3 Quarters (21 page)

“Okay, Charlie, I gotta get to work,” Patrick Pearse Emmet said. “But you need Number One Brother, you can beep me, or leave a short message. They relay it to me, and I'm there like the wind. Call yourself Charlie, for Charlie Chan, on any messages. I'll use the name Sonny, for Number One Son. We don't know who'll be listening or intercepting.”

“Okay,” Bobby said, impressed with Patrick's savvy.

“One more thing,” Patrick said as he rose to leave. “I'm not letting you go back to jail.”

His kid brother was no kid anymore.

That night, Herbie snored like a buffalo with a deviated septum. Bobby let him sleep in the big bed in the cabin, while he camped on the deck of the boat, in a large rubber dinghy, pulling a dark comforter over himself and staring up at the stars for the first time in a long while. The immensity of the night sky made his own problems seem smaller. He firmly believed that each individual, no matter what galaxy, what life-form, was responsible for its own destiny, its own private universe. He wasn't as swayed as John Shine was by Emerson's theories of the Oversoul and individual divinity. But he did believe each man was responsible for his own words and deeds.

After a few minutes, he drifted into deep, bottomless sleep.

Then somewhere in the black hole of the night, Bobby heard a tinkle of steel and feet squeaking on the polished deck.

Bobby's heart beat quickly as he lifted his head up slightly to see a hooded figure slinking across the deck. Then the flash of a straight razor zipping open and the glint of the summer moon reflecting in its blade. He saw the figure hurry like an apparition toward the cabin from which came Herbie's snoring.

“HERBIE! YOU JEW BASTARD!” Bobby shouted as loud as he could, hoping to get the reaction that would save Herbie's life.

Herbie came to life like a rocket booster, fire and fury erupting, arms and legs exploding in a swinging, kicking fit. “Motheeeeerfuuuuuucker!” Herbie shouted, grabbing the attacker by the wrist and bending the arm sideways until cartilage popped and the razor fell to the floor. Clutching the attacker by the back of the hood, he smashed his right fist into the face like someone pounding a catcher's mitt.

Now Bobby caught a glimpse of a second hooded attacker in time to partly deflect a swinging oar. Bobby bent and crunched a left hook into the attacker's rib cage and heard him groan so loudly it didn't sound quite human. The guy collapsed to his knees, and Bobby bent to lift him to his feet and hit him Again. But as he did, Herbie came charging, holding the first attacker like a battering ram, heading right for the door. Bobby jumped out of the way, allowing one goon to escape.

“Hold on to that fuck!” Bobby shouted. But Herbie was driven now by white-hot rage as he lifted the first attacker high above his head like a sack of coffee. He whirled in a demented circle while the second attacker abandoned his buddy and raced down the gangplank and dove into the water.

“Hold on to him, Herbie!”

But instead he flung the hooded man a good seven feet from the boat.

“Shit,” Bobby said, turning to the opposite direction in time to see the other attacker scaling the ten-foot fence. He looked back out into the swift moonlit river, but there was no sign of the first thug.

“They found me,” Herbie said. “Nowhere is safe from the wops and cops.”

“They were after me,” Bobby said.

“Me,
” Herbie insisted.

Bobby's father had a saying, “Sometimes, to argue with them is to educate them.” Bobby knew the hit was intended for him. But if Herbie believed he was the target, it would keep him as alert as a human rottweiler.

“Maybe you're right, Herbie. I better find you a new place to stay come morning.”

But Bobby was feeling exhilarated; he was now controlling the situation. He had sent a shiver through the nervous ranks of his enemies.
They have come looking for you,
he thought.
You have smoked them out. They are certain to make mistakes. Control the situation. Force them to make mistakes. Make them lead you to Dorothea.

A
s he drove crosstown, the clock on the Jeep dashboard flashed 9:45
AM
. Bobby checked in with Maggie on the cell phone, but Connie answered, “You get laid yet?”

“Mom, you're on my line,” came Maggie's voice.

“Oh, Jesus,” said Connie, clearly embarrassed.

“Way to go, Con,” Bobby said. He heard Connie hang up and Maggie laughing.

“You didn't hear that,” Bobby said, and laughed as he drove from the Seventy-ninth Street Boat Basin through the empty streets of Manhattan. Herbie Rabinowitz was on the floor in the back of the Jeep.

“Hi, Dad,” Maggie said. “I miss you.”

“Same here,” Bobby said, and he gave his daughter a vague update, telling her he'd learned some encouraging news about Dorothea that made him believe she was alive.

“I'm looking forward to our trip to Coney Island,” she said.

“Maybe next weekend,” Bobby said as he approached the underground garage of the Empire State Building, checking his rearview mirror to be sure no one was tailing him. The street behind him was Sunday-morning empty. “This is going to cut off in a minute because I'm going underground. I just wanted to tell you I love you and I was thinking about you.”

“Real quick, Dad,” Maggie said. “I was going through the press-clips file I have on your case last night, like you asked. There was a story in the
New York Times
back at the time of the trial, about that awful woman named Cis Tuzio? Like a biography . . .”

“ ‘Woman in the News'?” Bobby said, vaguely remembering reading it.

“Yeah,” Maggie said. “In the middle of the story it says that she graduated from Brooklyn Law School in 1982.”

“Yeah?” Bobby said. “And . . .”

“Well, then I read another story in
Brooklyn Bridge
magazine about your old lawyer, Moira Farrell,” Maggie said.

“Yeah,” Bobby said.

“She graduated from the same school, the same year,” Maggie said.

“You sure? I never made that connection.”

“Coincidence, huh?”

Bobby was impressed that his kid had put this together.

“Maybe not,” Bobby said. “Maybe they knew each other . . . .”

“Cis Tuzio was born and raised in Scranton, Pennsylvania,” Maggie said. “It doesn't say where Moira Farrell was born.”

“Try to get a yearbook from the school,” Bobby said.

“I already E-mailed the school with Mom's FedEx number asking them to send it ASAP,” Maggie said. “It costs twenty dollars for a back issue.”

The phone began scratching madly as the Jeep entered the underground garage. “This is breaking up, gotta go, Mag. I love ya.”

“Love ya, too, Dad.”

“No self-respecting hit man would be caught dead looking for you in Gleason's office,” Bobby assured Herbie. The big man walked directly to the TV, turned it on, took a beer from the fridge, and plopped into the recliner. A Stone for Governor Campaign commercial came on on New York 1.

“You got a shower,” Bobby said. “You can sleep in the recliner; just keep the door locked and the snoring down to a lion's roar, and you'll be okay till Monday.”

“Family values are the answer to a whole host of our society's ills,” said Stone in the commercial, addressing a group of senior citizens. “If we return to the values that your generation believed in, we will see a reduction in crime, drug addiction, teen pregnancy, soaring high school dropout rates, welfare families, and therefore taxes. We won't have to cut Medicaid or Social Security if a return to family values takes care of most of the problems of our youth.” There was wild applause from the seniors on the soundtrack and then the deep resounding voice-over of a narrator: “Join the family; join Stone for Governor.”

“You see,” Herbie said. “Politics is just organized crime with campaign buttons.”

There were two calls on the answering machine. The first one was from Moira Farrell, asking Gleason to congratulate Bobby on his release. “Bobby, if you hear this, don't be a stranger, darling,” Moira Farrell said in her sexy, purring voice. “Drop up to the office sometime for a drink. I'd like to personally welcome you home. Bye for now. You know the number.”

Eventually he would take her up on the invitation.

The second message was from Tom Larkin, asking Bobby to call, which he did pronto.

“I don't like talking on a PD phone,” Larkin said after they exchanged hellos. “But I wanted to tell you I'm looking into an old kidnapping case that I think could be related to your girl Dorothea's disappearance. It happened too long ago for it to be on computer, so I'll have to go to the main file room, search the archives. Could take a while. Be patient.”

“I appreciate it, Tom,” Bobby said. Since Larkin had steered him there, Bobby told him about Carlos and the pacemaker in the crematorium.

“Carlos told me about the teeth but not the pacemaker,” Larkin said.

“He didn't think it was significant,” Bobby said. “It was an afterthought.”

“Jesus,” Larkin said in a hushed whisper. “This is getting good, juicy. I might be able to answer some questions with that piece of information. I gotta go. One more thing. I know I asked you this a couple of times. But you're positive it was the Ukraine Dorothea said she was from?”

“Certain,” Bobby said.

“Not Romania, Georgia, Bulgaria, Russia, or . . .?”

“Dorothea Dubrow said she was from the Ukraine, Tom,” Bobby said, a tinge of annoyance in his voice. “Tell me why that's so important?”

“God bless,” Larkin said and hung up abruptly. The old cop came from a time when people actually wished God's good graces on one another. Bobby felt bad for getting annoyed with him.

Bobby shook his head again and then left Herbie in the office with a tub of the chicken soup he'd made the day before. “I'll be back for you in the morning,” Bobby said. “Don't you leave here. Don't answer phones. You have food, sodas, whatever you need. Just lie low.”

“Enjoy your day,” Herbie said. “Thank you for all your kindness. Shalom.”

“Shalom,” Bobby said and double-locked the door behind him.

A
n hour later, Bobby stood on the fly deck of
The Fifth Amendment,
put the key in the ignition, pushed in the buttons of the two parallel start switches, which brought the twin diesel engines to life. Because they hadn't been used in so long, he let them warm up for a good fifteen minutes, while he watched the gulls wheel and surveyed the quiet boat basin. As he grabbed the dual-lever engine and throttle controls, he saw three women wearing large sunglasses and minuscule string bikinis emerge from inside a Chinese junk moored in the neighboring slip about twenty feet from
The Fifth Amendment.
They each sat dramatically on deck chairs draped with thick towels, as if they were auditioning for a part in a movie.

Gleason had told Bobby that a junk-bond dealer with a sense of humor had bought that boat at the height of the greedy eighties and named it
Armage.
The women were young, gym-muscled, parlor-tanned, and blond-dyed. They looked over at a bare-chested Bobby in his cutoff jeans, whispered among themselves as he unhooked the stern line from the dock cleat and then untied the bow line. They waved to him and smiled, and three sets of white teeth beamed against their chestnut tans. Bobby smiled and waved back. His libido was alive and well. The junk-bond dealer, mid-fifties, nut brown, good shape, the hair on his chest a whiter gray than the silver mane on his head, walked up from below and handed out flutes of champagne. He winked at Bobby and shrugged. Bobby nodded.

“Drop in some time when you're feeling bored,” said the man.

“Anytime,” said the woman wearing the white bikini that didn't consist of enough fabric to wipe her full, pouted lips.