Dead Line

Chapter Seven

The first thing that struck me was the light, loads of it, pouring through the back windows, splashed across her rumpled queen-size bed, speckled across the dark hardwood floors that were casually draped with discarded clothes. The second thing to strike me was the airiness of it all. The apartment, from front to back, from side to side, was wide open, like an artist’s loft, no walls, except in a far, rear corner where I assumed the bathroom must have been.

This was unusual for Beacon Hill. Apartments here are usually closed and cramped and dark as the night in the middle of the afternoon, and the architecture usually ranges from the uncreative to the dowdy. This one was stylish even, chic, and I liked the owner immediately. Apartments and houses can do that. They have a reflected personality, an ability to acquaint and comfort. Having never actually met her, I already knew that Hilary Kane was my kind of woman. Actually, check that. She was much too good for me.

I called out, “Hello,” the single word, happy at its core, just drifting into the vacant air of the room. I thought to myself what a shame it was that she couldn’t answer. Of course, if she could, I’d be facing imminent arrest, so I guess I wasn’t in any great position to complain.

The entry was in the middle of the apartment. To my right, the back end, was where she slept, so noted because that’s where the aforementioned bed was, with a soft down comforter tossed haphazardly on top of it, as if she had overslept that morning and rushed into a day that would unknowingly be her last. I walked back into her bedroom area and looked at the fashionable clothes that lay about the floor — a pair of stretch jeans, a few flimsy tank tops, some rayon running pants — and shoes, everywhere, shoes, various types of clogs and boots and sneakers and high heels, some pointed and refined, others chunky and rugged. What is it about women and their shoes?

I wandered over to her small desk a few feet from her bed, painted white, and saw from the dust marks where the confiscated computer monitor had been. Various papers sat in careful piles, likely placed there by the uncharacteristically thoughtful police. About eight or ten framed photographs sat on a shelf on the desk — mostly women friends smiling into the camera, often arm in arm, at various celebratory events. Three photographs were carefully tipped over, turned down on their faces. I reached out a hand to grab one of them, to see the image, when a jolt went through my arm — Sweeney’s vivid warning: “Look but don’t touch, not unless you’re wearing these gloves.”

I yanked his latex gloves out of my back pocket and pulled them on, golf-glove style. I felt somewhere between ridiculous and ominous, but the alternative — winding up arrested and hauled into court to explain my actions and plead an innocence that wasn’t really mine — was enough to prod me on. I picked up one of the photographs and held it in my hand.

It was of a man, reasonably handsome, with blue eyes and a strong chin and a full head of black hair that tumbled down onto his neck. He wore a blue blazer and he stood on what appeared to be a dock hanging over somewhat churlish seas. This picture could have been torn out of a Ralph Lauren catalogue. He carried the classic look of an ex-boyfriend — a little too smug, far too pleased with himself, in total, not a keeper, not for someone with the style and taste of Hilary Kane.

My suspicions were confirmed when I picked up the second picture, this one of the same guy, his hair a little shorter, a too-cool formless sweater covering his torso with a white tee shirt showing underneath. He was wearing a pair of perfectly faded jeans, sitting on the front steps of what appeared to be an extraordinarily expensive house, a mansion even, that I immediately suspected was that of his parents.

But he’s not what caught my breath short. It was her, Hilary. She was sitting one step beneath him, and his arms were wrapped affectionately around her neck. I wanted to punch him in the head.

To say she looked beautiful would be like saying that eagles know how to fly. Yes, on one very simple level, it’s true, but it gets nowhere near the glorious heart of a wondrous reality. She was blonde, with soft hair that no doubt flowed like silk down beyond her shoulders. I wouldn’t know, because in the moment of the photograph, she had it pulled back in a casual ponytail that highlighted the perfect lines of her chiseled face. Her features were small and sharp, except for her eyes, which were big and grayish-blue. She was wearing an old baseball-style undershirt, navy blue arms, baggy, down to her elbows, and a white body. She had on jeans that were smudged with dirt on both her knees. She wore a controlled smile on her face, her lips pursed, as she looked upward as if trying to see her boyfriend who lurked above, though not really. She had on worn track sneakers. In sum, I think I was in love.

But onward. I put both photographs down, my heart now even heavier with the events of the day and the suspicions of the moment. I picked up the papers on the desk and flipped through them, looking for any clue as to her employment. But mostly they were old bills and flyers. I checked through her two desk drawers, looking, perhaps, for a pay stub or an ID card, but there was nothing of any worth inside. I began walking out toward the living room part of the sun-splashed loft when something on the floor caught my eye. It was just a corner of white paper, wedged behind the desk. I hunched down, pulled on it, and was suddenly holding another photograph, this one an image that stunned me.

Oh, it was nothing vulgar or pornographic or even remotely compromising. Black Hair wasn’t even in it, thank God. I was sick of him already. What it showed was the mayor of Boston standing with his arm around Hilary Kane, various clingers-on in the background, at some ribbon cutting ceremony somewhere. Scrawled across the bottom of the picture were the words, “To Hilary, the best lawyer at City Hall. With all my gratitude, Mayor Harkins.”

A couple of points worth making here. First, what kind of jug-head calls himself “Mayor” even to his own staff? At least he doesn’t have the title “Special Mayor.” Second, it obviously meant that she was in the employ of the city, probably as a lawyer in the corporation counsel’s office. Third, it might well indicate that the reason the FBI was investigating her death was because the Feds were probing the mayor on some other issue and were searching for a link to the Kane murder.

All of it was interesting, but not terribly conclusive. Still, the nagging got louder, almost to the point of shrillness. The photograph in my gloved hands was one of those pictures that only politicians and their pathetic groupies love. Hilary Kane obviously wasn’t one of them, given that it had slipped unnoticed behind her desk. She probably never missed it, forgot she had ever even had it, or maybe she had even tossed it toward the trash can and hit the rim. It was meaningless, to her and any normal-thinking person.

But not now. Now it was an important clue that I held in my own sweaty hands. Now it broached some terrifying questions. Now it whispered truths that I couldn’t quite hear. I came here because my very refined reporter’s instinct told me that Hilary Kane was in some way linked to the Gardner Museum heist. This picture indicated that I might well be right.

But when does intuition give way to facts? When does fear turn to anger? Did I cause someone to die? And not just anyone, but did I help end the life of the young and beautiful Hilary Kane, for reasons that I didn’t yet know?

I tucked the picture back behind the desk precisely where I had found it, happy — though that’s probably not a good description of the moment — to have it out of my hands. I picked up another photograph on the desk, this one of Hilary and two other women with remarkably similar features — one about her same age, the other older, no doubt a sister and their mother. They were standing outside of this very building, not posed, but candid. Each of them had a box of some sort in her hands, probably on the day Hilary moved in. I suspected that the lazy no-good boyfriend was the one behind the camera, his way of sneaking a break.

I looked hard into Hilary’s eyes, big and blue-gray, dazzling, knowing. She was a smart woman; you could tell that from even the quickest glimpse. She had that same somewhat practiced smile on her naturally beautiful face. Her hair was pulled back. She wore a tank top and a pair of short-shorts showing legs that were long and carefully formed.

I shook my head. I put the picture back down. I cursed, and the sound of my own voice jolted me from my dark reverie. Well, my voice and the faint rattle of a key in the door on the other side of the room.

With no great embarrassment do I confess to being relatively new at this whole burglary venture, though it does seem that whenever I commit one, Hank Sweeney is somehow involved. This time he apparently let me down in his role as chief scout. The plan had been for him to ring me if anyone was coming into the apartment. My phone, set on vibrate, hadn’t moved.

No time to assess blame. I placed the picture on the desk and bolted for the nearby bathroom door, the only place to take shelter in the entire apartment unless I were to have done the clichéd hide-under-the-bed thing, but it was probably packed with more shoes under there.

I got into the bathroom and pushed the door halfway shut just as I heard the apartment door open and a set of jangling keys pulled from the lock. The lights were off in the medium-size bathroom, but sunlight poured through the one window, showing a fashionable design in tile and slate. The sleek, black slate was in the walk-in shower, beyond the pristine glass doors. I mean, I’ve soaked the Record for enough $300-a-night hotels to give me a some fair standing as a designer, and I never came across anything this nice.

I slowly, silently pulled off the rubber gloves, so as to look slightly less menacing to whoever happened to catch me in there, and shoved them into my back pocket. I glanced out the window to see if there was a balcony, a fire escape, anything that would allow me to get out, but there was barely even a ledge. So I pushed my head closer to the door and listened to what was left in the proverbial store.

There were footsteps, somewhat light, like that of sneakers, moving across the floor away from the bathroom, toward the front of the apartment. It sounded like just one pair, which was a good sign, better, anyway, than half the homicide unit or a bunch of bruisers from the FBI. Why, I wondered, hadn’t Sweeney called?

Then silence. Nothing. Just dead air that lasted several minutes long. I wanted nothing more than to peer through the opening of the door to see who was on the other side. Short of that, I wanted to call Sweeney out on the street and ask him who the flying hell had just come by on his watch. But I couldn’t risk either. I was, in fact, in the act of committing what I think must be a felony — breaking and entering. I’m sure the Feds could add a host of other charges to it as well, like tampering with evidence, just to name one of the bigger ones.

All of which is to say, I remained still and silent and wondering. I strained so hard to hear any foreign, unusual sounds that I felt like Colin Montgomerie on the first tee of the U.S. Open. My senses, on hyperalert, caused me to take in just about every little detail of the bathroom.

On the vanity, she had a container of facial cleanser, a couple of bottles of moisturizers, a tube of some sort of hair product that was something other than mere gel, and a bunch of what I believe younger women call scrunchies — elastics to pull back her hair, in various shapes, colors and sizes. There was a bar of plain old soap, a tube of Colgate toothpaste, a single toothbrush in a white cup, and a floss dispenser. The only makeup I saw was a cylinder of lipstick. This was, as Aretha Franklin might say, a natural woman.

Still, on the other side of the door, silence. I inched closer to the opening, but didn’t dare take a look. I heard the cry of a baby far outside of the bathroom window, and beyond that, the distant sound of a siren, probably that of an ambulance. But inside this apartment, just the unsteady sound of my own breathing, and even that I tried to keep quiet.

And then, footsteps again, coming from the front of the apartment to the back, where the bathroom was located, and more important, where a well-known, otherwise highly regarded reporter from one of America’s truly great newspapers, remained in hiding. As my mind raced and my body braced, the sound of the steps stopped several feet away from the partially open door. Then I heard the scratch of furniture moving along the wooden floor — the chair to the painted desk where I had been a few minutes earlier, I assumed, sliding outward.

I heard a drawer open, papers being ruffled, then the drawer closing. This happened again, and again after that, and then I heard more papers being shuffled on what was probably the top of the desk. And then, once again, I heard nothing at all.

Well, almost nothing. I heard the faint sound of objects being lifted, then silence, then put back in place. And I heard what sounded like sniffling, and the sniffling turned into a low-level sobbing, which then took on the sound of someone actually convulsing in tears, shaking, crying, gulping for air, then exhaling sorrowful, uncontrollable moans. Man or woman, I didn’t yet know, but if this was an FBI agent or a homicide detective, they might have been taking this newfangled victim-compassion thing a little too far.

For at least five minutes, I listened to the heart-wrenching sounds of this person gasping and crying. They blew their nose. Their cell phone rang, but they didn’t answer. They just kept crying, apparently unable to pull themselves together again.

And I simply stood inside this door, leaning against a vanity, feeling both helpless and heinous, not to mention voyeuristic. At this point, it was all I could do not to cry myself, like a single cough in a movie theater setting off a fit of the same.

The person’s cell phone rang again — once, twice, three times, four, and then stopped, the sound echoing around the open expanse of the apartment before disappearing into a canyon of silence. Well, not silence, but sobbing.

And then a voice. It was low, somewhat husky, obviously thickened by all those tears, jarring in a room that hadn’t heard a voice in all this time. It was that of a woman, who said, “Hil. Hil. I should have been there to help you—” As she tried to continue, her words trailed off into a fresh round of tears.

The chair scratched abruptly on the wood floor. I heard a couple of abrupt steps toward the bathroom, then the door pushed quickly open as I stepped back to avoid it. Although I had many minutes to prepare for what was probably an inevitable confrontation, I hadn’t thought it through. I didn’t know what I was going to say. So as she looked at me and I looked at her, I held my hands up in the air in front of me and hurriedly said, “I’m not here to hurt you. My name is Jack Flynn. I’m a reporter for The Boston Record.”

She screamed. Well, maybe it wasn’t quite a scream. She yelped, one of those panicked sounds when a shocked person already under great duress doesn’t exactly know what to do. I could appreciate the feeling right now.

She backed out the bathroom door. I said, firmly, but hopefully not ominously, “I’m not here to hurt you. I will leave immediately if you allow me.”

I heard her sifting around for something, then saw her figure in the door again, this time with a steam iron in her right hand, which she held up as if she were going to fire it at me. Me, I don’t personally use an iron. I send all my shirts to the cleaners. Now I kind of understood why. This thing looked dangerous — sharp and hard, and of course, at times, incomprehensibly hot.

“Please,” I said, taking a step back against the far bathroom wall, the one with the window. “Please allow me to explain what I’m doing here. Again, my name is Jack Flynn. I’m a reporter at the Record. I had a story in this morning’s paper about the Gardner Museum heist. When I heard about Hilary’s death, I suspected she might be in some way involved, so I snuck into”—well, broke into, but this seemed an appropriate time to draw fine lines—“her apartment to find out if I was right.”

We locked gazes, but I had no idea what it is that she saw. How much like Hilary Kane did she look? Enough that I had absolutely no doubt this was her sister, the same woman I saw in the photograph of moving day in front of the apartment. Same eyes, same high cheekbones, same blonde hair except this woman’s was cut much shorter. And here in person, same long, lean body. I’d even call it a killer body, except right now, I’m the one she was in a position to kill. If she did, she’d even get away with it in court.

“Please,” I said. “I know it’s a sad and frightening time for you. I know I shouldn’t be here. But I’m trying to help. Please trust me.”

And still, she stood there in tears. She looked at me and I looked at her, and in the pounding silence, she slowly lowered the arm that held the iron. She said in a very husky voice, “Show me some ID. Don’t make any fast moves.”

I deliberately reached into my front pocket and pulled out the kind of press card that old-style reporters used to wear tucked into the front of their hats. I held it toward her in my left hand, and she took a step closer and took it from me.

With communication established, which in my business is almost always a good thing, I said, “I can give you a business card. It’s in my wallet. My wallet is in a car across the street.”

She looked carefully at the laminated Record ID card in her hand, then up at my face through her teary eyes, then back down at my picture, which, I should point out, wasn’t a particularly flattering one. I vividly recall that Elizabeth and I had a heated argument that morning, and an hour later there I was standing before a white backdrop, snap, snap, getting shot.

“How did you get in?” she asked.

There are basically two types of people in life: Those who hate reporters, and, well, those who don’t. The haters, they’re not always rational people, I’ve found, or for that matter, particularly likable. Ask them what they so disdain about the news media and they’ll tell you we’re all a bunch of lying, parasitic, sensationalistic pigs sucking off the body public. So what’s their point?

Actually, they’re likely to say all this with a rolled-up copy of a tabloid newspaper in their hands, or with plans to get home and watch that ever soothing 11 o’clock news. They hate us, but they watch and read us. They hate us because that’s just what they do in life, and we’ve given them too many good reasons for it. Turn on the TV news and we’re inevitably pictured as an unwieldy horde hollering stupid questions to politicians or criminals — sometimes one and the same — who conveniently ignore us until they hear an inquiry that suits their needs. Cop shows portray us as bumbling nuisances insensitive to anyone or anything but our own deadlines. And the haters, lemmings, just go along, thoughtlessly, hating us because they think that’s what they’re supposed to do.

But then there are others who get it, those who understand that the vast majority of reportage is a solitary endeavor important to the public realm, not to mention the public good. At our best, we provide the public information that it should have, or need to have, or want to have, and on our best days, all three at once. We shine attention on politicians, business leaders, and other notables who go wrong. We keep countless others right out of the simple fear of landing on the front page of the Record’s next issue. We do it seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year, every year for as long as I’ve been alive, and that’s not about to change.

Do we make mistakes? God yes. Do we occasionally embarrass ourselves? Yes again. But in sum and substance, we are a crucial contributor to the common cause, and smart people, most people, recognize that fact free and clear.

Now let me dismount from my high horse and try to figure out on which side of the chasm the striking blonde with the iron proficiency will stand.

“I broke in,” I replied.

“Why?”

“Because I think I might have been used. Because I was afraid that something I wrote, something somebody leaked to me for this morning’s newspaper, might have caused Hilary Kane to be killed. I needed to find out right away, rather than wait for some official statement from the cops that probably wouldn’t tell me nearly what I needed to know.” I added, “So I broke in. It’s wrong. It’s against the law. It’s an invasion of privacy. I understand all that. But I needed to find out what went wrong, and I needed to find out if I caused it.”

There was a long pause as I stopped talking, and she simply looked at me.

“You did,” she finally said, and with that, she turned around and walked out the bathroom door. I heard her footsteps keep going. I heard the apartment door open, then close. She was gone, but my reporter’s instincts, already in overdrive, told me it wouldn’t be for long.