Now that wasn’t a bad little comeback, as these things go, and no doubt as intellectually taxing as could be. Probably better than what I said next, which was, “Don’t put your greasy fingers on my new paint job.”
I began walking around my prized Alpha Romeo, which hadn’t been painted since I owned it, which had been a long time, to get into the driver’s side when Orca stepped into my path. Anyone who has ever witnessed a solar eclipse might relate to the situation. In addition, he was so close to me that I could smell not only the onions on his breath, but the pickles, the mustard and the ketchup as well. Actually, they weren’t just on his breath, but crusted in the corner of his thick, dry lips.
Chest to chest, he asked, “Where’s the girl?”
I squinted. “Girl? Which girl you talking about? Goldilocks? Little Red Riding Hood? Man, I think someone was taking you for a ride, hotshot. Those people don’t really exist.”
He seemed momentarily perplexed by that, so I tried making my way around him as he attempted to figure things out. Again, he cut me off and said, “The Kane girl. Where is she?”
The mere mention of that name—and the profound, personal failure it represented—from a moronic thug like this inspired a flash of rage in me. I controlled the physical part, mostly out of self-defense, but the intellectual reins weren’t so easy to hold. I said, “She’s dead, asshole. I read it in the morning Record.”
That perplexed him as well, standing there on Huntington Avenue in a ridiculous suit with a gray shirt and a monochromatic tie, bits of his lunch stuck around his mouth and his eyes all tiny and beady like those of a cow. Then he said, “The other one. The sister.”
“No clue, shitbrain. Now get the fuck out of my way before you regret ever being in it.”
Truth is, I rather like the line, which almost sounds like something out of a movie with an unassuming hero who emerges from a life of relative pacifism to finally face down an evil, bullying enemy. That said, I knew the results of the words—and their accompanying sentiment—would have anything but a Hollywood ending, even as they were just drifting forth from my mouth.
Wouldn’t you know that I was right. Indeed, here’s what happened next:
He punched me.
Oh, I don’t mean to imply that this was some ordinary punch marked by that sickening sound of knucklebone on flesh. No, this was the Lincoln Navigator of punches, inefficiently big and hugely unwieldy but filled with an almost indescribable power. If this punch were a dog, it would be a Great Dane; if it were an airplane, it would be a Boeing 747; if it were a book, it would be War and Peace.
He struck me in the stomach, directly in my navel, with a downward thrust that was even worse for the fact that I saw it coming. I felt the air lapse out of my entire body in a single split second. I saw the stereotypical stars, followed by—and I’ll admit, this makes no great sense—Ginger of Gilligan’s Island fame in a tight gown beckoning me toward a desolate lagoon. It doesn’t make sense because I’ve always been a card-carrying fan of Mary Ann. And then, for the briefest of times, I saw nothing. When my eyes reopened, I was looking up at the bumper of my car. A city meter maid, though since he was a man I’m not sure what his proper title would be, was standing over me, asking if I was all right. Sure, I’m fine. I thought I’d just take a quick catnap here in the gutter of Huntington Avenue.
He helped me to my feet and as I leaned on the hood trying to gather my wits, handed me a bright orange parking ticket. “I didn’t see you down there when I wrote this out,” he said. “Sorry.”
Yeah, I bet he was. I struggled over to the driver’s door, walking hunched over and bowlegged. I looked around for the Neanderthal assailant but didn’t see him anywhere. It was then that I vaguely recalled him speaking to me as I lay on the ground, his words filtered through my ears like the sound of an old record set on a speed too slow.
“You ain’t felt nothing yet,” he told me in my pain-induced haze. And indeed, for a guy so obviously, visibly stupid, he sure as hell had that part right.
Chapter Sixteen
F irst thing I did when I walked into the Record newsroom a little after noon was head straight toward Peter Martin’s office, where the Beastie Boys continued to reign supreme. Fear not, these guys couldn’t possibly throw a punch harder than the one I had just taken, though it was good of Martin to come to his doorway again and make sure I didn’t have to find out.
Inside, we both sat down at the round table—free and clear since the Vermeer, I noticed, had been placed atop a cabinet behind his desk. With no time to waste, I said to him, “I think we really screwed up. Check that. I think I really screwed up.”
He still had that calm and collected thing going, and asked me in an assured tone, “You told someone about the painting?”
I shook my head. Outside, the September sun had ducked behind a thickening cover of afternoon clouds. Midday traffic on the Southeast Expressway was oddly light. A washed-out, postpubescent model wearing a pair of uncomfortably tight jeans watched it all from a roadside billboard for the Gap.
I said, “I think we might have caused a woman to die.” And with that, I provided the scant details that I had, from my initial gut instinct when I heard about the murder to Maggie Kane’s first vague warning to the shot fired in Copley Square to the frustrating conversation with Tom Jankle a couple of hours before. I concluded by telling him that I both wanted and needed to head to Rome that night to cut through the consuming haze.
He listened intently, nodded his head occasionally, and when I was done, looked down at the table for a long moment of absolute silence. Finally, he asked softly, “She couldn’t have fled to Hartford?”
Then, looking me square in the eye, he said, “So we rushed a story into print that caused the death of a young woman while at the same time helping to retrieve one of the most valuable stolen paintings in history.” It was part question, part summation—and a typically pretty good one on both counts.
I pursed my lips and slowly nodded. Before I could say anything, he asked, “How do we know Hilary Kane was so innocent?”
Um, good question, because the fact is, we didn’t. She certainly would have been too young to play any role in the initial heist, though she could be involved in some way in the return, or the negotiation over the possible ransom that Stephen Holden seemed to think was so inevitable. I replayed for Martin some of Jankle’s suspicions that she might have been the conduit of intercepted information, but the nature of the information and the way in which she came across it was entirely unclear, making it potentially dubious.
“Look, Jack, we’ve got to do one thing at a time here,” he said. “So go write the story about the return of the Vermeer. It’s going to be the talk of the nation tomorrow. I’ve emailed you an official statement from the newspaper on how we plan to turn the painting over to authorities, having deemed it authentic.
“And then go to Rome. It might even be better that you’re out of the country, because once this story hits, the FBI is going to want to grab you for what could be a whole day of interviews. Just take it easy on me. No frescoed ceilings in your room and twelve-dollar bottles of mineral water from the minibar.”
W hen I came out into the center of the newsroom, Vinny Mongillo was fully reclined in his chair, talking to the environment reporter, Todd Balansky, aka the newsroom Romeo, who was leaning on his desk. When they say a reporter is in bed with his sources, Todd takes it to its most literal extreme. There’s not a tree hugger in New England he hasn’t tried to date—date here being a gentlemanly euphemism.
“Seriously, I had her screaming for over an hour. Screaming.” That was Todd, never one to be discreet about his exploits, talking in something less than a low voice.
“Yeah, I can hear her now,” Mongillo replied. “ ‘Todd, Todd, I can’t feel a damned thing! Todd, I can’t feel anything!’ ”
Mongillo laughed his big, full-throttle laugh, his stomach actually heaving up and down. I did as well, and Todd, not graced with the sel
f-deprecation gene, stalked away. Such was life in the Record newsroom for those who hadn’t caused the death of Hilary Kane.
I leaned on Mongillo’s desk where Balansky had just been and asked, “What do you have?”
It’s important to understand, Mongillo always has something, and I don’t mean crabs or heartburn or any of the various maladies that I’d normally accuse him of. No, I mean in the reportorial sense. He spends twenty of the twenty-four hours in a day with the phone to his ear, always hustling, horse-trading information, “What do you got; why I no have; hey, did I tell you about so-and-so; no, I can’t until I get something from you.” If reporters really were the animals that we’re often made out to be, then Vinny Mongillo would be the great white shark of the Record newsroom—a pure fact-gathering machine, always looking to devour another piece of information.
He hesitated here, which meant a couple of things—first, that he had the nugget of something, but second, that he hadn’t yet moved it from the realm of the probable to that of publishable fact. He looked at me with those big brown eyes that I was going to miss so much, and I looked at him with a half nod intended to loosen him up. How many times had we played out this game before?
He said, softly, “I hear the mayor’s antsy.”
“About what?”
He shook his head slowly. “Trying to figure that out. I’m just told he’s been following both these stories—Kane’s death and the FBI leak on the Gardner heist—with unusual attention.”
I asked, “But why would that be so unusual? Hilary Kane was a city employee. And the Gardner heist is in the heart of his city, and now involves his fugitive son. It could simply be that he’s scared to death about how this might hurt his standing in the polls, if his kid gets tied any further into this.”
Mongillo nodded again, taking it all in, betraying little that was already there. “That might all be right, but I’m told he’s not acting just attentive, but nervous. He’s worth keeping an eye on.”
Well, enough of the devil’s advocate. I said, “I’m hearing from a reasonably well-placed source that the Feds might be probing him for ties to his son. I don’t know a lot more than that, but we ought to get in to see him sooner rather than later.”
He nodded and asked, “You want to double-team him?”
“I do. Problem is, between us girls, I’m on a flight to Rome tonight. I’m hoping it’s a real quick turnaround and that I’m back here as early as tomorrow afternoon.”
He looked at me incredulously. “You’re going to Rome?” Then he repeated himself, this time less a question than an assertion. “You’re going to Rome. I wonder if you could go to Rome if you were, say, bleeding profusely from your fat skull?”
Interesting question, though not one that I currently had the time to ponder. Before I could respond, he asked, “Why?”
The problem with an answer is that it might prove to be little more than currency for Vinny Mongillo to trade upon with someone else. Like I said, he’s a shark, constantly in search of what else is there, always about to make the kill, and sometimes, even with the best of intentions, he can’t help himself.
So I shook my head and said, “I’ll tell you when I get back.”
“You’ll tell me right now or I’ll bitch slap you until you’re on your knees crying from a pain that you can’t really feel.”
How postmodern of him. I looked at those needy eyes and that wonderfully puffy face that I loved so much and decided not to withhold, not now, not with him gone from the newsroom in a couple of weeks’ time. I said, “This can go absolutely nowhere, and I really mean that.” I stared him hard in the eye and he stared back at me.
“It will go absolutely nowhere,” he said, “just like your career.”
Isn’t that the truth? So I told him about the shooting in Copley Square after I left him at lunch the day before, and Maggie Kane’s flight to Italy, her phone call to me, my belief that she probably talked to her sister before the murder, and that she had something vital to add.
“Good luck,” he said somberly. “Get the story, drink the Chianti, and feast on the spring lamb. God, are Roman women beautiful. They all look like me, only a little thinner and more fashionable.”
The phone was ringing when I got to my desk and I paused for a moment before I picked it up with the standard, “Flynn here.”
There was a hesitation on the other end of the line before I heard a familiar voice say, “Riggs here.” My heart reflexively lightened for the flicker of a moment, then quickly became weighed down by the reality of the day, the relationship, the incongruity of it all.
I pressed the phone hard against my mouth as if the receiver was in some way an extension of her face and said in a surprisingly thick voice, “How are you?”
Another hesitation, before Elizabeth said, “I’m okay. I’m okay.” She said this word—okay—in that cute way she always did, as if it were a mouthful. Then she added, “I just wanted to hear your voice for a minute, if that’s all right.” With that, she fell into silence. I didn’t, or maybe couldn’t, reply.
After a long moment, she suddenly said, “On the ride into work this morning, I was thinking about that weekend we had in Bermuda. Do you remember how hard it was raining?”
I did, and a small smile reflexively spread across my lips.
She continued, “We couldn’t even step outside, the way those big drops were slamming against the stone patio. We’d go to dinner and everyone would be complaining, but you and I just put the Do Not Disturb sign up and couldn’t keep our hands off each other and read books and had sex and talked about everything and drank wine in the bathtub. We didn’t see the sun once. I don’t know if the hotel even had a beach. And it was the best vacation I’ve ever had. It always will be.”
“It was on that trip that you told me you loved me for the first time,” I said. “It was the middle of the afternoon and we were in bed and we forgot to put the sign on the door and the damned minibar guy comes walking in and we hid under the covers, me still inside of you, and you whispered into my ear, ‘I love you, Jack Flynn.’ And I had to lie there, my entire body about to explode from the sound of your voice and the feel of you against me and the meaning of your words, and I couldn’t move.”
She gave me that little giggle of hers, but I heard her sniffle and knew that tears were rolling down her face even as it was crinkled into that wonderful smile.
After a pause, she asked, “What went wrong?”
Life. History. The past nagging at the present, altering the future, making me a very lonely man, at least for now, maybe always, a burden I couldn’t shake.
This was all undoubtedly true, and she was surely as aware of it as I. But instead, I said, “I don’t know.” Pause. “I don’t know.” Another pause. “Do you?”
As I asked this, I emerged from my hazy angst to notice Vinny Mongillo pacing along the aisle beside my desk, munching loudly from a bag of especially crispy Tostitos. He was also talking on his cell phone, saying, “Yeah, the guy’s a sleezehog, but he’s my sleezehog, my helpful sleezehog, so if you don’t leave him alone I’ll have your name in print in the most unflattering possible way within twenty-four hours.”
I met his gaze. On the other end of the line, Elizabeth was saying, “I’ve been thinking a lot about this, and I’ve come to the conclusion that this is just our unfortunate way. I don’t mean to sound cosmic, but maybe it’s just our destiny, to love each other, but never completely have each other.”
“Get off the damned phone.” That was Mongillo, hanging up from his call and talking directly to me.
I said, “Wait a fucking minute.”
Elizabeth, suddenly alarmed, said, “What? What did I say?”
I put my fingers up to my forehead in absolute frustration.
“Not you,” I said into the receiver, still pressed hard against my mouth. “Mongillo. He’s standing here telling me to get off the phone.”
I pulled the handset back and whispered to Mongillo, “Get
the fuck away.”
Problem was, good friend Hank Sweeney, once a Boston PD homicide detective, now a well-paid security consultant, had just walked in and held up two videocassettes with his right hand while giving a thumbs-up with his left. Mongillo grabbed both of Sweeney’s shoulders with typical exuberance.
“It’s always something. It’s just the way it is with us.” That was Elizabeth, on the other end of the line, her tone more resigned than aggravated. “I don’t even blame you, Jack. It’s just that life is always getting in our way.”
As I was listening, Mongillo hit me on my arm and gave me an urgent wave. “I’m going to call you tonight,” I said to Elizabeth. Then I realized I’d be on an airplane, but didn’t have the time to explain.
“We can finish this whenever you want,” she answered, her tone now more sad than resigned. The word finish, by the way, is the one that stuck out in my mind. It sounded to me like she stressed it, but maybe not.
I said, “I love you.”
“I love you too, Jack. I just wish, on both our parts, for both our sakes, that it was somehow enough.”
The receiver wasn’t even in the holder yet when Mongillo, his face so close that I could smell the Tostitos on his breath, said, “Come with me, my concave-chested friend. Our first big break.”
“I thought the return of the Vermeer was our first big break.”
“It was, but on the Gardner. This one’s on Hilary Kane.”
I fairly well jumped out of my rolling desk chair, not to mention my skin, proving to me how much more important the Kane murder was in my mind than the return of The Concert, which would automatically rank as one of the biggest blockbusters in the history of the Record.
Mongillo led us into the conference room. Inside, Sweeney handed him a tape and explained to both of us, in his most businesslike voice, “Off the record, this was sent anonymously to the homicide bureau of the Boston Police Department. In turn, it was provided to me by a homicide detective, with the intention of getting it to the two of you. The boys over there are chomping at the bit to use it, but for reasons that will become obvious when you see it, they’re fearing for their jobs, their pensions, their families.”
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