The Switch

24

Lanny Roth didn’t want to talk over the phone, so he’d arranged to meet Tanner, the next day, at a diner in South Boston not far from the Globe building. The diner, a sort of greasy-spoon joint but entirely authentic in its greasy spoonness, was on West Broadway. Tanner had been there before and liked it. It smelled of bacon and coffee, two of the best scents ever. The coffee was generic diner coffee, though, which meant it was just okay, but even bad coffee brewing smells great.

Tanner looked around for Lanny, walked up and down the length of the diner, looked in all the booths, and didn’t see him. Most of the booths were empty. It was after the lunchtime rush.

So he sat at a booth, and when the waitress came by with her Bunn carafe of coffee, he asked for water. He waited, occasionally checking his iPhone for mail. The waitress came by with her carafe again, and he shook his head, told her he was waiting for a friend.

After twenty minutes of waiting, he called Lanny’s cell. He reached a voice-mail message. At the beep, he said, “Lanny — did you forget? I’m at the diner.”

Next time the waitress passed by he ordered a grilled cheese sandwich, just to justify taking up a booth. Then he tried Lanny’s landline at the Globe and left a similar message. He waited another ten minutes, then e-mailed Lanny and tried his mobile phone again.

Still no answer. Had he left? He was returning to Boston from New Hampshire. From Manchester, it would take around an hour, no more. Maybe he’d gotten a late start. Maybe he’d lost his cell phone, was driving back without it. Or left his phone in do-not-disturb mode. That seemed the likely explanation. It was funny how nervous we get when someone goes off the grid, even temporarily. We all had to be reachable at all times. That’s what technology had done to us.

So maybe Lanny had gotten distracted — he did space out from time to time, partly a function of how fractured his work was — and busy and forgot about the meeting he’d requested last night. Whatever the election story was in New Hampshire, some aspect of it had detained him. He was reporting somewhere, talking to someone, not answering his mobile phone because that was rude when you were talking to someone.

That was all.

The grilled cheese arrived quickly, on a big white plate. It looked perfect. The bread grilled golden brown and glistening with butter from the grill. The cheese was something bland and pale orange like so-called American cheese, maybe Velveeta, perfectly goopy. He thanked the waitress and checked his phone. Then he put his phone down and enjoyed his late lunch.

Without meaning to, he struck up a conversation with the waitress. Hard to imagine, but she’d been working there fourteen years. Once, when Stenopoulos, the owner, had pinched her bottom, she had spun right around and pinched his. That put an end to the fanny pinching. Tanner had to laugh.

He ate his lunch unhurriedly, occasionally checking his e-mail, thinking about work, about the damned Four Seasons deal and how Blake Gifford had snatched it. He composed in his head an e-mail to send to Gifford but kept it in his mental outbox. What was it Gifford had said? It’s nothing personal. It’s just business. He knew Gifford was right. But despite himself, he was really pissed off about it.

He thought about revenues versus expenses and how deep in the red Tanner Roast was operating, and if it kept going that way for another three months, he was going to have to think about shutting down. Maybe he really wasn’t cut out to be an entrepreneur. He was a great salesman; he knew that. And he loved coffee to an extent that most people didn’t, and he knew a lot about it. But he didn’t have the — the what? the bare-fisted aggressiveness, the cold-bloodedness — that starting up a successful business seemed to require. He was too uncompromising, too obsessed with selling the best instead of the most.

But if he shut it down, if he gave it up, then what? Go back to selling enterprise hardware? Admit defeat, tail between his legs?

He missed having someone in his life he could complain to, talk to, reason with. More to the point, he missed Sarah. He missed having her next to him in bed. Had she dressed up for him at the tea place? He wondered. Maybe some part of her wanted to come back home, end the separation. Be a part of his life again.

He glanced at the time on his iPhone. He’d been waiting a full hour. Just to be thorough, he called Lanny’s cell one more time, his home landline, and his office landline, and in each case got a recording.

He wasn’t too far from the Boston Globe building. He figured he’d drop by the newspaper and ask there.

So he paid up, thanked the waitress, left her a big tip, and headed out to his car. He remembered what Lanny had said on the phone last night. The almost paranoid-sounding stuff about how everyone’s phone calls were monitored.

Do me a favor and don’t talk about this over the phone anymore, okay?

Lanny had said he’d talked to an intelligence source in DC. That what “we” had was scary big. That it was up there with the Snowden stuff, the revelations about massive NSA spying on US citizens. A story big enough to win him the Pulitzer Prize. Something explosive enough, damaging enough to our national security, that some American newspaper editors might be afraid to publish it; he might have to publish outside the country.

Could Lanny have gotten into some kind of legal trouble? Maybe being in possession of those damned classified documents was breaking the law.

The one person Tanner knew who stayed in close contact with Lanny on a regular basis was Carl Unsworth, the martial arts instructor and beer-night regular. He found Unsworth in his phone’s contacts and hit Dial.

As it rang, a dark thought popped into his head. He recalled all those tall tales Lanny had told about reporters who’d died in suspicious accidents or staged suicides. Could something have happened to him?

The phone rang a couple more times, and he came to his senses. Maybe it was contagious, Lanny’s conspiracy-mindedness. Hang around him too much and you’d end up wearing a tinfoil hat.

It rang long enough that Tanner expected it to go to voice mail, but then he suddenly heard Carl’s voice.

“Tanner?”

“Yeah, Carl, I was supposed to meet Lanny, but he never showed. I was—”

“Tanner,” Carl interrupted him. “I’m — I’m standing in front of Lanny’s house right now. It— He— Jesus, Tanner, they just rolled him out on a gurney.”

“Did something happen to him—?”

“Oh man,” Carl said, his voice high and choked, “Lanny’s dead.”

Tanner went cold and numb. He fumbled for words. “What— Carl, I don’t understand—”

“Tanner, he—” And then Carl’s voice got muffled. It sounded like he was crying. “The guy killed himself.”