Vinny started to say something and I cut him off, looking from one to the other, then out into an empty expanse of dining room at nothing at all.
“I’ve invested my adult life, my entire career, my very sense of identity, in pursuit of the truth. Sometimes it’s unpleasant. Sometimes it gets downright nasty. Sometimes the truth isn’t anything that you ever want to have anything more than a passing familiarity with. But still, you have to learn it. We have to let the public know it. Even at its worst, it’s a bedrock, an immovable foundation, a place from which to build or mend.
“And now, by doing what I’ve always done, believing what I’ve always believed in, I might have caused someone to die. I pursued truth, and Hilary Kane is dead. So tell me this: How do I ever justify what I do for a living now?”
Silence, at least at our table. In the background, you could hear the idle chatter of the working rich as they bade each other fond farewells until the evening cocktail hour would bring them together, perhaps in the very same place.
I looked at Hank, who stared complacently back at me. As we did this, it was Mongillo who absently pushed his plate a few inches toward the middle of our table and said, “Suppose you have it inside-out, Jack.” He paused here for a moment and we locked in on each other’s gaze. “Suppose,” he said, “that you didn’t print the truth at all?”
Did someone just pull the pin on an old-fashioned hand grenade? His words seemed to explode across the linen tablecloth, through the thick bone that needlessly protected my brain, and into that tiny part of my body, my nature, that occasionally commits an act called thought.
“Suppose,” Mongillo continued, knowing full well he was on something of a roll here, “that you were used so bad that it wasn’t even with truth, but with lies.”
I didn’t know whether to throttle him or hug him. I didn’t know whether to embrace what he was saying, or be repulsed by it. I didn’t know which was better, or more accurately, worse: to have the truth lead to someone’s death, or to have been set up with a deadly lie.
I felt my phone vibrate again, and then I felt it stop. I felt a pit in my stomach, and then I felt it go away. I felt all eyes staring directly at me, then I felt like I was very much alone. More than anything else, I felt the need to peel back the layers, to uncover the deceptions, to clarify the distortions, to confront the lies in search of an immovable truth.
“I need your help,” I said, hitting the edge of the table with my open hand, softly, not hard. As I said this, I looked from Mongillo to Sweeney. Each of them looked back at me and solemnly nodded.
“Someone’s going to pay,” Mongillo said, “And I want to be there to collect.”
Spoken like, well, Mongillo.
Sweeney said, “I’ve got more time than a turtle crossing the Mojave.”
Speaking of time, I checked my cell phone and saw it was close to 1:30 P.M., close to panic time for ordinary reporters.
“Thank you,” I said to each one of them, more sincere than I usually sound, which probably isn’t hard. “Then this would be the point in the life of a story when we make a plan.”
Right then, the nattily dressed Jason Buick, the appropriately obsequious manager of the club, approached our table with an air of apologetic urgency, as well as a cordless telephone.
“Jack, sorry to interrupt, but I’ve got a call here from a Mr. Peter Martin, who says he has an important news matter to discuss with you.”
“Mr. Peter Martin thinks that a change in the weather is an important news matter.”
“I heard that,” Martin said when I put the phone up to my ear.
“How are you, Peter?”
“I might be better if my best reporter might take a fricking moment and answer his fricking cell phone when I call him on it to talk about the biggest story in the nation today. Short of that, I’m not doing all that fricking well.”
I hate the word frick, by the way. I mean, be a newsman. Just say the real thing.
“I’ve been in meetings.”
That last line came out weak, the tone even weaker than the words. Reporters don’t go to meetings, at least this reporter, though I did meet the victim’s sister, or at least someone who I believed to be the sister, at the apartment. I was meeting Mongillo and Sweeney at the time of the call.
Martin said, his words and voice less accusatory: “I’ve got all hell breaking loose.” He paused for a flicker of a moment, then added, “And not just in the usual way.” That’s Martin’s code for: Jack, listen closely.
“Go ahead,” I said.
“I got a call a short time ago, a few minutes, maybe five minutes. It was from a young woman. She sounded really afraid, but coherent, not frantic or anything. She said she had tried to call you several times but only got your voicemail. So she called the switchboard looking for you. Barbara tried you on your cell phone, but you didn’t pick up. She thought the call sounded important, so she sent the woman to me.”
Barbara has an eye for news like Dean Martin had a taste for whiskey. She runs what’s known as the Record’s message center, sitting behind a big, circular panel in the front of the newsroom, answering phones, sending out pages, patching calls through to reporters traveling out of state and abroad. She hears sob stories from the public, tales of utter woe and incomprehensible tragedy. Then she makes sense of them, either blocking liars or searching out reporters for the callers who she believes are telling important truths. All this is to say, I listened even harder now.
Martin continued, “So the woman says to me that she’s in danger, that someone is stalking her. I’m thinking, yeah, give me a piece of news there, honey. Then she says, ‘I can’t go to the police. I need to speak to Jack Flynn. He’ll know why.’ ”
My mind was racing at a million miles an hour, but the problem was, my thoughts weren’t heading anywhere in particular. I didn’t know a stalking victim. I didn’t know anyone who couldn’t take their problems to the police. Before I could say anything, Martin added, almost as punctuation, “She said to tell you that this morning’s situation never really got ironed out.”
Get it? My sister; well, not my sister. Either one of my sisters would have clocked me with the iron and asked questions when I came to at Mass General Hospital. But the sister, Hilary’s sister, the one who could have put me out of my misery but instead chose only to add to it. Maybe she knew what she was doing after all.
So I got not only attentive, but deadly serious, pardon the overuse of the adjective. “How’d you leave it?” I asked, unable to conceal my urgency. “Where’d she say she was?”
“Wouldn’t tell me. She said she’d only deal through you. So she gave me a number that she said was to a pay phone and she told me to have you call it at exactly 1:45 P.M.”
Martin read me the number. My first thought was that some pay phones, maybe most pay phones, don’t take incoming calls. Martin being Martin, he said to me, “I told her, most pay phones don’t take incoming calls. He’ll try to call, but he may not get through. So she took down your cell phone number. If she doesn’t hear from you by 1:50, she said she’d call.”
A pause, as I collected myself and read the number back in my mind. Martin added, “So you may want to answer your fricking phone.”
Touché.
I hung up. Mongillo and Sweeney had not only ordered dessert, but the ever-efficient Pam had just delivered it. I told them I had to run—an emergency, a possible break in the story. I’d let them know what happened as soon as it did.
Mongillo looked at me with unabashed concern. “Are you still going to sign the lunch away?” he asked, fully cognizant—as well as appreciative—of the University Club’s policy of no cash transactions. I nodded. Sweeney looked at me with equal concern. “You want me to come along?” he asked. To that, I shook my head.
Many, many years ago, I used to think the most important woman in the world was my mother, and later, it was, of course, my wife. More recently, it was Elizabeth, but it was a feeling that was fading faster tha
n I knew how to explain. Walking out the dining-room door, it occurred to me that this woman, at least for now, at least for a while, had become the most important woman I knew. It was yet another one of my finely honed reporter’s premonitions that was to become sometimes painfully and occasionally blissfully true.
Chapter Nine
S he answered the phone on the first ring with an abrupt, “Yeah,” though given the situation, the grieving, the fear, the unknown, I excused her obvious and understandable lack of etiquette.
“This is Jack Flynn,” I said, trying to sound calm, reassuring, more confident than I was in the bathroom when faced with the prospect of a Sunbeam iron across the upside of my handsome head.
“I know,” she replied. Her voice was taut. She wasn’t being rude, just concise, as if she didn’t have the emotional capacity just then to say much more.
I was standing on St. James Street, my cell phone planted against my left ear, pacing back and forth along the brick façade of the University Club. She was on a pay phone at an undisclosed location, though I immediately knew she was hard by a busy street because of the noise from the loud traffic that threatened to overwhelm her voice.
“Tell me your name, who you are, and what I can do for you,” I said, still trying to sound confident and competent, not always an easy trick to pull off, especially in my current state.
She hesitated on the other end of the phone. I heard the revving engine of a truck gaining speed as it passed her, telling me that she was at an intersection, probably with a traffic light. I heard the beep of a thin horn, like on one of those tinny Asian imports that come from countries like Korea that you associate more with madmen than cars. I heard muffled voices in the near background, perhaps people at the same bank of pay phones.
“I’m being followed,” she said, responding to precisely none of my questions. She threw that line out there as if it were a dart, simple, direct, and more than anything else, pointed.
“How do you know?”
“I was so shaken after I saw you in the apartment that I pulled over on Beacon Street because I thought I was having an anxiety attack. I could barely see. I was hyperventilating. And this car that was behind me pulled over a little ways in front of me. When I pulled out, the car pulled out. So I went around the block, like they do in the movies, just drove a nonsensical route, and he followed me all the way.”
“Where are you now, and is he still following you?”
“I don’t know. I’m at a pay phone, obviously. I double-parked in the street. I haven’t seen his car, but I assume he’s out here somewhere. I’m just trying to stay around other people so he can’t get to me.”
I tried asking the most important question again in the same exact way. No sense in playing tricks on her: “I need to know, where are you now?”
“I told you, at a pay phone, in Boston. I can’t tell you any more. I’m too afraid.”
And at that moment, she truly sounded it, her voice becoming even more strained with fear, that fear nearly spilling over into a fit of emotion.
I said, trying to sound less like the inquisitive, opportunistic reporter that I am and more like the stable presence that I can occasionally be, “I want to help you. You tell me who you are.”
Again, silence from the other end, but this time not the result of her putting herself back together, but rather gauging whether it would be wise to provide me, a newspaper reporter, with this kind of information. That silence rounded the corner toward an eternity before she said, “I’m Hilary’s sister, Maggie.” And she left it at that.
I said, “If you feel threatened, why don’t you go to the authorities—the police or the FBI or somebody?” Truth is, I’d rather have her come to me, because once she was in the hands of detectives, I’d probably lost any shot at getting any decent information out of her. Police disdain the same public realm that I thrive in, for a lot of logical reasons, and some rather illogical ones as well.
But the greater truth was, I felt like I’d already caused the death of her sister, and wasn’t exactly of the mood or mind to be cavalier with her life next. So I added, “They could protect you.”
She laughed a rueful laugh, her mouth pressed hard against the phone, and replied, “Yeah, just like they did with Hil.”
I calculated that last comment in a gathering silence. Then I heard bells go off, not around me, not on the phone, but in my own head, like the ceremonial opening ring of the New York Stock Exchange. Information was starting to come in.
“Tell me what you mean by that,” I said, trying to maintain the veneer of control.
As she began to reply, an ambulance hurtled toward me on Stuart Street, it’s blaring siren echoing off the ancient stone buildings and smacking against the sleek glass side of the John Hancock Tower. She was talking, but I couldn’t hear her, so I said, trying to control my frustration, “Hold on, I can’t get what you’re saying.” Then I added, “Is there any chance we can just get together?”
Again, I heard her voice in the phone, but not the words formed by it. At that moment, the Boston Emergency Medical Services ambulance streamed past me and took a right on Trinity Place, heading toward Copley Square. As the blare faded, I said to her, “I’m sorry, I couldn’t hear a word you were saying.”
And then I heard it again, the siren, and angrily looked down the street to see if another one was on the way, or perhaps a fire truck racing to the scene of a disastrous crash. But my street was barren now—no ambulance, no fire truck, not even any traffic, really.
The siren, I realized, was coming through the other end of the phone. Unless my ears and all that empty space between them were playing tricks on me, Maggie Kane was standing somewhere in Copley Square, less than a few hundred yards from where I was then.
So with the phone up to my ear, I began walking, first tentatively, then quickly. I moved fast around the corner, down Trinity Place toward the square, somewhere between a stride and a jog. Still, I heard the ambulance in the phone, and as I got closer to Trinity Church, the live blare filled my other ear as well. Any reporter worth the ink in their Bic Click has been accused of being an ambulance chaser at some point in their illustrious career; I will say, though, I don’t think even the best of them has taken the concept quite this literally.
But Maggie Kane was around here. She was near me, and I needed to find her.
I arrived on the grassy stretch of the Copley Square park, panting slightly like Baker might and scanning intently around in search of any public phones. Because of the sirens, Maggie couldn’t speak, or if she did, I couldn’t hear her. The sounds of the ambulance faded, both in the phone and in my open ear, and I looked across the park, onto Boylston Street, and saw the tail end of the actual vehicle vanish down the block. I wonder if she heard what I heard in the phone, if she put sound and sound together and came up with the possibility of discovery.
I said to her, trying to catch my breath, “Look, Maggie, I really want to help you, but I can’t if you insist on hiding from me.”
She replied, in a voice even more shell-shocked than before, “Jack, I don’t know what to do.” And then there was silence—actual silence, without so much as the siren, which was fine, because it provided the opportunity for exploration. I set off across the park in search of a pay phone and the woman on it.
“She’s dead,” she said, her words now dissolving into tears. “Hil’s dead. Someone killed her. Now they might kill me.”
“I can help you,” I said. The problem with pay phones is they tend to fade into the cityscape. We tend to just assimilate them, overlook them, see right through them.
I crossed Boylston Street and jogged east along the wide sidewalk, past the Copy Cop, the CVS, the various financial institutions with nonsensically spelled and descriptively meaningless names like BancNorth. I kept my mouth shut tight and breathed only through my nose so she wouldn’t hear me straining. And I searched, as hard as my eyes would allow me, boring into the buildings and the crystal clear autumn a
ir that marked another September afternoon.
I saw a homeless man, gray-haired and bearded, pushing a grocery cart filled with plastic bags of beer cans. I saw men by the dozens in business suits returning from another expense account lunch. I saw women young and old darting about during a lunch hour filled with the routine administration of their busy and sometimes difficult lives. But no Maggie Kane.
“How am I supposed to trust anyone?” she asked. She asked this sincerely, like she wanted an answer, needed an answer, before we could consummate any relationship or deal.
I said, “You need to tell me who your sister trusted. That will help us find out who killed her.”
My eyes raced around the sidewalk, even as I stood frozen in silent agony. More men and women in suits. More kids in loose jeans. Another homeless guy, this one lugging a torn trash bag over his right shoulder.
And then I saw it. No, not Maggie Kane. That would be too easy, too ordinary. I could have just walked up to her and said, “Maggie, hi, it’s Jack. We met at your sister’s place. Yeah, that’s right, in the bathroom. I’d really like to help you.” We could have walked up the street to the Starbucks, had ourselves a nice cup of coffee, maybe some biscotti, and she could have explained to me in minute detail all that she knew about her sister’s life and what she suspected was the cause of her death, and I could then have taken that information and put it on the front page of the next day’s Record and brought an end to the tragedy that was overwhelming my otherwise perfectly pleasant career.
But no, it wasn’t her that I saw, not at first, anyway. What I saw was a dark green sedan double-parked on the north side of Boylston Street. I saw it because the rear driver’s-side window was rolled down, and a metal object barely protruding from it caught the afternoon sun in such a way that the gleam seemed to poke me in the eye. I realized it was some sort of scope, and below the scope I saw the long, black barrel of a rifle, and I followed in the direction of the rifle, across the sidewalk, and saw nothing but passersby making their merry way to places unknown.
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