3 Quarters (27 page)

Bobby stepped out of the Mustang in plain sight of Moira Farrell and Hanratty and browsed in a bookstore window three storefronts from The Broken Land. They didn't recognize him and paid him no mind.

Patrick had slid over to the driver's seat of the Mustang and watched Farrell's muscular male assistant walk to a white Ford Taurus, parked in a painted curb area reserved for the Brooklyn district attorney's office's vehicles. When he pulled out, Patrick followed.

Bobby tailed Moira Farrell and Hanratty up to Court Street, a busy commercial street of lawyers and their clients, lined with a Casbah of street merchants selling wallets, perfume, socks, incense, and books. Moira Farrell and Hanratty entered her office building, taking the elevator first to the thirteenth floor and then to her penthouse office.

Bobby remembered this was the address that Maggie had uncovered in her DMV search on the white Ford Taurus.

“Where's Stone for Governor,” Bobby asked the lobby attendant of the Court Street building.

“Thirteen,” the guard said.

Bobby sat on a bench in Borough Hall Park watching the front door of the office building. Seventeen minutes later he saw Hanratty leave and walk across the street to the Brooklyn Municipal Building, where the Brooklyn district attorney's office was located, where Cis Tuzio and Sol Diamond were preparing their new murder trial against him and simultaneously orchestrating the Stone for Governor Campaign.

After a half hour, Bobby's cell phone rang.

“The guy drove a white Ford Taurus directly to the police medical board in Rego Park, Queens,” Patrick said.

Bobby gave him the plate number of the Ford Taurus that had followed him from the upstate prison.

“Is it the same car?” Bobby asked.

“The very same,” Patrick said. “Who's it registered to?”

“Stone for Governor,” Bobby said.

Before Dr. Hector Perez was finished for the day, a new stack of medical disability retirement forms with the coded 91s at the upper right-hand corner were plopped on his desk by an indifferent Ms. Burns. Dr. Perez looked down at the forms in dread. At the morning meeting of the police medical board, the panel of three doctors had reviewed the three-quarters pensions that had been approved. Perez verbally gave credence to the signatures he had written on those extorted, bogus claim forms. As he did, he'd stared at Dr. Benjamin Abrams, who'd looked as cool as a lemon ice.

The story about the dead hooker had disappeared from the news already. Homicide detectives had made a cursory call to ask Deputy Inspector Hector Perez if he remembered seeing the woman at the hotel on the night of the convention. He told them he had never laid eyes on her.

But all through the meeting, Dr. Perez felt the perspiration drip from his armpits down his rib cage. He thought of poor Karen Anders and her severed throat and the horrors of what her family must be going through as these corrupt cops popped champagne corks to celebrate their lifelong, tax-free pensions, partly paid for with her blood.

And now, before he was to leave for the day, another batch of fraudulent pension forms fell upon his desk for his signature, engaging him in massive fraud to save his own ass. He looked down at the forms and saw the strong, bold signature of Dr. Benjamin Abrams. How was he able to live with himself? Perez wondered. How could Abrams adorn these forms with a once-proud signature? Dr. Perez realized that every time he signed one of these forms, his own signature became smaller and smaller, like a handwritten whisper. If this kept up, he thought, they'd need a magnifying glass to read his name.

He picked up the two top forms. Lebeche. Daniels. Caucasian, males, early thirties. But of course! Not one of the “91s” he'd signed was for a Hispanic or a black man. None of them were for women. This was a young white guy's club, he thought.

There must be plenty of blacks and Hispanics and women trying to get on three-quarters with trumped-up injuries, he thought. Like that policewoman from the Queens property office who had intentionally slammed a police car door on her trigger finger but claimed a perp did it in a struggle for her gun during an attempted arrest. She could have worked light duty until retirement. But she got greedy and tried to parlay the self-inflicted wound into a three-quarters pension. She had almost pulled it off, too. She had even gone out and bought herself a five-bedroom country house she couldn't afford in anticipation of the pension's being approved. Then she got caught on an IAB wiretap of another policewoman, who was being investigated for cocaine trafficking, bragging that she had falsified her injury. IAB had busted two dirty cops with one wiretap. She was fired, arrested, convicted, and given five years of probation on the felony fraud conviction. She also lost her pension.

But none of those minority applications, not even that greedy Latina's, had ever arrived on his desk with the all-powerful 91 code, Perez thought. If anything, with all those “91s” going through, he'd have to start rejecting some of the legitimate claims, just to balance it out. Or else the controller, city corporation counsel, and the mayor would be asking why they were handing out so many approvals. So, all over the city, there'd be cops with legitimate claims hobbling through life with no assistance.

“How's the missus?” asked Dr. Benjamin Abrams as he appeared in Dr. Hector Perez's doorway, trying to act normal. Perez looked up, pen in hand above the pension forms.

“Due any time now,” Perez said.

“Take a little free medical advice from this old sawbones,” Abrams said. “Don't do anything that could upset her. It wouldn't be fair to her or your child. Or yourself. Understand?”

Dr. Perez nodded and signed his name in the approval box on Lebeche's form. Then he did the same on Daniels's form. One at a time, he signed all the others, each signature growing smaller and smaller until he could barely recognize his own name.

G
leason said, “If you go to your buddy Roth with this story about all these people in cahoots—dirty money, pensions, and elections for sale—and he goes to press with it, you better get ready for jail food again.”

“You smell a sting operation?” Bobby asked.

“Yeah,” Gleason said. “It could be a federal one or a state attorney general sting on Barnicle and Farrell.”

Gleason snatched up the ringing phone and said, “Yeah?” Then his face grew ashen, and he covered the mouthpiece and spoke in a whisper. “Venus? You-o not-o supposed to call-o me-o here-o. Clients only-o. I told you to leave messages on the machine! Can't you understand fuckin' English? . . . Oh, you can?” He cupped the phone and whispered to Bobby, “She's a fast fuckin' learner.” Then he whispered back into the phone, “So, babe? How much-o weight-o you lose-o?”

Gleason looked across the living room of the small suite to be sure Alana wasn't coming through the door from the bedroom. Bobby shook his head, gazing around the living room. Gleason's apartment in the Chelsea Hotel was so clean and neat that Bobby found it hard to believe it was inhabited by the same slob with the office in the Empire State Building.

“I'll call you later, babe,” Gleason said, and clicked off the phone and turned to Bobby. “Where was I?” he said. “Oh, yeah, a sting. Never believe your first impression of anything.”

“I thought of that, too,” Bobby said. “Or that it could be a political dirty tricks setup of Stone. A new version of Abscam. Both are possible, Iz. But I don't think that's what this is. I think these people are all involved in extorting money from the police medical pension fund and siphoning it into the Stone for Governor Campaign.”

Gleason pulled on a crisp starched white shirt and began buttoning it.

“In exchange for what?” Gleason asked. “What's the quid pro quo?” He walked to the window, where he lit a cigarette and blew the smoke out into the wind, which swept it right back into the room.

“Judgeships, access, patronage,” Bobby said. “Power. The man is the executive in charge of the most powerful state government in the union. Major league juice.”

“Good story if you can prove it,” Gleason said, puffing frantically on his cigarette. “Can you believe this broad won't let me smoke in my own fuckin' room? I get her a new set of choppers, and all of a sudden this sweet little chick starts making rules.”

“She's smart,” Bobby said. “She subscribes to civilization. Hold on to her. But I sort of liked Venus, too. Let's backtrack to the real deal here.”

“The real deal is that if you blow a legit undercover operation, you'll be arrested for interfering with governmental procedure,” Gleason said. “I don't need the jury pool out there to read about you doing that in the
Daily News
. Forget for a moment what they're doing to the city, and focus on your case.”

Gleason took another puff of the cigarette and buttoned his cuffs. Traffic noise filtered through the open window.

“Sure, we could go and report Tuzio and Hanratty to the attorney general's office and Farrell to the bar association ethics board and Barnicle to the PI licensing bureau at the New York Department of State,” Gleason said, the cigarette bobbing in his lips. “But where's your proof? You seen guys hand other guys envelopes. How do you know they weren't birthday cards?”

Bobby heard the shower hiss stop in the bedroom, and Gleason fanned the smoke out the window.

“ ‘Cause your brother says he saw cash?” Gleason asked. “So since when is cash illegal? Did he see drugs pass hands? State secrets? You saw a third guy hand a lawyer a briefcase. The briefcase also had envelopes in it. And Snickers has peanuts. So what? The briefcase went on an elevator. So what? The elevator stopped on the same floor as Stone for Governor headquarters. So, they stopped to have a piss, all you know. This is a nice story, but it's bupkis. I don't think Roth could fly it past his copy desk, never mind us trying to fly it past a grand jury. You got Ivory Snow, ninety-nine and forty-four one hundredths percent soap suds. But no dirty laundry. Even if you had a wiretap and videotape and money passing hands, none of that would help you find out what the hell happened to Dorothea Dubrow. You're not going on trial for a goddamned pension plan. You're going on trial for murder. Find out what happened to Dorothea, an acquittal is a sure thing.”

Bobby took a deep breath, exhaled, nodded again.

“I just wanted you to know I'm on the right track,” he said. “There had to be a motive for the frame.”

“Yeah,” Gleason said. “Fuck the big picture; find the small details, the ones that concern Bobby Emmet and Dorothea.”

Bobby could hear Alana humming “YMCA” now as she moved around the bedroom. Gleason took a last desperate drag on his smoke and flicked the butt out into the breeze.

“What if that lands in a baby carriage?” Bobby said, annoyed.

“Then the parents should be locked up for neglect,” Gleason said, shrugging. “Anyone walks a baby in an open stroller in New York is guilty of child abuse. Don't blame me.”

He tried to fan the last of the smoke out the window, but it swirled in the room. He quickly unwrapped a pack of Life Savers and put half the pack into his mouth. Alana stepped into the living room with a terry-cloth robe pulled around her and a towel turban wrapped around her head.

“I smell smoke, Izzy,” she said in a singsongy whine.

“It must be from the fat fuckin' mick poet next door, babe,” Gleason said. “Or the douche-bag rasta painter downstairs.”

“You promised to watch your language around a lady,” she said.

“I think I better go,” Bobby said.

“Wait,” Gleason said as Bobby reached the door. Gleason pulled on his pants, reached into the front right-hand pocket, and produced a wad of cash. He started counting hundred-dollar bills until he reached fifty. He folded them and backhanded them to Bobby the way dope dealers passed cash. Bobby figured it was the way Gleason usually got paid. Bobby hesitated and then took the money and looked oddly at Gleason.

“What the hell is this for?”

“Herbie's brother paid me fifty grand,” Gleason said.

“For a day's work?”

“I said I'd get him off for a fifty-grand flat fee, whether it went to trial or I got it thrown out at a pretrial hearing,” Gleason said. “I did. You told me about the freeloading cop. That made my case. So that five grand is your ten percent. We made a deal; you get a dime on every dollar of every case you work on.”

Bobby felt as sleazy as Izzy as he put the money in his pocket.

“I want a ten-ninety-nine at the end of the year,” Bobby said. “I don't want to beat a murder rap and go away on an IRS beef involving you.”

“You just find out what happened to Dorothea,” Gleason said. “The best thing to do is to continue to confront Barnicle directly. Stay in his face. Make him sweat. Sweat leads to panic. Panic leads to mistakes. Mistakes lead to the truth—the truth about Dorothea.”