3 Quarters (41 page)

The sick feeling in Bobby's gut returned. He was beginning to think Sandy was absolutely right about Shine having Dorothea stashed in that beach house. But why? Was she in on this monstrous scheme? Faking her own death to get rid of him and make off with a bundle? Or did Shine have some sick obsession with her, the way Kate Clementine's uncle had, all those terrible years ago?

He would need to get into that house, one way or the other.

As he neared the back of the giant shopping mall located on a busy marina in southern Brooklyn, he also worried about Sandy and her child, alone with Barnicle.
I should call the cops,
he thought. Except they
were
the cops. In this part of Brooklyn, Barnicle was beyond the law.

“He's dropping him at the same bus stop,” Patrick said on the cell phone as Bobby pulled into an empty slip at the marina behind Kings Plaza and tied up, which would cause a ruckus if the slip's owner came back any time soon.

“Shine left him sitting there on the bench,” Patrick said as Bobby carried the cell phone with him up onto the dock, making his way toward the stairs to the street, passing the boat people, who were a species unto themselves, talking about winds and currents and marina taxes that would never affect the ordinary citizen too poor to own a boat.

“Bobby, he's taking off those goddamn glasses now,” Patrick said with alarm, as Bobby climbed the last steps onto Flatbush Avenue. He spotted Patrick's tan Plymouth parked across the wide six-lane avenue, about seventy-five yards from the man with the small black doctor's bag. The man stood and began to jaywalk across the street toward the parking lot of Kings Plaza Shopping Center. No longer blind. Dodging traffic.

Patrick got out of the Plymouth as the man quickly passed Bobby, who turned his head, as if looking for a bus that would never come. But Bobby had glimpsed the man's face. It looked an awful lot like one of the faces in the pictures accompanying the on-line
Civil Service Gazette
clipping that Maggie had downloaded from her portable laptop in Central Park.
Abrams
, Bobby thought.
Dr. Benjamin Abrams
. One of the two doctors who had turned Shine down for his three-quarters pension in 1991.

Patrick joined his brother as they entered the parking lot. An armed security guard on a scooter passed them, winding through the aisles of parked cars, searching for thieves, muggers, and car-jackers.

The man with the doctor's bag walked up a wide traffic ramp, and Bobby and Patrick followed at a distance of about fifty feet.

“Let's grab this guy and squeeze some information out of his neck,” Patrick said.

“Love to,” Bobby said. “But if I'm right, his name is Abrams. Dr. Benjamin Abrams, of the police medical board.”

“Fuck 'im,” Patrick said. “Let's put the bull on him . . . .”

“He's a deputy inspector in NYPD,” Bobby said. “You can get fired. I got nothing to lose. Go wait in the car.”

“Let me do this with you . . . .”

“Wait in the car,” Bobby said with big-brother finality.

Bobby followed the man with the doctor's bag into the dark, cavernous indoor parking lot and up a ramp to the second level. His footfalls echoed, and the man turned once. Bobby turned his back, jangled his keys, and pretended to be searching for his own car. He saw the man unlock the driver's door of a BMW and toss the bag into the front seat before climbing in. Bobby approached silently.

“Dr. Abrams?” Bobby said.

The man turned, saw Bobby standing there in the half-gloom, and said, “Yes, who's that?”

“Where is she, Abrams?” Bobby asked. “Where's the woman? Where is Dorothea Dubrow?”

The startled doctor quickly bent into the car, popped the glove compartment latch, and tried to grab his .38 caliber service revolver. Before he could reach the gun, Bobby yanked Abrams out of the car and slammed him against the back door. The wind blew out of the middle-aged doctor.

“I have no idea what you're talking about,” said Dr. Benjamin Abrams. “I know who you are. You're Bobby Emmet. Boy, oh, boy, are you in trouble now, fella . . . .”

“It's all here on tape,” Bobby said, waving the tape he had removed from the camcorder.

Abrams looked at the tape with horror, his lips trembling, and said. “What do
you
want?”

“Dorothea Dubrow,” Bobby said.

“I can't take any more of this . . . .” He closed his eyes as his face reddened and sweat formed on his brow.

“It's all here,” Bobby said, waving the tape.

“Please, not another tape . . .”

“I have John Shine picking you up on tape . . .”

“Who the hell is John Shine?” Dr. Abrams seemed to be genuinely baffled by the name.

“The guy who takes you blindfolded into the beach house,” Bobby said.

“I . . . have . . . no . . . idea . . .”

“Forget the name. Where does he have her stashed, Doc? She in on it?”

“You have nothing on that tape that shows I've done anything wrong . . .”

“Come on, Doc, how many phony three-quarters pensions do you approve in a month?” Bobby asked.

Abrams stared at him in silence.

“What's your take?” Bobby said, taking the doctor's shirtfront in his hand. “Or do they have something on you? On some other tape, maybe?”

“You are making an extremely serious accusation,” Dr. Abrams said now, trying to free himself from Bobby's grip.

The security guard on the scooter puttered up the ramp. Abrams looked at him. Bobby loosened his grip on the doctor.

“Everything all right there, folks?” the security guard asked as he stopped on the ramp.

“I can have you arrested right now,” Abrams said, suddenly filled with bravado. “I'll have you know, I am a deputy inspector of the New York City Police Department!”

Dr. Abrams quickly climbed in his car, locked the doors.

“When you get to the joint, Doc, I wouldn't advise you to spread that news around,” Bobby said.

F
rom the fly deck of the cabin cruiser, Bobby watched the yellow crime-scene tape rising and falling in the river wind. It cordoned off his boat slip, making
The Fifth Amendment
look like a diseased ship in quarantine. It was three
PM
, and the sun blazed on the rollicking Hudson flowing past the Seventy-ninth Street Boat Basin. Bobby walked along the narrow, wet walkway, and ahead of him he saw uniformed cops and detectives in suits and ties and a forensic crew with cameras and evidence kits. His heart beat with fear. Only a corpse would bring out this group.

Thank God I don't have the gun on me,
he thought.
They'd nail me with a gun charge for shit sure
. When he'd seen all the activity from the fly deck of Doug's boat, he hid the .38 on board.

Now he hurried down to
The Fifth Amendment.
Hanratty approached him first, walking with a cocky swagger.

“This time, shitmouth, we got us a body,” Hanratty said. “And you're going back where you belong. Into a cage.”

Hanratty grabbed him by the arm, and Bobby yanked himself free and hurried past him toward the boat. Cis Tuzio stood with her hands in her baggy pants pockets, her thin lips gathered together like a Boy Scout knot, her cheeks hollow with authority. She untied her lips to say, “No flamboyant lawyer or loudmouthed newspaper columnist is going to get you out of this one, Mr. Emmet.”

“If you're charging me with something, maybe you better tell me what it is,” Bobby said.

She motioned to a uniformed cop who nudged Bobby up the gangplank. A bevy of cops walked in front of and behind him. He was led across the deck and down into the cabin, into the master stateroom. The room was speckled with blood. Bobby felt his guts tighten and his mouth go dry as a forensic photographer popped a picture and stepped aside.

“Ah, Jesus . . . no . . .

Sandy Fraser lay across Bobby's bed. Nude except for white sandals. Her throat was slashed in a vicious semicircle, so deep Bobby could see the dull white of the spinal cord. Her eyes half open in death, as was her right hand. In that hand were three shiny quarters. Bobby stared at the quarters. They were all dated 1991.

“Ah, Jesus, no . . . .” Bobby whispered again.

“Jesus, no,” Tuzio said. “Bobby Emmet,
sì
. You're under arrest, fella.”

Hanratty twisted Bobby's left hand behind his back and snapped a handcuff over his thick muscular wrist. Bobby heard the awful ratcheting sound of the cuffs tightening, felt the pincers biting his flesh. He could almost hear the banging of the steel.

“This is so obvious a frame that it could hang in the Louvre,” Bobby said, the words fuzzy from his dry mouth.

“Robert Emmet, you are under arrest for the murder of one Sandra Fraser,” Hanratty said as he reached for Bobby's other wrist to manacle. “You have the right—”

“He has the right to be let go right now,” came a voice from the entrance of the cabin. Tuzio, Hanratty, and the others turned to see Forrest Morgan standing in the doorframe, blocking most of the afternoon light. His tired black face was furrowed with contempt. He pinned his badge to his rumpled suit jacket and stepped past Bobby and Hanratty to take a look at the corpse. It was being delicately examined by a deputy medical examiner. Bobby stared down at Sandy and felt himself swoon from the smell of feces, stale whiskey, and close air in the tight room.
This poor woman reached out to me for help
, he thought.
She tried to help me. Help find Dorothea. Tried to protect that little kid Donald. And they slaughtered her. To shut me up. She died because of me . . . .

Morgan tapped the coroner on the shoulder and said, “How long she been dead?”

“Judging by the temperature of the liver I took with the incision thermometer, I'd say one to three hours,” the deputy medical examiner said.

Morgan turned to Tuzio and said, “Mr. Emmet has been under constant Internal Affairs Bureau surveillance for the past thirty-six hours,” he said. “On land and sea. And he certainly hasn't been here with a woman in all that time. He's been out tailing other people. Law enforcement people. Some of them are in this room . . . .”

He glared at Hanratty, who attempted a cocky sneer.

“You know who you are, and it'll all be in my report,” Morgan said, looking back at Tuzio with a slow shake of his head. “In the meantime, ladies and germs, I am Robert Emmet's alibi, like it or not.”

Hanratty's sneer had turned to a look of dread. He unlocked the handcuff from Bobby's left wrist. Bobby turned to Hanratty.

“I think you better get a lawyer,” he said to the red-haired cop.

Then Bobby looked at Tuzio. “You have a lot of explaining to do, too, Cis,” Bobby said. “Maybe you should check this dead woman's
teeth.”

Tuzio looked Bobby in the eye, her lips clamping into a wrinkled bud that never managed to blossom. “I'm not finished with you yet,” she said, and turned and stormed out of the cabin, followed by a nervous Hanratty. Bobby glanced at Morgan. The black cop shook his head.

“Bag her up,” said the assistant coroner, and the morgue crew in jumpsuits walked to Sandy Fraser. Bobby watched them roll the nude and savaged woman onto a plastic sheet and roll her again like a human sausage. The same woman who'd come to him for help and human affection only a few nights before. Who'd slept on that bed. The woman who'd told him about John Shine and the blind doctor and Barnicle and the accelerated three-quarters operation. The woman too terrified to name the father of her now motherless child.

He felt a generalized lousiness spread through him, his skin suddenly clammy and itchy, his mouth pasty and his throat parched, a wave of nausea building in him, a malaise not unlike the one he'd felt on the morning he was arrested for the murder of Dorothea.

“This is going to be a closed crime scene at least until morning,” said one of the criminalists, an Asian man with a name tag that said Woo. “You'll have to find another place to stay tonight, guy.”

Bobby did not object. He wouldn't be able to sleep there again anytime soon. He turned to Forrest Morgan as he heard the zipper being crackled closed on the body bag behind him.

“I could have prevented this,” Bobby said.

“I don't think so,” Morgan said. “But you might be able to prevent another one if you tell me what the fuck is going on, man.”

They went up on deck, and Bobby inhaled the fresh air, watched the river flow past. It was too beautiful a day to die, Bobby thought. Especially like that.

“She had a beautiful kid,” Bobby said to Morgan.

“I know,” Forrest Morgan said. “I saw her and the kid with you in Coney Island . . . .”

“Sandy has an aunt in Jersey,” Bobby said. “See if you can track her down. Please. That kid was at Lou Barnicle's house, where Sandy lived. He's an important little boy to some very dangerous people, and somehow he's tied to all this. I wish I knew more than that right now, but I don't. But Sandy said the kid isn't really Barnicle's. He shouldn't wind up conveniently lost in the foster system or a body bag. Can you find the kid and then this aunt?”

“No problem,” Forrest Morgan said. “But I have to go through Child Welfare for that. That agency is a crossword puzzle of jurisdictions. But you know I'm on Barnicle's tail anyway. I got a good idea what's going on from following you around. I'm just waiting for the last shoe to drop.”

They walked down the gangplank, passing Tuzio and Hanratty, who whispered together on the dock.

“Now, why don't you tell me
everything
, “Morgan said.

“Everything
will be in Max Roth's column in the morning,” Bobby said, loud enough for Tuzio and Hanratty to hear him.