The Nominee

Fourteen

THE DINING ROOM OF the University Club was filled with the clink of fine china and the gentle chatter of the working rich as I glided through the front doors and up to the bar, where Lou, the nation’s foremost mixologist, was ready to fulfill my libational desires. This being a lunch, I ordered a Coke.

“Sorry about your publisher,” Lou said, sliding me a tumbler filled with ice and soda. “I know you two were tight.”

He knows a lot more than that. Lou, all five feet and nine inches of him, knows my likes, my dislikes, my ambitions, my fears, my desires, and my secrets. Not that I’ve ever told him. Lou, he just knows. It’s what he does, which is what makes him as great as he is.

“Thank you,” I replied.

“You have a visitor waiting for you,” he said, nodding toward the end of the bar. With a bemused look, he added, “I told him cell phones are banned in here, but he ignored me.”

I walked down to the far end, and of course, there was Mongillo, his enormous girth squeezed tightly into a booth as he said to someone on the other end of the line, “It’s either you or the other guy who’s going down. You decide.”

He saw me coming and abruptly said into the phone, “Gotta go.”

To me, “Hey, Fair Hair. Christ, you smell like shit. You moonlighting at a funeral home?”

Kind of, but I didn’t feel like getting into it right now. I sat on the other side of the booth. Lou came out from behind the bar and handed us a couple of lunch menus. I said to Mongillo, “Tell me you have something.”

“Issue one, Lance Randolph. I’ve been on the telephone all morning with every district attorney in Massachusetts. A couple of them tell me they were surprised — meaning, suspicious — when Randolph’s gubernatorial campaign put out word that he had the best prosecution record in the state. The truth is, they just didn’t think he was all that good. Now they’re not saying he was bad — just not the best.”

Lou returned and we both ordered burgers, medium. Mongillo asked for a glass of pinot noir. Some things in life you just can’t figure.

He continued, “Randolph jumped so far ahead so fast in the polls that these guys felt they couldn’t call him into question, because most of them are Democrats, and they didn’t want to look like they were challenging their own candidate. And as you’ve learned, these rates are hard to quantify.”

Don’t I know it. It took several weeks of sometimes arduous, but usually tedious work, poring over court documents, annual reviews, and state records, trying to put some semblance of a conviction rate together. Bizarrely, there is no clearinghouse for the statistics. What I had might be good enough to put in print, but the numbers still felt soft to me. I wanted anecdotes and quotes to support my cause.

I said, “We need to put something in the newspaper by the end of the week. It’s not an option to sit on this.”

Mongillo nodded. His cell phone rang, and not just any ring but a Hungarian marching song. Half the dining room looked over at us in disgust, as if I’d just cracked a lewd Pilgrim joke. “Turn that damned thing off,” I whispered.

“Sure. And take this knife here and disembowel me.”

He punched a button on the phone and it went silent. He said, “We’ll be in the paper. Let’s start to sketch something out at the computer today and see how fast we can put it together. Randolph have any clue this is coming?”

I shook my head. “I haven’t asked him about it yet, or any of his people, but word might have gotten back to him from one of the courthouses where I’ve been researching.”

The burgers arrived with Lou’s usual aplomb. Mongillo lovingly spread mustard, mayonaisse, and ketchup on his roll and his fries. I bit into mine plain.

He said before taking his first bite, “Issue two, Terry Campbell. I did a full clip search on him. Serious guy. Rich guy. Conservative guy. Some people say a deadly guy. He plays for keeps, that’s for sure. Ask the union out in Columbus. According to the stories, he bought the paper one day, and the head of the pressmen’s union was found dead of an alleged suicide the next day. The union guy was a tough son of a bitch who planned to fight Campbell tooth and nail, and then he’s gone.”

Mongillo started in on his food. It looked like he was holding one of those little White Castle burgers, his hands are so big.

I said, “Did you check his political and 501C contributions?”

“No, bro, I’m so fucking new at this game that unless I have a nationally acclaimed superstar like yourself telling me exactly when I should remove my hands from my sweaty balls and precisely what numbers to dial on the phone, I’m liable to just sit there like a drooling goddamned idiot until dinnertime, at which point I’m more than fully equipped to handle myself.”

I mean, is that really necessary?

I chose to ignore the quiet outburst, and asked, “What’d you find?”

He leaned over the table. “I’m not sure yet. He likes contributing money, Terry does, mostly to the typical lineup of right-of-center groups you might expect — the NRA, the Christian Coalition, National Right to Life. He gives big chunks, fifty thousand and one hundred thousand at a time. He contributes to politicians as well, mostly arch-conservative gubernatorial and senatorial candidates around the country—”

I cut him off, asking, “I assume nothing to Randolph, right?”

“Shit no.”

“Clay Hutchins?”

“No again. Hutchins is a mainstream Republican. Campbell is somewhere far off to the right.”

I asked, “You think there’s a story there on Campbell as a fringe figure? That wouldn’t play well in Boston, the publisher of the city’s most significant newspaper coming from the far right.”

Mongillo chewed for a moment, sipped his wine, and replied, “Yeah, but I don’t think someone who gives to the NRA and the National Right to Life can be labeled fringe, right? Rational people differ on these issues.”

He was right. “Well, who else did he contribute to? Anyone, anything, here in Massachusetts?”

“No political candidates, but records I got from the state attorney general’s office show he gave thirty thousand dollars to a small nonprofit group based in the Berkshires called Fight for Life.”

I looked at Mongillo and he simply shrugged his enormous shoulders. “I don’t know what it is,” he said. “I assume it’s a pro-life group, but I couldn’t find it mentioned in any newspaper clips, and they don’t list any disbursements with the A.G.’s office. They’ve been sanctioned for failing to comply with state reporting laws.”

“Fight for Life. Fight for Life. For some reason, it’s familiar, but maybe only because it sounds like so many other groups.”

We both ate our burgers while the dining room emptied out at the end of another lunch hour, that lunch hour expression not quite covering the duration that most people here took for the elongated meal.

I said, finishing off the last of my hand-cut fries, “Well, we’ve got to find out about Fight for Life. At the very least, it would be nice to be able to block Campbell from buying the paper. At the very best, it would be nicer to find out if he’s connected to Paul’s murder.”

Mongillo took a last significant gulp of wine as if he was polishing off a cold beer on a hot July afternoon, maybe sitting in box seats at a Sox-Yankees game.

He said, “We will. We will. First let’s put Lance Randolph back in our crosshairs.”

And with that, we headed back to theRecord to try to bring order to chaos.

My first call was to Hank Sweeney in the remote outpost of Marshton, Florida. He picked up on about the third ring.

We exchanged niceties, and I told him of my visit to the medical examiner’s office, and how there were no toxicology test results, or for that matter, any indication that tests were even ordered or done.

“What?” he hollered, his voice so loud that I had to pull the phone from my ear. His poor wife. She probably just blocked him out at this point in their lives.

“So you’re telling me that some little twerp of a deputy coroner disobeyed my direct orders?”

“I’m not sure what I’m telling you. I’m just saying there aren’t any results, or none that I could find.”

“Let me think about this for a moment. Where you at? I’m going to call you back.” With that, he abruptly hung up.

My next call was to an old friend, Adelle Adair, a senior partner with the old-line Boston law firm Horace & Chase. More relevant, Adelle was Governor Randolph’s senior prosecutor when he was the Suffolk County district attorney, meaning she was in a position to know things that I wanted to print, specifically about his inflated conviction rate. She’d helped me in the past on various stories, and I went into the conversation with the full expectation that she would help me again. At least that’s what I wanted her to think. Journalism, or at least the interviewing part of it, is a mind game.

“Not a chance, Jack. I’m not going there,” she replied when I laid out my story. “I can’t help.”

“Are you telling me I’m wrong?”

“I’m telling you I have a meeting in sixty seconds and have to hang up the phone.”

And I’ll be damned if that’s not exactly what she did. It’s becoming an uncivilized world out there in ways too great to fathom and too small to mention.