“P.R.”
“That’s fucking absurd.”
“I’ve got an offer to make three times the coin I make at the Record doing crisis consulting with Gregor/Sunhill”—the largest public relations firm in Boston—“beginning next month. Jack, this is real.”
Three times the pay. I thought of that scene chasing the gunman down Boylston Street a few hours before and wondered if they might have any more slots to fill. But I abstained. Instead, I said, “Vin, you sound like a typical victim, blaming your job for your weight and your health. You can shed some pounds without walking out on the one true thing that you love.”
He shook his head and said, “You might be right, but I don’t think so. I have to get away from the stress of daily deadlines, the worry about always having to re-prove myself, every damned day of the year in front of a million unforgiving readers. I’m gone, Jack.”
Baker trudged over and dropped his muck-covered tennis ball onto the lap of Vinny’s extra-strength khakis. Vinny picked it up without a thought and lobbed it across the nearby lawn. Baker walked after it in slow pursuit.
“When?”
“I’m going to give notice Friday and, if they’ll keep me, hang in there for two more weeks. I’d like to help you through the Kane story and the Gardner heist.”
I nodded, ruefully. Vinny lifted himself to his giant feet, and so did I. He embraced me in a tight bear hug, his massive, oily arms squeezing me into his pungent-smelling chest. What can you do besides love the guy?
“I’m not done with you yet,” I told him.
He smiled as he walked away, the cooler in his hand. “I’m taking control, Jack, and it feels pretty fucking good.”
He disappeared into the dark as I sat back down on the bench. I thought of Hilary Kane heading to her car that sun-splashed morning, having no idea it would be the last walk she would ever take. I thought of the panicked voice of Maggie Kane and wondered where she was, how she was. And I thought a bit too long about Vinny Mongillo, and wondered a bit too long about whether he was right about much of what he said.
Chapter Thirteen
Wednesday, September 24
T he sun was streaming from a pale autumn sky as I trundled down Hilary Kane’s front steps, turned left down Mount Vernon Street, left again on Walnut, and headed toward her parking garage, all as part of my workmanlike attempt to commune with the recently dead.
It was 6:45 A.M., an hour that most self-respecting reporters have never actually seen, not unless they happen to stumble through it at the tail end of the night before. But I couldn’t sleep very well in a bed as newly empty as mine, or lounge around an apartment that now seemed to have all the hominess of a highway-view room at the Dew Drop Inn. So here I was, in search of what I did not know.
They don’t necessarily teach this at the esteemed Columbia School of Journalism, this thing called empathy. But I wanted to see what Hilary Kane saw on her last few moments alive, to walk where she walked, to smell what she smelled. Homicide detectives, I’m told, do this as routine, to better understand the victim and perhaps the act that caused their death. Would it give me answers? Probably not, but it would lend itself to the cause.
So I wondered if she looked at the newly planted, brightly colored chrysanthemums in the window boxes at the corner of Mount Vernon and Walnut, or if she happened to smile at the handsome young man in the navy blue suit who came bounding down the steps of his town-house condominium building just as I was walking by.
So I asked him, “Sir, did you happen to see an attractive young blonde woman come down this street yesterday morning when you were on your way to work?”
“Who wants to know?” he asked, answering a question with a question in that way I so dislike. What I disliked even more was the prep school accent in which he asked it.
“Jack Flynn from The Boston Record.” I find myself unable to say these words without a certain sense of pride, which I guess is good, but maybe not.
“Go back under the rock you crawled out from, maggot,” he said, and walked off.
For this I went to college.
I considered, for the briefest of moments, lighting after him, accosting him, maybe even punching his too-pretty rich boy’s face. But I quickly decided, why bother? In this day and age of conservative talk show hosts blasting away at what they deem the “liberal media” from their cable television soapboxes, there’s a certain dim-witted percentage of the population that actually buys into their overly simplistic cause. Rich Boy was obviously one of them. The ultimate irony, though: He was carrying a copy of that day’s Record, home-delivered, under his right arm. Go figure.
At that exact moment, the vision of Vinny Mongillo sitting in a private office in a high-rise building earning in a week what most reporters make in a month suddenly had an even a greater visceral appeal.
So I went on my way, down the hill toward the Boston Common Garage, where Hilary Kane met her maker. A few doors down, an older woman—perhaps in her sixties—with a pretty face and long, grayish-black hair stood on the street with an ancient chocolate-colored Labrador retriever who seemed to be doing an in-depth olfactory study of the base of a sign pole. The dog’s muzzle was entirely white, she had bare spots along the side of her coat, and moved like she was riddled with arthritis. Her owner was ever patient and appropriately adoring, even saying to her in a singsong little voice, “What’d ya find, Bonnie? What’d ya find?”
There was a flicker of a debate in the journalistic calculator that was my mind over whether to approach her as well. The downside was that she, like the, ahem, gentleman before, might tell me to take a flying fucking hike. Not likely, though. Dog owners are something of a different breed, pardon the weak pun. And more important, they, along with their animals, are creatures of habit. If she was standing here at 6:50 in the morning today, bet the leash that she was out at virtually the exact same time yesterday.
“Very pretty old girl,” I said, and could have been talking about either one of them. They both looked over at me with appreciation. Bonnie’s tail began furiously wagging and her owner smiled kindly at me. “I’ve got a five-year-old golden at home. How old’s yours?”
“She’s fourteen,” the woman said proudly. “I got her the day I retired at sixty-five, and we’ve kept each other busy ever since.”
I gave her my whole I’m-Jack-Flynn-with-the-Record spiel, and before I could say anything else, she interrupted with, “Goodness, I’ve been reading your byline for years. I’m a big fan.”
From a maggot to a saint in about two minutes. This job has more ups and downs than a roller-coaster repairman. I thanked her and asked, “Did you happen to see a young woman come walking down this same street yesterday morning, an attractive blonde?”
Without hesitation, she replied, “Hilary, yes, it’s awful, tragic. I cried myself to sleep last night. Such a beautiful girl with a bright future.”
“It is tragic, it is.” And she didn’t even know the half of it. Hell, I didn’t even know the half of it. I said, trying to control my sudden urgency, “So you saw her yesterday?”
The woman nodded as she took a big swallow. She got a far-off look in her big brown eyes and said, “She was crying. We walk by each other almost every morning, and Hilary loves Bonnie, and Bonnie loves Hilary, so they always spend a few minutes with each other while the two of us make small talk. But yesterday, she was in tears and didn’t stop.”
“Did she say anything?”
“She just kept walking. She was crying, like I said, and she kind of blurted out, ‘Sorry Rita. I’ll see you tomorrow.’ But she’ll never see us again.”
“Did she say anything else? Did you notice anything different, aside from the fact she was crying?”
As I asked these questions, it occurred to me that the homicide detectives should be doing precisely what I was doing here. I would think it would be standard operating procedure. Was there a breakdown? Was there neglect? Were they just not here yet? Did they already come and go?
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“I remember that she was carrying the newspaper in her hand, your paper, all kind of folded up and wrinkled, which she usually didn’t do, and she was really rushing. I called out to her, ‘What’s wrong, honey? Is there anything I can do?’ You know, I don’t know her all that well. I mean, I didn’t know her that well. I just see her in the street every morning. But sometimes you just form a kinship with people, especially over a dog.”
I know. Believe me, I know. The woman was a good interview in that she had a good mind for detail and a good sense of recollection, but she required some prodding, so I asked, “Did she answer you?”
“She said the strangest thing, and I don’t want you to take this personally. She was past me, rushing down the hill, and she just barely turned around and said, ‘Don’t believe everything you read.’ And she just kept walking. I don’t know what she meant.”
Don’t take it personally. Is murder personal? Is being a colossal fuckup and causing someone’s death personal? Is transforming from truth-seeker to dupish, lug-headed fiction writer personal?
I got her name—Rita Wicker—and thanked her in as kind a tone as I could possibly muster through the crud of self-condemnation. I asked her if she had spoken to police and she gave me a surprised look and told me no. So I made my way off, off on what seemed an increasingly futile search for some form of control.
I was sitting at a stoplight in the Theater District remembering the time that Vinny Mongillo was propositioned at a nearby bar by a transvestite prostitute with hairy legs when my new cell phone chimed an unfamiliar ring.
“Flynn here.”
“It’s original.”
It was Peter Martin, who’s also an original, maybe too much so. His tone was tinged with excitement, but when he gets excited, he has this enviable capacity to become remarkably serene, almost Zenlike. The more things are popping, the calmer he becomes. He’d probably fall asleep in the middle of a nuclear war. It’s when there’s nothing happening that he turns into the proverbial basket case that he so often seems to be.
“The painting?” I asked.
“The painting.”
The light turned green and I accelerated past the Wang Theater, heading toward the Record newsroom. It was a few minutes after 7:00 A.M., and it wasn’t even remotely a surprise that Martin was already attacking not just the story, but the day.
“How about you and I sell the damned thing this morning and be sitting in our own Tahitian mansion by tomorrow night?”
As I asked this, I thought of Peter Martin complaining to the Polynesian houseboy that the tropical fruit picked from our own trees hadn’t been properly cleaned, or that he didn’t like the feeling of sand between his toes, or couldn’t something be done about the chirping crickets that were keeping him awake at night. I mean, there he’d be, peeling off his black socks on the beach, lathering his ass-white legs in Number 40 sunblock, wondering why we couldn’t get a faster Internet connection so he could keep up with The New York Times.
“How about you haul your ass out of bed and get the hell in here before the entire day slips by.”
“I’m already on my way, and I’ve already worked what the union would describe as half a day.”
His tone, still calm, turned less belligerent and more confiding. He said, “The Harvard profs worked all night. They say the microscopic paint chips they scraped from the canvas match the chemical composition of oil paint used in that era. It’s either the original, or a reproduction from the exact same time, which doesn’t really make any sense. We’ve got our hands full with the best story in town.”
“Provided,” I said, “that we don’t get arrested.”
He didn’t really acknowledge that, so I added, “And I’ve got an entirely new layer to add on to it. I’ll be there shortly.” It was time to share with him my belief that I somehow caused the death of Hilary Kane.
I hadn’t been off the line for more than a minute when the phone chimed anew, and assumed it was just Martin again wanting to play out the glory of the upcoming day. The Caller ID, though, said Restricted Number.
“Flynn here.”
There was silence, though again, not exactly silence. I heard traffic. I heard the audible mush of urban life. Then I heard the familiar voice of Maggie Kane, sounding at once very close but also very far away, her words echoing into the phone.
“Jack, it’s Maggie.”
“Where are you?”
“Where are you?”
Those were my own words, echoing back at me in that way that sometimes happens during foreign phone calls. That prospect—that this was a foreign call—certainly put a chill in me. Maggie Kane, not just on the run, but outside of America.
She didn’t respond, so I repeated, “Maggie, where are you?”
“Maggie, where are you?” My voice was slow and dull, even moronic.
“Europe,” she finally said, sounding as if she had to force it out in a rush.
“Europe?”
“Europe?” God, I hated the sound of myself. It was as if the otherwise good people of AT&T were somehow, in some way, mocking me.
“I jumped in a cab yesterday. I told the driver to take me to the airport. We came all the way around to the last terminal”—Terminal E, the international terminal—“and I bought a ticket on the next flight. Here I am.”
“Where?”
“Where?” I mean, I sound like a fucking moron, unable to even ask a creative question.
“I don’t want to get more specific. What if your phone is bugged?”
Good point. Check that: Excellent point. This was a shrewd woman on the other end of the line, exercising more caution in a stressful situation than I even thought to have.
I swerved to the side of the road and jumped out at the local White Hen Pantry, which is your basic 7-Eleven-style convenience store, though with a better, albeit illogical, name. I checked out the grungy pay phone in the small parking lot and said to her, “Do you have a pen?”
“Do you have a pen?” I’ve really got to learn to talk sharper, quicker. I wonder if there’s such a thing as voice lessons for plain, everyday speaking.
She did, and she wrote down the number, and I told her to call me immediately, and if it didn’t take calls, to telephone me back on my cell phone. Within seconds, the pay phone rang and we were in business.
“Where are you?”
There was no echo this time, which was good. And no caution.
She replied, “Rome. I took an Alitalia flight from Logan to here.”
“Do you think you were followed?”
“I didn’t see anything suspicious. I switched cabs once on my way into town.”
She sounded not just weary, but outright exhausted, possibly to the point where she was destined to break apart. And who could blame her? The morning before, her look-alike sister was murdered. She was shot at by a gunman in the light of day on a busy city street. She took an overnight flight to a foreign land. Three thousand miles from home, she was now suspicious of everyone and everything that flitted in and out of her tenuous life.
“Look,” I said, trying to sound soothing, “you sound like you’re doing well, given everything that’s going on. I want to help you. I really do. You have to let me.”
Her voice started quivering then as she said, “I am so scared…” Her words trailed off toward a muffled sob, and I pictured her at one of those newfangled European phone booths quaking over the receiver as fashionably dressed men and gorgeous women came and went in the art of another Roman afternoon.
“Let me help.”
She sighed loud in the act of composition. I could visualize her wiping her hands across the smooth regions of her pretty face, her short blonde hair probably matted down in front and tousled in back from the long flight.
“I need help,” she said, talking now without tears. “I’m afraid of what I know, and even more frightened by what I don’t.”
“Do you want to come home?” I asked.
“I can’t. I
’ll have to use my own passport to get into the country, and people will know. I’ll be killed.”
Again, her making more sense than me. “Then I’ll come to you,” I said. “I’ll fly out tonight. We’ll meet tomorrow morning. Have you checked into a hotel yet?”
She was crying again when she said, “No.”
“Where are you?” I had a passing familiarity with Rome from a long-ago work trip and a more recent weekend away with Elizabeth, an extraordinarily good weekend, actually, but no reason to dwell on that just now.
“Piazza Navona,” she said.
“Get a room at the Raphael. It’s not far from where you are right now, toward the Pantheon. I’ll meet you at the rooftop restaurant at the hotel tomorrow morning, ten A.M. your time. If there’s any problem, call my cell phone. If you can’t get a room there, go to the Albergo del Sole on Piazza della Rotunda, near the Pantheon.”
We were both quiet for a long moment, just the muted sound of transatlantic static on the line. Finally, she said to me, “Do you have any idea what it’s like to lose someone you love so suddenly? Do you have any idea what it’s like to be shot at?”
These weren’t asked so much in the hypothetical, as by way of explanation for her emotional state. The answers were yes to both questions, which have inextricably defined not so much who I am but what I’ve inevitably become. We are shaped to a greater degree than we probably care to admit by forces, occurrences, far outside of our control.
I didn’t answer. Now was not the time for conversation or comparison of our respective tragedies. I said to her, “Stay safe now. Tomorrow, we’ll get to the bottom of all this. Call me if you need me.”
She mustered the normalcy to say, “Have a good flight,” and the two of us hung up.
I walked back to my car thinking of what Martin was going to say when I told him of my mission. “What,” he’d tell me, “she couldn’t have fled to New York?”
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