3 Quarters (3 page)

Only now, when he was out of view of the other cons, did Bobby Emmet pause to lift his shirttail from his pants and use it to wipe the saliva from his neck and chest. The smell of the other man's spit reeked of tooth decay, cigarettes, mucous, and bile. It was a minor indignity compared to what the system had done to Bobby. The system he once believed in.

“Prisoner with visitor,” shouted Morrison, and the loud klunks of the tumblers in the mechanical locks being unfastened echoed through the cellblock.

“W
e'll be the biggest fuckin' thing since Butch and Sundance.”

“More like Laurel and Hardy,” Bobby said from his rigid plastic chair.

Izzy Gleason's copper-colored hair set off his squinty, red-rimmed, baby blue eyes. He wore a dark blue pin-stripe suit that couldn't have cost less than two thousand dollars. Bobby figured Gleason had bought one in every flavor with his share of dirty drug money.

“Look, Izzy,” Bobby said from the prisoner's table as Gleason continued to pace. “I'm already doing fifteen to life and—”

“I'm gonna get you a new trial,” Gleason screamed, cutting Bobby off in a high-pitched voice that sounded like an IRT subway squealing into Union Square. “With more cameras than Allen Funt.”

“In a new trial with you, somehow they might wind up strapping us both into Old Sparky, pull the switch,” Bobby said. “Besides, me and you, we're enemies, Izzy, remember? The DA investigator and the bionic mouth for the defense. How would it look if you represented me? I must have helped put a hundred of your clients in places like this!”

“You're forgetting the other two hundred who you collared who should be in here, but who I got off because I'm the best fuckin' trial lawyer in the city of New York,” Izzy Gleason said, taking another bite of a Clark bar, the chocolate damming the spaces between the teeth.

“You'll ruin your teeth,” Bobby said, shaking his head.

“Caps,” Gleason said, chomping the candy bar with the perfect teeth that looked like small tombstones.

“Who paid for
them,”
Bobby asked, “that nasty little Albanian hit man from Inwood you walked on that triple homicide at the titty bar?”

“No, he paid for my divorce lawyer,” Gleason said. “Now I'd like to use him to whack the divorce lawyer for all the good he did me.”

“You're freakin' nuts,” Bobby Emmet said.

“I'll tell ya what's fuckin' nuts,” Gleason said, circling the table, now lighting a cigarette, ignoring the NO SMOKING sign and Morrison. Gleason took a deep drag of the cigarette, inhaling like a man attached to a life-support system. The smoke puffed out in small clouds as he spoke, like dialogue bubbles in a comic strip. “I'm back from being suspended from the bar for a year. You've been in jail for a year and a half . . .”

“Seventeen months and four days,” Bobby Emmet corrected.

“Whatever,” Gleason said, blowing a long blue stream of smoke directly at Bobby, who fanned it away. “But in that time, I did a lot of thinking. I need a second act. See, I've had a great first act. Been on TV in all the big trials, on the cover of magazines, did all the talk shows, made all the money. Spent all the money. Romanced tall women. Some of them, with my help, wound up good-looking. Then it all went in the dumper. I lost both my houses, Riverdale and Westhampton. It didn't matter that me and the wife hadn't slept in the same bed for the last ten years. She waited for her best shot and flattened me when I got caught with my pants down in public . . . .”

“You're such a great lawyer that you couldn't hold on to one house?” Bobby asked.

“The IRS glommed the second one,” Gleason said with a shrug and a puff of smoke. “Then I got suspended for helping that damsel in distress . . . .”

Bobby took a deep breath and said, “You stayed in the same Plaza hotel room with your female client for three days when you were supposed to be in court with her.”

Bobby knew the details because he'd done the initial investigation and was the one who'd found Gleason with his missing client, a woman who was accused of castrating her sleeping husband with a pair of bolt cutters.

“How did I know the judge would get that pissed off?” Gleason said.

“You didn't think we'd look for you? Didn't think the judge was gonna report you to ethics for not showing up at his trial? Fucking up his calendar and his Caribbean vacation while you were out banging the defendant? The only way he got you and the lady—a man-hating, ice-blooded wannabe killer, I might add—both back in the courtroom was with bench warrants! This woman cut off her husband's nuts in his sleep, Izzy!”

“I was helping her detox,” Gleason said. “I couldn't put her on the stand drunk any more than I would go to sleep around her and a pair of sharp scissors . . . .”

“You took advantage of a client with a drinking problem,” Bobby said.

“Hey, I was drinking pretty good at the time, too,” said Gleason. “But I was helping to wean her off. And I got her off, didn't I? The booze and the attempted murder rap. And then she went back to her husband and his fuckin' loot! Maybe I was wiggling her, but then she
stiffed
me! And my wife got everything I owned. Add insult to injury, a year later I'm suspended. And the headlines were awful. But, Bobby, what a body this broad had. Literally to die a slow death for . . . .”

“Which her husband almost did,” Bobby said. “But forget her body. What do you have in
mind
now, Izzy?”

“I need you to listen to me,” Gleason said, pacing, smoking, chewing candy with his mouth open, his metabolism running on turbo, legs kicking, heels scraping, arms flailing. Bobby was certain Gleason never used illegal drugs because he'd tailed him in the past. Sugar, caffeine, nicotine, and alcohol were his drugs of choice.

But when you compounded all this with raging testosterone and a few missing chromosomes, he appeared like someone on high-octane cocaine. He wasn't completely, clinically insane, Bobby thought. But he was more than a half a bubble off plumb. And then there was his problem with women. Gleason was intoxicated by them—big women, small women, skinny, zaftig, white, black, brown, yellow. Worse than booze, the guy was nuts for women. With the exception of his wife, he was, by all reports, very nice to them.

A different guard tapped on the glass door, and Morrison got up and stepped outside to talk to him, leaving Bobby and Izzy alone.

“Okay, I'm listening,” Bobby said.

“I need a middle act,” Gleason said, taking a puff of his butt and leaning in close to Bobby, talking in a rushed, urgent torrent now. “I'm forty-eight, and except for some pin money, I'm broke. I know I'm considered a rummy and a clown. A has-been. I can read the papers. So can my two daughters. Thank God they're away at school most of the time. But the joke's over. It's humiliating, Bobby, and it's a long road back. I've had a long time to think, look around. When I do, I see that you're in here. Now, I know you never did what they say you did. I can relate to how much you loved that dame of yours.”

“I still love Dorothea,” Bobby said. “I don't talk about her in the past tense. Yet . . .”

“Good,” Gleason said. “Because I need you to either prove she's alive or that someone else killed her.”

“You'd probably defend that guy, too,” Bobby said.

“Don't get moral on me, asshole,” Gleason said, angry, pointing at him with what was left of the candy bar, the cigarette smoke surrounding him.

“I'm sorry,” Bobby said. “That was uncalled for.”

“I'm here to help
me
, sure, but I can get
you
out of this shit bowl,” Gleason said. “If you let me. See, I happen to think your lawyer, Moira Farrell, went in the tank on you . . . By the way, were you banging her?”

“No,” Bobby said. “Jesus Christ . . .”

“Too bad, because she sure fucked you,” Gleason said. “Worst courtroom defense I've seen since Mike Tyson's. I mean there was never even a body, no corpus delicti, and they convicted you . . .”

Bobby thought about the glamorous red-haired lawyer who wore the tight skirts and high heels and who had made great press copy but a terrible impression on his mostly middle-aged female jury. The trial had been like a slow-motion hallucination.

“Give me your pitch, Izzy,” Bobby said softly. “I want to get the hell out of here.”

The door opened again and Morrison leaned in and said, “Gleason, you got a fax coming into the administration office. And a phone call, too.”

“Okay,” Gleason said to Bobby. “Let me go get this, and we'll talk. Think about this, asshole. I'm your only chance . . . .”

At 7:40
AM,
Nydia Vargas Perez served her husband a cup of black coffee and a slice of dry toast. Dr. Hector Perez had already showered, shaved, brushed his teeth, changed into a fresh suit. He sipped the coffee with trembling hands, his mouth still dry with fear. She'd asked how the convention had gone the night before. He told her it had been dull, but that a bunch of doctors had sat up late in the lounge discussing how one-man patrol cars lead to police stress, ulcers, sick leaves, and overtime abuses. He hadn't wanted to disturb her when he got home around 1
AM
, so he sacked out on the couch.

Nydia barely listened as she rushed into the bathroom and retched with morning sickness. Perez tried to comfort his wife, but all he could think of was the dead woman.

After splashing her face and catching her breath, Nydia walked her husband to the door, kissed him good-bye, and was surprised at the enthusiasm of his embrace. “I adore you,” he said, as he rubbed her rotund belly.
“Te adoro . . .”

Then, crossing the Ninth Street Bridge over the infamous Gowanus Canal, named after an ancient Indian chief and now often used to dump whacked Mafia chieftains, Dr. Perez drove his Lexus 300 down to the Red Hook projects, where he had been born and raised. It was just a ten-minute ride but a social continent away from his brownstone block in Park Slope. The Red Hook projects were the second-largest public housing complex in the nation, marooned between the Gowanus Expressway and the moribund Brooklyn waterfront. The area was a forgotten urban asteroid, lost in its own orbit of deep shadows and high unemployment, fatherless children, rampant drugs, and the crackling automatic weapons of the night.

It bothered Dr. Perez that this wasteland felt more like home than his brownstone.

He knew from a lifetime of experience that the projects' trash was compacted at exactly 8:15
AM
every morning and quickly hauled away to prevent roaches, mice, and rats from feeding on it and the homeless from tearing it apart in search of redeemable bottles and cans. If he shoved the pillowcase with the blood evidence down the building trash chute into the compacting room by 8:05
AM
, it would be compressed with a ton of other garbage and on its way to the Staten Island landfill by noon, never to be seen again.

He pulled off Columbia Street behind the projects and walked to the rear of the car. With his left hand he clicked the remote, which automatically opened the Lexus trunk. The late-summer early-morning wind was blowing off the harbor, where Lady Liberty looked close enough to scratch. Dr. Perez peered both ways to be certain he was not seen and reached into the trunk to grab the pillowcase.

It was not there.

The trunk was empty and suddenly so was Dr. Hector Perez's future.

Bobby waited anxiously for Gleason's return. His head was pounding with echoes of the steel drum and Gleason's “get out of jail” pitch. Bobby was considering the alternative; there wasn't one.

Gleason reappeared, sipping a can of diet Coke, eating a bag of Raisinets, torching a new cigarette to life.

“Look, okay, I read the file,” said Gleason. “The Brooklyn DA's office, FBI, INS, and Interpol were unable to track any birth, family, school, police, or passport records of your girlfriend, Dorothea Dubrow, in the Ukraine, where
you
said
she
said she was from. No record of anyone with her name in Russia, Poland, East Germany, or any of the other former Soviet bloc countries.”