by Denis Hamill
“Somehow this all seems to fit you like a glove,” Bobby said.
“At least I got another client out of it,” Gleason said.
“Who?”
“The dentist’s sister. I’m using the same photos in her divorce from her husband, who was humpin’ the dentist’s wife. But somehow in the middle of all this, I got fucked in the heinie, too.”
“So where the hell are we going now?” Bobby asked, trying to find a destination amid the murk.
“North,” Gleason said. “Drive north. And tell me alls about John up-fuckin’-standin’ Shine and this here other bimbsky, what’s-her-face, Sandy. And Kate Clementine, who I remember because the case came up as a precedent in an insanity defense I used once.”
Bobby gave him the fill on Sandy, John Shine and the blind man, Barnicle and the mystery kid. And reluctantly told him about breaking into John Shine’s house.
“You’re an asshole, know that?” Gleason said. “First of all, you got caught doing a B and E, your bail is revoked. But second, if Dorothea is in there, this crazy fuck could have the place booby-trapped. If you found her, it could have killed you both!”
“It was a chance I had to take,” he said.
“Well, I checked your case file,” Gleason said. “Cis Tuzio never logged the teeth from the crematorium. So, I’ll tell ya what I’m gonna do. As much as I hate that bastard Roth, I want you to let him go to print in two days, saying that I’m gonna make a preemptive motion to quash in advance all further proceedings in the matter of the State of New York versus Robert Emmet on the grounds of suppression of evidence, namely those teeth, lab reports, and witnesses William Franz and Carlos Orosco, on the part of the prosecution in the previous trial. Evidence which would have exonerated you. I am going to charge that Moira Farrell, Tuzio’s childhood friend, college roommate, former co-clerk for the presiding judge, Mark White, acted in concert in a conspiracy against you for the murder of Dorothea Dubrow, who we don’t even think is dead! We are going to take depositions from this Carlos Orosco and this here Franz guy about physical evidence they gave to Hanratty and Tuzio at the Brooklyn district attorney’s office that was never introduced at trial. We’ll leak it all to Roth first. Then I am going to hold a lalapalooza of a press conference in front of the Brooklyn DA’s office on Primary Day, demanding that the state attorney general investigate all these allegations. You are going to walk, and I am going to run, all the way to the fucking bank!”
Bobby didn’t care what Gleason’s motives were. He liked what he was hearing.
“You want Roth to go with all of it?” Bobby asked.
“The whole shootin’ match,” Gleason said, pointing to the exit that was coming up. “Page A-freakin’-one! The wood! We’re gonna demand that criminal charges be brought against all of them. Lock ’em up and put ’em in your old cell! The Pulitzer!” He glared at a road sign. “Get off here, make a left at the first light after the traffic circle, and go about a mile and a half.”
Bobby followed the instructions as Gleason nervously drummed his fingers on the dashboard.
“That story will cause a political earthquake from Albany to Staten Island,” Gleason said, this time pointing to a pair of white stone columns supporting a pair of wide white gates. A raised wood sign on one column read HUDSON HEALTH MANOR. “In there.”
Bobby followed a winding gravel path up to a magnificent Gothic house that sat splendidly on a large knoll, shaded by a weeping willow. “Nutritionist who owns the joint is in deep ca-ca with the IRS,” Gleason said. “It’s a strictly cash operation. The Feds planted some two-ton agents in here who paid cash that was never declared on the owner’s taxes. Me and you, we’re gonna keep him out of Leavenworth.”
“Another one of your amazing barter deals?” Bobby growled.
“He’s already come through with his part of the bargain,” Gleason said. “Good thing, too, because I gotta start getting the brief for your motion typed tonight.”
“We’re coming all the way up here to get a typist?”
Bobby pulled to a stop in front of the house. Standing on the steps was a beautiful Latina vacuum-packed into a size seven red minidress. She wore red high heels and stylish Guess sunglasses, and she beamed when she saw the Jeep pull up. Behind her was a collection of very large, overweight women.
“Izzy, that’s not the adorable Venus, is it?” Bobby asked.
“Yeah, but look at that herd of bison behind her,” Gleason said. “My Venus looks like their lunch.”
Gleason ejected himself from the front seat in one frantic motion, and Venus ran into his arms. The compact lawyer swept the now svelte Venus off her feet and spun her around as she kissed his face, leaving lipstick imprints all over his cheeks. Gleason and Venus kissed passionately in front of the crowd of heavyset women, who broke into applause.
“Bobby, you remember Venus, don’t ya?” Gleason said as Bobby looked at a portion of the woman he had met a little over a week before.
“Hello, Venus,” Bobby said.
“Pleased to seeing you again, Mr. Bobby,” she said. “I am losing the weight and listening to the tapes of the English. I never feel the better in your life.”
“Take us home, Jeeves,” Gleason said, climbing into the back with Venus, mauling her like a teenager at a drive-in.
42
Gleason again warned Bobby not to jump the gun with John Shine. Everything Sandy had told Bobby about the blind doctor and John Shine could be lies, concocted by Lou Barnicle to throw him off his scent. Gleason told him to proceed with caution or wind up with his bail revoked.
That afternoon, Gleason took depositions from Carlos Orosco and William Franz. Venus typed the motion Gleason would make to the court. Max Roth awaited the reply from his source inside One Police Plaza to his Freedom of Information request to the NYPD on John Shine. As he awaited the file, Roth prepared his exclusive story about the Gleason motion, which would run on Tuesday, Primary Day.
At the same time, Bobby and Patrick used two rented cars to tail two separate teams of Gibraltar Security workers to the cop bars in all five boroughs. Although Tuesday was their usual pickup day, the Gibraltar teams—Zeke and Kuzak in one car, Flynn and Levin in the other—picked up Sunday envelopes from off-duty cops, who were actually lining up as if this were a going-out-of-business fire sale. Patrick and Bobby used camcorders to film the collections.
The Emmet brothers kept in contact with cell phones, using personal coded shorthand, referring to each other as “Charlie” and “Sonny.” By late afternoon, all the envelopes wound up back in Gibraltar Security.
On a few occasions during the long day of surveillance, Bobby felt certain he was also being tailed. He made the routine elusive maneuvers, four rights to spot a tail, driving a full 360 around a traffic circle, making U-turns in cul-de-sacs, checking for more tracking bugs on his Jeep. He always came up blank. But he still had the feeling they were being watched. If someone was following him, the tail was very, very good. Certainly no one he’d met in the three-quarters crew was capable of pulling it off. He chalked up the feeling to paranoia.
A few minutes before four o’clock the two brothers sat parked across the street from Gibraltar Security in Bobby’s rented Caprice. They watched the Gibraltar teams bringing in the envelopes.
“Sandy is right,” Bobby told Patrick. “They are certainly accelerating the operation. Millions in a single day.”
“Why the big push?” Patrick asked.
“The primary is Tuesday,” Bobby said. “A media blitz. And for a war chest for the general election. I dunno . . . .”
“You think it’s also because they know you’re onto their game? That you’ll expose it all to Max Roth in the Daily News or from the witness stand? To get as much as they can while the getting is good?”
“Maybe,” Bobby said. “But there’s something even more desperate going on.”
“And that has to do with the blind doctor, doesn’t it?” Patrick asked.
“Yeah,” Bo
bby said. “If Sandy is right, the doctor arrives tomorrow at noon.”
43
Minutes before seven PM Bobby met Max Roth in the small park across the street from the United Nations.
Roth had a ream of papers in his hand, and he insisted on walking as he told Bobby what he had learned from the Freedom of Information request to the NYPD on John Shine and from a Lexis legal-history computer search on him.
“First of all,” Roth said as they passed an old lady feeding pigeons and a small group of protesters across the street chanted about China’s human rights abuses in Tibet, “Shine was never married.”
“What about the wife and kid he always talks about?” Bobby asked. “The ones he said drowned in a boating accident.”
“I thought you said they disappeared,” Roth said.
“Drowned, disappeared, whatever.”
“You of all people should know the difference,” Roth said. “But more about that in a minute. Let’s talk about the year 1991: the year John Shine first applied for a three-quarters pension . . . .”
Bobby stopped in mid-stride, in front of two homeless men who were fighting over the last sip of a forty-ounce bottle of Olde English malt liquor.
“Shine told me he never applied for a three-quarters pension,” Bobby said.
“Bullshit,” Max Roth said, and continued walking, slapping the papers against his open palm. “He applied three times in the same year. Each time he was turned down. Shine claimed he injured his back wrestling with a crazed crack dealer.”
“He told me about that,” Bobby said. “That’s how he ruined the disks in his back. Said he never put in a claim because that was for crippled heroes who couldn’t work.”
“Well, he put in his three-quarters papers, and an internal investigation revealed that he messed up his back on a ski trip up to Hunter Mountain,” Roth said. “In his Internal Affairs interview, Shine claimed he was sandbagged by a certain captain he didn’t get along with.”
“His name wasn’t Barnicle, was it?”
“The one and only,” Roth said.
“Who were the doctors who disapproved him?”
“One was named Dr. Frederick Jones,” Roth said.
“No data,” Bobby said, shrugging, tapping his right temple.
“He died in a car wreck a couple of months ago,” Roth said. “I vaguely remember it making a blip on the wires. But the second doctor who turned John Shine down was one Dr. Benjamin Abrams.”
“Okay,” Bobby said, recognizing the name from the printout Maggie had made for him on her laptop in Central Park. He looked over at the East River, busy with afternoon boats.
“Dr. Jones was replaced by a guy named Dr. Hector Perez,” Roth said.
Bobby also recognized this name from the printout.
“It should be no surprise that John Shine is never with the same woman more than once,” Roth said.
“He claims it’s because he can never replace the love of his life,” Bobby said.
“That might be true,” Roth said as they walked toward the glittering glass UN building. “But whether he hurt himself in a ski lodge or in a fight with a crack head, according to his file, John Shine ruined four disks in his back, which also left him sexually impotent. Shine produced three affidavits from different doctors to verify this. Even the city’s doctors agreed that part was true. They just said the injury happened off duty, so they turned him down for three-quarters three times.”
“The irony here is that he probably did get hurt on the job,” Bobby said. “And Barnicle sandbagged him. So what we have here is a good cop who gets denied a legit claim and to get even he decides to concoct one of the biggest pension scams in city history.”
“Think of the dramatic dynamics here,” Roth said with a whoop of a laugh. “A good cop is hurt on the job busting a mutt, left impotent, then turned down for a legitimate medical pension, and to get even he’s fucking the whole department for fucking him.”
Bobby stopped, looked at Roth, and said, “John could think like that. He is grandiose.”
“Plus, he’s using Barnicle, who sandbagged him, as his bagman,” Roth said with a measure of dark admiration. “This guy big on poetry? Because there is some badassed poetic justice in his madness.”
“He loves Emerson,” he said.
“Well, that explains it,” Roth said, rattling the printed pages. “If all this is even half right, he is definitely one sick individual.”
“You said there was a woman in his past,” Bobby said.
Roth pointed to an NYPD kiosk box outside the UN, where a uniformed cop stood on duty, a young sentry assigned to look out for crazies who might take potshots at world leaders and diplomats. Then Roth leafed through the paperwork in his hands.
“According to his file,” Roth said, “Shine had that duty for a couple of years early in his career.”
“Yeah,” Bobby said. “He’s mentioned it in passing a few times. No secret there.”
“What he probably didn’t mention was that while assigned here, he had a steamy affair with a diplomat’s wife,” Roth said.
“It’s been known to happen,” Bobby said. “I met Connie while assigned to protect her. Patty Hearst married the cop who was assigned to bodyguard her. They say Princess Di even had a fling with her bodyguard. So . . .”
“So, in Shine’s case, it caused a mini diplomatic shebang, and FBI and CIA got involved,” Roth said. “The diplomat, whose name was Slomowicz, was from the Ukraine . . . .”
Bobby stopped and looked at his friend and swallowed hard.
“Where Dorothea was from,” Bobby whispered. “Tom Larkin kept asking me if I was certain she was from the Ukraine . . . .”
“Silly accusations of espionage were exchanged,” Roth said. “This was in the seventies when the Iron Curtain was still rust free. But according to this report, which has lots of blacked-out National Security sections, it looks like it was just sex. The diplomat’s wife, who was a brilliant linguist with great breeding, claimed she was tired of her husband being a New York nightlife whore-master. The diplomat was apparently out banging everything that moved, and Shine, a poor bored, single young cop, wound up laying a little log on the jilted bride. Probably just a vengeance fuck on the wife’s part. Most of the record is sealed because of National Security classification. But it couldn’t have been too politically serious, because all Shine lost was a month’s pay and he was transferred—with a solemn promise never to attempt any further contact with the woman or he would be fired from NYPD and arrested on federal espionage charges. The diplomat and his wife were recalled back home. In her case, probably to a fucking salt mine. More likely house arrest.”
“Shine never mentioned a word about any of that,” Bobby said. “And I worked with him for four years.”
“I’m not surprised,” Roth said. “But that’s as close as his file comes to John Shine ever having a woman or any other kind of significant other in his life. He never claimed a wife or kid on his medical insurance, income taxes, or anything else. And in his Lexis file, which is his legal history done by Social Security number and date of birth, there’s no record of a marriage. Although it does say that he employed an attorney to get him a visa to visit the Ukraine after the Iron Curtain fell in eighty-nine. He used the same lawyer when he won the lottery, to help him get his liquor license, set up his corporation, close on the Bay Ridge saloon and the Windy Tip beach house. The lawyer was, I’m sure you’d also like to know, none other than Moira Farrell.”
“Jesus, the world shrinks by the sick second,” Bobby said.
“Now, I remember clear as a bell, because I wrote about this, that Moira Farrell also defended a crew of Bensonhurst wise guys who laundered money by buying lottery tickets from actual winners,” Roth said. “A legit guy wins, doesn’t want to pay all the taxes, or let his ex-wife find out. So he sells the ticket to a mob guy for seventy-five percent of face value, in cash. This way he doesn’t have to pay forty percent in income taxes. He’s up fifte
en percent and remains anonymous. Bill collectors, the IRS, or his ex-wife never learn about him winning. No record of it. The wise guy, on the other hand, cashes it at the official lottery office and makes some of his dirty drug or gambling money clean and legal. Capisce?”
“You think Shine did that to launder some of the dirty three-quarters pension money?” Bobby asked.
“Yes,” Roth said. “With Moira Farrell’s client’s help. Shine buys a legit winning lottery ticket with the dirty three-quarters cash, sets himself up legitimately with a saloon, beach house, Mercedes. These people are better connected than Ma Bell.”
They walked across First Avenue and up Forty-first Street, where Roth had his car parked in the press parking zone alongside the old Daily News building.
“What else did you learn about this Kate Clementine case?” Bobby asked.
“I have a call in to the architect who designed that house of horror,” he said. “I want to see if she’s designed anything else like it.”
“I have to update Gleason,” Bobby said, “and at least one cop I know who I can trust.”
“Don’t tell me it’s that Forrest Morgan asshole.”
“He’s not a big fan of yours either,” Bobby said.
“I don’t like any of your friends,” Roth said. “They all have a habit of coming up dirty.”
“Dirt is your life,” Bobby said.
“This is true,” Roth said. “Anything else?”
“Do you have a connection at the State Department?” Bobby asked.
“Yeah,” Roth said. “Through our Washington bureau. Why?”
“At my trial they said they had no record of a Dorothea Dubrow entering the country,” Bobby said. “Let’s see if she entered under another name.”
44
MONDAY