3 Quarters

by Denis Hamill

  “If I revealed that, and they found out, they might kill Donald,” Sandy said.

  He studied her, hoping she wasn’t lying about everything.

  “What else can you tell me?” Bobby asked.

  “Whenever Barnicle gets a call on the special security phone—I call it the Batphone because he has it swept twice a week for taps—from one particular person, he makes me leave the room,” Sandy said. “But I eavesdrop as best I can. Your name comes up a lot. As someone who is in the way. I heard him say he understands that they can’t wait six months or a year for a new trial and risk an acquittal. I think they have other plans. I’m not sure what or with who, or when. But I think they intend to frame you again. Soon. Today. Tomorrow. Before the election.”

  “I heard that, too,” Bobby said.

  “They also use the phrase ‘accelerated operation’ a lot these days, since you got out on bail. I think they’re trying to collect a really huge haul of cash as quick as they can. I know you know about the three-quarters scam. They know you know. So I see lots of cash. They’re accelerating that operation. And they want to frame you for something new.”

  Bobby trembled in the hot sun. The music and fun suddenly went out of the mindless day. He looked both ways on the boardwalk, searching for unfriendly faces. Maggie, he thought. I better get back to her.

  Sandy checked her watch.

  “God, it’s almost two,” Sandy said in a quiet, resigned voice. “I gotta go before himself gets home.”

  The sun shone on her face and sparkled in her dark glasses, in which Bobby could see his own reflection. The fear he saw on his own face startled him. Sandy elevated herself to her tiptoes and leaned in to kiss him good-bye. He unconsciously turned his head, and she planted it on his cheek. She looked mildly wounded.

  “In spite of all she’s been through, Dorothea is one lucky girl,” she said as little Donald smacked his lips and jabbered nonsense syllables. “I hope you find her. I hope she’s finally honest with you about who she really is. I could never really nail her down. I guess I’ve said enough. Too much for my own good. Be careful, Bobby. I better go.”

  “I better get back to Maggie,” he said.

  “I’d say that’s a very good idea, Bobby,” Sandy said, almost like a warning. “I’d get her out of town, I was you.”

  With that she spun, and Bobby watched her wheel her stroller down the ramp from the boardwalk. She looked absolutely beautiful, scared, and alone. He walked back toward the amusement park to find his daughter.

  Bobby did not see Sandy pass the white van with the dark-tinted windows, in which sat Lou Barnicle, Kuzak, and Zeke, but they had just witnessed Sandy Fraser kissing Bobby Emmet on the Coney Island boardwalk and watched her and the boy get into her car.

  “What now?” Kuzak asked as Sandy climbed behind the steering wheel.

  “We make sure nothing happens to that kid,” Barnicle said.

  After his third visit to Nathan’s Famous and his sixth Cyclone ride, Trevor Sawyer looked as if he needed a rest from his newfound childhood. He climbed into the back of his Rolls, his face draining of color. Bobby could almost see his guts boiling like the Coney Island surf, with hot dogs, raw clams, french fries, sausage and peppers, and pistachio-flavored custard. He had been the proverbial kid in a candy store, thirty years too late.

  “Give me a few minutes,” Bobby said to Trevor as he took Maggie by the hand. The rich man just waved and covered his eyes with his right arm.

  “What’s your read on Sandy, my amazing child?”

  “I think she’s a straight shooter. The reason I think she’s sincere is that she didn’t try to make me think she was. She was just normal, worrying mostly about her baby. He’s adorable.”

  “Yes, he is,” Bobby said. “Does he remind you of someone? Someone you know?”

  “He has one of those faces, all right,” Maggie said. “I can almost place it. But, anyway, back at the ranch, I don’t think that Sandy would do anything that would come back to haunt her and her kid. But that’s just my bullshit detector at work.”

  Bobby took a deep breath and watched the roller coaster dip down the steel rails.

  “She’s in some kind of trouble, isn’t she, Dad?” Maggie said.

  “Yeah,” Bobby said.

  “I could tell that, too. Is there anything you can do to help her?”

  “I hope so,” Bobby said, also not wanting to believe what Sandy had told him about his friend John Shine.

  “I don’t care if I sound like some awkward, pubescent, spoiled rich brat,” Maggie said, staring at her father with watery eyes. “I’m still worried about you, and I want an old-fashioned hug before I leave.”

  She threw herself into Bobby’s arms, and he lifted her off her feet and squeezed her tightly to him and turned her around in the Coney Island sun and whispered in her ear, “Everything will turn out okay. Promise, kiddo.”

  He placed her down, and she ran for the limousine without turning her teary face back toward him.

  40

  Bobby needed to digest what Sandy had told him about John Shine. The rugged, brilliant cop had been more than his friend. He was a mentor, like a big brother or an uncle. And now Bobby was confronted by dark, uneasy thoughts about the man who lived alone spouting Emerson in a house by the sea. As Bobby drove along the Belt Parkway, he imagined this blind doctor checking on Dorothea, stashed in his friend’s house. Could Shine be that monstrous? That diabolical?

  But this was the same John Shine who saved his life just two days ago, Bobby thought, and then told himself to think harder.

  Then Bobby completed the memory.

  Right after he had been beaten by the Barnicle crew on the beach in the rain, Bobby had got into his Jeep. John Shine had climbed in next to him. Bobby had dialed the message machine at Gleason’s office. He punched in the remote code—378, the same as the office room number. Shine could easily have watched the numbers he pushed. Bobby had then listened to Tom Larkin’s message. With his guard down, after Shine had saved his life, Bobby had even told Shine the gist of Larkin’s taped message. About some seventeen-year-old kidnapping case, a more recently missing architect, the Ukraine. Later, when he arrived at the office at the Empire State Building, someone was checking the machine with that remote code.

  Had it been Shine?

  He was inching along the Gowanus Expressway now, toward the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, oblivious to the traffic.

  Had Shine checked Bobby’s messages? Discovered where and when Tom Larkin would be meeting Bobby? And then sent someone there to kill Larkin? Before Larkin could tell Bobby what he knew?

  Then Bobby remembered the well-thumbed Complete Emerson that Shine had sent him in jail. Bobby had always been troubled by the single passage in the Emerson essay called “Friendship” that Shine had chosen to highlight with a yellow marker: “We walk alone in the world. Friends such as we desire are dreams and fables.”

  Why, out of an essay that glorified friendship as one of the great treasures of human existence, would Shine highlight such a negative passage?

  Why? he asked himself over and over as he paid the toll for the tunnel and sped toward Manhattan. He kept asking himself the same question until he arrived back at the Seventy-ninth Street Boat Basin.

  When he checked his new messages, he found one from Max Roth. He said he had some information Bobby’d asked him to get from the old clips. Bobby called Roth and they met at an old-fashioned Greek diner on Broadway.

  “The old clips are warehoused, but I managed to dig out a very yellowed second-day story from the photo files on this Kate Clementine,” Roth said. He poked at the fruit salad and gave it a one-word culinary review: “Canned.”

  He dropped his spoon, refusing to eat.

  “A kidnapping, no?”

  “Yep,” Roth said, checking his drinking glass against the ceiling light for stains. He made a face and then unwrapped a sanitary drinking straw, poked it into the can of club soda, and sipped.

&nb
sp; “It was a little like the recent Katie Beers case,” Roth said. “The little girl in the underground chamber out in Long Island. But this was different. Kate Clementine was buried in an underground bunker by an obsessed uncle for two years and came out alive. The girl’s boyfriend was the main suspect all along. But it turned out to be the uncle, who said he was only trying to preserve her virginity and her wholesomeness. She’s been in and out of mental hospitals ever since.”

  “Poor kid,” Bobby said. “But what—”

  “And buried deep in the next to last graph of the jump I come across a name that gives me brainfreeze.”

  “Who?”

  “He was still a patrolman then,” Roth said. “He wasn’t in charge of the case. But he was one of the cops who discovered the underground bunker and set this Kate Clementine free and arrested her wacky uncle.”

  “His name, Max,” Bobby said, hoping he was going to say Lou Barnicle but fearing he was not.

  “John Shine,” Roth said, staring Bobby in the eye.

  Bobby closed his eyes as the steam from his coffee rose around him. The name resounded in the air. He took a deep breath and told Roth again about how Shine had saved his life from the three-quarters crew out in Rockaway. “But, thinking back, afterwards Shine pumped me for information about what I knew. That wasn’t unusual. He was always an information freak . . . .”

  “Maybe he saved your ass in case you’d told someone else, like me,” Roth said, sipping his club soda. “So he could prepare himself. Go to Plan B.”

  Then Bobby told Roth what Sandy had said about the blind man who carried a doctor’s bag into Shine’s house every Monday and Friday.

  “Maybe the sheen is coming off your buddy Shine a little, no?” Roth asked.

  “Max,” Bobby said, “I want you to find out everything you can about Shine’s police department record.”

  “I know a guy who can expedite a Freedom of Information press request,” Roth said.

  “Also run a Lexis legal history on him from the paper’s computer,” Bobby said. “Jesus, Max, what can his motive be?”

  “It can’t be greed,” Roth said. “He already won the lottery.”

  “If it is him,” Bobby said, “it must be some kind of weird revenge. Or obsession. Some dark part of his personality I never knew.”

  “I’m glad you’re thinking sanely, here,” Roth said. “In fact, as much as I dislike the weasel, I think you better track down Sleazy Izzy and tell him everything. About Shine, the blind doctor, Sandy and her baby with the mystery father.”

  “I will,” Bobby said.

  “I better get cracking,” Roth said, getting up from the booth.

  “I’m more spooked now than I was before,” Bobby said.

  “Why?” Roth said.

  “Dead, I knew there was nothing more they could do to Dorothea,” he said softly. “Alive, they can kill her all over again.”

  Bobby had to take another look inside that house.

  He spent the afternoon shopping for the supplies he’d need. That evening he took the boat out to Windy Tip and moored it at a buoy far enough out so that he wouldn’t be noticed in the dwindling light. He used the binoculars to watch Shine leave, setting his elaborate alarm system, dressed for the dinner shift at The Winning Ticket. Shine drove off in the Mercedes.

  Bobby waited until darkness fell and then pulled on a pair of surgical gloves, fastened a small but sturdy pinch bar to his belt, shoved a small watertight flashlight into his right pants pocket and a tube of Vaseline into his left pocket, and looped a nylon scaling rope with a three-pronged grappling hook around his waist. He dove off The Fifth Amendment and swam to shore in the tame tide. He came up on the far side of Shine’s house.

  He stealthily made his way to the westernmost wall that faced the open bay and the distant lights of the Coney Island amusement rides. Bobby hurled the grappling hook up to the high roof of the house and, after the third try, managed to secure a firm bite around the base of the red-brick chimney. He scaled the face of the house, his great strength easily hoisting him to the slanted roof. He pulled the rope up behind him and scurried across the roof tiles. He found the open attic window through which the squirrel came and went without triggering the alarm.

  The attic wasn’t wired. Shine had told him he left the window open a crack to allow an even flow of air into the hot, confined space. To prevent spontaneous combustion.

  The window was even smaller than Bobby had imagined. He rubbed the Vaseline on his bulky shoulders and the frame of the attic window. Getting through the window was like deflowering a virgin, he thought. A series of patient false starts, gentle maneuvering, delicate shiftings of position, incremental penetration, being careful not to be too rough.

  Finally Bobby was safely inside. His shoulders were raw with friction burns.

  In the darkness, he heard the scurrying of the rodents. Bobby played the beam of the penlight across the plywood flooring. The attic was an innocuous disarray of old cardboard boxes, unused furniture, discarded lamps. He even saw John Shine’s old NYPD dress uniform hanging in a plastic suit bag, adorned with award ribbons for bravery above and beyond.

  Dorothea wasn’t being kept in the attic.

  Bobby found the attic trapdoor, an elaborate one with folding stairs. He grabbed the handle and twisted, but it would not move. Locked from the other side. He used the pinch bar to pop the catch. It gave, and the trapdoor ladder unfolded down to the landing of the top floor.

  Bobby descended into the eerily quiet house and began his furtive search. He made a cursory examination of all bedrooms. Empty. As was the office. Using the penlight, Bobby looked through the paperwork on Shine’s desktop. Most of it appeared to be legitimate accounting work for The Winning Ticket. He had no time to pore over documentary evidence. He was looking for Dorothea.

  Bobby made his way to the first floor and got down on his hands and knees, placing his ear to the floorboards to listen for sounds of human life. “Dorothea,” he whispered. “Dorothea, can you hear me?”

  There was only silence and the crashing of waves on the shore. Far off he could hear the raucous echoes of country music, laughter, and shouting coming from The Central Booking Saloon. He was certain no one could hear him in here, so he moved across the floor on all fours, peeling back throw rugs, searching the floorboards for trapdoors, knocking on the planks with the pinch bar, tapping on the walls, listening for hollow echoes. Nothing. The house was as solid as its owner. He stamped his feet across the floors of the living room, dining room, kitchen, hoping Dorothea might hear him and knock back.

  He carefully examined the corridor between the stairs to the second floor and the living room wall. He banged on all the tongue-and-groove work along the narrow corridor. Nothing. The empty space under the stairs was a walk-in closet. He tapped on all the plaster walls. No break in the seams, no hollow echo.

  He scanned the floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall bookcase in the living room. Wiggling the oak moldings, touching books, feeling behind them for secret levers like the ones he’d seen in old Vincent Price movies. Nothing.

  Then something odd caught his eye. On one shelf, under the alphabetized section of E, he found two shelves of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Some were leather-bound original editions. Some were hardcovers. Some paperbacks. Some in Italian, Spanish, French. He hadn’t known John Shine could speak any other languages. John Shine loved Emerson and collected his works the way others collected stamps or coins or baseball cards.

  Then Bobby noticed one particular edition of what he was certain was “Self-Reliance.” A thin cheap paperback, but Bobby removed it from the shelf because of the odd Cyrillic script on its faded spine. He took the book from the shelf with trembling fingers and opened it to the copyright page. There, in tiny print, he saw where the book had been printed. An icy shiver moved through him when he recognized the word for Ukraine. There were handwritten initials on the inside of the cover: DD. It looked like Dorothea’s handwriting.

  He though
t of murdered Tom Larkin’s muttering about something concerning the Ukraine. He held the book for a long, anguished moment, imagining a trapped and bewildered Dorothea somewhere in this house. He replaced the book carefully on the shelf.

  “Dorothea!” Bobby shouted, standing in the center of the empty, ominous house. “DOR-O-THEA!”

  There was no reply. Just squirrels scratching in the attic.

  He checked his watch: 9:10 PM. John Shine had said he never stayed in The Winning Ticket past nine, which meant he would already be on his way home. Bobby left the house as he’d entered, careful to erase all traces of his visit.

  41

  SUNDAY

  Gleason sat in the passenger seat, chewing on the inside of his face. Since Bobby had picked him up at the Chelsea Hotel a half hour earlier, Gleason had been mute, looking hungover and tired. They were heading north on the Sprain Brook Parkway in Westchester County. Gleason gave directions.

  “Where’re we going?” Bobby asked.

  “I’ll tell ya when we get there.”

  “Where’s Alana?”

  Gleason mopped his face with his open hand, muffling the answer into an unintelligible garble.

  “I said, what happened to Alana?” Bobby said, louder.

  “The ingrate bitch left me for the fucking dentist!” Gleason shouted.

  “Why?” Bobby tried to hide his smile.

  “Soon’s he took off the temporary veneers and he put on the permanents, she smiled at me like a movie star, batted her eyes, and said, ‘Fuck you, Gleason, you revolting piece of shit.’ This is the bitch who tells me to watch my fuckin’ language! Who drank my champagne, ate my meals in the best restaurants in town, shopped with my money in Blooming-fuckin’-dales! And she calls me a revolting piece of shit!”

  “But I thought you were doing a barter with the dentist on the divorce,” Bobby said.

  “I was,” Gleason said. “I used Herbie to track his wife. He did. He stomped down a motel door and took pictures of the wife with the dentist’s sister’s husband. The two in-laws banging each other like minks in a motel in Sheepshead Bay. Once the dentist got these pictures from me, he figures he doesn’t need me anymore, so he starts banging my dame.”