Dead Line

Chapter Sixteen

First thing I did when I walked into the Record newsroom a little after noon was head straight toward Peter Martin’s office, where the Beastie Boys continued to reign supreme. Fear not, these guys couldn’t possibly throw a punch harder than the one I had just taken, though it was good of Martin to come to his doorway again and make sure I didn’t have to find out.

Inside, we both sat down at the round table — free and clear since the Vermeer, I noticed, had been placed atop a cabinet behind his desk. With no time to waste, I said to him, “I think we really screwed up. Check that. I think I really screwed up.”

He still had that calm and collected thing going, and asked me in an assured tone, “You told someone about the painting?”

I shook my head. Outside, the September sun had ducked behind a thickening cover of afternoon clouds. Midday traffic on the Southeast Expressway was oddly light. A washed-out, postpubescent model wearing a pair of uncomfortably tight jeans watched it all from a roadside billboard for the Gap.

I said, “I think we might have caused a woman to die.” And with that, I provided the scant details that I had, from my initial gut instinct when I heard about the murder to Maggie Kane’s first vague warning to the shot fired in Copley Square to the frustrating conversation with Tom Jankle a couple of hours before. I concluded by telling him that I both wanted and needed to head to Rome that night to cut through the consuming haze.

He listened intently, nodded his head occasionally, and when I was done, looked down at the table for a long moment of absolute silence. Finally, he asked softly, “She couldn’t have fled to Hartford?”

Then, looking me square in the eye, he said, “So we rushed a story into print that caused the death of a young woman while at the same time helping to retrieve one of the most valuable stolen paintings in history.” It was part question, part summation — and a typically pretty good one on both counts.

I pursed my lips and slowly nodded. Before I could say anything, he asked, “How do we know Hilary Kane was so innocent?”

Um, good question, because the fact is, we didn’t. She certainly would have been too young to play any role in the initial heist, though she could be involved in some way in the return, or the negotiation over the possible ransom that Stephen Holden seemed to think was so inevitable. I replayed for Martin some of Jankle’s suspicions that she might have been the conduit of intercepted information, but the nature of the information and the way in which she came across it was entirely unclear, making it potentially dubious.

“Look, Jack, we’ve got to do one thing at a time here,” he said. “So go write the story about the return of the Vermeer. It’s going to be the talk of the nation tomorrow. I’ve emailed you an official statement from the newspaper on how we plan to turn the painting over to authorities, having deemed it authentic.

“And then go to Rome. It might even be better that you’re out of the country, because once this story hits, the FBI is going to want to grab you for what could be a whole day of interviews. Just take it easy on me. No frescoed ceilings in your room and twelve-dollar bottles of mineral water from the minibar.”

W hen I came out into the center of the newsroom, Vinny Mongillo was fully reclined in his chair, talking to the environment reporter, Todd Balansky, aka the newsroom Romeo, who was leaning on his desk. When they say a reporter is in bed with his sources, Todd takes it to its most literal extreme. There’s not a tree hugger in New England he hasn’t tried to date — date here being a gentlemanly euphemism.

“Seriously, I had her screaming for over an hour. Screaming.” That was Todd, never one to be discreet about his exploits, talking in something less than a low voice.

“Yeah, I can hear her now,” Mongillo replied. “ ‘Todd, Todd, I can’t feel a damned thing! Todd, I can’t feel anything!’ ”

Mongillo laughed his big, full-throttle laugh, his stomach actually heaving up and down. I did as well, and Todd, not graced with the self-deprecation gene, stalked away. Such was life in the Record newsroom for those who hadn’t caused the death of Hilary Kane.

I leaned on Mongillo’s desk where Balansky had just been and asked, “What do you have?”

It’s important to understand, Mongillo always has something, and I don’t mean crabs or heartburn or any of the various maladies that I’d normally accuse him of. No, I mean in the reportorial sense. He spends twenty of the twenty-four hours in a day with the phone to his ear, always hustling, horse-trading information, “What do you got; why I no have; hey, did I tell you about so-and-so; no, I can’t until I get something from you.” If reporters really were the animals that we’re often made out to be, then Vinny Mongillo would be the great white shark of the Record newsroom — a pure fact-gathering machine, always looking to devour another piece of information.

He hesitated here, which meant a couple of things — first, that he had the nugget of something, but second, that he hadn’t yet moved it from the realm of the probable to that of publishable fact. He looked at me with those big brown eyes that I was going to miss so much, and I looked at him with a half nod intended to loosen him up. How many times had we played out this game before?

He said, softly, “I hear the mayor’s antsy.”

“About what?”

He shook his head slowly. “Trying to figure that out. I’m just told he’s been following both these stories — Kane’s death and the FBI leak on the Gardner heist — with unusual attention.”

I asked, “But why would that be so unusual? Hilary Kane was a city employee. And the Gardner heist is in the heart of his city, and now involves his fugitive son. It could simply be that he’s scared to death about how this might hurt his standing in the polls, if his kid gets tied any further into this.”

Mongillo nodded again, taking it all in, betraying little that was already there. “That might all be right, but I’m told he’s not acting just attentive, but nervous. He’s worth keeping an eye on.”

Well, enough of the devil’s advocate. I said, “I’m hearing from a reasonably well-placed source that the Feds might be probing him for ties to his son. I don’t know a lot more than that, but we ought to get in to see him sooner rather than later.”

He nodded and asked, “You want to double-team him?”

“I do. Problem is, between us girls, I’m on a flight to Rome tonight. I’m hoping it’s a real quick turnaround and that I’m back here as early as tomorrow afternoon.”

He looked at me incredulously. “You’re going to Rome?” Then he repeated himself, this time less a question than an assertion. “You’re going to Rome. I wonder if you could go to Rome if you were, say, bleeding profusely from your fat skull?”

Interesting question, though not one that I currently had the time to ponder. Before I could respond, he asked, “Why?”

The problem with an answer is that it might prove to be little more than currency for Vinny Mongillo to trade upon with someone else. Like I said, he’s a shark, constantly in search of what else is there, always about to make the kill, and sometimes, even with the best of intentions, he can’t help himself.

So I shook my head and said, “I’ll tell you when I get back.”

“You’ll tell me right now or I’ll bitch slap you until you’re on your knees crying from a pain that you can’t really feel.”

How postmodern of him. I looked at those needy eyes and that wonderfully puffy face that I loved so much and decided not to withhold, not now, not with him gone from the newsroom in a couple of weeks’ time. I said, “This can go absolutely nowhere, and I really mean that.” I stared him hard in the eye and he stared back at me.

“It will go absolutely nowhere,” he said, “just like your career.”

Isn’t that the truth? So I told him about the shooting in Copley Square after I left him at lunch the day before, and Maggie Kane’s flight to Italy, her phone call to me, my belief that she probably talked to her sister before the murder, and that she had something vital to add.

“Good luck,” he said somberly. “Get the story, drink the Chianti, and feast on the spring lamb. God, are Roman women beautiful. They all look like me, only a little thinner and more fashionable.”

The phone was ringing when I got to my desk and I paused for a moment before I picked it up with the standard, “Flynn here.”

There was a hesitation on the other end of the line before I heard a familiar voice say, “Riggs here.” My heart reflexively lightened for the flicker of a moment, then quickly became weighed down by the reality of the day, the relationship, the incongruity of it all.

I pressed the phone hard against my mouth as if the receiver was in some way an extension of her face and said in a surprisingly thick voice, “How are you?”

Another hesitation, before Elizabeth said, “I’m okay. I’m okay.” She said this word — okay — in that cute way she always did, as if it were a mouthful. Then she added, “I just wanted to hear your voice for a minute, if that’s all right.” With that, she fell into silence. I didn’t, or maybe couldn’t, reply.

After a long moment, she suddenly said, “On the ride into work this morning, I was thinking about that weekend we had in Bermuda. Do you remember how hard it was raining?”

I did, and a small smile reflexively spread across my lips.

She continued, “We couldn’t even step outside, the way those big drops were slamming against the stone patio. We’d go to dinner and everyone would be complaining, but you and I just put the Do Not Disturb sign up and couldn’t keep our hands off each other and read books and had sex and talked about everything and drank wine in the bathtub. We didn’t see the sun once. I don’t know if the hotel even had a beach. And it was the best vacation I’ve ever had. It always will be.”

“It was on that trip that you told me you loved me for the first time,” I said. “It was the middle of the afternoon and we were in bed and we forgot to put the sign on the door and the damned minibar guy comes walking in and we hid under the covers, me still inside of you, and you whispered into my ear, ‘I love you, Jack Flynn.’ And I had to lie there, my entire body about to explode from the sound of your voice and the feel of you against me and the meaning of your words, and I couldn’t move.”

She gave me that little giggle of hers, but I heard her sniffle and knew that tears were rolling down her face even as it was crinkled into that wonderful smile.

After a pause, she asked, “What went wrong?”

Life. History. The past nagging at the present, altering the future, making me a very lonely man, at least for now, maybe always, a burden I couldn’t shake.

This was all undoubtedly true, and she was surely as aware of it as I. But instead, I said, “I don’t know.” Pause. “I don’t know.” Another pause. “Do you?”

As I asked this, I emerged from my hazy angst to notice Vinny Mongillo pacing along the aisle beside my desk, munching loudly from a bag of especially crispy Tostitos. He was also talking on his cell phone, saying, “Yeah, the guy’s a sleezehog, but he’s my sleezehog, my helpful sleezehog, so if you don’t leave him alone I’ll have your name in print in the most unflattering possible way within twenty-four hours.”

I met his gaze. On the other end of the line, Elizabeth was saying, “I’ve been thinking a lot about this, and I’ve come to the conclusion that this is just our unfortunate way. I don’t mean to sound cosmic, but maybe it’s just our destiny, to love each other, but never completely have each other.”

“Get off the damned phone.” That was Mongillo, hanging up from his call and talking directly to me.

I said, “Wait a fucking minute.”

Elizabeth, suddenly alarmed, said, “What? What did I say?”

I put my fingers up to my forehead in absolute frustration.

“Not you,” I said into the receiver, still pressed hard against my mouth. “Mongillo. He’s standing here telling me to get off the phone.”

I pulled the handset back and whispered to Mongillo, “Get the fuck away.”

Problem was, good friend Hank Sweeney, once a Boston PD homicide detective, now a well-paid security consultant, had just walked in and held up two videocassettes with his right hand while giving a thumbs-up with his left. Mongillo grabbed both of Sweeney’s shoulders with typical exuberance.

“It’s always something. It’s just the way it is with us.” That was Elizabeth, on the other end of the line, her tone more resigned than aggravated. “I don’t even blame you, Jack. It’s just that life is always getting in our way.”

As I was listening, Mongillo hit me on my arm and gave me an urgent wave. “I’m going to call you tonight,” I said to Elizabeth. Then I realized I’d be on an airplane, but didn’t have the time to explain.

“We can finish this whenever you want,” she answered, her tone now more sad than resigned. The word finish, by the way, is the one that stuck out in my mind. It sounded to me like she stressed it, but maybe not.

I said, “I love you.”

“I love you too, Jack. I just wish, on both our parts, for both our sakes, that it was somehow enough.”

The receiver wasn’t even in the holder yet when Mongillo, his face so close that I could smell the Tostitos on his breath, said, “Come with me, my concave-chested friend. Our first big break.”

“I thought the return of the Vermeer was our first big break.”

“It was, but on the Gardner. This one’s on Hilary Kane.”

I fairly well jumped out of my rolling desk chair, not to mention my skin, proving to me how much more important the Kane murder was in my mind than the return of The Concert, which would automatically rank as one of the biggest blockbusters in the history of the Record.

Mongillo led us into the conference room. Inside, Sweeney handed him a tape and explained to both of us, in his most businesslike voice, “Off the record, this was sent anonymously to the homicide bureau of the Boston Police Department. In turn, it was provided to me by a homicide detective, with the intention of getting it to the two of you. The boys over there are chomping at the bit to use it, but for reasons that will become obvious when you see it, they’re fearing for their jobs, their pensions, their families.”

Sweeney and I were leaning against the U-shaped conference table. Mongillo walked over to one of five televisions hooked up to VCRs that are used to record the nightly news on all the affiliates. The room, by the way, is where the Record’s so-called braintrust holds a pair of meetings every weekday — the first at 11:00 A.M. to discuss the stories that were being pursued and the news that was breaking, and the second at 3:30 to update everyone else on whether those stories had been successfully pursued and the relative worth of the broken news. The top half-dozen editors gathered again at 5:00 P.M. on the newsdesk to read story tops submitted by reporters and view photos and graphics all in an effort to choose the content of the front page.

As Mongillo fumbled with the VCR, I asked Sweeney, “What are they looking for from us?”

“They want you to ask the questions around town that they don’t think they can ask right now, maybe even get it into print. Once it’s in the public eye, headquarters will have no choice but to give them the go-ahead to pursue.”

Not often do detectives deign to put reporters out front on a story. This, I told myself, must be fairly juicy, or perhaps disconnected, so sketchy, so far-fetched, that the homicide bureau was looking for the Record to take long-shot risks that they couldn’t afford to take. As I pondered this, the screen came to life. Mongillo stepped back and joined us against the table. All three of us stood with our arms crossed and our eyes riveted on the television.

We watched the almost stereotypical countdown—3…2…1—before an image appeared of what looked like an office lobby, captured by one of those cameras that was focused down at an angle, as if it were shooting from high against a wall, like something in a bank. The lower left-hand corner carried the stamp: “02:33, 09/20”—2:33 A.M., on Saturday, September 20, five nights before. All was still, empty, such that it could have been a photograph rather than a video — that is, until a distant silhouette appeared from around a blurry corner and hurriedly walked toward the camera, closer and clearer, closer and clearer.

“Stop,” I said.

Mongillo hit the Pause button on the remote control. I walked up to the television, fairly well putting my fat face against the screen. The frozen picture had waves rolling through parts, but remained clear in others.

“Roll it for another second,” I said.

Mongillo hit Play. The figure walked from the center of the screen toward a corner, in real life, toward the door. “Stop,” I said again.

This time, in the still frame, the figure was outside of the static, and I was standing there staring at the heartbreaking, breathtaking image of Hilary Kane.

Her blonde hair was mussed to the point of being unkempt, as if she had just jumped out of bed, and given the time, that’s probably exactly what she had done — a fact about her last days on earth that I didn’t really want to know, but maybe I needed to. She had a nervous look on her face, frightened even, and the way she moved was anything but the relaxed and satisfied gait you might expect from someone who had just spent an enjoyable hour or two in someone else’s apartment. She carried a bag over her left shoulder and what looked like rolled-up papers in her right hand. She put her head down and didn’t acknowledge the uniformed security guard who was visible in the far left side of the picture, sitting as he was behind a paneled desk.

“It’s Hilary Kane,” I said, still staring at the screen. The silence behind me spoke to the fact that these two already knew. “She’s coming out of a building at 2:30 A.M. on Friday night/Saturday morning, but where and why and what’s it have to do with anything?” With that, I turned around and faced Sweeney and Mongillo. Mongillo hit Play and Hilary walked out the front double doors. The video then gave way to blackness.

Her image in motion, this woman who I knew only in still pictures and then dead, and whose life, for me, took place in the abstract, was nothing short of jolting, a stark and almost cruel reminder of how recently she was among the living, of how great this loss had been, a vibrant person feeling real fear just a few days before. And then my story appeared in print, and some lives changed for reasons I couldn’t yet understand, and hers was over.

I got no answers from my two compatriots, so I asked again, firm to the edge of anger now, “What’s the significance?”

Sweeney spoke, directing his remarks from one to the other of us in that easy, mossy voice of his. “The building is the new Ritz-Carlton complex, the lobby of the north tower, which is exclusively high-priced condominiums. And I mean real high-priced. Mother of Christ, are they expensive. You could buy my entire retirement complex in Florida for the cost of the penthouse here, but maybe that’s saying more about where I lived in Florida—”

“Hank,” I said, cutting him off, urging him toward a point. “All we have here is a video of Hilary leaving the Ritz alone five days before she was killed. What’s got the cops so scared?”

He looked at me pointedly, maybe offended at the rush treatment of his presentation, but maybe not. He was, after all, a pro, one of the best homicide detectives the city of Boston had ever known.

“This,” he said, and he handed Mongillo the second tape.

Mongillo placed it in a second VCR, right beside the first, and the accompanying television came to life. The time stamp this time said “02:01, 9/20”—thirty-two minutes prior to the last tape. The lobby was the same, but the image was recorded from a different direction, apparently from a camera posted on the opposite wall. Again, all was still, until a pair of silhouettes appeared on the other side of the outer glass doors. The doors flung open, a man and a woman walked inside, the man’s beefy arm slung over the woman’s shoulder, drawing her toward him as they walked toward the camera, closer and clearer, closer and clearer.

“Stop,” I said, and again, Mongillo hit the Pause button of the remote control. I stepped toward the screen. Both faces were outside of the static, and right there, on the television in the conference room of The Boston Record, I saw frozen footage of Hilary Kane five days before her death in the intimate company of Mayor Daniel Harkins. My heart felt like someone tied a piece of lead to it and dropped it off a cliff. My chest immediately had the sensation of being empty. My stomach rolled into an immediate knot. Even in death, women can break your heart. I suppose I already knew that all too well.

“Roll it,” I said, and Mongillo hit Play.

The pair — I refuse to use the word couple in regards to Hilary Kane and any other man, let alone a politician twice her age — walked wordlessly past the guard at the front desk, and when they were out of his view, but still within the range of the lens, they stopped in a groping embrace. Harkins put both his hands on the back of her blonde head and pulled her face sharply into his. They kissed awkwardly, even angrily, at least on his part. She pulled back some, and when they began walking again, he stumbled ever so slightly, and then they were out of view. A few seconds later, the screen went dark.

We all stood there in silence for a long moment. I thought of the guard at the front desk, and immediately assumed that he was the likely source of the shipment to Boston PD. Maybe if the mayor had just said hello to him that night we wouldn’t be sitting here looking at this tape now. Who knows?

Outside the glass walls of the conference room, I saw Peter Martin walking from the vending machines with a can of Tab and a bag of pretzels. I heard Barbara announcing phone calls on hold for this reporter or that. I watched Todd Balansky corner an exquisitely mediocre-looking copy editor from whom he was no doubt seeking a date.

“This is why the mayor has been so nervous over the last couple of days,” Mongillo said in a low, serious voice.

Sweeney quickly said, “Where I used to work, this is what’s known as a break in the investigation.”

“Even,” I asked, “in an investigation in which they’ve already made an arrest?”

Sweeney replied, “This might explain why they moved so quickly, maybe too quickly, to make that arrest.”

I looked at Mongillo and without a word exchanged between us, he nodded back at me. I picked up the phone on the table beside the TVs and punched out the number to the mayoral press secretary down at City Hall, Grace Flowers. Her name, both the front and back ends, was an outright lie.

“Gracey,” I said in the most cheerfully fake voice I could muster when she picked up the line. She hated me. I already knew that. But she still had to talk to me. It’s another reason that makes this job so great. “Listen, I was looking to chat up the mayor a bit.”

“He’s out of touch,” she said, flat and unhelpful. No kidding. If she had her way, that was the extent of the conversation and the pursuit. Luckily, as is usually the case, the way would be mine and the tango had just begun.

“That’s a shame,” I said, still cheerful, still fake. “You know why? Because we’re looking to put a story in tomorrow’s paper that involves the mayor, and my bet is, given his potential appointment as a United States senator, he’d be real interested in what it’s about. He’d probably even have something to say about it, either him or his lawyers.”

His lawyers. I threw that in for dickish good measure.

“Jack,” she said, her voice bristling with frustration, “why don’t you tell me what it’s about so I can make sure that he returns your call.”

“Awfully afraid I can’t do that on this one, Grace. It’s very personal for the mayor. But I can do this. I can be available to talk to him. Just tell him it’s about who he’s keeping company with over at the Ritz, and to give me a call and I’ll go into it some more.”

I could hear her shouting “Jack!” as I hung up the phone.