Dead Line

Chapter Thirty-two

It wasn’t until I got to my desk in the newsroom of The Boston Record that I placed the manila folder before me and slowly, nervously, opened it up. The room around me was coming to life, with copy editors trickling through the door for their evening shift and the volume on the City Desk televisions turned loud as unnecessarily frantic announcers teased the top stories on the upcoming six o’clock news.

I looked over toward Vinny Mongillo, but he wasn’t there, and Peter Martin failed to herald my arrival as he’s prone to do. In the distance, I saw them gathered in the glass-walled conference room. Martin had a remote control in his hand and was clicking it at one of the televisions as if he was the first and only person to ever use such a device. Mongillo had his fist buried deep in a bag of what looked to be Fritos. The last time I saw someone eating Fritos, it was my colleague Steve Havlicek, who has since died. I tell you, people were fleeing my life like it was a rancid swamp.

I stared down at the first page of a printout. It was a Word file, thank you Bill Gates, a simple sheet with the words, “Toby Has,” at the top, in boldface, underneath which was a list of eight pieces of art which had been taken from the Gardner. Two of them had already been delivered to me, The Concert and the Storm. Below that, also in boldface, were the words, “Toby Can Get,” followed by two other pieces. Finally, in boldface, was the description, “Already sold,” with two more works listed underneath.

I turned the page and there was what appeared to be a new, separate printout, this one containing a list of bank names and account numbers, wiring numbers, bank deposit box locations and specific branches, along with multiple men’s names that immediately struck me as aliases for one Toby Harkins. Some of the bank locations were in London, others in Ireland. At the bottom was the word, in all capital letters, “CURRENT.” That was followed by an address in Dublin. Below that was the word “more,” in parenthesis, but when I turned the page, there were no others.

I sat in a bewildered silence for a long moment as the news blared at the City Desk — something about Senator Stiff Harrison — and editors consulted with their weekend reporters and Barbara at the message center repeatedly announced, “Call for Vinny Mongillo.”

Assuming Hilary Kane had turned over to whatever authorities she visited all that she retrieved from Daniel Harkins’s printer, then Toby Harkins’s involvement in the Gardner theft was the smallest trifle that they had. Far more important was the rock-solid evidence of a connection between the sitting mayor and the fugitive son, and more important than that, they had apparently up-to-date information on the location of America’s most-wanted fugitive.

I played this out in my mind. It was understandable, perhaps, that they didn’t want to leak his location, because by doing so, they might simply be scaring him away, pushing him to flee farther into the unknown. That said, I didn’t get the leak from Special Agent Tom Jankle until probably two full days after the FBI had received the printouts from Hilary Kane. Wouldn’t that have already given the Bureau enough time to capture its suspect?

And wouldn’t the FBI also recognize that if the mayor was involved, which he obviously was, that he would have immediately alerted his son about the information floating around in the public realm? If his son was in the process of escaping anew, wouldn’t it be better to blanket the public with information about where he’d just been, in hopes of new clues as to where he might be heading?

Or was it something else entirely? In almost any criminal case involving nearly any public disclosure, law enforcement almost always conceals at least one pivotal detail. Earlier in my career, I covered a series of killings in the old Massachusetts mill towns of Lawrence and Lowell. Women were found dead with their ring fingers severed but left at the scene. The police released this detail, but left out another key fact: that the killer placed an identical band upon every severed finger — rings which, ultimately, led to his capture. Later, I asked the chief detective on the case, Why? Why not fully disclose? He told me that they always leave something out for two reasons: to know if future killings are committed by the chief suspect, or by copycats; and to be able to weed out the surprising number of serial confessors who have nothing to do with the crimes.

So now what? My stomach was in knots. My head hurt. I missed my dog, my wife, my ex-girlfriend, my friend Hank. As much as anything, I missed the confidence of knowing that almost anything I did with a computer keyboard would somehow, in some way, turn out right. At that moment, I had no such confidence at all. Just ask Hilary Kane, which you can’t, and therein lies my main point.

I closed the manila folder and brought it into the conference room, where Martin, Justine Steele, and Mongillo were enraptured by the nightly news. I looked at the screen and saw a television reporter with a nasally voice that was destined to leave her forever on the weekend shift say, “And now, Luke, we’ll cut live inside to Senator Harrison’s press spokesman, Giles Hunt.”

The scene immediately cut to the fat-faced Giles at a podium with the Massachusetts General Hospital insignia on it. He was looking down, reading over some notes, and then he suddenly looked up into the cameras and said solemnly, “I have a very brief announcement, and then I’ll make the hospital’s chief physician available for any medical questions. At 5:12 P.M. today, Senator Herman Harrison passed away here in his hospital room, surrounded by his wife and children. He died in peace. As many of you know, doctors had stopped administering a chemotherapy regimen last week when it became apparent that the drugs were no longer staving off a cancer that had spread to most of his vital organs. Over the past twenty-four hours, the senator was lucid, but in a great deal of pain. During that time, he made a telephone call to the governor asking that she immediately name a successor upon his death, rather than extend the typical courtesy of not appointing someone for several days. There are key votes on Capitol Hill this week, and Senator Harrison wants the interests of Massachusetts and of America fully represented. The senator’s wife, Evelyn, has indicated that she is not interested in serving out the remainder of his term, nor are any of his children.

“On a personal note, it’s a very sad day for us all. The staff is feeling a deep sense of personal loss for a man that many of us have worked with for over a quarter century in public service. We also feel for the family, and yes, for the public, for the loss of such a great public servant.

“Now I’d be willing to entertain any questions for myself or for Dr. Bucik.”

Martin muted the sound and turned to me with a mix of excitement and relief. My eyes stayed riveted on the television, not on Giles or Dr. Bucik or anything to do with Stiff Harrison, who really was stiff now, but on the reporter asking the first question, a woman named Elizabeth Riggs.

She was standing in the second or third row with a carry-on bag over her shoulder, obviously just off a morning flight from the West Coast. The New York Times, no doubt, assumed she was familiar with the political geography of Massachusetts, and quickly dispatched her to cover this unfolding saga. I don’t specifically remember receiving a call from her about a return home, but I’d focus more on that later.

Martin, sitting down, said, “The Storm on the Sea of Galilee story is done. The painting is with the scientists, who say that initial tests show it’s authentic. Beyond that, you’ve just seen what happened on the tube. We have Amy Contras”—a very competent State House reporter—“on the story of Harrison’s death and the governor’s likely next step. This makes the Mayor Harkins story that much more urgent. Tomorrow morning, the governor will likely appoint him to fill the Senate seat. We need that story in the paper.”

He sat there looking at me, as did Justine on the other side of the table. I took a seat next to Mongillo, who continued to crunch away on the Fritos, though he took a second to hold out the open end of the bag toward me. As any adult would have done, I declined.

I slid the manila envelope across the table toward Martin and Steele and said, “This will probably interest you.” Always better to be understated with editors, I find. That way, you only excite, never disappoint, when they see the real goods. Overpromising is the worst thing you can do in the news business, and probably in life as well.

“These are the two files that I believe Hilary Kane pulled from Harkins’s home computer a couple of nights before she died. The first file, that’s the genesis for our leak, the story linking Toby to the Gardner thefts. But the second file, far more fertile, was never mentioned to me, and hasn’t seen the light of publicity.”

I fell quiet. Mongillo walked around the table and read silently over their shoulders. Barbara kept beckoning him, and he continued to ignore her.

A few minutes later, Martin looked at me. He was either scared or jubilant, I’m not sure which. Maybe both. Mongillo kept reading and crunching, and when he was done, gave one of those long, low whistles. “Fair Hair’s got himself the goods,” he said softly.

Martin said, “So we have him dead to rights. We’ve got him.” He clenched his fists into little balls on the table as he spoke as if he were about to punch at the air.

I replied, “It would seem that way, yeah, but for a couple of problems. First, we have no proof that these printouts are authentic. They were given to me by way of guidance. They’re nothing official. They’re not stamped with any sort of police evidence marking. So I’d be loath to quote directly from them.”

Martin asked, “Who gave these to you?”

I grimaced to myself and replied, “If we use them, I’ll tell you. But give me a little bit of time before I do.”

Martin unfurled his fingers and put them up to his puffy face. He said, “But you could use them as the basis of questions for Harkins, no?”

I nodded. “Certainly, though I haven’t yet. They were just put into my hand within the half hour, after I left the mayor.”

Martin asked, “What did Harkins say when you talked to him earlier?”

I chuckled a little bit, though I’m not entirely sure why, then I told them how he confessed to having contact with his son, about his belief that he could get Toby to surrender, and about how all hope was abandoned the morning my story ran.

Mongillo looked away in an exaggerated sort of way and said, “That was a high-impact story all right.” I stared at him for a moment, until I realized that trying to intimidate Vinny Mongillo was like trying to get a politician to shut up.

Martin asked, “What did he say about the Kane killing?”

“Denied any role. Didn’t say anything else.”

There was silence all around the table. I should note that with most controversial stories, it’s almost always the reporter who is pushing it hardest and the editors serving as the brakemen, and the higher the editor, the harder they’re pulling the lever to stop the runaway train. Ultimately, it’s their responsibility, and they don’t want to go down in an infamous history as having cost the paper its reputation, not to mention millions of dollars in a libel suit.

But I could already see it on Martin’s face. He wanted this story in print, sooner rather than later, and because we publish once each day, the next day’s paper would probably be just soon enough. And I could already feel it in my gut. My uncomfortable preference was to hold on to this thing for another cycle and see how the situation shook out.

“We’ve still got it,” Martin finally said. He said this while looking not at me, but at Justine, who would have to give her blessing to the final decision. “His interview alone, his admission that he was in contact with his son, is one hell of a significant story. These computer records are nice if you can get a Fed or someone over at PD to confirm them, but you know what: Who really needs them?”

I didn’t reply for a long time, for what might be described in a pulp novel as a pregnant pause. When I did, I said, “There’s something else.”

Justine said with a sardonic smile, “There’s always something else on this story.” I nodded at her.

I said, “I got a visit after sitting with the mayor. A henchman in a really bad suit, bad haircut, bad teeth, bad accent, bad everything, cornered me in a parking garage and said I needed to talk to someone. He dialed up a number on his cell phone, handed it to me, and on the other end is a guy who says he’s Toby Harkins.”

You could see the looks all around the table. Justine’s jaw actually dropped. Martin’s expression went from excited to outright exhilarated. Vinny stopped crunching in midmotion, something I’ve never seen him do before.

“So Toby and I are chitchatting, and he says he’d like to get together. He’s got a story to tell, and if I’m willing to hear him out, he’ll return the remaining works that were stolen from the Gardner Museum, to us.”

I fell silent and looked from one to the other. They were all frozen in time and space and emotion, as if someone had just flashed the temperature down a thousand degrees and this would be how posterity remembered us all, with amazed but perfectly ridiculous looks on our faces.

Martin broke out of the spell first, as could be predicted, and said, “So if you’re willing to take an exclusive story from America’s most wanted fugitive and splash it on the front page of The Boston Record, he’s going to reward you with the return of the treasures in the costliest art heist in history?”

I nodded. As I was doing that, Mongillo, apropos of nothing, said in an uncharacteristically mesmerized way, “A clean news break, then all those priceless treasures.”

“There’s a catch,” I said, and Justine nodded, as if she alone, and perhaps she was right, understood that there’s always a catch. I explained to them that he insisted on a Q and A to accompany the story, and more importantly, that we had to hold off on any story about his father until after Toby and I met.

Suddenly, the dreamy, exhilarated looks dissolved into confusion and, in Martin’s case, anguish. I added for emphasis, “If we go with the Dan Harkins story for morning, we lose the potential Toby Harkins story for Tuesday.”

And then the world, or the world as it existed in the conference room of the Record, fell silent. You could hear a Frito drop, which I think I actually did.

From there, we played it all out, the four of us did, played every possible angle — whether the caller was real or a mayoral-engineered fraud (probably real, given that we’d already had two masterpieces returned); whether Toby Harkins would really abandon the plan if we ran with a story about his father (probably would, given that he’s used to getting his way on every front); whether the Toby story would be better than the mayoral story (probably, but one would inform the other, still giving us both). Competition wasn’t a huge issue on this front, mostly because the Traveler wasn’t getting the leaks, the paintings, or the calls that we were. Of course, that could change in a minute if we ran with the Dan Harkins story and Toby shopped his exclusive around.

Peter Martin looked at me and said, “Okay, Jack, your reporting, your mayoral interview, your life on the line in a tête-à-tête with Toby. What’s your call?”

It occurred to me how ironic it would all be if because I had rushed that first story into print a week ago, now I dug my heels in on something far more solid, and we ended up losing it all. Still, I felt something in my gut, though that could have been an ulcer or a hernia. But what I think I felt was a gnawing sense to slow down, get more information, trade up, be careful. Of course, all of this belies what we typically do at a newspaper, but I was learning that sometimes you have to be different in this business to succeed.

Be certain of this, we could decimate the career of Mayor Daniel Harkins within the next twelve hours. I mean, it would be over, stripped of any of its past success, hung to dry on the pole of devastating publicity, another great pelt in the famous collection of Jack Flynn. But it didn’t feel right this time.

I said, “I think we wait.”

No one disagreed. Justine nodded her head, almost imperceptibly. Vinny crunched anew, but only momentarily. Martin said, “So here’s what’s probably going to happen. Tomorrow, the governor will appoint Harkins as the interim senator from Massachusetts. She’ll give him an appointment letter to carry to Washington. I would predict that he’ll spend the rest of the day in Boston to take care of his affairs, probably resign, clean out his office, and then on Tuesday morning, fly to Washington for the start of the Senate session. At that point, he must present an appointment letter to the clerk of the Senate, and then get officially sworn in, most likely by the vice president.”

He paused, probably to allow us to appreciate his vast knowledge of all things Washington and political, and we did, we did. But if I ever have that kind of detailed knowledge of the minutiae of federal government, shoot me in the head, please.

Martin added, “My point is, we still have a second shot at this, Tuesday morning. Before Harkins is given the oath on Capitol Hill, his appointment can probably still be delayed or derailed, if not by the governor, then by senators who don’t want him as part of their body. So if your friend”—he looked pointedly at me—“Toby doesn’t come through sometime tomorrow, then we say fuck it and jam the mayoral story into print on Tuesday.”

Yet again, Martin had brought order to chaos, boiled down a complicated scenario into its most logical elements, and formulated an endlessly practical plan.

All of this meant that at some point in the next twenty-four hours, another gorilla in a bad suit would show up at my doorstep or be waiting in my car or sitting in my favorite restaurant, waiting to escort me to a place that no reporter has ever been — in the company of Toby Harkins. I probably should have been a little anxious about this upcoming reality. I’d be smart to be anxious about it. But all I felt was a renewed sense of opportunity that I hadn’t experienced since I heard the first vague radio reporters of Hilary Kane’s death.

Vinny and I stood up in unison to get back into the newsroom, when Martin said, “One more thing. Vinny. I need you in Dublin by morning to check out this address that was pulled off the mayor’s computer file. Maybe you’ll run into Toby himself, but as important, find out if the FBI or Scotland Yard have been by.”

With that, Martin picked up the phone on the side table and punched out a number. He told whoever it was on the other end that he needed a reporter on a plane to Dublin that night. “Good, good,” he said, then he mouthed to Vinny, “You can still make the 8:30 flight.”

Back into the phone, he asked, “How much?” Silence, then, “No, I think there’s a misunderstanding. I just want a seat on the flight. I don’t want to buy the whole fricking plane.”

And with that, we left the conference room en masse to face a future that had already arrived.

I leaned on Vinny Mongillo’s desk and said, “Sorry you got dragged into this last-minute trip. It’s the second time you’ve had to rush overseas in a week. I bet you’re not going to miss that part of the business.”

He had taken the half-eaten bag of Fritos, crinkled up the top, and flung it into the trash. His desk phone was ringing. His cell phone was chiming some sort of marching song. His hair was matted down against his forehead, and his forearms were folded over his chest. He had already filed a page-one story for the next morning’s paper on the return of the Rembrandt that he so loved.

He pursed his lips and looked down with those big brown eyes of his and said, “Yeah, it’s just awful, racing to the airport, touching down tomorrow in another world, challenging authority, nailing the mayor or whoever we’re about to get, maybe getting all the art returned.”

He fell into silence, and I said nothing in return. He added, more softly, “This may be it for me. My last story. At least I’m going out with a bang.”

I nodded. I don’t know why this choked me up, but it did. Actually, of course, I know why it choked me up. Vinny Mongillo, the purest, most relentless information gathering machine I have ever met, was put on this earth to be a newspaper reporter, and he was right, this might really be it. I tried to picture the day that my phone would ring at work with Vinny on the other line pitching a story about a client who was paying him $10,000 a month to call in all his chits and connections in the biz. I couldn’t. I wouldn’t.

He said, “I’m worried about you on this one, Fair Hair. Your mood’s been off. Your nicely structured little world is coming apart. You’re blaming yourself for something that probably wasn’t your fault. So don’t let all this prod you into doing something stupid with Toby or the mayor.”

I nodded in acknowledgment, looking away all the while.

“I want to bring this story all the way back around,” I said. “I want to find out what the hell I did wrong. And I want to find out who the fuck killed Hilary Kane.”

Vinny replied, “I’ll be on the ground in Dublin for less than a few hours. If all goes well, I’m on a flight tomorrow afternoon back to Boston. I don’t want you muddling through this thing alone in that uncoordinated way of yours.”

And here, he smiled, that big, white, toothy smile of his that I’d seen a million times before and always thought I’d see a million times again, but maybe not anymore. I don’t know. Maybe I’d just go into business with him.

“You’re going to give Martin a conniption if you don’t haul ass for the airport,” I said.

“Exactly what I’m trying to do,” he said, still smiling.

He stood up and gathered a couple of notebooks and some pens together and pulled his passport out of his top desk drawer. Then he silently turned and wrapped his enormous arms around my shoulders and pulled me close to his very large, distinctly perfumed body.

“Be careful,” he said, his lips almost uncomfortably close to my ear, but that was okay, this time anyway.

“You more than me,” I said. And then he, like Elizabeth, like Hank, like everybody else, turned and walked away.