“John?”
“I want to make a phone call,” he said. “I have a right to make a phone call, don’t I?”
“You’re not under arrest, John,” Slaughter said, and Reade told him it was his phone, and of course he had the right to use it. But if he could answer a few questions first maybe they could get this all cleared up and then he could make all the calls he wanted.
Yeah, right. He dialed, and Nancy put him through to Roz. “I need a lawyer,” he said. “I’ve got a couple of cops here, and I think I’m a suspect in the murder of a woman I met the other night.” He looked across the desk at them. “Is that right? Am I a suspect?”
They didn’t respond, but that was as good as if they had.
He talked for a minute or two, then replaced the receiver. “No more questions,” he said. “I’m done talking until my lawyer gets here.”
“Was that your lawyer just now, John?”
He didn’t have a lawyer. The last lawyer he’d used was the moron who represented him in the divorce, and he’d since heard the guy was ill with something, and could only hope he’d died of it. He needed a criminal lawyer, and he didn’t know any, had never had need of one. And Roz wasn’t a lawyer, she was a literary agent, but she’d know what to do and whom to call.
He didn’t say any of this, however. He sat at his desk, and they continued to ask questions, but he’d answered as many questions as he was going to.
And, now that he’d stopped saying anything, one of them, Slaughter or Reade, took a card from his wallet and read him his Miranda rights. Now that he’d finally elected to remain silent, now that he’d finally called for an attorney, they told him it was his right to do so.
He had the feeling he’d already said a lot more than he should have.
four
L’Aiglon d’Or was on Fifty-fifth between Park and Madison, and had been there for decades. A classic French restaurant, it had long since ceased to be trendy, and the right side of the menu guaranteed that it would never be a bargain. The great majority of its patrons had been coming for years, cherishing the superb cuisine, the restrained yet elegant decor, and the unobtrusively impeccable service. The tables, set luxuriously far apart, were hardly ever all taken, nor were there often more than two or three of them vacant. This, in fact, was very much as the proprietor preferred it. A Belgian from Bruges, who most people assumed was French, he wanted to make a good profit, but hated to turn anyone away. “The man who cannot get a table one week,” he had said more than once, “will not come back the next week.”
In response, one customer quoted Yogi Berra — Nobody goes there anymore, it’s too crowded. The proprietor nodded in agreement. “Précisément,” he said. “If it is too crowded, no one comes.”
Francis Buckram saw he was a few minutes early and had the cab drop him at the corner. He found things to look at in a couple of Madison Avenue shop windows, and contrived to make his entrance at 8:05.
They were waiting for him at the table, three middle-aged men in dark suits and ties. Buckram, wearing a blazer and tan slacks, wondered if he should have chosen a suit himself. His clothes had nothing to apologize for, the blazer was by Turnbull & Asser, the slacks were Armani, the brown wing tips were Allen Edmonds, and he knew he wore the clothes well, but did they lack the gravitas the meeting required?
No, he decided, that was the point. The meeting was their idea, and he wasn’t coming hat in hand. Insouciance was the ticket, not gravitas.
Fancy words for a cop.
Well, he was a fancy kind of a cop, always had been. Always had the expensive clothes and the extensive vocabulary, and knew when to trot them out and when to leave them in the closet. Growing up in Park Slope, he’d been as well liked as Willy Loman ever hoped to be, and he was good enough in sports and enough of a cutup in class to mask an ambition that got him a full scholarship to Colgate. That was the next thing to Ivy League and a healthy cut above Brooklyn College, which was where most of his classmates went, if they went anywhere at all. He’d surprised them by going away to a fancy school, and he surprised his classmates at Colgate by going straight from the campus to the NYPD. He’d scored well on the LSAT and got accepted at four of the five law schools he’d applied to, told them all thanks but no thanks and went on the cops.
He stopped at the bar to say hello to Claudia Gerndorf, who’d profiled him for New York magazine shortly after he was appointed commissioner. She introduced him to her companion, a labor leader he’d met in passing, and he gave the man a nod and a smile but didn’t offer to shake hands. The guy had never been arrested, not so far as Buckram knew, but that didn’t mean his hands were clean enough to shake.
“I’ve got a column now in the New York Observer,” she said. “You know, we really ought to sit down one of these days and catch up.”
“We’ll do that,” he said. “Meanwhile, there’s a table of fellows I’ve got to sit down with right now.”
And you can put that in your column, he thought. Former Police Commissioner Francis J. Buckram — and don’t make it Francis X., assuming that every Francis gets stuck with Xavier for a middle name, and for God’s sake don’t make the last name Bushman — that Francis J. Buckram was spotted at a fashionable East Side eatery, sharing vichyssoise and frogs’ legs with three real estate heavies. He might not get anything out of the evening but heartburn and a headache, but a little ink linking his name with some serious New York money couldn’t do him any harm.
They were on their feet when he reached their table. He knew Avery Davis, who said, “Fran, it’s good to see you. You know these fellows, don’t you? Irv Boasberg and Hartley Saft.”
He shook hands all around, apologizing for keeping them waiting, and was assured they’d just gotten there themselves. They had drinks in front of them, and when the waiter came over he ordered a Bombay martini, straight up and extra dry, with a twist. Hartley Saft, who had a drinker’s complexion, took a refill on the Scotch. Davis and Boasberg said they were fine.
The conversation throughout the meal steered clear of Topic A. Ongoing terrorism got some of their attention, along with speculation about the eventual development of the Ground Zero site. Someone brought up a current scandal involving the health inspector’s office. “I remember when the papers used to print a weekly list of restaurants that got cited for violations,” Irv Boasberg said. “You’d look at the list, terrified you’d find your favorite Chinese restaurant on it, and what did it mean if you did?”
“That somebody forgot to slip the inspector a couple of bucks,” Hartley Saft said. “But it killed your appetite, didn’t it? You know what? Let’s not talk about restaurant violations.”
So they ate French food and drank California wine, and he made everybody happy by telling cop stories. That was always safe because everybody liked cop stories, and Fran Buckram had a batch of them that had stood the test of time.
Not every former police commissioner could say the same. Buckram was atypical in that he had come up through the ranks. New York’s top cop more often than not lacked any real police experience. The position was largely administrative, and the present holder of the office had previously served as fire commissioner in Detroit; he’d never been a policeman, or a fireman either, as far as that went.
It made a certain amount of sense. The president of the United States, after all, was commander in chief of the armed forces, but that didn’t mean he had to have been an army general in order to do the job.
As far as most cops were concerned, anyone fairly high up in the NYPD was light-years away from the street, and chiefly concerned with covering asses, his own and the department’s. The man at the top, the commissioner, was first and foremost a politician, then an administrator, and not a real cop at all.