Dead Line

Chapter Seventeen

I ’m at the point in my illustrious newspaper career where you can impose virtually any act of rudeness on me and it will roll off my back like water off a duck’s behind, or however that phrase goes. Call me names. Call me stupid. Call my journalistic bluffs. Just call me back. I think I speak for every reporter everywhere when I say, if you don’t, you’ve just made an enemy for life, and as that old saw goes, why pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel.

All of which is to say, an hour later, no word from the mayor. I had a flight to catch to Rome, a woman to save, a murder to solve, a salvaged masterpiece to publicize, and as I said to Mongillo when I wandered over to his desk, “The fucking fuckhead in City Hall doesn’t give us the respect to pick up the phone.” I was, in a word, angry. Of course, I was other words too — harried, stressed, uncertain, and here’s one I rarely use in self-description: nervous.

“I haven’t heard from him either,” Mongillo replied as he held the receiver of the phone away from his head to show I was interrupting a call. “You want to just show up where he is?”

Just show up. I love just showing up. It takes people off guard, gives them no time to prepare, doesn’t allow them to scribble notes to their nervous press secretary as you’re awaiting an answer on the other end of the line and they’re pretending to be lost in statesmanlike thought.

“Let me find out where he is,” I replied.

It was nearing 5:00 P.M. Time was an enemy, not an ally. And it’s not necessarily good to link a sitting mayor — or a standing one, for that matter — to a murder investigation on deadline. After the fallout from the Toby Harkins story of two days before, I’m not sure I was qualified to do anything on deadline anymore.

Fortunately in life, I’m blessed with friends in low places, people whom I find much more valuable than the invariably self-important types who ascend to loftier heights. I punched out the number to the mayor’s office in City Hall and asked to speak to a woman with the appropriate name of Rose, a former neighbor of mine going back to my childhood days in South Boston.

These days, she was the mayor’s official scheduler and gatekeeper to his inner office. Like any denizen of Southie, she was loyal to a fault, meaning her first loyalty would always be to me for one simple reason: She knew me longer, from the old neighborhood. So I engaged in our usual banter and then dropped the question without apologies. “I’m trying to track down the mayor. Is he in his office?”

“With the door shut, and Grace Flowers inside.”

Rose, Grace Flowers. There’s a woman named Daisy who runs the Parks Department. I’ve always wanted to host a garden party for the mayoral staff, but don’t know if anyone else would get the joke. Anyway, she gave me more information than I initially sought, which was typical, and good. I asked, “What’s his schedule like?”

“He’s not due to leave the building for thirty minutes. I don’t think there’ll be any changes.”

Within five minutes, Mongillo and I were armed with notebooks and pens, weaving through rush hour traffic, on the verge of accusing Mayor Daniel Harkins of being involved in Hilary Kane’s murder, at least in person, and eventually, hopefully, in print.

T he woman at the reception desk in Mayor Harkins’s outer office was not, as they say, any kind of rose. Well, let me amend that. She did seem rather thorny. She looked like she had been sitting here since James Michael Curley was running the show, what with her beehive hair getup and what looked to be a polyester pantsuit, which, for all I know, might have been back in style. I do know this: She wasn’t buying any of the Jack act.

“Good afternoon,” I said, in my absolutely most cheerful voice, as Mongillo and I innocently approached her desk. I saw her nameplate and smiled at her stern face and said, “Mildred, I’m Jack Flynn. This is Vinny Mongillo. If you could send our apologies to the mayor for running a little late, we’re ready to see him now.”

She looked from me to Mongillo and then back at me, her expression never changing from that of casual, bureaucratic scorn. Just a guess, but I think if she smiled, her entire face would crack and crumble all over her spotless, empty desk. She looked down at a sheet of paper in front of her, ran her fingers along what appeared from my upside-down perspective to be a list of names, and said, “I don’t see that you have an appointment with Mayor Harkins.”

“Last minute thing,” I replied, still smiling.

“Your names again?” She asked this as if we were about to tell her they were Crap and Phlegm.

“Jack Flynn,” I said.

“Spell it.”

“F-U-C-” Just kidding. I spelled my name quickly and clearly. Mongillo’s took a little bit longer, given that I don’t think she knew any names — O’Hara aside — that ended in a vowel.

She said, “And you’re from?”

“Boston.”

Look, if I said we were from the Record, she would have immediately called down to the press secretary, Grace, who would then have tried to escort us out of the mayor’s office, and failing that, would have warned the mayor to use some sort of back entrance. I mean, you think this is easy, this street reporting?

She shot me a look as piercing as a bullet, and believe me, I know of what I speak. Not only was she not buying the act, she was outright tiring of it — and fast. I snuck a look at the wall clock, which indicated that it was exactly thirty minutes after my good friend Rose had told me that Harkins would be leaving the building. The goal here was to stall, then ambush — a strategy they don’t necessarily teach at the Columbia School of Journalism, but they should. Believe me, they should.

“I mean,” she replied curtly, “what organization do you represent?”

“NATO.” Well, okay, that’s not exactly what I said either. I didn’t have to. At that exact moment, the mayor himself, the Honorable Daniel Harkins, came walking through a set of double doors behind this nice woman’s desk and ran full-on into Vinny Mongillo. I’d like to bottle the look on his face and keep it on my desk as a daily reminder of why I should stay in this business. He was, to put it mildly, shocked.

I said, in an overly upbeat voice, “This is really fortuitous running into you, Mayor Harkins. We were just trying to get in to see you.”

I smiled. He scowled at me. He also kept walking, straight through the windowless outer lobby toward the bank of elevators, in the company of a clean-cut, plainclothes Boston police officer who serves as his driver and security detail.

So I called out again, but this time not so happy about it, “Mr. Mayor, it’s very important that we talk to you.”

And he kept walking. The cop pressed a button to call the elevator. I said, louder this time, “Mayor, we’d like to ask you about your relationship with Hilary Kane and the visit she made to your apartment a few nights before her death.”

I heard a little crash behind me, which I think was Mildred’s jaw smacking against her desk. I think I heard Mongillo emit a low little chuckle, almost prideful. I watched as the mayor whirled around. His eyes were on fire and his cheeks were red and his nostrils were flaring like some sort of feral, furry animal. He was accustomed to people groveling, not challenging, which in very short form explains why I became a reporter rather than a political aide.

He stared at me in loud silence, until I said, “Your choice: We can follow you through City Hall shouting the questions out to make sure you can hear them all crystal clear, or we can talk about it civilly and privately in your office.” I was going to smile, but I didn’t. No need to rub it in.

He stood there indecisively for an interminable moment. If the elevator arrived and he leapt on it and shut the door, I’m not quite sure what Mongillo and I would have done. But he had to know that if we didn’t corner him at that exact moment, in this precise place, then it would be later that night at a fund-raiser, or maybe the next morning when he dedicated the new wing of a downtown hospital. So he stepped toward me and kept coming, his stride fast and purposeful. He brushed past me — his shoulder literally touching mine — as he sneered, “Come with me.” The look on his face was more of hatred than fear, which was fine. It allowed me to believe for the flicker of an unconsidered moment that this man was indeed capable of murder. Mongillo and I met eyes — he actually gave me a big goofy smile — and we followed him through the double doors and into potential trouble.

I first met Dan Harkins a decade ago, back when he was a junior varsity developer who had leveraged himself to his nose hairs to build what turned out to be a thoroughly bland hotel in Boston’s Back Bay. The most notable thing about the hostelry was that there was absolutely nothing notable about it at all, but in the high-tech and biotech booms that defined the city through much of the 1990s, he made a not-so-small fortune gouging businessmen who didn’t know there was another way.

His problem was, he wasn’t bright enough to build another hotel. Or check that. Maybe deep down, he was shrewd enough to know that he couldn’t possibly replicate his success. So in a fit of whimsy, in a flood of money, he threw his proverbial hat into the political ring, splashed his business credentials all over his television commercials, sucked in millions of dollars in campaign contributions from other developers and businessmen, and one odd day woke up as the newly elected mayor.

The most vexing issue he faced in the campaign was that of his estranged son. Toby Harkins had served some jail time in his late teens for stealing cars and selling drugs. In his early twenties, he was rumored to be an up-and-coming mobster, a Dorchester kingpin who ran an elaborate criminal enterprise that took a piece of every drug sale and loan sharking deal in the most active neighborhoods in and around Boston. That’s when I first met Harkins, the elder, during the campaign. We sat down for a long interview focusing exclusively on his son. He repeatedly said that his boy was a challenge from a very young age and that he had failed miserably as a father to meet it. He said their contact now was nominal and growing less by the week. Still, he stressed, he had hope that he could somehow play a role in turning his son around. He added, though, with no small amount of sadness, that he had no idea what that role might be.

The public didn’t seem to mind. How many parents are there in the world who wished their kids turned out better, who saw in their children’s failings some failings of their own? I suspect he carried that vote by a wide margin, and on Election Day, he swept to easy victory all across the city.

Once in office, word of his son’s growing prominence within the Irish mob became more prevalent. It wasn’t long before Toby Harkins’s name was linked to gangland killings, major drug trafficking operations, and the occasional spat with the Italian Mafia based in the city’s North End. It proved to be an appealing story for the networks, the heavyweight newspapers, and the national news magazines — the successful mayor and his criminal son, each operating with a sense of impunity on different sides of the spectrum in the same city. Still, the mayor survived, always with the explanation that he had lost control of his son, that he was filled with regrets over his parental shortcomings, and overcome with sorrow for the people who were affected by his son’s crimes. He loved the boy, he’d say, in the inevitable way that a parent always loves a child. But he had been completely shut out of his life.

The year before, the U.S. attorney’s office in Boston obtained a twenty-seven-count indictment against Toby Harkins that included charges ranging from heroin trafficking to murder. When FBI agents knocked down the door to Harkins’s $3 million condominium in Back Bay, he was gone — with luggage, untold amounts of cash, and his passport. Every few months, a new tip was publicized that he was spotted in a Dublin pub drinking a black and tan, or at a hairdresser in one of those dusty Central California valley towns that no person with any sense would ever think to go. But there’s no tangible sign that the Feds were any closer to catching him now than the day he left.

All of which was fine for his father, the mayor. With the son out of town, he was also out of the headlines. And this was no doubt exactly where he wanted his son to remain in the run-up to his potential Senate appointment. New publicity could easily deep-six his prospects with a governor who was nervous about alienating the electorate.

And then along comes Agent Tom Jankle to leak word to me that Toby Harkins is a suspect in the Gardner heist. Then we obtain a videotape showing that Hilary Kane had been in Mayor Harkins’s apartment. The morning of my story linking Toby to the Gardner, Hilary winds up dead.

Which brings us to the mayor’s office. It is a cavernous space with towering ceilings and exposed concrete beams. A wall of windows overlooks the famed Quincy Market and Faneuil Hall, one of the most popular tourist destinations in the world, though a place that no one from Boston would ever consider visiting, except for a weekday lunch.

The mayor stood in the doorway until Mongillo and I walked in behind him, slammed the door shut, and raged at us, “That’s the most obnoxious, underhanded, sensationalistic stunt that I’ve ever had a reporter pull on me in ten years of politics.”

Mongillo, aimlessly walking around the office, turned to him and tersely said, “I’ve done worse than that. This week.” Well, this was really turning into some interview.

Harkins smashed his fist against the closed door. He stalked over to a sitting area and took a spot in a leather club chair without extending an invitation to us to join him. We did, anyway, side by side on a leather couch that looked like a throwback to when Mildred had just started on the job.

I said, “Mr. Mayor, nice as it would be to make small talk, you don’t have the time, and truth be known, neither do we. We have a problem. We have videotape of you and Hilary Kane entering your apartment together at two A.M. on Saturday, and of Hilary leaving alone thirty-two minutes after that. Three days later, she’s dead, shot in the head. We’d like you to answer some questions.”

If a man, if a mayor, could actually foam at the mouth, I think he’d be doing it now. His entire face was crimson, and not because he graduated from Harvard. He didn’t. It appeared that blood vessels were about to burst in his nose.

When he finally spoke, it was with a surprising clarity and sense of calm that belied his appearance. Carefully enunciating every syllable, he said, “I don’t have to speak to either one of you or to your fucking stupid newspaper about this or anything else in my personal life. You understand that?”

Mongillo, God bless him, said, “We’re on the record here.”

I shook my head and said, “No, I don’t understand. A woman, a city worker, is dead. You were with her in unusual circumstances three nights before. It’s a fact worth reporting, and we’re going to do just that in tomorrow’s paper.”

Were we? Probably not, not unless we got something more to go on. Harkins may or may not have realized that his refusal to speak would put enormous pressure on us to justify rushing the story into print. On the other hand, a detailed denial would somehow give it credibility, or news value. If that seems warped, it’s probably because it is, but I never said the news was an entirely rational business.

He looked at Mongillo and said, “I’m off the record.”

Well, he’s wrong about that, really. A subject doesn’t go off the record unless the reporter agrees to it. The default setting is always on the record, which means that anything that’s said can be used in print — kind of like the Miranda thing, only for the media age.

Mongillo was about to say something that was no doubt terse, if not incendiary, so I quickly cut in and said in an even voice, “Sir, we’re not going to talk off the record to the mayor of Boston about his possible involvement in a murder investigation. This isn’t about your campaign strategy for reelection, in all due respect.”

No respect intended, really, but I didn’t think it wise to tell him that.

He looked at me and said, “I don’t specifically recall being with Hilary Kane in my apartment. I would tell you that any tape that you claim to have is probably a dupe, doctored in some way by the many opponents I have who seek to discredit me. You’re just a tool. I’d be careful if I were you.”

Good points, all, and believe me, I’d felt like a tool lately, somebody’s bitch, if you will, racing into print with a story that I wasn’t completely comfortable with, watching the news unfold of a young woman’s death, being told by her sister that I in some way was linked, now watching that sister running across another continent for her life.

Mongillo furiously jotted down his quote in one of those pocket-size reporter’s notebooks that bad actors carry in movies when an obnoxious scribe with an invariably bad haircut plays a bit part.

I replied, “Sir, we’re authenticating it right now.” A lie, but a damned good idea. I’d have to jump on the phone with Peter Martin to do just that as soon as we left. “We’re also confirming the story with actual witnesses.” Another lie, another case of needing to get on the horn with Martin and sending a team of reporters to swarm the Ritz and its environs.

Outside, the light grew pale and bluish, sending the office, which faced east, into shadows. Harkins hadn’t bothered turning any lamps back on when he unexpectedly returned.

He said, “Well, I tell you what. When you test the video and realize it’s a fraud, when you fail to find a single witness that puts me in that building with Hilary Kane, then you can give me a call and apologize for that repulsive exhibition in my lobby and these demeaning questions in my office. Meantime, stay the hell away from me.”

He stood, meaning, I guess, that he was through. I wasn’t. So from my vantage on the couch, with the very angry mayor towering above me, I asked, “Sir, when’s the last time you’ve had contact with your son?”

He glared at me even harder than he had before, and I didn’t think that was possible. If his eyes were lasers, I’d have a face full of holes. He seethed, “What the fuck does that have to do with anything?”

Interesting answer, informative, even while it wasn’t. Before I could speak, Mongillo stood up beside me and said, “It has to do with the story in the Record yesterday morning about your son being a suspect in the Gardner theft. When’s the last time you spoke to him or saw him?”

He looked at the floor, as if calculating his response, thinking back through time, not wanting to misstep or misspeak. He looked at Mongillo, and then at me, and said, “Too long to clearly remember.” He shook his head in sadness, relieved of some of the anger that encompassed him just a moment before, and added, “Far too long, and that’s the shame of it all.” And then he turned and walked out.

Mongillo and I followed behind him at a respectable distance. We allowed him and his police escort to ride down in the elevator alone while we waited for the next car. Once we got on it, I looked at Mongillo and him at me, and he said, “You’re a father. Your son’s an accused murderer, one of the ten most wanted fugitives in America. Can you really not remember the last time you spoke?”

I shook my head. The doors slid open and a pair of bureaucrats, Mildred’s sister and cousin, from the looks of it, stepped on. We had a lot, but nothing fit for print. In the newspaper business, it’s called gathering string. At this point, I still had no idea where it led, I just knew we had to get there fast.