3 Quarters (9 page)

“You're bitter,” Barnicle said evenly. “You have to learn to forgive and forget.”

Bobby paced the room, looked at some of the plaques Barnicle had won as a police captain over the years: the Emerald Society, B'nai B'rith, Knights of Columbus.

“Yeah, well, I have Irish Alzheimer's,” Bobby said, tapping his temple with his left forefinger. “I forget everything but the fucking grudge.”

“You're a courageous man,” Barnicle said. “No one can ever say that Bobby Emmet has no balls. Or brains. Too smart to be a cop, I always thought. But you're also reckless. You overstep your bounds. You step on other people's toes. You took a job where you even went after your own kind. What the fuck is that? I mean, IAB tries to run guys out of the department. But you, you tried to put cops in the joint. As you found out, that's not a nice place to be for a cop. And now here you are, as soon as you get out, making waves with me. For what?”

“I think you had me framed,” Bobby said. “No use beating around the bush. I think you set me up, and like most red-blooded Americans, I believe in revenge.”

“You got no backup, no carry license, no friends, and I'm supposed to gulp Maalox for the puny
agita
you wanna give me?” Barnicle produced a manufactured belch. “There, that's all the gas you give me. You're a burp in the hurricane of my life.”

Bobby took a deep breath.

“I'm going to find out what happened to Dorothea Dubrow,” Bobby said. “Bet on it.”

“Hey, I might be a lot of things,” Barnicle said. “But I don't go around killing girls. Especially beautiful ones . . . .”

“Jesus, that is aesthetically discriminating of you,” Bobby said.

“I run a legit shop here,” Barnicle continued, as if Bobby had not even interrupted. “I take care of guys retired from the job. Even you. That's right.” He smiled his toothy smile. “I can offer you twenty-five dollars an hour to start, bodyguarding a few rap stars right now. What do you say?”

“I'm sure you'd like that, having me check IDs and ticket stubs at Brooklyn College,” Bobby said. “Better to have me inside the tent pissing out instead of vice versa. But if you didn't help kill her, what makes you so certain Dorothea's even dead?”

“If she's alive,” Barnicle said, “why doesn't she come forward?” He stood up, poured a snifter of Rémy Martin cognac, swirled it, sniffed it. “She reads the papers. She knows what happened to you.”

“Maybe she's being held against her will,” Bobby said.

“Where, in a zoo? Come to think of it, she did have an ass like a jungle beast . . . no offense.”

Bobby felt a flare ignite in his head, a fuse of white-hot rage.
Control,
he thought.
Control.
“Offense taken,” Bobby said. “And duly noted.”

A knock came on the door.

“Come in, babe,” Barnicle said, still swirling the cognac in the snifter.

Bobby gripped the .38 by the handle again, behind his back. Sandy carried in a tray with two cups of espresso. Bobby loosened his grip on the gun and palmed it again. He fell silent as Sandy tore open an envelope of Equal and poured it into Barnicle's demitasse cup. As if performing a ritual, she stirred it with a tiny silver spoon, twisted a lemon rind, and skimmed the rim of the ceramic cup with it.

“Real sugar or plastic, Bobby?” Sandy asked, looking at him, her eyes filled with other questions.

Bobby had always been attracted to Sandy—her pleasant manner, sassy sense of humor, street-smart intelligence, her gleaming smile, her unabashed Brooklyn accent—back as far as when she worked over in the NYPD medical office.

All the cops had always wanted Sandy to interview them because she was as easy to talk to as she was to look at. Mid-thirties and she still had a body like that of one of those babes
Playboy
always found in college-campus searches. She'd dated lots of cops. Rumor had it she'd had affairs with married brass who promised to get divorced but only broke her heart. There had always been something hauntingly sad about her, a sense of never being happy, always searching for and never finding her place in life.

“Nothing for me, thanks,” Bobby said. Barnicle glanced from one to the other, not liking their eye contact. Sandy lingered for a moment as if awaiting instructions.

“The hell you waitin' for?” Barnicle asked.

“A ‘thank you' might be nice,” Sandy said.

“I'm the goddamned
boss,
” Barnicle said in an exasperated way.

“I'm a goddamned
lady,
” Sandy said. “A human being. We have these weird customs—‘please,' ‘thanks,' ‘you're welcome.' Like that.”

Sandy strode out of the office, Bobby watching her lovely gait until she closed the door behind her.

“That's my honey,” Barnicle said, smiling. “Had a baby with her when you were away on your . . . furlough. A son . . .”

He rattled the small cup into the saucer and pushed a framed photo of a baby boy toward Bobby.
Jesus Christ, how could Sandy have settled for this miserable prick?
he thought.
Maybe security was the biggest aphrodisiac.

“They sure shit a lot, don't they?” Barnicle said.

Bobby laughed darkly.

“If shit was gold, only people like you would have assholes, Barnicle,” Bobby said, leaning over the desk. “Now, listen to me,
Papa
. I'm gonna find out what happened to my woman. But I'm not a cop anymore. Like you, I don't have to follow any rules. So this is your last chance. If you know what happened to Dorothea, tell me now, and if she's okay, maybe we can go our separate ways. But if you or your goons had anything to do with hurting her in any way, or get in my way again, I'll gladly die killing you. Remember that. I
am
warning you, I am willing to die, but not before I find the truth.”

Barnicle stared right back into Bobby's eyes.

“When they send you back, they should make it the fucking puzzle factory this time. Because you are a fuckin' wack,” Barnicle said, shaking his head.

Bobby took the last bullet from the .38 and dropped it into the espresso. He smacked the gun onto the desk in front of the picture of the baby boy. Barnicle jumped in his seat as Bobby turned and walked out.

Zeke, Kuzak, and Flynn blocked the front door of Gibraltar Security. Levin was trying to fish the Glock nines out of the fish tank with a wire coat hanger as the piranha bit at the wire. Bobby looked at the three goons in front of the door.
Control.
Once again he picked up Sandy's steaming cup of coffee.

“Okay, which one of you research primates wants to wear this?” Bobby asked.

The ex-cops looked uneasy, glanced at each other, and finally cleared the path for Bobby to pass, carrying the coffee cup with him out the door, sipping it, savoring Sandy's luscious lipstick.

Sandy watched him go, and he wondered what she would tell him when he got her alone.

B
obby picked up Gleason and sped the Jeep Cherokee along the Belt Parkway, around the loop of Shore Road, the most magnificent stretch of waterfront in the city. He passed the million-dollar homes of the doctors, lawyers, gangsters, and politicians of Brooklyn. He moved under the pylons of the Verrazano Bridge, breezing by the Narrows, where tugs urged tankers past Staten Island, Brooklyn, and Jersey out to deep sea. Ferries, garbage scows, barges, Coast Guard cutters, police and fire boats, luxury liners, sailboats, and other pleasure craft, all moved through the great port of New York.

Bobby hadn't slept the night before because of the jail noise, but he was feeling absolutely no fatigue. Freedom pumped in his veins like some magical elixir. He had to get settled, see his kid first, and then get quickly to the checklist of his case.

He weaved through stubborn traffic on the Gowanus Expressway and finally burrowed through the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel and jolted up the West Side Highway of Manhattan to the Seventy-ninth Street exit.

The trip took thirty-two minutes, and the dashboard clock told Bobby it was 12:05
PM
. It was going to be a very long day, and he looked forward to every minute of it.

Gleason told Bobby to park on the rotunda above the Seventy-ninth Street Boat Basin. The rotunda was a shelf of granite and concrete sitting forty feet above sea level at one of the most beautiful marinas in the water-blessed city.

Although Bobby had once been a Harbor Unit cop, a regular fixture at the marina, he'd always approached it from the river and had never before taken time to see it from this vantage.

The boat basin spread out below them for three city blocks on the banks of the Hudson River, a weather-worn but resilient network of floating walkways and 145 boat slips, serving as home to cabin cruisers, motor sailers, trawlers, houseboats, yachts, fishing skiffs, sailboats, dinghies, speedboats, Jet Skis, and schooners. There was even a Chinese junk moored. The marina resembled the mouth of a small fishing village. “There's only ninety-one year-round slips,” Gleason said. “And seventy-six of us are considered ‘live-aboards.' My father put my name on the waiting list here the day I got married. He called it divorce insurance. Half the guys here are divorced and wound up with the boat, while the wife got the house. My old man was a half-assed sailor. Me, I need instructions to run a bath and I get seasick watching a bar of Ivory float. But I got a slip and a boat.”

The boat basin was a fenced-in public community with a twenty-four-hour dockmaster on duty in a wooden security shack. But it was hardly impregnable. All the residents had keys to the iron security gate and duplicates were given to friends, who made copies for more friends who came to the endless parties in the summer months.

Many New Yorkers had passed the Seventy-ninth Street Boat Basin on the West Side Highway dozens of times without even knowing it was there. If they did notice it while speeding past, they rarely stopped to explore it from the rotunda. It remained nestled there on the banks of the Hudson like a secret little gateway to the great archipelago of New York.

“The waiting list for a slip is as long as your enemies list, but once you get a lease here, you can keep it forever,” Gleason said. “The Parks Department is the landlord. I pay three hundred and ninety-five bucks a month rent and another hundred and twenty-five for parking. That's five bills a month it costs to live here on the Yupper West Side. They lose money, but they do a pretty damned good job. A guy can live year round on a boat here and never have to pay property tax because any moveable vehicle is immune to real estate tax laws. Broads love it here. It's a home run. It's like having season tickets to the Knicks. And remember: You gotta say you're living with me because there's no subleasing allowed. Don't get me evicted.”

They parked the car in the ancient indoor parking garage, shielding their eyes as they stepped out into the bright sunshine of Riverside Park. Gleason managed to communicate to Venus that he would like her to wait on a park bench while he and Bobby went into the boat basin. “Bench,” Gleason said. “As in warrant. Hang in there, hon, you're doing great.”

Gleason unlocked the security gate, and Bobby followed him in, stopping at the security shack inside the gate, a small hut covered inside in nautical maps, with a reception desk and tiny office off to the side. Gleason introduced Bobby to Doug, the dockmaster, the city's parks administrator of the boat basin. There were worse city jobs, Bobby thought, starting with mayor. Bobby recognized Doug first.

“Doug, this is Bobby, Bobby, Doug,” Gleason said. “Bobby's gonna be staying with me here awhile, slip ninety-nine-A. Extend all courtesies and Santa will grease your chimney come Christmas.”

Doug smiled and shook Bobby's hand. He was a friendly, affable guy with a thick set of arms and a face that had been leathered by twenty-odd years of salt, sun, and sea. His job was to maintain upkeep for the permanent tenants of the boat basin, collect rents, provide minimal security, and to rent temporary space to transient boaters for about a dollar a foot for nightly dockage, one of the great seafaring bargains on the eastern seaboard.

“Anything you need,” Doug said, “just call . . .
hey!
Aren't you . . .?”

“Yeah,” Bobby said. “It's been a while.”

“You guys know each other?” Gleason asked, surprised.

Now Doug remembered Bobby from the days he worked Harbor Unit and used to moor
Harbor Charlie,
the main NYPD patrol boat, at the boat basin when the cops wanted to stretch their legs or take a hot shower.

“Not for nothing,” Doug said. “I never thought you were guilty, Bobby. You were always a gentleman. Welcome back. I hope you feel at home here.”

“I appreciate that,” Bobby said.

“Keep him low profile,” Gleason said.

“You bet,” Doug said.

Gleason led Bobby down a slick floating walkway, stepping around heavy ropes, tie-off cleats, barbecues, deck chairs, ice coolers, life preservers. They passed two women in their thirties in cutoff shorts and halter tops who were too engrossed in conversation to pay them much mind. Bobby held his face to the sun and breathed in the river breeze, listening to the honking of boats on the river and the steady whoosh of cars on the highway behind him. Finally they came to slip 99-A.

“It's a nineteen-eighty-seven Silver-some-fucking-thing-or-the-other, and it's seen better days,” Gleason said.

Bobby examined the sorrowfully neglected 1987 forty-foot Silverton 34 Express that rocked gently as the Hudson flowed past her, downtown to the sea. The name
The Fifth Amendment
was emblazoned on its dirty stern. A tattered American flag on the cabin roof snapped in the river breeze.

The creaky boat's inside wasn't as bad as the weather-beaten exterior. The galley was a neglected but serviceable stainless-steel compartment with a small refrigerator-freezer, two-burner electric/alcohol stove, Corian-covered countertops, overhead microwave, overhead cabinets, pull-out storage racks, stainless-steel sink. “They teach you how to waltz with a mop upstate?” Gleason asked.