Dead Line

Chapter Twenty-nine

In newspaper-speak, we call this a he-said/she-said, the type of story where accusations and counteraccusations are flung and refuted with reckless disregard, always by people who seem a little loose around the lips. The frustrating part is that few of the charges are supported by documents; facts often give way to anger; reality is what the readers want to make it.

In this case, my operating theory remained largely unchanged. Mayor Daniel Harkins got drunk. He invited a young woman in a bar up to his condominium in the Ritz for a visit. Sex, power, and booze are hardly a new combination, yet a perennially fascinating one just the same.

Once in the apartment, she saw something that nobody aside from the mayor was intended to see (and I’m not talking about his Johnson): evidence that Harkins knew about his fugitive son’s role in the Gardner Museum heist. She reported it to authorities. She told her sister. She made a printout. And she ran.

A few days later, the mayor killed her. Maybe it was mindless rage. Maybe he feared a public campaign on her part — interviews on the network morning shows, sit-downs with the Record and The New York Times, appearances on Nightline, that would torpedo his chances for being appointed to the Senate seat. Another thought occurred to me as well. Maybe he hadn’t read the paper yet that morning. She was murdered early, before eight, and maybe he thought he was killing her before she said a word to anyone about what she saw.

I was playing this through my mind as I sat in a taxicab heading from Jamaica Plain to City Hall, where my car remained parked. The mayor, bless his bared little soul, saw no need to give me a lift back into town, which was probably just as well, because as soon as he stalked out of the hospital waiting room, I used the time alone to furiously scribble every quote I could remember on the note pad that I hadn’t wanted him to see.

The story that I had at that point wasn’t that the mayor had killed Hilary Kane. No, that would be too clean, and journalism, specifically newspaper reporting, is a dirty, grimy undertaking. But I could — and probably would — write a story saying that Boston Mayor Daniel Harkins had spent time alone in his apartment with a woman who was found murdered less than three days later, according to videotapes obtained by the Record. The second graph would read as follows: During the thirty-minute early morning visit, the victim saw a file on Harkins’s personal computer that detailed the mayor’s awareness of his son’s possible involvement in the Gardner Museum heist, according to a family member of the victim.

Then the denial, that Harkins said Sunday that he was trying to broker the return of the dozen masterpieces, and was trying to convince his son, federal fugitive Toby Harkins, to surrender to authorities.

He could deny until the cows came home, until Rembrandt and Vermeer and everyone else hung again on the Gardner’s walls, but it would be too late. The compilation of events, from the drunken tryst to the secretly held information to the taint of murder to the obvious pattern of previous lies, they’d kill him politically. He might be able to hold on to office until the next election, but by every possible and practical measure, Daniel Harkins’s career would be over. No Senate appointment, no reelection, nothing. He couldn’t even get a job as a mayoral driver. He’d probably have to become a lobbyist.

If he really didn’t kill Hilary Kane, would this be fair? I don’t know. Is it fair that my daughter died at birth and his son lived to take other people’s lives? Is it fair Hilary Kane died for doing the right thing? Is it fair that her sister is now living in constant fear?

Still, something bothered me about all this, and yet again, the feeling came from my gut, just as my hesitance did at that first story a week before. Looking into Harkins’s incredibly sad eyes at the hospital, there was something innately believable about what he said and the way he said it. I’ve been around liars every day of every week of every year of my career, and pride myself on my ability to spot them a mile away. Some reporters are great interviewers. Others are poets at the keyboard. My greatest asset, I believe, is an ability to peer into the human soul and discern fact from fiction. Harkins’s was a muddle, and it made me uneasy as I thought about the events and the consequences to come.

So what I needed were documents. The only documents to be had were the printouts from his computer. It was time, I came to realize, to acquire them, but the question was, how?

And the answer was, two ways. One, Maggie Kane could rack her brain and figure out where her sister might have hid them. And two, the hopefully sobered-up Hank Sweeney could call on his many contacts at Boston PD to tell me if they were taken during the initial search of Hilary’s apartment five days before.

My cell phone chimed. When I picked up, it was the unfailingly straightforward voice of Peter Martin, saying, “Your girl said she’s had enough of confinement. She’s going to get herself killed.”

My girl? Confinement? Sounds like I’m ripe for a grand jury indictment, followed by a splash on the cover of the Traveler, “Spiraling Journo Finds Bottom.” I asked the first question that popped into my addled mind: “Huh?”

“Maggie Kane. She says she’s had enough of the security, the hotel, the hiding. She says she’s heading back to work tomorrow and going on with her life.”

“Did you point out that her sister’s still dead and the killer, despite what police might think, isn’t behind bars?”

Martin said, “I did, though maybe not in your inimitable way. That said, I’m not going to argue too hard about saving $400 a night in hotel bills for her and her bodyguards, and another $1,000 a day in security costs.”

Ah, that’s my Peter. Rome is burning, and he’s worried about the water bill.

He said, “You should also know, the cardinal raced over to Mass General about thirty minutes ago to deliver what the television stations are reporting are the Last Rites to Senator Stiff. He might be dead and gone come tomorrow, and the governor seems to have every intention of appointing a replacement by the time the Senate reconvenes on Tuesday.”

As I’ve said before, there are some days, stories, when the timing could not possibly be more exquisite. Calls are returned early. Documents come available in the middle of the day. Key reporters for the opposing paper are out of town or chasing down false leads. And then there are stories like this one when the timing conjures images of a multiple car crash, with fire shooting into the air and body parts strewn about a blood-soaked stretch of road. If it can go wrong, it will. The rush is on, calls aren’t returned, answers are never what you had assumed. But no matter. The paper comes out every single morning whether you have what you need for a good story or not.

Speaking of which, Martin asked, “How’d it go with the mayor?”

“Interesting. Very interesting.”

“He spoke? What’d he say?” You could almost hear him get breathy with excitement, as if I were a woman and he asked me what I was wearing.

I told him — though just about the interview, not about my navy blazer and pale blue tie.

At the end of my summation, he said in that unnaturally calm way of his, “So we have it. We can get it into print.”

And he was right, for all the reasons I had previously recounted to myself — the video, the timing, the denial, the revelation. It would become a national story the second the morning Record hit the doorstep of the Associated Press office and they flung it across the world on their wire.

So why didn’t I feel better about this?

I said, “I’m on my way in shortly. Let’s talk about it a little bit more when I get there. You should inform Justine that we’re about to tie the mayor of Boston to a murder investigation so she doesn’t choke on her morning doughnuts.”

Martin said, “Will do. And do you realize in the Monday paper, the Record will be reporting the return of a priceless Rembrandt and the distinct possibility that the long-time mayor of Boston is or should be a suspect in the slaying of a young city worker?”

The guy was as jubilant as I’ve ever heard him. I had a role in both these stories, so again, why wasn’t I as happy?

When I arrived in my own car, I sat in the driver’s seat for a long moment trying to figure out what I needed to do first. In newspapering, the mornings are when you develop ideas. The middle part of the day is the time to gather information. The late afternoon is when you inevitably get your brains beaten out sitting at the computer trying to write what you know into some form of readable prose. Evening is when it’s someone else’s problem, namely the editors, and later, the copy editors who delight over finding the tiniest mistakes.

I was supposed to be in the gathering mode, but needed to stop my wheels from spinning and head in an affirmative direction. That’s when my phone rang. It was Mongillo, telling me in that gloating way of his, “Hey, Fair Hair, remember that big pile of clips that you had sitting on your desk on the Gardner heist?”

“Yeah?”

“You ever read them?”

“What’s your point, Vinny?” The answer, he already knew. No, I hadn’t read them, partly because I was running all over the world, namely because I didn’t give a rat’s furry ass about the Gardner theft, truth be known. What I cared about was why Hilary Kane was dead.

“My point is this: I know most of the stuff in the clips already, but one thing jumped out at me as potentially useful. On the third or fourth day of our coverage, the paper makes mention that Boston Police Detective Sergeant Hank Sweeney was one of the primary investigators, serving as a liaison between local and federal authorities. After that, we never mention him again. Why haven’t we been debriefing him now?”

A good question. The thought struck me like a bolt how uncharacteristically unhelpful Hank had been over the course of this story.

Before I could respond, Mongillo added, “I just tried him on his cell. No answer.”

I said, “I’ll find him.” And I was off.

Hank Sweeney lives in a high-ceilinged, parlor level, one bedroom apartment on Washington Street in Boston’s South End, a neighborhood that used to be on the frontier of danger and is now considered one of the most fashionable addresses in town. From his front door, he was just a few minutes in one direction to Roxbury, which was predominantly black, or in the other direction to Tremont Street, where some of the hottest victualers in Boston lined up along what was known as restaurant row.

“I get my people, I get your people, I get people who I don’t even know what they are,” he used to tell me. “I love it.”

Less than two years before, Hank was living alone in a prefabricated house in a mosquito-infested Florida development situated on what must have been the very edge of hell, if not actually in it. This is what he thought retirement was: aching boredom, overbearing heat, unending loneliness. And then I showed up on his doorstep, innocently enough, looking for a little bit of help on a murder case that had never been solved. He came up to Boston to give me more than everything I’d need, then never went back home. Best as I knew, his bed still sat neatly made in Marshton, just the way he had left it.

Now he was, in the polite vernacular of a decidedly impolite business, a law enforcement consultant. He didn’t do the gumshoe work of a private eye. He didn’t pack a weapon. He didn’t put himself in harm’s way, Vinny Mongillo’s dinner fork aside. What he did was advise well-heeled clients — and their attorneys — on how they could gain access to critical information and how they might be able to press the right buttons at police headquarters to make things happen in their favor. He did it selectively, and he did it well, and he did it on occasion for me — for free. But now that Mongillo raises the point, not so much on this case.

He had guided me on the argument unfolding between Boston PD and the FBI on Mount Vernon Street that afternoon, and he was the one to deliver the videotapes that incriminated Harkins a few afternoons back. But day in, day out, my good friend Hank Sweeney was not generally to be found.

So I decided to do just that — go find him. I pointed my car in the direction of his apartment and was there in a matter of minutes. I called him from my cell phone outside, but raised no answer on his home phone or his cell phone. I heard the former ringing from the street, but not the latter.

It was a brick townhouse building, four units in all, one on each floor, with big bay windows and a tiny front yard filled with beautiful flowers tended to by the elderly woman downstairs. I walked up the three steps to the door buzzers and rang Hank’s. Again, no answer. The more resourceful types would have devised a way to use a credit card to slip through the lock, or shy of that, scale up the side of the house, jimmy up the window and tumble onto his living room floor.

The most resourceful of all would have planned for such an occasion long ago and swapped house keys with Hank. They would have taken that key, plunged it into the keyhole, and walked into the apartment. This, thank you very much, is exactly what I did.

“Hello,” I yelled in his entryway. “Hello?”

No answer.

I’ll admit, I was slightly uneasy, due to two things. First, Sweeney’s a retired cop, meaning he probably still has a gun or two secreted somewhere around his apartment. Second, he might still be on that bender of the night before. Liquor and firearms don’t mix, though the NRA and the National Distillery Association would no doubt deny such an outrageous claim.

So I yelled one more time, “Hank? Hank, it’s Jack.” I pulled the door shut behind me.

I stepped into his living room and saw no signs of life. Fortunately, I saw no signs of death, either. The apartment came furnished, with stuff that looked straight out of the catalogue of Crate and Barrel, right down to the too-perfect knickknacks on the marble mantel and the silver picture frames that Hank had filled with photographs of his late wife. It seemed more like a showroom than someone’s home.

The place had an almost unnaturally empty feel to it. It was oddly still. All the windows were shut tight. The heater was off. There was nothing so much as a ticking clock or the occasional sound of running water from one of the apartments above.

I walked toward the back of the apartment and into the kitchen, where a dirty coffee cup sat on the counter, next to a glass with a little water in the bottom and an empty bottle of Excedrin. My good friend Hank probably woke up in a whole world of hurt.

It was brighter back here, and made me feel a little better. There was nothing suspicious thus far gleaned from this unsanctioned tour. I was starting to feel guilty about taking it, but told myself that I was checking on Hank’s health and well-being.

From there, I walked into the bedroom, where I stopped short at what I saw. An empty suitcase sat atop his carefully made bed, and some articles of clothing — a couple of shirts, a pair of khaki pants, and a pair of socks — were tossed on the bedspread next to the luggage. A couple of questions rose immediately to mind, the first one being: Who has a bedspread anymore? The second, more important query was: Had Hank just fled town?

This is a guess. This is only a guess. But it appeared that he might have pulled out a large piece of luggage, packed it with clothes, then decided to pare down to something smaller, maybe a carry-on bag. I poked around the bedroom looking for any other signs of his departure, but none came immediately to sight.

So I walked back into the kitchen, picked up the portable phone, and pressed the redial button. An abnormally long series of tones sounded, the phone rang twice, and a recording came on that said, “Welcome to American Airlines. Press 1 for—”

I hung up. Unless you could press 2 for help solving a murder that you think you might have caused, or press 3 to decide whether to savage the mayor’s reputation on the front pages of a newspaper for information that doesn’t make you feel entirely confident, the recording had very little more to offer. It already told me this: Hank Sweeney, you could bet, was getting out of town.

But why? Where? When?

I stuck my finger into the bottom of the empty coffee cup and the residue still had a hint of warmth. I walked over to the coffeemaker on a nearby counter, a simple Mr. Coffee machine, and pressed my palm gently against the carafe, which was warmer than a little warm. I’m no thermal engineer or whatever they might be called, but my bet is that he had shut this thing off within the last half hour. So I bolted for the front door.