Dead Line

Chapter Thirty-three

Any $50-an-hour hooker or million-dollar-a-year real estate agent knows there’s one true thing about business. It’s all about location, location, location, and sitting in the Record newsroom as darkness descended upon a September Sunday night, I knew this wasn’t where I would best attract the anticipated solicitations of a Mister Toby Harkins.

I mean, to get to me at my desk, Toby and his henchmen would have to somehow subvert the Record’s newly constituted security plan. Toby could mess with the Gardner guards, with the Boston police, with the FBI, with Scotland Yard, but don’t, under any circumstances, get on the wrong side of Edgar Sullivan.

So I made a couple of quick calls, the first one being to the private cell phone of Tom Jankle, special agent with the FBI. I had questions. He had answers. The issue was, would he give them to me. Would he tell me why he held back on me last Monday night, why he leaked what he did and didn’t leak what he didn’t? Would he tell me whether the FBI had nearly captured Toby Harkins in Dublin, whether they were gin clear on the involvement of the father with the son? These are the things I wanted to know, needed to know, before I met Harkins at a place of his obvious choosing.

“Yeah?” he answered.

Phone manners had gone the way of the Celtics dynasty and the $6 bleacher seat at Fenway Park. These days, it costs twenty bucks just to park at the game, another ten-spot for a hot dog and a beer, $65 for a decent seat and four bucks for a bag of peanuts, all so an overpaid bunch of prima donna choke artists can blow every homestretch to the dreaded Yankees. Maybe next year.

Not that this has anything to do with the price of Spam in Kuwait. So I said sharply into the phone, “Jack Flynn here.”

A hesitation. “Hello there, Jack Flynn.”

“How are you, Agent Jankle?”

“I’m well. Very well. What are you doing dedicating yourself to the public’s right to know on this fine autumn night?”

I could have beat around the bush, even if I’ve never quite understood the phrase or the action it supposedly represents. What kind of bush?

So I said, “I’m trying to find out — check that, I will find out, with or without your help — why you withheld so much information from me in your office last Monday night. You had a goldmine from Hilary Kane. You gave me some pyrite.”

Forgive the tough-guy talk, but I had had enough of the confusion, the obfuscation, the hazy motives, the two-bank setups. Like I said, I had questions, I wanted answers — just some straight-up, no frills information.

There was silence on the other end of the line, silence that persisted for so long that I asked, in no conciliatory way, “You there?”

He cleared his throat rather than provided a verbal answer. Eventually, he said, “Yeah, but I’m trying to figure out what I can tell you and what I can’t.”

“Agent Jankle,” I said, sharp, my words like metal rods, “Hilary Kane is dead. Maggie Kane, as you well know, almost joined her in the benevolent beyond. I’ve been punched and kicked and stuck in a hospital in Rome, which is someplace that no civilized person should ever have to be. I’ve had a man break into my apartment in the middle of the night.”

I paused here for dramatic effect, or maybe that’s melodramatic effect. Then I added, “And you started me on all this. I was having a perfectly merry time sitting with my girlfriend in some damned fine seats at Fenway Park watching the Red Sox when you kicked my life on its side. It’s not a matter of what you can or can’t tell me, what you want or don’t want to tell me. Sir, we’re at the point here and now when there are things that you need to tell me — immediately.”

Again, silence, though as I looked around the sparsely populated newsroom, the few reporters and editors present were now unapologetically staring at my end of this unfolding conversation. All we needed was a guy coming around selling Cracker Jack and the whole thing would have been complete — Jack Flynn, circus freak, come see him while he’s hot.

Still silence on the other end of the line, silence for so long that I finally said, quietly, “Do you get my point?”

“Jack,” Jankle said, “I want to help. I’ve wanted to help you from the very beginning. I’m just trying to figure out the best way to do that right now, for your sake and for mine.”

His voice drifted off into another void, though a moment later, he added, “How about you meet me at nine P.M., Yawkey Way, outside of Fenway Park, Gate A.”

“Make it worth my while,” I said.

“I will. I will.”

I hung up with some flair, if only to let everyone know they could go back to whatever it was they were doing. Then, proceeding on some sort of roll, I picked up the phone and punched out the first nine digits of Elizabeth Riggs’s cell phone number before letting my finger rest over the tenth button, the zero. Again, I had questions, she had answers. Why didn’t you call? Where were you staying? Why not at home? I looked at the clock on the nearby wall and saw it was 7:00, the throes of her deadline, so instead of pressing down, I placed the receiver carefully back in the cradle. I convinced myself that these inquiries would be better to pose in person, though when that might be was anyone’s guess.

So I gathered up a couple of legal pads for the upcoming festivities and headed into the night, a place where anything could happen, and as it turned out, anything would.

I’m not a stalker, but I play one on TV. This is what I was thinking when I found myself in the lobby of the Boston Harbor Hotel amid a little detour on my way home from work. I had an epiphany, or maybe it was just a guess. Regardless, it occurred to me that Elizabeth, having missed the water views she so loved from the place we once shared, probably checked into this very hotel and requested a harborfront room.

I picked up a house phone that was resting on an antique desk and asked the operator to be connected to a Ms. Elizabeth Riggs. There was a long moment of angst, on my part, anyway, before the woman on the other end said in an indistinguishable accent, “Certainly.” Then the phone began ringing.

My palms were sweating like that time back in high school when I asked my deepest, sincerest teenage crush to the prom, and she said — well, nevermind what she said. These things aren’t important now, or at least that’s what my psychiatrist would tell me if I could find the courage to enlist one. On the third ring, the most familiar voice in the world said, “Hello, this is Elizabeth.”

I hesitated, though not necessarily on purpose. My voice caught for a small fraction of a fast second, or maybe it was my brain. Either way, I said, “Hello, this is Jack.”

Get it? I was mimicking her. I don’t know if she did. Hell, I don’t know if I did.

Then it was her turn to hesitate, just long enough for me to say, “Flynn. F-L-Y-N-N. We used to live in the same condominium, sleep together every night, and have very good sex, at least by my modest standards.”

She said, surprised but not necessarily amused, “Jack. How — how — are you? Where are you?”

“I’m great, and I’m in your lobby.”

“Jesus, you could track down a black widow in a coal mine.” She said this with a laugh, though I’m not quite sure that, while true, she thought it all that funny.

We had spoken the night before, or, technically, earlier that very day, but it still seemed like forever ago, and if I remember right, she concluded the conversation in a fit of tears saying that she’d speak to me soon. So I guess she was right, even if she didn’t necessarily mean to be.

I said, “I thought I’d just say hi.” I was shuffling my feet on the thick lobby carpet. I could feel my cheeks burn from embarrassment, or nervousness, or some other not-so-random emotion that I wasn’t accustomed to. The words on both sides were delivered like wet noodles, and I instantly regretted walking into this hotel and placing this call.

I added, “So I’ve said it. I’ll leave you alone now. You’re probably on deadline.”

I hesitated, and so did she, until she replied, “No, Jack, why don’t you come up for a moment.”

A moment.

She gave me her room number, and I was off.

Heading upstairs, I recalled the first time that I kissed her. It was in an elevator at a roadside motel in Portland, Maine, both of us covering a terribly depressing story about children burned to death in a day care center fire, and somehow, amid the endless misery of that awful day, finding each other in the hotel bar, and in that find, discovering years of happiness that should have gone on forever. But shouldn’t I have known that they never would?

I knocked on her door just once, softly, and she opened it immediately, expectantly. She was dressed in what she used to call her “uniform,” a pair of perfectly fitting boot-cut jeans, faded, and a tee shirt with her long sleeves pushed up beyond her elbows.

Her hair was slightly messy, no doubt from playing with it as she tends to do on deadline. Her face, especially her eyes, looked tired, and I knew it was because she gets exhausted flying on airplanes, regardless of the time of day. She said, looking me square in the face, “Come in,” and I did. But the most noticeable, most important thing about the entrance was our failure to kiss.

We walked into the room with big, wide windows looking out across the blackness of Boston Harbor. She sat on the bed, me on an upholstered chair with a matching ottoman before it. Her laptop was open on the desk, beside a pot of coffee and a single cup. To break the ice, she said to me, “You beat me to the punch. I was going to call you tomorrow.”

“Well, I saw you on the news, asking a question, and I figured I’d just say hello in case we both got tied up with other things.”

“I’m glad you did.”

“Yeah, so am I.”

If I’d ever been involved in a more tortured, more awkward exchange, then my mind must have blanked it out completely and fortunately. This was like watching a fifty-car interstate highway pileup on a snowy night, only without any of the fascinating gore. We were talking about the fact we were talking, as if we were either eighty years old or had never previously met.

So I said, “I definitely shouldn’t have stopped by, unannounced. I’m just sad about Baker and aggravated over Hilary Kane and generally at wit’s end about life.” I paused and added, “And I miss you.”

She looked down now, as if the rug posed some new and fascinating aesthetic challenges, and replied, “I’m really sad about Baker too. I really am.” When she looked back at me, her eyes were wet.

Note her failure to say the simple, soothing words, “I miss you too.”

We both sat in silence looking anywhere but at each other. Then I stared at her face and said, “We fucked things up pretty well, didn’t we?” I paused and added, “I fucked things up pretty well.”

“We did, Jack, you and I. You have issues, and I didn’t deal with them very well. Other women would have, and will.”

My stomach felt at once empty and heavy. My head was starting to hurt. My eyes burned. This was a conversation I didn’t want to have, the last chapter in a book I didn’t want to read.

So rather than continue, I slowly, sadly, nodded my head, my lips pursed and my gaze down. I got up in a labored kind of way. I stepped toward her sitting on the edge of her king-size bed, leaned down, and kissed that same soft cheek that used to be pressed against my head in slumber every single glorious and inglorious night. And then I walked out of the room in silence, not fast, not slow, just forlorn. She did nothing to stop me. Maybe it really was good that I came here, but for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out how or why.