The Nominee

Five

IBEGAN THIS TRIPbelieving I was doing little more than a favor for Paul Ellis, conducting a process of elimination, the goal here being to eliminate his suspicion of foul play. Oh, it was a process of elimination all right, only someone was trying to eliminate me. I suddenly realized I was on a life-or-death mission in search of an unknown truth.

I pulled into Marshton without the white Cavalier anywhere in sight. I jumped off the highway onto Waterview Boulevard, though the only water to view seemed to be that damned swamp on one side of the divided road. I guess you have to credit the prescient town fathers for not calling their home Swampton. A mile or so down the road, just as my MapQuest directions said I would, I arrived at a complex called Serenity Heights.

Once there, I pulled into a community of tiny, cookie-cutter houses that sat on minuscule lots tight to the street. It was, in its defense, immaculate. You could eat stewed prunes right out of the gutters — not that you’d want to, but like I said, you could.

I took a left on Pleasant Street, went through the intersection with Hereafter Boulevard — just kidding — and turned right on Tranquility Road, where I found Sweeney’s house, which was just like every other house — nondescript, shaped like a box, and small. The Buick Park Avenue sitting under the carport told me he was home, or at least somebody was.

I looked at myself in the rearview mirror and saw that my hair, mostly dry, was stiff and rigid from the swamp. My face was streaked with caked crud, as if I had just been thrown out of a spa in the middle of a mud wrap because the receptionist realized I wouldn’t be able to pay. My clothes, still damp, carried the odor of a men’s room at Fenway Park toward the end of an extra innings game. It would be nothing short of a miracle if I could convince Hank Sweeney that, (a) I wasn’t a vagrant seeking a handout, and (b) he should talk to me. In my present condition, I don’t think Oscar Madison would invite me inside.

Here’s what I know about homicide detectives: They spend their lives on the edge of the darkest abyss. They tiptoe across the spattered blood of freshly killed babies, kneel beside the mutilated corpses of beautiful young women, engage in idle chitchat with suspects who have inexplicably strangled the life out of the only person they may ever love. The good ones go home and coach Little League games and attend PTA meetings between telephone calls summoning them to yet another scene of still another horrific crime. The bad ones sit back night after night with a bottle of whiskey or a 12-pack of cheap beer getting shamelessly, stupidly drunk.

The best of them are the most creative members of a profession better known for regulation than invention. They can save lives and change worlds by the discovery of a single strand of hair, a microscopic fiber, or a cigarette butt discarded in a nearby sewer. They see a room forever marked by death and imagine the last pitiful moments of life. They look at a suspect, perhaps a suburban high school kid or an otherwise successful husband, and slowly, methodically, deconstruct the boundaries separating good and evil and imagine just how far over the division this creature might have passed — and what sent him over the line.

To a man, and, okay, woman, though there aren’t many of those, they are more moneyed than the average cop because of all the overtime calls in the godforsaken hours of the early morning. Homicide isn’t a 9–5 job. Many of them wear bespoken suits and expensive Italian ties to make certain that no one confuses them with their carefully regimented brethren cops on the street or the suspects they’re so eager to throw in jail. They are at the top of the order, the fighter pilots of the police force, and they want you to know it.

I walked down the small driveway aside the perfectly neat little lawn, which, all in all, wasn’t exactly what I had expected of someone who had reached such an august position. The air wasn’t just hot. It was like climbing inside a pig’s anus and sloshing around in his lower intestine, that’s how hot and humid it was. I felt little streams of sweat carve lines in the drying dirt on my forehead. Still, his side door sat open, with only an aluminum screen door separating Sweeney from the thronging masses, which in this case, was me, so I knocked on the metal border. Within seconds, I could see the vague outline of a large black man ambling toward the door in that stiff gait that some older men have — heavy on the left side, then heavy on the right. As he got closer, I could see he was holding a newspaper in one hand and had reading glasses slung low over his nose. Maybe this is what all those consultants mean when they tell us reporter types that our readership was literally dying off.

“Yes?” he said, slowly with a hint of amusement.

It occurred to me that they probably got their fair share of traveling Bible salesmen, life insurance peddlers and snake oil con men in these parts, and given my current appearance, I probably looked like the worst of the lot.

“Mr. Sweeney?” I asked.

He kept the screen door closed between us. “That’s me,” he said, his amusement transforming to skepticism.

Already, from his tone and stance, I knew I could at least engage him, and if I could engage him, then chances were vastly improved that I could sway him, and possibly, eventually, move him. Far better he be like this than some by-the-numbers, just-the-facts-ma’am Joe Friday types who wouldn’t tell me if my shirt was on fire unless Rule VIa., second paragraph in the Department Handbook told them that even in retirement, they were required to.

I gave him my most polite voice, shaped and sorted from years of schooling at the hands of strict nuns in the parochial schools on the not-so-mean streets of South Boston.

“Sir, you don’t know me, but my name is Jack Flynn, and I’m from Boston.”

He replied, “Yeah, I do. You’re the writer for theRecord. You used to be in Washington, and now you do a lot of investigative stuff. Liked your stories on the president.” Real casual, almost matter of fact, like it was the most normal thing in the world that I’d show up at his house covered in swamp water to shoot the breeze. Still, the door remained shut between us.

“I am, and thank you,” I said, unable not to smile at the guy. I regained my footing. “Please pardon my appearance. I just had an unfortunate incident in your town’s namesake marsh. I’m hoping you might be able to help me.”

Still no invitation, or even a move to open the door, which did not bode well. If he didn’t shake my hand or make direct eye contact without a screen between us, it would be one hell of a lot easier for him to send me on my way.

“Me help you?” He started laughing a chesty laugh. “An old guy like me living in a swamp village in this hellish outback can help a young buck like you? I can’t wait to hear this.”

“It’s about our former publisher,” I said, calmly, sincerely. “John Cutter. Some questions have arisen, and I think you might be able to answer them.”

He just kind of stood there behind that screen like a priest in a confessional.

I asked, “Is this a bad time or do you have a few minutes to talk.”

“Son, I ain’t got nothing but time.”

The door stayed shut.

I had an idea. “I want to show you something,” I said, and turned around and trotted to the car, grabbed that day’sRecord and a printout of the news clipping on John Cutter’s death, and returned, hoping to bait him outside.

I’m brilliant. He pressed on the handle, turned back into the kitchen and yelled, “Mother, I’ll be in the yard for a minute,” and came outside. Breakthrough.

He was, indeed, a very large man, not fat, just big all over, tall with broad shoulders and a barrel chest and something of a gut that didn’t look bad and almost looked good, given the enormity of his frame. He had a full head of grayish-black hair, dark and crinkled eyes, skin the color of bitter-sweet chocolate, and an expression on his face that said there wasn’t an awful lot in this life that he hadn’t already seen.

I shoved my dirty hand out, and he looked at it for a short moment and shook it. Then we sat on a pair of plastic, KMart-quality lawn chairs around a matching table, and he scanned the headlines.

“Used to read this damned thing every day,” he said to me, slightly amused again. “Now I only see it when someone brings it down for me. I miss the Red Sox.”

“Well, you haven’t missed much these last couple of seasons.”

He didn’t reply.

I said, “I’m going to be honest with you. There are some lingering doubts, suspicions even, at the very highest levels of my newspaper that John Cutter’s death wasn’t from natural causes five years ago.”

I stared into Sweeney’s eyes, and he stared back at me, squinting a bit in the midday sun, which seemed to bother him not a whit. Me, the mud was washing down my face in rising rivers of sweat, which I kept trying to wipe off with my filthy hands.

I continued, “But the paper never asked the questions it probably should have asked back then. It never pushed the investigation as hard as it should have been pushed, maybe out of a fear of appearing too self-serving, of seeking preferential treatment.

“Probably it was a heart attack, but I just wanted to come down here and make sure that’s what you really, truly believed.”

Sweeney sat in silence for a moment, looking at me and then the newspaper clip in front of him.

Finally, he said, “Son, that was the last case of my career, my last day on the job, and probably the most famous victim I ever had. Everyone knew your publisher.”

He paused to pull a pack of cigarettes out of his chest pocket, lit one and took a long, leisurely puff.

“Some people never forget a face. I never forget a crime scene. Sometimes that’s not so good, not when you’ve seen the crimes I’ve seen — blood spattered everywhere, pretty young girls with crushed heads, kids shot dead before they ever made their First Communion, babies burned by their dads.”

That last one seemed to catch him for a moment. “Some dads,” he said, shaking his head and looking down.

He continued, “In this one, I think it was the old man’s housekeeper who found him in the morning. Stop me if I’m wrong here. She called one of the building managers. The building manager called 911, and a uniformed officer was there within about six minutes.

“He looks the place over and it all seems fine, but then he finds out from the manager who the dead guy is and he’s saying to himself, ‘Aw, shit.’” He paused. “Sorry, by the way. I don’t mean to make light of it.”

I shook my head to show I wasn’t offended.

He took another puff, blew the smoke off to the side, and continued. “He realizes that reporters and politicians are going to be crawling up our butts on this one, so he does everything by the book. He seals off the room and he calls for homicide, just in case. It’s exactly what you’re supposed to do in a sudden death. I’m cleaning out my desk and I get a call directly from the commissioner himself telling me to head up the crime scene. I get there, and because of who the victim is, I, in turn, do everything right by the book. I numbered every item in the room. I diagrammed the whole place — damned nice condominium, if I remember right. We photographed extensively. We dusted. And I ordered a battery of tests.

“This is my way of saying, if the M.E.”—medical examiner—“came back and said it was a heart attack, which obviously he did, then it was a heart attack. I supply them information. They’re the ones who make determinations.”

Interesting, but an extraordinarily unsatisfying answer, on multiple levels, so I asked, “Okay, but did you have any reason to believe it was something other than a heart attack?”

“Son, I’m a crotchety old man. Put a duck on the table and I’ll assume it’s a pigeon in disguise. It’s why I don’t mind saying that I was pretty good at what I did for all those years. You have to be that way in homicide. You’re not dealing with the church choir.”

I seemed to remember writing a story once about how a member of a church choir in Chelsea bashed his wife’s skull in, but didn’t see the need to raise that issue just then.

Instead, I asked, “But did you specifically see anything in that room that raised suspicions?”

He looked away at nothing in particular and grimaced, I think, reflectively, though when you’re old, there’s always the possibility that something actually hurts.

He said, “In this case, there were no outward signs of a struggle. There were no visible injuries on the victim. There was nothing obviously disrupted in the apartment. It comes down to what the toxicology tests say. I assume they showed no signs of a narcotic?”

He was asking me. I wanted him to tell me things.

I looked back at him and said squarely, “I don’t know what the toxicology tests say. I assumed you knew. You were the investigating officer.”

“But you’ll remember, that was my last day. I was as surprised as anyone that they gave me the case, knowing I was on the way out the door. Those tests take a couple of days to complete. I was gone by the time they came back, which is why I assume they came back negative and that’s why the M.E. determined it was a heart attack. They had to have come back negative.”

I nodded. “And there was nothing else in that room that bothered you?”

“Well, there was a dead body. That always kind of bothers me.” He had a nice twinkle in his eye, like he was starting to like the company, someone new to hear his old patter.

“Nothing else?”

He grimaced again and shook his head. Was he holding back? Was there some microfiber somewhere on the bed, a pillow out of place, a drop of blood on the kitchen floor? No way to know, not yet. But I would.

We sat in mutual silence for an elongated moment until I decided I had squeezed him for everything I could, at least at this sitting.

I changed the subject. “You don’t mind this heat, huh?” By then, all the mud had washed down my face and onto my neck. He, meanwhile, looked like an ad for Johnson’s Baby Powder, if they used old, overweight actors.

“The heat!” He said this loudly, like I was telling him about it for the first time, like the guy was angry with me.

Then he said, “I hate the fudging heat. But what are you going to do? I’m old. This is Florida. It’s where I belong, I guess.”

I got up and we shook hands. He asked if he could keep the newspaper. “Homesick,” he said. “Mother will want to read the obituaries.”

I asked, “You mind if I call you if something comes up?”

“Go ahead,” he said. Then he looked me over for a long moment and asked in a whimsical tone, “What happened to you?”

I replied, “I was chased into a swamp about fifteen miles back by a guy with a gun who had been following me from the airport.”

He simply shook his head slowly as he looked straight ahead at nothing in particular. He said with a newfound determination, “Call me with the toxicology results.”

And right then, I knew it wasn’t a request, but a challenge. Questions were popping up all around me like August corn on a Nebraska prairie, blocking my clear view, and with it, my perspective. Right then, I knew it wasn’t just a good idea to get those test results, but something I had to do.