3 Quarters (2 page)

Still, it had been the worst night since Bobby Emmet had arrived in Wallkill. He didn't mind the threats so much, even though he knew threats were often carried out. Solitary confinement had not prevented the determined cons in various joints from getting to Bobby during his one-hour-a-day lockout. To date he'd been stabbed twice, had his arm broken once, and received a concussion, all while he was being escorted by uniformed prison hacks to the car wash.

He could deal with the threats, the assaults, and the tedium. The part that bothered him was the banging of the steel. The endless vibrating, tooth-rattling, mind-numbing banging of the steel that reminded him all night long that he was living like one of
them
, one of the mutts, one of the skells he had spent a career taking off the street and vacuum-packing into steel drums like this.

The banging of the steel was the heartbeat of prison life. And Bobby Emmet could never get used to it like the other cons because, unlike them, he did not belong here. The mutts not only accepted the banging, they almost viewed it as a defiant celebration of the life that led them here. This was the tune to which they danced; what the Buddhists called the “om” of their universe.

Yet there was a silver lining to all this; as long as Bobby was bothered by it, he knew he was different. Not one of them. Not a skell, rapist, cold-blooded killer; not a human predator or a scavenger. Bobby had always worked, prided himself in never walking away from a job until it was finished. He was more interested in the intrinsic value of a job well done, done to the very best of his ability, than in the extrinsic monetary rewards. Or the glory of medals or pomp and circumstance. Bobby had always taken pride in protecting the law-abiding taxpayers who maintained a semblance of civilization.

But the noise also endlessly reminded Bobby of what separated him from his daughter, Maggie. And from those who had framed him for killing Dorothea Dubrow. Both of whom he would have laid down his life for. That impotence, that frustration, that bottled-up rage banged home all night long. It was the worst physical burden of doing time.

He wondered how he would tell the story to a stranger. Would he say that while in the midst of investigating a corrupt private-snoop firm owned and staffed by ex-NYPD cops, Bobby had been framed for murder? That he'd worked for the Manhattan DA's office? But it was the Brooklyn DA who'd convinced a jury that Bobby had killed Dorothea with a kitchen carving knife in his Brooklyn apartment and then in the night reduced her body to ash in the crematorium of a local cemetery. Even though he had spent every dime he could borrow to hire Moira Farrell, one of the best trial lawyers in Brooklyn, he was tried and convicted of killing Dorothea Dubrow. The whole thing, from arrest to conviction, took a mere seven months, which he spent in solitary at Riker's Island.

Since they never found a body, just a pile of ash, Bobby Emmet refused to believe that Dorothea was even dead. But he knew that while he was in jail, he would never be sure about what happened to her.

Stop,
he thought.
Stop thinking about death and Dorothea and life in here
. He watched the feelers of a large cockroach appear from a crack in the concrete near the ceiling, saw it probe the sour air of the cell. He closed his eyes and conjured Maggie . . . .

An equally torturous emotional horror was not being able to see his daughter, now fourteen years old. She'd visited Bobby twice, at different jails during the winter and spring school breaks, but he didn't want her to come anymore. Didn't like the way the other cons gaped at her now pubescent body. Didn't want her to see him here in this roach-and-vermin-infested shit hole.

The separation after the divorce from Maggie's mother three years ago had been hard enough on the kid. It had devastated all three of them. He and his former wife had once truly loved each other, but life together was never going to work. Connie Mathews Sawyer, his ex-wife, was third-generation rich. The Mathews name was a regular staple of the society pages. Big, inherited cosmetics-industry money. Bobby came from the proud, macho, self-reliant big dreams of the working class. “I'll make my own money, and I'll never take a dime from your old man,” was Bobby's constant refrain whenever Connie said she wanted to move away from Brooklyn, to a big estate near the family compound in Connecticut. Maybe Bobby made less money than his father-in-law's chauffeur, but no way was he going to live on what he considered a Mathews family freeload.

Instead, they'd bought a small house in Brooklyn and got a normal mortgage at the Dime Savings Bank like everyone else. Bobby'd told Connie that if she wanted to go to work after Maggie was born, to help pay off the mortgage, that was okay with him. Just no handouts.

They'd married young, against the wishes of Connie's father, who boycotted the wedding. The gossip pages of the daily tabloids had a field day, with headlines like “THE COP AND THE HEIRESS” or “LIPSTICK AND NIGHTSTICK.”

Bobby got a kick out of the press at first but soon found them hanging out outside his Brooklyn house, pissing off his working-class neighbors. They'd shoot pictures day and night, concoct fictitious domestic squabbles, spreading their lies in the papers and on tabloid TV. Maggie's first step and first tooth made news.

Bobby started hating reporters almost as much as criminals. The publicity made his job increasingly difficult. He had his balls broken constantly on the job, and he transferred from the Harbor Unit, to PAL, to Brooklyn South Narcotics, and finally to the Manhattan DA's detective squad.

The marriage was exciting at first, a raucous, rebellious, randy love affair, blessed with a beautiful daughter. But eventually, as they neared their thirties, the marriage proved to be a bad mix of two good people from different worlds, and the parting was a sad, sorrowful, painful truce. They had driven the marriage as far as it could go before running out of gas. All that remained was Maggie, and they weren't selfish enough to want her to carry a pair of unhappy parents on her back in order to call it a family. So they junked the marriage, promising to remember the good times, still bonded for life by their daughter, who reluctantly moved with Connie to Connecticut and then later to Trump Tower in Manhattan with her new stepfather.

Bobby and Connie would always remember that the last time they made love, on the night they received their divorce papers, it had been the best ever, each taking enough of the other to try to last a lifetime.

Then suddenly they were no longer a family, and it hurt each of them in a lasting, mournful, physically painful way. Bobby thought there should be graveyards for dearly departed marriages, where the forever-wounded could go and have a good cry every once in a while over a marker. The end of a marriage was a burial of a part of your life you would never have back again.

But it wasn't
this.

Jesus,
this
, this was worse, Bobby thought. Having steel walls between him and his kid was beyond separation. This was like a death between them, a living death that lingered and breathed and could never be mourned away.

Gray morning light now leaked into the cellblock.

“Rumor on the tom-toms upstairs is you might be getting a new trial,” said a voice through the bars. It was Morrison, a big, flabby, hound-faced guard who worked Bobby's tier.

“Fat chance,” Bobby said.

“That's why the savages are up in arms,” Morrison said. “Love to kill them a cop in the joint before you get to leave.”

“Rumors,” Bobby said, glad for the conversation, even though Morrison could often be a sardonic pain in the ass. “Just the press assholes trying to fill holes in their pages and broadcasts. Rumors . . .”

Bobby's trial, like his marriage, had been a media circus. And ever since, on a slow news day, the press boys always tried to bring the circus back to town: “Hey, what's up with John Gotti?” “What about Robert Chambers?” “Is Son of Sam still alive?” “What about the asshole who shot John Lennon?” “Hey, let's do a Bobby Emmet update.”

“Way I hear it, that Izzy Gleason fella came through security a few minutes ago to see you,” Morrison said.

“Izzy Gleason is the sleaziest shyster in New York,” Bobby said. “Why would he be here to see me?”

“If the shoe fits,” Morrison said, giggling, as he continued his patrol.

Bobby closed his eyes and in his mind's eye saw the despicable little lawyer with the red hair and blue eyes, always chewing on a candy bar or sucking on a cigarette, his body as spastic as a puppet's. Over the years, Bobby had often opposed Gleason, investigating and building cases against some of the most dangerous felons in the city, only to watch the notorious lawyer get many of them off with his brilliant, histrionic courtroom antics. Judges, cops, and DAs hated Gleason, but juries loved him because a trial with Izzy Gleason was like a day at the circus.

And now he was coming up to visit him?

Nah
, Bobby thought, hitting the floor again to do another set of push-ups.

Gleason was just getting off a one-year bar association ethics committee suspension. And Bobby
had
heard gossip that for his first time at bat in his comeback, Gleason wanted to get Bobby Emmet, his old nemesis from the Manhattan DA's cop shop, out of prison. But he had thought it was just another Gleason attempt to get his name back in the papers. Didn't think the little piglet was serious.

Goddamned press would have a field day with me and Gleason,
Bobby thought. The same shit would be dragged through the papers again for Maggie and for Connie and her new husband, who was a decent enough fella but a world-class rich bore. And it wouldn't be easy for Bobby's kid brother, Patrick, the “good” cop in the family. Patrick Pearse Emmet would have to put up with the same old hypocritical shit. The precinct locker-room taunts, the anonymous interoffice notes, the graffiti on the bathroom walls.

Just what I need
, Bobby Emmet thought, more sleazy publicity from the man whose past clients included a mass murderer on the Staten Island ferry who had been demanding Staten Island's secession—from the United States; a Westies gang crew charged with burying a city sheriff alive in a mountain of Sanitation Department rock salt after he padlocked their saloon; the owner of a pet cemetery that was really used as a burial ground for mob hits.

And these were just the ones Gleason got off.

Bobby hated everything Sleazy Izzy Gleason—or the Wizard of Iz, as the tabloids called him—stood for. But he couldn't help liking him personally. He could be a generous, comical, self-effacing little sleazoid. The man was a conscious caricature of himself. He'd learned his trade as a Bronx assistant district attorney and was an amazing trial lawyer, with a loud, abrasive, flamboyant style. He thought nothing of exploiting every hole card—race, sex, age, religion—in order to win. In at least three trials for which Bobby had done the investigation and which ended in hung juries, Bobby was certain that Gleason had been sleeping with a female juror who fell for his apparently irresistible combination of Irish blarney and Jewish moxie.

Bobby Emmet and Izzy Gleason were oil and swamp water.

At exactly 7:30
AM
, after a very long sleepless night, as he reached rep number thirty-seven in his nineteenth set of pre-breakfast push-ups, Bobby Emmet's cell door slid open and Morrison stood in the corridor, announcing, “You got a visitor, and you smell just about ripe enough for the rotten company.”

Bobby strode in front of Morrison, up the tier, getting a good “fuck you” rhythm going with his swinging arms and his powerful legs. He let each work boot heel hammer the concrete with a definitive clack as he moved, his big shoulders back, swollen chest out, head high on the thick neck, large fists opening and closing, making the veins and the muscles in his forearms pop and flex. It was a macho performance, a jailhouse show of force. He let all six foot two, 210 pounds, be known. He was his only weapon. He locked his eyes between half-open and half-closed, seeing all, revealing nothing.

“Hope you believe in mixed marriages, baby, cause I gone marry your ass, pig muthahfuckah,” said one black con, who'd reached through the bars, doing sexual pantomimes with his fingers. “You gone to be my Maytag, wash my bloomers and my socks and tell me bedtime stories, baby.”

From a cell on the other side of the tier came a long stream of spit, hitting Bobby on the neck with a hot, foul lash. Bobby ignored it, letting it drool down past his sweaty shoulder, over his bulging left pectoral.
Control,
he thought.
These people don't exist. They are
mutts. Skells.
You are Bobby Emmet, father, cop, citizen, honorable man. You have what they don't have—dignity. A dignified man has . . .
control.
Walk on,
he thought,
there will come another day.

“I gettin” out in three week, Emmet,” said a messily tattooed white con who stood in his cell, waving his half-chubbed dick through the bars. He'd spent so much time in jail he spoke with the inflections of the black ghetto. “Heah wha' I sayin', Emmet. Firs', I'm a unna pork you in the car wash. Then when I out, I'm a unna find me that little-titty daughter a yours and I'm a unna make her lick on me. School uniform. K-Y jelly . . .”

The veins popped in Bobby's temples, a blinding rage twisting in his head. He felt himself being sucked close to the edge, almost ready to go hurtling into the rage of what he called
muttdom.
Instead he swallowed, felt the other con's saliva drool down his chest as he balled and unballed his fists, didn't let one click of his boot heels vary.
Control
, Bobby Emmet thought again.
There will come another day.

Morrison the hack never said a word, just kept walking behind Bobby as he passed the last cell, where Bobby saw an enormous dark-skinned white guy with nappy hair who looked like Bluto from the Popeye cartoons. Bluto stood at the cell bars, just staring. He never said a word.
He's one to worry about,
Bobby thought, and turned right, where he faced another steel door.
Worry about the ones who say nothing.