3 Quarters (38 page)

Bobby did not see Sandy pass the white van with the dark-tinted windows, in which sat Lou Barnicle, Kuzak, and Zeke, but they had just witnessed Sandy Fraser kissing Bobby Emmet on the Coney Island boardwalk and watched her and the boy get into her car.

“What now?” Kuzak asked as Sandy climbed behind the steering wheel.

“We make sure nothing happens to that kid,” Barnicle said.

After his third visit to Nathan's Famous and his sixth Cyclone ride, Trevor Sawyer looked as if he needed a rest from his newfound childhood. He climbed into the back of his Rolls, his face draining of color. Bobby could almost see his guts boiling like the Coney Island surf, with hot dogs, raw clams, french fries, sausage and peppers, and pistachio-flavored custard. He had been the proverbial kid in a candy store, thirty years too late.

“Give me a few minutes,” Bobby said to Trevor as he took Maggie by the hand. The rich man just waved and covered his eyes with his right arm.

“What's your read on Sandy, my amazing child?”

“I think she's a straight shooter. The reason I think she's sincere is that she didn't try to make me think she was. She was just normal, worrying mostly about her baby. He's adorable.”

“Yes, he is,” Bobby said. “Does he remind you of someone? Someone you know?”

“He has one of those faces, all right,” Maggie said. “I can almost place it. But, anyway, back at the ranch, I don't think that Sandy would do anything that would come back to haunt her and her kid. But that's just my bullshit detector at work.”

Bobby took a deep breath and watched the roller coaster dip down the steel rails.

“She's in some kind of trouble, isn't she, Dad?” Maggie said.

“Yeah,” Bobby said.

“I could tell that, too. Is there anything you can do to help her?”

“I hope so,” Bobby said, also not wanting to believe what Sandy had told him about his friend John Shine.

“I don't care if I sound like some awkward, pubescent, spoiled rich brat,” Maggie said, staring at her father with watery eyes. “I'm still worried about you, and I want an old-fashioned hug before I leave.”

She threw herself into Bobby's arms, and he lifted her off her feet and squeezed her tightly to him and turned her around in the Coney Island sun and whispered in her ear, “Everything will turn out okay. Promise, kiddo.”

He placed her down, and she ran for the limousine without turning her teary face back toward him.

B
obby needed to digest what Sandy had told him about John Shine. The rugged, brilliant cop had been more than his
friend
. He was a mentor, like a big brother or an uncle. And now Bobby was confronted by dark, uneasy thoughts about the man who lived alone spouting Emerson in a house by the sea. As Bobby drove along the Belt Parkway, he imagined this blind doctor checking on Dorothea, stashed in his friend's house. Could Shine be that monstrous? That diabolical?

But this was the same John Shine who saved his life just two days ago, Bobby thought, and then told himself to think harder.

Then Bobby completed the memory.

Right after he had been beaten by the Barnicle crew on the beach in the rain, Bobby had got into his Jeep. John Shine had climbed in next to him. Bobby had dialed the message machine at Gleason's office. He punched in the remote code—378, the same as the office room number. Shine could easily have watched the numbers he pushed. Bobby had then listened to Tom Larkin's message. With his guard down, after Shine had saved his life, Bobby had even told Shine the gist of Larkin's taped message. About some seventeen-year-old kidnapping case, a more recently missing architect, the Ukraine. Later, when he arrived at the office at the Empire State Building, someone was checking the machine with that remote code.

Had it been Shine?

He was inching along the Gowanus Expressway now, toward the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, oblivious to the traffic.

Had Shine checked Bobby's messages? Discovered where and when Tom Larkin would be meeting Bobby? And then sent someone there to kill Larkin? Before Larkin could tell Bobby what he knew?

Then Bobby remembered the well-thumbed
Complete Emerson
that Shine had sent him in jail. Bobby had always been troubled by the single passage in the Emerson essay called “Friendship” that Shine had chosen to highlight with a yellow marker:
“We walk alone in the world. Friends such as we desire are dreams and fables.”

Why, out of an essay that glorified friendship as one of the great treasures of human existence, would Shine highlight such a negative passage?

Why? he asked himself over and over as he paid the toll for the tunnel and sped toward Manhattan. He kept asking himself the same question until he arrived back at the Seventy-ninth Street Boat Basin.

When he checked his new messages, he found one from Max Roth. He said he had some information Bobby'd asked him to get from the old clips. Bobby called Roth and they met at an old-fashioned Greek diner on Broadway.

“The old clips are warehoused, but I managed to dig out a very yellowed second-day story from the photo files on this Kate Clementine,” Roth said. He poked at the fruit salad and gave it a one-word culinary review: “Canned.”

He dropped his spoon, refusing to eat.

“A kidnapping, no?”

“Yep,” Roth said, checking his drinking glass against the ceiling light for stains. He made a face and then unwrapped a sanitary drinking straw, poked it into the can of club soda, and sipped.

“It was a little like the recent Katie Beers case,” Roth said. “The little girl in the underground chamber out in Long Island. But this was different. Kate Clementine was buried in an underground bunker by an obsessed uncle for two years and came out alive. The girl's boyfriend was the main suspect all along. But it turned out to be the uncle, who said he was only trying to preserve her virginity and her wholesomeness. She's been in and out of mental hospitals ever since.”

“Poor kid,” Bobby said. “But what—”

“And buried deep in the next to last graph of the jump I come across a name that gives me brainfreeze.”

“Who?”

“He was still a patrolman then,” Roth said. “He wasn't in charge of the case. But he was one of the cops who discovered the underground bunker and set this Kate Clementine free and arrested her wacky uncle.”

“His name, Max,” Bobby said, hoping he was going to say Lou Barnicle but fearing he was not.

“John Shine,” Roth said, staring Bobby in the eye.

Bobby closed his eyes as the steam from his coffee rose around him. The name resounded in the air. He took a deep breath and told Roth again about how Shine had saved his life from the three-quarters crew out in Rockaway. “But, thinking back, afterwards Shine pumped me for information about what I knew. That wasn't unusual. He was always an information freak . . . .”

“Maybe he saved your ass in case you'd told someone else, like me,” Roth said, sipping his club soda. “So he could prepare himself. Go to Plan B.”

Then Bobby told Roth what Sandy had said about the blind man who carried a doctor's bag into Shine's house every Monday and Friday.

“Maybe the sheen is coming off your buddy Shine a little, no?” Roth asked.

“Max,” Bobby said, “I want you to find out everything you can about Shine's police department record.”

“I know a guy who can expedite a Freedom of Information press request,” Roth said.

“Also run a Lexis legal history on him from the paper's computer,” Bobby said. “Jesus, Max, what can his motive be?”

“It can't be greed,” Roth said. “He already won the lottery.”

“If it is him,” Bobby said, “it must be some kind of weird revenge. Or obsession. Some dark part of his personality I never knew.”

“I'm glad you're thinking sanely, here,” Roth said. “In fact, as much as I dislike the weasel, I think you better track down Sleazy Izzy and tell him everything. About Shine, the blind doctor, Sandy and her baby with the mystery father.”

“I will,” Bobby said.

“I better get cracking,” Roth said, getting up from the booth.

“I'm more spooked now than I was before,” Bobby said.

“Why?” Roth said.

“Dead, I knew there was nothing more they could do to Dorothea,” he said softly. “Alive, they can kill her all over again.”

Bobby had to take another look inside that house.

He spent the afternoon shopping for the supplies he'd need. That evening he took the boat out to Windy Tip and moored it at a buoy far enough out so that he wouldn't be noticed in the dwindling light. He used the binoculars to watch Shine leave, setting his elaborate alarm system, dressed for the dinner shift at The Winning Ticket. Shine drove off in the Mercedes.

Bobby waited until darkness fell and then pulled on a pair of surgical gloves, fastened a small but sturdy pinch bar to his belt, shoved a small watertight flashlight into his right pants pocket and a tube of Vaseline into his left pocket, and looped a nylon scaling rope with a three-pronged grappling hook around his waist. He dove off
The Fifth Amendment
and swam to shore in the tame tide. He came up on the far side of Shine's house.

He stealthily made his way to the westernmost wall that faced the open bay and the distant lights of the Coney Island amusement rides. Bobby hurled the grappling hook up to the high roof of the house and, after the third try, managed to secure a firm bite around the base of the red-brick chimney. He scaled the face of the house, his great strength easily hoisting him to the slanted roof. He pulled the rope up behind him and scurried across the roof tiles. He found the open attic window through which the squirrel came and went without triggering the alarm.

The attic wasn't wired. Shine had told him he left the window open a crack to allow an even flow of air into the hot, confined space. To prevent spontaneous combustion.

The window was even smaller than Bobby had imagined. He rubbed the Vaseline on his bulky shoulders and the frame of the attic window. Getting through the window was like deflowering a virgin, he thought. A series of patient false starts, gentle maneuvering, delicate shiftings of position, incremental penetration, being careful not to be too rough.

Finally Bobby was safely inside. His shoulders were raw with friction burns.

In the darkness, he heard the scurrying of the rodents. Bobby played the beam of the penlight across the plywood flooring. The attic was an innocuous disarray of old cardboard boxes, unused furniture, discarded lamps. He even saw John Shine's old NYPD dress uniform hanging in a plastic suit bag, adorned with award ribbons for bravery above and beyond.

Dorothea wasn't being kept in the attic.

Bobby found the attic trapdoor, an elaborate one with folding stairs. He grabbed the handle and twisted, but it would not move. Locked from the other side. He used the pinch bar to pop the catch. It gave, and the trapdoor ladder unfolded down to the landing of the top floor.