The Nominee

Thirty-Five

SHE WAS KNEELING ON the antique Oriental rug, boxes all around her and tears rolling down her alabaster cheeks, when I walked through the door of Paul’s office and said in as calm a voice as I could muster, “Amelia, I’m sorry, I got here as fast as I could.”

She looked at me with eyes that showed a depth of sadness that I don’t think I’ve ever seen before. Amelia Bradford was more a Wasp than anyone I had ever met, in breeding, in demeanor, in outlook. Her family had lineage, manners, prestige — everything, in fact, but money, which is why she had been the secretary to the publisher ofThe Boston Record for the past thirty-four years.

“Oh, Jack, my God, look at you. You’re bruised. You’ve been beat up. Oh God,” she said, rising to embrace me and burying her cheek into my shoulder in another fit of tears. This isn’t what any guy wants to be told, but I figured now was not the time to point that out to her.

She smoothed out her pants and took a seat at the desk chair that was askew in the middle of the bright room. I sat on a nearby loveseat.

She began to talk, but glanced over toward the open door and stopped. I got up and closed it and we resumed. The office, by the way, was silent but for the gentle hum of circulating air. The room was drenched in springtime sun.

“The police came the day of Paul’s death and confiscated virtually every file,” she said. “They were wheeling dollies in and out all morning. Most of the material they returned yesterday, but some I believe they still have.”

I wasn’t exactly in the mood for a long windup here, but didn’t have it in me to prod Amelia along. So I sat on my tongue, so to speak, and let her go on. In this building, I guess we’re all storytellers of some sort.

She continued, “They seemed especially interested in his computer files, particularly his electronic mail activity, and took his whole computer system with them. They took his datebooks, his desk calendar. They asked if he uses a Palm Pilot, which of course, Paul doesn’t. He can barely figure out a Dictaphone.” She talked about him in the present tense, which was more sad than anything else, but with this, a smile passed over the corners of her lips. She became serious again and said, “They even emptied his trash and took that with them.”

Any moment now, a point. So I kept waiting, and waiting.

“But they were so obsessed with his email, wanting to know his address and his password, that they never asked me about good old U.S. mail, you know, stamps and the post office and the like. When he sends a regular letter out, I keep a copy in my computer system, from where I’ve made a printout. They didn’t ask me for any files like that, and I was in such a state when this all happened that I never thought to offer it.”

I think we were approaching what we in the business of journalism call news, so I leaned forward with my elbows on my thighs and studied her face as she spoke.

“I was going through some of this stuff last night, Jack. I just happened into the file and saw some of these old letters that Paul had sent to various people, and I just kept clicking on more of them, thinking of what a wonderful man he is, missing him.

“And then I came across this—” she reached toward the desk, picked up a sheet of paper and handed it over some boxes to me—“letter that he wrote. I’m embarrassed I didn’t think about it before. This was written, as you see, a little over a week ago — just a few days before Paul was killed.”

I took the sheet and began reading, but couldn’t focus, so I looked out the window for a moment at the perfect blue sky and thought about Baker loping across a freshly mown field in pursuit of a brand new tennis ball, all firm and yellow. I returned to the page, my world in better order.

It was a letter from Paul to Robert Fitzgerald. The top of the page bore a stamp saying that it had been delivered to Fitzgerald’s office by hand. In it, Paul wrote that aRecord reporter — who I knew to be Vinny Mongillo — had approached him recently with concerns about the veracity of some of Fitzgerald’s human interest stories. Paul said he had hired an outside investigator to re-report some of Fitzgerald’s stories from the past two years, and many of the people quoted could not be found. He said he was aware that John Cutter had warned Fitzgerald that the integrity of some of his stories appeared suspect, but that the matter was put aside when he died. Now, he wrote, he would need to meet with Fitzgerald to determine his future.

“Robert,” Paul wrote in his closing line, “you’ve been a major asset toThe Boston Record, and consequently, to my family, for nearly half a century. Because of your work, your talents, and your dedication, my initial desire is to urge you to retire, and with that retirement, hope that this matter quietly disappears. But my principal reservation is that the transgressions have been so significant that we must take punitive action to restore the integrity of this great newspaper. Thus, I’d like to meet with you Monday morning in my office to review some options. I have sent you this letter both as a courtesy and as a request to begin pondering our respective futures.”

And Monday morning, before that meeting occurred, Paul was dead. Five years ago, after John Cutter raised similar concerns, he, too, was dead, murdered, in a crime that had been concealed for all this time.

I stared at the letter until the black ink of the words faded into the white page and I was staring at nothing at all. I heard Amelia say, “Jack, are you having the same thoughts that I am?” But her voice sounded distant, like it was coming from the other side of a thin wall.

Let’s hope it holds up.

That was Paul, Sunday morning, in the Public Garden, his words now having greater meaning than they ever had before. He knew. He knew. Not only was he headed off to work to wrestle back the Terry Campbell empire and save a family newspaper from the scourge of a down-market chain, but he had a fateful meeting scheduled the very next day in which he was most likely going to strip the most famous reporter in the history of Boston of his power, prestige, and reputation. By pushing Fitzgerald out the door, he knew he would be making it more difficult to keep Campbell from getting in, but Paul understood the importance of our reputation, the meaning of integrity, the preeminence of truth.

I looked up at Amelia, backlit by the morning sun. She was saying something to me, but what, I’m not really sure. Already, my shock was beginning to turn to anger, more an abrupt transformation than an evolution. Much as I liked the man, deep down, I was always skeptical of Fitzgerald’s cozy relationships with politicians in Boston and Massachusetts. He had grown so tight with so many government figures, and so powerful in his own right, that he had become a part of the very establishment that our newspaper is supposed to scrutinize. Voice to the voiceless? Not anymore. Hell, maybe not ever.

I took a quick census of the damage caused, the people hurt. The roll of the dead was a brutal one: John Cutter, Paul Ellis, my neighbor Nathan. I had a sickening image of Hank walking into his tidy little house in Marshton one summer’s morning and setting down bags of groceries on the kitchen counter while calling out his wife’s name. And he’d wander through the unnatural quiet to find his Mary Mae covered in blood, a pistol in her hand, splayed across the couple’s bed, unable to cope with the lies that Fitzgerald had effectively woven into a public truth.

And then I thought of Sweeney, sitting alone night after night in his easy chair, watching television, fingering the worn newspaper clips that contained those deadly lies. Now he lay in a hospital bed, a seventy-one-year-old man with a bullet in his gut trying to make things right but with no clear idea how.

We have a governor who might not be governor but for Fitzgerald’s lies, a police commissioner who might not be commissioner but for a fabricated story of a bungled drug raid. My newspaper, the greatBoston Record, might not be so great, so powerful, so widely read but for Fitzgerald’s amalgamation of lies.

But did he kill? Was Fitzgerald a murderer? I started to think that perhaps he was.

Amelia was standing over by the desk, speaking to me in a voice I couldn’t hear. Then I did.

“Jack, it’s Brent Cutter. He’s on the telephone. He saw you come in here and wants to speak to you.”

She talked slowly to me, a little louder than would be the norm, as if I were Dorothy waking up in bed surrounded by all my farmhands who I thought were part of the enchanted journey toward the Emerald City. I started to say, “Tell him to…” but then couldn’t bring myself to finish the thought with a woman as pristine as this.

She asked me, “You want me to tell him to fuck off?”

Another reason why I love Amelia. Her ancestor, Governor Bill Bradford of Pilgrim fame, was rolling over in his ancient grave. But Amelia is a devotee to current day practices and modern mores.

“That’s exactly what I’d like you to tell him,” I replied.

“Brent, he asks that you please fuck off.” Never have I heard those words uttered with such exquisite grace and unfailing manners. I’d have to try that sometime.

Meanwhile, she hung up. I fully reengaged in the present tense. I had wrongs to make right, crimes to solve, even justice to administer, if I had to. And I’d have to do all this alone, because the police, led by Commissioner John Leavitt, were very well part of the problem, not in any way the answer.

Most of all, I had Fitzgerald to see, to complete the business that John Cutter and Paul Ellis were unable to finish over the last five years — that business, and so much more.

When I came out of Paul’s office, the haze lifting from my head like the fog over San Francisco Bay, I ran flat into Brent Cutter, who was pacing back and forth in front of the reception desk awaiting my appearance.

“I thought Amelia provided you with instructions?” I asked, walking past him but not stopping, just as he did to me two days before outside the executive committee meeting.

He set off after me. Though his legs are roughly as long as mine, he seemed to have to run to keep up with my stride. “Jack,” he said, “we need to talk, me and you, man to man.”

I stopped short, such that he banged into my right shoulder. I whirled around, picked him up by his Zegna shirt, and slammed him against the corridor wall, narrowly missing the Pulitzer Prize plaque that Fitzgerald had won for local reporting in 1984.

“You son of a goddamned dick,” I seethed at him, my face just inches from his. “Don’t you ever call yourself a man after what you’ve tried to do. Don’t you ever carry with you even a moment’s expectation that I owe you a goddamned thing.”

He was looking down at me like I was a maniacal crazy man, a creature wholly beyond comprehension. Of course, his hair was still perfect slicked back and the clothes I was about to rip probably cost about as much as my car.

“You’re a little rodent,” I said to him, still holding him firm against the wall. “You know what, forget that. Rodents have fur. They’re too cute. What you are is a parasite, a little goddamned slimy slug trying to suck all the money out of the business that your family worked decade after decade to build.

“You are a piece of garbage, and you’re lucky I don’t break your pasty fucking greasy face.”

And with that, I let him go. He slid down the wall, not all the way to the floor, but close.

He straightened up and tucked his shirt in, trying, but failing, to salvage some semblance of dignity. “I want to cut a deal with you,” he said. “I was wrong to exclude you. I want to put this behind us.”

I was starting to calm down, or rather, come down from my anger high. I looked at him and shook my head in resigned disgust.

He said with his typically arrogant tone, “If we sell to Campbell Newspapers, Terry will agree to a provision that theRecord retains local control for five years. He’ll agree to a further provision that mandates that I’m the publisher for the first thirty months, and you’re the publisher for the second thirty months.”

He paused, eyeing me warily, half hoping his offer was alluring, half fearing that I would slam my fist into the soft tissue of his nose. Truth is, I was somewhere in between.

“Jack, it’s inevitable that this company’s going to get sold. Old family businesses like ours don’t work in this new economy. You’d have learned that your first week in B-school, if you had gone. The trusts are breaking up. The cousins don’t want any part of it anymore, yet they still have a major say because of the shares they own. The economies of scale favor large chains. And the public is headed in other directions for news, like the Internet.

“So if we’re going to get taken over, why not cut the best deal we can. What I’m offering is two-and-a-half years for you to be the publisher of one of the largest, most important newspapers in America. That’s two-and-a-half years for you to leave your mark on the company, on journalism, to fulfill some goals, and to make a lot of money. Keep in mind, you have an equity stake in this company. You stand to make a small fortune in a buyout. And who knows. If you do well, maybe Terry keeps you on.”

I looked at it slightly different. I saw it as two-and-a-half years to preside over the dismantling of a once great newspaper as a cutthroat, cost-conscious chain pares down what it views as the fat, also known as the newsroom. I saw it as two-and-a-half years of working for a militant conservative, not a real newsman.

Very recently, as in, earlier that week, the thought had occurred to me that Brent Cutter might be a murderer. Now I just thought he was a moron. But the worst part about what he was saying was that in some odd way he was starting to talk sense. Wouldn’t it be great if life were that simple, if I could just sign on the dotted line, become an instant multimillionaire, order new furniture for the publisher’s office, dine around town as one of the most powerful, eligible bachelors in the city, and not have a worry in the world. There’s only one problem with that: history.

History says to me that John Cutter and Paul Ellis were murdered. History says to me that there’s a good chance that someone within the newspaper killed them. History says to me that all those who came before me at this wonderful newspaper didn’t bust their collective ass so I could cash in on some big payday.

Now I was starting to get mad again.

“Brent, I’m dealing with some issues right now — newspaper issues, moral issues — that your money-grubbing little brain couldn’t even begin to comprehend. Here’s something else you can’t comprehend: this business is about more than the money. It’s about more than our own personal ambitions. It’s about more than holding the title of publisher. It’s about a calling. You haven’t heard it. I have. If you get in my way, I’ll rip your fucking head right off your neck.”

And I walked away. Poor Brent was sputtering something about negotiable deals as I punched through the double doors on my way down to the newsroom. I’ve never really believed in destiny before, but I had a date with it now in the form of Robert Fitzgerald.

Best as I could tell, the first impulse when you believe you’ve figured out who murdered two people you greatly respect — the very first impulse — is to call the friendly homicide bureau of your local police department. That didn’t appear to be an option here, for a couple of reasons.

Reason A: If Eric Glass was to be believed, and at this point, this pimp and crack dealer seemed more believable than anyone else I knew, then it was John Leavitt who screwed up that bungled drug raid in Mattapan five years ago. It was Leavitt, back when he was a superintendent rather than the commissioner, who handled the informant, got the information, and directed the narcotics squad. And it was Robert Fitzgerald who blamed, in print, Sweeney’s son. So forgive the living hell out of me for suspecting that Leavitt may have been behind the fact that John Cutter’s murder evidence was rotting away in the basement of the coroner’s office. He didn’t want Fitzgerald to be caught lying, because he was a direct beneficiary of one of those key lies.

Reason B came in the form of a telephone call as I momentarily stopped in the familiar environs of the mostly empty newsroom just to clear my head.

“Flynn here.”

A pebbly voice said, “Sweeney here.”

“Hank?”

“Jack, listen up. Don’t say anything until you hear me out. Don’t come to this hospital. One of the police guards told me this morning that Travers found a partial fingerprint on the gun and matched it to a print of yours he pulled off your boat.”

Sweeney paused here to wheeze a little. I heard him swallow hard, summon some strength, and continue. “He’s got a police detail here waiting for you to arrive, and when you do, they’re going to arrest you for leaving the scene of a crime.

“So son, just stay put and I’ll call you later.”

“Hank?”

“Yeah, Jack.”

I wanted to tell him that I knew about his wife, about his son, about his anger and his loneliness and the injustices that made his life only a vacant shell of what it should have been. But I couldn’t, not there, not then, not over the telephone. So I asked, “How are you doing? You holding up?”

“I’m an ornery old man with a bullet in his stomach, a doctor who says I’ll be fine, and a wife who’s ready to kill me after I get better.” Pause, wheeze. “So yeah, I’m okay, Jack. I’m feeling better every day.”

I was quiet for a moment, a silence born of sadness. He said, “You sound down. Don’t be. We’re going to solve John Cutter’s murder, you and me. We’re going to do that together. And when we do that, maybe we’ll have Paul Ellis’s killer as well.”

I wanted to tell him that I think I already had, but I wanted to do that in person. Realizing that his phone was likely bugged, I knew I had to do it in person.

I said, “You’re a great man, Hank. A great man with a great family.”

And with that, he gently hung up the phone.

So wasn’t this just terrific. My options were to find myself arrested, killed, unemployed (not to mention unemployable), or shamed. Or probably a combination of two or more of the above. Seems like just Monday I had the world on a string. Now I come to find out that string was actually part of a noose.

As soon as I hung up the phone, Mongillo appeared at my desk, a fat roast beef sandwich in one hand and a pen in the other. He had a grin on his face that extended from the Sports to the Business section.

“Got it. Got it. Got it. I’ve got Randolph nailed. I have another example of him lying in his campaign literature — about a role he had prosecuting an accused murderer his last year as DA. It was a dual jurisdiction case, and State Police are telling me that more of the work was done out of Middlesex County. They pushed the court proceedings in Suffolk only because they were shopping around for a more conservative judge.”

I looked at him, grim-faced, full of angst rather than excitement. He kind of bowed in front of me, just about did a little soft shoe, then said, “Jack, it’s a hit. We might drive this clown right out of the nominating process. This shows him to be a recidivist liar.”

“Sit down,” I said. And he pulled up a desk chair and sat near me. The room was mostly empty because it was still relatively early on a Saturday, meaning I could walk him through what I knew without fear of being overheard. I told him about my conversation with Randolph, about his accusations against Robert Fitzgerald, and his threat to go to theNew York Times if we wrote about him again. I told him about Paul’s letter to Fitzgerald three days before he died. I told him, essentially, that I wanted to run his story, that we would run his story, but we needed to buy another day. I apologized for keeping him in the dark. I told him that I just didn’t know what else to do.

I couldn’t go to the cops because they would either ignore it, arrest me, or kill me, or perhaps all three, in that exact order. When you’re in newspapers, being ignored is as bad as being killed, and both seemed especially onerous right now.

So what I needed to do was to do what I do best, and that is to publish everything I knew in the pages of theRecord — the fact that the police department’s own toxicology tests show that John Cutter was poisoned, and the fact that two key officials — the governor and the police commissioner — had directly, professionally benefited from the lies published by a prominentRecord reporter, Robert Fitzgerald.

But I needed to do this authoritatively, not accusatorily. I needed our stories to be the final, weighty word. I also needed them to be the first word. If theNew York Times struck before we did, theRecord would look as if it were engaging in nothing more than forced-fed damage control.

In order to do all this, I needed to sit down with Fitzgerald and coax a confession from him. I didn’t expect for him to tell me he killed John Cutter and Paul Ellis. But I did need him to acknowledge that he had lied in print, and if he did that, we could avoid a messy string of he said/she said stories. Once I got Fitzgerald’s untruths into the paper, the police department, put on very public notice that its practices would now fall under the glaring glow of scrutiny, would take over the criminal case of John Cutter’s murder.

I explained all this to Mongillo. He sat in utter silence until he finally asked in an uncharacteristically timid voice, “Then what happens to theRecord? Are we in such a mess that the board will just vote to sell it come Monday?”

“Good question,” I said, glumly. “We can only control what goes into the paper. I don’t think we can control right now what happens to it.”

I called Justine Steele, the editor-in-chief, at home, and gave her essentially the same spiel, advising her to stay on alert. She said she’d come into the newsroom and be available that afternoon.

And then I picked up the phone and called Robert Fitzgerald.