Read Online 3 Quarters by Denis Hamill - Free Book Online Page B

had wasted no time, didn’t even call Maggie or Patrick to say he was home. No hugs, balloons, welcome-home parties. There was work to do. If he was going to stay out of the joint, he had to go get to the bottom of who framed him. Pronto.
    He knew that Sandy Fraser, Dorothea’s girlfriend, worked here at Gibraltar.
    He needed Sandy to fill in crucial missing blanks about Dorothea’s past. He also wanted to jostle the hornet’s nest of Gibraltar Security, to make them react, make mistakes.
    Bobby knew the area well, had been to a dozen barbecues and christenings out here, knew that a lot of cops, active and retired, lived in the more than ninety-percent white Gerritsen Beach, where some would sit around gin mills with neon shamrocks in the windows, overlooking Gerritsen Canal or the creek, lamenting about the slow encroachment of “them.” “Them” used to be just the “niggers,” but today it was “alla them”—immigrants, “Pakis,” “Chinks,” “dot heads,” “Rooskies,” “every kind of spic they make.” “These piss-colored people burn canary feathers, drink blood out of eggshells, and want to send their niglets to school with my kids,” Bobby remembered one forty-year-old retired cop saying, explaining why he was hammering a FOR SALE sign into his lawn with the handle of his service revolver. “Next stop, Windy Tip.”
    Windy Tip was a private, closed co-op community on the southern tip of Brooklyn, the last one hundred percent stronghold in the city of New York, where the truly terrified xenophobes took refuge with their backs to the sea. Even a New York Jew had to have the signatures of three prominent white Christian members of the Windy Tip co-op to be allowed to buy there. And the half-dozen Jews who did live there were married to shiksas, daughters of established Christian residents. Windy Tip was pure Pat Buchanan country, a simply breathtaking peninsula of bay and oceanfront property, just a few zip codes from Gerritsen Beach.
    Bobby folded a small piece of paper and jammed it into the doorbell so that it would ring continuously. Finally the door opened to reveal Zeke and Kuzak in expensive pastel-colored suits, which probably once fit them well but now barely closed over swelling guts. Zeke pulled the paper out of the doorbell.
    Both men had the strong, bulky frames of guys who used to pump iron and then went to suet when they gave up the gym for the oat bag. At the moment they also had the squinty, bloated, unrested look of an allnighter of booze, maybe a couple of grams of coke, a tag team of high-maintenance bimbos. Guys who lived like that went down like porridge, Bobby thought.
    â€œAh, the lady-killer,” said Kuzak, the big guy, his hair so perfectly cut it looked like a toupee. “Fuck you doin’ out?”
    â€œTake me to your sleazeball,” Bobby said.
    â€œA comedian,” said Zeke, the blocky, shorter man, a strap of hair lashed across his bald dome. “Maybe you should go to open-mike night over Pip’s Comedy Club on the bay.”
    â€œIf your moms is too busy bobbing for someone’s apples, I guess your boss will do,” Bobby said. He knew that in Brooklyn, especially a time warp like Gerritsen Beach, the best way to make someone lose his cool was to rank on his mother. It was an old and crude approach, but it rarely failed. “Ma” was still a holy word here, like in old gangster movies.
    â€œSay another word about my fuckin’ mother, I’ll cut your dick off,” said Zeke.
    â€œShe that hungry?” Bobby said.
    Zeke moved for him, but Bobby used a trick he’d learned in the joint when the macho-sissies went after his behind. As Zeke reached toward him, Bobby stepped his way, bringing his work boot down on the man’s instep. Zeke howled and a series of spasms erupted in his body, sending him reeling to the side, banging