“I tried to call you,” she said.
He came back to her. “Yeah, well, I’d gone full immersion.”
“What does that mean?”
“Nik, don’t get me wrong, I love my ride-alongs with you, but at a certain point, I have to break away, throw out the orange cone, and be the journalist I am.” She caught her hand gripping into his knee and brought it back to rest on her lap. He didn’t seem to notice. “I am officially on assignment with this story, you know. That’s a core deal—home plate for me—and I have to protect it. When I’m rolling with you, I benefit, for sure. I get a ton of insights and observations. But it’s too easy to lose my objectivity. If I lose that, I’m not a journalist anymore. I need to keep my independent eye.”
What was going on here? she wondered. Rook spoke so calmly and clearly about this, but the effect of what he was saying—about independence and breaking away—planted a kernel of anxiety deep inside her that took root fast and grew with every sentence he spoke. More comfortable (or, at least, safer) with facts, Nikki shifted the direction this had taken. “All right. Writers’ solitude. I’ve seen you work, I get that. But what could you possibly conjure up that makes you think I don’t have a case?”
“Just to mention, when you say ‘conjure,’ you make me sound, I don’t know, like some conspiracy whack job.”
She was trying to keep this from descending into an argument, but that one deserved a pushback. “Come on, Rook, do you need me to make a list of all the wild speculations you’ve spouted?”
“Only to get outside the proverbial box. To stimulate you to new thinking. It’s not like I went all Area Fifty-one.”
“The other day at the planetarium you suggested the unknown body fell from outer space. The next day you were pitching voodoo.”
“Well, let’s not get anecdotal. This is different. I have some solid, rather eye-opening facts, if you’ll hear them.”
“Of course I will. Glad to.” No she wasn’t. She wanted to run away. To anywhere but this moment.
He fished a notebook out of his sport coat. She couldn’t help notice he’d switched from his usual black Moleskine to a bright orange Rhodia from France. One more différance to absorb. She made an irrational decision to pitch the Clairefontaine pad he gave her. “Let’s start at the slaughterhouse,” he said. “People like Fabian Beauvais don’t just show up out of the blue to choke chickens.”
“Nice,” she said. “No, I’m sure there’s word of mouth in his community.”
“Agreed. But. There are also referrals. What’s one thing every immigrant needs, especially if he’s illegal? Someone to get him through the maze. Red tape, housing, jobs. And discreetly. Under the radar.” He opened the notebook to one of the early pages. “The slang is Gateway Lawyer. Now these are not your Park Avenue barristers. They’re not even up there with the Accidentes personal injury guys you see on bus ads. These are bottom-feeders, for sure, but they serve a role helping the margin class.”
Outside, the urgency of reporters vying to get called on caught her eye through the window and told her the press conference was winding down. “Is this going to be a civics lesson?”
“Getting there. The whole coincidence of the slaughterhouse manager pointing us to the Hamptons never went down easy for me.”
“Why not? It’s what happened.”
Rook continued without acknowledgment. “So I did some research. Our friend Jerry, the GM of the chicken plant, has a job-referral arrangement, which sounds suspiciously like a kickback deal, with a Gateway Lawyer by the name of Reese Cristóbal. Remember Fabian Beauvais had a rap sheet for a trespassing arrest? I’m going to let you guess what attorney handled his case. Reese Cristóbal. I guessed for you.”
“So far, this is all good background but—”
“Reese Cristóbal is a very busy man. He not only has strong ties to the illegal immigrant community—the night Fabian Beauvais got arrested for trespassing for his Dumpster dive, a couple of other guys got busted with him. Also immigrants. Also repped by our Gateway Lawyer.”
“Which would only follow if he’s handling a lot of these cases,” she said.
“Correct. But this was a first offense for Fabian. I found out the pair he was consorting with had more interesting records.”
Nikki cocked her head. “How did you get information on them?”
Rook grinned. “Please. Do I have to carry my Pulitzers for investigative journalism around with me?” Already chiding herself for not checking on Beauvais’s fellow arrestees, Heat urged him to continue. He referred to notes again. “Bachelor Number-One, Fidel ‘FiFi’ Figueroa had a disorderly conduct reduced to malicious mischief for lobbing a stink bomb into a crowd. Oh, and the crowd? It was in Washington Square. At a campaign rally for Keith Gilbert.”
“Go on,” she said.
“Ah, the sweet sound of your undivided attention. Bachelor Number-Two, Charley Tosh, was arrested for B and E and vandalism. To wit: In the middle of the night, he broke into, and thoroughly trashed, a storefront at Sixty-third and Lex. The Keith Gilbert campaign headquarters. Are we recognizing a pattern here? From your expression, I’d say so. And know why? This was not random stuff. They were paid for their pranks by a very active political action committee. This PAC has very benign initials. It’s registered as the CBP. Want to know what CBP stands for? The Committee to Block the PATHole.”
He glanced up from his notes. “Don’t blame me, these political wonks can be very snarky. Ever watch Bill Maher?”
In spite of herself, Heat’s curiosity piqued. “Is that ‘PATH,’ as in Port Authority?”
“Indeed, but not the train. The PATHole in question would be a certain commissioner from the Port Authority planning to run for the U.S. Senate.”
“Rook, so what? Those two did dirty work for a PAC with a sketchy name—”
“—Specifically, against Keith Gilbert’s campaign.”
“But that wasn’t Beauvais. He was only Dumpster diving.”
“With those two characters. You lie down with dogs, you’re gonna get fleas. And if you ask me, the ransack of Gilbert’s campaign HQ seems awfully reminiscent of the job we saw on West End Avenue. Except…”
“Except what?”
“Well, at the campaign office, somebody left a grumpy on the fund-raising chairman’s desk.”
She made a sour face. “You read the police report?”
“No, I got that from Keith Gilbert’s public information officer today.”
“Wait. You talked with Gilbert’s press aide?”
Rook gave a no-biggie shrug. “I knew Dennis when he was dean of the J-school at Hudson University. We met up this afternoon. That’s why I had my phone off.”
“Rook. I can’t believe this. You talked to one of my prime suspect’s staff? About this case?”
“I did. It’s called getting both sides.”
“What did you tell him about the case? Because you have to know it’s going straight to Gilbert and his Dream Team.”
“Are we getting paranoid?”
“No, we are getting annoyed.” Completely floored, Nikki fixed him with a look of indignation that unnerved him.
He got busy flipping ahead in his notebook and said, “I sense resistance, so let me get to my closer.” He came to a dog-eared page. “Remember at the slaughterhouse how some of the workers seemed a tad shy of the police, and slipped out the rear?”
“Of course.”
“Well, I went back there today and made friends in the alley.”
“You paid them?”
“Please. That would be insulting. I handed out Dunkin’ Donuts gift cards. And worth it, too, because one of them opened up to me.” He tapped a name in his book. “Hattie Pate. Hattie was friends with Fabian Beauvais. Guess you kill a few hundred chickens, you get to know somebody. Anyway, she said Fabby came in all freaked one day.
She asked what’s wrong, and he told her someone was out to kill him.” He paused. “Shall I repeat that?”
“Go on.”
“Beauvais told Hattie he’d been doing some freelance work for a bunch of guys. Some sort of ATM theft ring. They turned on him all of a sudden and said they were going to—quoting now, ‘fuck him up and kill him dead.’ They knew where he lived, so it was Hattie who turned him on to the SRO where he moved and we found his hidden ten grand. Gee, is it possible money’s why they were after him?” He stared at her, nodding and grinning while she processed his information. “I’ll say it again, you’ve got the wrong guy.”
She was so absorbed chewing over Rook’s story—and his indiscretion with the press flak—that she hadn’t noticed the news conference had broken up and that Wally Irons now stood a few feet away. “What’s this?”
“Nothing,” said Nikki, jumping in ahead of Rook. “I’m just bringing him up to speed on the case.” The captain didn’t totally appear to buy that, but his cell phone lit up and he moved on into the precinct.
When Irons was gone, Heat shifted in the god-awful molded seat to face Rook. “I’ll grant that you raise a lot of interesting points. But I hear nothing that changes the case I have against Gilbert.”
“You call a death threat nothing?”
“No, and you damn well know I’ll check it out.” She patted his notebook. “I want Hattie’s contact info so I can get on this. But for now, that’s hearsay, and hearsay doesn’t trump the evidence I’ve got on Gilbert.”
“Take a step back like I did, Nikki. Can you really call it evidence?”
“You bet I can.”
“Because I can recontextualize everything you’ve got.” It struck her that, up to that morning when Rook got blindsided by the news of the task force, he would have said, “We’ve got” instead of “you’ve.” He mimed tracing a square in the space between them with both hands and said, “I could reframe everything in a scenario that shows that the only connection Gilbert had to Beauvais was coping with a political dirty trickster who was harassing him and his campaign.”
“Wow, you could be Keith Gilbert’s press aide now, Rook,” she said with no small amount of sarcasm. “Spinning the whole thing to make the poor commissioner look like the victim.”
“Maybe not a victim, but clearly he was victimized.”
“Then riddle me this. Why did Gilbert deny knowing Beauvais?”
“Who knows? Maybe it had nothing to do with the killing. Or maybe he got pissed at being harassed by the Haitian. Maybe Beauvais was going to blow the whistle on the mistress. Or Keith and Alicia had a love child; another John Edwards situation. So Gilbert threatens him—just shooting off his mouth in the heat of passion—and then that ATM theft gang ends up killing him for stealing their ten grand. That would sure make me a little circumspect.”
He closed his notebook and slapped the palm of his hand with it a few times while he mulled an idea. “I think you need to look harder at the two brutes from that SRO. You know, just because Beauvais got himself killed doesn’t mean he was a good guy.”
Valid point. Nikki often caught herself falling into the natural trap of sanctifying murder victims.
“I’m just saying, step back. Maybe things look one way, but mean another. Isn’t it possible that Keith Gilbert had nothing to do with Fabian Beauvais’s death but was merely orbiting the periphery?”
Instead of opening up to possibilities, a gloom enveloped her. Nikki had grown accustomed to, and even grudgingly enjoyed, Rook’s diverting conspiracy speculations. It was like listening to his brain popping popcorn. But this had a different tone. His assertion that something bigger might be going on didn’t pass the Redenbacher test. This felt like a challenge to her whole case.
And not diverting at all.
Detective Feller sat waiting on the other end of a blinking light for Heat when she and Rook came into the bull pen. While she took the call, Rook dropped his messenger bag on his borrowed desk and drifted over to the Murder Board to survey the updates.
“Know what this case is for me?” began Feller, who was checking in from the Port Authority’s Central Automotive Headquarters in Jersey City. “Bridges and tunnels and bridges and tunnels. Oh, and tunnels.”
“Boo hoo. I’ve got two dozen phone messages sitting here from reporters, all of whom want me to be their confidential unnamed source on Gilbert’s arrest.”
“Conference them all with each other, that’s what I’d do. Then stand back and watch the lightning bolts arc out of the phone.”
“You about done?” she said.
“About. Got a bit of the unexpected over here. Motor pool ran the registration through their system, and there is no record of anyone signing out that Impala for the last month.”
“How can that be?”
“Because—are you ready? The car’s been stolen.”
“Stolen when?”
“Well, now it gets strange. They just discovered it and reported it today.”
Nikki finished the call, sidled next to Rook and uncapped a marker to post the stolen status of the Impala. When she had finished he said, “Are you tense?”
“No, why?”
“Did I detect a certain extra degree of squeak in your block lettering, or is that my imagination?”
“Could be,” she said. “Lord knows it’s plenty fertile.”
Before Rook could respond, Wally Irons leaned in from the doorway of his office. “Detective? Gilbert’s attorneys are in Interrogation-One with him now. Everybody’s ready to roll.”
Heat entered the box alone. Captain Irons, who she had invited out of protocol, was too big a coward to sit in (thank God), and Rook, who very much wanted—and expected—to take part, got some bad news from Nikki outside the interrogation room door. With such a high-profile, high-stakes case, the lead detective could not afford to put a foot wrong. Topping the list of stumbles would be allowing a reporter to take part in the formal homicide interrogation of a government official in the watchful presence of his opportunistic Dream Team.
The first thing she noticed was Keith Gilbert’s smile. Far from looking like a man who had just had his necktie, belt, and shoelaces taken away, he gave off a relaxed, nearly genial vibe. Nikki took the lone chair that stationed her back to the mirror of the observation room. Across the table from her, flanked by his trio of suits, Keith Gilbert looked more like a tycoon judge on Shark Tank than a murder suspect. Detective Heat decided she would have to change that.
“Keith Gilbert, for the record, this is a formal interview. Just as you were informed at the time of your arrest that anything you say can and will be used against you, in this meeting you remain under caution.…” Nikki continued to recite the boilerplate, not only to keep every move legally unassailable, but also to make the statement that this was her party. With A-list criminal attorneys present, she knew, going in, that there was only a slim chance of getting anything damning on the record—certainly no confession. But her hope was that somewhere inside those narrow odds there lived a prospect that a careless slip would come, or that one of his answers would conflict with a prior statement, or that a new piece of useful information would tumble. From such small things big convictions came.
Frederic Lohman, senior partner of Lohman and Barkley, fanned the air with one of his arthritic hands as if shooing gnats. “Detective,” he said equably in his signature near-whisper, “I think I can save us all some time if we stipulate that my client has been properly Mirandized and that, indeed, his right to an attorney has been fulfilled with some adequacy.” The old lawyer let out a hoarse chuckle which his side of the table joined, including Gilbert, who somehow still managed to appear tan and robust under the sickly fluorescents that washed everyone else out. “We can further economize time by informing you respectfully up top that no statements will be made, nor will any questions be answered, by Commissioner Gilb
ert.”
Nikki replied coolly, matching Lohman’s understated tone. But her message’s forcefulness couldn’t be missed. “And just as respectfully, counselor, if economizing time becomes the priority of this meeting, I’ll be sure to let you know. Meanwhile, the prime concern is getting answers to questions I will be asking your client concerning his role in a homicide. You may do as you like, but my agenda is not yours to set.”
Having been in so many rooms like this with so many clients over five decades, the attorney took the pushback the way he always did. As if he didn’t hear it. Lohman merely waited with a neutral expression. She opened her file and began. Determined to visit every detail, she went back to the beginning, holding up the photo of Fabian Beauvais and asking if he knew him. “Asked and answered,” replied the lawyer. Next she displayed the sketches of the two men who fled Beauvais’s rooming house. “Asked and answered.”
It continued like that, until, after a few minutes, Keith Gilbert started fidgeting and said, “Are you getting the idea, Detective?” Lohman put a scarecrow hand on his sleeve to no avail. “What’s the point of this?”
“To gather facts. And to give you a chance to cooperate—”
“—I have been cooperating—” Gilbert jerked his arm away from his lawyer’s cautionary touch. Nikki liked to see this and hoped his frustration would make him careless. “Tell me when I haven’t cooperated, huh?”
Heat obliged. “Do you call it cooperation by making evidence disappear, obstructing an investigation?”
“How so?”
“Keith.” From Lohman.
“No, I want to hear.” He flexed his head side to side and she heard the soft crackle of a neck vertebra. “In my role as a commissioner, I am sworn to uphold the law of the land, and I want to know how I have obstructed.”
“Let’s see, Commissioner. A vehicle registered to the Port Authority, a Chevrolet Impala, was being used by two persons of interest in this case.”