Dead Line

Chapter Twenty-eight

The sun had ducked behind a heavy cover of clouds and a chill autumn breeze blew in from the harbor as I stepped from my car and down onto the architectural atrocity that is known as City Hall Plaza.

Whatever urban planner thought that a multi-acre park of unfettered, uninterrupted brick in the heart of downtown Boston would serve as any sort of practical or aesthetic allure should have the plaza named for them, then hung in effigy on it. It is a park only a mason could love, overheated in the summer, a wind-whipped tundra in the winter, void of green, empty of humanity, offering nothing that anyone would regard as a creature comfort. It makes City Hall, located at its heart, seem like an oasis, which is no easy thing to do.

On this day, there were several hundred people gathered on the plaza, almost all of them dressed in their Sunday best. Most were black. Those who weren’t were elected or appointed officials trying to show they cared. Boston police had shot an unarmed man the prior week, the fourth police shooting in the last two months, and religious leaders from several predominantly minority neighborhoods had summoned their parishioners downtown in a show of prayerful protest.

Various ministers stepped to the dais praying that the police department would overcome its collective prejudice, that the elected officials would find the courage of compassion, that residents of the neighborhoods would see their way to forgiveness — provided the wrongs were quickly made right.

I stood in the rear, my eyes constantly on the back of Mayor Daniel Harkins, who sat in the first row, his head occasionally bowed, looking both chastened and determined. Afterward, as the crowd dispersed, Harkins appeared before several television cameras saying that all the shootings remained under investigation, that each one was certainly a tragedy, but he was still awaiting the dissemination of evidence and the compilation of reports to learn if any of the shootings were unjustified. Citizens deserve to be free of police violence, he said, but police also have a right to protect themselves while they do an extraordinarily dangerous and often underappreciated job. My legs got shaky just watching him walk a line this fine. Yet another reason why I took a job on the right side of the notebook.

Anyway, Harkins saw me while he was giving his interviews, and afterward, as he walked down a hulking set of concrete stairs that led from the plaza to the back of City Hall, he seemed not the least bit surprised when I caught up with him and asked if he had a moment to spare.

“What now, Jack? You have video of me in flagrante delicto with a member of a barnyard species?” He said this with a devilish smile on his face as he kept descending the steps.

Not wanting to allow him to set the tone, I said stone-faced, “No, sir, but I do have you caught in a lie.”

By then, we were at the bottom of the stairs, him a pace in front of me, heading toward his mayoral vehicle — a Ford Expedition that was parked with its engine running in the circular drive of City Hall known as the Horseshoe.

He replied, still walking toward the SUV, “A politician lying? Stop the presses.” And then he let out a little laugh.

I said, still flat, “It’s about your son. You lied about your son.” It almost hurt me to be this entirely humorless, to not engage him tit for tat in a whimsical little dance. But again, I wanted him to play on my terms, not the other way around. It’s important in any interview to not just control the questions, but to set the tone in which they are asked and hopefully answered.

He was at the rear door of the Expedition, his fingers on the handle. He turned and looked at me for the first time, the smile gone from his face. He said, “You don’t have shit.”

“I have you lying.”

His hand dropped down to his side. He was wearing a navy blue suit with a dark blue shirt and a cranberry-colored tie. The wind was whipping up from the direction of the harbor, tousling his hair and blowing through his jacket. His face, normally handsome and younger than his years, was ruddy from the hour or so he had just spent in the cold. He looked, in short, slightly disheveled and uncharacteristically worn.

“About what?”

“You want to talk about this right here?”

“It ain’t worth going anywhere else for.”

At that moment, two elderly women in the company of a forty-something man, all attired in sneakers and windbreakers, shrieked from the sidewalk and came clomping down the driveway.

“Mr. Mayor, Mr. Mayor,” the older of the two women yelled, “I love you. I absolutely love you. Could we get our picture taken with you?”

He gave them a wan smile and was about to respond when the second woman handed me a digital camera and said, “Shoot us, sonny.” Glad she wasn’t saying that to the mayor, because you never know how he’d take it.

Anyway, I’ve always loved the entitlement of the elderly, so much so that I can’t wait to have it someday. The three of them gathered around the mayor and pushed in real tight. I put the camera up to my eye and said, “On the count of three, everyone say fugitive.”

The three constituents said just that; Harkins merely glared at me. Truth be known, I didn’t think he was going to look all that pleasant in the photograph — a suspicion borne out when the young man pressed a few buttons on the camera, looked at the image, and said with some surprise, “Mayor, you’re not smiling.”

“Thank you, thank you, but I’ve got to run,” Harkins replied. “Flynn, get in the car.”

I got into the passenger-side rear door, Harkins got into the driver’s-side rear door, the monstrous SUV sped down the driveway, took a right onto the street, and we were off.

“What do you think I lied about?” Harkins said after a few moments of silence. He said this staring straight ahead, out the front window, as his young driver silently chauffeured us to destinations unknown.

Rather than wait for an answer, Harkins pulled a folded-up sheet of paper from the breast pocket of his suit coat, opened it up, scanned it, and barked to his police detail, “That’s it for my official schedule, Les. Take me to the Faulkner Hospital.”

“Sir?”

“You heard me. It’s in Jamaica Plain. Find it.”

Well, if he was going to shoot me, stab me, punch me, or inflict any act of violence whatsoever, a hospital was certainly a preferable destination.

Back at me, he said, “C’mon, what’d I lie about? I want to hear it.”

He was in a kind of take-charge, suffer-no-fools, accepting-no-bullshit mode, which for reasons that I wasn’t quite sure, I think played into my hand. I didn’t want a lot of mind games. I didn’t have the patience for the Machiavellian garbage that’s so prevalent in any dealing with any politician — the subterfuge, the layers of haze that float above even the simplest truths.

So I said in as flat a tone as I could muster, “I asked you last Wednesday when the last time was that you saw or heard from your son. You said, and I quote, ‘Too long to clearly remember. Far too long, and that’s the shame of it all.’ ”

I paused here as the car rolled through the Theater District. The driver stared blankly ahead and the mayor looked at me out of the corner of his increasingly angry eye. Then I added, my voice a little lower, “And that was a lie.”

“And why,” he asked, his frustration building into a crescendo, “would you say that?”

It was awkward, talking like this in the back of a car, or rather, an SUV. I felt like one of a pair of mob kingpins hashing out territory while trying to avoid the probing ears of federal agents, or Donald and Ivana Trump arguing in the back of their limousine over how to divvy up their New York empire. We were both facing forward, because to face each other made it almost awkwardly intimate — the very act, the shifting of the legs, the movement of the hips.

I turned my face to watch his, and he was, indeed, staring straight ahead. I said, “The night Hilary Kane was in your house, she saw a file on your personal computer. Let’s not play games here. You know this.”

He sat in silence. The car glided through the Back Bay, up Commonwealth Avenue, through Kenmore Square, past Fenway Park, where all this had started, and onto the Jamaicaway. All along, the entire time, he was silent, as if he hadn’t heard what I had said.

Normally in these situations, I refuse to speak. Never step into a gap that the person being questioned is supposed to fill. But finally, I could take no more, and said, “She saw the file about the Gardner thefts. She saw that you knew that Toby was holding on to some of the artwork. She made a printout. Before she died, she told her sister. Her sister told me. My plan is to tell readers.”

Still nothing by way of response. By now, we were heading past Jamaica Pond, gliding along the winding four-lane road in light Sunday traffic. Most everyone else had it easy today, God’s day, while Mongillo and Martin were back in the newsroom preparing to tell the world about the return of the stolen Rembrandt and Maggie Kane remained in hiding and the mayor next to me fought for his political life.

Again, I stepped hesitantly into the silence, this time saying, “To know about the Gardner pieces would mean that you had to be in contact with your son, because the FBI is saying they didn’t provide you with the information. There’s some question as to whether they even drew the connection.

“If you’re in contact with your son, you’ve been publicly lying about the extent of your relationship. It also raises legal questions about whether you’re aiding and abetting a fugitive. Finally, there are key members of the FBI who are privately suggesting that you might in some way benefit from the heist, from the sale or ransom of the art.”

If any one of these allegations was true, and they may very well all have been, it would prove catastrophic to the aspiring career of Boston’s incumbent mayor. At the very least, forget the Senate appointment. At most, you’re talking resignation, maybe criminal prosecution. That said, if any of them were false, and I put them into print, it would absolutely finish the already nose-diving career of the young and handsome Jack Flynn.

The driver took a right into the parking lot of the Faulkner Hospital and nervously asked, “Which part of the building are you going, sir?”

Harkins spoke for the first time in forever. He said in a much more conciliatory voice, “Just park the truck in whatever space you can find. We’ll get out there.”

He did, and we did. It was still cloudy, still windy, as Harkins walked across the parking lot toward the hulking brick edifice. I followed a pace or two behind, admittedly curious as to what he was doing, and why. If my good friends down at the Columbia School of Journalism ever teach a specific course in losing control of an interview, they ought to play a videotape for the young charges on exactly what was going on here.

We walked through the large automatic doors that led into the front lobby. At the reception desk, an elderly woman waved excitedly and said, “You’re doing a great job, Mayor.” He waved back without a smile and we didn’t stop. Instead, he strode to a bank of elevators, pressed 3, and we rode up in our perpetual state of silence.

Were we visiting a patient? Was he bringing me to see his fugitive son? Was he going to have me sit with a doctor who would explain that the mayor was mentally incapacitated and it wasn’t fair to write a story? What? What?

We walked off the elevator, him the standard step ahead of me, through a set of double doors, and into an empty, rectangular waiting room that was rimmed by institutional, upholstered chairs. It had all the standard accoutrements of the dreary hospital vigil — end tables that held stacks of outdated magazines, plastic greenery, a television set bolted high on a wall that at the moment was turned off.

Harkins stopped in the middle of the room and continued to look to the far end. He was looking in that direction, away from me, when he said in a voice that was somewhere between familiar and far away, “ ’Til the day I die, I’ll never forget it, because it was the happiest moment of my life. I was sitting right over there”—he pointed—“when the doctor came out with the news.

“It had been a complicated pregnancy. This was our first child, and Shelley had miscarried once before. When we got the hospital, she was in a great deal of pain, and the doctors immediately decided to do a C-section. They rushed her into surgery and told me to wait out here, in this very room. I sat in that corner.”

He paused. Not once had he looked at me during the start of his soliloquy. He was looking at the walls with the drab institutional art of sailboats on the Charles River, or at the scuffed tile floors. He slowly walked over to one of the chairs and sat down, and I sat a few seats away from him.

“I thought our boy was going to die, the way everyone had been acting. I thought, that’s it, the entire pregnancy, all that pent-up joy, it was about to lead to emotional devastation. So I sat in this room for two hours steeling myself, figuring out how Shelley and I would get over it, whether we’d try to have more kids, what it would do to our own marriage, how we could move on with our lives.

“And then the doctor came out and he said, ‘Mr. Harkins, it’s a boy.’ That’s it. Easy as that. ‘It’s a boy.’ There were a bunch of people around. It was six o’clock on a Saturday night, visiting hours. And I just broke down and cried.”

I thought he was about to do that all over again as he sat in that low-slung chair with the rose-colored cushions, his elbows on his knees and his gaze pointed down at the ground. Then he looked up at me, his head cocked sideways, his face all eyes, and said very softly, “Do you know what I mean, Jack? Do you know what I mean?”

I knew the next question was coming before he began speaking the words. “Do you have kids of your own?”

Well, not exactly. And why not, Jack? Because, Mayor, on that day that you’re reliving, you heard the exact words that I was expecting to be told, only it was going to be a girl. And I got the precise news that you had convinced yourself would be yours, only it was even worse. It wasn’t only my child who died in the hospital during what was supposed to be the happiest, most unforgettable time of my life; my wife died as well. And in that one moment of that one hellish day, two lives were lost and the lone survivor would never be the same.

So did I know what he meant? Yes, in the abstract, because I’ve spent too many hours imagining what I lost that day — the bottomless joy and the aching challenges and the everyday heartbreaks that might never be mine, all as I repeatedly warned myself that you can only miss what you once actually had.

But to his specific question, what was I supposed to say? Reveal my thoughts? Recount my most intimate travails? Share my agony? No. Instead, I met his stare and simply said, “Not yet.”

He nodded his head, though he understood exactly no part of my answer.

He said, “Well, Jack, when it happens, it changes you forever. They brought me in and had me wash up and when I held Toby for that first time, I never wanted to let go. Never.”

He was smiling then, but not a warm smile, more nostalgic, bittersweet. His voice trailed off as his gaze moved downward again. I kept my eyes focused on his, and thought I saw them begin to glisten.

“Still don’t.” When he said this, his voice was so thick, his tone so hushed, that I had to lean in to listen.

He fell quiet again, and we both sat in absolute silence, the only sound being the occasional rattle of a radiator on the near wall and the distant murmur of what were no doubt nurses talking and laughing at their station. This canyon, I refused to bridge. He had brought me to that visitor’s lounge for a reason that he had yet to reveal, so I sat there waiting for him to give me something more.

Finally, he looked across at me again, his face sideways, his ear almost parallel with the floor. His eyes, in fact, were wet, and he said quietly, “Maybe some men could walk away. Maybe you’ll be one of those guys. Your kid didn’t turn out according to the plan. The newspapers are clawing at you to make sure you’ve cut all ties. So you do, and you go on with your own career.”

Another long pause, as he turned from me to the wall straight ahead, his stare giving way to a vacant gaze. “I never could,” he said. “Toby’s pretty definitely a thief and probably a drug lord and maybe a killer, but he’s still the same human being that I held in my arms in this hospital thirty years ago. It’s a cliché, but he is my flesh and blood, my creation. How am I supposed to walk away from that?”

I suppose I should have been writing this stuff down. The three-term mayor of Boston, Daniel Harkins, was admitting to me a long-term lie, at the same time opening up multiple avenues of questions over whether he had aided a fugitive and possibly benefited from his crimes.

I sat those few chairs away blanketing him with my gaze, waiting to see if he wanted to take me further. I committed some of his comments to memory, repeated them over and over in my mind, not wanting to pull out a pen and a pad for fear it would inhibit him.

He looked spent. He actually appeared to have shrunk within the elegant confines of his navy suit. He just kept staring down, the fingers of his two hands entwined in front of him. I was about to speak, to delicately ask him some questions that needed to be answered, when he said, “And now you’re going to tell me that by trying to be a father to the worst possible son, by never forgetting that little boy who I held for the first time in this very hospital, that I’m going to lose my political career.”

Probably, but I’d argue — though perhaps not here and now — that it wasn’t simply fatherhood that would do him in, or even his wayward son, but the lies. It’s been said ad nauseum that in politics it’s never the crime so much as the cover-up, and this might be another prime example how.

I said, “But the fact you knew about the artwork and didn’t take any action is a total abrogation of your public responsibility as a citizen, and more so of your position as mayor. By being passive, you were essentially complicit. That’s a reportable story.”

He turned now and stared at me. “So you’re saying that a father should turn in his son, just call the cops and say, ‘Here’s where he is. Go arrest him. Let him spend the rest of his life in jail.’ ”

I thought about that for a long moment, and this time it was me looking at the floor and the mayor looking at me. I didn’t know the answer. I think I knew what I’d do, which is maybe pretty much the same thing that Harkins did, which is nothing. Or was it nothing? Because the point here was whether he aided and abetted, whether he, as the FBI intimated, actually played a role in making money off the art.

“Did you know about the Gardner art?” I asked.

“I learned about it within the past couple of months.”

“Did you know Toby’s location?”

“I learned that in the past couple of months as well.”

“Did you kill Hilary Kane?”

“No.”

“Did you reach out to Toby, or did he reach out to you?”

“I reached out to him.”

“But once you learned where he was, once you came to realize what you had, you thought it was fine to leave your murderous son who’s on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list free with a dozen priceless treasures.”

“You’re missing the point, Jack. You’re missing the entire point. I would never turn him in. I’m constitutionally incapable of doing that—”

“You lied.” I said this in a louder voice than I had meant.

“But I was about to do something different, something better. I was on the brink of negotiating the return of the art. And after he gave up the paintings, he was going to surrender.”

My eyes opened wide in shock, though probably no wider than my mouth. I sat there staring at him staring at me. There was a buzzing, churning, gnawing silence between us. And then Harkins added, “But then you printed your story on the front page of the Record, and the whole deal, the entire thing, went to hell.”