Paulie took a deep lungful of lilac-scented air, trying to decide if he should divulge that less than a week before, he and Jay Preble had met with Coatesworth outside a Lewiston sparring palace and the next day, Coatesworth set him up to interview Joan Slater. He felt a bolt of fear that MacMahon was about to ask why his name had turned up on a surveillance report.
“Big deal. Coatesworth’s a gambler,” Paulie said. “Lot of guys are.”
“Anyone who pals around with these Lewiston boys is more than just a gambler. The mere gamblers are kept at arm’s length. Customers don’t crack the inner circle.”
“What does it take to get inside that circle?”
“Willingness to work for the good of the enterprise,” MacMahon said. “That and a big pair of balls.”
* * *
Paulie drove around all afternoon, restless and irritable. He paid close attention to the rearview mirror, swearing when he realized the dilemma he’d face if he picked up a tail: Would it be the FBI or the mob?
He didn’t like MacMahon assuming he’d do legwork for him. He was a reporter, not some cop’s stoolie. Trading information with the police was close to verboten, Paulie knew. He figured the same was true for MacMahon. The fact Tommy was asking for help indicated how much he resented the FBI’s control of the case.
As wary as he was of sharing information with a cop, Paulie was intrigued by the Coatesworth theory. It’d be a big fucking deal if Desmond wasn’t the villain but rather the victim of corruption inside the mill, corruption that was tied to organized crime. Breaking a story like that could mean a big raise, a better beat.
Even if Paulie decided to play the game, MacMahon’s request wouldn’t be easy to fulfill. Joan Slater and Jay Preble were Paulie’s prime sources of information about Coatesworth. For different reasons, he wasn’t willing to push either of them.
With Joan, his reasons were personal. After leaving the restaurant Thursday night, they hadn’t done any more talking about the Desmond case. A nice meal with a good bottle of Chianti had led directly to her bedroom, where Paulie learned that she wasn’t just a good-looker.
For the first time in two weeks he’d stopped thinking about George Desmond. Joan might have been five years younger than Paulie, but she wasn’t intimidated by his worldliness. They made love deep into the night, caught up in the dizzying thrill of new intimacy. She shooed him out the door before dawn, warning that her landlady was both observant and judgmental. He tiptoed away through her backyard, circling the block to reach his car, which he’d parked several houses away from Joan’s, pointed in the opposite direction.
Paulie was no sentimentalist, but he didn’t want to ruin a nice thing with such a beautiful girl. He felt sure enticing Joan to give him the dirt on Ken Coatesworth would backfire somehow, or at least not bring them closer, and for a while at least, closer to Joan was where he wanted to be.
Paulie also wasn’t keen to press Jay Preble for information about Coatesworth. He didn’t want to lose the banker’s confidence before he figured out his game. Preble’s effort to buddy up—as if they had things in common—sent Paulie’s bullshit meter into the red zone. Determined to know more about the man who was wooing his friendship, Paulie spent an afternoon digging around in the Chronicle’s morgue. The stories he found about the local golden boy reinforced his skepticism. He and Preble had nothing in common beyond the fact they were men who lived in Riverside, Maine.
Valedictorian of the 1958 graduating class at Riverside High School, Preble was a track star and senior prom king. He was the first local boy accepted to Harvard since the mid-forties, not that anyone should have been surprised, given the Preble family legacy. He came home seven years later, with two degrees to hang on the wall and a couple of years of world travel under his belt. The Chronicle did a front page story about his homecoming.
Paulie got his South Portland High School diploma in 1956, barely having met the requirements for graduation. Thank God for shop class. Then he did some travel of his own, but it was on Uncle Sam’s dime. Paulie was pretty sure nobody in his Ferry Village neighborhood noticed when he was honorably discharged by the Coast Guard.
The state cops’ suspicion of Ken Coatesworth put the Preble charm offensive in a different light. Sitting there in the cop car next to the lilacs, he’d been tempted to ask Tommy Mac if Preble was under the microscope as well. But for the same reason he didn’t own up to having met Coatesworth at the Lewiston gym, Paulie bit his tongue.
He wasn’t a cop. He wasn’t going to do legwork for the cops and he wasn’t going to drop little tidbits of information that could bring shit down on the heads of guys he barely knew. Maybe Preble was a rich boy who got his kicks slumming. That wasn’t reason to put him on MacMahon’s radar. Instead, Paulie was going to keep his eyes and ears open and watch his own back.
Despite the fact it was late on a Saturday afternoon, a surly Jake Stuart still was presiding over the newsroom.
“You do anything productive today, or just fart around?” His bark echoed across the nearly empty newsroom as soon as he caught sight of Paulie.
“My byline’s been on page one three days this week. Doesn’t that count for something?” Paulie put some additional cockiness in his step as he approached his boss.
“Soft stories. Cheap way to get onto the front page. Big surprise—the guy who ripped off the mill was good in arithmetic. I’ll bet he was real good at it. He gave money to the poor. Probably the mill’s money.”
“Did you gripe all the time before you were promoted to city editor?”
Jake took off his glasses and massaged his forehead.
“What I want from you is a story that tells our readers what the cops know but aren’t talking about. What leads are they chasing down? Has Desmond been sighted anywhere? Has the search gone international?” Jake waved an ink-stained hand in his direction. “How about you call that FBI asshole Wellington and get him to tell you something?”
Paulie walked over to his desk and tried just that. Wonder of all wonders, Wellington took his call, but his purpose was to give Paulie an earful.
“You seem to have plenty of sources at your disposal,” Wellington said. “The fact that none of them know what they’re talking about is beside the point.”
“I have a job to do,” Paulie muttered.
“Serious money has been stolen from Riverside’s largest employer. You’re writing laudatory stories about the only suspect, telling your readers he was teacher’s pet in school and gave money to charity. You think he’s going to give the money he stole from the Saccarappa to the needy? Plenty of people will be hurting once the impact of his crime is felt.”
“What if Desmond isn’t behind the embezzlement?”
“There’s no credible evidence to support an alternative suspect theory. I understand your goal is to sell newspapers. Mine is to solve a crime. I wish you’d stop getting in my way.”
Chapter Sixteen
Monday, July 14, 2014
Riverside, Maine
The suburban home of former Portland High School basketball star Mike Thibodeau—an oversized Cape with a handsome stone wall across the front—was a fifteen-minute drive from downtown. A gleaming black Buick with a handicap plate sat in the driveway.
A slender woman leaning on a walker answered my knock at the front door. I introduced myself and told her I was looking for Mike Thibodeau. She cocked her head slightly, as if she was about to ask what a Chronicle reporter would want with her husband.
“You the one that called earlier?” she asked instead, opening the door in silent invitation without waiting for my reply. She led me through the house to a shaded back deck where a muscular man with a comb-over sat reading the Daily Racing Form under a broad awning.
“This is Joe Gale. He’s a sportswriter at the Chronicle.” His wife motioned me toward a chair.
Thi
bodeau crossed his arms in front of his big chest, his short-sleeved shirt revealing still-solid biceps. One of those guys who turns into a gym rat after retirement, I thought.
“Actually, I’m not a sportswriter. I’m a news reporter, covering the story about that skeleton found at the Saccarappa Mill this week. Have you heard about it?”
Thibodeau nodded, but his demeanor suggested he did not want to chat about it.
“Why’d you tell my wife you were a sportswriter?” His voice rumbled like approaching thunder.
“I didn’t. She must have assumed I was. I’m sure you’ve been interviewed by a lot of sportswriters over the years.”
Thibodeau’s face was impassive. “I know nothing about the Saccarappa Mill.”
“Excuse me, my soap opera’s coming on.” Mrs. T. was still standing inside the screen door. “I’ll leave you two alone to talk.”
“Do you remember a guy named Gil Parker? He worked in the construction department at the mill, was the supervisor when the Saccarappa shut down.”
“I told you, I know nothing about the Saccarappa Mill, and no, I don’t remember any Gil Parker.”
There was tension in his voice, even more in his body.
“He said he was in high school with you. Told me what a great basketball player you were. Your name came up when I was asking him about a wall that was rebuilt in the mill’s basement, sometime in the sixties. He said he thought you did the work.”
Thibodeau tipped his head back as if he was thinking hard. “Now that you say that, I have kind of a vague memory of doing a job over there once. Back when I worked for Tony DiRenzo.”
“Right. Gil told me you worked for DiRenzo, but he thought you were hired to work on the wall on your own time.”
He squinted in my direction, his mouth working a toothpick. I clamped my own shut, knowing if I kept talking, he would not. After thirty seconds he caved.
“So what do you want from me?”
“Anything you can remember about that job. What was wrong with the wall? Why did it need to be rebuilt?”
A nearly imperceptible shadow washed over Thibodeau’s face, a rearrangement of facial expression I recognized as a door slamming shut.
“A wall was falling down and the mill was looking for a skilled mason to fix it.” He uncrossed his arms, dropped them to his sides, locked eyes with me. “Somebody called. I didn’t ask questions. It was extra money.”
“Do you remember who asked you?”
“Nope.” His stare was almost a glare.
“Any guesses? Somebody must have recommended you. Who’d you know over at the Saccarappa?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “It was a long time ago.”
“You have any business records from when you did side jobs?”
“Hell, no.” He stood, a signal for me to do the same.
“Go out around the side of the garage.” His voice was granite when he gestured in the direction by which he wanted me to leave. “I don’t want you bothering my wife. She’s serious about her soap operas.” He ignored my proffered hand, resuming the arms-crossed intimidation pose: eyes impassive, mouth set in a tight line.
I took my time walking across his yard, cutting between the garage and a high fence to reach the driveway. Before starting the engine I pulled out my pen and jotted some notes, willing myself not to look up until I finished. Hand on the key, I glanced at the Thibodeau house and saw him in the front window. He held a pen and notebook of his own.
Back at the Chronicle, Gene pulled a chair next to my desk before I sat down.
“What did Thibodeau say?”
“Go to hell.”
“No shit.”
“He was beyond unimpressed to have a member of the fourth estate show up at his house to ask him about a side job he’d done forty-six years ago.”
“He kick you out?”
“Yup, after a big tough-guy stonewall act. Can’t remember who called him, he said. He did what he was hired to do. At the time he was a trowel-for-hire nights and weekends. Has no business records. Blah, blah.”
“That’s more than nothing.”
“He practically spit every word through clenched teeth. I think he would have removed me from his property physically if his wife hadn’t been sitting twenty feet away, watching her soap opera.”
“Exaggerating, aren’t we? He’s in his seventies for Chrissakes.”
“I wasn’t worried he’d actually do it, though he probably could. It’s obvious the man still works out every day. I’d give a week’s pay to know who he called to find out about me. He copied down my license plate as I was pulling out of his driveway.”
“You sure he’s dirty?”
“A non-dirty guy at least would have something to say about the fact the human remains everyone’s buzzing about were found behind the wall he repaired. Thibodeau postured indifference, but he was dripping sweat by the time I left.”
* * *
I spent the next few hours in the late 1960s. Stacking all the files related to the Desmond disappearance on a long library table, I put on my forensic journalist cap and jumped in.
From May 11, 1968, running forward two years, there were thirty-four stories about the case, most of them written in the first month. Paulie covered the breaking story and rode it forward until the end of May. After that there were several stories by a reporter named Bernard Francoeur, a bunch of news briefs and, on the one-year anniversary, a pallid retrospective carrying the byline Chronicle Staff. Reading them in order, both content and tone brought to mind a racehorse that roared out of the gate and faded in the stretch.
The investigators had a tight communication strategy. Only three cops were ever quoted by name: FBI Special Agent Curtis Wellington, Det. Thomas MacMahon of the Maine State Police and, early on, Riverside PD’s Armand Fecteau, the home-grown police chief mentioned by Barb Wyatt.
The index led me to a slim file on Fecteau, including his obituary in 1983. Firing up the laptop, I did an internet search for Curtis Wellington and came up empty. MacMahon appeared to be alive and well, living out his retirement in Kennebunkport. Making a note of his address and phone number, I moved on.
The official line segued from benign disappearance to possible fishing accident to embezzlement scheme. Those who knew George Desmond were consistent in their comments: he was a hard worker, a good friend, an honest man. Then some damning details were released. Suitcases were missing from Desmond’s home, his car was found in a remote parking lot near Logan Airport in Boston. Still, none of Desmond’s friends or neighbors revised their earlier remarks.
His coworkers were a different story. One of Paulie’s sidebars quoted a variety of mill muckety-mucks, including the tan man himself, Ken Coatesworth, saying Desmond had everybody fooled. It was clear the missing money had done big damage to the Saccarappa’s balance sheet, and Coatesworth and his colleagues were fearful about their professional futures.
Another of Paulie’s stories featured Jay Preble. Fresh out of Harvard Business School, he’d worked with the FBI to follow the money trail from Riverside National Bank. Paulie must have known Preble personally, because the story was full of the kind of quotes you got only from interview subjects who trusted you.
“Desmond was a slick operator,” Paulie’d quoted Preble as saying. “He was a patient, smart guy who knew what he was doing. He used the Saccarappa and his relationship with our bank to steal enough money to be comfortable for life. George Desmond was a scoundrel.”
My eyes were burning by seven-thirty. Knowing my fridge didn’t hold much, I picked up a pizza and a six-pack on the way home. Sitting on my deck with Lou by my side, I let my mind float on the sea of gathered facts.
What would Paulie do? Who would he call? What questions would he ask? Where would he focus?
At the back of
my mind, a loose detail flapped like a poorly nailed shingle in a high wind.
Why was some back-bencher named Francoeur given the story after Paulie’d been covering the hell out of it for weeks?
When I went into the house for a fresh beer I thought about the boxes of Paulie’s stuff that lived in my attic. For a month after his death, his desk on the windowed side of the Chronicle’s newsroom had sat like a shrine, as if he might show up some morning, slide into his creaky chair and curse his computer.
Eventually the day came when Leah asked if I’d mind packing up his stuff.
“You were closest to him,” she said. “Can you do it?”
I’d returned to the newsroom that night, after everybody but the post-deadline editor was gone, and packed it all up. A fat Rolodex. A stylebook with the cover torn off. Pens with no caps. Pencils with and without lead. A battered deck of cards and a cribbage board with wooden matches for pegs. Handwritten notes from friend and foe. And notebooks. More than a hundred narrow spiral-bound reporter’s notebooks. All of it went into the cardboard boxes supplied by the maintenance guy, then out to my car and up to my attic where it still sat three and a half years later, surrounded by the day’s accumulated heat.
Leaving my beer bottle on the counter, I pulled down the attic stairs, yanked the light chain and went looking for the Paulie Finnegan archives. Ten minutes later, dripping with sweat, I was sitting at my kitchen table, sorting his notebooks by date. Some were from the nineties, the decade before the powers that be pulled Paulie inside and made him assistant city editor. Others went all the way back to the sixties. Some were undated. I skimmed through all of the ones marked 1968 to 1970. Sure enough, among the words and phrases captured in faded ink were notes from his pursuit of the Desmond case.
It was slow going. Paulie’s penmanship wouldn’t have made the nuns who’d taught him proud, and his personal shorthand system was complicated. I jotted observations and questions about whether certain details were ever established. But no smoking gun pointed its barrel at me.
Four pages from the end of a notebook dated May 23-25, the name MacMahon was underlined twice. That had to mean the lead state police detective, who my internet research told me was alive and well in Kennebunkport. The notation was followed by a series of phrases that appeared to relate to organized crime.
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