Strangled

by Brian McGrory

  This, by way of explanation, would be one of those days.

  I was scheduled to be married. The lucky woman? One Maggie Kane, who entered my life approximately a year before, and then every bit as quickly fled from it. When I finally caught her in the Sixteenth Arrondissement of Paris in a story too complicated to get into here, I vowed to myself that I would never let her go.

  So much for that vow. Now I wanted nothing more than to let her go. Problem was, I was due to marry her in about seven hours. I’m not saying that I’m normal, just desperate, and the whirring hands of Father Time were hardly in my favor.

  It was 8:00 a.m., March 21. I stepped from wind-whipped Hanover Street, the main thoroughfare through Boston’s North End, into Caffe Vittoria, the oldest and best coffee shop in town and the anchor to my morning routine. I’d order a double cappuccino, take my place at a window table to read the morning papers, listen to some of the ancient goombahs tell me that I write like the Irish cook, and then head off to the newsroom of the Boston Record, where I’d spend another day digging another journalistic ditch until I finally had a hole big enough to bury another villain. Next day, I’d do it all over again. It may not be much, but I consider it a pretty good life.

  A life, mind you, that I suddenly realized I wanted to hang on to, in all its ever-so-subtle glory and unsubtle individuality.

  “You look like a man about to lose his freedom.”

  That was Kenny, the server who works the espresso and cappuccino machines like Arthur Fiedler used to work the Boston Pops — except Arthur had a shock of white hair where Kenny has none, and Arthur had a refined build, while Kenny looks like he just stepped off the pages of Steroids Monthly. At your neighborhood Starbucks, he’d be called a barista, or maybe that’s a venti. I don’t know. At Vittoria, given that he’s about six feet four inches tall and even his eyebrows seem to have muscles, most people simply call him “sir.”

  “No, just my virginity,” I replied.

  Wedding day. Virginity. Get it? Everyone in the joint doubled over in knee-slapping hilarity.

  Well, okay, nobody doubled over in any sort of hilarity. Actually, they didn’t even laugh. Truth is, I’ve known them all too long and too well, these faux crotchety old guys with names like Sal and Vinny, and they’ve heard too much of my schtick before. Why I even continue to try is testament to my true spirit of American optimism. Either that, or I can’t help myself.

  Kenny put a big cup of cappuccino on the counter for me before I even asked, along with my usual bagel, and I retired to my regular table in the window, opened up my New York Times, and didn’t — or maybe couldn’t — read a word. The lead story was about another car bomb explosion at a checkpoint in Iraq that I couldn’t pronounce. I scanned down the page and was surprised I didn’t see a headline that said something like, “Jack Flynn about to surrender life as he knows it.” Drop head: “Is he nuts?”

  A guy named Tony, a retired plumber, put his pastry down at a nearby table and called out, “Jack, this is a wonderful thing you’re doing. It’ll be great to get another marriage under your belt. You’ll get yourself familiar with a good lawyer, learn where the best sandwich shop is around the divorce court, the easiest places to park, maybe start a working relationship with the judge. This’ll pay off in spades as you get older.”

  “Thanks, Tony. You’re like another father to me.”

  My name, by the way, is Jack Flynn, and maybe, in fact, I am nuts. But before I could address that question, I had to consider another: Did I love Maggie Kane? The answer: Damned if I know, which may, in fact, be all the answer I would really need.

  I mean, I must have loved her when I gave her that ring on Christmas Eve not even three months before, right? She cried, and all right, so did I, and not just over the price. We talked about the life we were going to make, the successes we would see, the kids we might have. And then when we went to bed that night, the last woman I thought of before I drifted toward a restless sleep wasn’t Maggie, the wife I was about to have, but Katherine, the wife I had until she died six years before.

  Time to get over it, Jack, I kept telling myself these past couple of years. Move on, let history dissolve into the present tense, still there, flavoring life, but secondary to current events.

  But this issue was academic. What I had in front of me — a wedding — was ominously more realistic. The only real question I was forced to address this day, it was increasingly occurring to me, was how the flying fuck was I going to get out of it?

  Think, Jack. Think.

  “Congratulations, Jack, we’re all so thrilled for you. We had started to think you were gay.”

  That was Don, short not for Donald, but Donatello, another member of the daily morning crew stopping by the table to shake hands with the happy groom-to-be.

  “Don, I can’t tell you how thrilled I am myself. Before Maggie came along, I was starting to think you had a nice ass.”

  He gave me a funny look, like I had carried the joke one notch too far. He returned to his usual seat, me to my dilemma.

  By the way, it’s worth pointing out that this wedding was to occur at 4:00 p.m. before a justice of the peace in a conference room of Boston City Hall. There would be no family, no friends, no witnesses, no music, no flowers, no cake, no garter belt, no bridesmaids, no groomsmen, no wedding gown, no tuxedo, no band, no nothing but me and Maggie Kane getting married and heading straight to Logan Airport for our flight to Hawaii and a lifetime of frustration and emotional confinement. In other words, the logistics were somewhat simple in all this. I really only had to inform two people of my absence — Maggie and the JP. But that seemed small solace at the moment. I needed to figure out how.

  Think, Jack. Think.

  I folded the paper up, having read only about six words of it. I left three-quarters of my cappuccino in the cup and half my bagel on the plate, and I headed into a future that suddenly seemed colder than the worst winter’s day.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said to Kenny on my way out the door.

  “No, you won’t. You’ll be sitting on some island being massaged by native women and oversexed by your new wife,” he replied.

  No, I’d see him tomorrow. I just wasn’t of the mind to correct him right then.

  At eight forty-five on a Tuesday morning, the newsroom of the Boston Record, the newsroom of any big city daily newspaper, for that matter, is a pretty desolate place. Most self-respecting reporters are still sitting at home in ratty bathrobes chugging black coffee and chain-smoking cigarettes, wondering who they’re going to screw that day and how they’re going to deliver said screwing by deadline. Or maybe not.

  When I walked into the Record, only the omnipresent and always nervous Peter Martin, the editor in chief, was in the newsroom, undoubtedly plotting that day’s coverage, micromanaging his underlings before they even arrived at work, stressing over events that had yet to occur. I knew he was in the room because about thirty seconds after I had peeled off my coat and taken my seat, he appeared at my desk like a squirrel approaching a chestnut.

  “So today’s the big day,” he said. “The long walk down the short aisle. Do you, Jack Flynn, take this woman to be your lawfully wedded wife —”

  I cut him off with a simple “Not now, Peter. I don’t think it’s going to happen.”

  He didn’t say anything at first, and I thought he might have been thinking about his two wedding days and the failed marriages that followed, and the fact that he wakes up every day now very much alone, married, as the cliché goes, to his job. Instead, he said with an unvarnished tone of hope, “So you mean you might be available to write today?”

  Everyone — absolutely everyone — has their own agenda in this breaking story we call life.

  “I have to sort a few things through, Peter,” I said, my own tone betraying some incredulity that I have not an ounce of doubt he failed to detect. “I’ll let you know if I’m up.”

  He hesitated again, and I saw his eyes form a squint and hi
s lips start to move as if he was about to ask a question, when the aged and lovable Edgar Sullivan, director of Boston Record security, ambled through the room and arrived at my desk.

  “Special delivery for Jack Flynn,” Edgar announced, his tongue inside his cheek, where it often is.

  Martin flashed a look of relief over the fact he now had the perfect excuse not to wander into the deep, dark forest of my personal life. Without so much as a good-bye, he spun on his heels and walked quickly toward his office.

  Edgar handed me a manila envelope. “This was just dropped off at the front desk.”

  I looked at the envelope for a moment, bearing only my name on the cover. It wasn’t handwritten, but rather in small typeface, which struck me as somewhat odd, but not necessarily alarming. In other words, I was wondering why Edgar had brought it up himself.

  Which is when he said, “I hear today’s a big day for you, Jack. I couldn’t be happier. She’s a wonderful woman. You’re doing exactly the right thing.”

  He was standing over my desk. I was sitting. The room behind him was a half-lit haze of empty expanse. I replied, “I’m not going through with it, Edgar.”

  Without hesitation he said, “In that case, you’re doing exactly the right thing.” He said this with the slightest little smile forming in the wrinkles around his mouth.

  And you wonder why I love the guy.

  I leaned far back in my chair as he leaned against my desk. “How long have you been married?” I asked.

  “Forty-seven years —” he replied proudly, as he absently stretched his arms over his head and locked his fingers together.

  “That’s really wonderful,” I interjected.

  “To four different women,” he finished.

  Ah. It’s probably worthwhile to point out here that Edgar looked like a cross between Ward Cleaver and the Maytag Repairman. I mean, he looked like he had dinner waiting on the table every single night that he walked through the door at 6:00 p.m. sharp. Saturday night, he and the missus would go to a movie. Sunday morning was church. They called the kids on Sunday nights. Needless to say, I was somewhere between bemused and floored, or maybe a combination of the two.

  “How long to the current one?” I asked.

  “I’m currently between wives,” he said, a mischievous look in his eyes.

  “Okay, the most recent one.”

  “Seven years. It was a pretty good run. The one before was my personal record — fourteen years. My first and second ones were thirteen years apiece.”

  “You have trouble when you get into the early teens, huh?”

  “It’s hell,” he said with a big smile. He stood straight up, slapped my thigh, and said, “Jack, whatever you do today, you’ll do the right thing.” And he was gone.

  As Edgar limped off, I pulled the envelope open and dumped the insides on a bare patch on my desk. Out slid a folded sheet of paper and a slightly heavier placard of some sort.

  I picked up the heavier object, which turned out to be a Massachusetts driver’s license for a woman by the name of Jill Dawson, who, if my math was correct, was thirty-two years of age. She wasn’t smiling, but she had the kind of practiced closemouthed camera look that I had been trying to acquire for about thirty years with precisely no success. A good-looking woman, to say the least, with a certain softness to her. She had the look of someone who might volunteer at the local animal shelter while dating the star quarterback of the local NFL franchise.

  I looked inside the envelope and saw nothing else, so I unfolded the small piece of white paper that was lying on my desk. The words were in the same kind of printed font as my name on the cover.

  “You’re going to help me get the word out or other women will die.”

  Two blank lines below that were the words “The Phantom Fiend.”

  It was written just like that — no commas, no periods, no real sense. I read it and then reread it and for good measure read it again. I looked at the envelope for any other markings I might have missed, but saw none. This was likely some stupid prank, yet I felt a pit growing in my stomach, growing into the size of an orange, then a grapefruit, then something bigger.

  Obviously, prank or not, a few questions needed to be answered — for instance, what was the word? What other women would die? Who was the Phantom Fiend? Why was he sending this to me? And most urgently, given his use of the word other, did this mean that Jill Dawson was already dead? If she wasn’t, was she about to become an unwitting target?

  Jill Dawson — the name was unsettlingly familiar. I’d heard it. Maybe I had read it. I quickly started typing into the Record’s online library system, but got one of those maddening dialog boxes on my screen that said it was down for weekly maintenance. So I snatched up the phone and punched out a number to an old source at Boston Police headquarters in Schroeder Plaza.

  “Sergeant Herlihy here,” the voice on the other end of the line said.

  “Reporter Flynn here.”

  “Mother of God. Let me put you on hold for a sec. I need to call my wife and tell her I’m talking to someone famous.”

  This is the kind of bullshit I put up with every day in my valiant and unswerving pursuit of news.

  “If you can knock off the stand-up comedy routine for half a second,” I told him, “I have a quick question.”

  “For a celebrity reporter, anything.”

  “The name Jill Dawson mean anything to you?”

  Sergeant Kevin Herlihy, a longtime source of mine dating back to when I was a young crime-and-grime reporter and he was a cop walking a pretty dangerous beat, mulled over that question for a moment, or at least he mulled over whether he wanted to answer it.

  After a moment he said, “Check your own morgue. Murder victim. Found dead in her Beacon Hill apartment on January third. Case unsolved, last that I know. Homicide has revealed very little information, even to us grunts in uniform.”

  “As always, thank you.”

  I quickly hung up before he had a chance to take a parting verbal jab.

  What had started as a pit was now a watermelon. I was holding the driver’s license of a murdered woman, along with a note that said there’d be more victims unless I helped get some mysterious word out.

  I hated to say it, but this certainly solved one problem, or, more accurately, delayed it. I snatched up the phone and punched out the cell number to Maggie Kane. I expected to get her voice mail, but instead she picked up on the third ring. I heard an announcer’s voice in the background cutting through the din of commotion, telling people something about a final boarding.

  “Maggie, hey there.” I paused, still listening to that announcer. “Hey, where are you?”

  “The Atlanta airport,” she replied. Her words came out flat, uncertain.

  “Are you traveling on business?” Soon as I asked this, I felt ridiculous. Maggie Kane teaches third grade.

  “No, Jack. Listen, I was about to call you.”

  My head was spinning so fast I thought it might fly off my neck. My vision was actually blurred. On what was supposed to be our wedding day, the happy bride-to-be was sitting in the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, and I think it’s a pretty safe conclusion that she wasn’t getting on a plane bound for home. Admittedly, the happy groom was planning to kibosh the whole deal, but that’s not really the point here.

  “Jack,” she said before I could say anything. “Jack, I was about to call you. I’m really sorry. I’m, well, I’m just not ready to go through with this right now.”

  Just like that.

  I mumbled “I’ll call you later,” and hung up the phone. I should have been relieved. I should have told her that I understood what she felt. But what I really felt was angry, and, surprisingly, a little fearful, though of what, I wasn’t exactly sure.

  Like I said, I knew it was going to be a big day. I just had no idea why.

  3

  It’s one thing for a reporter to harbor suspicions in a murder case. Hell, suspicion is the backbo
ne of some of the best and most basic newspaper stories. Is the governor right to say she can balance the state budget without raising taxes? Did the president really not have sex with that woman? Did that priest really have all those young boys’ best interests at heart?

  But it’s quite another thing for a reporter to be harboring evidence in a murder case, and evidence was exactly what I seemed to be harboring, as I leaned over my desk and studied the driver’s license photograph of a recently deceased woman I never met by the name of Jill Dawson.

  She had big blue eyes and shoulder-length dirty-blond hair that looked like it was cut by one of the more expensive stylists — what do they call themselves these days, coiffures? — on Newbury Street. She seemed to have a quiet confidence, like the eldest child of a happily married couple in an affluent suburb like Newton or Wayland. She probably graduated in the top five percent of her high school class, went off to Haverford or Swarthmore, and still takes a vacation with her best friends from college at least once a year. Some guy was probably extremely happy as her boyfriend or husband — unless, of course, that same guy killed her.

  Jill Dawson. Yet another woman I met in the past tense. And looking at her, I bet I would have liked her. A lot.

  My little newsroom reverie was interrupted by Peter Martin and Edgar Sullivan, who approached my desk the way a cold front approaches New England, which is to say ominously and silently, and beckoned me into the nearby, glass-walled conference room.

  “We have the digital tape, but it doesn’t show much,” Edgar said as he pushed a disc into a DVD player. A plasma television screen mounted on the wall lit up, Edgar pressed a button, and the camera froze on the image of a rather overweight security guard sitting at the front desk of the Record, reading — what the hell is this? — the rival Boston Traveler.

  “Aha, we’ve finally caught Scully in the act,” I said, maybe a little too animatedly. Both Martin and Edgar ignored me, which I guess is their right, impolite as that might be.

  Well, not exactly ignored me. Edgar began his brief presentation by saying, “Jack, if you could just put a zipper on it for about three minutes, that might be helpful.