Small Town

Well, he was a fancy kind of a cop, always had been. Always had the expensive clothes and the extensive vocabulary, and knew when to trot them out and when to leave them in the closet. Growing up in Park Slope, he’d been as well liked as Willy Loman ever hoped to be, and he was good enough in sports and enough of a cutup in class to mask an ambition that got him a full scholarship to Colgate. That was the next thing to Ivy League and a healthy cut above Brooklyn College, which was where most of his classmates went, if they went anywhere at all. He’d surprised them by going away to a fancy school, and he surprised his classmates at Colgate by going straight from the campus to the NYPD. He’d scored well on the LSAT and got accepted at four of the five law schools he’d applied to, told them all thanks but no thanks and went on the cops.

He stopped at the bar to say hello to Claudia Gerndorf, who’d profiled him for New York magazine shortly after he was appointed commissioner. She introduced him to her companion, a labor leader he’d met in passing, and he gave the man a nod and a smile but didn’t offer to shake hands. The guy had never been arrested, not so far as Buckram knew, but that didn’t mean his hands were clean enough to shake.

“I’ve got a column now in the New York Observer,” she said. “You know, we really ought to sit down one of these days and catch up.”

“We’ll do that,” he said. “Meanwhile, there’s a table of fellows I’ve got to sit down with right now.”

And you can put that in your column, he thought. Former Police Commissioner Francis J. Buckram — and don’t make it Francis X., assuming that every Francis gets stuck with Xavier for a middle name, and for God’s sake don’t make the last name Bushman — that Francis J. Buckram was spotted at a fashionable East Side eatery, sharing vichyssoise and frogs’ legs with three real estate heavies. He might not get anything out of the evening but heartburn and a headache, but a little ink linking his name with some serious New York money couldn’t do him any harm.

They were on their feet when he reached their table. He knew Avery Davis, who said, “Fran, it’s good to see you. You know these fellows, don’t you? Irv Boasberg and Hartley Saft.”

He shook hands all around, apologizing for keeping them waiting, and was assured they’d just gotten there themselves. They had drinks in front of them, and when the waiter came over he ordered a Bombay martini, straight up and extra dry, with a twist. Hartley Saft, who had a drinker’s complexion, took a refill on the Scotch. Davis and Boasberg said they were fine.

The conversation throughout the meal steered clear of Topic A. Ongoing terrorism got some of their attention, along with speculation about the eventual development of the Ground Zero site. Someone brought up a current scandal involving the health inspector’s office. “I remember when the papers used to print a weekly list of restaurants that got cited for violations,” Irv Boasberg said. “You’d look at the list, terrified you’d find your favorite Chinese restaurant on it, and what did it mean if you did?”

“That somebody forgot to slip the inspector a couple of bucks,” Hartley Saft said. “But it killed your appetite, didn’t it? You know what? Let’s not talk about restaurant violations.”

So they ate French food and drank California wine, and he made everybody happy by telling cop stories. That was always safe because everybody liked cop stories, and Fran Buckram had a batch of them that had stood the test of time.

Not every former police commissioner could say the same. Buckram was atypical in that he had come up through the ranks. New York’s top cop more often than not lacked any real police experience. The position was largely administrative, and the present holder of the office had previously served as fire commissioner in Detroit; he’d never been a policeman, or a fireman either, as far as that went.

It made a certain amount of sense. The president of the United States, after all, was commander in chief of the armed forces, but that didn’t mean he had to have been an army general in order to do the job.

As far as most cops were concerned, anyone fairly high up in the NYPD was light-years away from the street, and chiefly concerned with covering asses, his own and the department’s. The man at the top, the commissioner, was first and foremost a politician, then an administrator, and not a real cop at all.

Still, the street cops liked it when the top slot was filled by someone who’d been on the job himself. Buckram, who started out walking a beat in the Gravesend section of Brooklyn and put in his time as a detective with Major Cases, eventually parlayed a saloon-born friendship into a stint as police commissioner of Portland, Oregon. He spent three years there, and got a ton of good press; the crime rate dropped, and the Portland cops went up a few notches in everybody’s esteem, not least of all their own.