd go directly to The Gold Shield, where he'd meet his “goom” or pick up a cop groupie and go for a roll in the hay.

“I'll be across the street, a few car-lengths up the block,” Bobby told Patrick as he dropped him at a bus stop a half-block from The Gold Shield. He pointed to a hydrant diagonally across from the saloon where he would park the Mustang. “Put this on.”

Bobby tossed him the reversible jacket, turned to the blue side. Patrick took off his sports jacket and tie. When he was done, Bobby put a Yankees hat on Patrick's head and handed him a copy of the
News.

“Just observe, have a beer, listen,” Bobby said. “Don't look too much. Read the
News
. Casual.”

Patrick took a seat at the foot of a half-full, L-shaped bar, near the front window of The Gold Shield. The saloon was something out of the past: polished oak-wood trim, high tin ceilings, mirrors with peeling silvering. Sawdust was scattered on the floors, and the window was decorated with shamrocks and Irish tricolored flags. Mounted behind the bar were framed
Daily News
front pages of great police busts from yesteryear. There were also mounted plaques from the NYPD thanking the bar for running Police Widows and Orphans Fund benefits and donating beer for PBA picnics.

Zeke and Kuzak were perusing the opposite wall, which was like a Police Hall of Fame, displaying old nightsticks decorated with brass nameplates of infamous old flatfoots and hundreds of gleaming facsimiles of gold shields of retired detectives. All were mounted in neat rows in handsome glass display cases. Zeke was pointing out some of the nameplates.

Patrick ordered a mug of Bud from a reed-thin bartender with an NYPD ring and opened the
Daily News
from the back to the sports section, thumbing to Vic Ziegel's column about the Yankees. He looked at the badge-shaped clock above the back bar and saw it was 12:12
PM.
The bartender brought Patrick his foamy beer and took a five-dollar bill, rang up three dollars, and brought him back two singles change.

Zeke and Kuzak walked from the wall display to the bar. Patrick noticed each man place three singles on the bar. The act was deliberate and almost ritualistic. Each ordered a mug of Bud. The skinny barkeep pulled the mugs of beer, placed them in front of Zeke and Kuzak. He grabbed the six singles, rang up $2.25 twice, and came back and placed a small stack of three quarters in front of each man.

“Them Mets need relief pitching something terrible, don't they?” the bartender said to Kuzak and Zeke.

“The bullpen is like a paraplegic ward,” said Kuzak.

Hanging behind the bar was a big brass nautical bell, salvaged from an old police boat and imprinted with the NYPD insignia. The bartender grabbed the rope on the clapper and rang it loudly three times. He paused, his hand still on the bell clapper for a moment, then rang it again four more times.

Odd, Patrick thought. Same beer, different prices. Two sets of three quarters. Three rings of the bell and then four. After the bells, Lebeche and Daniels, the two cops who had robbed Martinez the drug dealer in Coney Island earlier in the morning, now off-duty and in civilian clothes, walked from the end of the bar and took positions on either side of Zeke and Kuzak. Patrick glanced over the
News
and saw Lebeche and Daniels in another precise, deliberate ritual; each lifted the small stack of three quarters from in front of Zeke and Kuzak and replaced the coins with dollar bills.