Dead Line

by Brian McGrory

  But beyond the sidewalk, I saw the shiny glass front of a store, a bagel store called Finagle-a-Bagel, to be more specific, and through the reflecting glass, I noticed the hazy outlines of a female form leaning on a wall with a telephone up to her ear. And thus I found Maggie Kane.

  “I think I’m just going to run, to get the hell out of Boston for a while. Maybe I’ll call you from wherever I go.” That was her, still talking into the phone, having no idea of what was unfolding outside. The door to the store was propped open, which explained the street noise and the ambulance silence. There were a few customers flitting in and out. The situation, the scenario, the utter unlikelihood of a rifle here in Copley Square, of a woman talking to me on the verge of death, took a moment to register, and once it did, the next few seconds seemed to unfold in that proverbial slow motion, though rapidly so.

  I yelled into the phone, “Duck, Maggie. Duck!” To emphasize that I wasn’t just some proselytizing member of the Audubon Society seeking to fill our ranks, I hollered, “Hit the floor!”

  I don’t know if she followed orders or not, because the next thing I did was pull the phone away from my ear and fire it in the direction of the car. Now’s as good a time as any to relive the past, so I want to remind anyone and everyone that it was a scant few decades before that I pitched a no-hitter in Little League, and a talent that immense doesn’t fade all that fast. I’d also like to note that this wasn’t the first time I threw a telephone in what seemed to be a life or death situation. A few years before, in the Washington bureau of The Boston Record, I struck a derelict FBI agent named Kent Drinker in the wrist with a desk phone that had never before made such an important connection, but more on that topic some other time.

  I watched the mobile phone scream through the twenty feet of afternoon air between me and that green car. I think I was still on the line with Maggie Kane when I made the throw, and the thought briefly occurred to me that the phone might end up inside the car, Maggie might fall to the ground in escape, the car might drive off, and I might get a cell phone bill for about five thousand Benjamins because no one on either end ever bothered to hang up. I’d like to see Peter Martin’s reaction to that.

  Instead, the phone struck the scope dead-on, not to use that word too loosely here. I saw the gun twitch to the right. I heard it fire, the report thundering off the walls of the nearby buildings and echoing back onto the street. People screamed. Some ran; others dropped to the ground, everyone no doubt believing they were amid one of the biggest nightmares of modern America: the mass murder. Six dead, two injured, gunman commits suicide. Film at 11.

  I glanced over at the store and saw that the bullet had taken out a plate glass window many feet to the right of where Maggie Kane had stood. I tore after the car, which was in the process of pulling back into traffic. I was running off the curb and into the street when the driver leaned on his horn and accelerated through the intersection. The image of me as roadkill flickered into my mind, and then out. I grabbed the last three figures off the license plate—JF1, as in Jack Flynn has the number one arm—and ran another thirty or so yards down Boylston Street until I couldn’t see the car anymore.

  I jogged back to the bagel shop, sweating like a hog in heat by now. All the customers, all the staff, were gathered on the sidewalk, some in tears, others in small groups talking among themselves while they waited for the television cameras to arrive and make them famous, if only for the night. I walked through and among the groups, looking for Maggie, then around them, and then I scanned the sidewalk and park on the other side of the street, but saw nothing of consequence. I asked a few people if they saw a pretty woman with short blonde hair leave the scene, but no one had. When they realized I had no microphone or klieg lights, their interest seemed to wane significantly.

  It was then that I heard the familiar ring of my cell phone and reflexively reached into my back pocket to answer it. But the ring came not from immediately behind me, but from a short distance in front. My phone, sitting in the gutter, was chiming, and I immediately thought of Maggie Kane, standing at a nearby pay phone, urgently trying to reach me.

  I bolted toward the sound, saw my severely dented phone resting atop an empty, bleached-out Doritos bag, and answered it. I mean, I was on what Verizon calls the “Do Anything plan,” but I had no idea it allowed me to literally throw my phone around. God bless Japanese engineering.

  “Finally, you pick the frick up.” It was the annoyed and annoying voice of Peter Martin. Let’s quickly review: I think I’m responsible for a woman’s death. I just saved another woman’s life. I chased a murderer down one of the main avenues of downtown Boston. And Peter Martin, sitting in his comfortable office over at the Record, is severely put out because I haven’t answered the phone every six minutes when he’s been on the other line.

  I bit my tongue, and my lip, and the inside of my cheeks. Finally, I said, “I’ve had a few things going on.”

  Martin replied, his tone now one of complete sincerity, “You’re going to want to get over here, and fast. There’s a hand-delivered package sitting at your desk, and if it’s what I think it is, all hell is about to break loose.”

  “What? What is it?”

  With that, the phone made some funny squawking sound, like two horses mating on a Wyoming ranch, and went completely dead. When I pressed the On button again, the battery fell loose in my hand. Goddamn Japanese engineering.

  As the sound of sirens filled the air all over Copley Square, I stepped off the curb, flagged a cab, and headed for the newsroom.

  I was alone, and so was Maggie Kane, and somewhere in the city, a killer was on the loose with a motive that I didn’t yet know.

  Chapter Ten

  I occasionally wonder what it would be like to walk through the sleek lobby of a downtown office tower every morning, ride the elevator to, say, the twenty-eighth floor, and report to work in a windowless cubicle at a job in which the tomorrows are indistinguishable from the todays. A bad day at the office is when the markets dip in the triple figures or that surefire client decides to take his business to Acme Whatever down the street. A good day is when your best stock announces a split or when you lock down a sale you never really expected to make. It’s a tribute to the human psyche that you’re able to contain the euphoric onslaught of unmitigated joy.

  Truth be known, it’s why I went into newspapers—that and the fact that my father worked for the Record as a pressman and newspapering is the only business that I have ever known. As a reporter, you can be sitting at Fenway Park one moment watching the Red Sox make an improbable journey toward the pennant, and the next moment, you’re being led by a pride of hairy thugs to a meeting with one of the most senior law enforcement officials in the city—all in the name of front-page news. You can challenge authority at will, make even presidents sweat, and tell people, regular, normal, God-fearing people, that which they would never otherwise know. All this, and no license required.

  And yet, on days like this one, I looked longingly on those downtown towers, pining for the relative predictability and obscurity contained within—at your desk by 8:30, out by 5:00, all aboard the 6:07 to Wellesley Farms. Honey, sorry I’m one-and-a-half minutes late, but Mr. Talksalot wouldn’t let me go.

  By way of explanation, my situation: One young woman dead, another likely on her way, an editor informing me that, in his words, all hell was set to break loose, and a colleague espousing an uncannily insightful theory involving my utter imbecility. And of course, add to this the fact that my fabulously intelligent and beautiful live-in girlfriend, one Elizabeth Riggs, was at that hour home packing her belongings to depart not just my house, but I suspect, my life.

  “Tell Agent Jankle, please, that I am planning to post a story on our website very soon about the murder of a young woman in Boston that I think he will be very interested in.”

  That was me, essentially lying to Special Agent Tom Jankle’s secretary. Look, someone was obviously lying to me about something, so I’m
not going to sit back and be purer than a virgin snow. I was in the taxi, talking on the cabbie’s cell phone that he was nice enough to loan me because he knows I’m Jack Flynn and the urgent business of daily journalism never takes so much as a momentary break.

  Well, actually, a loan might be something that would happen in St. Louis or Denver. This being Boston, I was paying to use it for the duration of the ride. And Jack Flynn, Jack Ass, no difference to him. He didn’t understand English when I initially inquired, but became well versed in the intricacies of capitalism when I pulled out a crisp $20 bill.

  Anyway, the particularly ornery woman on the other end of the line seemed unimpressed. “Even if he cared,” she told me in a tone so dismissive it made me more jealous than angry, “I couldn’t reach him at the moment anyway. He’s on a flight right now to Washington.”

  Ding, ding, ding. That, ladies and gentlemen, would be news we’ve just spotted there. Washington, D.C. is, last I checked, capital of the United States of America, home of, among other things, the White House, and more pertinent to the situation, the headquarters of the FBI. Someone wanted to see Jankle about something—and quickly. I punched out a couple of more numbers on the rented phone, tossing out lines to FBI officials I knew in Boston and Washington. That done, I placed a call to my condominium, to see how Elizabeth was faring, but got only the voice machine.

  The phone rang in my hand and, without thinking, I answered it with my usual, “Flynn here.” A raspy voice on the other end of the line began a machine-gun-fire conversation in a language I had never before heard. I handed the phone up to the driver in the headdress and tunic.

  I leaned back and closed my eyes and listened to his end of the indecipherable conversation and thought about how big this world we live in really is. This driver had fled his homeland, perhaps leaving a family behind, to journey across an enormous ocean to the mysterious shores of America, all in the name of freedom. Perhaps it was political freedom, perhaps financial. Didn’t matter, he had set out in a brave search for a better way in another part of the globe.

  So if this world around us was so big, then why, I wondered in my current state of exhausted angst, did mine seem so suddenly small? Everywhere I looked, there were walls of misery and an impenetrable haze of helplessness. I thought of Hilary Kane’s parents, probably planning her burial. I thought of desperate Maggie Kane running for her life. I thought of Elizabeth, home sadly packing up her things, maybe drying the inevitable tears that streamed down her cheeks on the top of Baker’s soft head. Everyone and everything seemed to be going away.

  Before I came to terms with any of it, the car stopped. I opened my eyes and saw the familiar and sometimes friendly front doors of the Record. The driver said, “$18.75.” With tip and the phone bill, the ride cost me $45. As Martin would probably point out, it wasn’t so long ago that you could fly from Boston to Washington on People’s Express for about the same amount. But no matter. Time now to head inside and peer into the looseness of a broken hell.

  A s I strode through the newsroom, I could see Martin pacing along a distant aisle, his head down, his hands moving as if he were carrying on a conversation with himself, which he probably was. I stopped at the reception desk and asked Barbara, my surrogate mother and the chief gatekeeper of all things Record, if she could see her way to finding me a replacement phone.

  “Honey, I don’t know which looks worse, you or this Nokia,” she said in her thick South Boston accent when I handed it over. I tried to think of a witty response, but that rather large part of my brain had apparently ceased to function, though hopefully not for good.

  When I got to my desk, Martin was already standing there, accompanied by Edgar Sullivan, the paper’s longtime director of security—and when I say longtime, I’m talking in multiples of decades. Edgar couldn’t catch a cold these days, never mind a thief, but he’s always been our security director, thus he always will be our security director until the day that he decides not to be, which is just one more reason why I loved this newspaper so.

  I said, “All right, Edgar, you’ve got me. I refilled my Coke in the cafeteria last week and forgot to pay.”

  Edgar, a longtime friend, laughed an appreciative laugh and replied, “Up against the desk, Jack. Don’t make this hard on either one of us.”

  Martin, ever impatient and equally humorless, said simply, “Why don’t we turn off the laugh track while we get down to business.”

  And business, I suspected, was this rather large tube wrapped in brown butcher’s paper that sat propped against my desk, with an envelope taped to the top that said in handwritten letters, “Jack Flynn.”

  We all looked at it together, silently, until Edgar said, “I already scanned it once downstairs, through a machine, but I brought the handheld up with me to show you it was safe.” And with that, he produced a portable magnetometer that he flicked on and casually waved around the perimeter of the package.

  Around the room, reporters were openly peering in our direction. Some had actually wandered by to watch. Subtlety isn’t a trait of even good journalists. Martin, standing directly beside me, rubbed his hands together and said, “Let’s have a go.”

  Not quite yet. Edgar pulled a pair of latex gloves from the breast pocket of his ancient and wrinkled blue blazer, and handed me a second pair of the same. “I’d advise that you wear these, Jack,” he said in his soft, gravelly voice. “We might be dealing with important evidence here.”

  Indeed, we might. Now’s as good a time as any to note that this would be the exact kind of package in which a painting might be shipped, which had been Martin’s unstated point since he reached me on the phone in Copley Square. You don’t need Carl Bernstein kicking around the newsroom to know when news might be about to hit us flush in the face.

  Finally, Edgar, who had already exhibited more knowledge of protocol than I ever would have imagined that he had, gently pulled the envelope off the package and handed it to me, unopened. He then pulled a letter opener out of his coat pocket—what the hell else does he keep in there?—and said, “Keep it as intact as you can.”

  And I did, which wasn’t easy, given how many sets of eyes were on me. It was about four o’clock, rounding the corner from the casual ease of another newspapering afternoon to the full tension of deadline. But everyone in the room seemed to have nothing but time.

  I pulled the note out, sat down in my chair, and read.

  “It’s real,” it said in the same crude, almost childlike handwriting that was on the envelope. “We have the others.” And then, in a direct quote from what the thieves told the Gardner Museum security guards that night, the note concluded, “Tell them they’ll be hearing from us.” It wasn’t signed, as these things usually aren’t. It just ended, unceremoniously so, right there.

  I turned around to show Martin, but he had already read the entire thing over my shoulder.

  I began rereading the brief note, when Martin said in a tone as taut as a rope, “Open it.” He knew, I knew, what was very well inside.

  I reached for the tube, when Edgar put up his wrinkled hand and said, “Let me do it.” My old friend Edgar was suddenly equal parts Dirty Harry and Sherlock Holmes. He flipped a box cutter out of his breast pocket and, like a surgeon, cut the paper wrapper off the tube in one precise stroke of his gloved hands. He pulled off the top and handed me the package.

  I reached inside and pulled out a heavy piece of scrolled paper and handed Edgar the empty tube. It had the odor of age to it, of history, something significant that had been passed through the years, studied by scholars, and in this case, perhaps hidden for too long in a dark corner of a distant safe. I pushed the old newspapers and used legal pads and assorted books off the top of my desk and unfurled the canvas. Before I could fully synthesize that which I saw, I heard the familiar voice of Vinny Mongillo, who must have arrived on the scene with uncharacteristic silence, utter the following memorable words: “Holy fucking fuck.”

  I was looking at what seemed to b
e an oil painting, though in truth, how the hell do I know these things? It could have been done in Crayola pastels and I wouldn’t have known the difference. Anyway, the painting showed three people—two of them sitting, the third, a woman, standing—on the far side of what seemed to be a checkered-floor conservatory, with two of them playing some sort of musical instruments and the third leading them in song. It reminded me of one of those incredibly complicated thousand-piece puzzles that my grandmother used to assemble over the course of weeks on her dining-room table.

  “Vermeer,” Mongillo said, stepping forward, in a distant voice that made it sound like he might be under a hypnotic spell. I looked at him for a long moment as he stared wide-eyed at the canvas. “The Concert. You’re looking at one of the great art works of all time, the most valuable painting stolen from the Gardner Museum thirteen years ago, a priceless treasure too great for words, too beautiful for anyone to ever assign mere human emotion.”

  By now, my massive friend was standing directly beside me, hovering over the painting like a Yellowstone bear regarding a finely sculpted piece of Nobu sushi. It’s important to have a full appreciation for the aesthetic—as an art dealer might call it—of Vinny Mongillo. He is big in the way a mountain is big, with an unwieldy girth that sprouts oversize limbs coated in a constant sheen of oil and sweat. His hair is thick and black and always matted down—and not just on his head. His odor is that of Italian cold cuts. His clothes—rugged khakis, flannel shirts, heavy shoes—are bought from specialty shops that supply outsize construction workers making an honest day’s wage for a hard day’s work. In short and sum, he looked like the type of guy that would collect various renditions of Elvis on felt, but here he was ready to fall to intellectual pieces over a painting by this master called Vermeer.

  “What do you see?” he said to me, still in that faraway tone. He said this as he continued to drink in every last detail of the canvas, never taking his eyes off the muted colors of the paint.