3 Quarters (43 page)

“So who is he?” Barnicle asked Moira Farrell as he pointed at the fifth glass of champagne.

“He's on his way up on the service elevator,” Moira Farrell said.

“I want him to look me in the eye and tell me that I will be the new state chairman of police,” Barnicle said.

“I'm looking forward to meeting him, too,” said Tuzio. “I want an assurance that this meatball charge of suppression of evidence in the Emmet trial won't stand in the way of my state supreme court judgeship. And Hanratty here goes where I go, of course. And Sol Diamond can get his seat on the court of appeals.”

“Of course,” said Moira Farrell as she heard sounds coming from an inner office behind her. “Well, then, I think it's time you all finally met the man who made all this happen.”

Moira walked across the opulent office and opened a large teak door, and John Shine stepped into the room, wearing faded dungarees, a pair of Top-Siders, a Yankees hat, and a plain zippered jacket.

“This some kind of fucking bad joke?” Lou Barnicle snapped, staring at Moira Farrell. “I used to boss this asshole around for cheap laughs. If he's Mr. Big, I'm the goddamn pope.”

“Who
is
he?” asked Cis Tuzio, totally baffled, looking from Barnicle to Moira Farrell to Hanratty.

“He came to me as a client and presented this ingenious scenario,” Moira Farrell said.

“His name is John Shine,” said Barnicle. “A weirdo lone wolf who quotes dead poets and runs a saloon in Bay Ridge. He's a busted-down cop, retired.”

“Sandbagged
is the word, Lou,” John Shine said. “Not retired.”

Barnicle squirmed in his seat. “Something's wrong here, Moira.”

“Sit down, Moira,” John said. “Let's get the finishing touches over with as quickly as possible.”

Moira took a seat on the suede couch next to a perplexed Barnicle.

“Is everything on track?” Cis Tuzio asked. “With the campaign? The appointments? This Bobby Emmet is trouble.”

“There's supposed to be a big story in tomorrow's
Daily News
, “Barnicle said.

“Well,” Shine said, “there is a problem with this Bobby Emmet . . . .”

“He was your fuckin' buddy boy on the job,” Barnicle said. “I've seen you with him, still pallin' around with him. Just the other day down Windy—”

“Yes,” Shine said. “That's why I put you in charge of disposing of him. On a personal level, I simply like him too much to do it myself. But you blew it, Lou, repeatedly. And you, Miss Tuzio, you left a trail that only Bobby Emmet could trace. But he did. Right to me! Which makes sense, since I really can't rely on anyone but myself. It always comes down to self-reliance, doesn't it? Even you, Moira, as sweet and brilliant and beautiful as you are, you were exceedingly sloppy with one very tenacious cop.”

“I was told to make sure he was convicted,” Moira said. “He was. It's not my fault this Gleason freak came along . . .”

“Now, wait a minute,” Tuzio said. “What does all this rambling mean? Tomorrow is the primary. Is everything going to work out? Are we on track, on schedule? What's it all mean?”

“It means I presented a foolproof schematic for success, and you fools have consistently blown it,” Shine said. “As Mr. Emerson once said, ‘A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do.' I'm a great soul. You're all lost souls. I have something I must do.”

Shine smiled, grimaced, raised his flute of champagne.

“Fuck is he talking about?” Barnicle demanded of Moira Farrell. She just shook her head, baffled, concerned.

“But it will all turn out fine in the end,” Shine said with a smile. “To the new governor.”

He raised his glass in a toast.

The others, too confused to do otherwise, awkwardly raised their glasses to sip. As they did, Shine placed his glass on the coffee table and quickly removed two silver pistols, one from each jacket pocket, each equipped with a silencer. He shot Barnicle first, through the right eye, with the gun in his left hand. The second bullet pierced Moira Farrell in the center of her chest. He turned his head quickly, wincing with back pain, aimed the right-handed pistol and shot Cis Tuzio in her open mouth as she attempted to scream. Shine caught an astonished Hanratty in the heart.

With gunsmoke wafting in the air, the four corpses sagged in bewildered final poses on the expensive couches, champagne glasses softly trickling bubbly over their lifeless bodies. Shine took out a hankie and wiped his prints from both guns and pulled on a pair of soft leather driving gloves. He walked to Barnicle and placed the left-hand pistol in his right hand. He placed the second pistol in Hanratty's hand.

He took five stacks of cash from the many bundles in the bags and cracked one of them open, scattering scores of hundred-dollar bills between the dead bodies to make it look as though these four had quarreled over money. He dropped the other four bundles on the coffee table. The only object he had touched in the room was the champagne glass. He lifted the glass and washed down a painkiller with the last of the champagne. He put the glass in his jacket pocket, zippered both big bags, and placed a shoulder strap over each shoulder. Shine knew from experience that a million dollars in one-hundred-dollar bills weighed exactly twenty-two pounds. That would mean that each five-million-dollar bag would weigh one hundred and ten pounds. The unwieldy weight of the two hundred and twenty pounds of money was murder on his bad back.

He took one last look and then was quickly gone.

A
fter Bobby picked him up outside the library, Max Roth said, “The architect, the one who built the house where the wacko stashed Kate Clementine, was a woman name of Barbara Lacy. It was in the old clips.”

“Is she the missing architect poor Larkin was talking about?” Bobby asked, quickly changing to the center fire lane to avoid the buses in the right lane. The dashboard clock said it was 7:25
PM.

“Yes, I think she's the same one,” Roth said, pulling some newspaper clips and copies of microfilmed documents from a big
Daily News
manila envelope. “Her family finally called me back. This woman went missing about nineteen months ago . . . .”

“About the same time as the corpse showed up in the crematorium,” Bobby said, swerving to avoid a cabbie. Roth braced himself, looked at Bobby's animated face, and flicked through his notebook and old newspaper clippings.

“It was a two-day story buried in the middle of the paper,” Roth said. “Buried because you and that pile of ashes in the cemetery were scattered all over the first five pages.”

“I don't need to be reminded,” Bobby said.

“I called the city desk a few minutes ago, and they said the story about the dead woman on Gleason's boat is moving on the police wires,” Roth said. “But it says you have an alibi this time.”

“I don't have an excuse for letting it happen,” Bobby said, making a squealing right-hand turn though a light that switched from yellow to red at Thirty-fourth Street. He drilled the Jeep west toward the
Daily News
building. “I can't let it happen to Dorothea.”

Max Roth cleared his throat, rustled the newspaper clippings, and read from his notebook as they approached the crisscrossing intersection of Herald Square, where traffic was always snarled and the shoppers from Macy's clogged the streets.

“Anyway, seventeen years ago, back at the time of the Kate Clementine case, this Barbara Lacy told reporters that she built the ‘house of horror' to specifications for the mad uncle, who said he was afraid of a nuclear attack,” Roth said. “He claimed he wanted an underground bunker that would keep out radiation and shield him from the atomic explosion. She thought he was a crackpot, but she was a young kid out of Pratt Institute, and she needed the work. So she built it.”

“And she disappeared nineteen months ago,” Bobby said, screeching to a stop at Broadway. “What did you learn about her?”

“She was a heavy smoker,” Roth said. “She had a brownstone in Brooklyn Heights. And yes, she was born and raised and still lived in New York. And probably drank the fluoridated water regularly.”

“Like the woman whose teeth were found in the crematorium,” Bobby said, staring at Roth. “Jesus, the poor woman . . .”

Horns honked from behind him the nanosecond that the light turned green. Bobby floored the pedal and zoomed through the intersection, dividing a crowd of angry shoppers.

“Family said it was the cigarettes that gave Lacy her first heart attack at the age of thirty-nine,” Roth said, bracing his foot against the dashboard for leverage as Bobby swerved around a traffic cop. “They installed the pacemaker in NYU Medical Center. All these months the family figured she had a heart attack somewhere and was considered a homeless Jane Doe and was buried in some potter's field grave . . . which is where we'll wind up if you don't slow the fuck down!”

“Ah, Je-sus, Max, it is her,” Bobby said, forcing an oncoming cabdriver to skid to a halt in the middle of the intersection as Bobby made an illegal left onto Seventh Avenue. “They killed this poor woman, cremated her, and made it look like Dorothea . . .”

“I naturally asked the family what the last architectural work she did was,” Roth said, clutching the overhead handgrip as Bobby made a shrieking right onto Thirty-third Street. “This took them a while to find, but they were more than eager to help because they do want a fresh story in the paper. I didn't have the heart to tell them she's in an urn with Dorothea Dubrow's name on it in the Kings County evidence room.”

“So what did she design?” Bobby asked, eagerly, passing the delivery trucks outside the General Post Office on Thirty-third Street just west of Eighth Avenue.

“Well, she redesigned a SoHo loft,” Roth said. “She rehabbed a Brooklyn Heights condo . . .”

Bobby rattled off an address Maggie had given to him and asked if it was the same one where Lacy did the work.

“How'd you know?” Roth asked.

“It's the address where Tuzio and Farrell live,” Bobby said, coming to a stop at a light on Ninth Avenue.

“Jesus Christ,” Roth said. “And it gets better. Then Lacy overhauled a restaurant in Bay Ridge . . .”

“The Winning Ticket,” Bobby blurted.

“Yep,” Roth said. “Then she drew up a whole set of plans for Shine for a beach house in Windy Tip.”

“Does Shine's house have a basement, a bomb shelter?” Bobby asked, excited. “Something like that?”

“Ordinarily they can't dig anything like that in the sand down there,” Roth explained. “But according to the plans, the house sits on top of part of an abandoned post–World War Two Nike Hercules missile silo, one of many that were dug by the Army Corps of Engineers to defend New York Harbor. I found most of this on record in the library.”

“The silo provides enough space for an underground quarters?”

“Oh, yeah,” Roth said. “Some of them used to be manned, waiting for the Red Menace and the Yellow Peril.”

“This is part of what Tom Larkin wanted to tell me,” Bobby said. “Larkin probably tapped into Shine's folder. Found out about his bogus past. About how his three-quarters was repeatedly denied. And when he started checking into Kate Clementine, he also found out that Shine worked on that case and had used Moira Farrell as his lawyer and Barbara Lacy as his architect, before she disappeared.”

“Disappeared at the same time Dorothea did,” Roth added. “Then Shine somehow found out that Larkin was onto him . . . .”

“Found out from me, that bastard,” Bobby said. “Shine sent me to Larkin, just to find out what he
knew!”
The light turned green, and he lurched through the intersection. “When I inadvertently let him know that Larkin was getting too close to exposing him, Shine had him killed.”

Roth took his foot down from the dashboard as Bobby approached the
Daily News
building near Tenth Avenue and pulled into the yellow-lined truck-loading zone. Then he looked Bobby in the eyes.

“Look, I have to finish filing my piece for tomorrow,” Roth said.

“Hey, Max,” Bobby said. “Thanks.”

Roth took a deep breath.

“But I have something else that's even more disturbing I gotta tell you,” Roth said. “I don't want you to do anything stupid with that gun I know you're carrying around.”

“What, Max?” Bobby said, looking at the clock on the dashboard that said it was 7:43
PM.
“Come on, man. This is coming to a head. I gotta go!”

“You asked me to check with the State Department . . .”

“Yeah?”

“Well, they have a record of a woman named Dorothea
Slomowicz
entering the country from the Ukraine twenty-two months ago.”

“And?”

“And ‘Slomowicz' was the name of the Ukrainian diplomat whose wife had an affair with John Shine,” Roth said.” ‘Dubrow' was her maiden name.”

Bobby sat frozen for a long moment, staring at the river two blocks west. He cleared his throat, tried to swallow what Roth was saying.

“Max, are you saying it's possible John Shine is Dorothea Dubrow's father?” Bobby asked.

“I think it's more than a possibility, Bobby,” Roth said. “What are you gonna do?”

“I have to meet Gleason, and then I have to get back into that fucking house,” Bobby said. “Tonight.”

B
obby arrived to meet Gleason at the Empire State Building at 8:14
PM.
He didn't want to risk the chance that someone was lying in wait for him in the underground garage, so he parked the Jeep on the street. It would make for a quicker departure anyway. He put the NYPD pass in the window.