Authors: Denis Hamill
“If she is, and you find her, all of this is over?”
“Yes. And I have some ideas about who knows where she is. I have lots to do. And that's why I can't stay long andâ”
Bobby abruptly cut himself off as he saw a white Taurus with tinted windows pull into the bus stop behind his Jeep across the avenue. He saw the driver's window open a crack and a camera lens come out and point in his and Maggie's direction as they sat next to the window.
“Son of a bitch,” Bobby said, standing to shield Maggie from the photograph. Bobby then ran out the front door of the restaurant, into fast-moving downtown traffic, toward the Taurus.
“Hey! You haven't paid your check!” shouted a harried waitress, who chased Bobby into the street.
“Dad,” Maggie shouted as she followed. “What's wrong?”
The camera lens quickly disappeared back behind the tinted window, and the white Taurus made a hasty departure from the bus stop, racing through a red light amid madly honking horns, and then weaved downtown in free-moving traffic. Bobby stood in the middle of the gutter, traffic swerving around him.
Maggie reached her father and gently led him back into the restaurant. Patrons gaped at him oddly, a few looked as if they recognized him now and whispered furtively. Bobby apologized to the waitress and then unfolded his cell phone and called Max Roth but was once again connected to his voice mail.
“Max, for Christ sakes, this is Bobby again. I need to run a plate! I'll keep trying.”
Maggie lifted her knapsack onto the table and unzipped it, took out a small Apple notebook computer, which she left unopened, and searched through a collection of computer disks in a zippered pouch.
“Gimme the plate number,” she said. “Why didn't you tell me?”
“What are you going to do with it?”
“Gimme it, Dad,” Maggie said, taking the plate number from Bobby as she walked to one of the large phone-rigged café computers and plugged a disk into the floppy-disk drive.
“You can run a license plate?” he asked.
“If it's New York, Jersey, or Connecticut I can because I have a Usenet Warez bootleg copy of the communications software for those DMVs, with the passwords,” she said. “So I can dial in and do a search. It's how girls track down cute guys who wave from passing cars.”
Bobby watched in amazement as Maggie clicked at the keyboard.
“I remember going out with you on the police boat, Dad,” she said as she waited for the computer search to appear. She looked up smiling, and in that tilt of her head Bobby could see her face was maturing into womanhood, saw her mother's disarming feline eyes, and once the little brace came off, that smile would help her win her way with most guys. She looked so much like her mother it was spooky, bringing back haunted memories he didn't want to visit.
“You took me to all those neat little islands in the harbor,” she said. “Under the Verrazano Bridge, over to Hoboken, all the way around to Liberty Island and Ellis Island, where Grandma and Grandpa came into the country . . . By the way, she called. She knows you're out. Wants you to call . . .”
“We have to call her together,” Bobby said. “Her hearing isn't so hot anymore. And when everything is straightened out for good, maybe we'll go down there together and visit her in Florida, huh?”
“I'd love that,” Maggie said. “Can I bring Theresa, from Brooklyn?”
“You're already asking for sleepovers?”
The two of them laughed, because in the old days after the divorce Maggie never once came to Bobby's apartment without having Theresa sleep over.
“I wish I would have known Grandpa before he was killed,” Maggie said, tapping a few more keys on the computer.
“He died as bravely as he lived,” Bobby said. “My mom never wanted me to join the police force after he was killed. Then after what happened to me, she took it hard, kiddo.”
“Dad,” she said. “I really like Dorothea. I think she's nice, smart, funny. And she loves you. Not that Mom puts you down. She doesn't. In fact I know Mom still has at least a physical thing for you . . .”
“Maggie, Jesus God,” Bobby said, wiping cappuccino cream from his mouth, blushing in front of his kid.
Time passes and suddenly your kid was telling
you
about the birds and the bees
, he thought.
“Just look at the way she got dressed for you today,” Maggie said. “I mean Trevor is okay, a nice enough dude, more money than God's boss, but Mom is incapable of hiding her feelings. I saw the way she looked at you in the lobby, like she wanted to jump your bones . . .”
“Maggie, this is your mom and dad you're talking about here,” Bobby said.
“I'm talking the real deal,” Maggie said. “You guys were married for twelve years, man. But Dorothea . . . I could tell her stuff. Dorothea was totally cool. If she
is
alive, Dad, please, you got to do whatever it takes to find her.”
Bobby touched her hand.
“I fully intend to,” Bobby said. “That's why we might not be able to have our weekends together right away. I might be dealing with some bad people. I just can't let you get hurt.”
“Cool, but let me help, when I can,” she said. “Computers, databases, a little hacking, classified information, legwork, phone stuff, just anything. Dad, I live for something to do. Especially for you . . . .”
“Thanks, Mag,” Bobby said. “And thanks for believing in me.”
“Know what bothers me, Dad?” Maggie said. “The blood. If it wasn't Dorothea's blood in your apartment and your car. And if it wasn't her body in the crematorium, then whose
was
it?”
“That's the question that put me in jail,” he said.
Maggie circled her finger up in the air as the computer search was completed. She read from the screen and seemed disappointed. “The white Taurus is a lease job,” Maggie said. “Leased to, get this, the Stone for Governor Campaign, Inc. The address is Fifteen Court Street, Brooklyn.”
“Jesus Christ,” Bobby whispered with quiet surprise. It wasn't a DA cop or a paparazzi or one of Lou Barnicle's Gibraltar Security goons who had followed him from prison and all over the city.
Maggie packed up her disks and her laptop and slung the backpack over her shoulders. They stepped out onto the sidewalk, and at the corner Bobby put his arm around his daughter's shoulder. He noticed more than a few people giving him disparaging looks.
“They think you're a pedophile.” Maggie laughed.
He took his arm from around his daughter's shoulder and angrily shoved his thumbs into his belt. They'd stolen those few months of their lives, he thought, when he could still walk with his kid without him looking like a pervert sugar daddy.
“Cheer up,” she said. “You're free.”
“Not yet,” he said.
“Is there anything else I can do?” Maggie asked. “Anything on your checklist I can scratch off for you?”
Bobby smiled and said, “Actually there is. Check the old newspaper clips. I need to know more about Cis Tuzio.”
“The witch . . .”
“Yeah,” Bobby said. “Where she lives. Where she shops. Where she went to law school. Where she socializes. Hobbies . . . .”
“I'll even find out where she buys those brooms she flies around on,” Maggie said with a smile.
Bobby smiled again and gave her his new cellular phone number.
“Dad, I don't think you should drop me home,” she said. “The press'll still be there, and you have better things to do.”
He kissed Maggie on the cheek and checked his new watch, which told him it was almost three o'clock.
“Go find her, Dad,” Maggie said. “Go find out what happened to Dorothea.”
“I
can't tell you how thrilled I am you're out,” John Shine said. “You said you need to ask me about something?”
“You were assigned to City Hall once,” Bobby said. “What do you know about this guy Stone? Gerald Stone, the councilman who's running for governor? Is there a file on him?”
“You don't need a file,” said John Shine. “I busted him once. Doing ninety on the Brooklyn Bridge. Half-stoned. Bimbo with him. Claimed she was a campaign worker. Now he's Mr. Family Values.”
They were in a window booth of The Winning Ticket saloon on Third Avenue in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. Shine had bought the place with the winnings from a three-million-dollar New York State Lottery jackpot. Shine watched Bobby devour a chicken breast sandwich, sliding fries into the right corner of his mouth.
Shine had ignored the first few remarks from the two half-drunk off-duty cops standing a dozen feet away at the bar of his restaurant. Bobby seemed almost oblivious when the bigger of the two drunken cops, the one wearing a Giants jacket, said, “I guess when you eat with the jigs in the joint, you rewrite the book of etiquette.”
There were only a few men on the opposite side of the horseshoe bar and a couple at a booth near the back door, out of earshot of the boisterous cops. Bobby noticed just four tables of late-lunch customers in the main dining room, which was separated from the bar by a smoked-glass divider.
“So Stone has an arrest record?” Bobby asked.
“I didn't say that,” Shine said. “The duty captain that night squashed the arrest. The captain was from Staten Island, where Stone was a councilman. It helps to have someone who can get you a zoning variance when you need one, so he let him sleep it off without logging the arrest. Pissed me off. But that's life in the PD. The bimbo spent most of the night, behind closed doors, in the captain's office. You get the picture . . . .”
“Fuck the book of etiquette,” said the short, squat cop at the bar, talking loud enough for Bobby to hear. “Look how he rewrote the book of love. In blood. With a fuckin' carving knife.”
“Then charbroiled her,” said the tall one.
“Pay no attention to them,” a furious Shine said. “â'Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members.'â”
“Emerson,” Bobby said.
Shine smiled and said, “You actually read the Emerson I sent you?”
“Well, I sure had the time,” Bobby said, washing down the food with some orange juice. “I read it at least three times. I agree with a lot of what old Ralph Waldo had to say. The stuff that's not outdated is right on. Some of it is transcendental babble. But, look, getting back to Stone . . .”
“He was a Vietnam vet, and I never met one of them who didn't inhale,” Shine said. “He liked broads back then. He's politically conservative. He's ambitious.”
“Why would he single me out?” Bobby asked.
“Big case,” Shine said. “High profile. Votes.”
“There are other big cases,” Bobby said. “Why would he have someone tailing me?”
The two cops at the bar were getting louder. “I hear his nickname upstate was Officer Bobby Bunghole,” said the tall cop and they both broke up laughing like a pair of cartoon magpies. Shine looked at Bobby across the butcher-block table and said, “You don't have to listen to this garbage in my place. I can still personally eighty-six two Cro-Magnons like them, bad back or not.”
Bobby stopped Shine when he started to get up to deal with the drunken cops.
“I'm used to it, John,” Bobby said. “And believe me, I've heard worse. Think what the church said about Emerson after his speech about every man's individual divinity at Harvard. He wasn't invited back for years.”
Shine laughed and settled back in his seat, his face a twisted grimace from the four herniated back disks he'd suffered several years before, wrestling on a rooftop with a crack addict.
It didn't seem to bother him that the perp later walked and made half a million dollars in a title fight. Or that Shine had been in a back brace ever since. He'd done what he was paid to do, and the injury was part of the job.
Bobby had admired Shine, twelve years his senior, since the days he'd taught Bobby the ropes. Taught him how to win friends in the precinct streets by walking a beat with confidence rather than a swagger. How to finesse brass with a genuine inquiry about the welfare of his wife and kids. How to get a confession from a perp with a hero sandwich and a pack of smokes faster than a beating. How to maintain your dignity among the lying, cheating, corrupt cops by remembering you didn't take this job to become rich or to maim people.
“I've worked almost every detail on the job,” Shine had said one day long ago when Bobby was a rookie, as they drove in a sector car through the violent and racially strained streets of the 71st Precinct in Crown Heights. It was a lecture on policing Bobby would never forget. About how Shine had worked everywhere from Harbor to Aviation to Vice, the U.N., Narcotics, Bunco, Organized Crime. “I pulled duty at City Hall under Beame and Koch and Dinkins, worked presidential motorcades, walked a beat, did community relations,” Shine had said. “I learned in one of my first details, a post outside the United Nations, that you couldn't hit anyone without the possibility of causing an international incident. Treat everyone like they were a diplomat and you wouldn't get in trouble. From guarding mayors and presidents, you learn that the citizen should have just as much protection, because these guys work for the citizens. And as Emerson said, âPay every debt as if God wrote the bill.'â”
Shine was a tall, elegant-looking man with the long, strong tapered body of a swimmer and the clear-thinking, focused, predatory mind of a hunter. He had wrinkles around his eyes from many years of sun, sea, and laughing. But in the two years Bobby had been away, pain had bitten even deeper lines in his face.
The NYPD brass hated him because he was a maverick, and women loved him for the same reason. But John Shine was rarely with the same woman twice. Ever since the death of his wife and kid early in his police career, whenever Bobby or anyone else asked him about remarrying, John Shine's response was always the same: “I've already had the one great love of my life.”