Dead Line

Chapter Twenty-five

So now what? Now what happens when virtually anything of any emotional value in your life is stripped away, one thing, one person at a time, slowly, tragically, after a while, almost mockingly. My wife is long gone. Elizabeth is on the other coast and doesn’t bother to call. My career is in shambles. Mongillo is leaving the paper. My most trusted friend, my dog, is dead.

Well, here’s what happens. You shift into automatic pilot. You dull your emotions, something I’ve had no choice but to practice over the years. You think practically, address the obstacles one at a time, and always strive toward a goal, which in this case was finding out who killed Hilary Kane, and why.

With those answers, I might well save Maggie Kane and salvage what was left of my own damned reputation.

First things first. I pulled my cellular phone out and listened to the message that was left for me as I comforted my dying dog. It was an unfamiliar voice, gruff and grainy, emerging amid a din of background noise that sounded like a restaurant or bar. “Jack Flynn,” the voice said. “Call this number—” and he gave it to me. “Your friend Hank needs your help, quickly.”

I didn’t like the sound of that. One death in one day was enough. So sitting in my parked car in the lot at the Angell Memorial Hospital, I punched out the number as quickly as I could, which wasn’t very quickly at all, given that my unsteady hands kept striking the wrong keys. When I finally got it right, a man picked up the phone on about the fifth ring with an abrupt, “Mulligan’s.”

“This is Jack Flynn. Someone left me a message saying that Hank needs my help.” I said this in as firm a voice as I could muster.

“Hold on,” he said, and the phone clanked on a hard surface. In the background, I heard the tinny sound of jukebox music, the loud laugh of a drunken woman, then a man’s voice, close by, asking for a pack of Winston’s. A moment later, that same man got back on the line and said, “Yeah, he’s still here, drunk as a skunk, sitting by his lonesome over in a corner booth. You better get him out of here before he says the wrong thing to the wrong person.”

“Where are you?” I asked.

“In Southie, 840 West Broadway, World-famous Mulligan’s Bar and Grill.” He was giving me a whiskeyed laugh as he slammed down the phone.

Great. This is just what the doctor — or rather, veterinarian — ordered, a night of playing caretaker for a drunken friend just a few minutes after putting my dog down. I didn’t think I would ever again feel anything but sad, but an inner anger began to weave its way to the forefront of my thoughts.

Regarding Hank, he had been a friend of mine for a couple of years now. I quite literally showed up on the doorstep of his Florida house one morning looking for help on a case that he had handled in homicide back before he retired. And did he ever help me. He flew to Boston. He guided me through a labyrinth of obstacles and deceptions toward an elusive truth. He risked arrest. He got shot. Once, he even plunged into the icy harbor in a needless bid to save my life. And I’ve got to say, I’ve loved the guy ever since.

That said, a couple of things were noteworthy about that call from Mulligan’s. First off, in all the time I had known him, I had never witnessed Hank Sweeney drink anything more than a single beer or, if I bought it for him, a glass of red wine. He just plain wasn’t a drinker. A smoker? Yes. An occasional pain in the ass? Most definitely. One of the more lovable guys I’ve ever met? Absolutely. But a drunk? Never. Not unless there was something about him that I hadn’t seen in the last couple of years since we met.

Second off, as I may have mentioned, Hank Sweeney is black, not that it matters. Except in South Boston it actually does, because the neighborhood was, is, and will probably always be lily-white. Yes, there are minorities in the Town, as the natives — myself included — tend to call it, but they’re mostly in the projects and certainly aren’t regular patrons of the slew of Broadway’s Irish bars. So when Prince Charming said on the phone that Sweeney might well say the wrong thing to the wrong person, he might just mean that Hank could tell someone, “Hello.”

Third off, Mulligan’s was the former hangout of Toby Harkins, the front when Harkins ran the most feared criminal organization in Boston, a veritable gang of Irish mobsters who ruled the city’s drug and rackets trade with what seemed like impunity. These days, I suspect, it’s just another bucket-of-blood bar along the main strip through Southie, though maybe old Hank, being the former homicide detective that he is, knows something I don’t, which wouldn’t be all that unusual.

So I stepped on it, as they say in the movies, hurtling past the Franklin Park Zoo on my left, the golf course where I met Tom Jankle a few days before on my right, through Dorchester, and into South Boston, all in less than ten minutes.

The good news was, I found the place immediately. The expected bad news, and I don’t know any other way to say this, so here goes: Mulligan’s was a real shithole.

More specifically, it was a windowless brick building. Actually, check that. There was one little sliver of a window covered with bars that made the whole thing look like a maximum security prison, and a more clever man than I could explain why in some metaphoric way, that might very well be the case. The sign above the door looked like it was scrawled by hand. The door itself, made of steel, was covered in the type of graffiti that probably seemed clever to the people who wrote it—“See Jane suck Dick”—but lost its humor in the harsh light of day. All in all, a most uninviting place, which I’m betting wasn’t entirely unintentional.

I double-parked, because that’s what people in this part of the city do, unless of course they triple-park. I steeled myself for the briefest of moments on the sidewalk, gulped in the clean, crisp, autumn air, then pushed against the door.

It was dark inside, almost black. Actually, hold on. There was really no good way to know. The moment I came through the door, the smoke hit me with such velocity that my first impulse was to slam shut my eyes. The second, which I had to overcome, was to turn right around and escape into the night.

I breathed through my nose to regulate the intake as my eyes adjusted to the assault. I mean, there are Boston Fire Department battalions that wouldn’t come into this place without an open radio line to headquarters. The employee lounge at RJR Reynolds’s is like a Martha Stewart commercial compared to the environs here. But nonetheless, once I got my bearings, I forged on, all in the name of friendship.

The long bar was on the right of the establishment, and there were booths set off to the left, along with a few cheap Formica tables. The place was, shockingly, crowded, peopled mostly by men with slicked-back hair in slightly soiled tee shirts and women with wide hips and crooked teeth. I think I was probably related to half of them.

I couldn’t see Sweeney, which was probably okay, because I really couldn’t see anything through all the pollution. So I made my way to the bar and said to the wiry, silver-haired bartender, “I’m Jack Flynn. You called me about Hank.”

He looked at me curiously for a long moment, before he said, “Jack, that you?”

“Bobby?” Bobby, as in, Bobby, my father’s second cousin, the one who could wriggle his ears and memorized the alphabet backward for the benefit of the many times he was stopped and questioned by the police for drunk driving. I really was related to half the place. I asked, “What the hell are you doing here?”

“Been tending bar here for the last forty years, every Saturday night, whether I want to or not.”

Maybe my mother had been right: I really ought to keep in better touch with family. Or maybe not.

Once the smallest of talk was out of the way, we really and truly didn’t have anything much to say, so I asked, “So what’s the deal with Hank?”

A toothless woman halfway down the bar was screeching for a Bud, so Bobby took leave for a moment, did a quick scan of the rest of the bar, and returned. He nodded his head toward the far corner of the establishment, and said, “He’s over there.”

I turned, and sure enough, my friend, Hank Sweeney. He was sitting in a corner booth with an empty tumbler in front of him, which didn’t seem to matter, because Hank looked stone-cold asleep, and sleep is probably the most benevolent take on the situation.

“How long’s he been out for?” I asked.

“Dunno. Twenty minutes or so. He’s getting himself in a lot less trouble that way.”

I laughed and said, “Hitting on all these young women, is he?”

As I asked this, a raspy-voiced, silver-haired lady of about seventy years old cuffed me in the back of the knee with her metal cane and yelled, “You going to order or are you going to block the bar yakking all night?”

Bobby looked at her with a cross of amusement and anger and said, “Milly, keep your fucking cane to yourself in here. I told you that already. And this guy’s my cousin, so get the fuck away.”

She looked at me for a long moment, and I could actually see her eyes fight through a state of inebriation to focus. “You’re blood, are you? Yeah,” she said, sizing me up. “You two look just alike. You could be brothers.”

You’d probably have to be there to know just how entirely offensive that statement was.

“The Flynns are a very blessed group,” I said, smiling.

She walked away without a reply.

When she was out of earshot, which for her would be about two feet, Bobby leaned over the bar and said to me, “Your friend came in here and demanded that we get Toby Harkins on the phone. Said he had a thing or two to tell him. I explained that Toby’s a fugitive, that I had no idea how to reach him, and that he’d best just order a drink and enjoy it in peace like everyone else.

“But he wouldn’t take no. Kept asking and asking. Started going around to the tables, threatening people, ‘I’m a retired cop. I’ve got connections. You get me that fucking slimeball Harkins on the horn or I’ll run your ass in jail.’ All that shit.

“Jack, I know this ain’t the Ritz here or anything, but we don’t need that shit. You know what I mean?”

I said, “I know what you mean. I know. I’ll take care of it and make sure he doesn’t come back. Just in case he does, call me again, would you? By the way, how’d you know to call me now? Did he give you my number?”

Bobby waved an arm at me as if I had said something profoundly stupid. “No, he couldn’t count to ten, for chrissakes. I went into his cell phone, and yours was the first and only number he had in there, under ‘Jack,’ so I called it.”

Typical Flynn, always thinking. I knocked my fist on the bar in a show of thanks and made my way across the room, through the smoke and the grime and amid the drunken din, toward Hank. I tell you, this whole place could be a lecture hall in the School of Hard Knocks.

I sat across the booth from him and he didn’t even stir. Understand, he is a considerable man in every way imaginable, but for now, I’m referring to the physical part of things. His head is enormous, which makes it understandable that his neck, charged with supporting it, is so large. He was splayed against the backrest of the high bench, snoring slightly, his hands twitching every once in a while on the surface of the grimy table. I put my right hand on his left and squeezed it for a moment, and as if he were a battery-operated toy, his eyes came slowly to life.

“The fuck are you doing, Hank? You’re going to get yourself killed.”

From the look that he gave me — complete and unadulterated confusion — he had no answer to my pointed question. If I had asked where he was, hell, who he was, I don’t think he could have answered those either. He stayed quiet for a long while, his eyes fixed on mine, then drifting around the room to get a handle on what was going on. Finally, he said to me in a voice thick with sleep and booze, “Guy’s got a right to get himself a drink on a Saturday night.”

“He sure does, but ten of them, and at Toby Harkins’s bar in Southie?”

Hank gave me a drunken smile and said in that soft voice of his, “Hey, someplace new, someplace different.”

I said, “Cut the shit, Hank. Tell me what the hell’s going on. Somebody could have busted your skull the way you were wandering around in here, threatening the locals with jail and telling them to put you in touch with Harkins.”

“All right, Jack. All right. I got carried away. Give me a break. And a cup of coffee.”

Good point. I bet the coffee’s great in here, a veritable Starbucks with a liquor license. I made my way back to the bar and Cousin Bobby set me up with a cup of Mulligan’s finest for Hank, and a Miller High Life for me. I set the drinks on the table with an odd sense of pride. This, after all, was my hometown.

I said, “So spill.”

Hank took a long sip. A Beach Boys song poured from the jukebox, “Help Me Rhonda,” one of those tunes you go through life innately hoping that you never hear again, and invariably, you’re disappointed.

He replied, “I got drunk. I had an idea. I thought I was invincible. I did something stupid.” He paused and met my eyes. “Thanks for bailing me out.”

I didn’t reply. Instead, we sat in silence. Well, not exactly silence. There was cackling and shouting on the other side of the room as a couple of what I would imagine were regulars were starting to dance. God, please don’t have this be a Beach Boys medley.

I said, “Baker died tonight.”

Hank’s mouth dropped open. He put his coffee mug down. “What?”

I explained about the tumor that had spread from his stomach into his chest, about the pain, the remote odds of survival, the vet telling me that it was the most humane thing to do. I said it all as if I were reciting it, knowing how many times I was going to have to tell people the same sad story. Hell, at that point, I hadn’t even called Elizabeth with the news, but that said, Elizabeth hadn’t called me now in days.

“I’m so sorry, Jack,” he said. “I know what that animal meant to you, and he was a wonderful dog.”

By now, old Hank almost seemed sober, though his eyes had wide circles around them and his clothes — a windbreaker over a V-neck sweater over a golf shirt — were disheveled from when he fell asleep sitting up. “Thank you,” I said, and then there was more silence as my mind drifted back to Baker lying on that blanket and slowly shutting his eyes for that final time.

He broke it by asking, “You ever do things that you really regret? A decision you made. An action you committed. Or maybe something you didn’t do.”

He searched out my eyes and his hands fidgeted nervously on the table. I’d never seen him quite like this. As the best homicide detectives are, he’s a trained observer, somewhat aloof from all that going on around him, skeptical without being cynical. But here he was, uncharacteristically anxious, drunk, in a place he ought not to have been in so many different ways. I didn’t know what to say so I said this: “Sure. We all do.”

He looked at me like he wanted something more, specifics maybe. I’ll admit, this wasn’t really the conversation I had bargained for sitting in Mulligan’s bar at nearly ten o’clock on a Saturday night an hour or so after putting down the best dog that will ever trot the earth. I looked around the freak show that was this bar, then back at Hank, and said, “Well, obviously, every moment of every day this week I’ve regretted rushing that story into print about Toby Harkins, because now and always, Hilary Kane is dead. That what you mean?”

“Kind of,” he said, absently nodding. Then he added, “Not your fault, Jack. You did what you had to do. And you got a priceless painting returned.”

“And a young woman killed.”

More silence. I gulped my beer, draining nearly half the bottle. Hank sipped his coffee.

I asked, “You think the mayor killed Hilary Kane?”

Hank held the cup in both of his hands and talked in that wheezy voice he gets when he’s confiding stuff that he wants you to hold true. He said, “If I were still on homicide and I saw those tapes, he’d be my number one suspect. That’s why the cops want you to get that stuff into print.”

I thought about telling him what Maggie had told me in Paris about her sister finding a computer file in the mayor’s apartment that night linking father and son. But I didn’t, and I’m not sure I can explain why, mostly because I don’t think I know. Instead, I said, “I was trying to reach you earlier today. I needed your help, but I never heard back from you.”

“Well, you got me now, here in the flesh.”

“And now I’m going to get rid of you. Come on, I’ll give you a lift.”

As we struggled to our feet in the tight-fitting booth, Hank said, “You ever fear that when you get older someday and you look back over the life you’ve lived, instead of feeling triumph and pride, you’re going to be filled with frustration and regret over how things turned out?”

I paused as I thought about this. Images of Katherine and Baker and Elizabeth and Hilary Kane and Maggie popped in and out of my tired brain. I thought of the empty apartment I was heading home to, the work I faced tomorrow. I swallowed hard and said, “Sometimes, yeah.”

“It’s not easy,” Hank said as he ambled heavily toward the door. Outside, it was cool and crisp and clean, and I gulped in the fresh night air, but the dank smell of smoke and old booze still clung to my hair and my skin and my clothes.

We got into my car, and Hank said again, “It’s not easy.” And two minutes later, as I maneuvered down Broadway, I heard the soft sounds of him snoring.