3 Quarters (36 page)

At noon, Dr. Benjamin Abrams sat on a bench, feeling the sun beat on his face. He had arrived five minutes earlier and taken a seat at the bus stop on the corner of Flatbush Avenue and Avenue U, across from the Kings Plaza Shopping Center, just as he did every Monday and Friday. Immediately after sitting down, he put on the special glasses, plunging himself into inky darkness.

They were wraparound glasses with light-tight frames that softly bit into the skin and bone surrounding his eyes, the lenses made with pure black glass that blocked out all view. Although they looked to others like sunglasses for the blind, they were designed so that the wearer could see absolutely nothing.

Dr. Abrams never dared trying to peek or to alter the glasses. He had no desire to know his blackmailer's identity. As long as he went along with the blackmailer's simple requests, his life would proceed smoothly. No hassles, no interruptions, no angst. He would never be dragged into court for murder. Never subject his wife or daughter, Rebecca, to the humiliation. Never have to do a day of jail time. All he had to do was sign those silly “91” pension forms when they came in and report here to this bus stop twice a week with his little black doctor's bag. He was always approached by the same soft-voiced gentleman, who escorted him into a car that always smelled new, where he was buckled into a deep leather seat.

Today was exactly the same as all the other Fridays and Mondays. The man pulled up to the bus stop, walked to Dr. Abrams, led him into the car, buckled him in. They drove in silence for another fifteen minutes. Abrams was unsure which direction, as the driver always made a series of turns.

Then he was escorted by the driver into a building, led along a very narrow corridor, through a low door and down an even more cramped, very steep stairwell into this comfortable, soundproof subterranean bunker-living quarters.

The twenty-by-twenty-foot underground room was equipped with a bathroom, shower, kitchenette, a living room area, a stereo, a TV with a special chip to block out normal programming but hooked up to a VCR, a bookcase filled with books. There was a stationary bicycle and a StairMaster. The room was stuffy, but a steady whir of fresh air blew through a tiny duct in the kitchen area.

Off the living room area was a small alcove with a full-sized bed, neatly made. In another corner was an overstuffed armchair.

When the blackmailer was safely in his armchair, with a spotlight behind him to shroud him from view, he would tell the doctor that he could remove his blindfold glasses. When he did, Abrams would always find Dorothea Dubrow sitting on the sofa, staring at him with the same sad dark eyes.

“Hello, Doctor,” she said. “Today I am feeling cold. Is the sun out?”

Dr. Abrams placed a thermometer in her mouth. He'd recognized her from the photographs that came out at the time of the trial. Dr. Abrams knew that Bobby Emmet was accused of killing this poor woman, who had been held captive here for the past eighteen months. But precisely because of what these same people had done to Emmet, Dr. Abrams would never mention a word of her existence to anyone. He had no desire to know who was behind all of this. Life and freedom were too precious. Suppose they did the same to his own daughter?

Besides, every time he examined Dorothea Dubrow she was in generally good health. The three-milligram Haldol tablets that he prescribed for her kept her as docile as a parlor cat. There were never any signs of abuse. She obviously ate well and did exercise. He always gave her a multivitamin shot, to be certain she did not become malnourished. Her beautiful teeth were regularly brushed and flossed. There was no sign of rape or mistreatment at all. The blackmailer even provided her with sunlamps to keep her from growing too pale. But today she was trembling, her teeth chattering.

He checked the thermometer: 102.6. Not deadly, but not good.

Dr. Abrams checked her pulse, her heartbeat, her reflexes. She obeyed all his polite commands with a mannequin's pasty smile. The drugs and so much time down here had made her listless and accustomed to a simulated one-note life that was like a human dial tone.

But none of that bothered him. She was still a basically healthy woman. She was the least of his troubles. She was alive, unlike the butchered woman in the videotape that the blackmailer held over his head.

“She has a fever,” Dr. Abrams told his blackmailer, who sat in his shadowy chair behind the shield of light.

“Will she be okay?”

“She has to be kept warm,” Dr. Abrams said. “Give her Tylenol and lots of juices. I want to keep tabs on her. Contact me immediately if she gets any worse.”

“There's a possibility we might have to travel soon,” the man in the shadows said. “Is she up to that?”

“Check with me first,” Dr. Abrams said. “Any change in environment could exacerbate the fever.”

“All right,” the blackmailer said.

“I'm finished here,” Dr. Abrams said as he closed his small doctor's bag, patted Dorothea Dubrow on the shoulder, and put the wraparound glasses back on. “Remember to keep her warm.”

“Is the sun shining today, Doctor?” Dorothea Dubrow asked, her teeth chattering.

He was startled to hear the question again. Then he said, “Yes, yes, it is.”

“Feel it for me,” she said.

Then the blackmailer led Dr. Abrams blindly up the stairs.

T
he room was ripe with too many flowers.

The wake was only one night, in Walter B. Cooke's in Bay Ridge, the most popular funeral parlor for those few cops who still lived in Brooklyn. The PBA had made all the arrangements for the wake and burial.

The undertakers had done a good job on Tom Larkin, repairing the ruined neck and adding color to his gaunt, dead cheeks. Old-time retired cops filed past the coffin, kneeling, blessing themselves, saying silent prayers. Larkin had been the only one of his contemporaries to keep working. Most got out after twenty years or less, depending on whether they got three-quarters, and called it a career. Larkin, who was still on the job when he died, called it a life.

Bobby greeted Rose Morse, the woman who had been dating Tom Larkin, as she sat in stunned bereavement. Larkin was the second man in her life to die in the past five years. “Good men are harder and harder to find as a woman gets older,” she said to Bobby as she clutched his hand. “I'll never find another one like him . . . .”

Bobby was fumbling for words. “He was crazy about you,” Bobby said. “You gave him a last dance he didn't even know he had in him.”

That sent her cascading into tears, and Bobby felt terrible. Some other women in the funeral parlor came to her side to comfort her with Kleenex, hugs, and soothing words.

Bobby retreated to the back of the reposing room, where he found John Shine standing, the way men do at bars, talking softly to a few saddened old-timers. Then he glimpsed Forrest Morgan in the corridor near the entrance to the viewing room, signing his own name and then tracing his finger down the list of other signed names. Bobby exchanged glances with Morgan, and he and Shine drifted to the rear wall of the parlor, where they could converse in whispers. Shine leaned against the wall and sighed with grim relief.

“I can't stand for long periods,” he said.

“I can't stand what's going on,” Bobby said.

“You think they killed him, don't you?”

“Positive,” Bobby said.

“But who the fuck would hurt old Tom? He was ready for pasture.”

“He was onto something,” Bobby said.

“What? What could he possibly have known?”

“He was looking into what happened to Dorothea.”

“You actually had him working that?”

“You're the one who told me I should see him.”

“Yeah,” John Shine whispered, arching his back, trying to get comfortable. “I thought he might have a useful hunch or two, that he was spinning some wacky theories. But I didn't know he was actually
working
the case.”

“He was just nosing around.”

“So why would someone kill him?”

“Maybe because he was raising the dead, John,” Bobby said.

“Riddles I don't need, Bobby,” Shine said. “You were in touch with him. What the hell was he telling you?”

“About some old case.”

“What case . . .?”

Bobby was interrupted when Lou Barnicle appeared with a flourish, followed by a badly limping Kuzak, who favored his crotch area with a protective stoop. Then came Zeke, O'Brien, Flynn, Levin, Lebeche, Daniels, and two new additions—Caputo and Dixon.

“Where do they get the balls?” Bobby asked.

“It is a disgrace,” Shine said. “You start at one end. I'll start at the other. We'll toss the whole shit pile of them onto the sidewalk.”

“I'd like nothing better,” Bobby said. “But not here.”

“Tom would love it,” John Shine said, twisting his torso for relief. “A real fuckin' Irish wake. We'll kick ass and take names and leave the dead for the sweepers.”

Bobby laughed and a few heads turned.

Forrest Morgan, the only black man in the room, watched each of the three-quarters crew sign in. His and Bobby's eyes met again, and then Bobby glanced toward Caputo and Dixon. Morgan acknowledged Bobby's barely perceptible signal and tapped those two on their shoulders and pointed out toward the lobby. Caputo and Dixon appeared startled and looked to Lou Barnicle as if for guidance. He shrugged and nodded for them to accompany Forrest Morgan.

Barnicle then looked at Bobby and Shine. Bobby stared right back, watching him dip his hand in a holy water font and bless himself, kneel at the casket, clasp his hands, and bow his head over the body of Tom Larkin.

“Hypocritical bastard,” Shine said. “He had no use for Tom. Never did.”

“The feeling was mutual,” Bobby said. “Let's get some fresh air.”

They walked out of the reposing room into the lobby. John Shine seemed happy to be in motion, his movements growing more fluid with each step.

“Barnicle is in nose deep, John,” Bobby said, as they crossed the lobby and pushed through the glass front doors onto humid Fourth Avenue, alive with honking horns and the lights of the Brooklyn night. “But I think he's working for even worse people.”

“I think you better keep me in the loop,” Shine said. ‘You're gonna need all the help you can get.”

“I appreciate that,” Bobby said, as he saw Forrest Morgan grilling Caputo and Dixon beside a fire-alarm box on the corner.

“Start by telling me what Tom was looking into that could have gotten him killed,” Shine said.

“Funny,” Bobby said. “This wake got me thinking. Both of us lost women, the loves of our lives, and neither of us had a body for a wake.”

John Shine looked at Bobby oddly. “What a morbid thought,” he said. “Talk to me instead about what could have gotten Tom killed. What was he looking into?”

Before Bobby could answer, Forrest Morgan strode quickly across the sidewalk and pointed to Caputo and Dixon.

“Did you witness these two men having any kind of altercation with Torn Larkin in the last week or so?” Morgan asked aloud, as Caputo and Dixon stood looking at Bobby and Shine.

Bobby stared at Caputo and Dixon with disgust and then looked back at Forrest Morgan, who stood, big and powerful and sweaty, in front of him.

“I don't talk to Internal Affairs,” Bobby said, and winked at a smiling John Shine.

T
revor Sawyer sat next to Bobby Emmet as they made their third trip down the thunderous Cyclone ride in Coney Island, making sixty-mile-an-hour hairpin turns on the oldest wooden roller coaster in America. Sawyer, a native New Yorker, had never been on the Cyclone before. Bobby thought this man who had everything must have had a very sad childhood. “Never been to Coney Island before.” Sawyer said. “Of course, I sailed past with father a few times. But when Maggie asked me to take her here from Southampton—without her mother's knowledge, of course—I jumped at the chance. I'm delighted I did.”

“Consider yourself baptized,” Bobby said. “A born-again New Yorker.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald was right, Bobby thought. The rich really are different. And not just because they had more money than everyone else, as Ernest Hemingway had snidely replied to Fitzgerald's comment. It was because the money
owned
them. And often distanced them from some of the best things in life. Like simple fun. And what good was Hamptons money without Coney Island fun? The rich were raised with the belief that if it didn't cost a lot, it couldn't be good. And they remained impoverished in the soul.

“Thanks for showing me around,” Trevor said, his eyes pinwheeled like a kid's, as they moved past the barkers of the arcades and the other frantic rides of the amusement park.

“You don't have to be poor to love ‘The Poor Man's Paradise,' ” Bobby said. “Coney is yours, too. It belongs to the citizens.”

“I'm glad something does,” said Trevor.

Earlier, Bobby had tried to explain that this was more a state of mind than a place. A symbol of freedom that attracted the immigrant masses. What beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti called “a Coney Island of the mind.” Bobby told Trevor that Coney Island, even now in its shabby elegance, was still a perfect Oz that managed to survive the foulest of political neglect over the years.

“What's troubling you?” Bobby asked as they walked, looking for Maggie, who had wandered off with Sandy Fraser and her little boy, Donald, into the Kiddieland park. Maggie had volunteered to help with Donald, but Bobby knew she was really trying to get a read on Sandy for him.

“I was at another political gathering,” said Trevor. “Again for Stone. Again no monetary solicitation. It makes me nervous.”

“Because the rich might not control the next governor?” Bobby asked, a drop of acid in the remark.