Dead Line

Chapter Twelve

On the way back into town, my new cell phone, courtesy of Barbara, chimed from its hiding place in the center console, and I had a fleeting wish that it was Elizabeth telling me that she had skipped her flight and wouldn’t leave until we had refashioned our relationship into what it once was. Such are the pathetic thoughts of another perfectly helpless man.

The caller ID told me it was a restricted number, and as I got ready to answer, I imagined that it might be Maggie Kane, looking for help on the run, or Tom Jankle, special agent with the FBI, looking to shed light on what the flying fuck was going on in my professional — as opposed to my personal — life.

“Flynn here.”

Silence. Well, not exactly silence, but a muffled static, as if someone was holding their calloused hand over the receiver and scraping it around.

I said, slightly louder. “This is Jack Flynn.”

Still nothing more than that previously mentioned sound. And then my phone started beeping a little warning sound and unceremoniously went dead. It was out of juice. Barbara had given me a warning that I didn’t heed, and I didn’t have a car adapter yet. No big deal, just people’s lives on the line.

Back on the better side of the tunnel, I drove past the turnoff for my condo, drove straight through downtown, and parked a few minutes later in a space near the Boston Public Garden. It’s where I came to think and to walk and to gulp fresh air, and God knows, I needed to do all three of those things in no small way right now.

Baker was somewhere far beyond, thrilled at the prospect of circling the duck pond a time or two, and immediately went into prowling mode in a futile search of nocturnal squirrels. I walked alongside him, happy to be outside, even as I was devastatingly sad within, thinking of all the memories I had from this twenty-three-acre patch of green in the center of town.

It’s where I first told Elizabeth that I loved her, on a snowy Christmas morning when we were the only two people in the park. It’s the last place I saw the beloved Record publisher, Paul Ellis, before he was murdered in the newspaper parking lot two years before.

We walked once around the elegant duck pond, Baker probing the bushes and groves of trees for possible prey, my eyes attracted to the glittering lights of the downtown skyline to our east. My thoughts inevitably drifted to Katherine, as they so often do, and I wondered what she would tell me to do. I imagined her walking right here beside me. I imagined her telling me with a smile forced across her perfect lips that I had to move on, that life is for the living, that I didn’t have time to keep trying to hold on to something that wasn’t mine anymore.

“But I thought it would always be mine,” I told her.

“It is, Jack, and it isn’t.” And what was that supposed to mean?

Well, maybe it meant that I was crazy, because there I was in the dark of a September night talking to myself on an otherwise barren expanse of the Public Garden. Even Baker looked back at me with an expression that said, My guy is going over the edge.

So I shut up and thought of the look on Elizabeth’s face, how her soft brown hair framed her beautifully shaped cheeks, the pain in her eyes, the way she despondently turned and walked away, this time, probably, forever.

I thought of Maggie Kane, so frightened and confused, telling me, accusing me, of causing the tragedy that had just overwhelmed her life. Maybe she, too, was dead.

And then I thought of the noise, the mysterious rustling, coming from behind a bank of rosebushes, a thought that had already fully engulfed Baker, who was in an uncharacteristic state of high alert. He stood in front of me on the path, his legs locked, the gold fur standing straight up on his back, growling the growl of a tough dog, like a German shepherd.

“What is it?” I whispered to him, and hearing the tension in my voice, he let out a loud warning bark. Who, by the way, was this guard dog?

It was a moonless, windless, and cloudless night, meaning the stars shone in the sky but the still Earth was bathed in a murky, inky black. Again, more rustling, so I called out, “Who’s there?”

As is so often the case in these situations, the question was a rather obvious one, but still, it seems like it would get the job done. Not here though, not now. There was no response.

And then I heard a man’s voice, soft and low, followed by more rustling. After that, I caught an inexplicable whiff of a pizza delivery boy — the odor of a fresh-baked pepperoni pizza mixing with the plainness of the cardboard box and the sweat of the person delivering it. And then I thought to myself, pepperoni pizza and sweat. Pepperoni pizza and sweat.

“Mongillo, that you?”

An enormous silhouette appeared from the side of the rosebushes. I watched the outline of a beefy arm pull something away from his face, and heard the unmistakable voice of Vinny Mongillo reply, “Jack, that you?”

Baker went running toward him, his tail wagging like the propeller of an outboard motor. Mongillo called out, “Don’t go anywhere. Let me just get rid of this call.”

Then he said into the phone, “If I think you’re leaking to the Traveler, I’ll personally squash both your testicles and present a scientific analysis of your impotence on the front page of the Record. Got it?” And he hung up.

He came walking across the grass and onto the cement path, Baker happily in tow, and said to me, “Jesus, Fair Hair, if I didn’t know any better, sometimes I’d think you don’t really love me anymore.”

I wanted to strangle him even as I wanted to hug him. Instead, I simply said, “What the hell are you doing out here?”

“Looking for you. Trying to get a damn cell phone signal out here at night. Passing the time, you know?”

No, I didn’t, though I did recall him telling me that afternoon that we urgently needed to speak.

My nerves were starting to calm down by now. Baker lay down and chewed on the end of a fat stick. I said, “What do you need?”

“Some friendship. A little bit of love. But I’d settle for a drink.”

“At the moment, I think I can only give you the first part.”

“Well, I brought the third.” He walked over to the rosebushes and came back carrying one of those Igloo coolers just large enough to hold a six-pack of beer or the appetizer course of Vinny’s typical lunch. He opened it, pulled out two icy Sam Adamses, and jovially said, “You remember that great commercial when we were kids that went, ‘If you’ve got the time, we’ve got the beer?’ ”

I nodded my head as we both took a seat on a lone wooden bench. I replied, “The slogan I always liked was the one that went, ‘The one beer to have if you’ve having more than one.’ You can’t really get away with that campaign these days.”

He chuckled, and so did I, but beneath the very thin veneer of friendly frivolity lay something of great import. I could sense it, but I didn’t know what it was, so I cut to the chase and said, “Tell me what’s going on.”

“You’re not going to like it, Fair Hair.”

“Tell me.”

I had fears of them finding Maggie Kane’s bullet-ridden body in the trunk of a Lincoln Continental parked at Logan Airport, or visions that Tom Jankle had just announced his resignation at a hastily called Washington press conference and wouldn’t have anything to say to anyone about the events of the day. In other words, I wasn’t in the mood for stalling or games, so I added, for emphasis, “Now.”

“I’m leaving.”

“You just got here.”

“No, I mean, the paper.”

“So do I.”

He smiled and took a long swig of his beer, so long, in fact, that he drained it. He opened his cooler and pulled another one out and methodically put the empty in its place.

He looked at me without an ounce or a trace of humor and said, “I’m serious, Jack. I’m leaving the Record.”

He let that hang out there in the dark of that September night, let the words form into the concept and then drift toward an unthinkable reality. From the first day I walked into the Record newsroom, Vinny Mongillo was already there. I never remember him taking a sick day. I don’t think he ever went on vacation. I never heard him give voice to an ambition that involved anything beyond his next major story. The thought, the departure, was pure lunacy.

“You get an offer from the Times? The Post?”

We were sitting side by side on that bench, each with a Sam in our hands, looking at the other through the dark with our heads cocked and our minds racing to points far beyond the serenity of this gorgeous park.

He shook his head and said, “No newspapers, Jack. I’m getting out of the business. I’m done.”

Well, this just went from the lunatic to the imbecilic. I looked at Mongillo, at all of him, from his enormous head with the heavy mop of thick black hair to the fat cheeks to the puffy neck and the barrel chest and the wide girth and the bulbous, stubby legs. I asked, “What the fuck are you talking about?”

He simply shook his head and repeated those bizarre words, “I’m done.”

I said, “You’re going to get a job at a Home Depot, are you?” And immediately I regretted my pallid attempt to make light of either him or his situation. So quickly, I added, “I mean, what the fuck.”

He finished off that beer as well, opened the cooler, pulled out a fresh one, and tucked the empty inside. It was growing cool outside and there were crickets all around us and Baker continued gnawing on a good-size stick in the damp grass.

Mongillo took a healthy — or perhaps unhealthy, depending on the perspective — gulp, peered at me hard with his newly sad brown eyes, and said, “Look at me, Jack. Fucking look at me.” With that, he set his gaze downward at the patch of dirt beneath the bench, his shoulders hunched, his head forward, the beer bottle looking miniature in his catcher’s mitt-size hand.

“I’m obese, Jack,” he said, his face still pointed down. “I’m a fucking pig. I’m a hundred pounds overweight. My cholesterol is double my IQ. My blood pressure is racing faster than the NASDAQ in the late nineties.

“I eat when I’m stressed and I eat when I’m lonely, and these days, stress and loneliness are the only two emotions that I know.” He paused and gulped his beer and looked at me and then down again and said, “It was okay in my twenties and early thirties. You’re immortal then, you know? You have your whole life ahead of you, at least what’s supposed to be the best of it.

“And now I’m supposed to be in the middle of it all, you know — a wife and a couple of kids and a cute little house and a lot more responsibility than what’s in tomorrow’s paper and what little factoid in the twelfth graph that the Traveler might have got that I probably missed. I’m supposed to mow a lawn, Jack, to change a fucking diaper. But instead, all I do is eat and drink and write about other people while my own life passes me by.

“One day in the not-too-distant future I’m just going to keel over from a heart attack, Jack, and my only mark on this earth will have been a few exclusive front page stories with some nice turns of phrase that not a soul could possibly remember two days after I wrote them. That’s what my obit will say: Wrote for The Boston Record, survived by his mother. Poor, lonely stressed-out bastard.”

He stopped and finished his beer with another ferocious gulp and this time just let the bottle fall from his hand and clank down onto the dirt, the sound one of forlorn emptiness not unlike the sum and substance of his little speech.

Let me be clear: Vinny Mongillo was the best, purest, most dogged reporter I had ever known, relentless in pursuit, flawless in execution, gloating in the aftermath of a page one break. So I asked in as straightforward a tone as I could muster, “So what do you propose to do?”

“P.R.”

“That’s fucking absurd.”

“I’ve got an offer to make three times the coin I make at the Record doing crisis consulting with Gregor/Sunhill”—the largest public relations firm in Boston—“beginning next month. Jack, this is real.”

Three times the pay. I thought of that scene chasing the gunman down Boylston Street a few hours before and wondered if they might have any more slots to fill. But I abstained. Instead, I said, “Vin, you sound like a typical victim, blaming your job for your weight and your health. You can shed some pounds without walking out on the one true thing that you love.”

He shook his head and said, “You might be right, but I don’t think so. I have to get away from the stress of daily deadlines, the worry about always having to re-prove myself, every damned day of the year in front of a million unforgiving readers. I’m gone, Jack.”

Baker trudged over and dropped his muck-covered tennis ball onto the lap of Vinny’s extra-strength khakis. Vinny picked it up without a thought and lobbed it across the nearby lawn. Baker walked after it in slow pursuit.

“When?”

“I’m going to give notice Friday and, if they’ll keep me, hang in there for two more weeks. I’d like to help you through the Kane story and the Gardner heist.”

I nodded, ruefully. Vinny lifted himself to his giant feet, and so did I. He embraced me in a tight bear hug, his massive, oily arms squeezing me into his pungent-smelling chest. What can you do besides love the guy?

“I’m not done with you yet,” I told him.

He smiled as he walked away, the cooler in his hand. “I’m taking control, Jack, and it feels pretty fucking good.”

He disappeared into the dark as I sat back down on the bench. I thought of Hilary Kane heading to her car that sun-splashed morning, having no idea it would be the last walk she would ever take. I thought of the panicked voice of Maggie Kane and wondered where she was, how she was. And I thought a bit too long about Vinny Mongillo, and wondered a bit too long about whether he was right about much of what he said.