He paused for just long enough that I thought he was done, then added,
"I need some room. I need some time. And I need some help."
This was curious. I considered his words, then said, "I give you some time and space and whatever help it is you're talking about, what do I get in return?"
"I can help you on this case, just like I helped that reporter out in L.a." only I'm hoping you're a little more loyal, or at least reliable to your sources."
I said, "I think Benedict Arnold was slightly more loyal than the last reporter you dealt with."
He almost smiled in spite of himself. I looked him over for a moment.
Despite my finely honed abilities in the area of character judgment, I couldn't get a full handle yet on Kent Drinker. I wasn't sure if he was driving events in this case, or if the events were driving him, whether he was mishandling the investigation or deftly trying to conceal some larger truth. Not knowing hurt. It left me unsure whether he was friend or foe. I wanted to believe the former. My natural tendencies always caused me to suspect the latter, especially from public officials.
The raw facts were these: he had misidentified the presidential assassin. He had showed an inordinate amount of interest in who had called my hospital room. He had apparently consorted with a militia leader to concoct a story about motive, and then lied to me about it.
About an hour ago, I had learned that he might have lied to me about that militia leader being a paid informant. He had a direct line to the president of the United States. He had iced out even his top subordinate, Stevens, and was seemingly a one-man show in trying to solve the case.
Or trying not to solve it. I didn't know, and thus, my dilemma. And this thought popped into the front of my mind from one of the deep recesses: had he really iced out Stevens, or was I being played for a moron? Wouldn't be the first time, though that's not really the point here.
He kicked softly at a small stone in the field and said, "You drew too hasty a conclusion on Tony Clawson."
"Yeah?" I replied, my tone ranging from disbelief toward the incredulous.
Drinker ignored that and said, "You were right about some parts, wrong about others."
I played this through the journalistic calculator that was my mind.
"Let's see," I began. "Essentially, you publicly named a suspect who didn't even have the same eye color as the guy the Secret Service shot dead at Congressional. Help me out here with what we might have gotten wrong."
He asked, "Can I talk to you off the record?"
This again. I said, "I'd rather talk on the record and keep things on the up and up."
Drinker stayed silent for a moment.
"Once more, I'd like to, but I can't," he said. "I'd be fired in an hour, especially with my history. I want to stress, I have some information that's important for you to know."
Well, I didn't know whether to believe him, believe Stevens, or believe my own instincts, which told me not to believe anyone. The worst he could be doing was lying, so I told him, "Okay, on background, attributable to a law enforcement official."
"No way. There are only about three people who know what I know. I'd be fingered immediately." He paused and added, "My advice would be to take what I have and try to confirm it on your own."
There was a lengthy silence between us as I mulled my options, which were limited in number and scope. The last thing I expected on this night was for Drinker, who I regarded with little more than suspicion, to offer an enduring alliance and perhaps give me my biggest break on the case. Obviously I was wary for every good reason, but it wouldn't serve me well just then to shut him off.
In the quiet, Baker settled down in front of us and chewed on a stick.
I looked up briefly and saw that the sky was now a solid sheet of black.
"All right, off the record," I said.
Without much hesitation, Drinker started talking as if I had just turned on a spout. "We have a fucked-up situation. I'll admit up front, this shooting has nothing to do with the militia. You have us cold on that. And the dead shooter is not the Tony Clawson we offered up in that Home Depot ID, the California drifter. Good work on that, by the way. Sometimes I wish my people were as thorough."
"So you were lying last time when you told me Nathaniel was a paid informant?"
"I was protecting the truth."
I wasn't quite sure how to respond. So I didn't.
He continued, "It's a different Tony Clawson. And it's his background that's so interesting and so potentially devastating, especially to my agency."
Okay, so this was getting better by the syllable. I stayed silent, hoping the dead air would prod him to continue.
He stayed silent too. FBI agents must learn reporter tricks up at Quantico or something. I finally said, "Devastating, how?"
He shook his head purposefully. "Can't go that far," he said. He paused, then added, "Find out who Tony Clawson is, or was, and you'll know exactly what I mean."
Everyone had a suggestion. I thought of the words of the anonymous caller early that morning. Learn about Curtis Black, and you will have dug to the core of this case.
Baker came swaggering over and dropped the tennis ball at Drinker's feet. Drinker looked at me, then picked up the ball, gave it an underhand toss, and said to the dog, "Go get it," as if he needed instruction.
In the momentary silence, the voice of my anonymous source filled my mind again. Nothing is as it seems. A good warning, it increasingly seemed. So the obvious question now, beyond the obvious questions about Clawson, was what in God's name Curtis Black had to do with Tony Clawson.
Drinker turned his attention from the dog to me. "I need to ask you one more time, and I'm hoping you'll decide to cooperate. Who was that on the telephone in your hospital room that day?"
I didn't utter a word. In the void, Drinker added, "Look, I'll admit, we have a full-court press on you in trying to find the identity of your caller. I tried the hard approach. Stevens is trying the soft approach. You've been more than resistant. Here's the truth: I think I know who called you that day. That person's been in touch with you since. That person can screw up this entire investigation and, in effect, screw up the entire story that I'm more than ready to help you with. You help me, I help you, and you'll in fact be helping yourself."
Well, note especially his reference to Stevens, because that's the last clear sentence I heard him say. After that, it was as if I had just been kneed in the gut. So perhaps my first instincts were right: Stevens and Drinker really were in this together, trying to play with my mind. Or perhaps not. My head was starting to hurt. So much for the mind-clearing benefits of my evening dog walk.
I said, "Truth is, I really don't know who was on the phone, and that's all I'm saying about it right now." I regarded this as my best strategy. If I gave up any more details, my value to Drinker would likely lessen, and I'd receive less help. Simple journalist survival skills.
Drinker looked me over carefully. "There's a lot at stake for both of us," he said. With that, he turned around silently and walked back across the field from whence he came, his tan raincoat fading and then melding into the dark of the night. He left behind a couple of questions: Who the hell is this Tony Clawson, and is Drinker as good a friend as he wants me to believe? I knew then that the answer to the former would probably reap the answer to the latter. Now it was just a matter of doing the work.
Boston, Massachusetts February 13, 1979
Curtis Black sat in the front of the van as if he were watching a movie, transfixed by the developments unfolding on the screen. And just like a movie, everything was proceeding as if it were all part of a tightly written script.
The driver stood casually beside the armored Wells Fargo truck as if he didn't have a worry in the world, oblivious to everything going on around him, including Black's attention. He even pulled a cigarette out of his shirt pocket and lit it, took a few puffs, let it fall to the pavement, and stubbed it out under his black shoe. His cohort came
from the back of the van, pulled out a dolly, and walked into the Shawmut Bank, where he would collect the day's receipts. If all went according to plan, he should be visible in the door in about seven minutes.
"Be alert," Black said into the small microphone pinned to the wrist of his shirt. Inside the van, the three men crouched against the back door.
Black continued staring out the window. The hazy dusk had grown thick, made to seem even darker by the moonless sky. A mist gathered on the windshield. The streets appeared slick with water, reflecting the glare of car headlights and store signs. All in all, Black thought to himself, ideal conditions for a heist.
Black regarded the armored car driver for a moment. He was about forty-five, maybe fifty years old, ruddy from all that time standing outdoors in weather just like this, stout, boyish, as if his wife made his lunch for him every day and packed it in a brown paper bag. He had big forearms, probably from lifting bags of money back at the warehouse. Imagine that? Black thought to himself. Here's a guy making $10 an hour, and he spends his days lugging other people's money around to the point that it probably hurts his back. Life can be ironic, and irony can be cruel.
Black shot a quick glance at his watch. The guard had been inside the bank for four minutes now. According to the plan, he should be approaching the door in roughly three minutes. Black's three men continued to crouch against the van door.
"Sanchez, come on up," Black said into the microphone.
The driver of the getaway car opened his door and walked up to the side of the van, his ski mask on top of his head like a wool hat, with the part that covered his face not yet pulled down. He stood beside the van, waiting, looking at the ground, concealing his face from any passersby.
And just as planned, the guard appeared inside the door of the bank, pushing a dolly with a duffel bag. He turned around and opened the door with his backside.
"Showtime," Black announced into his wrist. "G."
In a blaze of action, the rear door of the van burst open. The three men jumped out into the moist winter air, their black masks shielding their faces. On the pavement, they fanned out, then sprinted toward the guard at the bank door from different angles. There was to be no mistake: this was a relentless commando raid. Shoot one attacker, and there were still two others to finish the job.
"Freeze," Stemple yelled. The guard jerked his face up and was instinctively reaching for the semiautomatic pistol in his side holster when Rocco hit him with a body slam at full running speed. The guard sprawled out on the pavement, dazed. When he rolled over to get up, Cox was already on top of him, stripping his gun away, then pushing a jackboot down on his throat.
"You even move your tongue and I'll fucking rip your fucking Adam's apple out," Cox seethed. The guard stared upward, helpless and wide-eyed.
Meantime, at the van, Sanchez yanked his mask down over his face and approached the driver of the armored car from behind. His sole job was to immobilize the driver, preferably by putting him in a headlock, and knocking him unconscious with a knee to the face. Black had chosen Sanchez for this role because of his immense physical stature. He was six feet, two inches tall, some 220 pounds of raw muscle, a veritable mountain of a man.
Black watched from the seat of the van as Sanchez headed toward the armored truck at a controlled but rapid clip. He saw the driver reach for his sidearm. Just as the driver pulled his weapon out, Sanchez made contact, grabbing his coat and preparing for the headlock.
It was misting out, and that presented an unexpected problem. The drops of moisture had balled up on the driver's water-repellent jacket.
Sanchez's hands slipped, causing a couple of seconds of uncertainty.
The driver, considerably shorter, squirmed loose. Sanchez lost his balance-not enough to fall, but plenty enough to leave a gaping canyon of opportunity for any decent shot. Barely stopping to aim, the driver fired his gun in the direction of the bandits in front of the bank door, a wild shot but a shot nonetheless. The report felt like an explosion to Curtis Black, the sound echoing off the facades of the ancient stores and carrying down rain-slickened Hanover Street like a rolling ball of thunder.
As Black sat with his panoramic view from the front seat of the van, the moment seemed to freeze before his eyes. Sanchez stood a few feet from the driver, trying to regain his balance. The driver stood with the gun in his hand, taking aim again at the bandits. By the bank door, Stemple and Rocco, grabbing the duffel bag filled with money to lug to the getaway car, had fallen to their knees at the sound of the shot. Cox took shelter by crouching down behind the incapacitated guard.
Any and all semblance of control had been lost. Every minute of meticulous planning had become nothing more than a distant, disconnected memory, irrelevant to the events at hand. Never in the life of Curtis Black had he felt the raw terror he did at this instant, watching his heist spiral out of control, his destiny in the hands of four men he neither knew nor trusted.
He watched as Sanchez regained his balance, then shifted his body weight in preparation to lunge at the gun-wielding driver. On the sidewalk, he saw Stemple and Rocco reaching inside their jackets, though now he couldn't tell who was who. They both wore those ominous ski masks. They were both dressed identically.
"Hold fire," Black yelled into his wrist microphone. "Hold your fucking fire."
Crack.
Another shot, another echo rolling down Hanover Street. Passersby screamed, though Black hardly heard them. They dove behind cars, scattered down the sidewalk like frightened animals. Black scanned the scene frantically, looking for the source of the shot, afraid to know the answer. There was no good answer.
That one second felt like an hour. Black watched in horror as the driver dropped his gun, then crumpled to the wet pavement. Blood began flowing from a grotesque cavity in his neck, the liquid trickling out into a puddle of crimson that formed beneath the man's face. Sanchez stood over him for a moment, looked up at Black in the van, then bolted back toward the getaway car.
Stemple and Rocco ran toward the car with the duffel bag, their bodies slung low to the ground by the weight of the money. Cox crouched down low to the guard, lifted his gun up over his head, and swung it down violently at the guard's face, crushing his nose. He then stood up and sprinted after Stemple and Rocco.
Black flung the driver's-side door open on the van, lowered his head to conceal his features, and raced the ten yards back to the getaway car, where he snapped the rear door open and settled into the backseat.
Rocco and Stemple flung the money into the trunk and got into the back beside him. Cox settled into the front. Sanchez drove. The group squealed away, a tiny band of silence amid so much chaos.
Success and failure. Maybe a million dollars in the trunk. One man dead, five lives in so much jeopardy.
In a parking lot at the end of the Boston Fish Pier, where the group switched getaway cars from the Lincoln to a stolen station wagon, Black paused for a moment in the darkening night.
"Who killed him?" he asked, in something just short of a shout. "Who killed him?"
No answer.
The new driver, who had met them at the pier, took in the scene with panicked eyes. It wasn't supposed to be like this, he knew. The mood was supposed to be one of restrained celebration. It was his job to sweep them quietly out of town.
"What happened?" the driver asked nervously.
No answer. Rather, the men silently but hurriedly folded themselves into the new vehicle, ignoring the question. Stemple paused at the door, turned around, and flung his gun far into the harbor. Black could only shake his head. What was the point now? he wondered.
Would it do any good to merely yell at a man who had just committed cold-blooded murder? Instead, he leaned against a light pole and vomited into a plastic trash bag. His life, he knew, would never be the same.
fifteen
Present Day Friday, November 3
A thin, cold mist descended on downtown Chelsea, the tiny droplets balling up on my coat and
in my hair, leaving a sheen on the potholed street so that the gaudy yellow neon lights of the Wall Street Check Cashing store reflected every which way I looked.
Grown men, mostly Asians and a few Hispanics, gathered aimlessly on street corners, some of them talking loudly, others just staring straight ahead. In front of the Goodwill store, one of the only successful businesses on this strip of Broadway, a man with a makeshift bullhorn read from the Bible, emphasizing the word Christ whenever he got the chance, almost singing it. No one seemed to notice him. On the street a few feet away, an ambulance slowly rode by, its siren blasting at full throttle. The man with the bullhorn yelled above the din.
With this as my backdrop, I pushed against the heavy wooden door into the dark haze of the Pigpen, which looked and smelled just as I had remembered it from a few years before, which is to say dirty and of stale beer. There was a fog from cigarette smoke both fresh and old.
Wan daylight filtered through tiny, yellow Plexiglas windows. Outside, the sound of the siren faded as the ambulance rolled down the street.
Inside, the bartender looked me up and down and said, "You need something?"
"Sammy around?" I asked, quickly figuring that small talk wouldn't get me very far in this establishment. A couple of barflies, middle-aged men with stubble on their faces and defeat in their eyes, looked my way. Across the room, I saw Sammy Markowitz sitting at his usual booth in the back, smoking a cigarette, flipping through a sheaf of papers that I assumed were the prior day's bookmaking profits. A banker's lamp glowed on his table.
"Not here," the bartender said.
I said, "You must have missed him come in, because he's sitting right over there." I began walking in Markowitz's direction when a sizable gentleman in an ill-fitting black sport jacket and a T-shirt stood up from a bar stool and blocked my path.
The Incumbent Page 22