The Nominee

Sixteen

Wednesday, April 25

THE EAVES WERE FILLED with the haunting strains of “Amazing Grace” as I and five other pallbearers carried Paul’s casket slowly down the long center aisle of Trinity Church, through the massive double doors, and into the probing sunlight where, with a quiet heave, we loaded him into the gleaming black hearse that waited on the brick plaza outside.

I know I was supposed to spend the entirety of the hastily arranged service reflecting on all things Paul, what he had done with his life, his family, his city, and most of all, his newspaper. I know I was supposed to be thinking about what a rabbi he had been, a father figure after I had no father, a great newsman and journalistic servant. I was supposed to recall how when other big-city papers around the country slashed staff and shrunk their news holes, Paul would hear nothing of it, and in fact, took advantage of the dour economy to hire more reporters and position theRecord to be even stronger when better times arrived.

I knew all this. I knew I loved Paul, I knew I admired him. But forgive me for spending most of the hour — my eulogy aside — wondering if I’d soon join two members of the Cutter-Ellis clan lying on my back in an ornate wooden box — pardon my bluntness — dead to the world. And if I was, would it be Brent Cutter, the new publisher, who would insist on standing before a crowded church and deliver a eulogy about a reporter he never understood.

The fact of the matter is, arriving home the prior night to a missing dog served as a bracing slap, a real life’s lesson in the reality of my vulnerability. I became increasingly obsessed with the Florida gunman, where did he go, and most momentous of all, where was he now? Lurking on some nearby roof with a laser-scope rifle waiting to cut me down like an animal? I don’t think I slept more than five minutes the night before — though admittedly, thoughts of Elizabeth Riggs might have had a thing or two to do with that.

While organ music floated through the soothing darkness of the church, I made a few important decisions about my life, which I hoped would carry on for a while yet — my life, though the decisions as well. First, I’d report the murder attempt, and I’d do it quietly to the Boston Police commissioner, John Leavitt, asking for his discretion and his help with Florida authorities. I didn’t want to become the focus of any story. Second, I would reluctantly accept any police protection that he offered, and if he didn’t, I would ask Justine Steele to authorize newspaper funds to hire my own guards. Third, and perhaps most importantly, I would use my standing within the newspaper and the Cutter-Ellis families to suggest, urge, recommend, whatever, that Robert Fitzgerald, one of the most respected men in New England, a voice of reason clearer than any other, and my mentor, be the interim publisher ofThe Boston Record. Not bad, ladies and gentlemen, for a guy who still bore a passing resemblance to Swamp Man.

On the issue of Fitzgerald, think about it. He was a fully formed adult with a long, distinguished track record in journalism that included a Pulitzer Prize. He was well known in the industry at large, better known in our community and as faithful as me to the Cutter-Ellis clan.

And to name him meant I didn’t have to serve in the post myself, an expectation that became immediately apparent when Vinny Mongillo approached me on the sundrenched bricks and said, “All anyone in the newsroom is wondering, all anyone in town is wondering, is whether Fair Hair has the cajones to try to become the next publisher and save the paper.”

His face was close enough to mine that I could smell the pesto sauce on his breath. He was wearing a black undertaker’s suit and a car-crash of a purple-and-brown — patterned necktie. Sweat dripped down his forehead and over his eyes.

He added, “I’m telling them all that I know him better than anyone else, and that he does.”

“Robert Fitzgerald would make a great publisher,” I said.

The sun shone from above, businessmen and tourists passed through the plaza, and students lolled on the immaculate lawn that separates Trinity Church from the Boston Public Library, reading classic books likeThe Sun Also Rises.

“Jack, don’t even think about it.” Mongillo said.

“I’m going to recommend him.”

He gave me a look like I had cuffed his mother upside the head.

“You’ve got to be shoving a fuzzy donkey dick right up my fucking pie hole.”

I unconsciously shot a look toward the hearse to make sure no one heard his rather descriptive proclamation, including Paul.

Mongillo continued, growing even more animated with his big, furry hands, “He’s a liar, Jack, a fucking liar. Didn’t you read theTraveler yesterday? He pipes stuff. I know it. I can prove it. I will show it to you. Do not use your influence to make him the publisher of the newspaper that we both love.”

My face flashed red and I said, “We’ll talk this afternoon.” And I turned and walked back toward the limousine. Mongillo pursued me, putting his hand on my shoulder. I turned and said, “Not here, not now. I need your help, not your petty personal bullshit.”

“It ain’t petty or personal, and it ain’t bullshit. Give me ten minutes this afternoon.”

I said, more calmly, “I will, I will. And we also have to talk about the Randolph story. We need it in print before we lose it. Life is getting in the way.”

When I broke free and walked toward the crowd of mingling mourners, Cal Zinkle approached me. Cal is one of the city’s most prominent lawyers, a longtime friend of the Cutter-Ellis family who was also one of the most vocal members of theRecord ’s board of directors, sometimes with some impact, sometimes not. He grabbed my arm softly and said, “I’m very sorry about Paul,” then quietly added, “We have to talk.” Apparently, he meant sooner rather than later, sooner as in now, because he guided me back to the perimeter of the masses, not giving me a whole lot of choice to go anywhere but with him. I looked around with a sense of unease. It struck me here and now that I was more than exposed to potential gunfire.

Safely out of earshot of anyone else, though not gunshot, he wrapped his arm around my shoulders in fatherly fashion and said, “Jack, I’ll keep this short and sweet.”

In another time, in another circumstance, I might have had to quell a laugh at that introduction, mostly because Zinkle is, in fact, short, though I don’t know about sweet. Short, as in, very short. He’s as polished as a debutante’s fingernails, charming, personable. He was dressed in a perfectly pressed navy suit with a matching bright yellow necktie and pocket square — a nod, no doubt, to the season. He had jet black, Reaganesque hair and spoke in fluid sentences as if he was always performing before a jury. If you looked at him without scale, you’d think he stood six foot five, he carries himself that well. But inevitably someone else would come walking into the frame, and you quickly realize that Zinkle stands no more than five foot five, and I’m probably being generous at that.

“Jack, theRecord needs you,” he said. “The community needs you. You have to offer yourself up as the next publisher. Yeah, yeah, I know it might cause some strife, but you know as well as I do that the alternatives are not particularly good.”

This intrigued me — not the request, but his early assessment of a field of potential publishers. I looked back at the crowd slowly making their way to their cars for the procession to the cemetery. I looked around at the periphery of Copley Square. I edged closer to him and asked, “What are the alternatives?”

He replied, hushed, “Brent Cutter called me and several other board members last night. He wants the job, and he wants us to meet in emergency session today or tomorrow to approve him. He says he’s the heir apparent, the only family member with the executive experience to take over the newspaper at such a troubled time. And in many ways, he’s right.”

I was afraid of this, and being afraid of this implies that somewhere inside my cranium, I was expecting it. I mean, of course Brent Cutter would try to be the next publisher, for every logical reason. Still, to hear the fear put to words, to hear that he had launched an active campaign to take control of our newspaper, my newspaper, enraged and emboldened me. I didn’t want a newly joined feud to be waged in the public eye, nor did I want the paper to be turned over to Brent Cutter for the sole reason that a Cutter or Ellis always served as publisher.

“Is there a board meeting scheduled?” I asked.

“Not a full board meeting, but tomorrow, fiveP.M., in the newspaper’s executive conference room, there’s a meeting of the executive committee. Brent was pushing for today, but in deference to Paul, a few of us insisted that we should hold off another day.”

I hesitated, and said, “I have another plan.” Zinkle looked at me clear-eyed, expectantly. I said, “What about putting Robert Fitzgerald’s name before the board, perhaps even on an interim basis until we get under solid footing again.”

He nodded as he considered this. I looked behind him again and saw that most of the crowd was now in their cars and the procession was actually waiting for us. If I was destined to be shot at Paul Ellis’s funeral, now would be the time.

“Interesting idea,” he said. Like so many other power brokers in this town, Zinkle claimed a slot on Fitzgerald’s long list of prominent friends. “Have you talked to Fitz yet?”

“Not as yet.”

“Jack, you know I love him, and I don’t believe any of that bullshit about him fabricating, but he’s a throwback. He’s old. You were like a son to Paul Ellis. You’ve made an enormous name for yourself at this paper, and in turn, given the paper a huge credibility boost, national prominence. Maybe it’s your responsibility, your destiny, to take charge.”

Everybody’s engines were running by now, and people were looking our way and murmuring about the delay. I was standing so close to him they might have been wondering some other things as well, but their issues, not mine.

I said, “Maybe, but maybe I’m not the best one for the job right now. Let me talk to Fitzgerald first.”

“We need a plan in place by noon tomorrow, because the other option isn’t a very appealing one.”

With that, I walked hurriedly toward my car, noticeably flinching when a truck backfired on nearby Boylston Street. On my way, Brent Cutter stepped out of the back of his limousine, extended his hand, and said, “Wonderful eulogy, Jack. Thank you. We’re all going to get through this together.”

Great. He’s trying to save his ass while I’m trying to save my life, the newspaper, and while I’m at it, the world. I wondered at that point, though not aloud, whether it would be inappropriate to bloody the company president’s nose at a family funeral. Probably, so I didn’t.

I pulled open the heavy wood door of St. Sebastian’s Church in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston and paused for a moment while I let my eyes adjust to the dim environs. I’m not sure of the difference, but to me, this was more cathedral than church — with curved, soaring ceilings, massive pillars, and massive stained glass windows that cast an eerie light across the hundred or more rows of empty wooden pews. I was here on a mission of mercy, though it was more secular than sacred.

In the distance, on the altar, I saw a lone figure, and as I walked slowly down the center aisle, I realized he was intently polishing a collection of silver chalices that were spread out across a small table. When I got within a dozen rows of him, he looked up, smiled hard, and said, “Well Jack Flynn. May lightning strike me now.” With that, he put a chalice down, climbed down off the altar, and shook my hand.

“Hello, Roger,” I said. I pointed at the cleaning rag that he still held in his left hand and said, “You really are a man of the cloth.”

He laughed, God bless him, even though it wasn’t all that funny.

His name, by the way, was Roger Sullivan. He was my age, a high school classmate of mine, a talented and ferocious hockey player who could outskate and outfight just about anyone he played against, which explains why he made the all-city team twice. I’m not intimate with the church celibacy rules, but I do know that Sullivan, still ruggedly handsome these days, used to get more tail than a zookeeper when I knew him.

Of course, all that changed sometime in his early twenties, when he heard the calling, quit his job as a stock researcher at a downtown mutual fund company, and joined a seminary. Now he had his own parish hard by the old neighborhood where we had grown up so many years ago.

“I’m waiting for the walls to begin shaking and the roof to cave in,” he said to me. “I’m wondering what in God’s good name brings you here, because knowing you, it’s not God’s good name.”

We stood just below the altar in the otherwise barren church, he in his priest’s collar, me in my suit fresh from Paul’s burial. I said to him, my tone serious now, “I need some guidance.”

“Spiritual?” he asked. He had that familiar mischievous twinkle in his eye as he posed the question.

“Journalistic.”

“Big difference.”

“Don’t I know it.”

Then I said, “I’m doing some research on pro-life groups and I’ve run up against a wall. I’m trying to find out about an organization called Fight for Life.”

By the way, it’s important to note that Roger Sullivan is an active opponent of abortions, but with a twist. Rather than walk picket lines at abortion clinics or preach at Sunday mass, he instead works at teen centers throughout Dorchester, advising sexual abstinence where appropriate. And when he deems that impossible, he guides sexually active kids toward birth control.

For this, the same church that for years tolerated so much pedophilia within its ranks threatened to defrock him. So Father Roger, as the kids call him, took his program underground, secretly providing high school age boys with condoms and steering girls to doctors who might prescribe the Pill. ARecord reporter uncovered evidence of his network about a year ago and wanted to run a story. Roger pleaded with me to intercede and stop it, and I’m not ashamed to say that I did. And here I was, playing life’s perpetual game of payback.

“Bad news,” he said. “Very bad news.”

My intuition was, as usual, correct. Roger leaned against the banister where people used to kneel for communion. He said, “You’re talking about a dangerous, militant group.”

“An antiabortion group, I assume?”

“They’ve gone beyond that these days.”

I looked at him expectantly, and he added, “You of course remember that bombing last year at the stem cell research lab over in Cambridge? One of the lead scientists involved in embryo cloning was killed. Nobody’s ever been charged, but the word around the pro-life groups is that Fight for Life was behind it. I don’t know how you’d prove it now, because I hear they’ve all but disbanded and moved on to other states. Maybe state and federal investigators will tell you of their suspicions.”

Well, so a Hail Mary journalistic maneuver comes true. Any better than this and I’d get down on my knees and say a prayer of thanks — something I hadn’t done in far too long. If I could prove in the pages of theRecord that Terry Campbell funded a fringe group that murdered a prominent MIT scientist, not only would his overtures to the paper be outright rejected, he might well be arrested.

“Any contacts within the group?” I asked.

Roger shook his head. “Not my kind of people.”

I turned and quickly made my way down the aisle for the doors.

“Peace be with you,” Roger called out to me.

I turned and said, “I think it’s too late for that.”

Oscar plunked two tumblers filled with gin and tonic on the marble bar of the Somerset Club and said to me in a soothing tone, “You just let me know what else you need, Jack.”

Well, let’s start with a suit of armor, a bullet-proof car, a greater understanding of women, a takeover specialist to ward off Campbell Newspapers, and in case I get caught in another Florida swamp, a wet suit with a snorkel.

“How about a bowl of pretzels, Oscar?”

“I’ll bring them right over.”

And with that, Robert Fitzgerald and I made our way through the empty, sunlit bar to a window table overlooking the gorgeous back garden, where the yellow, pink, and red tulips were full and round and open to the shower of light. As we took our seats, Robert said in that deep, sonorous voice of his, “You were beautiful from the altar, Jack. Paul would be so very proud of you. And I am.”

I nodded my appreciation and took a long sip from my drink. Normally I don’t like to drink during the day. Today I’d make an exception.

Regarding the venue, the Somerset Club is Boston’s oldest, and inarguably, most exclusive — read, Waspish — private haunt, which probably explains why it was so empty even during the lunch hour. There aren’t many true-blue, old school Wasps left these days, and those who are really don’t pay much heed to the old mores like their ancestors did. It also explains why I’m a member. In pursuit of new blood, the club fathers loosened their, ahem, lineage requirements, and with Paul Ellis’s help, accepted a young man, last name Flynn, from the hard luck streets of South Boston.

Truth is, I don’t use the place very much, mostly because the closest thing they have to a gym is a busboy with the same phonetic name but none of the appeal. The University Club has a gym and several Jims, thus it’s where I choose to spend more of my time.

The Somerset Club, though, was also where I came on the day John Cutter was buried five years ago. Paul Ellis invited me there for a drink. We sat and sipped scotch and talked about John, about the changing role of newspapers, about the peculiar difficulties of keeping a family business intact. And at the end, he asked me if I’d ever be interested in coming over to the business side of the paper. I told him no, and Brent Cutter was named president the next day.

It was also the place where Paul, then the company president, took me for lunch on my first day as aRecord reporter. We dined on turkey clubs as he beamed across the table at me and told of the great relief in having me report at the one newspaper where I belonged.

“You’ve found your life’s calling at this newspaper, just like your father before you,” he told me. “And what a great life it’s been, and a better life it will be.”

Well, times change, even if places like the Somerset try not to change with them. Sometimes that change isn’t necessarily for the better, as evidenced by the prospect that the Cutter-Ellis clan may soon relinquish control of theRecord.

“It’s been crazy, Robert,” I said, looking down at the table, then up at his face. “Paul’s dead. Someone’s trying to take our newspaper away from us. And on Monday morning someone took a few shots at me in Florida. I have to start figuring a way out of all this, and I need your help.”

He leaned over the table and said, “What the hell do you mean that someone shot at you?”

I told him, and he was surprised I hadn’t earlier. Then, just like Elizabeth, he asked if I had reported it to the authorities, knowing full well I hadn’t.

“I’m going to tell Leavitt today,” I replied. “But look, I have an idea on another front.”

He nodded, and I said, “I’ve thought about this long and hard. I’d like to launch a campaign to have you step in as interim publisher and get us through this mess. The paper needs you more than it ever has before.”

I regarded him closely for a reaction. The room was so quiet I could hear Oscar start the dishwasher behind the bar. I could hear the steps of a busboy, I think Jim, walking with a tray of clinking glasses.

Fitzgerald looked me in the eye and said, “My boy,The Boston Record has been published by a member of the Cutter-Ellis family for every one of its one hundred and twenty-seven years. Every one.” He paused here for effect, squinting at me he was staring so hard. “I’m flattered at the thought, but trust me when I tell you that I’m not the one to break that long and glorious streak.”

He paused again, as if the backdrop of silence gave greater definition to his words. I remained quiet as well.

He said, “You are. Paul Ellis looked at you as he would a son, and he wanted you to someday be publisher. I know that for a fact. I want you to be publisher. More important than any of that, you’ve gone out and learned the business inside and out. You’ve dedicated yourself to this wonderful paper. You should be publisher.” His voice was raised for these last few words.

“Robert,” I said, “My name is Flynn, not Cutter or Ellis. My father was a pressman, not a fancy executive. I belong in the newsroom. You know that as well as I do. For chrissakes, I wouldn’t know an audit from an Audi.”

“You belong,” he replied without missing a beat, “where this newspaper needs you most, and right now, that’s in the publisher’s suite. You know the journalism, the core mission. You hire people who know the rest.”

We both sat there in silence, looking around but not at each other, or at least not me at him. What he was looking at, I’m not really sure.

Finally, I asked him, “So you’re telling me no?”

“What I’m telling you is that you should seek the job.”

More silence, a longer silence. The busboy skirted out of the room carrying an empty tray. Oscar was pulling liquor bottles out of the well and wiping them down with a damp cloth. A young mother with a toddler in a white tennis sweater walked through the garden. I took a big swig of gin and tonic.

“Well then,” I said. “How do I go about doing that? At least tell me that.”

Fitzgerald reached his hand over the table and held my forearm as he drilled his eyes into mine.

“Son,” he said, “I can’t tell you how you should be publisher. But I can tell you that you’ll make an excellent publisher. You have the foundation. What you don’t have in lineage, you make up for in brains. And you have the capacity to grow into the job. And I’ll be there to help you anytime you need it, including the day you start.”

I looked down at my tumbler, which was either half empty or half full, depending on whether you were in the throes of a bender or in the midst of a twelve-step program. Either way, I pushed it to the side, suddenly figuring I didn’t need another drop of alcohol clouding my specious judgment.

“Well,” I said, slowly, methodically, almost regretfully, “As always, Robert, I appreciate your counsel.” I paused and thought back to all those times that Paul had tried to lure me into a front office job. I thought about Sunday morning, when he let me know that he hadn’t even told Brent about the takeover bid, he had that little faith in him.

I continued, “I’ve got to think this through more. I’ve got to figure out where the hell my life is going to go from here, and as importantly, where I want it to go from here.”

As I said that, I thought back to Elizabeth’s visit the night before, her long legs in those faded jeans, the cut of her white tee shirt, the way her brown hair framed her perfect face. Then I thought of the way the moronic Brent Cutter thanked me outside the funeral a couple of hours earlier. Then I thought of the guy wading through the swamp, the look on his face as he took aim at me.

The look on his face.

I had seen him before, or at least someone who looked like him, someone who reminded me of him. I knew when I first saw him sitting in that car that he reminded me of someone.

The look on his face.

The North End. The basketball court.

I slapped my hand on the table, rattling our respective glasses.

“The guy who shot at me,” I said, apropos of nothing. “I saw him here in Boston on Sunday night. He was watching me play basketball on Prince Street and he was carrying a gun.”

I stood up before Fitzgerald could say anything. I told him, “I’ll call you when I know more.”

And with that, I went to seek danger, before danger once again sought me.