The Nominee

Thirty-One

Friday, April 27

I STOLE A SIDELONG glance at Vinny Mongillo standing innocently beside me at the rental car counter at West Palm Beach International Airport, a rotund presence gabbing away on his cell phone with another faceless official back on Beacon Hill, and turned my attention to the pretty young thing with the lazy accent in the unfortunately unflattering brown Hertz jersey.

“Good idea,” I said. “I’ll go ahead and get the full-sized.”

As we made our way from the airport, which, by the way, was crowded with happy tourists arriving from points north for a spring weekend in the sun, Mongillo cupped his hand over the phone and said to me, “If you see a Perkins, stop. Best waffles in America.” Next thing I heard, he was saying into the phone, “Fuck him and the patronage cart he rolled in on.”

My patience for these theatrics was running thin, mostly due to the exhaustion brought on by the fistfights, the gunfights, the garish discoveries. Just another day in the life of Jack Flynn, intrepid reporter. Right? Well, I hoped not.

Anyway, here I was, destined for Marshton just four days after the last such sojourn almost got me killed, and the man I had initially come to visit was now lying near death — because of me.

Why had I returned? Logical question. The best way to answer that is to explain what happened after I left Sweeney the night before:

First, I paid on a Northeastern University criminology professor by the name of Avi Dents. Get it? Evidence. Just kidding. I’m punchy. His real name is Sam Brookstone, a longtime source of mine. Still in my stocking feet, I brought John Cutter’s folder to his house, pleaded with him for confidence, and asked him to tell me what it meant.

He’s a rather owlish guy, almost trying to look the role of the academician, with tufts of hair that rise far off a mostly bald scalp, and large, thick glasses. He was wearing a cardigan sweater. Alan Dershowitz looks outright suave in comparison. I mean, who wears a cardigan anymore? Even Mr. Rogers went off and retired. He invited me into his library as he scanned the report, took a long puff on an overly fragrant pipe, and said to me, “The victim in this report was poisoned to death, I dare say murdered.”

That confirmed what I pretty much already knew. Two Cutter-Ellis’s down, one Flynn to go.

All of which still left something of an accommodation problem. To be more specific, I had abandoned my nice police guard, and I imagined that Gerry and Kevin weren’t terribly pleased about that. They also realized, no doubt, that wherever Sweeney was, I had been as well — a fact that could land me under arrest. Keep in mind, I had just stolen state property, to wit, John Cutter’s toxicology test results. I had shot a man in the face. I fled the scene. So I called Gerry from my cell phone and left him a voicemail saying I was fine and would be in touch in the next day or two. I called the hospital and was told that Sweeney was in intensive care and had slipped into a coma.

What I needed was a pair of shoes and a place to sleep, if only for an hour or two. So of all places, I returned to Long Wharf, toThe Emancipation, God bless her. It had been two days since I’d been there; long time no sea. Sorry. Nathan was gone, dead; Baker was still staying with friends in the nearby town of Weymouth; Kevin and Gerry knew how much I hated the place, so I didn’t think they’d look for me there. I didn’t sleep a wink, less from fear than the incessant rocking.

Around threeA.M., I heard footsteps along the dock. Someone rapped on my window. I should have been frightened. I should have been reaching for some form of a weapon. Instead, I yelled, “Who’s there?”

“It’s Mongillo.” I knew it was really him because it sounded like he was chewing on something.

I was wide awake, walked out on deck, and asked, “How the hell did you know I was here? I thought I was hiding.”

He put the better half of a Slim Jim in his pocket, if there is such a thing, and said, “A good guess. People are worried about you.”

“Who?” I asked. Serious question. Who was left to worry?

“Well, the cops who were supposed to be watching you, for starters, but I guess they’re more worried about their jobs.”

Sitting under a moonless sky in the throat of a deadly night, we hatched our plan to travel to Florida together. If Mary Mae was as fragile as Sweeney says, I didn’t want to give her the news of her husband on the telephone, because it could well kill her. The trip would devour precious time, but I felt the need to go see her in person.

Then I told Mongillo about my encounter with the goons on Charles Street, and my belief that Campbell might be a ruthless businessman, but wasn’t a brutal killer.

By sevenA.M., before I even got a chance to see our page-one story in theRecord that morning, my cell phone rang with a rather agitated Benjamin Bank on the other end and a conversation that went like this:

Bank: “I can’t believe you ran that story before you talked to us.”

Flynn: “Why wouldn’t you believe it? I told you that’s exactly what we were going to do.”

That was followed by silence, which was followed by his exhortation that the governor, traveling to Washington for a round of courtesy calls on Capitol Hill, had to see me that afternoon, and couldn’t do it in Boston, as previously planned.

“It has to be done in person,” he said.

So we added Washington to our travel agenda. Vinny insisted on coming along for the entire ride to help protect me, though what he’d do in the face of danger, I wasn’t exactly sure. Vinny, like any good reporter, also wanted to be where the story was, which was Washington. And like any good reporter, he likes an expense account meal at a good restaurant, and they had plenty of those in Washington as well.

All of which brings us to Marshton. I pulled in front of Sweeney’s mint-colored house with the spotless little yard. Mongillo hung up his phone with a look of horror on his face and said, “This is where people go to retire? Mother of God, I’m upping my 401K contribution to the full ten percent on Monday.”

I ignored that and said, “Wait here. I want to chat with Mrs. Sweeney alone.”

“Leave the car running and the AC on or I’m going to melt away to nothing in this fucking heat.”

Not likely, but he knew that already. It was a little after elevenA.M. and as Mongillo already pointed out, the sun was like a tortuous act of an unmerciful hell probing the very depths of our collective soul. I ambled down the driveway, past the Buick Park Avenue that was parked exactly as it had been a few days before, and up to the side door.

I pulled open the aluminum screen door, and unlike last time, the main door was shut tight and, as I found out when I gently tested the knob, locked. I rang the doorbell and heard it chime on the other side of the thin glass window. I waited and listened, but saw and heard nothing move inside.

So I repeated the act — doorbell, wait, listen. Nothing. She might be an invalid, I thought, so I should take my time, keep my powder dry, which in this weather, was impossible. I stood in the raging heat for a few minutes, moving around a bit on the stoop just to create some semblance of a breeze, then I rang one more time. After that, I rapped on the glass window of the door, increasingly harder after I continued to get no response. Obviously, she hadn’t driven anyplace, because their car was still here. Maybe she was in the backyard hanging laundry or cooling off a blueberry pie. The problem with that theory is that molten lava wouldn’t cool in this climate.

Still, I walked to the back of the house, where there was, indeed, a short clothesline, though nothing hanging on it, and a small patch of grass that looked like it hadn’t been mowed in a couple of weeks. I walked up to one of the windows of the house and looked inside. It was their bedroom. The double bed was perfectly made up, some of his clothes were folded on a nearby chair, and a plaque with Sweeney’s badge and a letter of commendation hung on the far wall, next to a small mirror. This room essentially told me nothing, though the portable air conditioner in the adjacent window did. It was off, pretty much assuring that no one was inside.

I walked around to the far side of the house, within easy sight of the neighboring house. I glanced quickly in at what appeared to be the living room. There was a television, about a nineteen-incher. Across from it sat a Lazy-Boy recliner, next to a side table holding a large-sized Mr. Goodbar, opened. The carpeting was standard issue Berber. The assorted prints and paintings on the wall were of the type you’d buy in a suburban shopping mall.

“Can I help you with something?”

It was the frail voice of an elderly woman, and I turned slowly around to see exactly that — a lady of maybe eighty-five years, maybe five feet tall in a loose-fitting housedress, standing on the edge of her driveway with, okay, a gun. She had it pointed at roughly my left testicle. I don’t think she could see all that well, and her hand appeared unsteady — two facts that I wasn’t sure improved my current plight.

I mean, as a kid, my mother didn’t even let me play guns or war or cops and robbers or anything else with perceived violence and easy, simulated deaths. Now, in the last five days, everyone I meet seems to be packing heat and are all too willing to use it.

“Hi there,” I said, almost too happy. I clasped my hands in front of me, not wanting the woman to get an itchy trigger finger because she thought I was reaching into my pocket. At the same time, I was protecting, nominally, the family jewels.

“My name is Jack Flynn. My identification is right out there in my car—” I made an exaggerated pointing motion toward the Buick LeSabre—“and I’d be thrilled to go get it and show you if you’d like. I’m from Boston, and I’m looking for Mrs. Sweeney.”

“You some salesman?” she asked. She talked out of the side of her mouth in a tone that showed she was remarkably unimpressed. Her skin was tanned as leather, but looked even darker, framed, as it was, by her white hair. I noticed that the quaint housedress had a repetitive print of buff surfers on their boards with the phrase, “Hang Ten.” Hadn’t heard that one in a while.

“I’m not. I’m a family friend. I’m here to see Mary Mae.” I thought that by using her first name, that might seal the deal.

The woman said, “You’re no family friend. Go the hell back from whatever slime pit you came.” With that, she cocked the revolver and held the gun out further from her face.

I shook my head and said, “Whatever you say,” and began walking slowly around the front of the house. What an assassin in Boston couldn’t accomplish, a woman octogenarian in Florida might.

I’ll confess more than a small amount of relief when I arrived at the car unharmed and snapped open the door. Mongillo was yakking on the phone and barely gave me a look. I started the car up and sped around the block, prepared to hear the sound of a tire exploding or the back windshield shattering at any given moment.

When I was young, there was an old lady down the street, Mrs. Irving, who used to hand out Hershey Kisses to the neighborhood kids and we’d gather round and listen to her stories about the days of milk-men and tabletop radios. Nowadays, they threaten you with Smith & Wesson revolvers. Times change, not always for the better.

None of which I explained to Mongillo, because he never hung up. I pulled around the corner, jammed the car in park, hustled out the door, and cut through a neighbor’s yard to arrive back at the Sweeneys’ side door, safely out of sight of Granny Clampett.

I felt around the top rim of the door molding for a hidden key. Nothing. I checked in and around a nearby bush. Nada. I felt beneath the front bumper of the car for one of those magnetized compartments that holds keys. Again, nonexistent. I came up with the absurd idea of checking under the doormat, a straw rectangle that said “Welcome” on it. And there it was, the house key. What kind of cop hides a key under a mat? Probably a retired and overly trusting one.

When I opened the door and walked inside, I nearly staggered back from the heat. All the windows were sealed shut, and the place had that medicinal kind of Ben-Gay odor to it that causes a reflexive limp and a sore rotator cuff.

“Mary Mae?” I called out, still standing in the doorway, my voice somewhere between conversational and a soft holler. No response. I remained just inside the front door in case she was also a Smith & Wesson groupie. Everybody else these days was carrying; no reason to expect she wouldn’t be. These retirees probably had a shooting range next to their shuffleboard court. I called her name again, only louder. The words, though, seemed to get caught in the thick air and fall to the linoleum kitchen floor like a wet rag. In the oppressive heat and the stultifying silence, I was pretty much convinced there was nobody home.

I walked through the neat little kitchen with the plain countertops, tin spice canisters, and GE appliances, into a small front dining room with a formal but inexpensive looking table that had the appearance of never being used.

I felt a set of eyes on me, causing me to peer cautiously around the room, expecting to find Ma Barker or whatever her name is from next door. Then I realized the eyes were part of a collection of photographs on the internal wall. I’ll admit, this burglary thing is relatively new to me, even as it’s getting old.

The pictures, in fact, were the only sign of life in an otherwise antiseptic room, so I stopped for a long moment to gaze at them, unsure what my next move would be. On top, there was Sweeney’s son, I think he said his name was Michael, standing in the driveway of a two-decker house in what was probably the middle-class Hyde Park or West Roxbury neighborhood of Boston, his hair buzzed short, a big smile on his handsome face, a cadet’s uniform on his muscular body. My bet is that he was on his way to his first day at the police academy.

The next photograph down showed him in his dress blues against a ruffled velvet curtain in a dimly lit auditorium on what must have been graduation day, serious and proud beneath the stiff brim on his new police cap, his body rigid in pose. The shot below was that of father and son, the younger in his patrolman’s garb, the elder in a long drab-tan raincoat that a detective might wear on television, leaning on a desk and laughing at the camera in the confines of a police station somewhere in Boston.

And beside the pictures, this poem, placed in a simple black frame:

A Parent’s Regret

Someday, joy will replace the greatest pain

That anyone should ever have to endure.

Until then, until you meet your child in heaven,

A life of tear-stained somedays.

— Anonymous

Don’t I know it. I swallowed hard and walked from the dining room, past a front door that looked like it was never used, into the living room that I had seen from outside the house when I ran into the pit bull of a woman from next door. This room had more of a lived-in feel, beginning with the reclining chair that had deep grooves in the cloth cushions. The candy bar I had noticed from the window was melted and goopy from the heat. A pair of remote controls sat on the side table along with an oldTV Guide. I didn’t know people still readTV Guide, but I didn’t know people still ate Mr. Goodbars, either. Maybe it’s a Florida thing, or a retiree thing, which I guess is the same thing.

Anyway, on the carpet next to the chair sat an uncovered shoebox containing various scraps of paper and clipped newspaper stories, so of course, I reached inside and pulled some out. The first one was a three-paragraph announcement in theParkway Daily Transcript, a little neighborhood newspaper, saying that Michael A. Sweeney had graduated from the Boston Police Academy and been stationed to Precinct 4 in the South End. I don’t know why that gave me a pang of pride, but it did. I sifted through a program for the academy commencement exercises and a letter from the commissioner assigning Sweeney to the street narcotics unit.

Then I saw a yellowing clip from theRecord that was dated from five-and-a-half years before, a front-page story with the headline, “Officer, Minister Killed in Botched Mattapan Drug Raid.” The lede of the story went on to explain how a young narcotics officer was shot and killed and a city reverend died of an apparent heart attack during a drug raid on the wrong apartment in a Mattapan tenement house. The reporter, Jacob Stein, went on to identify Sweeney by name in the third paragraph. John Leavitt, who was then the police superintendent in charge of detectives and the narcotics squad, expressed regret for the two deaths and said, “This tragic incident is under thorough and intensive investigation. We will find out what went wrong, and we will take all proper punitive and corrective measures.”

As I went to place the papers and clips carefully back in the shoebox, I thought of what was missing from this collection, which was the same thing missing from the wall in the dining room — no letters of commendation for Officer Sweeney, no flowery tributes to a fallen brother, no photographs of the mayor presenting the heartbroken parents with an American flag after a funeral fit for a hero. All they had was a generic poem, written anonymously. Then I saw why.

There on the floor beside the cardboard box was another old clip, this one more fragile, the ink worn from constant handling and smudged in one place, as if from a single drop of water. I picked it up. It was aBoston Record story, and I was startled to see the familiar byline of Robert Fitzgerald.

The story carried the intriguing headline, “Deadly Mistake,” and appeared in the paper the day after the news story of Michael Sweeney’s death. The lede was classic Fitzgerald prose: “He was the meticulous architect of what was to be a valiant strike at one of the most notorious and nefarious drug dens in the city of Boston. He met with informants. He conducted surveillance. He filed for search warrants.

“But when the hour came, Michael Sweeney, a young detective, the son of a veteran Boston cop, made one mistake: He led his brethren to the wrong apartment. And that one mistake cost him his life and likely led to the death of an elderly man of the cloth.”

The story went on for seventy or so more lines, quoting police officials anonymously saying that Sweeney was an ambitious young officer who made the rookie mistake of relaying the wrong address in the briefing report given to all officers taking part in the raid. Those police officials say Sweeney had a history of being careless in his details. They said the department would likely admit fault in the reverend’s death and offer his estate somewhere along the lines of two million dollars. Of Sweeney’s death, they said he was mistakenly shot by another cop and implied he had brought it on himself.

I was so engrossed in the story that when I got to the end, I found myself sitting in Hank Sweeney’s easy chair, and jumped up with a start.

They made a scapegoat of him.

Obviously something wasn’t right here, or someone. I rested the frail newspaper clip on top of the others in the shoebox and began looking around the rest of the living room — the name seeming to belie the present feeling and the mood. Sweat formed on my forehead, along my lower back and under my arms. The smell of the house began making me nauseous. But I forged on, in search of Mary Mae, knowing full well I wasn’t going to find her. In that case, what I was looking for, I didn’t really know.

I do know there were various knickknacks on the shelves of a bookcase wedged into a corner — some Hummels and several pictures of a dignified, well preserved older woman who I assumed was Mary Mae herself — in one with Sweeney, in another smiling behind the wheel of a new car with the sticker still on the back window. Strange as it sounds, her smile made me smile too. She was like that.

I walked into the bedroom, where there was another photo on the bedside table of the ever-photogenic Mary Mae standing on the balcony of a resort hotel room at sunset. I pulled open the lone door inside the room and saw a closet filled with both of their clothes — hers on the left, his on the right. Most of hers were wrapped in plastic, as if they had just come back from the dry cleaner.

I was thinking that my voyeuristic tendencies were starting to get the better of me and that it was time to take leave when the sound of the telephone crashed through the heavy, hot air. I actually jumped. I regrouped and was, for some strange reason, drawn to the ringing phone, and walked out from the bedroom back into the living room to watch it. The phone, a Princess touch-tone, sat on the bookshelf between a framed picture of the couple and a small silver urn. Mid-ring, it kicked over to an answering machine, and I suddenly heard Sweeney’s distant voice saying, “We’re not here right now to take your call, but you know what to do at the beep.”

It beeped, then came Sweeney’s voice all over again, sounding tired, his words slurring into each other. He was out of his coma, obviously, but barely.

“Mary Mae,” he said, and then paused. The tape quietly rolled and I moved closer — so close, in fact, that I was standing right over the machine, hunched down trying to hear not just each word, but every inflection. I found myself staring at the turning cassette as if I might be able to see Sweeney’s face in it, and maybe that of Mary Mae.

“My Mary Mae, remember how you’d get up on your toes and kiss me when I went off to work and tell me to watch myself because I was the only husband you’d ever have?” He paused as if composing himself, drawing in breaths. It sounded as if it hurt him just to talk.

He continued, “Well, I didn’t do so good last night. I took a risk and I got shot right in the gut.” I could hear him moan as he moved in his hospital bed. “I know, I know. I’m a horse’s arse. I’m too old to be doing this, running around like a kid. You used to tell me that all the time.

“But I’m helping this guy, this reporter, to figure out whether the publisher of theRecord was murdered, and I think he was. This guy’s good. Been with theRecord for a while. Used to work in Washington. I know you didn’t have any use for the paper, but I stayed with it, even after what they did. Anyway, I figure if I help this kid out, maybe he’ll help us get some justice. Just a thought.”

Another long pause. I stood directly over the tape, still straining to listen, and think I heard him choking back tears on the other end.

“I don’t know, Mary Mae. It’s an idea. It’s tough for me to figure these things out by myself.”

Another pause, I thought I heard him convulsing, though I didn’t know whether it was in pain or sadness. My hands, helpless, began moving just to give me a sense of action, mobility. At one point, I put my right hand on the receiver and almost jerked it up to talk to him, but just as quickly I pulled it away.

“I’m so sorry that I’ve been gone so long. I don’t like to be without you and I know you don’t like to be without me.”

I heard a door open, whirled around, and stared into the kitchen, bracing myself for what was to come. Granny Clampett? Mary Mae? Then I realized the sound came from the phone, in the hospital room, not here in the house.

Sweeney said, his tone more upbeat and firm, “Okay, honey, I love you too. I’m going to get myself patched up and get out of here soon.” And with that, the line went dead.

My eyes settled on the photograph of the woman, smiling next to her husband, her arm around his waist and his around her shoulder. Then I scanned the rest of the shelf, fixing on the small, silver urn. I picked it up and turned it around and saw the engraved words that I expected to see: Mary Davis Sweeney, 1930–1997.

One of the two cassettes in the machine rewound. The rest of the house was filled with the dull ring of dead air. I stood alone and quiet, staring at the urn, thinking of Sweeney in the Public Garden two nights before.

I can’t even remember what it’s like not to be married to her, and I’d never have it any other way.

I placed the urn carefully back on the shelf and said, “Mary Mae, old Hank is one hell of a guy.”

Then I strode from the living room, through the dining room and the kitchen. I walked out the door, locked it, slipped the key back under the mat, and jogged through the neighbor’s yard. The sun was so hot by then I thought I might self-immolate. Sheer desire for the car air-conditioning spurred me on.

I snapped open the driver’s side door. Mongillo now had his laptop fired up and his phone hooked up to a headset with a microphone, and continued gabbing and typing at the same time. The air in the car felt so cool it almost felt cold. He cast a quick glance my way when I got in, and returned to his call.

I pulled out my own phone and called directory assistance. I asked for the Marshton Town Hall, was connected, and requested to speak to someone who handles vital statistics. The phone rang again and a frail-sounding woman answered, “Bella here.”

I put on my best, friendliest, I-could-be-your-hard-working-son voice, and said, “Bella, hi, my name is Jack Flynn. I’m a reporter forThe Boston Record. I’m working on a story and need one very quick piece of information that I’m hoping you can help me with.”

“Hi, Jack,” she said. “I moved down from Boston last year. I get theRecord sent down in the mail.”

I was about to point out that she could read it on-line, same day, free of charge, but decided this probably wasn’t the right time. Nor was it the right time to say that quick prayer of thanks to the gods of journalism who seemed to be smiling down on me that very minute. Instead, I said, “That’s terrific. This looks like a great town to move to.”

“Oh it is,” she replied. “We have so many things to do here.”

“I can’t even imagine. Unfortunately, I’m in kind of a rush right now. What I’m looking for is a death certificate on a Mary Davis Sweeney, who died in 1997. Is it possible to get the cause of death on her?”

“Well, we’re not supposed to do this by phone. Normally you’re required to come in and fill out an official request, then pay a five dollar administrative fee for the certificate, unless you want a raised seal, then it’s twenty dollars.”

I knew, though, with the word “normally” that I had her, provided I didn’t screw up. I said, “I know this is a hassle, but is there any possible way that you might help a fellow Bostonian out on the phone, and I’ll send the money to town hall?”

She paused and said, “Hold on.” For the next two minutes, I listened to the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction” played by Muzak. Who knew?

She picked up the phone again. Her tone was markedly different, less friendly. She said, “Mary Davis Sweeney. Says here she died of a gunshot wound.”

“Anything else?” I asked.

She paused, then said, “Self-inflicted.”

I thanked her, quickly hung up, and made a circular motion with the index finger of my right hand, signaling Mongillo in no uncertain terms to hang up the goddamned telephone and talk to me. He did, proving once again how much smarter he is than he looks.

I said, “Tell me everything you know about that botched drug raid where the minister died, and tell me what you think Fitzgerald did wrong.”

Just one more mystery in the increasingly complex mix.