The Nominee

by Brian McGrory

  I looked around the room at all these new creature comforts and the stunning view of the sun-splashed park outside the massive windows, and said to him, “If you don’t mind, plan on staying here again tonight. We’re a little exposed on that boat.” I caught myself and added, “Assuming you’re able to stay again tonight.”

  He nodded. “Mother’s going to love it when I show up at home with all these fancy soaps and shampoos.”

  As soon as he left, I snapped up the bedside phone and called one Vinny Mongillo, who was no doubt sweating buckets on the treadmill at his luxury gymnasium. Not quite sevenA.M. , and he picked up the phone on the first ring.

  “Mongillo here.”

  “Flynn here.”

  “Jesus Christ, Jack, I had a cat growing up who didn’t have as many lives as you do.”

  “Yeah, but he was probably better with a litter box.”

  All right, weak, I know, but note the aforementioned time.

  “I got skunked by theTraveler today, by Elizabeth. Come hell or high water, we’re getting that Randolph story in tomorrow’s paper. We’re coming back at them with a vengeance.”

  By the way, this is worth noting. When you lose on a story, the only possible antidote is to kick the living hell out of the competition the very next day, to kick them so hard they lose their ability to even come back at you. It’s not often I lose to begin with, but when I do, watch out. Someone pays. In this particular case, it would be Randolph. In war—and that’s what newspaper competition often feels like—I believe this is called collateral damage.

  “I’m with you.”

  “I’m going to have to lean hard on you to put it together. I’ve done a lot of the work over the last couple of weeks, but I’ll meet you in the newsroom later today to go over it.”

  The phone wasn’t down but five seconds when it rang and I stared at it for a long moment, wondering who the hell knew I was here. Twenty minutes ago, I didn’t even know I was here.

  I picked it up. It was 6:55, according to the alarm clock next to the phone.

  “Jack, it’s Elizabeth. We have to talk.”

  “Damn right we do. You screwed me, big-time. That why you came over the other night, to pump me for information? That why you wanted to leave the restaurant with me last night? Are you that desperate for a scrap of news that you trade on our former—” emphasis placed here on the word “former”—“relationship?”

  “Jack, first off, the other reporter got the bodyguard info independently. Once we had that, the editors were doing a story with me or without me. I added the stuff on the possible link because I couldn’t imagine that you wouldn’t use it. I wasn’t looking to beat you on your own attempted murder. I just couldn’t let theTraveler fall behind.”

  The word bullshit comes to mind, but I had to give her one point: I should have used the material myself. I was spread too thin, I was running so hard, that I was losing some of my judgment.

  She said, “We need to meet. I want to go over something with you.”

  “No way, not today. You’re the competition, which became painfully obvious in this morning’s paper. After this is over.”

  “Then it may be too late.”

  She was good at piquing my curiosity. She was also an excellent reporter, among other things. But I resisted.

  “Maybe tomorrow,” I said. “Today’s just not going to work.”

  She began arguing, but the other line rang, the noise jolting me upward as I sat on the edge of the sun-splashed bed. What, did everyone but Mr. Magoo know exactly where I was supposed to be, quote/unquote, hiding?

  “Hold on.” I pressed the hold button, then the button for the other phone line, and announced, “Jack Flynn here.”

  “You fucking prick. Let me tell you something, you fuck. When you least expect it, you’re going to turn around and feel the cold barrel of my gun pressed up against your forehead.”

  The voice, that of a seething, irrationally angry man, was too familiar, as, unfortunately, was his message. “Who is this?” I asked. Dumb question, I know. I wondered if anyone has ever answered it honestly and thoughtfully.

  Not yet sevenA.M. , and I had my ex-girlfriend on Line 1 and my would-be killer on Line 2. I didn’t know which one could do me more harm.

  “I’m the guy who’s going to kill you. I’m the last guy you’re ever going to see alive. I’m the guy you’re going to beg and plead and cry in front of, and when you’re done, I’m going to stick three bullets in your stupid fucking brain and watch you die, just like I did with your publisher. Then I’m going to spit on your bloody fucking face.”

  He certainly had a way with words, my intended assassin. By now, I recognized his voice as the one I heard a few nights before—“Fucking dog,” he said in that same contemptuous way—on the basketball court.

  I quickly reached into the top drawer of the nightstand, pulled out the Holy Bible, and flung it across the room at the door, hoping it might deliver yet another miracle. Sure enough, there was a knock, a cop yelling, “You all right,” and then a key in the hole.

  When the officer walked in the room, I pointed at the phone and mouthed the words, “Killer on Line 2.” Hey, it’s a life, albeit a threatened one.

  I said into the phone, “Why don’t we meet someplace and talk this thing through?”

  “We’ll meet,” he said. “We’ll fucking meet. We’ll meet exactly when I want us to meet, and it will be the last thing you ever do.”

  Across the room, the cop whispered into his portable radio. In front of me, the light for Line 1 continued to flash.

  “Look, let’s just talk about this for a damned minute.”

  He laughed into the phone, a sinister, wheezy laugh, and said, “Fuck yourself.”

  He hung up just as three plainclothes officers rushed into the room.

  I immediately pressed Line 1 and said, “I’m going to have to call you back.” And I hung up, Elizabeth’s voice leaking from the receiver as I thrust it down.

  Twenty-Two

  TERRYCAMPBELL WAS SITTINGon the corner stool of the Street Bar at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel when I strode in shortly after elevenA.M. I recognized his face from our brief encounter when he tried to hire me away a couple of years before, walked right up to him and introduced myself. He shot me a blank, bloodshot stare, stuck out his hand and said it was nice of me to make the time. I neither shook nor replied. His hand just hung there for a moment until he self-consciously pulled it back to his side. I don’t imagine that really pleased him. I don’t pretend to particularly care.

  Campbell was tieless, which is not to be confused with tireless. He had on a blue button-down shirt open at the neck beneath a navy blue blazer, a pair of gray wool pants, and tasseled loafers. I hate tasseled loafers, but figured that pointing out my distaste for such things might be the wrong way to launch our hopefully brief though possibly deadly relationship.

  Beyond the clothing, he had one of those faces that looks like it was mashed against a concrete wall at some early point in his childhood, flat with a forehead so wide and sprawling you could strip a cigarette billboard across it, all accentuated by a line of brown hair receding faster than a Kennebunkport tide. He looked, in short, like a bulldog, or one of the bad guys in a Dick Tracy comic strip, mean, even thuggish, someone accustomed to striking fear in his business adversaries from his appearance as much as his brains.

  But brains he apparently had as well, at least when it comes to making money. He had already struck his first few million in an oil field somewhere in the godforsaken center of Texas when someone somewhere told him there was yet another kind of black gold—ink. So he bought a mid-sized newspaper in Mobile, Alabama, then another one in South Dakota, then another in Ohio and Illinois and eventually in sixteen states, twenty-seven newspapers in all, each of them becoming nearly identical in style and tone to the one he bought before.

  His modus operandi was well grooved, not subject to even the slightest degree of deviation, according to my research of
the past few days. He would install a publisher-editor from his corporate office. That figure, the same man, in many cases, who traveled from one new acquisition to the next, would then cut the editorial staff, sometimes by as much as half, meaning reporters and mid-level editors were simply shown the door with two weeks’ severance pay. He would hire fancy graphics specialists and buy souped-up full-color presses, so he could then appear at the monthly luncheons of the Rotarians or the Chamber of Commerce and gleefully report how much more money Campbell Newspapers was spending on the new and improved product.

  All the while, the news hole—the part of the paper devoted to actual news, named such because newspaper ads are always laid out first—was dramatically reduced. The paper shrunk in size. Wire reports filled the front pages because they’re cheaper to produce than staff-written stories. Local events went uncovered. Campaigns were given nary a nod. Government officials were provided no oversight. And ads were printed in blazing reds and blues and greens. The advertisers, smitten with the appearances, willingly paid more. And when they did, they often got favorable news stories written about them, as part of what Campbell liked to call “knocking down the archaic wall that isolates a newsroom from the rest of the thriving world.”

  Well, archaic is one way to put it. Sacred is another, and in the parlance of the times, Campbell’s philosophy sucked, and for my money, so did he.

  But in business parlance, it was revenue positive. See. I could be a publisher. The circulation levels were generally maintained by the jazzy graphics and splashes of color and the AP stories he played on the front page about the three-year-old in Oklahoma having his arm torn off by a white Bengal tiger traveling with a western circus. And the profit margins soared into the stratosphere, at least 30 percent at every one of his papers, according to the reports I was reading, and at some papers, closing in on 40 percent. They were the darling of Wall Street, causing other newspaper chains to ape their every cut and gimmick.

  Best as I could tell, though, their strategy rarely involved rampant, violent deaths at the papers they were buying. Note the word rarely, rather than never, because in one case, at some middling paper in Ohio, Mongillo had informed me that the head of the trade union was found dead of a gunshot wound days after Campbell bought the newspaper. The medical examiner determined it was self-inflicted, but news reports at the time cast no small amount of doubt.

  Financially speaking, compare his profits to a paper like theRecord which, while publicly traded, was essentially family-owned. We kept raising the staff levels. We rarely put wire on the front, preferring to cover major stories with our own reporters. We broke stories that other, even larger papers had to follow. We maintained reporters abroad. We had blanket coverage at home. We gave readers a regular diet of in-depth, multi-part investigative projects. And most of the time, our profit margins hung in the 22 percent range, high enough to make plenty of money and maintain the craft at an excellent level, though not so high that Merrill Lynch brokers coveted our stable stock, particularly because in bad times, recessionary times, our margins might dip as low as 16 to 18 percent without anyone in the front office getting panicky.

  Paul, and before him, John Cutter, believed that good journalism made for good business, and good business provided for good journalism. What they never did was intertwine the two.

  “I understand this isn’t an easy time for you,” Campbell said. We were both standing awkwardly at the bar, him on one side of his stool, me on the other. He said this without a trace of sympathy in his voice, but rather as if he was repeating a weather forecast he had just heard.Record deaths behind us, an unsettled system hovering over the area, the threat of more violence on the way.

  I didn’t reply. My silent defiance told him to get to the point. At least that’s what I meant it to say. He asked, “Do you care to sit at a table?”

  “Sure,” I replied, and we did.

  The Street Bar at the Boston Ritz-Carlton Hotel, for anyone never blessed enough to have been there, is a cloud of tranquil formality in a world of casual chaos. If that sounds a bit too much like a brochure, well, forgive me, because it’s the truth. It derives its name because it is situated on the street level, that street being Arlington Street, which overlooks the stunning Public Garden. But it’s the view within that is the most noteworthy of all.

  The walls are hunter green, the dimly lit sconces pure brass, the gray-haired waiters all in black tie. And the drinks, the drinks. Well, let’s not kid ourselves. They’re like any other drinks, only twice as expensive. But it’s worth every dollar to sit on the soft settees and plush upholstered chairs while tossing down handfuls of complimentary mixed nuts from the ornate silver bowls.

  We took our places at a window table overlooking the sidewalk, the street, and beyond, the sun-splashed park where just four days ago Paul had warned me of this guy I was sitting with now. Four long days ago. As I sat, I noticed Gerry Burke, one of my bodyguards, standing on the sidewalk looking in the window at me looking out at him. He gave me a sheepish smile and stepped out of sight. Kevin Hart, his cohort, stood at the doorway to the bar in a tan Secret Service–style vest. There was another undercover cruiser idling at the hotel entrance with two more officers inside. After last night’s incident, Commissioner John Leavitt was taking even fewer chances today.

  The waiter materialized at our table like an apparition to take our drink order. Campbell asked for a scotch, straight up, I asked for a ginger ale. As I’ve said, I don’t like drinking before five unless there’s some good reason for it, and Terry Campbell certainly wasn’t reason enough.

  “I’m very sorry about your publisher, Jack. I understand from many people that the two of you were quite close,” he said, picking through the nuts to find the cashews. I hate when people do that, but again figured now was not the time to point this out to him. He looked at me and I looked at him. He was trying to tell if I’d be malleable in his hands, an instrument or an impediment in his grand business plan to buy one of the most respected papers in America and make it his flagship. I was trying to tell if he was a killer, capable of taking Paul Ellis’s life, or more likely, hiring someone to do the same. I couldn’t tell yet, and I suspect, neither could he.

  “I think you know this already, but I feel the need to restate it because of your hostile attitude here, but I had nothing—nothing—to do with Paul Ellis’s death.”

  He paused to eye me for any reaction. I didn’t give him one.

  “I’m an honest, hard-working journalism executive,” he said.

  Seven words, four lies. That’s pretty good, maybe even some sort of record. He should consider a career in Massachusetts politics. His use of the word journalism caused my skin to crawl, like an earwig was scurrying across my nerves. Nonetheless, I stayed silent.

  The waiter came by and put the drinks on the table, pouring my ginger ale in front of me from a small Canada Dry bottle, and his scotch from a little decanter.

  I didn’t want to talk about Paul with this creature. I really didn’t want to talk about anything with him except for the business at hand, and even that, only because I had no real choice. I said, “We’ll find Paul’s killer soon enough.” I said this as I tossed some nuts into my mouth, casual. “But that’s not what you called me here to discuss. You have some business to go over?”

  I looked at him expectantly but blandly, dismissively. He seemed about to argue with me, then smartly decided it wouldn’t do anyone any good.

  Instead, he said, “As you know by now, I want to buy theRecord, and if you’re willing to back my bid, to speak in favor of it, I’m prepared to offer you a financial package so generous that you won’t ever have to work another day in your life.”

  “I like to work.”

  He gave me an annoyed look and said, “You can work. You can donate the money to charity. You can give it to your kids. You can buy a yacht and sail the Mediterranean. You can do anything you want. What it means is freedom, and freedom is whatever you decide to make of it.�
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  With that, he reached into the breast jacket of his blazer. For a second, I thought he might be pulling out a gun. But instead, he had an envelope. He gently opened it up, unfolded the single sheet of paper inside, and slid it across the table toward me.

  “This is what you’d get paid in the event of a sale.”

  I fixed my gaze on his face. He sipped his scotch and tossed a couple of more nuts into his mouth. I clanked my ice around my tumbler without taking a drink. My elbows were up on the table, my chin resting on my right knuckles. Outside, the sun was pouring down, but on the more civilized side of the tinted windows, the light was discreetly dim.

  Finally, I lowered my eyes to look at the numbers, and what I saw I had to assume was a typo, meaning there were two too many zeros. I looked at it again, trying to mask my surprise.

  My first impulse, so long as it’s never repeated, was to shout to the heavens, “I’m rich, I’m rich.” Not only could I finally buy that summer-house I always wanted up in Maine, I could probably buy the entire coastline, maybe even the state.

  Instead, I kept my chin in my hand and asked Campbell, “What did Paul say when you made him this offer?”

  He hesitated, then said very carefully, “He told me he couldn’t at this time support the sale of theRecord, though he would keep an open mind on the topic.”

  “Bullshit,” I replied. “Paul would only sell to you over his dead body, and I won’t even let him do that.”

  His annoyance now transformed into anger. No doubt he was surprised that I didn’t look at the figures he was throwing around and melt in his arms. “You may not have any choice. And this deal won’t be sitting on the table for long.”

  “Oh, I’ll always have a choice, and my choice will always be no. Just like Paul, I’ll have to be dead before this paper is sold, so you can keep on trying.”

  He pinched his right index finger and thumb into his tightly shut eyes. The waiter chose that inopportune time to ask if we wanted another drink, and Campbell snapped at him, “Not now.” I didn’t want him thinking he could answer for me, so just for kicks, I said, “Sure, I’ll take one.”