The Patriots Club

by Christopher Reich

  “Company’s really in the shitter. We’re never going to find a buyer unless that ass Fitzgerald signs off on that bill.”

  “That ass Fitzgerald” was Senator Hugh Fitzgerald, chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, and the bill being bandied about was the $6.5 billion Emergency Defense Funding Bill, of which $265 million was earmarked for the Hawkeye Mobile Air Defense Units manufactured by Triton.

  Jacklin gazed down at the Potomac. In the sodden, gray morning, the river looked lifeless, dead. He thought of the dinner planned that evening, the care and preparation expended to ensure that it was the event of a lifetime. Not to mention the expense. Truffles. Caviar. Peter Duchin’s big band was setting them back a hundred thousand dollars alone. Word that one of Jefferson’s companies was due to declare Chapter 11 would be a fly in the soup. A goddamned hairy Texas horsefly! Jacklin tightened his hand into a fist. He’d be damned if Hugh Fitzgerald would single-handedly shut down Triton.

  “I’m due to testify on the bill later this morning,” he said with a glance over his shoulder. “I’ll have a word with the senator afterward, and see if I can’t convince him to recommend its passage.”

  “Fitzgerald? Good luck, J. J. The man’s left of Gandhi.”

  “I know. I know,” said Jacklin, with a wave of the hand. “But the senator and I go way back. Just a matter of having him reconsider his career options. He’s seventy-four years old, after all. Time he did something else with his life.”

  “And if he doesn’t?” De Valmont yanked out his silk pocket square and began to carefully refold it.

  “I’m sure we can find a way to convince him. Either with a carrot or a stick.”

  De Valmont nodded, but his eyes said he wasn’t convinced.

  Jacklin returned to the center of his office and sat down in his Princeton chair. It wouldn’t be easy, he admitted, but it could be done. It was no coincidence that many of the senior partners at Jefferson had served in high government positions. Some called it access capitalism. J. J. Jacklin preferred “good business.”

  “Gentlemen,” he called to his partners. “Shall we get down to brass tacks?”

  21

  Thomas Bolden sat in the back of the taxi, his cheek pressed to the cold metal door frame. Traffic moved in fits and spurts. The sky had hardened to a steely gray, the clouds fused into a solid, darkening wall. The taxi came to a halt. Pedestrians hurried along the wet sidewalks, one eye for the sky wondering when the hesitant snowflakes would yield to the real McCoy.

  Bolden glanced at his lap. His right hand trembled as if palsied. Stop, he ordered it silently, but the shaking didn’t lessen. He took a breath and placed his left hand on top of it, then stared back out the window.

  Until now, it had all been a terrible mistake. The mugging, his abduction and interrogation, the botched attempt to kill him. He’d been willing to consign all of it to the trash. Guilfoyle had the wrong man. It was that simple. Yet, as they drove up Fifth Avenue, his eyes aching in their sockets, his trousers stained with cooking grease and yesterday’s veal piccata, he realized that he’d been wrong. It didn’t matter if he could forgive and forget. They would not.

  “They” had followed him into his workplace.

  “They” had gotten to Diana Chambers.

  “They” had killed Sol Weiss.

  It didn’t matter that he had no knowledge of “Crown” or a man named Bobby Stillman. The fact that he knew of them was enough.

  “They” would not go away. Not now, Bolden told himself. Not ever.

  He thought of Jenny.

  If Diana Chambers was fair game, she might be next.

  “Driver,” he said, tapping his knuckles on the Plexiglas screen that divided the cab. “Take me to Fourteenth Street and Broadway. The Kraft School. There’s a twenty in it if you can make it in ten minutes.”

  22

  Of course, they couldn’t stop talking about the mugging.

  “Calm down, you guys,” said Jennifer Dance. She sat on the front of her desk, legs dangling. “One at a time. Remember, once someone else starts talking, keep your thoughts to yourself until they’ve finished.”

  “Yo, Miss Dance.” A tall, fleshy Hispanic boy with a crew cut and a green tear tattooed at the corner of his eye stood up.

  “Yes, Hector, go ahead.” Then, to the rest of the class: “It’s Hector’s turn. Everyone give him your attention.”

  “Yeah, like shut up,” added Hector with real venom, casting his eyes around him. “So, Miss Dance, like I’m wondering, if it was this razor-sharp knife, why didn’t it cut right through your arm? I mean, like deep, like you guttin’ a cat or somethin’.” He shot his buddy a glance. “Ten stitches, man. I could do better than that.”

  “Thank you for your comment, Hector, but I think I’ve already answered that. I don’t know why he didn’t hurt me worse. Just lucky, I guess.”

  “ ‘Cuz you good-lookin’,” a voice rumbled from the back of the room. “Them boys wanted to slam yo’ ass.”

  Jenny stood and walked briskly down the aisle. It was a normal-size classroom, one student per desk, blackboards running the length of each wall, map cartridges she’d never even thought of using, hanging behind her desk. She stopped in front of a hulking young man seated in the last row.

  “That’s enough, Maurice,” she said firmly.

  Maurice Gates shrugged his massive shoulders and dropped his eyes to the floor as if he didn’t know what the big deal was about. He was a huge kid, well over six feet, at least 220 pounds, braided gold necklace hanging outside his football jersey (in defiance of school rules against jewelry), his baseball cap turned halfway to the back.

  “Jes’ the truth,” he said. “You a good-lookin’ woman. Wanted to get him some gash. ‘At’s all. Know’d you’d like it, so he didn’t want to mess you up real bad.”

  “Stand up,” said Jenny.

  Maurice looked up at her with sleepy eyes.

  “Stand up,” she repeated, softer this time. The classroom was all about control. Lose your temper and you’d already lost the battle.

  “Yes, ma’am.” Maurice rose to his feet with enough moans and grimaces to do Job proud.

  “Mr. Gates,” she said, “women are not bitches. They are not ‘ho’s,’ or ‘gashes.’ Is that clear? We, females, do not live in a constant state of arousal. And if we did, we wouldn’t require the attentions of a crude, chauvinistic musclehead like yourself.”

  “You go, girl,” said one of the students in the back row.

  Maurice shifted on his feet, his face a blank, as Jenny continued. “You have been in my class for two weeks now,” she said, standing toe-to-toe with him. “At least once a day, I have asked you to refrain from using offensive language. If I can’t teach you algebra in this classroom, I would, at least, like to teach you respect. Next time I have to waste a second of the class’s time keeping your butt in line—one second—I’ll have you kicked out of school.” She delivered the last part on her tiptoes, her mouth a few inches from Mr. Maurice Gates’s ear. “Your attendance here is a condition of your release from Rikers. So unless you want a ticket right back there, you’ll sit down, shut up, and keep your comments about the superior sex to yourself.”

  Jenny stared into the boy’s eyes, seeing hate flare in the way his eyelids twitched, sensing his anger at being humiliated in front of his classmates. The kids called him Mo-fo, and they used the words with all due deference. Make no mistake, he was an angry, volatile young man. His case files pretty much came out and said that he’d been a player in several unsolved homicides. But Jenny couldn’t worry about that. She had a class to teach. Order to keep. She owed the kids that much. “Sit down,” she said.

  For a second or two, Maurice Gates remained standing. Finally, he bunched his shoulders and sat.

  The hush in the classroom lasted ten seconds.

  “We were discussing what an appropriate punishment might be for mugging someone,” Jenny said, retaking her place at the head of the class.
“Remember, I got my watch back. All I got was a little cut and very scared.”

  “You popped one of ’em, too.”

  “Yes, I did,” said Jenny, adding a little swagger to her step. “A right hook.” A few of her knuckles were swollen and painful to the touch.

  She checked the clock. Nine-thirty. Her school planner called for her to teach math and English before recess. Math was a goner. She still had hopes for salvaging English. She was reading the class “The Most Dangerous Game,” the story where a mad hunter sets men loose on his private jungle island to track down and kill. There were plenty of metaphors in the story that the kids could relate to, especially at the end when “the Man” gets his comeuppance.

  “Twenty years,” someone shouted. “Sing Sing.”

  “Nah, ten, but no parole.”

  “Ten years?” asked Jenny. “For grabbing a watch and giving someone a little cut? Don’t you guys find that kind of harsh?”

  “Hell no.” It was Maurice Gates. “How else you think they gonna learn?”

  “Excuse me, Maurice, do you have a comment?”

  The supersized teenager nodded. “You got to teach those muscleheads a lesson,” he said, eyes boring into Jenny. “You got to be tough. No mercy. Unnerstand? Less’n you want ’em to come for you in the middle of the night. They mad enough, they even cut you in your own bed. Door locked. Don’t matter. They gonna get in. Take care of bidness. You be sleepin’ alone. They gonna get in. Cut you good. Ain’t that right, Miss Dance? You got to put ’em away.”

  Jenny held his eyes, wondering if she might have to go to security on this one. Don’t you dare come after me, her look said. I can take care of myself.

  “Ten years,” said Hector, banging his feet on the ground.

  In no time, the class raised a chant. “Ten years. Ten years.”

  “Enough!” said Jenny, patting the air with her hands. She looked from face to face. Hector had robbed a bodega in his neighborhood. Lacretia had gotten into “the life” when she was twelve. For the most part, they were a decent bunch of kids. They weren’t angels, but she hoped she could just drive home what was right and what was wrong.

  “Miss Dance?”

  “Yes, Frankie.”

  Frankie Gonzalez walked up alongside her and put his head on her shoulder. He was short, and skinny, and rubbery, the class runt and self-appointed clown. “Miss Dance,” he said again, and she knew he was making his wiseass smile. “Yo, I kill them muthafuckers they touch you.”

  The class cracked up. Jenny patted his head and sent him back to his desk. “Thank you, Frankie, but I think that’s a bit extreme, not to mention against the law.”

  She dropped off the desk and walked to the chalkboard. She wanted to make a list of appropriate penalties and take a vote. Crime and punishment passed for reading and writing.

  Just then, the door to her classroom opened. A tall, rangy man with close-cropped gray hair and a weathered face peered in. “Miss Dance, may I have a word? Outside, please.”

  Jenny put down the chalk. “I’ll be right back,” she said to the class. She smiled as she entered the corridor. A parole officer, she thought, or a cop come to tell her about one of her new charges. “Yes, what can I do for you?”

  The man approached her, the smile bleeding from his face. “If you ever want to see Thomas Bolden alive again,” he said, his voice hard as a diamond, “you’ll come with me.”

  23

  “Look who’s back,” said Detective Second Grade Mike Melendez as John Franciscus walked into the squad room. “Night shift ain’t enough for you, Johnny? Hey, I got a shift you can take.”

  “Short Mike. How you doin’? Tell you the truth, heating’s going berserk at the house,” Franciscus lied, stopping at Melendez’s desk, rapping his knuckles twice as if knocking. “Place is like a sweatbox. Got a guy coming at noon to take a look at it. Just what I need. Put another C-note into the house.”

  Melendez stood up from his desk, stretching his six-foot-eight-inch frame, and headed toward the hall. “You doing a four-to-one? Didn’t see you on the roster.”

  “No. Figured in the meantime I’d take care of some paperwork, maybe catch a few Z’s in the duty room.”

  Melendez gave him a look as if he were certifiable. “Make yourself at home.”

  Franciscus walked to the back of the squad room, saying his hellos to the guys. A New York City detective’s day was divided into three shifts: “eight-to-four,” “four-to-one” (which actually ended at midnight), and the night shift. Twice a month you did a “back-to-back,” meaning you did a four-to-one and an eight-to-four the following day. Since most of the cops lived upstate, they’d fitted out the duty room with a couple of cots and plenty of fresh sheets.

  The detectives’ squad room for Manhattan North was located on the sixth floor of an unmarked brick building on 114th Street and Broadway. They shared the building with SVU—the special victims unit—child protective services, and the local welfare office. It was a real crowd of jollies from morning till night. But the squad room itself was a haven: large, clean, and heated to a pleasant sixty-six degrees. A row of desks ran down each side of the room, separated by a wide aisle. The floor was old freckled linoleum, but spotless. The walls were standard-issue acoustical tile. A bulletin board covered with shoulder patches from visiting cops hung on one wall. Franciscus preferred it to the pictures that hung across the room. There in a row were the ranking policemen in the New York City Police Department. The big muckety-mucks. The commissioner, his deputy, the chief of police, and the chief of detectives. Once he’d dreamed of having his picture up there too, but things happened.

  Just then, Melendez sauntered over.

  “Pickup already go through?” Franciscus asked. Every morning at eight, a paddy wagon stopped by to haul the night’s take down to 1 Police Plaza, or “One PP,” for formal booking and arraignment.

  “Half hour ago. Your boy went along nice and easy.”

  “Still not talking?”

  “Not a peep. What’s up with that?”

  “Don’t know. I’m heading over to see Vicki. See if she can dig something up for me.”

  “You got a name?”

  “Not his, unfortunately. Something else the complainant was talking about.”

  “Who? Mr. Wall Street?”

  Franciscus nodded. “Amazing a kid like that can make it. You see his body art. ‘Never Rat on Friends.’ You love it? I had something nifty like that on my shoulder, they would have kicked my butt out of OCS.”

  “Doesn’t matter where you come from anymore. It’s what you can do. How you handle yourself. Look at what Billy did with his GED.”

  Melendez’s kid brother, Billy, had worked as a trader with a foreign exchange firm doing business out of Tower 2, eighty-fifth floor. No one above eighty-four made it out. “God bless, Mike.”

  “Amen,” said Short Mike Melendez. “Oh, the lieutenant said something about seeing you later. He’s in his office, you feel so inclined.”

  “You want to take odds on that?” As union trustee, Franciscus was in constant demand to answer questions about health care, retirement, and the like. The lieutenant had his thirty in, and was set to retire in a month’s time. For weeks, he’d been harping on how to take his pension.

  Franciscus had hardly sat down and gotten comfortable when he saw Lieutenant Bob McDermott amble from his office. McDermott raised a hand. “Johnny. A word.”

  Franciscus labored to his feet. “You still thinking of taking insurance? Don’t.”

  McDermott shook his head and frowned, as if he wasn’t interested in talking about himself. “Got a sec? Need to tell you something.”

  “Actually, I’m just on the way to IT. Got a lead I want to check on.”

  “It’ll just take a minute.” McDermott put a hand on his shoulder and walked with him toward his office. Given the lieutenant’s easygoing nature, it might as well have been a stickup at gunpoint. McDermott shut the door behind him and walked to his des
k. “Got a report here from your doctor.”

  “Yeah,” Franciscus said lightly. “Saw him last week.” But inside him, his gut tightened.

  “You didn’t tell me.”

  “Nothing to tell. Just the usual.”

  “That’s not what it says here.”

  Franciscus waved away the report. “Ah, that’s bullshit,” he said. “Just some minor blockage. He gave me a load of pills. No problem whatsoever.”

  “EKGs don’t lie.” McDermott settled his gaze on Franciscus. “Johnny, did you know that you had had a heart attack?”

  “It wasn’t a heart attack. It was just a . . .” Franciscus tried to keep up the bluster, but couldn’t quite bring it off. The thing about the lieutenant was that he was truly a good guy, probably better suited to the clergy than the police. “To tell you the truth, I didn’t have a clue,” he said, at length. “I just took it for another lousy day. You know . . . the job.”

  “Says here you have an eighty percent occlusion of five of your principal arteries. Eighty percent! Johnny, your heart’s a walking time bomb. Why haven’t you scheduled a procedure?”

  “A procedure?” Franciscus pulled a face. “Come on. I quit smoking five years back. I haven’t had anything stronger than a beer in ten years. I’ll be okay.”

  “Look at you. You’re gray as a ghost,” said McDermott with genuine concern.

  “It’s friggin’ winter. What do you expect, George Hamilton? Besides, you don’t look so hot yourself.” Franciscus looked away, feeling miserable for the cheap shot.

  McDermott tossed the manila folder that held Franciscus’s future onto his desk. “Sit down.”

  Franciscus took a seat. “Look, Bob, let me ex—”

  “Please, John.” McDermott rocked in his chair for a moment. The two men exchanged glances. Franciscus shrugged. McDermott said, “I looked at your file. You got thirty-four years in, plus three military. Some people would call that a career. You should be following me out the door.”

  “And then what? You got a job lined up at OTB for me, too?”