Cover Story

by Gerry Boyle

  “Portland?”

  “I don’t know, Jack. I didn’t grill her. Anyway, she said the media has really been after her. Some Maine TV guys got her leaving her office, she said. Chased her to her car. She was thinking she’d talk to the Times this afternoon. She wanted to talk to you first. Mostly I think she just wanted to talk to you.”

  “I’ll call her,” I said, then paused. “I don’t know if I should stay another night with you.”

  “Jack, I talked to Roxanne. She was fine. We made plans to get together sometime.”

  Oh, great, I thought.

  “This story with you in it. When’s it running?”

  “I don’t know. Tomorrow? This is a big deal, you know, McMorrow. I don’t think they’re going to sit on anything, especially if it’s an exclusive. They’ll want to splash it.”

  Christina, suddenly media-savvy?

  “Ellen said she wanted to talk to you about it today.”

  “Okay,” I said. The light changed. The taxi behind me honked and swerved to pass.

  “You know, some serious things are happening with all of this, Christina,” I said. “Very serious stuff. I think you should know—”

  The phone got fuzzy, Christina’s voice was faint.

  “We’ll talk, Jack. I’ll call the parking man and tell him you’re on your way. Just pull up and he’ll drive you over and drop you. Call from the car at the lot and I’ll come down. I’ve got another call, Jack. Bye.”

  And Christina hung up. I didn’t.

  I called all of Roxanne’s numbers, left more messages. I called Donatelli’s pager and punched in the car-phone number, called again, and punched in the number at the loft. I dialed until there was nothing more I could do.

  Sagging in the seat, I crossed the Manhattan Bridge, the elegant web of the Brooklyn Bridge to my right.

  I barely noticed.

  So you been warned, pally. You go back to goddamn Maine and you find your little lady and you lock the doors and you stay there with her. Or we’ll find her.

  I could do that. I could leave tonight, catch a flight or a bus. But the DA. What would they think if I took off? Could they come and get me? Invent some sort of charge to hold me in jail? And then where would Roxanne be? With Clair, I hoped, but hell, I didn’t know where she was now.

  She’d be okay for tonight. The warning had been received. I’d stay and talk to the cops in the morning, tell them I had to get back to my life. I’d come back for a grand jury or a trial or whatever. They could call me anytime. If I wasn’t home, I’d be out cutting wood. They could leave a message.

  I turned off the bridge, wound my way back toward the river. This time I approached the parking lot from the Navy Yard side, driving slowly between the darkened factories. A block away, I turned off the lights, hoping the Rover would blend into the shadows.

  But then I was out in the open, and the car seemed as conspicuous as a parade float. The parking attendant that night was a plump white-haired man who popped out of his little building and gave me a big wave. I stopped at the razor-wire gates and he closed them, locking them with a chain and padlock. I called and Christina answered. I said we were on our way and then I got out and climbed into the backseat. If the man thought this strange, he didn’t show it.

  He even made small talk, until I flopped down on the seat.

  When I raised myself up, a car was approaching. A small red car. I crouched. It passed. A woman was driving but she didn’t look at me. I hadn’t seen her before.

  We waited. Where was she? The parking guy whistled and I dug a five-dollar bill out of my pocket and handed it to him over his shoulder. He said thank you and called me sir. I heard a motor behind us and half-turned.

  It was a minivan with fake wood sides. It was coming toward us, driving slowly on the cobblestones. And then it slowed more, eased over a pothole, and I could see the sliding door pop out and start to open.

  “Get down,” I said, and I did, but the driver just turned and looked at me, half-smiling, like I was joking.

  And the bay door clattered open.

  I shouted this time, “Get down.” Kicked the door open and threw myself out. Christina was standing there, one arm stretched above her. I grabbed her and pushed her inside, pressed her hard against the wall.

  “Jack,” she said.

  She laughed, put her arms around me.

  “Glad to see you, too,” she said.

  I looked back, saw the driver grinning and shaking his head, and the minivan moving slowly up the street. The door was shut.

  The driver said, “You all set now?” and winked.

  Christina straightened her tank top and her shorts, went to the door, and reached up for the handle. She gave him a wave and pulled the door down, plunging us into darkness.

  “Hold that thought,” she said, “until we get upstairs.”

  In the loft I went right to the studio window and looked out. The van was gone. There was a black car at the corner to the right, a vague shape in the darkening dusk. Christina came into the room and came up behind me, putting her hands on my shoulders and leaning against me.

  “Paranoia becomes you,” she said, her mouth close to my ear.

  “Somebody shot at me today.”

  She tensed, interested. Kept her hands on my shoulders.

  “Really? Where was that?”

  “Washington Heights.”

  “Well, they probably thought you were a rival drug dealer.”

  “They chased me up onto a roof.”

  “So?”

  “So, it had to do with Butch and things he was looking into.”

  “Things?”

  “Irregularities, you could call it. Cases from the eighties.”

  Christina didn’t answer for a moment. Her fingers gently kneaded my shoulders.

  “So they killed the mayor and framed Butch for it to get rid of him?”

  I shook my head. Her fingers pressed.

  “Seems unlikely, doesn’t it?” I said.

  “A bit over the top, even for New York. Why kill the mayor?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe he was in on it.”

  “Well, he’s not going to tell anybody that. Why would he?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “So there’s no need to kill the mayor. Why not just kill Butch and be done with it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Framing him doesn’t do any good. He can still talk in jail. He can get somebody else to look into—”

  “He did,” I said.

  “Oh,” Christina said.

  “And they told me to stop.”

  “Today?”

  “Yeah. That’s why I don’t think I should stay here.”

  “Because you’re not going to stop?”

  “I’m not sure yet.”

  Christina kneaded deeper and bent close to me.

  “Same old McMorrow,” she whispered. “Same old Jack.”

  27

  At eight o’clock the phone rang. I was watching the news on the big screen, where Butch, coming out of court this time, still looked small. I picked up the phone and answered hesitantly. It was a man’s voice. He said he was a nurse at Maine Medical Center in Portland.

  “What?” I blurted.

  “Is this Mr. McMorrow?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m calling for Roxanne Masterson.”

  “Oh, God,” I said. “Is she okay?”

  “Oh, yeah. Fine. She just wanted me to tell you that she hadn’t had time to return your calls because of an emergency. A DHS emergency.”

  I sagged back into the chair.

  “She’s been here since this afternoon. The police were here, too.”

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “Well, I can’t really say because it’s all confidential. But it’s, well, it’s a pretty sad case. An abuse case. Sex abuse. The little girl has been here all afternoon. Roxanne came in with the mom, and right now I believe she’s out trying to place the other four
children. She asked me to call you and tell you she’ll call as soon as she can, but it could be a while.”

  “If you see her, tell her to be careful,” I said.

  He didn’t answer.

  “Could you do that? Tell her what’s going on down here may spread up there.”

  “Umm, okay, I guess. What’s going on . . . what was that again?”

  I repeated it and he said he’d try. I called Roxanne’s car again, her office. Talked to the machines. Hung up and stared at the TV. Well, at least she was with other people. Foster parents, kids, Portland cops.

  In the throes of domestic strife, she’d be safe.

  I turned the channel and watched Butch exit the courthouse yet again. The route of the state funeral procession, still two days away, was flashed on the screen. Reserve your balcony now.

  Christina came out of her room in a short shift sort of thing. She was still buttoning it up as she crossed the room.

  “You ready?” she said.

  I turned off Bill Clinton in mid-condolence. Christina arranged the sixty-dollar takeout meal at the table: steak, creamed spinach, French fries, and onion rolls. She opened a bottle of cabernet sauvignon. It was from a vineyard in California I’d never heard of. Christina lighted candles and poured the wine into crystal wineglasses.

  “I just can’t drink out of paper cups,” she said. “I’m sorry. My mother always said ‘The glass should be commensurate with the quality of the wine.’ Those sorts of things are very important to Mum. Ah, yes. The ritual of alcoholism.”

  On that note, we sat. Christina raised her glass for a toast. To what, I thought.

  “To an escape from all our problems,” she said. “No matter how fleeting. The escape, I mean.”

  She looked at me, her eyes reflecting the flickering candles. Our glasses touched.

  Christina was oddly animated at dinner. She talked about her show, her plans for a larger installation that would expand its scope. She went on about Christophe and his Australian “woman-child,” then delivered an inside account of how Ellen’s marriage had ended.

  “Again, she’s twenty-four,” Christina said. “He’s old enough to be her father. What is it with men and their absolute dread of mortality and aging? I mean, look at Mick Jagger.”

  She sipped her wine, took a bite of steak.

  “Not you, Jack. You always had the long view of things. That’s why I think you questioned your work as a journalist so much. I always thought that. You were very good at what you did here, a very good writer, but I think you were after a more timeless sort of expression.”

  I tried to smile.

  “I’m surprised you gave it that much thought,” I said.

  She smiled slyly. Took a long swallow of wine and reached for the bottle.

  “Oh, I did. One time—oh, God, I shouldn’t tell you this. It’s the wine, probably. But one time I, well, I said your name.”

  I looked at her.

  “While Christophe and I were, you know. Doing it.” I felt myself blush.

  “Now don’t get embarrassed. Oh, I shouldn’t have told you.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “But you know what was really funny? I thought Christophe would get all mad. You know, get up and stomp out of the room. But he didn’t.”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “He wanted to hear more. Isn’t that bizarre?”

  I shrugged. Didn’t answer.

  “Pathetic, really, I thought. I don’t know what I was thinking with him sometimes. I mean, he could be great. Fun and dashing and very smart. Very quick conceptually. Ideas just came to him. An idea a minute. But then he had these weird little nooks and crannies. In his character, I mean.”

  So we ate and Christina talked. Dessert was chocolate mousse cake, which I skipped and she picked at. At eleven, she asked if I wanted to watch the news. I wanted to say no. It had been a long day.

  Through windows. Across planks. Down hallways where kids waited with knives.

  But I was a player in this game now. I needed to know as much as possible. I needed to know what they knew.

  On WNYC, it was my friend Stephanie Cooper, still hard at it. This time she was at the Museum of Natural History, on the sidewalk out front, where she’d persuaded a relic of a custodian to talk about Butch as a kid following his dad around the halls. There was a still shot of Butch’s father when he was a New York cop. I looked at him, felt the doors of memory pried open. I remembered Mr. Casey, as my father called him, picking me up and holding me high over his head. I felt his big hands under my arms.

  Stephanie must have felt something, too.

  “It was here that the young Butch Casey began what would be a decades-long friendship with Jack McMorrow, son of a museum entomologist.”

  Then the custodian, a white-haired woman I vaguely remembered.

  “They were little buddies. Butch was the one with the devil in him, roaming the back halls. The McMorrow boy was the one Butch recruited for his little adventures.”

  She said it the Irish way, “divil.” Then she smiled.

  The camera switched to Stephanie.

  “It was a fateful connection,” she said, staring soulfully with the museum turrets behind her. “And it continued until minutes before Butch Casey allegedly took a knife and plunged it into the heart of the mayor of New York. Accompanying him on this night, the night of the most devilish adventure of his life, was his childhood buddy, Jack McMorrow.”

  Stephanie paused triumphantly.

  “This is Stephanie Cooper. At the Museum of Natural History in New York.”

  The anchor thanked her, said there was more to come.

  “WNYC revisits the murder that may have pushed this homicide detective over the edge. We talk to residents of the West Village, where Butch Casey lived quietly after leaving the police department. Meanwhile, Casey’s closest friend, Jack McMorrow, remains in New York in the company of Brooklyn artist Christina Mansell, with whom he was staying in a Midtown hotel. More from WNYC’s Rick Greene.”

  “What?” Christina said.

  “Shhh,” I said.

  Rick was in front of police headquarters, but the tape switched to a press conference. Police Commissioner Kiley stood at a podium while motor drives whirred.

  He said the investigation was proceeding, but much remained to be done.

  “Is Casey cooperating?” someone called out.

  “I can’t comment on that at this time.”

  “Are you convinced that he acted alone, or could there be other arrests?”

  “As I said, we continue to investigate. We are following up all possible leads to determine whether any conspiracy took place. You can be assured the investigation will proceed on all fronts until we are absolutely one hundred percent certain Mr. Casey acted alone, or he didn’t.”

  “Mr. Commissioner, are you investigating Jack McMorrow, Casey’s friend at the pub that night?”

  “No comment.”

  “What about the woman McMorrow was with at the Meridien? WNYC has identified her as Christina Mansell. Will you be talking to her about a possible wider plot that ended with the assassination?”

  “Oh, my God,” Christina said.

  “We will continue to talk to anyone and everyone connected with Mr. Casey,” the commissioner said.

  The phone rang. Staring at the screen, Christina answered it.

  “Oh, I know. It’s outrageous . . . I don’t know. I have a lawyer but he just does the loft stuff . . . You think I should? . . . Talia, get real . . . I just stopped by . . . No, he’s not dangerous . . . We’re sitting here right now. We just finished dinner and turned it on. We’re both absolutely flabbergasted . . . Do you really think so? I never thought of that . . .”

  Christina talked, her bare feet up on the chest in front of the couch. I watched the segment on Butch in the Village, but it didn’t say much. A few neighbors saying he was quiet and polite. They missed the lesbian bar. The segment on Leslie Moore’s murder was bett
er, with footage of Fiore at the time, of Georgie Ortiz, except the caption said his name was Muriqi. There were rapid-fire shots of newspaper headlines: Homicide Hits Home . . . Fiore Says Cops Overstepped . . .

  And then a Times headline:

  Police Say DA Let Murderer Walk.

  By Jack McMorrow.

  I leaned forward and there was Stephanie Cooper, now in front of the Times building. Did the woman ever sleep?

  “It was this story, sources say, that got McMorrow in hot water with his editors at the Times. The story outlined the police investigation and quoted Casey himself defending homicide detectives’ procedures and blasting John Fiore for his decision not to seek a grand jury indictment of Georgie Ortiz. But sources say the problem for McMorrow was that he did not tell his editors that Casey was not only one of his best sources on the police department, but also one of his oldest and closest friends. This is Stephanie Cooper, reporting for WNYC at the New York Times in Manhattan.”

  I took a deep breath. Shook my head. Felt like I was caught in a wave and it had torn off my clothes, tossed me naked on the beach. Sources at the Times. Sources at the museum. On the television, in the newspapers. And where the media left off, the man on the phone, the guys on the roof, in the cars outside, took over.

  It was relentless, and it showed no sign of letting up.

  Christina said good-bye, started to put the phone down. It rang again. She answered.

  “Fantastic? No, I don’t think it’s fantastic . . . Yeah, I’ve heard of him . . . He does? . . . You called him already? . . .”

  I got up from the couch, left the television on. Christina, still talking, was reaching for her wineglass. At the door to her bedroom I paused and peered in. The window to the fire escape was open, the bars unlocked. I walked in, knelt on the bed, and swung the bars closed. Easing off the bed, I crossed to Philippe’s room. I could hear Christina talking, the excitement in her voice.

  “He said that? Get out!”

  I went into the darkened room and slowly closed the door. Stood motionless for a moment and then eased my way to the windows, where I stood against the wall and looked out.

  The black car had moved from one corner to the other and was parked in the shadows, just the hood and windshield showing. I peered at the windows across the street but saw only darkness. I waited. Remained still and silent, like a bird-watcher who knows that you learn more from what you hear in the woods than from what you see.