3 Quarters (4 page)

‘They said the ashes contained DNA,” Bobby said.

“Yeah, but she has no medical records or history here in the United States to match it against. The authorities—local, Feds, Interpol—believe she was using an alias. This Dorothea Dubrow dame of yours, she's a complete enigma.”

“It blew my mind when this came out at trial,” Bobby said. “All I know is that when I met her, she had been in the country a few months, was living with a girl named Sandy Fraser. Maybe Dorothea's vague background explains why she always avoided setting a wedding date. Maybe she was already married. Maybe she was on the lam. I just don't know.”

“You're missing the point,” Gleason said. “How can they say you
killed
a woman who doesn't fucking exist?”

“The blood in my apartment,” Bobby said. “The same as the blood in my car . . .”

“That could be anyone's blood,” Gleason says. “If they can't prove it was the blood of this cipher named Dorothea Dubrow, where's your motive? There is none. If they can't connect that blood or those ashes to you, this case holds no water.”

“Yeah, and so . . .”

“And so,” Gleason said, reaching into his inside jacket pocket and removing a sloppily folded, chocolate-smeared sheath of fax papers. “So . . . I almost forgot . . . So, last week I sort of went into the court of appeals, and with your brother Patrick's power of attorney, I filed a brief for a new trial based on lack of evidence and motive.” He stuffed a Tootsie Roll into his mouth and tried desperately to get it mashed into a manageable wad. Bobby watched him unclog the words from the brown mass in his mouth as Gleason handed him the fax papers. Bobby unfolded them, felt them tremble in his fingers as he saw the seal of the New York State Court of Appeals on the top of the legal document.

Gleason finally said, “This was all done early this morning to avoid a press circus. It just came over the fax. Your conviction has been set aside, and there will be a new trial. You'll be processed out of this shit bucket in less than an hour.”

B
obby sauntered with a renewed bounce in his step on his way back up the metal stairs on his last walk to his cell, his final subjection to the banging of the steel.

“Slow down, Emmet,” said Morrison the hack. “You're still state property until I get the release papers.”

When they reached the tier to walk back to his solitary-confinement cell, it was the middle of the morning lockout, and Bobby passed the immense, silent, glaring Bluto character.

“Morrison, can I talk to you a minute,” said Bluto.

Morrison paused in front of Bluto's cell and said, “Get back to your cell and start packing, Emmet. I'll be a sec.”

Bobby's and Bluto's eyes met like ice cubes in the same small dirty glass. Bobby held the frozen stare for a long moment. “Move it,” Morrison said. Bobby broke the stare and proceeded down the gauntlet of prisoners, who mingled in knots and cliques, smoking and scratching their balls, bullshitting, telling recycled crime stories that predated the Internet.

As Bobby resumed his shoulders-back, chest-out, stomach-in parade down the tier, he saw tension suddenly move from one set of eyes to another, like the rattling of delft before an earthquake. He saw the tattooed ape who had made the vile remarks about his daughter, huddled with his back to him, saw him suddenly spin to face him, a sharpened metal spoon in his hairy right hand. He also saw the black man who had spit on him, saw him step quickly from his opened cell and produce another crude jailhouse shank. Now a third guy, with the mixed-blood features of all the races of the hybrid city of New York—what they called in here a “whorehouse baby”—started walking briskly his way from a distance of five feet, a pointed deadly stick sliding down from his shirtsleeve.

All conversations stopped at once, and an eerie, breath-bated silence fell on the prison corridor, the way the dimming lights in a theater bring a sudden hush just before show time.

Bobby could hear a faint muffled scuffle from behind him. Then he saw Morrison struggling to free himself from the grip of two prisoners, and at that same moment Bobby felt a set of massive arms bear-hug him from behind, two white hands the size of prime ribs clamping together at his sternum.
Bluto,
Bobby thought.
Worry about the ones who say nothing . . . .

Now Tattoo grinned at him. Bobby blew him a kiss, and the other two snarled, nostrils flaring.
Control,
Bobby thought.
Think, don't panic. I'm better than these mutts. I can't let these lowlives take my life. Not now! I'm getting
out!
I'm gonna see Maggie. I'm going
home
and these cocksuckers are gonna try to kill me . . .

When in doubt, go for the balls,
he thought.

Straining his right arm, he was able to wiggle his probing right hand behind him like a backhoe. He groped until he located Bluto's balls and squeezed them like a fist full of ripe peaches, twisting until Bluto's scream exploded in his ear and echoed through the cellblock.

Then, as the three cons lunged at Bobby, he steered Bluto in front of him by the balls, the way he would a bull by a nose ring. As the three attackers lunged, Bobby yoked his left arm around Bluto's throat and used him as a human shield just as the three attacking cons thrust at him with their crude shanks. The weapons entered Bluto's neck, chest, abdomen, making wet plunging noises. Bobby felt a spasm with each impact. Now the tier was alive with shrill jailhouse screams, whistles, and war whoops, which resembled, Bobby thought, what Purgatory must sound like on Halloween night. With his free hand, Bobby quickly grabbed Tattoo by the left ear, violently whipped his face toward him, and met him halfway with his own head. The impact made a sound like a watermelon falling off a roof to the street, and Tattoo collapsed in a spray of blood. Little ticking noises coming from his throat.

The black man with the bloodied shiv made another lunge at him, and this time Bobby used his massive upper-body strength to heave the bleeding Bluto at him, using him as a battering ram. Bluto collapsed on top of the attacker, pinning him to the floor, a man trapped under a boulder. Bobby kicked him once in the left temple, and his eyes rolled back in his head like a doll's.

The whorehouse baby jumped into his own cell and slammed the door shut with a loud clang. Bobby reached through the bars, grabbed a handful of his hair, and pulled him face-first into the space between the bars, crushing both his cheekbones. The astonished con dissolved to the cell floor like a spreading stain.

Bobby heard the hacks charging, shouting for the cons to return to their cells. Then he heard muffled whispers from Bluto. Bobby crouched and turned him over to listen. Bluto lay on the dirty cellblock floor, gasping and hemorrhaging, his torso a palette of blood.

“You a bad dude,” the big man wheezed. “But they gonna get you outside if not here.”

“Who?” Bobby said.

“Big people, important people. You bad for bizniz. Only reason I tell you is I respec' that you never dimed inside. Word is, no matter how many beatins in whichever joint, you never dimed. But you're still a fuckin' pig. Now, tell these muddafuckuhs to get me some needle and thread 'fore I die all over the fuckin' floor. You, you're no rat. But you just bad for bizniz. And they gonna git you . . . .”

Bobby looked up and saw a flying wedge of hacks with riot helmets and Plexiglas shields and batons at the ready storming down the tier. Bobby lay down flat, clasped his hands behind his head, and was soon picked up under the arms and dragged on his boot tips down the tier and heaved into his cell. The door slammed shut. For the last time. In less than an hour, Bobby Emmet was going home, where he was most certainly going to be “bad for bizniz.”

D
r. Benjamin Abrams sat at his large oak desk in his office at the NYPD Medical Board at 1 Lefrak Plaza in Rego Park, Queens, as bright morning sun lanced through half-shut window blinds.

It was 8:45
AM.

Dr. Abrams, a tall, elegant-looking man who was finally losing his proud mane of silver hair at age fifty-one, was going through a stack of police medical-pension applications when Dr. Hector Perez, the new doctor on the medical board, entered the offices. Perez nodded hello to Ms. Burns, the slightly sour, middle-aged civil-service receptionist.

When Dr. Perez walked past Dr. Abrams's open door, he looked ashen and fatigued, shiny with perspiration. Unlike every other Monday and Thursday morning when the medical board met, the young doctor had not even said hello, just stopped to unlock his office door.

“You have a package, Doctor,” Dr. Abrams said.

Dr. Perez nervously picked up a thick package bearing a sticker marked URGENT. A little more than a half hour earlier, before Ms. Burns had arrived at 8:10
AM,
her usual ten minutes late, Dr. Abrams had signed for the messenger delivery.

Dr. Abrams had taken special notice that the parcel had no return address. A parcel that felt as if it contained a videotape, just like the one he had received two years ago.

All three doctors' offices had TV sets with VCR units, for viewing the latest video pitches from the technology and pharmaceutical companies and taping the news shows that were pertinent to their jobs. But Dr. Abrams could remember only one other videotape that had ever arrived without a return address and was marked URGENT. That one had borne
his
name.

At 9
AM
Dr. Abrams stared at his TV screen, looking for clues on the twenty-four-hour all-news TV station. The newscaster mentioned briefly that the body of a murdered woman, suspected of being a prostitute, was found in a hotel room in the Hotel St. Claire. Dr. Abrams knew that the night before the St. Claire had been the site of a convention of the American Association of Police Physicians. He had not accepted their invitation to attend. The last convention he'd gone to had been in Boston two years earlier. The parallels were frightening.

He glanced across the hall into Dr. Perez's office, where pictures of the doctor's beautiful wife and various diplomas and awards decorated the walls. He knew that Dr. Perez had been at last night's gala, so Dr. Abrams had a disturbing idea as to why the young doctor did not look like a happy camper this morning.

Dr. Abrams continued sorting through the paperwork on his desk as if his life depended on it. Which it did. As he had for the past two years, Dr. Abrams separated out those medical-pension applications with a small number 91 penciled onto the upper right-hand corner of the first page. He arranged these in a neat stack on the right-hand side of his desk and dropped all the others in a loose pile on the left. He knew which ones he would approve and which ones he'd reject without even reading them for merit.

Then Dr. Abrams unscrewed the cap of the Montblanc pen. It had been given to him by his now fifteen-year-old daughter, Rebecca, one Father's Day. She was a straight-A student at Dalton and wanted to be a doctor like her dad. He always used his daughter's pen to sign his signature on all the specially coded “91” applications, to remind him of the shame that she would suffer if he did not approve these petitions.

He flashed back to that morning two years ago. Another dead woman. Another package. Marked URGENT. A video clearly showing Dr. Abrams, in a Boston hotel room, sitting up naked in a bloodstained bed, holding a straight razor and hovering over the nude body of a hooker, with three shiny quarters in her open palm, each dated 1991.

The morning after a convention of police doctors in Boston. A murder still unsolved and mostly forgotten. But his blackmailer knew that murder has no statute of limitations. And so Dr. Abrams had been signing his approval signature on the specially coded NYPD medical-pension forms ever since, as instructed.

He looked at the stack on the right-hand side of his desk. There were a few dozen backlogged “91” applications. Full approval of a pension required the signatures of two of the three NYPD doctors. Once you had two, the third doctor always rubber-stamped his approval; easier to join 'em than to fight 'em. Although they had never discussed it, Abrams knew from a simple process of elimination that the second signature on the “91s” had always been supplied by Dr. Frederick Jones, a prominent Harlem physician who had been given this prestigious job by a previous mayor as a payback for his support in the black community.

Then the system was disrupted. Jones was killed in an automobile accident three months ago on the Saw Mill River Parkway, coming into the city in a torrential rainstorm. The “91” applications had piled up, and Abrams had been wondering who the lucky replacement would be.

Dr. Perez appeared in his office door, his face as white as a hockey mask, mumbling about something he ate. But before he left, he asked if there were any applications he should peruse.

Abrams looked him in the stunned eyes. He picked up the thick pile of applications with the “91” codes. “Actually, these look like they need to be expedited,” Abrams said. “We're more than a little behind . . . .”

Dr. Perez took the applications and pretended to examine them. His fingers left damp imprints on the crisp pages. He swallowed dryly, grimacing. He blinked twice, and from his suit jacket pocket he produced a gold Mark Cross pen given to him by Nydia to celebrate his appointment to the NYPD Medical Board.

“Nice pen,” Dr. Abrams said as Perez signed the forms.

O
utside the prison gates Gleason handed Bobby a pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses and said, “Hurry up before the fuckin' press descends like seagulls after a Puerto Rican picnic.”

“Okay, Izzy, so what do I owe you for you helping me?” Bobby asked, trotting after Gleason, who power-walked across the parking lot. Out of the corner of his eye Bobby noticed a white Ford Taurus parked on the opposite side of the parking lot and saw a long telephoto lens pop out and point in his direction. Then the lens disappeared back behind a partially open tinted window. “You must have an agenda, Izzy; what do I have to do?”