The Nominee

Thirty-Three

AT TIMES LIKE THIS, you have to ask yourself why you got into the business of journalism in the first place, why you’ve spent a career, a life, in pursuit of truth and public enlightenment.

Okay, I got into it because my father happened to work for a newspaper and the owner paid my way through school. So maybe I’m the wrong person to ask.

But as I’ve said of Paul Ellis, and of John Cutter before him, they looked atThe Boston Record as their own form of public service, no less noble than a stint served in elective office, and I have to say, I more than agree, especially after my up close and personal with Governor Lance Randolph. And I don’t give a rat’s furry ass that Randolph accused John Cutter of covering up Fitzgerald’s fabrications. I know it couldn’t be true.

I had some awful choices to make. I could well go public with suspicions that Robert Fitzgerald had been a recidivist fabricator for any number of years, and had knowingly written a false story about Lance Randolph’s record during the district attorney’s first gubernatorial campaign. But if I did, Randolph would levy his own accusations of a longtime, internal cover-up, and the paper would become the proverbial laughing stock in the city and in the industry. Even if we were right, it wouldn’t matter, because as we defended ourselves, the board of directors couldn’t meet fast enough to approve the sale and get the paper in the hands of Terry Campbell. They’re thinking of the stock price, not the reputation.

Times like these, I had to prioritize: (1) Save the paper; (2) Save my life; (3) Find out who killed John Cutter and Paul Ellis, and why. I had a vague understanding that these things were in some way linked, but couldn’t yet figure out how.

So would it serve theRecord ’s higher purpose, and in turn, that of the public, to drop the story of Governor Lance Randolph and his crime-fighting record? Would it be okay, in this most unusual circumstance, to look the other way when an ugly truth comes knocking on our newsroom door? Would it mitigate the unseen damage if the paper, in turn, quietly and quickly got rid of its star reporter, Robert Fitzgerald, without a public word? And is that even possible, or would too big a fuss be kicked up and the truth come pouring forth?

These were the nagging — no, plaguing — questions I had as I took my first pleasant swig of an exquisitely icy Sam Adams in a little jazz bar just outside of Georgetown called One Step Down. I sat across a rickety table from Vinny Mongillo, who happened to be strumming an air guitar in sync with the band’s rendition of Ray Charles’s “What’d I Say?”

Earlier that evening, Mongillo and I worked side by side in the bureau for about an hour, retracing Fitzgerald’s steps across a random sampling of his stories. Some of the people he quoted by name, we located. Most others we didn’t. I had little doubt that these stories contained egregious lies, made-up people, false premises. But the operative words there arelittle doubt. I still had some, and I needed to erase it.

After that, the two of us bolted for the National Airport. Deadlines loomed over the landscape of my life like mines. Monday afternoon, theRecord board of directors had scheduled its full meeting to determine the newspaper’s fate. Tuesday, the Senate Judiciary Committee would begin its expedited hearings into the nomination of Lance Randolph as U.S. attorney general. Before then, I would have to decide if my paper wanted to pursue the truth, or in the name of a higher purpose, avoid it.

Meantime, I had to get back to Boston to meet with the ailing Hank Sweeney, to figure out how to push John Cutter’s death into the realm of a homicide investigation, and to confront Fitzgerald. I also wanted to make sure that Sweeney wasn’t taking any sort of legal fall for the gunman’s death. Unpleasant duties, all, but entirely necessary. Finally, I was waiting for a break in the murder of Paul Ellis, and wondering every moment if Ellis’s death was linked to Cutter’s, which is what I strongly suspected. Oh, and one other question: Was I slated to die sometime soon? Jack Flynn, this is your life. Let’s just make sure that it continues on for a while.

At National, the last of the USAirways shuttles to Boston were cancelled because of rain somewhere along the route. It used to be, jets would land on snow-covered runways in all but blizzard conditions piloted by men who readSoldier of Fortune rather thanAndrew Harper’s Hideaway Report. Now, there’s mist over O’Hare and the entire national aviation system goes into three days of impenetrable gridlock. I was stuck in Washington overnight with nothing to do but have a beer.

There were basically just two people in the world whose counsel I wanted (Paul Ellis, my father, and Katherine Flynn not being of this world anymore) — Robert Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Riggs. Fitzgerald, of course, was not exactly the best person to approach anymore, and Elizabeth, the last few crazy days aside, was no longer part of my life. I don’t think.

I called Sweeney from the cab back into DC. He picked up his room phone, which was a great sign, and said he was feeling better, that Mary Mae was mad as hell at him for loping around like a rookie cop, and that we’d get some privacy in the hospital room the next day to go over what we had. He said he believed the cops bought his story about shooting the gunman, who was identified as Kevin Clancy, a.k.a. Mike Andrews, an ex-convict who got popped on parole a short time ago.

The police, Sweeney said, couldn’t connect him in any way to the Cutter-Ellis family, leaving them to believe he was a hired hitman. Great. Basically the cops were no closer to an answer than before Paul’s murder was committed. Among other things, Luke Travers was an incompetent.

Speaking of whom, when we got to the jazz bar, I had an idea and I called him from the street outside. I couldn’t shake the thought of this inordinately decent man, Hank Sweeney, sitting alone in his tiny, mint-colored house hard by a Florida swamp, missing his life in Boston, furious at what the police and my newspaper did to his son, talking to a silver urn that held the remains of his beloved wife, a lone tear falling from his cheek onto the clip of a Fitzgerald story that lay on his lap.

Travers picked up his cell phone on the first ring.

I said, “I have proof that John Cutter was murdered five years ago and the police department has been covering it up.”

“Where are you?”

An ambulance roared by, its siren in full blare, heading, I’m sure, to the emergency room at the George Washington Hospital just down the street.

I told him, “Don’t embarrass yourself. Just listen. A police toxicology test showed that someone poisoned Cutter with arsenic. His death certificate says he died of a heart attack. I have the toxicology test, a vial of Cutter’s blood, and a contaminated tissue taken from the crime scene, all in my immediate possession.”

“So you have stolen police evidence?”

“It would be police evidence if the police actually used it as evidence. Instead, you hid it away in a basement locker. It’s not so much stolen as rescued.” Touché.

“How did you get it?”

“I’m a reporter. Someone gave it to me.”

“Sweeney?”

“Again, don’t embarrass yourself. I’ve got a proposal for you.” Everyone seemed to be making proposals — or rather, demands — so I figured I’d get into the act. I needed to accomplish two things. First, I needed positive, definitive proof of Fitzgerald’s fabrications on a large story, not just Lance Randolph’s bony word. Second, I wanted to help Sweeney. This was what’s known as a double-bank shot. I said, “Give me the name of the informant in the botched drug raid five years ago that killed that minister over in Mattapan. I will personally guarantee you that this has nothing to do with Paul’s death, nothing to do with this case. And in return, I’ll give you these toxicology tests and tell you everything else that I know.”

“You’ll tell me everything you know either way, in front of a grand jury,” he replied, tersely.

I rolled my eyes and let it show in my tone. I asked, “Are you about to make an arrest in Paul’s murder?”

The question was met with a long silence. I thought I could hear him exhaling in frustration on the other end of the line. “We’re not as close as we’d like to be,” he said. “We’ve gotten some breaks. The suspected gunman, I believe, is now dead. But I think he was for hire. Who hired him, I don’t know.”

I said, “If you want to play tough guy, then go through all the formalities. Convene a grand jury. Send me a subpoena. I’ll file a petition to have it quashed. We’ll go to court. It’ll take forever. Meantime, you can read everything that I know every single morning on the front page of theRecord. Best half a dollar you’ll spend. By the middle of next week, you’ll be lucky if your bosses even let you answer phones for the Police Athletic League.”

More silence — a blessed sound right now. Finally, he asked, “What do you need the name for?”

“Lieutenant, if you don’t stop with the asinine questions, you’re going to be reading all the answers in tomorrow’sRecord, and you’ll also read about how the former publisher was poisoned to death, and how the police department has covered that fact up for five years. What’s it going to be?”

More silence. He eventually said, “Give me your number and I’ll call you back in an hour.”

An hour’s just long enough for a homicide detective to dig through old files to find the name of a secret street informant. I gave him my number and hung up the phone without so much as a good-bye.

Inside the bar, Mongillo had taken the liberty of ordering himself a Grey Goose and tonic — whatever the hell that is — and me a Sam. The waitress brought them back and said, “You need anything else, Vinny, my name’s Ginny. We rhyme. Just let me know.”

“You know her?” I asked, surprised, as she walked away.

“I do now.”

I knew I should have brought him to the University Club, where it would be me who knows people.

The liquor flowed, the music played, Mongillo held an imaginary saxophone up to his face, contorting his body and puffing his cheeks. This was no time to get drunk, which probably meant it was every time to get drunk.

“Do you play?” I asked, realizing how little I knew about a man who I counted as a pretty good friend.

“Every once in a while,” he replied with a smile. He added, “By the way, I asked Peter Martin to join us. He said to give him a call if we go and get something to eat.”

When the band went on break, the lead singer, a slinky brunette with a sonorous voice, stopped by our table and said to Mongillo, “You look like you know what you’re doing. Why don’t you join us for part of the next set.”

Mongillo hit his right hand to his chest, flicked it out and said, “Word.” Okay, he didn’t do that, but I saw someone do it once onThe Simpsons. What Mongillo said was, “I’d be digging that.” He said it with the biggest, happiest, sloppiest smile I’ve ever seen. The singer gave me a coy look and left.

Feeling the mild glow of a single beer in the boozy din of the narrow bar, I leaned across the table and told Mongillo, “I’m completely, inextricably screwed.”

“We all are, babe, every one of us in our own unique way.”

“No,” I said. “I’m really screwed.”

He polished off the last gulp of his Grey Goose, sucked on an ice cube, and waved a hand at Ginny, who set off in pursuit of another.

Mongillo looked at me and said, “Jack, you have it made. You’ve made a national name for yourself at a major metropolitan newspaper. You’re close friends with the ownership family, though ignore the fact that most of them are now dead and the remaining one in power hates your guts. All right, forget that whole point. Most important, you have a wonderful woman who’ll love you to the end of time.”

A wonderful woman who’ll love me to the end of time? Yeah, me and who else? And why can’t I just love her back?

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

“I’m talking about what matters.”

“You don’t think the paper matters? You don’t think losing the paper matters?”

“Oh, I do. I do. To me, it probably matters more than anything else, and that’s part of my problem.”

I took a long pull from my bottle. He dipped deep into his fresh highball glass of vodka and tonic, gazing down at the table as he did. I looked at him silently, and he continued, “Jack, Fair Hair, look at me. I don’t have anyone like Elizabeth Riggs sitting at home, staring at a wall or a dark TV or the pages of a book that she’s not really reading, hoping against hope that she might have a slight chance of spending another night with me.

“Jack, you have something I can only dream about — normalcy, a regular boy-girl relationship—”

“It’s not that easy,” I interjected. “And I don’t have it.”

He held out his palm to shut me up. “Here’s what I have. I have work. I have the ability to pull an on-the-record quote out of a fresh corpse, to spin a New England News Brief into a front-page story. That’s all. That’s it. Believe me, when I’m sitting at home all alone every night with a frozen pizza watching another inane sitcom, I don’t dream about writing more front-page stories. That’s not how it works.”

I began to say something when the band suddenly began belting out a bluesy song from the small stage. We sat in mutual silence for the moment, both of us watching the singularly stunning lead singer with the flowing hair and the leather pants do her thing. And at the end of the first song, said singer beckoned Mongillo with an exquisitely alluring finger motion. He rose slowly out of his chair, as if attached to a string, drained his glass while standing, and ambled toward the stage.

The saxophonist handed Mongillo his instrument and he wrapped the strap over his back. The band struck into “Stormy Monday,” and Mongillo began to play along.

He played what is inarguably the most beautiful saxophone I have ever heard. He played “Early in the Morning.” He played “Hootchy Kootchy Man.” He played after the band stopped and the crowd was on its feet in spontaneous applause and he walked about the room with his cheeks blown up like balloons and his eyes watering and music coming from his instrument that was like something created by a higher being. And when he put the sax down, he sat at the piano and began to play all over again.

I was on my feet clapping my hands together until they hurt, the self-pity, the worry, the angst, gone for just a moment, courtesy of the amazingly multitalented Vinny Mongillo. I clapped so hard that I shoved my elbow into someone standing close behind me. I turned to apologize and saw something, in retrospect, that may well have changed the rest of my adult life.

She was wearing an old pair of perfectly fitting jeans, a tight white tank top, some dangly earrings. She wore makeup, but not a lot, just right, and her hair flowed down beyond her bare shoulders. She looked at me without saying anything, and virtually without expression, close, her eyes set like headlights on mine, unmoving, just a pool of familiar blue. It’s the look she used to give me when I would lie on top of her first thing on a Sunday morning and we would begin yet another fit of slow and wonderful sex.

Beyond us, Mongillo stopped playing. The room echoed with cheers and applause, then the noise finally died down. The band took another break and Vinny, glowing, walked to the bar with them.

I said, “Hello, Elizabeth.”

She didn’t move away, didn’t move any closer, didn’t move her eyes even a fraction away from mine. “Hello, Jack,” she replied.

I was about to ask her how she knew I was here, but I flashed back to my conversation with Mongillo minutes earlier and realized I knew the answer to that already.

“You haven’t run your Fitzgerald story yet,” I told her. It was an obvious point. If she had run a Fitzgerald story, it would have been in her paper already.

“It’s ready. I have it. But I didn’t want to do that to you right now. So I quit.”

She didn’t want to do that to me, so she quit. Forgive me for repeating, but it took a moment to sink in, the enormity of what she just said.

Around us, everyone returned to their tables and seats after the chaos surrounding Mongillo’s stint — well, everyone but Mongillo, who I saw out of the corner of my eye standing at the bar with the band’s drummer and lead singer, laughing and carrying on in that way he always does.

“You shouldn’t have quit,” I said.

“We do a lot of things in life we shouldn’t do.” She spoke, again, without moving back, hardly moving at all. “We shouldn’t shut people out of the present because of something that happened in the past.” She said this casually, just presenting the words to me, unconcerned with how I might feel.

I asked, “What else?”

“I shouldn’t have left that day. I shouldn’t have agreed so readily to part ways with you. I should have fought you every step, refused to vacate our apartment, refused to get out of your life. Because your life is my life. Because my life is your life. I haven’t stopped believing that, feeling that, not even for half a second. You might be a jackass, but you’re my jackass, and you’re always supposed to be my jackass. Always.”

My mind, for whatever bizarre reason, flicked to her apartment, to the fact it was void of even the hint of a man except for the pictures of me. I thought about those last awful moments together, the zip of her luggage in the bedroom, the slow sound of her footsteps, the muddled sobs as she buried her face in Baker’s muzzle, then the melancholy click of our front door. What was she thinking as she stood in the hallway, tears streaming down her face, a future so markedly different from the expectations of her past?

I asked, “Then why did you cheat on me?”

Still, she didn’t move. Our faces were no more than a foot apart.

“I didn’t,” she replied. “And you know I didn’t. You wanted to believe I did, for whatever contorted reasons. You couldn’t function with me, Jack. The past got in the way. Your feelings for Katherine wouldn’t allow you to completely give yourself to me, and that’s understandable. That’s something we could have worked on. But then you fabricated this relationship in your mind, made yourself believe I was unfaithful, because that made your decision to split more definitive in your mind, more rational.”

Great, I was getting intense psychotherapy, entirely free of charge, right here for the whole world to watch and hear in the environs of a Washington jazz bar.

She added, “And part of it was my fault. He’s a cop, a detective. I was stringing him along, using him. I needed information on Fitzgerald, about how he lied in print on a famous, failed drug raid a few years ago. I thought Travers could help me. I couldn’t let you know. So I panicked that day. I was ashamed. And I walked out when I shouldn’t have. Given the situation, I just didn’t know what else to do.”

Anyone else have any surprises they’d like to spring on yours truly today?

Working a story on Fitzgerald and stringing Travers along. Made sense, if only to another reporter, of which I was one. I stared down at the floor for a long moment, trying to scrutinize the seemingly inscrutable. Then I looked around the crowd for a moment just to buy a little bit of time.

What must the people around us have thought, the occasional guy, just out of college, squeezing past us with two Budweisers and a pair of kamikaze shots for himself and his best pal, the two of them doing nothing more that night than bouncing from one bar to the next, not a worry in their simple little world.

In the silence, she said, “Jack, I’m incapable, constitutionally incapable of cheating on you. I thought about it. I had, for lack of a better word, an emotional connection to this guy. I severed that connection the day you kicked me out. I put the Fitzgerald story aside, and now that I’m back on it, now that I have it, I don’t want it at all. Travers, he means nothing to me, just some guy trying to get more from me than I ever wanted from him, which pretty much defines any guy but you.

“But Jack, you have to look within. You have to figure out how to get over what happened to you in that hospital nearly four years ago, because it’s consuming you. I can only imagine how devastating that must be to lose the one you love, to have her die on what is supposed to be the greatest day of your life. And believe me, Jack. I never intended to replace Katherine. But sooner or later, you have to move on. You have to ease up on yourself. You have to allow yourself to understand that you can’t spend the rest of your life consumed by grief. You have to let someone else in, and I was hoping to be that someone, now and always.”

“Why’d you quit theTraveler?”

“I had a choice: put the story about Fitzgerald in the paper, knowing it would hurt you and theRecord to no end, or walk away from it, knowing that in some small way, I might be helping you.”

“What does the story say?”

She shook her head. “I can’t tell you that, Jack. I can quit theTraveler, but I can’t be completely unfaithful to it. I got the story on their dime. I’m not going to hand it to the competition. It deals with an old drug raid. I don’t yet have all the specifics. The paper doesn’t either. You need to find it out on your own.”

My cell phone rang on the table. I stepped over and picked it up and saw from the caller identification that it was a Boston Police number. I said, “Yeah.” It was Luke Travers on the other end.

This is one of life’s little ironies. I don’t know why that lightened my mood, but it did. Okay, so I do know why that lightened my mood.

“The name you’re looking for is Eric Glass. On the street, he just goes by ‘Glass.’”

“What street might that be, because I need to find him?”

Travers hesitated on the other end. He replied, “I just helped you all I can.”

“Good for you. I’ll say the same thing when I try to fit your name and the word ‘moron’ into our lead headline tomorrow. And you know what? When I do, I’ll be doing the entire city a favor.”

“He usually hangs on the corner of Boylston and Harrison downtown. It’s his territory, for crack and girls.”

I hung up before my naturally sunny disposition overcame me and I thanked him. I turned back to Elizabeth. It ends up I didn’t have very far to turn. She had followed me the few paces over to the table and positioned herself right against me, her face again about a foot from mine. Her eyes searched my eyes. Her mouth seemed to be drawn to my mouth.

I said, “You shouldn’t have quit. I really didn’t need you to do that.”

She said, “I did it for you, Jack.”

God, how I wanted to tell her how I felt. I wanted to move my head the six inches it would take to meet her in the middle of this dwindling divide. I wanted to hold her, then tell her everything that was going wrong and ask her to help me figure out a way to make all of this right.

But here’s what I said instead: “I can’t deal with us, Elizabeth. I can’t get the present straight, never mind the past. I’ve already lost enough to last a million lifetimes, and right now I’m at risk of losing a whole lot more. Thank you for your help, but right now, I just need to be alone.” And I turned and walked away.

Ask me why I did and the only thing I could say is that I had a devoted belief that a broken trust, like a cracked mirror, can never be properly repaired, that once a relationship is tormented in the way ours had been, even if we summoned the intense energy to put it back together, everything that would happen in that relationship would be viewed through the prism of its absolute worst moments. The good would always be tempered. The bad would seem that much worse. I wanted something fresh, easy, without the history, the miserable memories. And not to sound too altruistic — I thought she deserved better than what I had to offer. Who wants to see everything from the warped perspective of a tragic past?

So I kept walking. I stopped at Mongillo, who was still leaning on the bar with a couple of members of the band, and said, “You’re an asshole for giving me up.”

He looked at me and said, “Don’t be a bigger asshole and walk out of here.”

“Watch me.”

After a few steps, I turned back around and told him, “We’re on the 6:30A.M. flight. We have urgent work to do together in Boston tomorrow morning. If you’re not at the airport, I will fucking kill you.”

And I headed for the door. On my way, I turned and looked at her through the crowd, standing in the exact spot she had been, looking back at me. We kept our eyes on each other’s for a moment until finally I turned away, pulled open the door, and stepped out into the warm Washington night. As I flagged a cab, my cell phone rang and I looked down at it, figuring — all right, hoping — it might be her. But it was aRecord number on the caller identification.

“Jack Flynn,” I answered.

“Jack, it’s Amelia Bradford, Paul’s secretary.”

Amelia, it’s worth noting, is a perfectly preserved and uncommonly proper woman in her early sixties, unflappable by any measure. Because of that, her tone — something between concerned and panicked — seemed not so much surprising as alarming, especially when you factor in that she was calling at ten o’clock on a Friday night.

“Amelia, what’s wrong?” I asked.

“Jack, I’ve found something. I’ve found something very strange and I don’t know what to do about it. I know how Paul thought of you, so I think you should see it right away. Can you come down to the newspaper?”

“Amelia, I’m in Washington tonight, stuck here because of a cancelled flight. What do you have? I’ll be in Boston by tomorrow morning.”

“I think it’s a clue, Jack. I found it cleaning out Paul’s office this evening. It’s something you should look at, but I don’t want to go into it over the phone.”

“Where will you be in the morning?”

“Here, in the office, continuing to box everything up and clean it out. It’s so terribly sad, Jack, and it only feels worse with all this indecision.”

I replied, “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Would it be that life was that easy.