Dead Line

Chapter Twenty-three

Saturday, September 27

We gathered in the glass-walled conference room of The Boston Record, myself and Mongillo fresh off the flight from Europe, though I use the word fresh rather liberally there, as well as Peter Martin, former editor turned publisher Justine Steele, and Edgar, our crack director of security, a tiger in lamb’s clothing. I wanted Hank Sweeney to be a part of things, but couldn’t raise him on the phone.

We spread ourselves out around the horseshoe-shaped conference table. Several large containers of Mexican take-out food, Martin’s idea of largesse, sat at a side table. One quick question: When editors send for ethnic food for their charges, why can’t it ever be French?

It actually felt damned good to be back on American soil, and specifically on the commercial carpet of this wonderful newsroom. Some reporters, the worst reporters, never leave the building. They spend all their time on the phone, rarely glimpsing real life, the travails and the triumphs of the people we write about. I tend to spend an inordinate amount of time either on the street or on the road, with a front-row view of the mess that defines so much of modern life. It’s when I come back into the newsroom that I’m best able to make sense of what I’ve seen and work it into a form that the Record readers will understand.

Anyway, Edgar started us off. “I had a private contractor comb this room two hours ago for bugs, and they found nothing. I’ve had Peter’s, Jack’s, and Vinny’s phones tested for any form of listening or tracking devices, and detected none. Ms. Steele, I can have yours examined as well if you’d like. We’ve doubled our full-time, round-the-clock security detail in the lobby, and the same applies for the parking lot. Ms. Maggie Kane is currently in the presence of a team of trained security guards at an undisclosed location.”

“Would you tell her to give my best to Dick Cheney?” That was me, Jack, trying to draw a laugh with a little levity, in what I regret to inform turned out to be a dismal failure. In fact, I knew that Maggie was at that very moment in a downtown hotel, along with the former front line of the Nebraska Cornhuskers. Is it normal that I should feel jealous about that?

Martin, stone-faced, said, “Jack, why don’t you tell us what happened on your all-expenses paid European vacation this week.”

Yeah, it was just great. I went to Rome and got kicked in the balls and punched in the face and fled to Paris, where a woman laughed at my nudity and I had a room service hamburger and escaped the city with the specter of death looming every which way we looked. But it is, I determined for all of humanity, possible to do the Louvre in under two hours.

Well, that’s not what I really said. What I did was ignore his attempt at humor just as he did mine. I mean, I was exhausted, harried, impatient, and sore. I had slept in a chair the night before while Maggie Kane was stretched out in all her womanly splendor on the big, firm, king-size bed that dominated not just my room, but my thoughts. I was tired of chasing that which I didn’t yet know, and being chased by a villain who I couldn’t identify.

So instead, all businesslike, I launched into my spiel. I explained, because Justine hadn’t heard them before, my initial suspicions that I had been set up or duped in the original story portraying Toby Harkins as a suspect in the Gardner heist. I showed them the videotapes of Mayor Harkins and Hilary Kane. I described the bungled breakfast meeting, the assault on the Roman street, the flight to Paris, the unrequited rendezvous at the Louvre, the visit in my hotel room in the dark of a French night. I omitted the precise details of the bathtub moment.

And then I told them of Maggie Kane’s assertions about what her sister saw in Harkins’s apartment that night that caused her to be so worried when she left, and that probably brought about her murder within a few days.

When I stopped, I looked from Martin to Steele and said, “So that’s what I got. Sorry I didn’t bring back any souvenirs, but I was tied up trying to save the world as we know it, not to mention something even more important, which is myself.”

Maybe it’s worth noting for no other reason than random kicks — though I don’t like that word much since the encounter on the Roman street — that Martin was attired in a shirt and tie on an autumn Saturday afternoon in a mostly desolate newsroom. Truth is, I don’t ever really recall seeing him in anything but a shirt and tie, as if that’s all he owned. Justine, a well-preserved middle-aged woman of relentless style, was wearing fashionable and casual jeans and what was no doubt an extraordinarily expensive top, even if it looked like you could get the same thing at the Gap for ten bucks. Vinny and I looked like last week’s laundry.

Martin said, as he’s prone to do in these situations, “So give me the lede as you have it now.”

A lede, by the way, is newspaperese for the first paragraph of a hard news story, usually a down and dirty summation of the points that will follow in the body of the work. I thought about that for a moment. Vinny used the time to help himself to more ranchos huervos or quesadillas or whatever it was that was over there. Edgar seemed ready to keel over from boredom, but I think he was just giving it his Columbo act.

I said, “The way I’d write it now is something to the effect of, ‘The city attorney slain earlier this week in the Boston Common Garage had been involved in an intimate encounter with Mayor Daniel Harkins days before her death, according to the victim’s sister.’

“Second graph: ‘During that encounter, the sister said, the attorney happened across seemingly confidential information in the mayor’s personal computer listing telephone numbers and other information about his fugitive son.

“ ‘The mayor,’ ” I said with a little more drama here, “ ‘has previously maintained that he has not communicated with his son in any way in at least ten years.’ ”

Martin gave that kind of exaggerated head nod that said, “Not bad.” He asked, “Now when Harkins wins a libel suit against us, do you think he’d convert this building into a casino or just outright level it and make a parking lot?”

Mongillo laughed, despite himself. Justine stared at me without expression. Edgar looked out the window at the Southeast Expressway. I got Martin’s point.

“I’m not saying we’re there, yet. I’m saying that’s what we’re striving for.”

“I understand,” Martin replied. “Do we have anything besides the sister’s word to go on? You’ve considered, I’m sure, that this could be a setup. She might not be a sister at all, or assuming she is, she might have some vendetta against the mayor. Maybe she had an affair with him.”

My head hurt again, and not from the fall in Rome, which is not to be confused with the fall of Rome. I said, “She says that Hilary took the printout of the information, or at least the sheets that she got her hands on until the printer malfunctioned. She doesn’t know where they are. My best guess is that the Feds or the Boston cops came across them in the sweep of her apartment last week.”

Martin: “Can’t your pal Sweeney call in some chits over at homicide and tell you that?”

I nodded and was about to say that I was trying to reach him when Martin, smartly, added, “But if they had found it, what’s that ex-boyfriend doing sitting in the slammer?”

I nodded again. I can’t say it enough, Martin knows how to cut to the quick faster, with more accuracy, than a plastic surgeon in Beverly Hills.

Out of nowhere, Edgar said, “Let’s see that video of her walking out again.”

We all looked at him for a moment, and without comment, I got up and hit Play again. I mean, at this point, Edgar could have said he needed me to disrobe while he pierced my nipples and I probably would have done it. Anyway, on the screen, there was the image of Hilary again, walking through the lobby alone on her way out the door. Edgar ordered me to stop, and he got slowly out of his chair and ambled toward the screen and pointed at the shoulder bag that she was carrying.

“This could be it, those papers,” he said, and sure enough, what looked to be a couple of sheets of white paper were protruding from her unzipped bag.

“Go to her entrance,” he said. And I did, and there was the bag again, but with no papers sticking out.

Edgar, in a moment of low-key triumph, said as he sat back down, “She took something out of that apartment.”

We all considered this in silence. Well, near silence. Mongillo was eating away, making his usual Vinny sounds. Martin was spooning Mexican food from the serving containers onto a plastic plate.

Justine said, “Well, I think we can agree that we’re not where we need to be. We have video footage, and we have the account of the sister, which entirely involves what a judge would describe as hearsay evidence, though that’s perfectly usable in print. But it is entirely necessary to have some sort of corroboration, and that computer printout would be pretty damned good. Short of that, even a police source saying that they’re investigating the mayor would help us.”

Martin, himself sitting back down now, said, “The question we’re not asking, though, is how do these two unfolding events tie together? At the core, we have Jack’s story naming Toby Harkins as a suspect in the Gardner heist. But that spawns two different stories. First is the return of the Vermeer. Obviously, someone is trying to signal to us that we’re on the money, or not, and I have a good feeling we haven’t heard the last of them.

“Second, we have the death of Hilary Kane and the constant threats to her sister. Why,” and he looked around at each of us here with an uncharacteristically dramatic flair, “would it be in anyone’s best interest to have the Kane sisters dead after — after — the story has already been in print?”

And right there, floating out there above the table, hanging in that gloomy conference room on this otherwise brilliant autumn afternoon, was the question of the hour, of the day, the week even, maybe the month. We all sat in a stumped silence mulling what Martin just said, trying to grab on to the moving parts of the stories and fit them into some semblance of a proper place. I’ll admit, I was frustrated.

And then Mongillo spoke. He took a giant bite of guacamango or whatever the hell they call that green gunk that looks like it came from a dying cat’s intestines. He swallowed, sipped on a bottle of Coca-Cola, and said, “Because maybe Hilary Kane saw something that night in Harkins’s apartment that we don’t yet know about. Maybe the mayor or whoever else is behind her death is afraid that she told Maggie. And maybe it’s on those printouts that we haven’t yet found.”

At that exact moment, I heard the sounds of pieces coming together, fitting snug into preconceived slots, like doors kissing shut or the hood of a car falling closed, as if suddenly, there was a design to what we needed, a rhyme and, if you will, a reason.

I nodded and looked down at the expanse of the shiny table and said without looking at anyone, “Mongillo’s right. Maybe what we already have isn’t what we really need.”

Martin spoke up. “Well, gentlemen, you’re going to have to put this to Harkins. There’s a good chance that we’re essentially about to accuse the mayor of Boston of murder. Much as I like the element of surprise, it would be nice to give him a little bit of notice and maybe see what he has to say.”

He added, “He’s at a nondenominational prayer breakfast in City Hall Plaza at ten tomorrow morning. That sounds as good a place as any to ask him if he’s killed anyone lately.”

Mongillo looked at me and I looked at him and we both nodded. Another classic double teaming in the making, courtesy of The Boston Record. The mayor wouldn’t know what hit him.

And at that point, I had no idea that misfortune was about to give way to catastrophe.