The Nominee

Twenty-Seven

I USED TO THINK I knew lonely. Lonely was staring down at the angelic face of your wife, sweat still gathered in her hair, minutes after she died in the delivery room of Georgetown Hospital, your infant daughter also dead before she ever drew a breath.

Loneliness is a few years later, the sound of the door languidly clicking shut when your girlfriend walks out of the apartment for the final time, her muffled sobs in the hallway, and then nothing at all.

Lonely was walking through the Public Garden on a drizzling Christmas morning wearing dirty jeans and a frayed shirt in the company of just your dog, watching young families glide by on their way to church, fathers holding the mittened hands of their little girls, peals of laughter, shouts of familial joy.

Lonely was sitting on a wet bench later that afternoon wondering what your life would have been like but for that awful day, thinking how much you miss the woman you married, then wondering if your former girlfriend was decked out in a red velvet dress and flashing that sophisticated crinkle-eyed smile at her new boyfriend’s mother.

Now I was learning a new shade of loneliness. Lonely these days was losing your publisher, your newspaper, your livelihood, your pride, your sense of self, your security, finding out your mentor might be a fraud, all in the course of about four days. All of which is exactly how I felt as I staggered from the building into the awaiting unmarked cruiser at theRecord ’s front door.

“Where we heading, Jack?” Gerry Burke, the police driver, asked from the front seat. Good question. Truth is, I had no idea.

I didn’t even stop in the newsroom, because everyone would have been asking me how it went, and how it went was absolutely awful. They’re looking to me for salvation. Instead, I find out we’re about to get bought out by a cheap chain because I found myself incapable of convincing a few board members to stay the course of the last 127 years. The word failure came to mind. So did loser, not to mention jackass.

And at that exact point, I couldn’t go home because, well, I didn’t have one.

“Holy Name Cemetery,” I finally said. Gerry gave me a quick, odd look, as did Kevin, who was also sitting in the front seat.

“Not for eternity. I just want to swing through for a moment and take a look at something.”

That something being my father’s grave. If you can’t function among the living, then pay a call on the dead. At least that’s what Dr. Kevorkian used to say. I think.

My cellular phone chimed and I snapped it up. Mine, just to be clear, was set on the ordinary, standard ring — none of this “Hungarian Marching Song” or “Swanee River” for me.

“Flynn.”

“Sweeney. Where you at?”

“Physically or mentally?”

“Let’s start slow. Physically.”

“In the cruiser with your boys. We’re heading over to West Roxbury to Holy Name Cemetery.”

He said, “Something you want to tell me.”

“Yeah, my father’s buried there.”

“Good for you. We need to talk.”

I asked, “You know where Holy Name is?”

He almost sounded angry again in that way he gets. “Know where it is? For chrissakes, it’s like old home week when I go over there. I know half the people in the place. I know cemeteries are supposed to depress me, but Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, I walk out of there feeling like a million bucks. I get to sleep in a bed without a top or a velvet lining.”

“It’s all the way in the back right corner, right under the biggest oak tree in the place,” I said.

“Sounds like he’s a neighbor of my old friend, Kenny Lonagan. I wonder if they’ve met.”

I had to think about that one for a moment. I said, “I’ll see you there.”

“Jack?”

“Yeah?”

“What about mentally?”

“Couldn’t be worse. But thanks for asking.”

“Well, I don’t think I’m about to make it any better. I’ll be there in ten.”

That ancient tree wasn’t yet in bloom, and the grass all around the place still looked thin and brown from the harsh winter. But someone had planted two small American flags on either side of my old man’s marker, and those flags added a needed dash of color as they fluttered in the chill spring breeze.

I never quite know what I’m supposed to do at a cemetery, which probably explains why I spend so little time there. Do you kneel, do you sit, do you talk, do you read, do you think? I felt like I needed to do all that and more.

The unmarked cruiser idled at a respectable distance, and Gerry and Kevin each stood inconspicuously among graves on opposite sides of me about thirty yards away.

With no one within earshot, no one living, anyway, I said, “Well, Dad, you always wanted me to come work at the paper, so I did. Of course, I think you meant the pressroom, not the newsroom, and right about now, that would probably be one hell of a lot easier, not to mention safer.

“Now Paul Ellis is dead. The paper, your paper, my paper, Paul’s paper, is about to be sold, and once that happens, it will never be the same. I don’t know as there’s anything I can do about it anymore. But Dad, I want you to know, I’m trying. I really am.”

I paused, staring at the gray granite stone that said simply, “Arthur Flynn, 1930–1993.” My father was never really the flamboyant type.

“What would you do? The one guy I can ask, Fitzgerald, may be part of the problem.” I asked again, louder, “So what am I supposed to do?” Obviously, I was searching for inspiration, and if it was divine rather than pragmatic, so be it.

Silence. The wind rustled through the branches of that nearby oak. The flags fluttered a bit more. A scrap of trash — a discarded Dunkin Donuts cup — tumbled into a bush adorning an adjacent gravestone.

“A lot of people came before me at this paper. A lot of people gave their sweat, their blood, their hearts and their souls to theRecord, you among them. I’ll do what I can to keep it going. I’ll do whatever I can to find out how John Cutter died, who killed Paul Ellis, and why.”

I grew angrier standing there talking to no one who could overtly hear. I raised my voice and said, “I’m going to get justice if it’s the last thing I do. And maybe it will help keep me alive as well.”

I heard another car motor up, stop, and a door slam. I saw Sweeney walking across the colorless grass, weaving among the grave markers, heading toward me. He carried some papers under his right arm that looked to be files.

About ten yards away, he paused and read one of the stones, then knocked his hand against the top. “This is Kenny Lonagan, guy I told you about,” he called out to me.

Then he looked at the marker and said, “Kenny, this here is Mr. Flynn. Mr. Flynn, this is Kenny Lonagan. You boys are going to be spending a lot of time together so you might as well get to know each other.”

He sidled up to me and said, “Hey there, son.”

He looked tired, a fact he explained to me by saying, “Jesus Christ, my idea of work down in Florida is watering the yard, and I usually do that with my fat behind planted in a lawn chair. This police stuff is hard work. I don’t know how I did it all those years.”

That said, he also looked content, even happy, as if he was exactly where he belonged, doing precisely what he was meant to do in life.

I smiled along with him. I couldn’t help it. Before I could even get a word out, he handed me a file and said, “Here, take a look-see at this. I don’t want you thinking I’m crazy or telling you some tall tales.”

I opened up a manila file folder and saw the handwritten words at the top of a standard police form, “John E. Cutter/Sudden death. Four Seasons Condominiums,” along with the date. I felt an immediate pit in my stomach. This was the police report, I quickly realized — different than the coroner’s report I had perused two mornings before.

“Check out item twenty-nine,” Sweeney said to me. He stood a few feet away, looking down at my father’s grave.

As I scanned down, he said to me, “I like this color granite. It catches the light nice, but not so much that you can’t read it like with a lot of them.”

I said, “I can see you in this color.”

He snickered, and replied, “Yeah, maybe. Or maybe I should do red so I stand out. Tough to make a name for yourself in this place.”

“This where you’re going to be buried?” I asked.

He waved his hand at me in that way he does, like I was bothering him, even though I knew I wasn’t. “Oh, I don’t know. I have to see what Mother wants. Christ, I hope she doesn’t want us going down in Florida. We’ll be rotted from the damned heat two hours after we die.”

I gladly returned to the sheet. Item 29 said, “Discarded blue tissue, located on tile floor behind toilet basin.”

“Flip the page,” Sweeney instructed me.

I flipped the page and saw another official-looking form that said, “Directive for toxicology test,” complete with John Cutter’s name, the pertinent death information, and Sweeney’s signature and shield number.

He said, “So there was a tissue and there was an order. I’m not some senile old goat, even if I am a senile old goat.”

He laughed at this. I continued to eye the file. He asked, “You know where I found that?”

I shook my head.

“First I looked in the police files. Pain in the ass to nail it down. The snots in administration were going to make me wait seven days for this.” Louder, angry: “Seven days! Can you believe that shit. So I called the commissioner and he helped me out. I get the file pulled out of the archives, and it’s got nothing in it — I mean, nothing. That order was missing, and the list of items in the room was torn out. Someone tore the damn page right in half.”

The pale sun was starting to slip out of view and a particularly muscular gust of wind blew in from the west, causing Sweeney to look toward it, then turn to me with a smile. “Weather,” he said, the word standing out there on its own like a rock. “I love it. We don’t have weather in Florida. You know what? Check that. We have two kinds of weather — hot and muggy, and usually they’re on the same day.”

“I don’t get it, lieutenant,” I said. “If someone ripped these out of the file and stole them, then what am I doing with my hands on them now?”

He focused hard on me for a moment, the corners of his lips turning up on his boyishly handsome face.

“Because, son, they stole them from the official file — the file I left in the homicide bureau the day I retired. Whoever stole the records didn’t realize that I also kept duplicate files of my own, and when I retired, I had all my duplicates shipped over to the archives. I just had these pulled out today — with no small effort, I might add.”

He smiled at me and I held his eye for a moment, approvingly. He said, “What are you doing tonight?”

“Putting my resumé together and checking property values in suburban Kansas City.” He gave me a quizzical look. I said, “Long story. But I’ll find some time. What are you proposing.”

“Well,” he said, “The missing files hint at foul play. I’m hoping against hope that somewhere in an evidence locker in the bowels of the coroner’s building we’ll find an explanation of what happened with John Cutter.” He reached into the pocket of his navy blue windbreaker and pulled out a pair of keys strung on a paper clip. “And these will help us get there.”

I furrowed my brow. He added, “The coroner’s office, the evidence locker, care of some good old friends, or old good friends, however you wordsmiths would say it.”

I was struck immediately by what was at stake, not for me, but for him. I said, “You’re not going down there. You get caught breaking and entering, you get arrested, you lose your pension — everything you busted your ass for all those years on the force.”

Rather than argue the point, he asked, “Jack, tell me the alternative?”

“I go in alone. I’ve got nothing to lose at this point. Christ, I’ve already lost most of what I had. There’s nothing left.”

He regarded me for a moment as I regarded him, then he said, “We go in together. Yeah, I know it’s your friend involved, and your newspaper, but somebody messed with old Hank Sweeney, and that was a big, big mistake.”