The Nominee

Thirty-Six

MONGILLO PULLED THE NAVY blueRecord delivery truck into the newspaper’s enclosed loading port and shut the automatic garage door. He got out and we stood on the dimly lit dock together, both of us nervous but neither wanting to concede the same.

“If I do well driving this thing, maybe Campbell Newspapers will hire me in the delivery department,” Mongillo said.

“A good thing,” I replied, “because I think their drivers are paid better than their reporters.”

Then I asked, “You know where it is?”

He gave me that look that implies — all right, outright states — that I’m an idiot.

“Just asking,” I said.

I had an appointment with Robert Fitzgerald at sixP.M. in his downtown office. I would have preferred to meet in the newsroom or the middle of Boston Common, or on the stage at Symphony Hall, where witnesses would inhibit the prospect of crime, specifically murder, but didn’t want him thinking for a moment that I was harboring suspicions of anything untoward. He believed, I hope, that this meeting was a much needed morale-boosting session as I tried to save the newspaper from the grips of that miserable chain.

I had spent the better part of the afternoon typing up a story on John Cutter’s toxicology tests, rehashing his murder, reviewing how those results were never made public and stood in direct contrast to his death certificate. I quoted Sam Brookstone, the Northeastern University criminologist, saying the results unequivocally indicate foul play. The story was ready to run when we were ready to run it.

After I finished writing, I went into theRecord ’s database of old stories, specifically looking at April 25—the day John Cutter was found dead at the Four Seasons Hotel five years ago. I plugged in Lance Randolph’s name, along with Robert Fitzgerald, and got a hit: “Governor Proposes Stricter Gun Law.”

The story, written by Fitzgerald, said that Randolph proposed tougher sentencing on Massachusetts’ already tough handgun codes. That was mildly interesting, but it was the fourth paragraph that gave me what I needed. “Randolph unveiled his new proposals last night to an annual dinner gathering of party leaders and major political contributors in the main ballroom of the Four Seasons Hotel in Boston.”

Bingo. What this showed was that on the same night that John Cutter was killed, Fitzgerald was downstairs in the hotel covering a political event. This likely explained why a tissue from the hotel men’s room was found on Cutter’s bathroom floor, because Fitzgerald brought it there and inadvertently dropped it.

None of this I could use in print, but still, it stoked my confidence, even anger, as I prepared to confront him.

Mongillo, bless him, had scouted out the front of theRecord building and spied two unmarked Boston Police cruisers idling in the street, waiting, no doubt, to apprehend me as I came or left. My good friend, Luke Travers, had left three voicemails on my cell phone, the first asking me to call him, the second asking me to fucking call him, and the third asking me to fucking call him fucking right away. The poor boy needs some medication for his blood pressure. Maybe he’s not getting any sex lately — I hope.

So here we were. I pulled up the rolling cargo door on the rear of the truck, walked into the cavernous, windowless freight area all gloriously smudged with ink and filled with the delightful odor of old newspapers, and took a seat on the floor against the side wall. Mongillo yanked the door shut behind me with a thunderous clap. I heard the sound of the driver’s door open, then slam shut, the engine start, the garage door rise, and we were off.

He rolled open the door separating the cab from the freight and said in a low voice, “We’re driving by an unmarked car right now. He’s eyeing me, eyeing me, we’re past him, no sign of movement. Bang. I think we’re safe.”

“As he’s eyeing you, you ever think you might just want to shut up?”

“Everyone’s a critic. Let me do it my way, Fair Hair.”

We pulled up onto the Southeast Expressway on our way downtown. “Open and clear behind us,” Mongillo announced. I stayed on my haunches trying to brace myself against the significant bumps.

Five minutes later, I felt him pull off the highway, cut hard left, then right, left again, and one more time, right. This wasn’t built for what the nice people at Lexus like to call a “smooth, luxurious ride.” We stopped at a couple of red lights. I heard him roll his window down at one stoplight, causing me to crouch down further. Then I heard him say, “No, no papers on board. Sorry, I really don’t have any. Look, here’s a copy of today’sTraveler, just take this and get the fuck away.”

Well, he certainly didn’t have a future in customer relations. Distribution, he was still doing all right.

A couple of minutes later we glided to a stop, and he backed up a few feet with the beeper sounding. When we stopped again, he said quietly, “We’re here. The window in his office is still dark.”

I checked my watch—5:45P.M. We were fifteen minutes early. I stood up with stiff legs and looked through the narrow door into the front cab and out the windshield. The sky was still a bright blue, streaked by the fading sun, but the street was covered in the deep shadows of a late spring afternoon.

“Stay in back,” Mongillo said. “I’ll watch for him.”

I sat in the back of aRecord delivery truck preparing for what was undoubtedly one of the most difficult, most important interviews I would ever conduct, ranking right up there with an election eve confrontation with a rather desperate president of the United States a couple of years before. I needed to make Fitzgerald understand that I knew, without even the remotest hint of a doubt, that he had fabricated multiple stories — and specifically, stories dealing with the governor’s crime-fighting record and the bungled Mattapan police raid. Then I needed to convince him to make it easy on himself, and in turn, theRecord, by admitting the fabrications. This would provide a clean peg for a front-page story. If I was on a streak, I could nudge the conversation toward the deaths of John Cutter and Paul Ellis, but this was far less likely. Most important, I had to get out alive.

“Still no sign,” Mongillo said.

I checked my watch again—5:51. I felt around in my pockets and on the floor to make sure I had what I needed — a pen, a legal pad, and a microcassette. Maybe I needed a gun as well, but I’d already used one of those two days before, and the aftertaste wasn’t something I particularly liked. My guile would be my most potent weapon. I think.

I thought of the first time I had met him. I had just started at theRecord, just had my first front-page story, on how a Massachusetts congressman had accepted the free use of a Martha’s Vineyard vacation house for an entire summer from a lobbyist representing Philip Morris, the tobacco empire.

He walked up to my desk, this tall, dignified man with the bow tie and the stately gait, more senatorial than most senators could ever hope to be. He held out his hand — I shook it — and he said, “Young man, you’ve already earned your pay for the year.”

We exchanged small talk, and he invited me to come downtown to his office the following Monday — the beginning of our traditional, weekly meetings.

That first Monday I arrived, he sat in his rocking chair and pulled a tiny notebook out of the breast pocket of his checked sportcoat and carefully flipped through the small pages until he came to his intended notes. I thought it nothing short of completely charming that this great scribe, this legend, had invested the time in critiquing my work.

“How long did the story take you to do?” he asked. “When did you first call the congressman’s office? Did you detail for the press secretary what you had?”

He nodded at my answers, guided me, corrected me, lauded me, always providing an anecdotal rationale for the way things should be done, but always sure to tell me there is no one precise way in this business to do anything at all. After we were finished with my stories, we analyzed the rest of the paper, the stories over the past week he liked, and why, the stories he didn’t, and why not, the stories with potential that was never fulfilled. This is how it went every Monday from noon to oneP.M., over coffee and bagels, and every Monday I left with the dueling sense of exhaustion and reinvigoration.

“Okay, I see him,” Mongillo said, quietly. I moved up, such that I was sitting right behind his seat, within easy earshot. “He’s alone. He’s walking down School Street. Stopping, reaching into his pocket, pulling out keys, putting them in the door. He’s not looking around, not acting suspicious. Opening the door, shutting it, that’s it. He’s inside.”

I said, “Thank you, Bob Costas.” Then, more seriously, I asked, “You don’t think he’s suspicious that there’s aRecord delivery truck parked across the street at a time when no newspapers are being delivered?”

Mongillo replied, “I’m backed into an alley. All he sees is the windshield, if he notices anything at all. And maybe we’re out delivering the Sunday inserts.”

Mongillo fell quiet, and I remained that way. He even had his cell phone set on mute — an unprecedented event. A moment later, he announced, “Okay, his office window is now lit up. Stay where you are, I want to see if he does anything odd up there, sends any code or signal out.”

What is this, Robert Ludlum?

Another moment of quiet, broken again by Mongillo. “Nothing,” he said. “He’s done nothing to cause worry. It looks like he believes this is just a typical gathering between two longtime friends, the mentor and the demented.”

Maybe that was funny, but I wasn’t of the mind to laugh.

Mongillo continued, “I’m going to get out, walk around, open the back door, and let you out. I’ll be waiting right here with my eyes peeled on the window. If you have the slightest problem or any fears, just appear in the window and hold a hand up. I’ll get through the door myself and the State Police will be right behind me.”

Fitzgerald himself once told me that when you scrape away everything else, your success in an interview often comes down to your demeanor, your comportment, your ability not just to express confidence, but to exude the notion that you are absolutely going to get your way. It’s always worked for me before. I hoped to hell it would work for me right now. This is what I thought about as I stepped from the back of theRecord delivery truck on a pristine Saturday afternoon in a dank alley in Downtown Crossing.

Be confident, get the story, make deadline. After that, everything else would work itself out.