3 Quarters (35 page)

Bobby remembered Franz from the days when Bobby was still a cop with Brooklyn South Narcotics and often brought the chubby, bespectacled little man NYPD forms to sign in connection with various cheap homicides. Not much talk, just bureaucratic cop-to-ME formalities. Bobby remembered him for his high-pitched laugh and for always smelling of onions—of the hot-clog-with-everything-on-it variety. He'd hate to witness Franz's own autopsy. Now Bobby rose to greet Franz, who still smelled of onions. He wore blackframed glasses with lenses as deep as glass bricks.

“Ah,” Franz said, rocking a toothpick in his mouth as he walked with short, quick paces past a female receptionist, “I was wondering when you'd get around to me, Mr. Emmet.”

He waved to the receptionist and a hospital security guard and said, “He's okay.”

Bobby followed him through a heavy metal door. Franz grabbed two white lab coats from a wall hook, tossing one to Bobby and pulling on his own as he clicked down a hospital-green corridor to another door. Bobby then trailed Franz down a flight of steps and was immediately overwhelmed by the smell of formaldehyde and death.

“You remember me from the old days, Brooklyn South?” Bobby asked. “Or the goddamned newspapers?”

“Cops' faces I don't remember,” Franz said, inspecting the tip of the toothpick for salvage. “Killers I do. So tell me, did you kill her?”

He stopped on the stairs and turned and smiled at Bobby through thick lenses. Buried deep in the distorted wavy abyss behind the glasses were two little dark, dilated eyes.

“No,” Bobby said, “I didn't.”

“I didn't think so,” Franz said with a silly high-pitched laugh that made him sound like a gradeschooler, and then he click-clacked down the remaining steps.

Bobby recoiled as they passed through another door into a scrub room outside the morgue. He handed Bobby a pair of surgical gloves and a surgical mask. They both donned the protective gear to ward off airborne bacteria from the exposed corpses inside. Bobby then followed Franz into the sprawling, brightly lit lab of antiseptic stainless-steel sinks, linen hampers, and scattered gurneys. Bobby scanned a row of autopsy tables equipped with overhead Luma-Lite lamps, dangling microphones, and Stryker saws and instrument tables where handsaws, files, forceps, scalpels, and other stainless-steel tools of the death trade were neatly arranged. The lab was lined with several glass-enclosed offices, covered with vertical blinds. The two men crossed the autopsy area, where space-suited medical students were working on cadavers. One medical student looked up from a corpse, through the window of his headgear, and seemed to recognize Bobby. He nudged another student. The two of them stared like celebrity hounds. Bobby hoped the body wasn't the remains of Tom Larkin.

Franz then entered his small, cramped office and took a seat behind his desk. He wheeled himself in his office chair to a Mr. Coffee that rested on top of a low file cabinet and poured himself a cup.

“Coffee?”

“No thanks,” Bobby said.

Franz sprinkled in a half packet of Sweet'n Low and wheeled himself back behind his desk. “Did you know that every little pink packet of Sweet'n Low in the world is made right here in Brooklyn?”

“You don't say?” Bobby said. “So, why don't you think I killed her?”

“A voice from the grave,” Franz said with his high-pitched laugh. “You're here about the teeth, no?” Franz sipped the coffee, pushed the steam-fogged glasses a little higher on his little sweaty snout.

“Yes, I am,” Bobby said.

“About a year and a half late,” Franz said, the smell of the onions still drifting from him.

“Oh?”

“I turned the teeth over to the district attorney's office,” Franz said. “Funny how they were never used in evidence.”

“ ‘Funny' is the wrong word,” Bobby said. “I spent a year and a half behind bars.”

“Oh, I know, I know, I know,” he said. “I don't usually follow most of the homicides that come through here, anymore than a baggage handler follows what happens to a piece of luggage. I don't mean to sound insensitive, but you get numb to the endless conveyor belt of domestic violence, drug killings. Children I always remember because every one is an innocent. Yours I remember, too, and not just because it made headlines.”

“Why, then?”

“Because, how often do we get ashes here?” he asked, blurting the silly high-pitched laugh again.

“Not really ashes,” Bobby said. “It's bone dust.”

“Ah, you've done your homework,” Franz said, impressed, sipping his coffee. He added a little more Sweet'n Low.

“Who did you give the teeth to?” Bobby asked.

“Cis Tuzio herself. An unpleasant woman.”

“Do you have a voucher for it?”

“Yeah,” Franz said. “The teeth were never returned. I was told they were lost.”

“Convenient,” Bobby said.

“They said it made no difference because Dorothea Dubrow had no available dental records to compare them to,” Franz said.

“My attorney might be subpoenaing you,” Bobby said, standing to leave. “That okay with you?”

“Anytime,” Franz said. “I'd like nothing better. Because those teeth spoke to me like they still had a tongue attached to them. Spoke to me with a New York accent.”

Bobby leaned on his desk and tried to find the eyes behind the thick kaleidoscopic glasses. “Explain all that to me, Mr. Franz,” Bobby said very softly. “Please . . .”

“Was your girlfriend a smoker?”

“She hated cigarettes,” Bobby said. “She was a health nut.”

“And she was supposed to be from the Ukraine, no?”

“That's right.”

Franz wheeled himself to the file cabinet under the Mr. Coffee and pulled out a drawer, removed a file, and opened it as he rolled himself back behind the desk.

“The DA's office might have lost the teeth,” Franz said, perusing the official documents in the folder. “But I didn't lose the lab tests. Judging by the high tar and nicotine content in the teeth, the person who belonged to those teeth was a heavy smoker. American cigarettes, because of the ammonia additives that American tobacco companies use to boost addiction levels. She would probably have lived in New York most of her forty years, judging by the amount of fluoride in her teeth. It's the same type of fluoride we use here. I haven't been able to find anywhere else in the world besides New York that uses the same chemical formula of fluoride as was found in those teeth.” He paused and giggled and put on a mock accent, “Yo, dem teet' tawk wit' a New Yawk accent.”

Franz started to giggle with the high-pitched voice again. “New Yawk, New Yawk, helluva town,” he blurted, and began giggling some more and then stopped abruptly when he saw that Bobby Emmet was deadly serious.

“Dorothea didn't smoke,” Bobby said. “She was twenty-five, and she had lived in New York for less than a year.”

“Then they better arrest you for killing someone else,” said Franz, and then he started to nervously laugh some more, putting his hand to his mouth to stop himself.

“Can I get a Xerox of these tests?”

“My pleasure,” Franz said.

G
leason was supposed to meet Bobby aboard
The Fifth Amendment
the next morning at nine. He arrived at 10:12 AM.

“Sorry I'm late,” Gleason said. “I got caught in an argument with the broad . . . .”

“Alana?”

“My candy jones was driving her crazy, so I cut down to two Hersheys a day,” he said. “Detoxing. Now she says if I don't see a shrink about gnawing the inside of my face, she's gonna split. I ain't seein' no doctor. So I started smoking three packs a day again. You mind?”

He lit a Kent 100 before Bobby answered and threw the match overboard into the morning wind.

“As long as it's out here on deck,” Bobby said, watching the flight of the match. “Speaking of doctors, I have to tell you about Franz, the first deputy chief ME in Brooklyn.”

Gleason blew out a lungful of smoke, took a
Daily News
from his back pocket. It was folded to the Max Roth column about Tom Larkin's death. He said, “Tell me about this, too.”

Bobby told him about Franz first, handing Gleason the photocopy of the lab report on the teeth, about how the little man had said the teeth were from a woman in her forties, a New Yorker and a smoker. Gave him all the little details about American cigarette ammonia additives and New York City's unique fluoride formula.

Gleason leafed through the file, walked to the edge of the Silverton, grabbed the railing, and took a drag of the cigarette.

“I checked on the pacemaker thing,” Gleason said. “Tuzio was savvy enough to log it as evidence. No suppression there. It was up to her to use it; she chose not to. But it doesn't explain why Moira Farrell never used it. It did fall into the category of exculpatory evidence.”

Bobby went through the whole Tuzio-Farrell connection that went all the way back to their high school days in Scranton.

“Collusion,” Gleason said. “Conspiracy. Jesus, I can make a dog and pony show out of that alone.”

“It could mean the judge, too,” Bobby said. “Max Roth was in the Brooklyn courthouse yesterday doing some research, which showed that
both
Farrell and Tuzio once clerked for Judge Mark White, who presided over my trial and sentenced me.”

“My next press conference is gonna be a fuckin' doozy,” Gleason said, slapping the rolled file folder against his palm. “I might hold this one on the fuckin' Brooklyn Bridge. They've tried to sell the public every thing else. Tell this Franz guy I want to depose him on Sunday if he's available. Same with Carlos Orosco from the crematorium. I need a few hours each of their time.”

“I can arrange that,” Bobby said.

Then Bobby told him about Larkin. About the message on the answering machine asking him to meet him in the Kopper Kettle.

“Well, you already know what he said . . .

“I do?” Gleason looked confused.

“You know, about the Kate Clementine kidnapping case,” Bobby said as if familiarizing Gleason about what he already knew. “Some missing architect? The Ukraine? I don't have to tell you what he said, you heard it yourself, Izzy . . . .”

“When the fuck did I hear it?” Gleason said. “The only thing I heard the last few days was Alana sayin', ‘No checks, no sex!' And ‘stop cussing and stop eatin' candy and stop smokin'.' What the hell you mean I ‘heard it'?”

“Didn't you check the messages on the machine in the office the other night?” Bobby asked.

“I told you, I have no fuckin' idea how that machine works,” Gleason said.

“Well, someone was using the remote code to check the messages the other night when I went there to get the gun,” Bobby said, walking to the edge of the boat and looking downtown on the calm river.

“It wasn't me,” Gleason said. “If you check the outgoing message on the machine, it says that if you need to get in touch with me for professional reasons, to call my Chelsea Hotel number. Clients don't call me at the office. I have them call the Chelsea because there's a switchboard. Human beings who answer the phones when I'm out. I told you I have no fuckin' idea how to work them machines. Especially from the outside.”

“Then who the hell was checking the messages?” Bobby wondered out loud.

“Who else did you give the remote code to?”

“I didn't give the code to anyone,” Bobby said. But he suddenly thought of one person who might know it.

“Whoever had the remote answering-machine code knew Larkin was gonna connect the dots for you,” Gleason said. “This person also knew where and when you were gonna meet him. And got there first. Me, alls I remember about the Kate Clementine case was that some crazy relative abducted her or something. It's going back a while. One thing for sure: ‘Clementine' ain't no fuckin' Ukrainian name.”

“I have some people to see,” Bobby said.

“I'll check and see if Tuzio ever logged the teeth,” Gleason said as he squinted downriver, the wind flattening his hair. “If she didn't, then we got us a suppression of evidence case to go with the conspiracy. The pacemaker is interesting, but without a body or medical history there is no way to know if Dorothea ever had one. Only your testimony to the contrary. Which without corroboration is meaningless. The teeth are different. That evidence is clearly exculpatory and corroborative, because even though there is no body, we have an expert witness ready to say these teeth came from a forty-year-old woman. A lifelong New Yorker. Which contradicts the prosecution's description of Dorothea Dubrow as a twenty-five-year-old native Ukrainian who was only in this country less than a year.”

Sometimes, in moments of lucidity like this one, Bobby felt safe in Izzy Gleason's hands.

“I'll keep in touch,” Gleason said, and hurried off
The Fifth Amendment.