“I’ve got a meeting. I’m not sure if I’ll be out. But I’ll call you.”
He asked, “Who’s the meeting with?”
“The Phantom.” Then I added, “I’ve got to leave this line open. Call you soon.”
He was whistling as I hung up the phone — chewing, panting, and whistling.
A moment later, an elderly man ambled past, still dressed for winter in a long wool herringbone coat, even though the day was screaming spring. People are like that in this town — suspicious of the weather, slow to acknowledge that the season is really changing, always believing that the next wind is going to send another cold front or storm system our way.
This old man, though, he was looking at me, almost studying me, and the truth is, he looked familiar.
He stopped short and said, “Excuse me, but did you used to have a dog?”
I wondered if that was some sort of code for “I’m the Phantom Fiend and I just committed another murder.” I replied, “I did, but he died about a year ago of cancer.”
He nodded slowly and said, “I used to watch the two of you play fetch out here in the mornings. You were quite a pair.”
Well, okay, I wasn’t sure I knew how this morning could get any worse. I said, “Thank you,” but he had already turned and was walking off.
My phone chimed again.
“Any luck?”
It was Peter Martin, once more not seeing the need for the kind of manners that separate human beings from lower forms of life.
“It depends what you call luck. If you’re asking if I’ve been approached yet by a serial murderer and asked to go take a car ride to a dark warehouse where my life will be immediately endangered, the answer is no. But in that same regard, I also feel kind of lucky, so the answer would be yes.”
He dismissed that line without even seeming to think about it.
“No sign of him yet?”
“No.”
“Keep me posted.”
We hung up. I scanned the park. There were a few young mothers pushing strollers together on the cement path closest to the shoreline. Businessmen and -women were coming and going in either direction. A maintenance worker was spearing loose litter with a sharp-edged pole and placing the trash in a plastic bag.
In other words, there were abundant witnesses to anything that might happen here, which was a relief, but which also made me wonder if the Phantom or the Strangler or whatever he might like to be called would be frightened off by the exposure of the venue. But he’s the one who picked the spot.
I should also mention that Edgar Sullivan, the Record’s aging but no less relentless director of security, was somewhere with a view of this park, if not actually in it, per Martin’s orders. We had discussed calling the police, but immediately dismissed it because of the myriad possibilities that they would screw things up.
My phone chimed anew.
“Flynn,” I said.
“Go into the trash can to your immediate right and pull out today’s Boston Traveler. Open up to page thirty-eight and see the destination written across the top of the page. Place the newspaper back in the receptacle, do not pick up your phone again, and take a taxi directly to the location that is written down. If you use your phone between now and the time you get to the location, either you will be killed or you will never see me again.”
It was that same slightly synthesized voice, the words fringed by just a bit of static, as if someone was speaking through a machine set on its lowest level of alteration. By the way, who uses the word receptacle except for maybe a junior high school vice principal or a bureaucrat with the city sanitation department? I thought better than to question him on his language usage and instead said, “I’ll do exactly as told.” For kicks, I added, “Is there a number where I can reach you if something goes awry?”
By the time I got that request out, he had already hung up. They say that jokes are all about timing, and I’m starting to think they’re right.
I stood up and walked to the green barrel to the right of the bench and saw a copy of that day’s Traveler lying near the top. I say near because on top of the paper were several plastic bags filled with what could politely be called dog waste. As I pulled the paper up, one bag spilled open and the, ahem, waste dripped onto the front page. Now, I’m not saying this is an inappropriate substance to appear on the front of the Traveler; God knows they’ve published worse. But I am saying I’d prefer it wasn’t on a paper I had to read.
I carefully flipped the paper open to page thirty-eight while trying to avoid getting dog shit on my hands. The smell wasn’t entirely pleasant. It always seems fine when it’s your own dog, but someone else’s, it’s completely gross. It wouldn’t happen this way in the movies, with the handsome hero trying to avoid the animal feces as he’s working toward saving the city — that I knew for sure.
Anyway, I got to the appropriate page, and written across the top in pen were the words “Prudential Skywalk. Telescope in the corner pointing toward Charles River and downtown Boston.” And that was that. This Phantom definitely had a flare for the dramatic.
I placed the paper back in the barrel, as ordered, making a mental note to call Peter Martin at the first available opportunity and see if we could get a handwriting analyst to look at the paper before the garbagemen came. I walked back out onto Atlantic Avenue and flagged a cab that happened to be passing by.
The Prudential Skywalk, for the uninitiated, is the pavilion on the fiftieth floor of the Prudential Center, for a while the tallest building in town, but now eight floors shorter than the nearby Hancock Tower a few blocks away. The Pru, as Bostonians tend to call it, is a remarkably ugly structure, boxy and boring and nearly a blight, except it’s our blight, and for that, the city loves it.
I got out of the cab on Boylston Street, reflexively looked straight up at the top of the building in the way that tourists from New Hampshire probably do, and took the escalator up into the mall that wraps around the skyscraper. The streets and mall passages were busy with late-arriving workers and early shoppers, and I looked around in quasi-wonderment at whether I was being followed. I assumed that the Phantom was probably already in the Skywalk, though if he was, what was with all the taxicab stuff? Why not simply sit on the bench with me in Columbus Park?
The elevator ride made my ears pop, as elevator rides generally do. At the top, I paid the nine-dollar admission fee and pictured Martin quibbling with me when I submitted the expense. He’d argue that I should have been able to talk my way in for free because I wasn’t actually going to see the view.
As I strode out onto the glass-enclosed Skywalk, the first sensation was that of light — light everywhere, streaming through the windows, reflecting off the floors, dancing along the walls, glistening off the telescopes that were pointing at the Financial District and the harbor beyond.
The second sensation was that of space — space everywhere. I don’t care how old I am, I don’t care how many times I’ve sat in offices or dined in restaurants atop high-rise buildings; whenever I do, the feeling is one of being above it all, figuratively as well as literally. The city below is minuscule, as are all the little problems of everyday life, things like traffic and litter and crowds and late appointments. High in the sky, you’re above the daily grind, free to contemplate the larger issues of life.
Which I don’t necessarily think was good at the moment, because what I had to contemplate were hardly the issues of soaring dreams. A broken marriage before the vows were ever recited, two dead women, a newspaper publisher with no balls, a serial killer who regarded me as his confidant, and some unknown would-be assailants who seemed to want me dead. I think I’d have to be soaring around the earth in a space shuttle for these problems to appear small at the moment, but maybe that’s where the Phantom would send me next.
Speaking of which, I didn’t see him. Of course, I didn’t expect him to be padding around the Skywalk with one of those stickers on the front of his jacket that says, “Hello, my name is
Phantom Fiend.” But I didn’t see anyone who looked the part. Actually, I didn’t see anyone at all, which didn’t entirely thrill me.
So I went to the assigned telescope, which, as described, was tucked into the corner overlooking both the Charles River and downtown Boston. The morning sun sparkled on the calm skin of the water and flashed on the distant office towers. In the distance, the newly clean water of Boston Harbor looked nearly turquoise.
I had no change for the telescope and wasn’t of the mind to walk back into the lobby to get any, so I stood and drank in the view with my bare eyes. Vehicles in miniature dawdled down Boylston Street fifty stories below, reminding me of the Matchbox cars my father used to bring home for me when I was a kid. Down on the street, people were but insignificant little specks flitting about, and I couldn’t help but think that’s how the Phantom regarded them in life as well as in death — as insignificant, a means toward a very temporary gratification, or maybe just a step in his pursuit of fame.
I wondered if on a clear day you could see Hawaii. Probably not. And then I realized I was facing the wrong way, which I deemed to be something of a metaphor, though for what, I wasn’t exactly sure. I did know one thing for certain: it would be nice if Maggie picked up the phone and gave me a call. That said, I hadn’t actually broken a finger dialing her cell phone number, either.
Just then my phone rang. I looked at the incoming number and saw it was “Unavailable.” I answered with my trademark, clipped “Jack Flynn here.”
“I told you to go alone and you’re not,” the Phantom said.
I looked down the long, sun-soaked expanse of the Skywalk in both directions and saw an older man in a Red Sox cap and sunglasses peering through a telescope. From the way he was standing, favoring one leg, I assumed it was Edgar. I replied, “I wasn’t followed, and I haven’t used my phone.”
The Phantom didn’t respond directly to that assertion. Instead, he said without a hint of impatience, “Leave the Prudential Center complex. Drive by taxi to the September 11th memorial in the Public Garden. Go there right away. Again, do not use your cell phone or contact anyone about anything. I will meet you there.”
This Phantom was lucky I had a lot of time on my hands. Truth is, I was starting to doubt his last assertion, that he’d meet me there, and was wondering if this might be some sort of wild serial killer chase, meaning I was going to come away empty-handed and still without a story for the next day’s Record. That being the case, I suspected good old Barry Bor would be getting another call on his show, and I’d have yet another miserable morning to follow.
I did as told again. Should I ever reunite with Maggie Kane, this was probably pretty good practice at being married. Again, a cab happened to be out front, but I was less suspicious because it was an actual cabstand. I rode the six blocks down to the Public Garden in anxious silence, got out at the corner of the park, and walked along the sidewalk of Arlington Street toward the main entrance at the base of Commonwealth Avenue.
This park was also familiar ground. It’s where I got engaged to be married, where I first told a former live-in girlfriend named Elizabeth Riggs that I loved her as we tromped through the sunlit snow one Sunday morning in the calm aftermath of a bad blizzard, where I last saw former Record publisher Paul Ellis alive the morning he was murdered in the parking lot of his newspaper. And now I was heading for this memorial built in honor of 202 Massachusetts residents killed in the attack on the World Trade Center in New York; many of the people were aboard the two planes that were hijacked shortly after leaving Logan Airport on the morning of September 11.
When I was about thirty yards from the park gates, I saw a cab roll to a stop at the entrance. The door flung open and a well dressed young man — I say well dressed and young because he looked similar to me — stepped out and strode purposefully inside the park in the direction of the September 11 memorial. Across the wrought-iron fence and through the defoliated trees that separated the Public Garden from Arlington Street, I could see the man sit on one of the stone benches facing a memorial wall etched with the names of all the victims. I slowed down, curious. He slouched with his two hands folded under his chin. He then hung his head low, his hands holding the back of his neck in what I guessed was sad contemplation.
I kept walking toward the gates of the Public Garden, but slower now. I didn’t know if this was the man I was supposed to meet. If it was, I was shocked at his age, which, like I said, was close to mine. I had anticipated someone much older, from the voice on the phone and the fact that the original Boston stranglings had occurred forty-plus years before. More likely, the guy was simply a visitor to the memorial, and a visitor who looked like he wanted some time alone.
It was when I was walking through the grand front gates, toward the memorial, that I heard what could have been a car backfiring, or someone setting off firecrackers, but I knew instantly to my core that it was something else entirely: gunshots. Reflexively, I ran my hands down my arms and torso to see if I had been the target. I felt nothing liquid, which was good. I also didn’t feel any pain, which was better. The sound had come from the area of the memorial, so I instinctively hunched low along the evergreen bushes and trotted along the cement path toward the man I had seen earlier.
I had run maybe twenty yards when, without warning, a figure in black blasted from one of the bushes and slammed directly into my face and chest with such ferocious force that we were both knocked to the ground. My head bounced on the pavement, causing me to see the clichéd stars of comic-book fame. More to the point, I also saw a handgun clank on the ground a few feet from my left arm. Without thinking, which is probably why I did it, I lunged for it, but the guy who knocked me over had already scrambled to his feet and dove on the weapon just ahead of me. He then leapt back up and sprinted toward the park entrance. I climbed unsteadily to my feet and set off in an uncertain pursuit.
I had staggered but a dozen or so steps when I saw the guy fling open the back door of an awaiting van along the curb of Arlington Street. I saw the van peel away. I heard a woman wailing in the distance, “He’s bleeding to death. Someone call for help. He’s dying.”
The next day’s paper would identify the victim as Joshua Carpenter, the husband of a flight attendant who was killed in the September 11, 2001, attack. His family would be quoted saying that, without the actual body of his wife, without a gravestone to mark it, he visited the memorial every morning to mourn her. Police would say that he was the victim of a brazen daylight robbery, and that uniformed officers and plainclothes detectives were calling in all their informants and scouring the city’s most drug-addled sections for any tips on the killers.
I knew it wasn’t a robbery. I knew this poor man wasn’t the intended victim. And I knew as well that the cops would never find the killer.
But that’s all I knew, and that was a huge problem.
13
My plane bounced down at McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas, as if the pilot was in as big a rush to get to the tables as everyone else. Everyone but me, that is. I had come here to gamble, though not in the same way that my fellow passengers likely would. No, I was in Vegas to pay a visit to one Bob Walters, once one of the lead investigators on the Boston Strangler case, a lieutenant detective now retired from the Boston Police Department for some twenty years.
I’ll admit, it would have been a hell of a lot easier to have called him on the phone instead of flying nearly three thousand miles to knock on his door, except that I subscribe to the theory that in newspaper reporting, and life in general, it’s always better to show up. If there’s only one thing I’ve learned in twenty-plus years in the information negotiation business, it’s this: People tell you things in person that they wouldn’t on the phone. They’re not as likely to slam a door in your face as they are a receiver in your ear. They admire the effort made in pursuit of knowledge, and generally reward it.
I also thought it was a pretty opportune excuse to get the hell out of Boston, given that
people kept dying the worst possible deaths, with at least one of those deaths apparently intended to be mine.
The day had been a tense one. Peter Martin, Vinny Mongillo, and I listened to Justine Steele’s rationalization for not running the story that morning, reporting the fact that a serial killer named for the Boston Strangler had murdered at least two women and reached out to a Record reporter to warn that more deaths were on the way. I guess being publisher means, among other things, never having to say you’re sorry, because an apology she did not give. What she did give, though, was a promise to run the story the following morning.
That led to the question of whether to report the fact that I had been contacted by someone claiming to be the Phantom who directed me to go to a location — the Boston Public Garden — in which someone was murdered. On this we collectively decided to withhold information, based on reasons I thought were just. It was all too circumstantial. It looked like we were trying too hard to inject ourselves into the story. And the tipster may not have been the Phantom at all. Truth be told, I didn’t think he was.
Which brings me to the most significant question in all this, at least in regard to me: Who wanted me dead, and why? I was reaching the conclusion that it was preposterous, if not downright impossible, that the same figure tipping me off about the strangulation deaths of young women was also trying to kill me. Why guide me with letters and try to kill me in person?
So I updated the story for the following morning’s paper to include the fact that the Phantom had also contacted radio host Barry Bor and led him to a website that contained photographs of a murder scene. That done, I sneaked to the airport in the back of Vinny Mongillo’s car and boarded a nonstop Delta flight for Vegas. Normally I’d be over the moon about an all-expense paid trip to Sin City — a couple of nights in a five-star hotel, dinner at Craft-steak, blackjack at the Wynn Las Vegas, maybe a cocktail or two at the Ghost Bar. But on this particular trip, all I wanted to do was get safely to my room, sleep for seven hours, and make it to Bob Walters’s house in one living piece the following morning.
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