Dead Line

Chapter Five

Tuesday, September 23

I sat at the wrought-iron table on our harborfront veranda staring so intently at the front page of the Record that the words seemed to meld into one giant block of meaningless black. Maybe it was the hour, which was 6:00 A.M., or maybe it was my condition, which was exhaustion. I blinked hard, took a long pull of fresh-squeezed orange juice, and looked again.

“Investigators Eyeing Fugitive in Gardner Heist,” the headline read in a thick, appropriately foreboding font. Under that, in slightly smaller letters, “New leads create link to Toby Harkins.”

My name, my byline, looked especially large up there on the left side of the front page, over a story that was stripped right across the top — a banner, as we call it in the news biz. On the far right side, the copy-editors cut in with a small photograph of Rembrandt’s Storm on the Sea of Galilee, making it look like we put a whole lot more thought into this venture of reporting this story than was actually the case.

In general, I make it a practice not to read my stories once they’ve appeared in print, because all you can get is frustrated at some penny-ante change that some nickel-and-dime editor might have made along the line, entirely ruining the otherwise perfect rhythm and flow of your sentences and thoughts. This one I read, mostly because I barely remembered writing it, it all happened so quick.

And I was doing just that, reading it, when I heard the sliding glass door open behind me, and turned to see a topless Elizabeth Riggs, clad only in a pair of my white boxer shorts, her morning hair a tangle atop her beautiful head, step out onto the balcony and wrap her long arms around my neck from behind.

“I didn’t hear you come to bed,” she said in her thick morning voice, her warm breath filling my ear. “I didn’t hear you get up. I don’t recall getting what I asked for before you abandoned me last night.”

It was true, all of it. I tumbled into bed sometime after 2:00 A.M. and a couple of cold beers drunk in the company of my dog Baker in the living room of our condominium. I had needed something to calm me down and help me get to sleep. Then I rose at 5:30 at the first light of early morning, unable to wait for the events of the day.

The Record, God bless the men and women in circulation, was already waiting on our doorstep, and I sat out here reading it in the growing light of a rising sun. It was cool out, yes, somewhere in the low 60s, but fresh, crisp, vibrant in that way that September is supposed to be.

“Where were you?” she asked, her mouth still directed against the sensitive parts of my ear. I felt her warm breasts against my neck, her hair against the sides of my face, and I’m not sure why it all made me feel so sad, so vacant, but it did. Actually, I lie. I do know why, it’s just that I didn’t want to confront it. The next day, Elizabeth would be gone, and despite anything on the front page of that day’s paper, despite the whirlwind that was about to come, her departure was the major headline in the periodically sad life of Jack Flynn.

Without saying anything, I pointed to the story in front of me.

“Oh my God,” she said. She said this as she pulled her arms back, came around to my side and sat on another chair silently reading the paper. By the way, it’s important to note that our deck was completely private, inaccessible to any pair of eyes on land, though I’ve often been suspicious that voyeuristic yachtsmen, familiar with Elizabeth’s penchant for topless and even naked lounging, drop anchor in the waters just off our building. I scanned the harbor but didn’t see any on that morning.

She carefully read the story, turning from the front page to the jump — the part of the story that’s continued inside the paper — then back to the front page again. Finished, she trained her enormous blue eyes on me and said, “How the hell did you ever get all this between the time I left you at Fenway and the Record’s deadline?”

That was, to be sure, a compliment, presented in a classically journalistic way — with an incredulous tone, even a skeptical one, rolled into a question. Before I could answer, there was a knock, or rather a scratch, at our sliding door, and I turned to see Baker, his eyes at half mast and his fur fuzzy on top of his big head from what I’m sure was an unsatisfying half night of sleep, pawing at the glass to join the crowd.

As I opened the door to let him out, I heard an announcer on the Bose radio in the kitchen reading the news with one of those fake wire tickers sounding behind him.

“Federal, state and city officials are thus far offering no comment to this morning’s Record report that investigators are eyeing the infamous fugitive Toby Harkins, the estranged son of the Boston mayor, in the 13-year-old, unsolved art heist at the Gardner Museum. The Record reports that authorities are still uncertain…”

I slid the door shut and the voice gave way to the tranquil sounds of a calm morning sea.

“It was one of those incredible, rare stories where everything falls immediately into place,” I said to Elizabeth, sitting back down at the table beside her. I told her about getting picked up inside the Boston Cab garage, about the meeting with Jankle, about the rush with Martin to get this into print. She asked me a few typically intelligent questions, then focused on the story again.

In the silence, I looked around, at Baker already sprawled out on the cool floor of the deck, at the beautiful woman sitting beside me, at the harbor water glistening beneath us, and thought, in a couple of days, my little family—“our starter family,” as Elizabeth liked to call it — would be no more. Elizabeth would be gone. Forever? I didn’t know, but maybe. Maybe.

I should have been sitting there basking in triumph. Instead, I found myself climbing into a hole of emptiness, a feeling, a state of mind, hell, a state of being, that I knew all too well. I knew it, I lived it, after my wife and infant daughter died on the delivery table a few years before, leaving me with only memories of what I had and a forlorn void in place of what I never got to know, each day of fatherhood represented by another tear shed in that private hell called loneliness.

Did Katherine’s death affect my relationship with Elizabeth? No doubt, there are entire teams of Harvard-educated psychiatrists that couldn’t detail all the ways it did — about why I hadn’t asked Elizabeth to marry me, about why we had split up temporarily the year before, about why, now, with twenty-four hours left in our time together, we couldn’t even have a fully-fledged adult conversation regarding our future time apart.

She saw me staring silently at the water, saw, no doubt, the sad, even pained look that marked my face. She said, “I’m really proud of you, Jack,” and I looked at her and she at me and I suddenly found my throat too thick to risk a response.

She stood up, still topless, always sexy, and she grabbed my hand and pulled me along with her. She left the door open for Baker to come and go at will, and on the rumpled white comforter of our sun-splashed bed, we became lost in an emotional stretch of silent sex. Afterward, as she looked down at me and pushed her face hard against mine, her tangled hair falling around my cheeks and ears, I felt her tears fall from her eyes into mine.

“I love you,” she whispered, but the words, more sad than happy, carried more mystery than finality.

“I love you too,” I replied, but I fear I sounded in some odd way resigned, though to what I didn’t know.

Later, in the kitchen, she poured herself coffee. I ate fistfuls of Cap’n Crunch directly from the box. We avoided talk of her departure as if its very mention would set upon us an unspeakable plague. I knew she would be packing up most of her stuff that day, but what she instead said when I asked her plans was, “I have a lot of things to do around here.”

That radio announcer was still blathering in the background, this time about the weather, then about the traffic.

“The surface roads are jammed all along downtown Boston as police have several major thoroughfares cordoned off for what we’re told is a crime scene, possibly a murder or suicide scene, in the Boston Common. Boston police are confirming that the body of a young woman, in her late twenties, was found with a gunshot wound to her head a little over half an hour ago….”

That’s the first I heard of it. It didn’t really register at the time, though maybe, in retrospect, it did. I flicked the radio off, rubbed Baker’s ears and gave Elizabeth a long, silent kiss good-bye.

W hen I walked into the Record a few minutes before 8:00, Peter Martin was sitting at the desk beside mine scanning the wires, nervous as he’s ever been, which is saying quite a lot. Here’s a guy who drinks black coffee by the bucket just to soothe himself. His idea of a relaxing vacation is visiting the libraries of every twentieth-century president in two weeks’ time. Once, when I had him temporarily convinced that there was more to life than newspapers and politics, he went to an upscale golf school in the Carolinas, one of those blessed places where you sip juice while sitting on a director’s chair with your name hand-embroidered in the back while watching some young club pro demonstrate the importance of the interlocking grip on a pristine driving range. He claimed to love the experience, but he never played golf again.

Anyway, the newsroom looked almost the same as it had when I left a few hours before, only the copydesk was now vacant and a custodian — a cleaning engineer, I think they’re now called — pushed an industrial-size vacuum down the empty aisles. Eight A.M. is at least an hour before most self-respecting reporters are climbing off their futons, and a couple of hours before they’d find their way into work.

“Thank God, I was sure you were going to be late,” Martin said, looking up from his computer screen.

“Good, and you?”

He ignored my attempt at morning humor, stood up, and said, “Let’s go into my office.” I followed him through the mostly dark newsroom in silence.

Inside, the two of us sat across from each other at a small circular conference table in Martin’s glass-enclosed office in the far corner of the newsroom. One wall of windows overlooked the traffic-clogged Southeast Expressway. The other wall overlooked the copydesk. All the furniture, the decorations, the lamps and the accessories, were exactly the way that the previous editor, Justine Steele, had them before she ascended to the publisher’s office the year before. I swear, if Justine had left photographs of her children, Martin would have kept them on his desk.

Martin put his elbows on the glass tabletop and said, “The Traveler doesn’t have a word on this. The three network affiliates are broadcasting our story, verbatim. The radio is quoting liberally from us and attributing everything. So far, we’re all alone. But the whole world’s about to crash our party. The Times is going to come in, the news mags, The Washington Post, the networks out of New York. This is big — huge — and we can’t give anything up.”

He was giving voice to what I already knew, but that’s okay. This story, ours alone for the day, was about to turn into classic gang-bang journalism, the exact kind of story I hated most, when mobs of reporters trample across every possible bit of information, and every shred of context be damned. I nodded. Noticeably missing from Martin’s soliloquy were words of praise for this morning’s performance, but alas, he rarely had the patience for the triviality of commendation. I used to hold that against him; I don’t anymore.

He continued, “So we have to figure out where we go from here.” He looked anxiously out at the empty newsroom and continued, “When people find the time in their busy lives to wander into work today, I’ll deploy as many as it takes to blanket every conceivable angle — the investigation, rewrite a tick-tock of the original heist, another lengthy profile of Harkins, the possibility of any connection to the mayor. What else?”

I remained silent. He knew he had everything covered. Martin resumed speaking.

“Jack, obviously you’re the lead. Hit the investigation hard, do everything in your power to break more news. I don’t have to tell you how to do it. Like all the other times before, just get it done.”

Would that it were so easy. The problem with this business is that in every possible way, it involves constant reinvention, or at least restoration. If there’s a formula, it consists of only this: Hard work — the extra telephone call, the added question at the end of the interminable interview, the long drive to some far-flung town to meet someone who you’re not quite sure will be even the slightest bit of help. Hard work begets luck, and from there, the cycle continues.

“We will,” I said, confident, but not really, and don’t ask me why. Confidence is my trademark, but as I’ve said, these were strange times. Elizabeth was leaving. Something gnawed at me on this story, and as I looked out the window, I saw traffic at a veritable standstill on the highway, and even that inexplicably bothered me.

I stood up and said to Martin, “What do you know about the dead woman on the Common?”

Most editors in chief are big-picture people, probably because it’s easier to be that way, just like it’s easier to travel great distances by air than to drive in a car, though high above, you miss all the individual brushstrokes that go into the art of real life. Martin was decidedly different. To be sure, he could think big and ponder the most serious questions in the business, but he also had an insatiable curiosity for the details of even the smallest house fire in Dorchester.

As if to prove the point, he said, “First reports out say she was a young attorney, maybe thirty years old, found in her car in the garage under Boston Common by an attendant picking up the trash. Single gunshot wound to the head.”

What the hell was the deal with parking garages lately?

“Suicide?” I mean, logical question, given that all the lawyers I knew were always saying they wanted to kill themselves.

“If it was,” he replied, “then she managed to hide the gun.”

B ack at my desk, I snatched up the telephone, and pulled out the phone number for Tom Jankle, special agent of the FBI. My hope, my expectation, was that if he spoon-fed me the prior night when he only knew me by reputation, then now that we had a track record, he should be ready to spew any remaining information he had. No telling how much chicken I left on that journalistic bone, but my educated hunch was, a lot. A lot.

A rather imperious-sounding woman informed me, “Special Agent Jankle is not available right now. May I help you?”

A couple of points here. First, why don’t newspaper people have the word “Special” in our titles? Actually, why don’t we have titles at all? Why can’t I say to someone over the phone, “Hello, this is Special Reporter Flynn calling from The Boston Record blah blah blah.” Actually, here’s why: Because we’d sound like asses, which is exactly how this secretary sounded now.

Point two: I hate when self-important secretaries and other assorted assistants ask, “May I help you?” as if my call, my concerns, must be so profoundly trivial that I couldn’t possibly warrant the attention of their boss. Let me ask you something: Are you a party to the investigation? Are you prepared to be quoted in front of a million people in tomorrow’s Record, or to leak sensitive information that will push the story along? If not, then just take a message.

Actually, I didn’t say any of that. More politely, but not too much so, I said, “You could take a message.”

“Is there someone else who could help you?” Okay, now this was getting rich. The night before, her boss sends a team of trained apes to pull me out of a ball game at Fenway Park. They chauffeur me to his office. He sits with me in private as the clock ticks toward midnight and provides me hitherto unknown details on the largest unsolved art heist in the history of the nation. He’s in essence, actually, looking for my help. And she’s thinking I don’t warrant his attention, because this great man must absolutely be far too important to deal with anything or anyone so trivial as the largest, most respected, and most important newspaper in New England.

“I don’t think so,” I replied, my voice still surprisingly soft, even upbeat. “If you could just tell him—”

“His schedule is very full today.”

“So’s mine.” Not quite as nice. “But if you could ask him to call Jack Flynn”—I gave her my number before she cut me off again—” I’ll absolutely take the time to talk to him.” I thanked her, almost overly pleasantly so, and quickly hung up, another border skirmish in the war on government imperialism successfully fought.

Then I proceeded to pound out another two dozen calls to various state, city and law enforcement officials who I knew or should have known or wanted to know, all in what the unkind might call a fishing expedition, but I’d prefer to describe as an informational dragnet. On a story of this caliber and magnitude, you leave no number undialed, no office unchecked. Hell, the truth is, most of the bureaucrats I was ringing up would take it as a compliment that I was even calling. Of course, all I got was equally officious secretaries and occasional voicemails, but the return calls would come soon enough.

All along, something still wasn’t right. Intuition, while a gift, was not always a blessing. The pang in my stomach was slowly turning into a knot, and someone seemed to be tying it tighter, pulling on the strings, giving me a sickening feeling that penetrated my flesh and rattled my bones. I turned fully around and gazed out the far windows of the newsroom to see that traffic was still at a standstill. I absently flicked the On button on the portable television that sat on a corner of my desk.

As the screen came to life, I saw a familiar reporter standing in front of the Gardner Museum, a microphone held up to his uncommonly handsome face. “Behind me,” he was saying, “is one of the world’s great art museums, but most famous not for its paintings, but for being the target of the country’s costliest heist.” From there, it kicked over to a prerecorded segment that basically reiterated the guts of my morning story, with full attribution. I turned the volume down and made a few more calls.

Somewhere along the line, I noticed that the television image flipped from the Gardner footage to an open grassy space set against the backdrop of the Boston skyline. I quickly turned the volume up to hear a rather comely redheaded reporter saying, “Ham, police are saying that she was found at about 7:15 this morning slumped over the steering wheel of her Saab with a single gunshot wound to the left side of her head. The car doors were all closed, the doors locked, the windows unbroken. No gun was found inside. The twenty-seven-year-old victim was found on the second level of the garage. Her identity has not yet been released pending notification of her relatives.”

The knot was starting to feel like a damned tumor. I bore in harder on the reporter. Behind her, detectives in suits came and went from a headhouse into the garage.

Ham, as anchors are wont to do, asked a stupid question. “Kelly, any suspects yet that we know of?”

Kelly shot him a look that melded disbelief and disdain. Then, composed, she replied, “Ham, the police are being unusually mum on this case. It has all the makings of becoming a very high-profile murder investigation, and they haven’t tipped their hand to us as of yet. There is, however, a briefing scheduled for police headquarters later this morning, and hopefully I’ll have more information to pass along after that.”

It wasn’t Kelly’s rather colorless answer that sounded alarms, but what occurred at the crime scene as she gave it. Behind her, an enormous man in a dark windbreaker quickly walked out the glass doors of the headhouse, his mustache twitching with each step. He was in the frame for maybe two seconds, tops, but the sight sent a lightning bolt of recognition into my fragile brain.

Tom Jankle, special agent with the FBI, hanging around a local murder scene. It made not an ounce of sense. FBI agents don’t investigate homicides, at least not run-of-the-mill ones, though I suppose none of them appear run-of-the-mill to the victims. They don’t work with local police departments, at least not very well. They don’t usually even offer their help. Cops and G-men are usually like cowboys and Indians.

Was it really him? I only caught the quickest of glimpses. I pondered that exact question as Kelly in the field answered yet another profoundly inane question from Ham on the anchor desk, and there, in the background, was Tom Jankle, once again hurrying back into the same glass doors in the near distance that he had just exited, his head down and a cellular telephone planted against his ear.

I snatched up my phone and called Martin’s office. He picked up on the first ring.

“Who do we have on the Boston Common murder?”

“For right now, Mongillo. He’s the only staffer up this early.”

We both hung up, comfortable enough with each other that we didn’t need time-consuming salutations or felicitations. I immediately belted out Mongillo’s cell phone number, and he, too, picked up on the first ring.

“Mongillo.”

“Flynn here.”

His voice brightened. “Hey, hey, it’s Fair Hair”—his nickname for me. “This is an unexpected honor. Hold on while I get rid of this call.” That’s the thing about Vinny Mongillo — he always had another call. About five seconds later, he was back on the line.

“So why on God’s good earth would Jack Flynn, the author of the biggest story in America today, be calling a simple little reporting grunt like me?”

This, for anyone who knows Mongillo, even in passing, was an obvious dose of false modesty. He was as tenacious a reporter as I’ve ever met. He wielded his ever-present phone like a mallet and his pen like a jackhammer, and he had this inordinate, almost otherworldly ability to convince a coat of paint to share the secrets of the damned. This he knew, and so did virtually everyone who knew him.

“Why,” I replied with a question of my own, as newspaper people tend to do, “would the FBI be interested in that murder you’re covering?”

“I didn’t know they were.”

“I believe there’s at least one agent on the scene, and maybe others that I don’t know about.”

He paused, then asked, “Why do you think they’d be interested?”

He’s uncanny. He heard in my voice the whispery combination of faint knowledge and uncertainty, and was calling me on it.

I replied, “Why don’t we get together.”

“I’ll call you after the police briefing.”

He was about to hang up when I asked, “The victim, Vinny. What’s her name?”

“Hilary Kane,” he said, without hesitation. And then the line went dead, without so much as a good-bye.