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.”
“Let’s hold right there,” said the lawyer. “All this is fine stuff, very entertaining. But, Detective Heat, you do recall this victim was not killed by a Chevy Impala, right?” He smiled at his colleagues, enjoying his own joke. “I believe he was dropped from an airplane, and that my client was twenty miles away in Fort Lee, New Jersey. So what’s our issue?”
“Continuing, Commissioner,” she said, pointedly shunning Lohman. “This morning I mentioned the use of the Port Authority vehicle to you. Four hours later — what a surprise — the Impala in question is not only missing from the motor pool, but somebody at your Port Authority just happened to notice — this afternoon — that it was stolen a month ago. I’d like an explanation why that remarkable coincidence doesn’t smell like obstruction.”
Frederic Lohman brought up something grisly with a ragged cough, and said, “My client is not required to theorize on your speculations.”
“No, Freddie, I want to answer that. My reputation’s in question here.” Ignoring the don’t-do-it headshake from his attorney, Gilbert went on. “I never deal with the Automotive and Technical Center directly. I only know they have a lot of vehicles to account for. My guess about the timing is that the Impala probably came up stolen as they took inventory of assets for Sandy preparation. That would have less to do with me, and more with the hurricane, I assure you.”
“Shall I be assured like when you said you didn’t know Fabian Beauvais?”
Lohman knocked on the table as if it were a door, a first in Nikki’s experience in that interrogation room. “All right, I am going to strongly counsel my client exercise his right to silence,” he said with a glare to Gilbert. “And Detective Heat, your innuendos do not become any more credible through repetition. In fact, I expect we will be out of here soon due to the motion we have filed now that new evidence raises serious and fundamental doubts about your case.”
She didn’t know exactly where Lohman was heading, but it was more than his theater of relaxed confidence that began the slow rise of warning chimes inside Nikki. He was holding something. But what? “I’m not sure what you mean by new evidence,” she said, testing the waters, “but if you’ve retained a private investigator, those findings will have to wait to stand the test of a public trial.”
“Really? When a specific and credible threat was made against the life of the deceased by someone other than my client? To wit, a credit card fraud and ATM theft ring with motive, means, and opportunity to do so?”
Those alarm bells rang louder.
Frederic Lohman raised his tangle of eyebrows. “You don’t know about this? That surprises me. Detective, your own, ah…let’s call him friend…Jameson Rook, the respected investigative journalist, has uncovered sufficient evidence for me to file a motion for immediate release on own recognizance without bond. I expect we should hear quite soon because Commissioner Gilbert is so vital to the preparation for the coming natural disaster.”
Rook? What the hell did he say in that meeting with Keith Gilbert’s press aide? How many other of his people did he talk to about this case? Heat’s brain spun. She had intended to rock them in this session, but now it was she who’d been shaken. While Nikki tried to gather herself, the lawyer continued in his offhand monotone, “Now the release on OR is only a start. We’re going to press hard for a bench dismissal based on these new facts. Of course, that’s a tougher road, but worth a wild shot. We all take wild shots, don’t we, Detective Heat?”
Her cell phone buzzed on top of the file beside her. The caller ID said it was the DA’s office. Across the table, they were all smiles. The room indeed had become a shark tank. And to Nikki, it felt like it was filling with water.
Minutes later, Heat stood peering through the glass watching Keith Gilbert get processed out. Not to Rikers Island but, as his fossil of a lawyer repeatedly claimed, to fulfill his irreplaceable role at the Port Authority leading storm crisis preparation. Rook looked on behind her, and, as the shipping magnate fastened on his nautical racing watch, he said, “I swear, Nikki, I did not tell them anything.”
She didn’t turn to him or even raise her voice. “Funny coincidence, wouldn’t you say?”
“Well, sure, I know how it looks. Especially when you’re already in a twist because I met with Gilbert’s press guy.”
“Today.”
“Give me some credit here. I know better than to divulge inner workings of a case to somebody connected to your suspect.”
“They got it from somewhere. And they kinda said it was from you. No, they actually said it was.”
“They’re lying.” He gave her a eureka look. “Or they have an inside source. Maybe a mole at First Press. I’ll bet that’s it.”
Wally Irons interrupted, joining them at the window. “Talk about a travesty.” He shook his head. “I put my face out there in public, and now this? Makes me look like a dumbshit.”
“Sir, nobody’s unhappier about this than I am,” said Heat, “but it’s just a setback. It’s an OR release. We still have a case.”
“Yeah? Sounds like you’d better start plugging holes. Beginning with asking your boyfriend to excuse himself from the precinct premises.” The captain left on that note, retreating to his office so he wouldn’t have to deal with Rook himself.