None of this I could use in print, but still, it stoked my confidence, even anger, as I prepared to confront him.
Mongillo, bless him, had scouted out the front of theRecord building and spied two unmarked Boston Police cruisers idling in the street, waiting, no doubt, to apprehend me as I came or left. My good friend, Luke Travers, had left three voicemails on my cell phone, the first asking me to call him, the second asking me to fucking call him, and the third asking me to fucking call him fucking right away. The poor boy needs some medication for his blood pressure. Maybe he’s not getting any sex lately—I hope.
So here we were. I pulled up the rolling cargo door on the rear of the truck, walked into the cavernous, windowless freight area all gloriously smudged with ink and filled with the delightful odor of old newspapers, and took a seat on the floor against the side wall. Mongillo yanked the door shut behind me with a thunderous clap. I heard the sound of the driver’s door open, then slam shut, the engine start, the garage door rise, and we were off.
He rolled open the door separating the cab from the freight and said in a low voice, “We’re driving by an unmarked car right now. He’s eyeing me, eyeing me, we’re past him, no sign of movement. Bang. I think we’re safe.”
“As he’s eyeing you, you ever think you might just want to shut up?”
“Everyone’s a critic. Let me do it my way, Fair Hair.”
We pulled up onto the Southeast Expressway on our way downtown. “Open and clear behind us,” Mongillo announced. I stayed on my haunches trying to brace myself against the significant bumps.
Five minutes later, I felt him pull off the highway, cut hard left, then right, left again, and one more time, right. This wasn’t built for what the nice people at Lexus like to call a “smooth, luxurious ride.” We stopped at a couple of red lights. I heard him roll his window down at one stoplight, causing me to crouch down further. Then I heard him say, “No, no papers on board. Sorry, I really don’t have any. Look, here’s a copy of today’sTraveler, just take this and get the fuck away.”
Well, he certainly didn’t have a future in customer relations. Distribution, he was still doing all right.
A couple of minutes later we glided to a stop, and he backed up a few feet with the beeper sounding. When we stopped again, he said quietly, “We’re here. The window in his office is still dark.”
I checked my watch—5:45P.M. We were fifteen minutes early. I stood up with stiff legs and looked through the narrow door into the front cab and out the windshield. The sky was still a bright blue, streaked by the fading sun, but the street was covered in the deep shadows of a late spring afternoon.
“Stay in back,” Mongillo said. “I’ll watch for him.”
I sat in the back of aRecord delivery truck preparing for what was undoubtedly one of the most difficult, most important interviews I would ever conduct, ranking right up there with an election eve confrontation with a rather desperate president of the United States a couple of years before. I needed to make Fitzgerald understand that I knew, without even the remotest hint of a doubt, that he had fabricated multiple stories—and specifically, stories dealing with the governor’s crime-fighting record and the bungled Mattapan police raid. Then I needed to convince him to make it easy on himself, and in turn, theRecord, by admitting the fabrications. This would provide a clean peg for a front-page story. If I was on a streak, I could nudge the conversation toward the deaths of John Cutter and Paul Ellis, but this was far less likely. Most important, I had to get out alive.
“Still no sign,” Mongillo said.
I checked my watch again—5:51. I felt around in my pockets and on the floor to make sure I had what I needed—a pen, a legal pad, and a microcassette. Maybe I needed a gun as well, but I’d already used one of those two days before, and the aftertaste wasn’t something I particularly liked. My guile would be my most potent weapon. I think.
I thought of the first time I had met him. I had just started at theRecord, just had my first front-page story, on how a Massachusetts congressman had accepted the free use of a Martha’s Vineyard vacation house for an entire summer from a lobbyist representing Philip Morris, the tobacco empire.
He walked up to my desk, this tall, dignified man with the bow tie and the stately gait, more senatorial than most senators could ever hope to be. He held out his hand—I shook it—and he said, “Young man, you’ve already earned your pay for the year.”
We exchanged small talk, and he invited me to come downtown to his office the following Monday—the beginning of our traditional, weekly meetings.
That first Monday I arrived, he sat in his rocking chair and pulled a tiny notebook out of the breast pocket of his checked sportcoat and carefully flipped through the small pages until he came to his intended notes. I thought it nothing short of completely charming that this great scribe, this legend, had invested the time in critiquing my work.
“How long did the story take you to do?” he asked. “When did you first call the congressman’s office? Did you detail for the press secretary what you had?”
He nodded at my answers, guided me, corrected me, lauded me, always providing an anecdotal rationale for the way things should be done, but always sure to tell me there is no one precise way in this business to do anything at all. After we were finished with my stories, we analyzed the rest of the paper, the stories over the past week he liked, and why, the stories he didn’t, and why not, the stories with potential that was never fulfilled. This is how it went every Monday from noon to oneP.M. , over coffee and bagels, and every Monday I left with the dueling sense of exhaustion and reinvigoration.
“Okay, I see him,” Mongillo said, quietly. I moved up, such that I was sitting right behind his seat, within easy earshot. “He’s alone. He’s walking down School Street. Stopping, reaching into his pocket, pulling out keys, putting them in the door. He’s not looking around, not acting suspicious. Opening the door, shutting it, that’s it. He’s inside.”
I said, “Thank you, Bob Costas.” Then, more seriously, I asked, “You don’t think he’s suspicious that there’s aRecord delivery truck parked across the street at a time when no newspapers are being delivered?”
Mongillo replied, “I’m backed into an alley. All he sees is the windshield, if he notices anything at all. And maybe we’re out delivering the Sunday inserts.”
Mongillo fell quiet, and I remained that way. He even had his cell phone set on mute—an unprecedented event. A moment later, he announced, “Okay, his office window is now lit up. Stay where you are, I want to see if he does anything odd up there, sends any code or signal out.”
What is this, Robert Ludlum?
Another moment of quiet, broken again by Mongillo. “Nothing,” he said. “He’s done nothing to cause worry. It looks like he believes this is just a typical gathering between two longtime friends, the mentor and the demented.”
Maybe that was funny, but I wasn’t of the mind to laugh.
Mongillo continued, “I’m going to get out, walk around, open the back door, and let you out. I’ll be waiting right here with my eyes peeled on the window. If you have the slightest problem or any fears, just appear in the window and hold a hand up. I’ll get through the door myself and the State Police will be right behind me.”
Fitzgerald himself once told me that when you scrape away everything else, your success in an interview often comes down to your demeanor, your comportment, your ability not just to express confidence, but to exude the notion that you are absolutely going to get your way. It’s always worked for me before. I hoped to hell it would work for me right now. This is what I thought about as I stepped from the back of theRecord delivery truck on a pristine Saturday afternoon in a dank alley in Downtown Crossing.
Be confident, get the story, make deadline. After that, everything else would work itself out.
Thirty-Seven
Seven years earlier
ONE EVENT DOWN,one more to go, Bertram Randolph—Governor Bertram Randolph—thou
ght to himself as he shook the last hand in the line of construction workers outside the Coolidge High School in Roxbury and looked around for his car.
The dedication had gone well. The speeches were short and smooth. He thought he saw a couple of local reporters jabbing down notes. And it would be a hell of a lot better than what he had next, which was another damned fundraiser in a windowless banquet room where he’d have to bare his political soul for a bunch of fatuous businessmen holding five-hundred-dollar checks.
He turned around and waved good-bye to the workers. His son, Lance Randolph, the district attorney, suggested they walk back through the school rather than across a dirt-covered construction site. But he didn’t want to get stopped again by every fawning teacher in his path, so he said with a smirk, “Come on, kid. I always said politics was a dirty business. Don’t worry about your damned shoes.”
They walked around a construction trailer in the gentle morning sun, father and son, a political dynasty in the making. As they walked side-by-side, Randolph turned to his son and said, “I’m thinking about running for the Senate next year.” Bill Gowan, the governor’s State Police bodyguard and driver, walked a few paces ahead.
Lance Randolph’s eyes widened. He snapped his neck toward his father and said, “You’ve got a lock on the governorship. Why challenge an incumbent senator?”
“I’ve done this two terms already, son. I don’t know if I have much left I want to do, or for that matter, can do. I’m sick of running every four years. I like the idea of playing on a national stage. And in the Senate, you can collect a thousand dollars at a time in contributions, cutting down on this bullshit fund-raising time.”
The two were in the middle of a stretch of hard-packed dirt. Behind them were only construction trailers. To their right was the high, windowless brick wall of the school gymnasium. Straight ahead, about thirty feet away, was the school driveway and their shiny state-issue, navy blue Ford LTD sedan.
Lance Randolph was about to say something when a student walked around a far corner and called out, “Hey, Mr. Randolph.” He was a strange-looking kid, with long, stringy hair. Stranger still was what he wore—a flowing white coat that looked like something he might wear in a science lab.
He repeated himself. “Hey, Mr. Randolph.”
“Damn,” Bertram Randolph said out of the side of his mouth. Ever since he got into this business twenty years before, he found himself constitutionally incapable of ignoring voters, whether they be young or old, black, red, or white, male or female. Some politicians were good at the gentle, dignified blow-off, but not him.
He said to his son, “Come with me for a second. We’ll do this quick.” And he veered toward the funny-looking kid.
They were but fifteen feet away when the young man reached inside the flowing coat and pulled out a short, semiautomatic rifle. Lance Randolph, the district attorney, froze, unable even to get the sounds out of his mouth to form a scream. Bertram Randolph, the governor, stopped, reached his hand out, and said, “Son, what you want to do is to give me that weapon right now before someone gets hurt and you get in big, big trouble. Give me that gun.”
The kid looked at the governor as if he didn’t understand. He then turned slightly to his right, took aim, and fired at Trooper Gowan, who was opening the passenger door of the governor’s car. Gowan crumpled immediately to the ground. He never saw what hit him.
The teenager then calmly turned back toward the father and son. He took a step closer, the gun aimed straight ahead, and said to Lance Randolph, “You sent my friend to jail. Big mistake on your part.”
And with that, Lance Randolph began to run. When he bolted, he was so panicked that he pushed off against his own father and mistakenly knocked him to the ground. The kid fired a long volley of bullets at the district attorney as he ran furiously toward the car, hoping to take refuge behind it. But every shot missed.
The prosecutor reached the car and dove behind the back end. The governor picked himself up slowly from the soft, filthy ground, wiped a smudge of dirt from his right eye, and stared at the young gunman, not wanting to show fear. Thoughts of the Brookline abortion clinic shootings, all the murderous rage that had become too commonplace in America. And here he was, face to face with evil.
“Give me the gun, son. I’m the governor of Massachusetts. If you give me the gun, I can help you out.”
The elder Randolph looked out of the corner of his eye to the Ford resting about thirty feet away, wondering if his son was in the process of helping him, maybe pulling the gun from Gowan’s holster to shoot his way out of this mess. But he didn’t see anything, because there was nothing to see. Lance Randolph hid on the other side of the car, shaking too hard to act.
“Son, I’ll help you, honest to God. But you have to give me the gun.”
The kid gazed back at the governor, his face completely without emotion. His laboratory coat rippled gently in the morning breeze. His hair blew around the bottom of his neck. He took aim.
“No, son. No!”
And he fired.
The first shot slammed into Bertram Randolph’s skull, knocking him back onto the dirt ground. The boy fired a dozen more times, the bullets ripping through the governor’s gray suit and slamming into his flesh and bone with one sickening thud after the next.
The student stopped shooting. He looked curiously at the car and began slowly walking toward it. The district attorney hid behind the rear bumper.
Halfway there, the kid’s face became contorted with a look of incomprehensible despair. He let out an almost inhuman moan, as if the reality of the moment, of his deeds, had just taken hold. He stopped, put the barrel of the rifle against the roof his mouth, and pulled the trigger.
As the boy lay dying on the ground, Lance Randolph emerged from behind the car, first tentatively, then confidently. He sprinted toward his father, dropped to his knees, and held him.
“Oh God, oh God, oh God,” he kept repeating over and over again. He knew his life had changed forever in that one split moment with that one thoughtless reaction. He just wasn’t sure yet how bad.
Thirty-Eight
THE WOODEN STAIRS LEADINGup to Robert Fitzgerald’s second story office seemed unusually high, but then again, so did the stakes. Perhaps the latter explained the former. Anyway, when I got to the top, I took a deep breath of the somewhat stale air and walked toward his open door.
Fitzgerald was standing behind his desk, his head down, shuffling through a pile of papers. I knocked once on the door by way of warning and walked inside. He looked up and flashed a bittersweet smile.
“Jack,” he said in that deep, sonorous voice of his. “Jack, I’ve been thinking nonstop of you.” He walked around his desk and shook my hand, placing his other arm gently around my shoulder. It would have been natural to fall into our old pattern, the teacher and his student, but I didn’t because I couldn’t. Calm and confident, those were the keywords, the demeanor that got me through so many interviews before.
“Sit, sit. We have much to catch up on.” I took a seat in my traditional place, a brown leather club chair facing the windows. “How about a glass of port,” he asked. “I’ve got some nice tawny that I think you’ll like. It will soothe things a bit.”
I nodded, figuring that alcohol could only help the situation on either side, emboldening me, loosening him. He poured two glasses and handed me one, then sat on the opposite side of the antique cherry coffee table in his Boston rocker. He wore a handsome spring sport jacket with a light checked pattern, an open-collared blue oxford cloth shirt and a pair of slightly rumpled khakis.
The room, by the way, was lit with low lamps covered in hunter green shades, giving what I’d best describe as a Locke-Ober feel or a Somerset Club mood to the place, familiar, clubby, and refined. A single large blue Oriental rug covered much of the dark, parquet floors.
As we sat, my eyes drifted across all those photographs on his wall of fame—Fitzgerald with Henry Kissinger and John Glenn and Robert Kenne
dy and even Fidel Castro, not to mention every governor of Massachusetts and mayor of Boston in the last forty years. How many of these people did he lie for? How many of them illicitly benefited from the paper’s blind faith in its star reporter?
There was also a collection of famous front pages framed and hung along the brick-colored walls, many of which included an analysis or story by Fitzgerald—the first moon landing, the assassination of Martin Luther King, the resignation of Richard Nixon.
Finally, I focused on Fitzgerald, who was, in turn, focused on me. “Jack,” he said, “No one should be expected to withstand the pressures of the week you’ve just had, between Paul’s death and the Campbell takeover bid. I hope you’re being fair to yourself and will take some time off and get away soon.”
I shook my head and said, “I can’t even think in those terms yet, Robert. You know that.”
He nodded and asked, “What do you hear in regard to the police investigation?”
I replied, “Nothing terribly encouraging. I don’t get a sense that the cops are any further along today than they were on Monday, do you?”
It was a subtle first gambit, turning it back on him, testing his knowledge of the proceedings. He flashed a hint of being startled, and replied, “I think your information would be as good as mine, no?”
I didn’t respond. It’s an old reporting trick: Make him fill the void with something he might not have otherwise said.
Stunningly, he fell for it, showing me just how far off his game he was on this day. He got an anxious look on his face and added, “I don’t know, Jack. It almost seems strange to think about—Paul dying, that old mariner on the waterfront getting shot to death, someone trying to kill you.”
He lowered his voice as well as his eyes and said, “I don’t know what to think.”
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