The Nominee

Twenty-Four

WHEN IT’S A TIP from a source, it’s called a lead. When it’s a warning from the opposing tabloid newspaper, it’s called a disaster. And that’s what I had on my hands. True it was only a potential disaster, but life had a way of fulfilling all of its bad potential lately.

I ducked into the backseat of the unmarked gray cruiser idling at the curb in front of the Ritz, snapped open my cell phone and punched out a familiar number. The warm air from the car’s purring heater made me realize just how brisk it had been outside.

“Mongillo here.” Vinny Mongillo picked up on the first ring, as he always does — not an inconsiderable skill considering that he always has to place another call on hold to get to the new one. He’s the Liberace of the telephone keypad.

“We need to talk,” I told him.

“Yeah, everyone needs to talk. Who’s this?” Not offensive, just Mongillo.

“Flynn, you asshole.”

“Jesus Christ. Hold on, Fair Hair.”

The line went quiet. I pictured him sitting in the newsroom, his huge frame perched forward in his custom seat, a bucket-sized iced coffee and a box of Dunkin Munchkins on his desk, flipping back to Line 1 to tell a U.S. senator that he no longer had the time to talk but thank you very much for whatever it is that you tried to say.

The line click backed in and Mongillo said, “Where are you? Why aren’t you here?”

“Can you meet me downtown, ASAP, at Locke-Ober?”

“No. I hate that place. Like eating in a musty museum. Too nineteenth century.”

Everyone’s a goddamned restaurant critic these days, especially when it comes to my favorite place in town. So I said, “All right, tell me where.”

“Amrhein’s. Great steak tips. I’ll meet you there in fifteen minutes.” Like this is what I had to think about in life right now — the quality of my luncheon steak tips.

As the police driver put the car in gear, Gerry jumped in the back seat on one side, Kevin on the other, so I was sandwiched between two mountainous men in a vehicle with heavily tinted windows. If ever I were to feel completely safe, it would be now, especially knowing, as I did, that this assassin just wasn’t all that blessed in the talent department, though I suppose Paul Ellis might disagree with that.

On the drive, I left a voicemail for Cal Zinkle, the downtown lawyer, member of theRecord board of directors, and most important, friend, seeking some last-minute advice on the presentation I had to make to the committee that afternoon that I had done no preparation for whatsoever, unless you consider living my life as preparation enough, which I’m hoping they do. I also clued him in briefly on Terry Campbell’s connection to right-wing groups, most notably the militant Fight for Life. I left a message for John Leavitt, the police commissioner, seeking an update on the investigation into Paul and now Nathan.

Then I called Justine Steele at theRecord.

“Steele here,” she said, snatching up her line. I’ll explain that newspaper types aren’t particularly well versed inEmily Post’s Guide to Business Etiquette, or if they are, choose not to adhere to it. The tradeoff is, they at least pick up their own phone, which no one else does anymore. Your typical housewife seems to have a spokesman these days to handle all media matters.

We talked about that morning’sTraveler story about Nathan’s slaying, which didn’t particularly thrill her. We talked about the need to come back big and cover every possible base. She would assign a reporter to write about the shooting attempts on me. Me and Mongillo would do whatever it took to get the Randolph story in print, just to get revenge on theTraveler.

I started to mention the warning I just got from Elizabeth, hesitated, then decided not yet, not until I could speak to who I needed to speak to, meaning Fitzgerald himself. Instead, I said, “Assuming we get it clean, you think the Randolph hit will affect his nomination?”

She said, “Depends on the mood in D.C. These guys all embellish, so the Judiciary Committee members might be afraid of tossing stones, lest their local paper come at them on one resumé point or another. We’ll see how it plays out, but it will probably play out quickly. His nomination seems to be on a fast track.”

“I’m seeing Mongillo right now on this, and I’m going to ask him to write the bulk of it. This is a crazy, crazy day.”

Her tone softened. “Understood. Jack, this story is important, but what you have today is crucial.” She paused, then said, “Good luck in front of the board. I’m with you one thousand percent, and so is everyone else in the newsroom. And if any of us can help in any way, just let me know how.”

I looked out the window and saw that the glitzy boutiques of Back Bay had given way to the rickety storefronts of South Boston. We had driven less than two miles over the course of just under ten minutes, but had left one world for another.

The Back Bay is old Boston — gaslit lanterns, magnificent nineteenth-century brick townhouses with graceful bow windows, impeccable front gardens, yummy mummies pushing baby strollers with perfect children to the Clarendon Street Park, nannies and cooks gathering at the meat counter at DeLuca’s market every day to buy that evening’s roast.

Southie is equally white and every bit as historic, but it has long been a refuge for the working Irish rather than the effete Wasps, and a refuge is just how they want to keep it. Visually, the neighborhood isn’t much. The houses are wooden, crammed together along narrow streets lined with sidewalks stained with blackened gum. The tiny yards are all impeccably neat. The children wear carefully pressed plaid uniforms as they walk in small groups to their parochial schools. The store windows out along Broadway, the main thoroughfare, are covered with unseemly grates that shopkeepers pull down at closing time with a thunderous clack.

Outsiders? They hate them — the blacks, the young Wasps, the upwardly mobile families who move into the Town, as the locals call it, for its proximity to the water and the financial district. But they don’t hate them, as in “they hate them.” They hate them for what they represent, and what they represent is an intrusion into a close-knit community that may not have money, may not have lofty goals, but does have an enduring sense of self. They don’t, by any measure, want that diluted.

I should know. It’s where I grew up. It’s where I’ll always call home, even if I don’t live there anymore. And it’s always what I’ll regard as the most wonderful place in the world.

The car pulled up in front of Amrhein’s, a handsome brick block of a building right on Broadway where the $7.95 chicken piccata was considered outrageously gourmand. Gerry and Kevin jumped out, surveyed the scene, then beckoned for me to follow. We walked into the restaurant single-file, me in the middle. Inexplicably, I had gotten used to this protection surprisingly fast. The specter of violent death has a way of making us embrace any good change.

The painted middle-aged woman flitting about the front of the store looked at my two guards and warily asked, “Table for three, fellas?” Then she spied me, shrieked, and said, “Jack, I thought we’d lost you forever!”

I’ll confess that despite my love of all things Southie, I don’t come around much anymore — not because I’ve outgrown it, but because it seems so sad since my parents died. That and the fact that my tastes range more toward chateaubriand than flank steak these days — a fact that doesn’t give me much pride, but is a reality just the same.

I stepped forward and hugged Judy McCormick, an old neighbor of mine growing up. We made small talk for a few minutes about who was doing what to who, then I peered around the old-fashioned lounge with the gray-haired bartender and the warren of dining rooms with high-backed booths and red vinyl banquettes and said, “I’m meeting someone. Guy by the name of Vinny Mongillo?”

Her face brightened even more as she reached into a slot on the side of the hostess stand and grabbed a plastic menu. “Oh, cousin Vinny,” she said. “Back here. C’mon.”

On the way toward the back of the dining room, I asked, “You two are related?” I mean, she had green eyes and auburn hair. Like I said, her last name was McCormick. If she’s an Italian, Hank Sweeney’s a Swede.

She turned and said, “God no. That’s just what we call him, you know, from that movie. All the waitresses love him.”

She brought me up to the last booth, where Vinny sat with his back to me reading Page Six of theNew York Post while sticking half a potato skin in his ample mouth. He turned and said, “Christ, Judy, I thought we had standards in here.” She laughed like she really meant it, put her palm on my cheek, and glided away.

I could walk into the downstairs dining room at Locke-Ober, juggle ten rabid foxes while doing my drop-dead imitation of Corporal Agarn onF-Troop, and the waiters would inquire — like they had marbles in their mouthes — if I’d like another Coke. Here, you make a lame joke, or just show up, and you get waitresses guffawing and affectionately patting you down. Maybe I ought to find my way home more often.

Vinny, to me, “Whoa there. You, my friend, look like shit.”

His cell phone, sitting on the table, rang. He picked it up, looked at the caller ID, and hit a button that stopped the ringing. He put the phone back down.

I said, “Well, let’s see. I’ve been chased through a swamp, shot at, nearly froze to death in Boston Harbor, and hit on the side of the head with a rock. Excuse the fuck out of me if I’m not looking my very best.”

“Touchy, touchy.” He picked up another potato skin and pushed the platter toward me. I took one as well. Surprising how much a simple wedge of potato can weigh. Not so surprising once I bit into it.

His phone rang again. The ringer, by the way, was still set to the annoying folk tune, or whatever the hell it was. That didn’t make it any less annoying. Same routine — he picked it up, looked at the number, pressed a button, and put it back down on the bare Formica tabletop.

“Tell me what’s been going on with you,” he said. So I did. I filled him in on the chase the night before, on Terry Campbell’s denials that morning, on the fact I had a retired police detective up from Marshton, two bodyguards standing in the foyer, a meeting coming up in three hours to try to take over the newspaper.

“By the way,” he said, real casually, picking up the last of the potato skins without offering it to me. “Elizabeth felt pretty bad about today’s story.”

Anyone else hear the sound of screeching brakes?

I said, “What? What the hell are you talking about.”

He was quiet for a moment as he tried to get a large piece of potato skin down his gullet. Finally, he replied, “She came by the gym at 7:30 this morning. She was saying she felt really awful that she put the screws to you on the Nathan Bowe killing, and, you know, blah blah blah.”

“No. What’s blah blah blah?”

“I don’t know. I was running on the treadmill. The news was on the TV. Katie Couric was doing this thing on best Vegas restaurants. I was only half listening to her.”

Of course. My ex-girlfriend spills her guts to the one guy she knows will have my ear, and that guy is entranced by Katie Couric’s analysis of the best steakhouses along the Strip.

A young waitress with a slight Irish brogue came walking up and gushed at Vinny, “I saved you some of yesterday’s pot roast. Would you like it in a sandwich?”

“Perfect,” he said. “Tell William to cook my fries on the well-done side. And none of that horseradish sauce. Makes my nose itch.”

She turned and started walking away without taking my order. Vinny called out to her, “Hey Kelly. I think my friend here wants a bite as well.”

Without apologizing, she simply looked at me and put her pencil up to her pad. I ordered a hamburger, plain.

“All right,” I said as she left, getting a little aggravated by all this. “Let’s air out what we have on Lance Randolph. We’ve got solid information that shows that he embellished his prosecution record as district attorney during his two campaigns for governor. He inflated his conviction rate on murders, on rapes, on armed robberies and aggravated assaults, and we can attribute that to aRecord review of all available court data. The real numbers show him to be somewhere in the upper middle of the state’s DAs, according to that review, but his numbers show him to be number one in virtually every category.”

Mongillo was smiling openly — so openly that I could count about a dozen bacon bits stuck in his teeth. “I love this shit,” he said. He made a gripping motion with his enormous left paw and said, “The governor’s future, the nominee to be the attorney general of the United States of America, and we have his balls right here. This is why I didn’t bother with law school, because of stories like this.”

I ignored that and said, “We need to put it together this afternoon. I need you to take over my files and throw in your interviews. I have it half-written already from last week, and I have one more idea I want to explore. But need you to do the rest. Call Randolph’s people. Call the district attorney’s association in Washington and get a quote putting prosecution rates in perspective.”

“Gotcha.”

“We need this in tomorrow’s paper, come hell or gunshots. TheTraveler skunked us today. We have to come back at them hard tomorrow.”

He nodded.

I said, “Issue number two, Terry Campbell. If we can pin down this Fight for Life group, link them in print to the MIT bombing and show in some way that Campbell knew what he was getting into with his contribution to them, we’ve killed him — absolutely killed him.”

“No easy task,” Mongillo said. He was, of course, right.

I said, “And issue three. I need to hear why you don’t like Fitzgerald.”

With a mouth full of food, he said without hesitation, “Because he’s a liar.”

I’ve been hearing that more and more lately. His phone rang again. Same routine. He turned back to me, looked me flush in the face and said with stunning simplicity, “He makes shit up.”

I rubbed my cheek with my hand. He folded up hisPost and pushed it aside. I said, “Like what?”

Vinny deals more in the realm of facts than that hazy world of supposition, so I knew by asking this question, I wasn’t going to get rhetoric or hollow accusations in response. And I didn’t.

“Do you remember,” he began, “that story about five years ago. The narcotics squad raided an apartment over in Roxbury. They burst through the door with a battering ram. There’s an old guy, alone, inside. I think he’s eight-six. He runs into his bedroom. Four cops knock his bedroom door right off its hinges. Their guns are drawn. They’re screaming bloody murder. You know, ‘Police with a warrant! Freeze! Get down or we’ll shoot!’ The guy froze all right. He has a heart attack and dies right there on the floor.

“Ends up, they have the wrong apartment. They’re supposed to be in the one across the hall. The guy who died is a retired Baptist minister. The real drug dealer hears the commotion from his apartment, gets nervous, and tries to make a break for it. Problem is, he runs flat into a cop at the back door. People are screaming. There’s a guy dead upstairs. Nobody’s sure where the drugs are. Somebody takes a shot in the commotion, a cop, and he hits a young detective, shoots him dead, all by mistake. That’s two dead. No arrest. No drugs seized.”

I nodded. Kelly showed up with our food. In front of Mongillo, she carefully placed an almost comically thick pot roast sandwich on a toasted bulky roll with a heaping order of hand-cut, slightly overcooked French fries, a small ball of coleslaw, and a crisp piece of lettuce nailed by a toothpick to a brilliant red tomato. In front of me, she slapped down a plain hamburger sitting lonely in the middle of an otherwise empty plate.

Mongillo peered curiously at my lunch for a moment, then at his. He cleared his throat and said, “So anyway, Fitzgerald comes in with a column two days after the bungled raid saying that a young narcotics cop who was heading up the investigation mistakenly provided the wrong apartment number in the pre-raid briefing. Ironically, it was that same narc cop who was killed in the friendly fire. Seems to give them a little bit of cover, no? Fitzgerald doesn’t attribute it. He doesn’t source it in any way. He just states it as fact, Robert Fitzgerald throwing us another little crumb of wisdom from that journalistic mountaintop of his.”

Mongillo was becoming more animated now, almost angry. I bit at my burger, which even in its celibate state, I have to confess, tasted pretty damned good. The Bristol Lounge at the Four Seasons Hotel doesn’t do it any better at three times the price.

Mongillo continued, “Then it never comes up again. I waited until the search warrants were released. I wanted to review them, check the facts. But you know what? They disappeared. The court documents simply vanished. The magistrate said he didn’t know where they were, and the cops said they lost their copy. So they paid a huge sum to the reverend’s family and the case was forever closed.”

I said, “But that doesn’t prove Fitzgerald lied.”

Mongillo said, “No, but I heard rumblings on the street. I kept hearing that Fitzgerald’s account was flawed, but nothing I could ever nail down.”

“Maybe he was given bad information,” I replied.

“Bullshit. Then why didn’t he attribute it. Then why didn’t he revisit it. You know how much I dislike the guy, but I have to say one thing about him: he’s not naïve. He wouldn’t just take a pile of shit and try to put it into the paper. He wouldn’t blindly buy someone’s line. He knew what he was doing.”

There was silence between us. Well, not quite silence. Mongillo began addressing his heaping pot roast sandwich and making all the commensurate noises that an overly demonstrative Italian would make during the beloved act of eating — sounds considerably louder than a pair of Wasps engaged in an act of sex.

I said, “What else.”

He swallowed hard, hesitated, and said, “This is less concrete. But his stories are too neat, his quotes too perfect. He’s got simple people talking much too eloquently. Mailmen are talking like great existentialists. He’s either making up the quotes, or he’s making up the people. Either way, he’s a fraud.”

I was about half through with my hamburger and losing my appetite fast, not because I was full, but because I felt empty.

I asked, “Which do you think?”

“Most of his stuff is political. He’s doing analysis, or he’s talking to some government official, and that’s all fine. But when he does human interest, too often I can’t find the regular Joe or Josephine who he’s quoted by name in print. And when he just quotes someone without a name, I know he’s piping that.”

“What do you mean you haven’t been able to find them? You’ve tried?”

Mongillo took another bite of his sandwich, put it down and lovingly, heavily salted his fries.

Then he looked up at me and nodded, his big eyes meeting mine in some sort of strange look of guilt. I repeated, “You’ve checked?”

He looked down at his plate. “Look, it’s a disease, I admit it. I love the newspaper. I’m allowed, you know, even though I’m not like another son to the owners. It’s the greatest place I’ve ever worked, and it covers the only city I’ve ever lived in.”

He chewed on and swallowed a massive bite of pot roast, then said, “It’s always bugged me, or scared me. I always thought he’d end up being an embarrassment to the paper some day.

“So I do a little private fact-checking from time to time. When he quotes someone by name, I look them up in the phonebook, or on the Internet, and if I can’t find them, I sometimes swing by where they’re supposed to live or work. And you know what, about half the time, these people don’t exist.”

There was another silence between us. If silence could have weight, this one would resemble an elephant. I knew Mongillo loved theRecord, but I had no idea how much. I knew he disliked Fitzgerald, but I never realized the extreme depths of his disdain, or its basis.

“Why didn’t you ever tell me any of this?” I asked.

He ripped away another piece of his sandwich, chewed, swallowed, and said, “I told you I didn’t trust this guy. I told you all the time. You didn’t want to hear any of it. The guy’s important to you. He’s important to the paper. I don’t know. I guess I didn’t think I could get through to you. Or maybe I like you so much I didn’t really want to.”

I said softly, “So you didn’t do anything about it?”

He stared straight back at me, his big brown eyes set deep in his enormous olive face. He shook his head. “I did.”

“What?”

“I told the publisher. I let Paul Ellis know.

“And now,” he said softly, slowly, “Paul Ellis is dead.”