Sweeney and I were leaning against the U-shaped conference table. Mongillo walked over to one of five televisions hooked up to VCRs that are used to record the nightly news on all the affiliates. The room, by the way, is where the Record’s so-called braintrust holds a pair of meetings every weekday—the first at 11:00 A.M. to discuss the stories that were being pursued and the news that was breaking, and the second at 3:30 to update everyone else on whether those stories had been successfully pursued and the relative worth of the broken news. The top half-dozen editors gathered again at 5:00 P.M. on the newsdesk to read story tops submitted by reporters and view photos and graphics all in an effort to choose the content of the front page.
As Mongillo fumbled with the VCR, I asked Sweeney, “What are they looking for from us?”
“They want you to ask the questions around town that they don’t think they can ask right now, maybe even get it into print. Once it’s in the public eye, headquarters will have no choice but to give them the go-ahead to pursue.”
Not often do detectives deign to put reporters out front on a story. This, I told myself, must be fairly juicy, or perhaps disconnected, so sketchy, so far-fetched, that the homicide bureau was looking for the Record to take long-shot risks that they couldn’t afford to take. As I pondered this, the screen came to life. Mongillo stepped back and joined us against the table. All three of us stood with our arms crossed and our eyes riveted on the television.
We watched the almost stereotypical countdown—3…2…1—before an image appeared of what looked like an office lobby, captured by one of those cameras that was focused down at an angle, as if it were shooting from high against a wall, like something in a bank. The lower left-hand corner carried the stamp: “02:33, 09/20”—2:33 A.M., on Saturday, September 20, five nights before. All was still, empty, such that it could have been a photograph rather than a video—that is, until a distant silhouette appeared from around a blurry corner and hurriedly walked toward the camera, closer and clearer, closer and clearer.
“Stop,” I said.
Mongillo hit the Pause button on the remote control. I walked up to the television, fairly well putting my fat face against the screen. The frozen picture had waves rolling through parts, but remained clear in others.
“Roll it for another second,” I said.
Mongillo hit Play. The figure walked from the center of the screen toward a corner, in real life, toward the door. “Stop,” I said again.
This time, in the still frame, the figure was outside of the static, and I was standing there staring at the heartbreaking, breathtaking image of Hilary Kane.
Her blonde hair was mussed to the point of being unkempt, as if she had just jumped out of bed, and given the time, that’s probably exactly what she had done—a fact about her last days on earth that I didn’t really want to know, but maybe I needed to. She had a nervous look on her face, frightened even, and the way she moved was anything but the relaxed and satisfied gait you might expect from someone who had just spent an enjoyable hour or two in someone else’s apartment. She carried a bag over her left shoulder and what looked like rolled-up papers in her right hand. She put her head down and didn’t acknowledge the uniformed security guard who was visible in the far left side of the picture, sitting as he was behind a paneled desk.
“It’s Hilary Kane,” I said, still staring at the screen. The silence behind me spoke to the fact that these two already knew. “She’s coming out of a building at 2:30 A.M. on Friday night/Saturday morning, but where and why and what’s it have to do with anything?” With that, I turned around and faced Sweeney and Mongillo. Mongillo hit Play and Hilary walked out the front double doors. The video then gave way to blackness.
Her image in motion, this woman who I knew only in still pictures and then dead, and whose life, for me, took place in the abstract, was nothing short of jolting, a stark and almost cruel reminder of how recently she was among the living, of how great this loss had been, a vibrant person feeling real fear just a few days before. And then my story appeared in print, and some lives changed for reasons I couldn’t yet understand, and hers was over.
I got no answers from my two compatriots, so I asked again, firm to the edge of anger now, “What’s the significance?”
Sweeney spoke, directing his remarks from one to the other of us in that easy, mossy voice of his. “The building is the new Ritz-Carlton complex, the lobby of the north tower, which is exclusively high-priced condominiums. And I mean real high-priced. Mother of Christ, are they expensive. You could buy my entire retirement complex in Florida for the cost of the penthouse here, but maybe that’s saying more about where I lived in Florida—”
“Hank,” I said, cutting him off, urging him toward a point. “All we have here is a video of Hilary leaving the Ritz alone five days before she was killed. What’s got the cops so scared?”
He looked at me pointedly, maybe offended at the rush treatment of his presentation, but maybe not. He was, after all, a pro, one of the best homicide detectives the city of Boston had ever known.
“This,” he said, and he handed Mongillo the second tape.
Mongillo placed it in a second VCR, right beside the first, and the accompanying television came to life. The time stamp this time said “02:01, 9/20”—thirty-two minutes prior to the last tape. The lobby was the same, but the image was recorded from a different direction, apparently from a camera posted on the opposite wall. Again, all was still, until a pair of silhouettes appeared on the other side of the outer glass doors. The doors flung open, a man and a woman walked inside, the man’s beefy arm slung over the woman’s shoulder, drawing her toward him as they walked toward the camera, closer and clearer, closer and clearer.
“Stop,” I said, and again, Mongillo hit the Pause button of the remote control. I stepped toward the screen. Both faces were outside of the static, and right there, on the television in the conference room of The Boston Record, I saw frozen footage of Hilary Kane five days before her death in the intimate company of Mayor Daniel Harkins. My heart felt like someone tied a piece of lead to it and dropped it off a cliff. My chest immediately had the sensation of being empty. My stomach rolled into an immediate knot. Even in death, women can break your heart. I suppose I already knew that all too well.
“Roll it,” I said, and Mongillo hit Play.
The pair—I refuse to use the word couple in regards to Hilary Kane and any other man, let alone a politician twice her age—walked wordlessly past the guard at the front desk, and when they were out of his view, but still within the range of the lens, they stopped in a groping embrace. Harkins put both his hands on the back of her blonde head and pulled her face sharply into his. They kissed awkwardly, even angrily, at least on his part. She pulled back some, and when they began walking again, he stumbled ever so slightly, and then they were out of view. A few seconds later, the screen went dark.
We all stood there in silence for a long moment. I thought of the guard at the front desk, and immediately assumed that he was the likely source of the shipment to Boston PD. Maybe if the mayor had just said hello to him that night we wouldn’t be sitting here looking at this tape now. Who knows?
Outside the glass walls of the conference room, I saw Peter Martin walking from the vending machines with a can of Tab and a bag of pretzels. I heard Barbara announcing phone calls on hold for this reporter or that. I watched Todd Balansky corner an exquisitely mediocre-looking copy editor from whom he was no doubt seeking a date.
“This is why the mayor has been so nervous over the last couple of days,” Mongillo said in a low, serious voice.
Sweeney quickly said, “Where I used to work, this is what’s known as a break in the investigation.”
“Even,” I asked, “in an investigation in which they’ve already made an arrest?”
Sweeney replied, “This might explain why they moved so quickly, maybe too quickly, to make that arrest.”
I looked at Mongillo and without a word exchanged between us, h
e nodded back at me. I picked up the phone on the table beside the TVs and punched out the number to the mayoral press secretary down at City Hall, Grace Flowers. Her name, both the front and back ends, was an outright lie.
“Gracey,” I said in the most cheerfully fake voice I could muster when she picked up the line. She hated me. I already knew that. But she still had to talk to me. It’s another reason that makes this job so great. “Listen, I was looking to chat up the mayor a bit.”
“He’s out of touch,” she said, flat and unhelpful. No kidding. If she had her way, that was the extent of the conversation and the pursuit. Luckily, as is usually the case, the way would be mine and the tango had just begun.
“That’s a shame,” I said, still cheerful, still fake. “You know why? Because we’re looking to put a story in tomorrow’s paper that involves the mayor, and my bet is, given his potential appointment as a United States senator, he’d be real interested in what it’s about. He’d probably even have something to say about it, either him or his lawyers.”
His lawyers. I threw that in for dickish good measure.
“Jack,” she said, her voice bristling with frustration, “why don’t you tell me what it’s about so I can make sure that he returns your call.”
“Awfully afraid I can’t do that on this one, Grace. It’s very personal for the mayor. But I can do this. I can be available to talk to him. Just tell him it’s about who he’s keeping company with over at the Ritz, and to give me a call and I’ll go into it some more.”
I could hear her shouting “Jack!” as I hung up the phone.
Chapter Seventeen
I ’m at the point in my illustrious newspaper career where you can impose virtually any act of rudeness on me and it will roll off my back like water off a duck’s behind, or however that phrase goes. Call me names. Call me stupid. Call my journalistic bluffs. Just call me back. I think I speak for every reporter everywhere when I say, if you don’t, you’ve just made an enemy for life, and as that old saw goes, why pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel.
All of which is to say, an hour later, no word from the mayor. I had a flight to catch to Rome, a woman to save, a murder to solve, a salvaged masterpiece to publicize, and as I said to Mongillo when I wandered over to his desk, “The fucking fuckhead in City Hall doesn’t give us the respect to pick up the phone.” I was, in a word, angry. Of course, I was other words too—harried, stressed, uncertain, and here’s one I rarely use in self-description: nervous.
“I haven’t heard from him either,” Mongillo replied as he held the receiver of the phone away from his head to show I was interrupting a call. “You want to just show up where he is?”
Just show up. I love just showing up. It takes people off guard, gives them no time to prepare, doesn’t allow them to scribble notes to their nervous press secretary as you’re awaiting an answer on the other end of the line and they’re pretending to be lost in statesmanlike thought.
“Let me find out where he is,” I replied.
It was nearing 5:00 P.M. Time was an enemy, not an ally. And it’s not necessarily good to link a sitting mayor—or a standing one, for that matter—to a murder investigation on deadline. After the fallout from the Toby Harkins story of two days before, I’m not sure I was qualified to do anything on deadline anymore.
Fortunately in life, I’m blessed with friends in low places, people whom I find much more valuable than the invariably self-important types who ascend to loftier heights. I punched out the number to the mayor’s office in City Hall and asked to speak to a woman with the appropriate name of Rose, a former neighbor of mine going back to my childhood days in South Boston.
These days, she was the mayor’s official scheduler and gatekeeper to his inner office. Like any denizen of Southie, she was loyal to a fault, meaning her first loyalty would always be to me for one simple reason: She knew me longer, from the old neighborhood. So I engaged in our usual banter and then dropped the question without apologies. “I’m trying to track down the mayor. Is he in his office?”
“With the door shut, and Grace Flowers inside.”
Rose, Grace Flowers. There’s a woman named Daisy who runs the Parks Department. I’ve always wanted to host a garden party for the mayoral staff, but don’t know if anyone else would get the joke. Anyway, she gave me more information than I initially sought, which was typical, and good. I asked, “What’s his schedule like?”
“He’s not due to leave the building for thirty minutes. I don’t think there’ll be any changes.”
Within five minutes, Mongillo and I were armed with notebooks and pens, weaving through rush hour traffic, on the verge of accusing Mayor Daniel Harkins of being involved in Hilary Kane’s murder, at least in person, and eventually, hopefully, in print.
T he woman at the reception desk in Mayor Harkins’s outer office was not, as they say, any kind of rose. Well, let me amend that. She did seem rather thorny. She looked like she had been sitting here since James Michael Curley was running the show, what with her beehive hair getup and what looked to be a polyester pantsuit, which, for all I know, might have been back in style. I do know this: She wasn’t buying any of the Jack act.
“Good afternoon,” I said, in my absolutely most cheerful voice, as Mongillo and I innocently approached her desk. I saw her nameplate and smiled at her stern face and said, “Mildred, I’m Jack Flynn. This is Vinny Mongillo. If you could send our apologies to the mayor for running a little late, we’re ready to see him now.”
She looked from me to Mongillo and then back at me, her expression never changing from that of casual, bureaucratic scorn. Just a guess, but I think if she smiled, her entire face would crack and crumble all over her spotless, empty desk. She looked down at a sheet of paper in front of her, ran her fingers along what appeared from my upside-down perspective to be a list of names, and said, “I don’t see that you have an appointment with Mayor Harkins.”
“Last minute thing,” I replied, still smiling.
“Your names again?” She asked this as if we were about to tell her they were Crap and Phlegm.
“Jack Flynn,” I said.
“Spell it.”
“F-U-C-” Just kidding. I spelled my name quickly and clearly. Mongillo’s took a little bit longer, given that I don’t think she knew any names—O’Hara aside—that ended in a vowel.
She said, “And you’re from?”
“Boston.”
Look, if I said we were from the Record, she would have immediately called down to the press secretary, Grace, who would then have tried to escort us out of the mayor’s office, and failing that, would have warned the mayor to use some sort of back entrance. I mean, you think this is easy, this street reporting?
She shot me a look as piercing as a bullet, and believe me, I know of what I speak. Not only was she not buying the act, she was outright tiring of it—and fast. I snuck a look at the wall clock, which indicated that it was exactly thirty minutes after my good friend Rose had told me that Harkins would be leaving the building. The goal here was to stall, then ambush—a strategy they don’t necessarily teach at the Columbia School of Journalism, but they should. Believe me, they should.
“I mean,” she replied curtly, “what organization do you represent?”
“NATO.” Well, okay, that’s not exactly what I said either. I didn’t have to. At that exact moment, the mayor himself, the Honorable Daniel Harkins, came walking through a set of double doors behind this nice woman’s desk and ran full-on into Vinny Mongillo. I’d like to bottle the look on his face and keep it on my desk as a daily reminder of why I should stay in this business. He was, to put it mildly, shocked.
I said, in an overly upbeat voice, “This is really fortuitous running into you, Mayor Harkins. We were just trying to get in to see you.”
I smiled. He scowled at me. He also kept walking, straight through the windowless outer lobby toward the bank of elevators, in the company of a clean-cut, plainclothes Boston police office
r who serves as his driver and security detail.
So I called out again, but this time not so happy about it, “Mr. Mayor, it’s very important that we talk to you.”
And he kept walking. The cop pressed a button to call the elevator. I said, louder this time, “Mayor, we’d like to ask you about your relationship with Hilary Kane and the visit she made to your apartment a few nights before her death.”
I heard a little crash behind me, which I think was Mildred’s jaw smacking against her desk. I think I heard Mongillo emit a low little chuckle, almost prideful. I watched as the mayor whirled around. His eyes were on fire and his cheeks were red and his nostrils were flaring like some sort of feral, furry animal. He was accustomed to people groveling, not challenging, which in very short form explains why I became a reporter rather than a political aide.
He stared at me in loud silence, until I said, “Your choice: We can follow you through City Hall shouting the questions out to make sure you can hear them all crystal clear, or we can talk about it civilly and privately in your office.” I was going to smile, but I didn’t. No need to rub it in.
He stood there indecisively for an interminable moment. If the elevator arrived and he leapt on it and shut the door, I’m not quite sure what Mongillo and I would have done. But he had to know that if we didn’t corner him at that exact moment, in this precise place, then it would be later that night at a fund-raiser, or maybe the next morning when he dedicated the new wing of a downtown hospital. So he stepped toward me and kept coming, his stride fast and purposeful. He brushed past me—his shoulder literally touching mine—as he sneered, “Come with me.” The look on his face was more of hatred than fear, which was fine. It allowed me to believe for the flicker of an unconsidered moment that this man was indeed capable of murder. Mongillo and I met eyes—he actually gave me a big goofy smile—and we followed him through the double doors and into potential trouble.
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