Instead, I told Mongillo, “Fuck it. I’m going for it.”
His face broke out in a broad smile—a warm aberration amid the emotional malaise of the past couple of days. He got up out of his double-wide chair and embraced me, first soft, then harder, patting my back all the while.
“I’ll never have to work another weekend again,” he whispered into my ear.
“I’ll have you back on the overnight shift by next week, asshole,” I replied.
“Blow me.”
“Bitch.”
As I pulled back, he stared me in the eyes and said simply, “Thank you.” And that’s all I really needed to hear.
I told him, briefly, what I had learned about Fight for Life, and asked him to press his law enforcement confidantes on it.
Back at my desk, I could feel the mood lighten. Or maybe I just felt light-headed at the thought of making more money than your typically paidRecord reporter. I love money, but more on that some other time. Meantime, Justine Steele, the editor-in-chief, swung by my desk.
“Good job at the service this morning, Jack.”
“Oh, you know how it is. You never say everything you want to say, and you always think up the best lines after you’re done.”
She put a hand on my shoulder and said, “No, I mean it. I wouldn’t have changed a word.”
Regarding Justine, she took over as editor two years ago. Paul Ellis wisely ousted the former editor in chief, Bob Appleton, after he nearly got in the way of the paper—all right, me—breaking a blockbuster story about the president of the United States in the final days of the last national campaign. Even more wisely, he reached down into our ranks and plucked Steele for the top job.
Boston born and bred, with the thick accent to prove it, she began at theRecord as an intern; begged, borrowed, and pleaded for a staff job right out of college; covered the far-removed suburbs, the police department; then worked out of our Washington bureau, our Hong Kong bureau; and later became managing editor. Paul wasn’t even trying to be politically correct when he appointed her the first woman editor in the paper’s history. She was, quite simply, the best person for the job.
Ever since, she’s displayed a surprising amount of humility and humanity—unlike the stereotypical woman who gets to where she is by digging her high heels into the necks of so many sisters on her way to the top.
“Jack, I know how close you were to Paul, but we really need you putting your feelings aside and leading the charge on this story,” she said. “As it is right now, we have next to nothing new for morning. I need you.”
I need you. I never hear those words enough from a woman. No man does. In plain black-and-white, my future had become the proverbial elephant in the room, the unmentionable; I wondered if this was her way of asking what I planned to do next. So I said, “I’m already looking at some angles and shagging down tips. I’m also figuring out what the hell my future is at this place, and whether it’s in this room.”
She said, “You know as well as I do how big a story the murder of the publisher and the potential sale of the paper is, Jack, and I know as well as you do that you’re in an awkward position. I respect the hell out of you for that story you wrote in yesterday’s editions. But here’s the thing: I really don’t want to read anything anywhere else that we don’t have first. I need your help on that.”
“You have it,” I said. She nodded at me, let her eyes linger on mine for an extra second to confirm we had an understanding, and walked back to her office.
I snapped up the telephone and dialed out the number of the police commissioner, John Leavitt.
I got the usual, “Can I ask who’s calling,” from his secretary, followed by the ever onerous, “Can I ask what this is about?”
“Sure. I just wanted to talk to the commissioner about the pictures we have of him in a crotchless clown suit handing out anatomically correct animal balloons at the Franklin Elementary School.”
Just kidding. I said, “I’d like to talk to him about the Ellis killing.”
You could win ten Pulitzer Prizes and be not only the toast of the town, but the king of all journalism, and it wouldn’t matter a whit to most secretaries, whose sole ambition is to make their bosses seem more important than everyone else.
Case in point: She said in a self-important, high-pitched voice, “We’re referring all those calls to Lt. Travers.” Before I could say a word, she transferred me. I hung up and called her number back. I explained to her, in as calm and cheerful a way as I could muster, that the commissioner asked me to call him. She had a suspicious tone as she said, “Please hold,” then a moment later transferred me without apologies or comment.
“Jack,” the commissioner said, picking up the phone, “you’re not about to start holding us up for information in this investigation, I hope? I heard about your antics out at the crime scene on Monday.”
He had a hint of humor in his voice, which I liked. He was a good, no-nonsense chief who had a strong understanding of criminal justice and a better understanding of people, and, best of all, how the two intertwined.
“No, sir,” I said. “I want to report a crime.”
And that’s exactly what I did as he listened silently on the other end. Finally, he said, “Well, I wish you hadn’t waited as long as you did to report it. If I thought we were struggling with this case a few minutes ago, imagine how I feel now?”
Then he went on to say in that efficient clip of his, “First things first. Even though the crime—attempted murder—was committed in Florida, it’s obvious that you’re being stalked in Massachusetts and you need protection here. I’ll assign a detail to you. I’ll send them over to theRecord within the hour. Do not—I repeat, do not—leave the building until and unless you are accompanied by my officers. Insist on seeing everyone’s identification cards, not just their badges. No one will be insulted.
“Second, I have to immediately pass this information on to Lt. Luke Travers, who’s directing the case—”
“Sir, I have a problem with that. I need discretion here, and Travers and I have some personal issues—”
“He’s told me you’ve had a prior disagreement—”
“Did he tell you what it was about?”
“No, and I’m not interested.”
That means he did.
Leavitt said, “I have no choice, for your own safety and for our hopes to solve Paul Ellis’s murder, to pass along the information. I also have to make Florida aware of it, and you may be summoned to whatever county this occurred in to file a report.”
Things were out of my control. I just had to sit and go with it, and truth is, in some small way, given all the other decisions I had to make, that was okay by me.
Brent Cutter looked up from his desk surprised—or maybe it was annoyed—when I strode through the door of his outsized office.
“Jack,” he said in his typically unctuous and condescending tone, “this isn’t the newsroom up here. We have structure. We make appointments.”
Yeah, and we look out only for ourselves, apparently.
“I just need a minute,” I said, clipped, businesslike.
He stood up on his side of the compulsively neat desk. I remained standing on mine. We must have looked pretty odd to the secretaries who sat right outside his door.
I said, “I understand you’re making a bid at an executive committee meeting tomorrow to be the next publisher of theRecord.”
He stood impassively, until he finally moved his head as if to nod. You could have heard a clock ticking, if he had one, which he doesn’t, because he gets his time, makes his appointments, functions as a human being, all from the two computers that sit on his desk. I don’t know why that bothers me so, but it does. A clock, for God sake. Get a clock.
As I fixed my stare on him, he said with a dismissive smile, “Jack, this is all way above your pay grade. You make sure you cover Paul’s murder well. I’ll make sure we have the experienced family leadership to lead us through this most difficult time.”
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br /> Experienced family leadership. This most difficult time.The corporatese was sickening, but I maintained composure.
“Brent, as a courtesy, I want to inform you that I also plan to go to the meeting and, at the request of some current board members, I’m going to ask to be instated as the next publisher.”
Information delivered, mission accomplished, I turned to walk out the door. He said, his voice firmer now, “Jack, you try that and you’ll get eaten alive. I’ll make sure of it. You don’t have the skill set to run this paper. You don’t have the background. And you don’t have the name.
“You might be good at what you do down in the newsroom, but this is a whole different endeavor up here. The next publisher needs experience in financial management. He needs to understand the intricacies of circulation figures and advertising revenues. He needs to be able to multi-task at the same time as he leads.”
Skill sets. Endeavors. Multivitamins or whatever it was he said. I kept thinking of those Flintstone tablets I took as a kid. I used to like Barney best, though I guess that’s not important now. I wondered what Paul would tell me to do at this very moment.
I turned back around to face him and said, “Brent, the next publisher has to understand the news business, nothing more, nothing less. He has to understand what it is and what it means to put out a great newspaper. On that front, you don’t have the first hint of a vague clue.”
His face flushed even a deeper shade of red, like that of a Twizzler. “Jack, like I said, you’re good at being a reporter. I respect you for that. But you’re way over your head up here. These are changing times. Family-run papers like these might not survive much longer without some major changes.”
Major changes?
“What the hell are you saying?”
“I’m saying the next publisher has to be a realist, and he has to understand business principles. You’re not and you don’t.”
Touché to Brent for his uncharacteristically rhythmic use of the English language. Maybe he was his father’s son after all, though obviously not. Speaking of whom, John Cutter was probably rolling over in his grave these days, for a lot of reasons, not the least of which was the behavior of his son, which ranged somewhere between foolish and blasphemous.
“So you’d sell out to the Campbells?” I asked that flippantly, assuming a steadfast denial on his part. I mean, selling out the Cutter-Ellis–ownedBoston Record to an utterly mediocre chain—complete lunacy, right? Right?
After a pause that carried on too long, he replied, “I’d listen to what they had to offer. We have no choice anymore. For God’s sake, Jack, Cousin Paul understood that.”
Paul understood no such thing, but I didn’t have the patience or the inclination to explain that to him here and now. So I just shook my head and said, “Brent, I’m sorry it’s come down to this, but I’ll see you tomorrow afternoon at the board meeting.” And I walked out.
When I arrived in the newsroom, Barbara, the chief receptionist and my surrogate mother, told me, “Honey, clear out your voicemails. All your calls are getting bumped to me and I don’t know where the hell you are anymore.” Apropos of nothing and everything, she added, “I don’t even know if we’re going to have a job tomorrow.”
At my desk, I listened to the thirty or so phone messages and one particularly pointed call from Luke Travers, the lieutenant with the Boston Police Department, telling me in no uncertain terms, “I want to remind you that each time you choose to withhold information, you’re hindering our investigation.” How nice of him to care.
After him, along came the melodic voice of a young woman who identified herself as Lindsey Nutter. Her name didn’t ring a bell, but her tone certainly pressed my buttons—not to carry this telephone analogy out too far. She was confirming our date for nineP.M. of that very night at Café Louis in Boston’s Back Bay. I flipped to my datebook and saw her name with the notation, “Harry’s friend,” and remembered that my college roommate in Washington, trying to get me over my rather pronounced post-Elizabeth funk, was trying his hand as a faraway Cupid. Obviously she didn’t read the papers to see the kind of, well, conundrum I was in. I figured, what the hell, I could use some newfound female companionship to give my brain a rest, and I could sure as hell use a drink.
As I was preparing to walk out of the newsroom for the day, my phone rang and I instinctively snatched it up with my trademark, “Flynn.”
“Jack Flynn?”
Impatiently: “Yeah, you’ve got him.”
“Mr. Flynn, this is Terry Campbell, chairman of the board at Campbell Newspapers.”
Terry, by the way, is a man. I hate when men have women’s names like Terry and Carroll and Kim and Pat, though there’s something sexually appealing about the converse—women who are named Toni or Sam or Ronnie, but I guess that’s not really important now.
“What can I do for you, Mr. Campbell.” I refused to allow my voice to betray any emotion. If anything, my tone was entirely uninspired and unimpressed—standard issue reporter, you might say.
“Well sir, I was wondering if you might be so kind as to give me a few minutes of your valuable time for a personal meeting to discuss the futures of our respective companies. It’s been made clear to me that you might be playing an important decision-making role at theRecord. You might find such a meeting”—and here he paused the way some people do when they’re trying to make an unsubtle point—“very beneficial.”
Yeah, but did my life depend on it?
“To tell you the truth, Terry, I’m rather busy these days. Perhaps you might want to call our human resources director if you want to talk about benefits.”
He didn’t laugh.
“I can guarantee you that I’ll be brief.”
Brief, as in, bang, bang, you’re dead. I smiled to myself.
I quickly weighed my options. Not to meet means never to know firsthand what he wanted, to lack the essential information he would have provided, good or bad. In my business, information is currency, firsthand information being like gold coins, accepted and understood around the world.
“When?”
“Tomorrow morning, elevenA.M. , the Ritz-Carlton.”
“See you then.”
Eighteen
ALOT OF PEOPLE, too many people, regard my quaint hamlet of Boston like it’s some sort of backwater populated by vanilla-flavored Wasps who wear brown shoes with navy blue suits and believe fish and chips represent a gourmet meal. They look at us like a New York annex, not so much a younger brother but a distant, poor cousin, unfashionable, unsophisticated, even uncouth.
To them, I would highly recommend a visit to Café Louis, where the grilled margherita pizza, the linguine in a Tuscan meat sauce, and the Baby Baci cake, served warm with homemade cinnamon ice cream are as good as anything that the waiters might serve at the Union Square Café or the Gotham Bar and Grill.
The restaurant is a rather austere room—the interior designer I’m sure would call it “minimalist” and charge $500 an hour for putting nothing in it—in the back of the renowned Louis clothing store, an establishment where neckties fetch upward of $100 and shirts twice that much. Best as I can tell, you need a mortgage to buy one of their suits. If I’m paying that kind of money for anything, I expect it to come with windshield wipers.
Not that I’m claiming poverty here. Paul did offer me a small stake in the company to keep me around a couple of years back after I broke that White House story. But Paul’s also a Wasp to the core, and he put the stock in trust, meaning I would barely see a dime until I was likely living in a place called Pleasant Manor and preparing for my eternal home at Shady Acres. But hopefully it would be enough that I wouldn’t end up in Marshton.
Back to Café Louis. I arrived a few minutes early, exchanged greetings with Matt, the congenial maitre d’ who sported a slightly disheveled look that probably involved clothes that cost more than my car, and took a seat at a corner table with myNew York Times. I ordered a Sam Adams from a waiter with a goatee
and a collarless shirt who called me “dude.” Didn’t matter. I just wanted twelve ounces of icy, golden lager, every one of which I needed right about now to put the day in perspective and ease my angst over what was about to come.
I don’t do blind dates. Why I was doing one now is tribute to the persuasive powers of Harry Putnam, a longtime friend who told me repeatedly and forcefully that I was making a mistake by walking away from my relationship with Elizabeth, and okay, if I insisted on doing it, here’s someone who might relieve the pain. Actually, what he said was that I’d be an obtuse idiot for not taking Lindsey Nutter to dinner, if not to bed. That last part was pure Putnam, not me. I’ve never even seen the woman, thus the descriptiveblind before the objectdate.
Initially I had recommended lunch at the venerable Locke-Ober Café, a Boston institution that was in existence long before salmon was raised on farms and chickens were given free range. Even with a new celebrity chef, they still have liver and onions on the luncheon menu, and a goodly number of silver-haired men swear it enhances their sex drive, though maybe “sex walk” is a more accurate term.
I also suggested lunch because unlike dinner, which can lollygag for hours, the noon meal has a purpose, a beginning, and a reasonably defined end. As important, it can be cut short if need be with the simple line, “I’m sorry, but I have to get back to work,” an excuse not entirely incongruent with my chosen profession.
When I called Putnam to report back on my brilliant plan, his response was as follows: “Being a good reporter doesn’t mean you’re smart. You really are a dumb fuck, aren’t you, Flynn?”
I’m open to suggestions about how I’m supposed to respond to that. With none immediately available, I followed his direct orders to reschedule the meeting from lunch to dinner and to change the venue to a place, in his words, “a little less nineteenth century.”
“Not,” he added, “that there’s anything wrong with that. Next time I’m in town, the chateaubriand at Lockes is on you.”
Lindsey arrived. In the split second that she glided to the table in a flash of bare arms and long legs, I realized she was every bit, every inch, what Putnam said she was, which is inexorably, singularly gorgeous, with silken blond hair that flowed just beyond her shoulders, cheekbones so high and firm they looked as if they required a zoning variance, and a body that was at once lean and elegant yet wonderfully curvaceous, a veritable Disney World adventure ride, something called, say, Nirvana.
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