Dead Line

by Brian McGrory

  And then, footsteps again, coming from the front of the apartment to the back, where the bathroom was located, and more important, where a well-known, otherwise highly regarded reporter from one of America’s truly great newspapers, remained in hiding. As my mind raced and my body braced, the sound of the steps stopped several feet away from the partially open door. Then I heard the scratch of furniture moving along the wooden floor—the chair to the painted desk where I had been a few minutes earlier, I assumed, sliding outward.

  I heard a drawer open, papers being ruffled, then the drawer closing. This happened again, and again after that, and then I heard more papers being shuffled on what was probably the top of the desk. And then, once again, I heard nothing at all.

  Well, almost nothing. I heard the faint sound of objects being lifted, then silence, then put back in place. And I heard what sounded like sniffling, and the sniffling turned into a low-level sobbing, which then took on the sound of someone actually convulsing in tears, shaking, crying, gulping for air, then exhaling sorrowful, uncontrollable moans. Man or woman, I didn’t yet know, but if this was an FBI agent or a homicide detective, they might have been taking this newfangled victim-compassion thing a little too far.

  For at least five minutes, I listened to the heart-wrenching sounds of this person gasping and crying. They blew their nose. Their cell phone rang, but they didn’t answer. They just kept crying, apparently unable to pull themselves together again.

  And I simply stood inside this door, leaning against a vanity, feeling both helpless and heinous, not to mention voyeuristic. At this point, it was all I could do not to cry myself, like a single cough in a movie theater setting off a fit of the same.

  The person’s cell phone rang again—once, twice, three times, four, and then stopped, the sound echoing around the open expanse of the apartment before disappearing into a canyon of silence. Well, not silence, but sobbing.

  And then a voice. It was low, somewhat husky, obviously thickened by all those tears, jarring in a room that hadn’t heard a voice in all this time. It was that of a woman, who said, “Hil. Hil. I should have been there to help you—” As she tried to continue, her words trailed off into a fresh round of tears.

  The chair scratched abruptly on the wood floor. I heard a couple of abrupt steps toward the bathroom, then the door pushed quickly open as I stepped back to avoid it. Although I had many minutes to prepare for what was probably an inevitable confrontation, I hadn’t thought it through. I didn’t know what I was going to say. So as she looked at me and I looked at her, I held my hands up in the air in front of me and hurriedly said, “I’m not here to hurt you. My name is Jack Flynn. I’m a reporter for The Boston Record.”

  She screamed. Well, maybe it wasn’t quite a scream. She yelped, one of those panicked sounds when a shocked person already under great duress doesn’t exactly know what to do. I could appreciate the feeling right now.

  She backed out the bathroom door. I said, firmly, but hopefully not ominously, “I’m not here to hurt you. I will leave immediately if you allow me.”

  I heard her sifting around for something, then saw her figure in the door again, this time with a steam iron in her right hand, which she held up as if she were going to fire it at me. Me, I don’t personally use an iron. I send all my shirts to the cleaners. Now I kind of understood why. This thing looked dangerous—sharp and hard, and of course, at times, incomprehensibly hot.

  “Please,” I said, taking a step back against the far bathroom wall, the one with the window. “Please allow me to explain what I’m doing here. Again, my name is Jack Flynn. I’m a reporter at the Record. I had a story in this morning’s paper about the Gardner Museum heist. When I heard about Hilary’s death, I suspected she might be in some way involved, so I snuck into”—well, broke into, but this seemed an appropriate time to draw fine lines—“her apartment to find out if I was right.”

  We locked gazes, but I had no idea what it is that she saw. How much like Hilary Kane did she look? Enough that I had absolutely no doubt this was her sister, the same woman I saw in the photograph of moving day in front of the apartment. Same eyes, same high cheekbones, same blonde hair except this woman’s was cut much shorter. And here in person, same long, lean body. I’d even call it a killer body, except right now, I’m the one she was in a position to kill. If she did, she’d even get away with it in court.

  “Please,” I said. “I know it’s a sad and frightening time for you. I know I shouldn’t be here. But I’m trying to help. Please trust me.”

  And still, she stood there in tears. She looked at me and I looked at her, and in the pounding silence, she slowly lowered the arm that held the iron. She said in a very husky voice, “Show me some ID. Don’t make any fast moves.”

  I deliberately reached into my front pocket and pulled out the kind of press card that old-style reporters used to wear tucked into the front of their hats. I held it toward her in my left hand, and she took a step closer and took it from me.

  With communication established, which in my business is almost always a good thing, I said, “I can give you a business card. It’s in my wallet. My wallet is in a car across the street.”

  She looked carefully at the laminated Record ID card in her hand, then up at my face through her teary eyes, then back down at my picture, which, I should point out, wasn’t a particularly flattering one. I vividly recall that Elizabeth and I had a heated argument that morning, and an hour later there I was standing before a white backdrop, snap, snap, getting shot.

  “How did you get in?” she asked.

  There are basically two types of people in life: Those who hate reporters, and, well, those who don’t. The haters, they’re not always rational people, I’ve found, or for that matter, particularly likable. Ask them what they so disdain about the news media and they’ll tell you we’re all a bunch of lying, parasitic, sensationalistic pigs sucking off the body public. So what’s their point?

  Actually, they’re likely to say all this with a rolled-up copy of a tabloid newspaper in their hands, or with plans to get home and watch that ever soothing 11 o’clock news. They hate us, but they watch and read us. They hate us because that’s just what they do in life, and we’ve given them too many good reasons for it. Turn on the TV news and we’re inevitably pictured as an unwieldy horde hollering stupid questions to politicians or criminals—sometimes one and the same—who conveniently ignore us until they hear an inquiry that suits their needs. Cop shows portray us as bumbling nuisances insensitive to anyone or anything but our own deadlines. And the haters, lemmings, just go along, thoughtlessly, hating us because they think that’s what they’re supposed to do.

  But then there are others who get it, those who understand that the vast majority of reportage is a solitary endeavor important to the public realm, not to mention the public good. At our best, we provide the public information that it should have, or need to have, or want to have, and on our best days, all three at once. We shine attention on politicians, business leaders, and other notables who go wrong. We keep countless others right out of the simple fear of landing on the front page of the Record’s next issue. We do it seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year, every year for as long as I’ve been alive, and that’s not about to change.

  Do we make mistakes? God yes. Do we occasionally embarrass ourselves? Yes again. But in sum and substance, we are a crucial contributor to the common cause, and smart people, most people, recognize that fact free and clear.

  Now let me dismount from my high horse and try to figure out on which side of the chasm the striking blonde with the iron proficiency will stand.

  “I broke in,” I replied.

  “Why?”

  “Because I think I might have been used. Because I was afraid that something I wrote, something somebody leaked to me for this morning’s newspaper, might have caused Hilary Kane to be killed. I needed to find out right away, rather than wait for some official statement from the cops that probably wouldn’t t
ell me nearly what I needed to know.” I added, “So I broke in. It’s wrong. It’s against the law. It’s an invasion of privacy. I understand all that. But I needed to find out what went wrong, and I needed to find out if I caused it.”

  There was a long pause as I stopped talking, and she simply looked at me.

  “You did,” she finally said, and with that, she turned around and walked out the bathroom door. I heard her footsteps keep going. I heard the apartment door open, then close. She was gone, but my reporter’s instincts, already in overdrive, told me it wouldn’t be for long.

  Chapter Eight

  I t was the teeth of the lunch hour, so to speak, when an unapologetic Hank Sweeney—“I just assumed she lived in the building”—and I breezed through the front door of the University Club and took a table in the far corner of the half-filled dining room.

  This wasn’t the leisurely, wine-soaked lunch that the other diners—mostly stockbrokers and institutional investors who already had the flavor of the day’s Dow—were sharing. I needed information and I needed some counsel, and I needed it fast. The clock was pounding toward 1:00 P.M., an hour when all good reporters already had a rough draft of the next day’s story in the computer monitor of their minds. Me, I had only questions to ask of people I hadn’t yet called, as well as a sense of gloomy guilt so large and ominous it could envelope an oversize cow.

  Still, I’m not a good reporter. I’m a great one. Just ask me. Which is why the passage of time didn’t bother me as much as it did, say, Peter Martin, who kept ringing my cell phone approximately every nine seconds, no doubt, in his words, to find out where the flying frick I might be and did I have the time in my busy day to bother writing a follow-up story about the biggest theft in the history of the fricking world?

  Or something like that. I couldn’t be sure of the exact verbiage because I didn’t answer the calls. I’d get to him soon enough.

  My favorite waitress, Pam, glided over to the table with menus and I pointed at Hank, who, by the way, was the only black in the room not carrying a tray or wearing an apron, and said, “Burger?” He nodded, looked at Pam and said, “Medium, please.”

  “Same,” I said, and added, “And bring a third one for our late-arriving friend, rare, with extra everything. And we’re in something of a rush, Pam.”

  As if he sensed a countdown toward good food, Vinny Mongillo appeared in the distant doorway, spotted us without trouble, and sauntered through the room like he owned it, even stopping and chatting with a couple of the more familiar captains of industry along the way. It makes no sense that a man of his considerable girth can actually saunter, and yet he does, he does. He makes every motion seem so natural, right down to the clap he gave me on the side of my shoulder as he said, “Jesus, Fair Hair, your voicemail was so dire it made it sound like one of the mean third-graders stole your Halle Berry lunchbox.”

  I ignored that, which I do with so much of what Mongillo says. He exchanged greetings with Sweeney, calling him, unless I heard wrong, “Brother Hank.”

  I said to Mongillo, without elaboration or any need for it, “Spill. I need everything you know and everything you suspect on the Kane murder.”

  He shook his head, not in a way that denied my request, but more like how a kitchen contractor immediately searches out the negative in even the simplest undertaking. “You want a faucet in your sink? Oh, boy, I don’t know, especially with the way the tile is cut and the pipes are shaped and the light fixture hangs down.” And then he comes up with an answer that he knew all along.

  Vinny’s like that as well. He always has the answer. He just wants to make sure you know the obstacles he overcame to get it.

  So here we go. “You want to talk tight-lipped,” he began. “Jesus mother of an unforgiving Christ. The press release was a total of one paragraph. One. The homicide cops never came over to the tape to talk to us hacks. The briefing at headquarters lasted all of two-and-a-half minutes, and involved the commissioner reading a statement that said nothing and walking away from the podium without answering any questions.”

  I glanced over at Sweeney, retired homicide lieutenant with the Boston PD, and he seemed enraptured by his view from the other side, actually leaning over the table, his big chin resting on the back of his right hand. He wasn’t completely familiar with the whole Mongillo extravaganza quite yet and this probably wasn’t the time to warn him.

  Mongillo kept talking as Pam filled our water glasses and placed a basket of bread on the table.

  “Here’s what they want you to know,” he said. “They want you to know that the victim’s name is Hilary Kane. She’s twenty-nine years old. She’s a lawyer for the city. She was shot once in the temple and once in the back of the head as she sat in the driver’s seat of her car, a 2002 Saab 9-3 four-door. She was dead virtually immediately.” He paused here for effect, then added, “And the police, of course, also want you to know that they’re pursuing numerous leads.”

  That last bit is a line, and a rather ridiculous one, written into the end of every police press release. I looked back over at Sweeney, who seemed to take no offense.

  Mongillo reached over for a hunk of bread, spread a heaping wad of butter on it like it was good for him, and took a longing bite. After he chewed for a moment, he said, “Here’s what the police don’t want you to know.” And with that, he looked at the two of us conspiratorially.

  “They don’t want you to know that they’re in some bizarre shit-fight with the FBI over the evidence in this thing. The city beat the Feds to the girl’s apartment by about an hour, then they argued so hard about where the evidence should go that bosses had to be called in from both sides. My understanding is that there’s a U.S. attorney preparing to walk into U.S. District Court by three this afternoon seeking a temporary restraining order against Boston PD from mucking with any materials, meaning possible evidence, pulled from the victim’s apartment.”

  Mongillo paused for another bite of bread. I took the opportunity to pose a question, the answer to which I already pretty well knew, at least partially. Or maybe not. “Why the hell is the Bureau getting involved in a local murder?” I asked.

  Mongillo looked at me in that way an impatient teenager might look at his tagalong little brother.

  “Gee, good question. You ever thought about being a reporter?”

  Luckily, the hamburgers arrived at that exact moment, and any prospect of tension gave way to the joys of gastronomy—and believe me, with Hank Sweeney and Vinny Mongillo involved, virtually any gastronomy is a joyous occasion, and when the food is on someone else’s tab, namely mine, it’s nearly transcendental.

  Mongillo took a monstrous bite into his burger, chewed methodically, then said, “It’s the question of the hour. I’ve got about two dozen calls out on it. I’m not getting any answers back, at least not yet, anyway. Obviously, either the victim or a suspect that we don’t yet know about is in some way linked to a federal case.”

  Yeah, the Gardner Museum heist. So I told him, in utmost confidence, of my visit to her apartment that afternoon. Sweeney sat there eating, taking it all in.

  When I was done with my soliloquy, Mongillo looked at me bemused and said, “A B&E on Beacon Hill. Christ almighty, Fair Hair’s turning into quite the bad boy.”

  As he made reference to my lawbreaking ways, I felt my insides begin to churn, until I realized it was actually my cellular telephone vibrating in the breast pocket of my jacket. I glanced at the number—Peter Martin’s, again—and ignored it.

  I shook my head sadly and said, “I wish I could laugh about it. The fact is, I think I caused an innocent person to die.”

  Vinny was midbite as I said this. He stared at me as he chewed, and when he was done, he said in an uncharacteristically soft tone, “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

  I nodded. “Unfortunately, I am.”

  “Tell Vinny.”

  “I’m not sure yet what there is to say. I get leaked information, spoon-fed, really, by a senior governmen
t official I’d never previously met. I get it into the paper under the crush of deadline. I wake up the next day and a lawyer with the city, a young woman, is shot dead in the Boston Common garage. Sorry, Vinny, but I don’t believe in coincidence. I work for a newspaper. I’m not allowed to. That story triggered something, and in this case, it was a gun.”

  Vinny shoved a couple of Chef Kelly’s handcut French fries into his mouth, which inexplicably made me wonder why chefs get this lyrical little title that precedes only their first name. Reporter Jack. I just can’t picture it.

  Vinny was quiet. Check that. He wasn’t speaking, he was chewing, which is anything but quiet. I looked at Hank, who stared back knowingly at me, though what he knew I wasn’t sure right then. In the absence of anything else, I said, “I may have caused a young woman’s murder.”

  That hung out there like a storm cloud before a hard rain. It hung out there until Hank audibly cleared his throat and said, “Jack, if all this worst-case scenario jazz is right, you didn’t cause anyone to die. You didn’t leak the story. You didn’t pull the trigger. You don’t know what the story behind the story really is.”

  I replied, in a sharper tone than I intended, “So what you’re saying is that I was probably just used.”

  Hank nodded.

  I pounded my closed fist on the table, so that the plate with my mostly uneaten hamburger rattled against my water glass, and a few of the nearby diners, fearing some rapid downturn in the NASDAQ, reached in unison for the Palm V’s to check the latest numbers.

  Hank Sweeney had just given voice to my unspoken fears, and I looked at him hard and all but hissed, “That’s worse. That’s much worse. I’m too good to be used. I’ve been doing this too fucking long to be used. I’m supposed to use people. I’m not supposed to be the one who’s used—especially not in the death of a young woman.”