Dead Line

Chapter Eight

It was the teeth of the lunch hour, so to speak, when an unapologetic Hank Sweeney—“I just assumed she lived in the building”—and I breezed through the front door of the University Club and took a table in the far corner of the half-filled dining room.

This wasn’t the leisurely, wine-soaked lunch that the other diners — mostly stockbrokers and institutional investors who already had the flavor of the day’s Dow — were sharing. I needed information and I needed some counsel, and I needed it fast. The clock was pounding toward 1:00 P.M., an hour when all good reporters already had a rough draft of the next day’s story in the computer monitor of their minds. Me, I had only questions to ask of people I hadn’t yet called, as well as a sense of gloomy guilt so large and ominous it could envelope an oversize cow.

Still, I’m not a good reporter. I’m a great one. Just ask me. Which is why the passage of time didn’t bother me as much as it did, say, Peter Martin, who kept ringing my cell phone approximately every nine seconds, no doubt, in his words, to find out where the flying frick I might be and did I have the time in my busy day to bother writing a follow-up story about the biggest theft in the history of the fricking world?

Or something like that. I couldn’t be sure of the exact verbiage because I didn’t answer the calls. I’d get to him soon enough.

My favorite waitress, Pam, glided over to the table with menus and I pointed at Hank, who, by the way, was the only black in the room not carrying a tray or wearing an apron, and said, “Burger?” He nodded, looked at Pam and said, “Medium, please.”

“Same,” I said, and added, “And bring a third one for our late-arriving friend, rare, with extra everything. And we’re in something of a rush, Pam.”

As if he sensed a countdown toward good food, Vinny Mongillo appeared in the distant doorway, spotted us without trouble, and sauntered through the room like he owned it, even stopping and chatting with a couple of the more familiar captains of industry along the way. It makes no sense that a man of his considerable girth can actually saunter, and yet he does, he does. He makes every motion seem so natural, right down to the clap he gave me on the side of my shoulder as he said, “Jesus, Fair Hair, your voicemail was so dire it made it sound like one of the mean third-graders stole your Halle Berry lunchbox.”

I ignored that, which I do with so much of what Mongillo says. He exchanged greetings with Sweeney, calling him, unless I heard wrong, “Brother Hank.”

I said to Mongillo, without elaboration or any need for it, “Spill. I need everything you know and everything you suspect on the Kane murder.”

He shook his head, not in a way that denied my request, but more like how a kitchen contractor immediately searches out the negative in even the simplest undertaking. “You want a faucet in your sink? Oh, boy, I don’t know, especially with the way the tile is cut and the pipes are shaped and the light fixture hangs down.” And then he comes up with an answer that he knew all along.

Vinny’s like that as well. He always has the answer. He just wants to make sure you know the obstacles he overcame to get it.

So here we go. “You want to talk tight-lipped,” he began. “Jesus mother of an unforgiving Christ. The press release was a total of one paragraph. One. The homicide cops never came over to the tape to talk to us hacks. The briefing at headquarters lasted all of two-and-a-half minutes, and involved the commissioner reading a statement that said nothing and walking away from the podium without answering any questions.”

I glanced over at Sweeney, retired homicide lieutenant with the Boston PD, and he seemed enraptured by his view from the other side, actually leaning over the table, his big chin resting on the back of his right hand. He wasn’t completely familiar with the whole Mongillo extravaganza quite yet and this probably wasn’t the time to warn him.

Mongillo kept talking as Pam filled our water glasses and placed a basket of bread on the table.

“Here’s what they want you to know,” he said. “They want you to know that the victim’s name is Hilary Kane. She’s twenty-nine years old. She’s a lawyer for the city. She was shot once in the temple and once in the back of the head as she sat in the driver’s seat of her car, a 2002 Saab 9–3 four-door. She was dead virtually immediately.” He paused here for effect, then added, “And the police, of course, also want you to know that they’re pursuing numerous leads.”

That last bit is a line, and a rather ridiculous one, written into the end of every police press release. I looked back over at Sweeney, who seemed to take no offense.

Mongillo reached over for a hunk of bread, spread a heaping wad of butter on it like it was good for him, and took a longing bite. After he chewed for a moment, he said, “Here’s what the police don’t want you to know.” And with that, he looked at the two of us conspiratorially.

“They don’t want you to know that they’re in some bizarre shit-fight with the FBI over the evidence in this thing. The city beat the Feds to the girl’s apartment by about an hour, then they argued so hard about where the evidence should go that bosses had to be called in from both sides. My understanding is that there’s a U.S. attorney preparing to walk into U.S. District Court by three this afternoon seeking a temporary restraining order against Boston PD from mucking with any materials, meaning possible evidence, pulled from the victim’s apartment.”

Mongillo paused for another bite of bread. I took the opportunity to pose a question, the answer to which I already pretty well knew, at least partially. Or maybe not. “Why the hell is the Bureau getting involved in a local murder?” I asked.

Mongillo looked at me in that way an impatient teenager might look at his tagalong little brother.

“Gee, good question. You ever thought about being a reporter?”

Luckily, the hamburgers arrived at that exact moment, and any prospect of tension gave way to the joys of gastronomy — and believe me, with Hank Sweeney and Vinny Mongillo involved, virtually any gastronomy is a joyous occasion, and when the food is on someone else’s tab, namely mine, it’s nearly transcendental.

Mongillo took a monstrous bite into his burger, chewed methodically, then said, “It’s the question of the hour. I’ve got about two dozen calls out on it. I’m not getting any answers back, at least not yet, anyway. Obviously, either the victim or a suspect that we don’t yet know about is in some way linked to a federal case.”

Yeah, the Gardner Museum heist. So I told him, in utmost confidence, of my visit to her apartment that afternoon. Sweeney sat there eating, taking it all in.

When I was done with my soliloquy, Mongillo looked at me bemused and said, “A B&E on Beacon Hill. Christ almighty, Fair Hair’s turning into quite the bad boy.”

As he made reference to my lawbreaking ways, I felt my insides begin to churn, until I realized it was actually my cellular telephone vibrating in the breast pocket of my jacket. I glanced at the number — Peter Martin’s, again — and ignored it.

I shook my head sadly and said, “I wish I could laugh about it. The fact is, I think I caused an innocent person to die.”

Vinny was midbite as I said this. He stared at me as he chewed, and when he was done, he said in an uncharacteristically soft tone, “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

I nodded. “Unfortunately, I am.”

“Tell Vinny.”

“I’m not sure yet what there is to say. I get leaked information, spoon-fed, really, by a senior government official I’d never previously met. I get it into the paper under the crush of deadline. I wake up the next day and a lawyer with the city, a young woman, is shot dead in the Boston Common garage. Sorry, Vinny, but I don’t believe in coincidence. I work for a newspaper. I’m not allowed to. That story triggered something, and in this case, it was a gun.”

Vinny shoved a couple of Chef Kelly’s handcut French fries into his mouth, which inexplicably made me wonder why chefs get this lyrical little title that precedes only their first name. Reporter Jack. I just can’t picture it.

Vinny was quiet. Check that. He wasn’t speaking, he was chewing, which is anything but quiet. I looked at Hank, who stared back knowingly at me, though what he knew I wasn’t sure right then. In the absence of anything else, I said, “I may have caused a young woman’s murder.”

That hung out there like a storm cloud before a hard rain. It hung out there until Hank audibly cleared his throat and said, “Jack, if all this worst-case scenario jazz is right, you didn’t cause anyone to die. You didn’t leak the story. You didn’t pull the trigger. You don’t know what the story behind the story really is.”

I replied, in a sharper tone than I intended, “So what you’re saying is that I was probably just used.”

Hank nodded.

I pounded my closed fist on the table, so that the plate with my mostly uneaten hamburger rattled against my water glass, and a few of the nearby diners, fearing some rapid downturn in the NASDAQ, reached in unison for the Palm V’s to check the latest numbers.

Hank Sweeney had just given voice to my unspoken fears, and I looked at him hard and all but hissed, “That’s worse. That’s much worse. I’m too good to be used. I’ve been doing this too fucking long to be used. I’m supposed to use people. I’m not supposed to be the one who’s used — especially not in the death of a young woman.”

Vinny started to say something and I cut him off, looking from one to the other, then out into an empty expanse of dining room at nothing at all.

“I’ve invested my adult life, my entire career, my very sense of identity, in pursuit of the truth. Sometimes it’s unpleasant. Sometimes it gets downright nasty. Sometimes the truth isn’t anything that you ever want to have anything more than a passing familiarity with. But still, you have to learn it. We have to let the public know it. Even at its worst, it’s a bedrock, an immovable foundation, a place from which to build or mend.

“And now, by doing what I’ve always done, believing what I’ve always believed in, I might have caused someone to die. I pursued truth, and Hilary Kane is dead. So tell me this: How do I ever justify what I do for a living now?”

Silence, at least at our table. In the background, you could hear the idle chatter of the working rich as they bade each other fond farewells until the evening cocktail hour would bring them together, perhaps in the very same place.

I looked at Hank, who stared complacently back at me. As we did this, it was Mongillo who absently pushed his plate a few inches toward the middle of our table and said, “Suppose you have it inside-out, Jack.” He paused here for a moment and we locked in on each other’s gaze. “Suppose,” he said, “that you didn’t print the truth at all?”

Did someone just pull the pin on an old-fashioned hand grenade? His words seemed to explode across the linen tablecloth, through the thick bone that needlessly protected my brain, and into that tiny part of my body, my nature, that occasionally commits an act called thought.

“Suppose,” Mongillo continued, knowing full well he was on something of a roll here, “that you were used so bad that it wasn’t even with truth, but with lies.”

I didn’t know whether to throttle him or hug him. I didn’t know whether to embrace what he was saying, or be repulsed by it. I didn’t know which was better, or more accurately, worse: to have the truth lead to someone’s death, or to have been set up with a deadly lie.

I felt my phone vibrate again, and then I felt it stop. I felt a pit in my stomach, and then I felt it go away. I felt all eyes staring directly at me, then I felt like I was very much alone. More than anything else, I felt the need to peel back the layers, to uncover the deceptions, to clarify the distortions, to confront the lies in search of an immovable truth.

“I need your help,” I said, hitting the edge of the table with my open hand, softly, not hard. As I said this, I looked from Mongillo to Sweeney. Each of them looked back at me and solemnly nodded.

“Someone’s going to pay,” Mongillo said, “And I want to be there to collect.”

Spoken like, well, Mongillo.

Sweeney said, “I’ve got more time than a turtle crossing the Mojave.”

Speaking of time, I checked my cell phone and saw it was close to 1:30 P.M., close to panic time for ordinary reporters.

“Thank you,” I said to each one of them, more sincere than I usually sound, which probably isn’t hard. “Then this would be the point in the life of a story when we make a plan.”

Right then, the nattily dressed Jason Buick, the appropriately obsequious manager of the club, approached our table with an air of apologetic urgency, as well as a cordless telephone.

“Jack, sorry to interrupt, but I’ve got a call here from a Mr. Peter Martin, who says he has an important news matter to discuss with you.”

“Mr. Peter Martin thinks that a change in the weather is an important news matter.”

“I heard that,” Martin said when I put the phone up to my ear.

“How are you, Peter?”

“I might be better if my best reporter might take a fricking moment and answer his fricking cell phone when I call him on it to talk about the biggest story in the nation today. Short of that, I’m not doing all that fricking well.”

I hate the word frick, by the way. I mean, be a newsman. Just say the real thing.

“I’ve been in meetings.”

That last line came out weak, the tone even weaker than the words. Reporters don’t go to meetings, at least this reporter, though I did meet the victim’s sister, or at least someone who I believed to be the sister, at the apartment. I was meeting Mongillo and Sweeney at the time of the call.

Martin said, his words and voice less accusatory: “I’ve got all hell breaking loose.” He paused for a flicker of a moment, then added, “And not just in the usual way.” That’s Martin’s code for: Jack, listen closely.

“Go ahead,” I said.

“I got a call a short time ago, a few minutes, maybe five minutes. It was from a young woman. She sounded really afraid, but coherent, not frantic or anything. She said she had tried to call you several times but only got your voicemail. So she called the switchboard looking for you. Barbara tried you on your cell phone, but you didn’t pick up. She thought the call sounded important, so she sent the woman to me.”

Barbara has an eye for news like Dean Martin had a taste for whiskey. She runs what’s known as the Record’s message center, sitting behind a big, circular panel in the front of the newsroom, answering phones, sending out pages, patching calls through to reporters traveling out of state and abroad. She hears sob stories from the public, tales of utter woe and incomprehensible tragedy. Then she makes sense of them, either blocking liars or searching out reporters for the callers who she believes are telling important truths. All this is to say, I listened even harder now.

Martin continued, “So the woman says to me that she’s in danger, that someone is stalking her. I’m thinking, yeah, give me a piece of news there, honey. Then she says, ‘I can’t go to the police. I need to speak to Jack Flynn. He’ll know why.’ ”

My mind was racing at a million miles an hour, but the problem was, my thoughts weren’t heading anywhere in particular. I didn’t know a stalking victim. I didn’t know anyone who couldn’t take their problems to the police. Before I could say anything, Martin added, almost as punctuation, “She said to tell you that this morning’s situation never really got ironed out.”

Get it? My sister; well, not my sister. Either one of my sisters would have clocked me with the iron and asked questions when I came to at Mass General Hospital. But the sister, Hilary’s sister, the one who could have put me out of my misery but instead chose only to add to it. Maybe she knew what she was doing after all.

So I got not only attentive, but deadly serious, pardon the overuse of the adjective. “How’d you leave it?” I asked, unable to conceal my urgency. “Where’d she say she was?”

“Wouldn’t tell me. She said she’d only deal through you. So she gave me a number that she said was to a pay phone and she told me to have you call it at exactly 1:45 P.M.”

Martin read me the number. My first thought was that some pay phones, maybe most pay phones, don’t take incoming calls. Martin being Martin, he said to me, “I told her, most pay phones don’t take incoming calls. He’ll try to call, but he may not get through. So she took down your cell phone number. If she doesn’t hear from you by 1:50, she said she’d call.”

A pause, as I collected myself and read the number back in my mind. Martin added, “So you may want to answer your fricking phone.”

Touché.

I hung up. Mongillo and Sweeney had not only ordered dessert, but the ever-efficient Pam had just delivered it. I told them I had to run — an emergency, a possible break in the story. I’d let them know what happened as soon as it did.

Mongillo looked at me with unabashed concern. “Are you still going to sign the lunch away?” he asked, fully cognizant — as well as appreciative — of the University Club’s policy of no cash transactions. I nodded. Sweeney looked at me with equal concern. “You want me to come along?” he asked. To that, I shook my head.

Many, many years ago, I used to think the most important woman in the world was my mother, and later, it was, of course, my wife. More recently, it was Elizabeth, but it was a feeling that was fading faster than I knew how to explain. Walking out the dining-room door, it occurred to me that this woman, at least for now, at least for a while, had become the most important woman I knew. It was yet another one of my finely honed reporter’s premonitions that was to become sometimes painfully and occasionally blissfully true.