Strangled - Brian McGrory [113]
I liked the simple sound of all that, apparently more than Peter did. He said, “You could get arrested for interfering with an investigation. And maybe so could I.”
I replied, “Hey, jail’s probably a hell of a lot safer than where I’m at now.”
He didn’t have a comeback to this one, least of all because he undoubtedly knew it was true. He said, “All right, against my better judgment, go. But I’m going to have Buck meet you at the airport when you arrive.”
I said, “I don’t think Buck can find the airport, but go ahead and let him try.”
And then I heard another little click. Peter Martin had just hung up the phone on my ear.
Before I could even put the phone down, it chimed anew. I thought it was going to be Martin calling me back to apologize for the abrupt cessation of our conversation. Instead, it was the serious voice of a self-important young woman telling me — not asking me, but telling me — in her words, to “please hold the line for Commissioner Harrison.”
“I don’t want to hold the line for Commissioner Harrison.” That was me, replying, but there was no one on the other end to hear, no one except some Muzak version of the Rolling Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” Believe me, I know how you guys feel.
A good two minutes passed, and by then I was pulling into the Avis return lot, some guy in a brown shirt walking briskly toward me with one of those handheld checkout devices as jet airplanes roared overhead. Still no sign of Harrison on the phone.
It’s an unvarnished power trip, this whole “hold the line for” stuff, a blunt declaration that my time is more important than yours, and you should be thrilled to wait while I finish up whatever else I may have been doing to get on the line and grace you with a few moments of my busy day. Another two minutes passed. “Satisfaction” morphed into “Rhinestone Cowboy,” a song I’ve always liked, and that played to the end. By that point, I was curious as to just how long Boston Police Commissioner Hal Harrison was going to leave me waiting on the phone for a call I had neither made nor necessarily wanted to have. But I wasn’t quite curious enough, so I hung up.
Ten minutes later, as I was walking through the airport terminal, my cell phone rang. This time when I picked it up, it was Harrison acting as if that whole prior incident had never occurred. Or maybe he just didn’t know about it.
“Jack? Hal Harrison here.” He said this in an abnormally loud voice, as if he were giving a speech at the morning roll call.
“Hello, Commissioner,” I said.
“Jack, it’s been too long since you and I got together and chatted about things. And that conversation the other day didn’t exactly go the way I had hoped or planned. You know what I mean?”
I didn’t, but I didn’t say that.
Instead I said, “What do you have in mind, Commissioner?”
“Well, nice of you to ask. You’re under a lot of pressure at the Record with these murders. I think I’m in a position now to share a little perspective on this whole thing with you, seeing as I was one of the lead detectives back in the sixties on the successful Strangler investigation. Mind you, I’m not looking for any publicity on this thing. God knows, we’re getting too much of that as it is. I just think I might be in a position to give you a little help.”
“When do you have in mind, Commissioner?”
“Any chance you might find your way to my office tomorrow morning, say, ten a.m.? I’ll have coffee for us. I think I can make it worth your while.”
“Count me in,” I said. And with that, I secured another first class upgrade and boarded the plane bound for Boston. If there were air-traffic controllers who had any idea of the metaphorical storm I was about to fly into, they never would have let the flight leave the ground.
31
As predicted, Buck wasn’t awaiting my arrival at Logan International Airport when my flight landed at twelve-thirty. Or if he was,