The killing of Judy Buchanan played in Peoria. It became one of those murder cases that—arbitrarily, it would seem—takes on a circus-logic life of its own. It did have all four basic ingredients of such cases. It was frosted with lurid extramarital sex. It had ambitious politicians who used it as a stage. It had a sociopath who was widely presumed to be guilty but who somehow remained free. Most crucial of all, the victim was a strikingly beautiful blonde (that it was dyed was irrelevant), one unknowable enough to be a blank slate upon whom the masses could project their own prejudices, hypocrisies, and fears.
The sidewalk outside the building where Judy Buchanan’s supposed contract murder took place was nearly always crowded and strewn with flowers. (Location, location, location, the old florist on the ground floor muttered each night, counting his money.) Periodically, earnest Protestant ministers in shirtsleeves came there to bellow sweet nothings about the wages of sin. But most of the people on the sidewalk had come to embrace each other and cry crocodile tears suitable for any newscast’s B-roll. Often, these people waved cheaply printed posters of Judy Buchanan’s now-famous head shot (for sale at souvenir stands throughout New York). It was ten years old and was something she’d had taken during her brief, fruitless stab at acting. Any appreciation of the irony of this—blowing up a head shot of a woman whose lovely head had been nearly blown off—seemed lost on most Americans, perhaps like irony in general. Increasingly, the mourners and gawkers waved one of the surveillance photos that had been sent, anonymously, to the NYPD, the FBI, the Justice Department, and a host of newspapers, tabloid and otherwise. The shot of Judy Buchanan in an exquisitely tailored pantsuit, on the train platform in Milwaukee—alone and, in the opinion of many, looking trapped—became an especially popular choice. Once in a while someone would even deploy photos of her mentally retarded son, Philip, who, despite his afflictions and the violent deaths of his parents, seemed always to have a smile for the camera.
Outside the building where Tom Hagen lived, Al Neri stationed uniformed private security officers—off-duty or retired cops all. Despite this, the cul-de-sac was often clogged with curious civilians, both from the press and the public. Miles of TV footage were shot, nearly all of it featuring dark cars with tinted windows emerging from the building’s underground garage and driving uneventfully away. Even early in the morning, when Neri went out to get his roadwork in, there was always some clown looking up toward the building’s top floors and pointing.
The case dragged on for months, spewing money, minting new minor-key celebrities, selling newspapers and magazines, garnering book deals and reliable TV ratings, and inspiring debates in barbershops and beauty shops from sea to shining sea. All this for a case that was yet to yield a single arrest.
WHEN HE WAS INITIALLY BROUGHT IN FOR QUESTIONING, Tom Hagen had, of course, said nothing until his attorney showed up. The attorney he hired was Sid Klein, famous for his role as a congressional counsel during the anti-Communism investigations. Hagen had admired his work for years and had put him on retainer for a rainy day. There was no one, anywhere, who was more vicious, more zealous, more comfortable in the glare of a high-profile case. Defending those alleged to be connected with the so-called Mafia had actually become one of Sid Klein’s specialties. Both the Barzini Family and the Tattaglia Family—following Hagen’s lead—had Klein on retainer as well.
It looked like the police didn’t have much. They seemed to want to make something of the .22 caliber pistol, a Ruger, that they’d found on the scene. It had recently been fired three times, and someone had wiped it clean. “We have evidence that shows the gun belongs to an ex-convict named Richard Antony Nobilio, Jr.,” one of the detectives said. Richie had done a stretch in Lewisburg for conspiring to violate federal narcotics laws.
“Was it the murder weapon?” Klein said.
“At this point, we’re not sure.”
Meaning no, Klein and Hagen immediately understood.
“Mr. Nobilio is an associate of yours, though, right?”
Hagen and Sid Klein exchanged whispers, and Klein let him answer.
“Yes. I do some legal work for Mr. Nobilio—who has, by the way, paid his debt to society and plays the organ at his church. I am an associate of his in a few investments. As for the pistol, I think I can save you some time. Mrs. Buchanan wanted to get a pistol for her protection—she travels frequently in connection with her job as a courier for some businesses I work for as well. I don’t know a thing about guns myself, so when she asked me what to get, I referred her to my dear friend Richard Nobilio, who’s something of a buff on the subject of firearms. He was supposed to drop by this afternoon and help her out. I’m not sure if the gun you found is the gun he got for her, but I do know that he thought she should get something smaller, easy to handle for a lady. A .22 is a gun like that, right?”
“No man who took his woman’s safety seriously would set her up with just a .22.”
Right, Hagen thought. Exactly. He started to answer, but Klein shut him down.
“Questions, Detective,” Klein said. “Not statements.”
“All right, question.” He sneered. “Would Mr. Nobilio have had any reason to harm Mrs. Buchanan?”
“None,” said Hagen.
Sid Klein laughed. “I don’t mean to tell you gents how to do your job—for which I thank you. I mean that. My father was actually a cop, as you may know, one of the few Jews on the force in those days, but maybe you knew that, too. At any rate, if the gun really is Mr. Nobilio’s, doesn’t that tell you something? Who’d leave a gun at a crime scene if it could be easily traced? That gun being there, don’t you think it rules Mr. Nobilio out as a suspect? And by extension, his associate Mr. Hagen as well? I think we can safely say that what you have there is either a plant or tampered evidence or both.”
“Tampered evidence?” one of the detectives said. “Sweet Jesus Christ. This early in the game, you’re pulling out your cheap lawyer tricks.”
“Cheap?” Klein said. An elongated beat later, he raised an eyebrow. It looked vaguely motorized. “I doubt that when Mr. Hagen gets my bill, he’ll agree that I’m cheap,” Klein said. “And I certainly don’t have to tell you that the laws of the land are not lawyer tricks.”
Klein had struck a nerve, the way for which had been paved by preying on the detective’s anti-Semitism. Even under the circumstances, it was a pleasure for Hagen to watch Sid Klein work.
Another detective started talking, but Klein interrupted him and turned to the first one.
“That was her gun, probably, right? How could she have been in any position to wipe her prints off of it? Why would the killer have bothered?”
“I don’t know,” the detective said, clearly working to put on a front. “You tell me.”
Klein raised his palms. “I can’t! All I’m trying to say, those are some interesting questions. Food for thought, I guess would be the expression.”
When the interview was over, the police let Hagen go, though he was asked to remain within the five boroughs of New York until further notice. He looked at Klein, and Klein closed his eyes and very slightly shook his head. Fighting that could wait.
A pool of reporters were waiting for them. “Mr. Hagen!” one shouted. “Why would an innocent man need to hire Sid Klein?”
Hagen started to answer, but Klein—almost like a third baseman cutting off a waiting shortstop—strode forward to field the question. “It is a sad fact,” Klein said, “that in this cruel and fallen world, only small children are innocent. There is no such thing as an innocent adult. It’s an oxymoron. However, not-guilty people hire me all the time for various matters, and I’m happy to announce that Congressman Hagen is among them.” Hagen had been Nevada’s lone congressman for less than six months, appointed to fill out the term of a man whose ranch was downwind of the nuclear testing ranges and who had died of cancer. Sid Klein’s use of the title was calculated. Every breath he took seemed calculated. His pregnant pauses, his gestures, even his eye blinks made him seem like a remarkably lifelike robot. “Congressman Hagen is merely here to be of service to the authorities,” Klein continued. “It is certainly our hope that those responsible for this reprehensible act are brought swiftly to justice. As you may know, Mrs. Buchanan was a valued employee of a company in which Congressman Hagen is a member of the board of directors, and she will be missed. Our sympathies and indeed our hearts go out to her family.” Klein took an unnecessarily deep bow. “Gentlemen.”
Al Neri—who hadn’t been around this many cops since he was one himself—squared his shoulders like a football lineman and led the way to a waiting car. It sped away.
Hagen showed no remorse.
Why should he? He hadn’t had anything to do with the murder. And what could he do about it now? Nothing. Nothing, that is, except to swing into what he’d spent half his adult life doing: damage control (the other half had been spent on negotiation). Hagen did have some remorse, at some level, about various things—he was not a heartless man; quite the opposite, he believed—but it was nobody’s business but his own.
Nobody said anything. When the car pulled up outside Klein’s building, Klein patted Hagen on the knee and got out. Hagen nodded his appreciation.
Neri got in back with Hagen, and Hagen raised the partition so that the driver couldn’t hear. The car was not a limo, but Neri had had it tricked out with limousine details. It was also armored, of course. What used to be one of Momo Barone’s chop shops, over on Bergen Street, now did exclusively legal custom work, specializing in jobs like this.
“How bad was it,” Hagen asked, “after I left?”
Neri stuck out his lower lip. “Not so bad.”
Meaning very, Tom understood. “The cops didn’t…”
“Nah. They left when you did. Mike tried to conduct more business and wrap things up, but from what I understand, the other fellas, they was all excited and this and that, so there was various concerns raised about the security, and everybody pretty much left after that. You didn’t miss nothin’, believe me. Unless you was of a mind to see the boss take Eddie Paradise aside and quietly rip him a variety of new assholes.”
Hagen nodded.
They rode the rest of the way home in silence.
She was dead. It didn’t seem possible. Gone. Just that afternoon, she’d been susceptible to the little death, at least twice, and thereby seemed breathtakingly alive. Tom couldn’t think about that. About her. About Judy Buchanan, who was dead. Murdered.
He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and tried to focus.
Tom Hagen’s biggest fear now wasn’t that he’d get pinned with the murder itself. He had too much on his side, too many strings he could pull or have pulled, to get taken down by a crime he did not commit. His biggest fear was that the killing had had something to do with Theresa. That she’d somehow arranged it.
In any event, some ugly things were bound to come to light. What and how and how much? That was still up in the air and might remain that way for a while. Obviously, Tom needed to have a long and difficult talk with his wife. He obviously needed to talk to Michael as well.
When he got home and he and Al got into the elevator, Tom did not hesitate.
“Penthouse,” he said.
Al nodded.
This thing of ours must come before your wife, your children, even your mother. Tom Hagen would never take the vows, but he knew them. No man was ever more faithful to them.
“We have any idea who tipped off the cops?” Tom asked on the way up. “How they knew where I was?”
Neri shook his head. “Unless somebody shows us his hand, I doubt we ever will.”
“How you figure?” Tom said.
“Too many possibilities,” Al said. “My first thought was that it was a cop. There are plenty of men on the force who’ll look the other way at a lot of the things we do but not when it comes to a murder, especially of a white woman. If it is a cop, we’ll probably never know who, and we’ll never be able to retaliate. But then I started considering all the people on the scene—almost forty, by my count. Who knows who they told about where they were going to be tonight? How many top men in various Families knew when and where the meeting was going to be? How many of those people might have some kind of ax to grind against you or Michael or our whole organization, who’d like to see us taken down a notch the way I guess it happened with the Cuneos? I’m not ruling out that it’s one of our people, either. And, yeah, it could be the disgraziato, too,” meaning Nick Geraci, “although, you ask me, that cocksucker gets credit for too much already.”
“But if you had to bet?” Tom asked.
“Cop,” the ex-cop said, shrugging. “And we’ll never know who.”
The elevator doors opened.
It was almost three in the morning, but the lights in Michael’s study still burned.
WHAT TOM TOLD THERESA WAS THAT THERE WERE people who wanted to hurt the family, and that, rest assured, they would not succeed.
They were in their bedroom, behind a locked door.
She dissolved before his very eyes, wailing and sobbing. Theresa was a tough woman, and this, what he’d reduced her to, was hard for him to watch.
When he lifted her up, she spit in his face and called him a filthy name. She was on the edge of hyperventilating.
The look in her eyes was not Theresa. It was barely human. It was the look of a wounded and dangerous animal.
Tom forced himself not to react. He greeted her passions by turning his to stone.
He was, in fact, relieved.
There was nothing at all in the way she was handling this to suggest she’d had anything to do with it. She could have never been so purely angry if at the same time she’d been worried about her involvement in a murder.
Tom told Theresa the accusations were lies, each and every one of them.
Hope flickered across her face. But then she slapped him, then told him to leave her alone. He did, optimistic that she’d come around, that everything would be fine.
The accusations were not all lies, of course. Just the criminal ones. It was an overstatement he soon came to regret. He’d been paying more attention to her reaction than to his presentation.
Hagen’s fingerprints turned up all over both the apartment where Judy Buchanan had been killed and her apartment in Las Vegas as well. This looked bad, but it meant nothing to the case. In the court of public opinion a person could be found guilty of adultery and thus convicted of murder, but in actual court, that was a tough one. In court, going up against Sid Klein, forget it.
But it wasn’t just the public who found the fingerprints meaningful. Theresa took their two daughters and their dog—a collie named Elvis—and went to stay with her parents in New Jersey. She’d done that before, though never over another woman.
Tom wasn’t crazy about the idea, but he understood and supported her decision.
Soon after that, a “police spokesman” cited a “vast cache” of evidence they had come upon that corroborated the illicit nature of Mr. Hagen and Mrs. Buchanan’s relationship.
An incriminating photograph had also been mailed, anonymously, to one of the New York tabloids and had been reprinted in newspapers and magazines across the country.
Not long after that, Theresa had taken nearly all her things and all the girls’ things, too, and moved to the house she’d bought in Florida. She enrolled the girls in school there. She begged Tom not to be in contact with her, told him she hoped he rotted in hell.
“I’m sure I will,” he said.
She laughed at him and hung up.
It made him think of the girl he had married, that laugh. That girl didn’t have it in her to laugh like that. Tom had to face up to it: the bitterness in that laugh, the anger and the cynicism, the loss of innocence, had been his doing.
He’d work this out, he told himself. He was sure of it.
His heart started revving, but as these episodes went, it was a mild one. He stayed at his kitchen table, staring at the phone, alone in his huge white apartment, sipping Crown Royal on the rocks from a misshapen coffee mug little Gianna had made for him. He got up to get more ice, then picked up the phone and called his son Frank in New Haven. He let it ring for a long time, but there was no answer. He called his younger son, Andrew, at Notre Dame, but when he heard the boy’s voice he couldn’t think of what to say.
“Dad?” Andrew said.
“How did you know it was me?”
“Nobody else calls me and doesn’t talk.”
“When else did I ever do that?”
“How are you, Dad?”
“Have you talked to your mother?”
“Yeah,” he said. Every day. He was Theresa’s secret favorite, which probably only Theresa thought of as a secret. “Mom said you’d call. Have you been drinking?”
How was it possible at that age to be such a prig? “What are you, my father?”
“No,” he said. “Your father died from drinking too much.”
“God willing, you’ll live long enough to see that things aren’t so black and white as how I think you see the world.”
“God, huh?”
“How’s school?”
Andrew humored him and talked about it for a while.
“You know that what’s going on here,” Tom said, “it’s a crock, all right? It’s just harassment.”
“I believe you, Dad.”
He said it in a way that sounded reassuring, like absolution. When Andrew first said he was considering the priesthood, Tom was afraid it was because he was such a mama’s boy and worried that she’d loved him so much it had turned him into a fairy, the way Carmela had done to poor Fredo. Now Tom was thinking it was something else. That Andrew thought he needed to atone for the proverbial sins of the father.
“This is all going to blow over,” Tom said. “This is all going to work out, believe me. Things aren’t what they seem.”
“‘There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’”
“Is that right?”
“It’s from Hamlet, Dad.”
“That’s the problem with education. You learn something new and you forget that other people sat at that same desk before you got there.”
“I love you, Dad.”
“Good luck with those exams,” Tom said.
He hung up. He rubbed his face, then poured the last of the bottle into the mug. Tom missed them, Theresa and the girls, and his sons, too. It was clouding his judgment, making him sentimental.
Tom realized now that he’d been mistaken. What had happened to Theresa—that hardness that he’d heard in her laugh—was something that happened to everybody. It was the goddamned human condition. Sid Klein was right. There are no innocent adults.
THE FIRST BIG BREAK IN THE CASE SEEMED TO COME when, canvassing the neighborhood for witnesses, the homicide detective who’d first taken the reins of the case found a woman who’d seen the killers leave. She would have come forward sooner, but she’d heard that the killers were “Mafia hit men” and she was afraid. On the night of the murder, she said, she’d been out walking her dog and had seen two men run out of Judy Buchanan’s building, one carrying a big gun. The woman hid behind a parked car. The men got into a late-model Plymouth and drove away. As they did, the woman got a look at their license number, which she had committed to memory. The woman was a musician and good at memorizing things, which were the only clues the public had about her identity. There were various rumors about the woman and how the detective knew her. There also seemed to be some holes in her story. Until such time as a trial, though, her identity was being protected. Even the breed of her dog was confidential.
The cops ran that license-plate number, and it led them to a Mrs. Robert Dantzler, in a modest house in the outer reaches of Queens. The Plymouth was in the driveway, with a new Corvette parked behind it. They asked the young woman who answered the door if they could speak to her mother, but that was Mrs. Dantzler: a plain-faced twenty-year-old in clingy pajamas at noon. She was unfazed by the insult. Her husband (a retired beat cop and licensed private investigator) and her big brother (Vernon K. Rougatis, who was “between jobs”) had gone away suddenly on what they’d called a business trip. They’d packed in a hurry and taken a cab. She didn’t know if business trip was code for something else. All she knew, she said, was that she was getting tired of her husband’s “bullcrap” (“Mr. Dantzler’s [nonsense],” according to the newspaper of record). The house was crammed with things: new appliances, new furniture, and one whole room full of expensive china dolls. Later, there would be feature stories about how these dolls had been a comfort to her. Mrs. Dantzler stayed on the periphery of this story for a while, unsuccessfully suing to get her husband’s surveillance photos back and to get paid by anyone and everyone who had published them. Even after that, she was a regular guest on The Joe Franklin Show.
The sheer amount of material goods—her Corvette had only eighty-three miles on it—seemed beyond Bob Dantzler’s means, but apparently the only sinister element lurking behind all that was a mountain of consumer debt. The finished basement was Bob Dantzler’s part of the house, she said, but police didn’t find anything there that was of much use. Mrs. Dantzler said that in addition to a suitcase, her husband had taken a “really big” satchel with him on his trip. He did have a sizable arsenal down there—sixty-one guns, rifles, and shotguns, as well as hundreds of boxes of ammo, which led to many people’s assumption that he’d been a contract killer for the Mafia, and not merely a man enjoying the bejesus out of his constitutional right to keep and bear arms.
Dantzler’s personnel file—he’d spent twenty-five years on the force—revealed no ties or noteworthy run-ins with elements of the Mafia. Neither did the interviews with the men who’d worked with him. He’d been regarded as a capable, unambitious cop, remarkable only because he got divorced and remarried every few years, the way movie stars do.
Days after the search of her house, the plain young woman in the pajamas, the fifth Mrs. Bob Dantzler, found out that she was the last of the line.
Responding to an anonymous tip, police found Bob Dantzler and his brother-in-law on a garbage barge in New Jersey, docked but as yet unloaded. Each man had been shot twice in the back of the head and wrapped in a bedspread. The bullets came from a .45, more gun than was usually used for such assassinations. Their wallets were still in their pants pockets. No acid or quicklime had been used to accelerate decomposition. Their heads, hands, and feet were still attached. Whoever killed them obviously wanted them to be found.
The brother-in-law had A-negative blood, which occurs in only six percent of the American people, the fourth-rarest type. Judy Buchanan’s blood was O-positive. The other blood type found at the scene, which must have come from the shooter, was A-negative. There seemed to be a strong circumstantial case that these were the killers and that the investigation should focus on who had hired them.
“It’s just simple common sense,” Sid Klein pointed out to a group of reporters assembled outside his law office, “that these deaths have nothing to do with my client. What, after all, did Mr. Hagen have to gain from killing the killers? Nothing. No tie between him and these men has been or will be found. What did the people who hired the killers have to gain? Everything. Is it time to look beyond my client and try to find the person or persons behind these heinous crimes? It is. It is past time.”
Nonetheless, the garbage had been loaded at a city sanitation facility only a block from where Tom Hagen lived. That, of course, meant nothing—garbage came there from all over the East Side—but it certainly didn’t look good.
What about the allegation that the police had evidence that showed that Judy Buchanan had been a kept woman for almost ten years, that Hagen had even paid for the bills incurred by her mother and her son?
“It’s a misunderstanding,” Klein said. “Minor accounting blunders, is all that is. The payments in question were perfectly legal fringe benefits she had been given. These payments should have been funded by a company for which Mr. Hagen was a signatory, not by Mr. Hagen personally. It was an honest mistake, and the accountant who made these mistakes has been fired. He accepts full responsibility for these errors, however, and he’s prepared to admit to them, under oath, in a court of law.”
MANY OF THE EFFORTS TO BUILD A CASE WERE VISIBLE to the naked eye, and it seemed safe to assume that any number of behind-the-scenes things were happening, too. An arrest seemed to be getting closer every day.
And kept not happening.
As the investigation dragged on, it started to seem to some observers that the law-enforcement officials in charge—and it was challenging, from the outside looking in, to discern just who was in charge—seemed more interested in keeping the drama before the public than they were in solving the actual murder.
Exhibit A: the hapless NYPD detective initially on the case might never have been replaced at all if not for a newspaper column that revealed corruption galore in his past. Federal prosecutors threatened the columnist with jail if he did not reveal the “underworld kingpin” who’d been his anonymous source, which he refused to do. Years later, however, in the deeply moving and often hilarious memoir Hard-Bitten, he claimed he’d been contacted by an expensive public-relations firm in lower Manhattan, which had then coordinated his interview with Eddie Paradise, who had committed to memory the intricate details of the many payoffs the detective had accepted—from the Corleones as well as several other New York Families. They’d all checked out.
According to the book, at the time of the murder, Paradise had no idea that the detective was under his friend Momo Barone’s thumb. He also had no idea that the Roach, his best friend, was conspiring against him. That—and the famous lion—all came out later. At the time, the way Eddie Paradise saw things was that he’d found a progressive and bloodless means of hurting the detective, someone he believed to be a threat to the Corleone Family, and the little guy was intemperately proud of himself for his own cleverness. The chapter begins this way: “Little Eddie Paradise was the first mobster to ever hire his own P.R. flak. He would not be the last.” Later in the chapter, Hard-Bitten chronicles the troubles that fateful column unleashed: “It was all just theater. I was acting tough, but that’s all it was—an act. And the sabers the Feds were rattling came straight from the prop department. Fool that I was, though, it all seemed real to me. I was a young man with three kids to feed and a long-suffering wife, so from where I stood the blades on those sabers looked pretty sharp. I had to look inside myself, but back then all there was to see was booze and fear. So I just played my part, like the enterprising red-blooded, true-blue American fake that I was. I put on a brave face, spent a few nights in jail, and when it all blew over, I was a hero. A poster boy for the First Amendment. A couple years later, I won a Pulitzer Prize. Anyone who says this isn’t a great country can kiss my saggy white ass.”
The men the NYPD next assigned to the case were skilled and respected straight arrows well known to anyone on the New York crime beat: Detective John Siriani, one of the most decorated Italian-Americans on the force, and Detective Gary Evans, a brush-cut telegenic blond of no discernible ethnicity. From the beginning, though, there was something peculiar in the set of their jaws, some oddly glazed look about them, as if they were two proud star ballplayers stuck on a team that’s given up on the season. They were not men given to self-pity. If they ever asked why me, there is no record of it. They would have known full well that there were any number of reasons two homicide detectives with astronomically high clearance rates might get assigned to a case that, among other things, was preordained to bring that rate down.
It became possible, though, for even casual observers to see some of what was behind the deadened look in the detectives’ eyes. Every few days, some public official called some kind of press conference or made some statement about the case that was clearly calculated to make news; each time it happened, it must have driven home to the detectives what pawns they were. The coroner came to work every day with TV makeup on. The mayor and several members of the NYPD’s top brass—including Chief Phillips—were unshy about discussing the case and, more so, what it represented. The district attorney’s office installed a new bank of telephones for their friends in the press. The increasingly reclusive director of the FBI reversed field and discussed the case as part of an hour-long interview with the dean of the network-TV anchormen.
Attorney General Daniel Brendan Shea, of course, was engaged in his quest to go down in history as the man who brought down the Mafia, to destroy the sorts of men who’d made his family filthy rich, who’d helped fund his Ivy League education, and without whom his meteoric ascent to becoming the youngest attorney general in American history would never have been possible. It was therefore natural that in the speeches he made at college graduation ceremonies and in the proximity of the petty arrests his people were racking up, he might at least in passing mention this high-profile case with its supposed Mafia ties. He also spoke not once, not twice, but three times at fund-raising events for a lowly New York State Senate candidate—a man who just happened to be the prosecutor assigned to the case. On all three occasions, Danny Shea mentioned “the scourge of organized crime” in general and “the tragic events surrounding the death of Mrs. Buchanan” in particular. In the third, he actually used the term “hit men.”
MICHAEL CORLEONE MET WITH SID KLEIN OVER lunch in the upstairs back room at Patsy’s, an old-school red-sauce Italian place on Fifty-sixth Street. Michael’s office was almost certainly free of wiretaps, by dint of Al Neri’s love of gadgetry, and Michael often cooked lunch himself for meetings there, but Rita Duvall was there with two nuns visiting from France. (She’d been raised in a convent after her mother shot her father and then herself.) The law prohibited wiretaps in lawyer’s offices, but Michael was wary of relying on that, as was Sid Klein—who, amazingly, had no office. He got by with a photographic memory and a file clerk who worked in a converted bank vault in Chinatown. Klein never took notes and rarely carried a briefcase.
They arrived separately, came in through the kitchen, and took the back stairs to their table. Patsy’s knew how to make things easy for important people who didn’t want their meals interrupted by the intrusion of the public.
Al Neri sat alone at the next table.
“He could join us,” Klein said.
“He’s fine,” Michael said.
“I should get a man like him,” Klein said. “A person can’t be too careful these days.”
“‘These days’?” Michael said. “When was it ever different?”
“Ah, a philosopher,” Klein said. “A history buff. I like you. Where’d you find him, anyway? Not through a service, I bet.”
Michael suspected Klein already knew the answer. “He was a cop,” Michael said.
“I thought people in your line of work hated the cops.”
Neri chuckled softly.
“What line of work would that be?” Michael said.
“You tell me,” Klein said. He held up his hands. “Or better yet, don’t.”
“You’re on retainer,” Michael said.
“That’s true,” Klein said. “But I only want to know what I want to know, and when I want to know it, I ask. Keeps my life simple.”
Michael lit a cigarette. What people never seemed to understand about him—even people who knew enough to know better—was how little of his time was taken up with things that might be considered criminal. A typical day in the life of Michael Corleone was indistinguishable from that of any other successful private investor and real estate developer. He was, in fact, a little bit of a history buff, though. He understood that while a man’s life is made up of typical days, it is only the atypical days that history can use.
Sid Klein opened his menu. Michael didn’t and wouldn’t. It was something he’d learned from his brother Sonny. Any fine restaurant will try to make you whatever you ask for. Just ask.
“This is what’s beautiful about the Italian people,” Klein said, jabbing a finger at the menu for emphasis. “At all your important discussions, you sit down, break bread. I shouldn’t say just bread. Great food and plenty of it.”
Michael ignored this.
“Enlighten me, counselor,” Michael said. “Isn’t there a rule of law that requires the police, the prosecutors, either one, to turn over evidence to you?”
“And who am I?”
Michael frowned.
“I’m nobody,” Klein said. “That’s who I am. I’m Tom Hagen’s lawyer, but he’s not charged with anything, he’s not indicted, nothing. So until there’s a real trial on the horizon somewhere—which I’m sure you don’t want that, a trial—but until that point in time they don’t have to give anybody anything. If you ask me, they’re playing this out the way they are because they don’t have anything.”
Which is one of the many points Sid Klein was making in the many interviews he was granting to what seemed like anyone who asked.
“So is that why you’re conducting so much of your business—which in this regard is often my business—on the front pages of the newspapers?”
“Ah, all right. I see. That’s why you asked me here. Though I have to wonder why you didn’t just ask Tom, or why you didn’t ask him to ask me.”
Michael Corleone’s smile was disconnected from anything happy or amusing. “I asked you here, as I thought I told you, because I got a call from the chef himself that said the veal would be good today.”
“I’m getting the gnocchi, extra sauce.” He pronounced it ga-no-chee. “I love that stuff, can’t get it at home. I’ve had it here before, actually.”
Michael corrected his pronunciation.
“Are you sure?”
“How could I not be sure about a thing like that?”
“Let’s ask the waiter.”
“I only corrected you because you said you loved the stuff. I didn’t want you to embarrass yourself.”
“You’re aware of what I do for a living, right?” Klein said. “You think I’m real worried about embarrassing myself? Let’s ask the waiter.”
But when it came time to order, he neither asked the waiter nor mispronounced it.
“Is there anything I’m saying,” Klein said when they were alone again, “when those notebooks and microphones are in my face that isn’t positive for Tom and by extension you and your business? I hardly think so. They’re playing this whole thing out in the press, and if there’s never a trial, who’s going to be in a position to rebut all those false allegations? Nobody. As Tom’s lawyer, I’d have to forbid him from doing it, and if he did so, I’d have to resign. You can’t do it, either. Commenting at all would look like an admission of guilt. I’ll tell you what, the thing I’d really like to say is that this isn’t what a contract killing looks like. This isn’t how it works in the…in the line of work they’re talking about. Those men who killed her would have been Italian, for one thing, and—”
“What are you talking about?”
“Don’t worry, I’d never say things like that in public. But it’s true that the public has very little idea about how all this works, the mechanics of it. Even the cops don’t understand it, but if I could just—”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about. So maybe you shouldn’t talk about it.”
Klein rubbed his chin. He looked over at Al Neri. Neri smiled, in the manner of a patient cat who knows it will eventually get its shot at the mouse. “All right,” Klein said to Michael. “You’re right. I was out of line.”
Michael lit another cigarette and took his time doing it.
“How sure are you,” Michael said, “that they aren’t going to charge Tom with this?”
“A good lawyer is careful to never be overly sure of anything,” Klein said. “As for how sure I am, I’m bad with odds-making, which I’m sure you’ve heard from some of your associates.”
Michael had, of course. Klein was a lousy gambler who bet often and fairly small and thus never had any trouble covering his losses. That the betting didn’t escalate, that he didn’t dig himself deeper by trying to make up everything he lost Saturday on Sunday’s games, did show unusual discipline, which Michael admired. Still, few habitual gamblers manage to maintain such discipline over time.
Michael excused himself to go wash his hands and to give Klein a chance to grow anxious over not really answering the question. Silence was a fine tool for working over a big talker. Al caught his eye as he passed. He’d seen the tactic before.
“Please don’t misunderstand, young man,” Klein said when Michael returned to the table. “I’m not being coy with you or…what’s the term? Busting your balls? I’m confident that there’s not a good case here, but they’re going to make sure it gets played for everything it’s worth and then some.”
“Curious: who’s they?”
“C’mon. Who do you think?”
“I want to hear your perspective. I’ve paid for it.”
“If they charge Tom Hagen with this horrible crime,” Klein said, going into an impression of James K. Shea’s phony Brahmin accent, “they shall suffer an ignominious defeat on the field of battle.” He sounded more like Morrie Streator, the Vegas comedian who’d popularized the impression, than he did a Shea brother. Klein shook his head in self-deprecation. “I’ll stop. But, see, if charges are never filed, they get to use this thing until they get bored with it. Sooner or later they’ll drop it—probably after the November election—but they’ll do it quietly, and therefore they’ll never look like they’ve suffered any sort of defeat—”
“Because the public’s memory is as short as a senile dog’s.”
Klein smiled. “Tom told me that little saying of yours. Catchy. Can’t say as I disagree.”
“So what right do the authorities have in telling Tom he can’t leave the area?”
“The five boroughs of New York?” Klein clarified. “No right whatsoever.”
“But if I sent him on an out-of-town business trip—”
“A business trip where?”
To meet with Jack Woltz in Los Angeles, for one thing. Michael had had to trust Johnny and some of his people out there to get the ball rolling, but it was a project that needed Tom’s touch. Or to meet with Pat Geary, the Nevada senator and their old friend, who was running against Jimmy Shea in the primaries, a glorified favorite-son candidate who appealed to voters in the South and the mountain West and other, more conservative elements in the party—a campaign that presumably was aimed less at winning than at being enough of a pain in the ass that he could make a speech at the convention and garner other, more substantial favors. “Why does it matter where?”
“I suppose it doesn’t. Go ahead. Feel free. Nothing will happen.”
“Nothing?”
“Nothing legal,” Klein said. “But I’d think he’d be followed. Given the interest the Justice Department has shown in the case, I’d wager that those doing the following will be FBI.”
“Though, as you say, you have no talent with the odds,” Michael said.
“Sure, it’s true,” Klein said. “But in a wager like this, think of me as the house.”
“I have my own airplane,” Michael said. “I fly it myself, as kind of a hobby. If Tom and I took a business trip together, and I flew us—”
“What are you saying, that you’re going to take airborne evasive action against the FBI?”
“You watch too many war movies,” Michael said.
“You still have to file flight plans with someone, though, right?”
“If I fly from private airstrip to private airstrip in a private plane—me, a hired pilot, either way—who knows who the passengers are? What can the FBI do, take an airplane up, follow me in the air, and land right behind me—or my employees—on a privately owned airstrip? Is that legal?”
“What do you think?”
“I think I’m getting tired of you asking me questions when I want answers.”
Klein shrugged. “My apologies. You want opinions, ask a cabbie or a judge. I do two things for a living. I ask questions and I argue. I get my answers from other people.”
“I thought maybe you were going to say the two things you do are suck blood and kiss ass,” Michael said.
Klein laughed. “Those, too.”
“That’s four things.”
“They’re all related.”
“So what’s your point?”
Their food came.
“Don’t be naïve, is my point,” said Sid Klein when they were alone again. “The Feds don’t want to take you to court for any of this, they want to ruin you. Under those circumstances, they’re much less concerned with what’s legal than you are.” He beckoned toward his plate. “Ga-no-chee?”