3 Quarters (39 page)

Bobby descended into the eerily quiet house and began his furtive search. He made a cursory examination of all bedrooms. Empty. As was the office. Using the penlight, Bobby looked through the paperwork on Shine's desktop. Most of it appeared to be legitimate accounting work for The Winning Ticket. He had no time to pore over documentary evidence. He was looking for Dorothea.

Bobby made his way to the first floor and got down on his hands and knees, placing his ear to the floorboards to listen for sounds of human life. “Dorothea,” he whispered. “Dorothea, can you hear me?”

There was only silence and the crashing of waves on the shore. Far off he could hear the raucous echoes of country music, laughter, and shouting coming from The Central Booking Saloon. He was certain no one could hear him in here, so he moved across the floor on all fours, peeling back throw rugs, searching the floorboards for trapdoors, knocking on the planks with the pinch bar, tapping on the walls, listening for hollow echoes.
Nothing.
The house was as solid as its owner. He stamped his feet across the floors of the living room, dining room, kitchen, hoping Dorothea might hear him and knock back.

He carefully examined the corridor between the stairs to the second floor and the living room wall. He banged on all the tongue-and-groove work along the narrow corridor. Nothing. The empty space under the stairs was a walk-in closet. He tapped on all the plaster walls. No break in the seams, no hollow echo.

He scanned the floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall bookcase in the living room. Wiggling the oak moldings, touching books, feeling behind them for secret levers like the ones he'd seen in old Vincent Price movies. Nothing.

Then something odd caught his eye. On one shelf, under the alphabetized section of
E
, he found two shelves of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Some were leather-bound original editions. Some were hardcovers. Some paperbacks. Some in Italian, Spanish, French. He hadn't known John Shine could speak any other languages. John Shine loved Emerson and collected his works the way others collected stamps or coins or baseball cards.

Then Bobby noticed one particular edition of what he was certain was “Self-Reliance.” A thin cheap paperback, but Bobby removed it from the shelf because of the odd Cyrillic script on its faded spine. He took the book from the shelf with trembling fingers and opened it to the copyright page. There, in tiny print, he saw where the book had been printed. An icy shiver moved through him when he recognized the word for
Ukraine
. There were handwritten initials on the inside of the cover: DD. It looked like Dorothea's handwriting.

He thought of murdered Tom Larkin's muttering about something concerning the Ukraine. He held the book for a long, anguished moment, imagining a trapped and bewildered Dorothea somewhere in this house. He replaced the book carefully on the shelf.

“Dorothea!” Bobby shouted, standing in the center of the empty, ominous house. “DOR-O-THEA!”

There was no reply. Just squirrels scratching in the attic.

He checked his watch: 9:10
PM
. John Shine had said he never stayed in The Winning Ticket past nine, which meant he would already be on his way home. Bobby left the house as he'd entered, careful to erase all traces of his visit.

G
leason sat in the passenger seat, chewing on the inside of his face. Since Bobby had picked him up at the Chelsea Hotel a half hour earlier, Gleason had been mute, looking hungover and tired. They were heading north on the Sprain Brook Parkway in Westchester County. Gleason gave directions.

“Where're we going?” Bobby asked.

“I'll tell ya when we get there.”

“Where's Alana?”

Gleason mopped his face with his open hand, muffling the answer into an unintelligible garble.

“I said, what happened to Alana?” Bobby said, louder.

“The ingrate bitch left me for the fucking dentist!” Gleason shouted.

“Why?” Bobby tried to hide his smile.

“Soon's he took off the temporary veneers and he put on the permanents, she smiled at me like a movie star, batted her eyes, and said, ‘Fuck you, Gleason, you revolting piece of shit.' This is the bitch who tells me to watch my fuckin' language! Who drank my champagne, ate my meals in the best restaurants in town, shopped with my money in Blooming-fuckin'-dales! And she calls me a revolting piece of shit!”

“But I thought you were doing a barter with the dentist on the divorce,” Bobby said.

“I was,” Gleason said. “I used Herbie to track his wife. He did. He stomped down a motel door and took pictures of the wife with the dentist's sister's husband. The two in-laws banging each other like minks in a motel in Sheepshead Bay. Once the dentist got these pictures from me, he figures he doesn't need me anymore, so he starts banging
my
dame.”

“Somehow this all seems to fit you like a glove,” Bobby said.

“At least I got another client out of it,” Gleason said.

“Who?”

“The dentist's sister. I'm using the same photos in her divorce from her husband, who was humpin' the dentist's wife. But somehow in the middle of all this, I got fucked in the heinie, too.”

“So where the hell are we going now?” Bobby asked, trying to find a destination amid the murk.

“North,” Gleason said. “Drive north. And tell me alls about John up-fuckin'-standin' Shine and this here other bimbsky, what's-her-face, Sandy. And Kate Clementine, who I remember because the case came up as a precedent in an insanity defense I used once.”

Bobby gave him the fill on Sandy, John Shine and the blind man, Barnicle and the mystery kid. And reluctantly told him about breaking into John Shine's house.

“You're an asshole, know that?” Gleason said. “First of all, you got caught doing a B and E, your bail is revoked. But second, if Dorothea
is
in there, this crazy fuck could have the place booby-trapped. If you found her, it could have killed you both!”

“It was a chance I had to take,” he said.

“Well, I checked your case file,” Gleason said. “Cis Tuzio never logged the teeth from the crematorium. So, I'll tell ya what I'm gonna do. As much as I hate that bastard Roth, I want you to let him go to print in two days, saying that I'm gonna make a preemptive motion to quash in advance all further proceedings in the matter of the State of New York versus Robert Emmet on the grounds of suppression of evidence, namely those teeth, lab reports, and witnesses William Franz and Carlos Orosco, on the part of the prosecution in the previous trial. Evidence which would have exonerated you. I am going to charge that Moira Farrell, Tuzio's childhood friend, college roommate, former co-clerk for the presiding judge, Mark White, acted in concert in a conspiracy against you for the murder of Dorothea Dubrow, who we don't even think is dead! We are going to take depositions from this Carlos Orosco and this here Franz guy about physical evidence they gave to Hanratty and Tuzio at the Brooklyn district attorney's office that was never introduced at trial. We'll leak it all to Roth first. Then I am going to hold a lalapalooza of a press conference in front of the Brooklyn DA's office on Primary Day, demanding that the state attorney general investigate all these allegations. You are going to walk, and I am going to run, all the way to the fucking bank!”

Bobby didn't care what Gleason's motives were. He liked what he was hearing.

“You want Roth to go with
all
of it?” Bobby asked.

“The whole shootin' match,” Gleason said, pointing to the exit that was coming up. “Page A-freakin'-one! The
wood!
We're gonna demand that criminal charges be brought against all of them. Lock 'em up and put 'em in
your
old cell! The Pulitzer!” He glared at a road sign. “Get off here, make a left at the first light after the traffic circle, and go about a mile and a half.”

Bobby followed the instructions as Gleason nervously drummed his fingers on the dashboard.

“That story will cause a political earthquake from Albany to Staten Island,” Gleason said, this time pointing to a pair of white stone columns supporting a pair of wide white gates. A raised wood sign on one column read HUDSON HEALTH MANOR. “In there.”

Bobby followed a winding gravel path up to a magnificent Gothic house that sat splendidly on a large knoll, shaded by a weeping willow. “Nutritionist who owns the joint is in deep ca-ca with the IRS,” Gleason said. “It's a strictly cash operation. The Feds planted some two-ton agents in here who paid cash that was never declared on the owner's taxes. Me and you, we're gonna keep him out of Leavenworth.”

“Another one of your amazing barter deals?” Bobby growled.

“He's already come through with his part of the bargain,” Gleason said. “Good thing, too, because I gotta start getting the brief for your motion typed tonight.”

“We're coming all the way up here to get a typist?”

Bobby pulled to a stop in front of the house. Standing on the steps was a beautiful Latina vacuum-packed into a size seven red minidress. She wore red high heels and stylish Guess sunglasses, and she beamed when she saw the Jeep pull up. Behind her was a collection of very large, overweight women.

“Izzy, that's not the adorable Venus, is it?” Bobby asked.

“Yeah, but look at that herd of bison behind her,” Gleason said. “My Venus looks like their lunch.”

Gleason ejected himself from the front seat in one frantic motion, and Venus ran into his arms. The compact lawyer swept the now svelte Venus off her feet and spun her around as she kissed his face, leaving lipstick imprints all over his cheeks. Gleason and Venus kissed passionately in front of the crowd of heavyset women, who broke into applause.

“Bobby, you remember Venus, don't ya?” Gleason said as Bobby looked at a portion of the woman he had met a little over a week before.

“Hello, Venus,” Bobby said.

“Pleased to seeing you again, Mr. Bobby,” she said. “I am losing the weight and listening to the tapes of the English. I never feel the better in your life.”

“Take us home, Jeeves,” Gleason said, climbing into the back with Venus, mauling her like a teenager at a drive-in.

G
leason again warned Bobby not to jump the gun with John Shine. Everything Sandy had told Bobby about the blind doctor and John Shine could be lies, concocted by Lou Barnicle to throw him off his scent. Gleason told him to proceed with caution or wind up with his bail revoked.

That afternoon, Gleason took depositions from Carlos Orosco and William Franz. Venus typed the motion Gleason would make to the court. Max Roth awaited the reply from his source inside One Police Plaza to his Freedom of Information request to the NYPD on John Shine. As he awaited the file, Roth prepared his exclusive story about the Gleason motion, which would run on Tuesday, Primary Day.

At the same time, Bobby and Patrick used two rented cars to tail two separate teams of Gibraltar Security workers to the cop bars in all five boroughs. Although Tuesday was their usual pickup day, the Gibraltar teams—Zeke and Kuzak in one car, Flynn and Levin in the other—picked up Sunday envelopes from off-duty cops, who were actually lining up as if this were a going-out-of-business fire sale. Patrick and Bobby used camcorders to film the collections.

The Emmet brothers kept in contact with cell phones, using personal coded shorthand, referring to each other as “Charlie” and “Sonny.” By late afternoon, all the envelopes wound up back in Gibraltar Security.

On a few occasions during the long day of surveillance, Bobby felt certain he was also being tailed. He made the routine elusive maneuvers, four rights to spot a tail, driving a full 360 around a traffic circle, making U-turns in cul-de-sacs, checking for more tracking bugs on his Jeep. He always came up blank. But he still had the feeling they were being watched. If someone was following him, the tail was very, very good. Certainly no one he'd met in the three-quarters crew was capable of pulling it off. He chalked up the feeling to paranoia.

A few minutes before four o'clock the two brothers sat parked across the street from Gibraltar Security in Bobby's rented Caprice. They watched the Gibraltar teams bringing in the envelopes.

“Sandy is right,” Bobby told Patrick. “They are certainly accelerating the operation. Millions in a single day.”

“Why the big push?” Patrick asked.

“The primary is Tuesday,” Bobby said. “A media blitz. And for a war chest for the general election. I dunno . . . .”

“You think it's also because they know you're onto their game? That you'll expose it all to Max Roth in the
Daily News
or from the witness stand? To get as much as they can while the getting is good?”

“Maybe,” Bobby said. “But there's something even more desperate going on.”

“And that has to do with the blind doctor, doesn't it?” Patrick asked.

“Yeah,” Bobby said. “If Sandy is right, the doctor arrives tomorrow at noon.”

M
inutes before seven
PM
Bobby met Max Roth in the small park across the street from the United Nations.

Roth had a ream of papers in his hand, and he insisted on walking as he told Bobby what he had learned from the Freedom of Information request to the NYPD on John Shine and from a Lexis legal-history computer search on him.

“First of all,” Roth said as they passed an old lady feeding pigeons and a small group of protesters across the street chanted about China's human rights abuses in Tibet, “Shine was never married.”

“What about the wife and kid he always talks about?” Bobby asked. “The ones he said drowned in a boating accident.”

“I thought you said they disappeared,” Roth said.