Dead Line

by Brian McGrory

“You know,” I said, jovially, “we can always order more food.”

  She shook her head, smiling again, but it was a wan smile now. Then she stopped smiling and looked down at the patch of taupe carpet in front of her and said quietly, “My sister was buried yesterday.”

  “I’m sorry,” I replied. “I can’t even begin to tell you how sorry. Which is why I want to start finding out what the hell went wrong, and if there’s any small part of this that we can still make right.”

  She looked up at me with those blue eyes, but said nothing. I began to speak, but was interrupted—startled, really—by the ringing phone. Nobody knew where I was except the people who were already here, and then I realized: Mongillo, waiting for my arrival down at the champagne bar.

  “Let me grab this,” I told her. “I think it’s my colleague.”

  Picking up the phone: “Yeah.”

  “I come all the way to the city of eternal love to get stood up by the likes of you?”

  “Listen, change of plan. I’ll fill you in on everything very soon. But I don’t want you to leave the bar just yet, in the event that you’re being cased. Stay put. Have a plate of foie gras and I’ll call down there in about twenty minutes.”

  Sitting back down, I said, “We don’t have the luxury of a lot of time, so I’m just going to ask you to tell me everything you have. I want to know why your sister is dead, and I want to know what I did to cause it.”

  She looked back down at the floor for a long moment. The room, by the way, was illuminated by a single low lamp, and light from the street that filtered through the floor-to-ceiling windows cast odd shadows across the walls.

  “It’s someone very powerful, very dangerous,” she said, staring up at me, her arms on her knees. She was wearing a pair of raggedy old jeans and a navy blue sweatshirt—a kind of Honey-I’m-just-going-to-grout-the-bathtub-before-I-haul-you-back-in-bed-and-have-my-womanly-way-with-you look. Trust me, it works.

  “That’s what we do at a newspaper. We take on powerful people.”

  “Not this time,” she shot back. “This time you helped them kill my sister.”

  Valid point, perhaps, and even if not, I wasn’t in any position to fight back. She still had some anger in her, and it wasn’t my place to fight it. It might never be my place. I also couldn’t afford to have this be an argument. I needed it to be a congress. And this is what I did, better than just about anyone I know—I got people to talk, whether politicians or professional crooks, or as is so often the case, a combination of the two.

  So I said again, “Yes, it’s my fault, but now we’re in it together, and I need information to get us out. Tell me what you know, Maggie. Please.”

  She looked at me again with those piercing eyes, not frightened or angry now, but determined. The look turned into a stare. I told myself, warned myself, to forget her aesthetics, as Mongillo might say, and concentrate on her knowledge. I met her gaze, flat, intentionally needy, helpful, apologetic, some odd combination that I wasn’t sure I could actually pull off.

  And then she started.

  “My sister had a fiancé,” she said. “This schmuck who’s been questioned, though I’m sure he didn’t kill her. She was ready to be married. And one morning she caught him—well, anyway, she broke it off. And then she made a mistake a week or so ago. She was confused and vulnerable and she was at a bar, drinking, and she ended up with the mayor, Dan Harkins.”

  Maggie hesitated, looked back down at the floor, and said, “This is embarrassing for Hilary.” She paused again, searching for polite words, no doubt.

  I interjected, “Look, if it makes you feel any better, there are people out there who’ve accused me of being in bed with the mayor for a long time.” It was a little reporting humor—too little, it ended up, because Maggie just stared at me expressionlessly for a long moment.

  Then she said, as if relieved to get it out in one long exhale, “They went back to his place. He has a condo at the new Ritz-Carlton complex there. You probably know that already. She didn’t spend the night or anything.

  “When she was leaving, he was asleep in the bedroom, and she logged on to his computer, she says to get her email, and I believe her. But when she moved the mouse, a file was already on the screen.”

  She paused here, this time as a frightened look drew her face even tighter than it had already been. She put her hands up to her temples again, as if steadying herself, before she went on. I remained quiet, part of that old reporter’s rule about never getting in the way of someone who is telling you an important story.

  After a long moment, she said, “The file, like a Microsoft Word file, was slugged ‘Toby.’ That’s the name of his son, the fugitive. You know that.” She said this last sentence as a declaration, not a question. And she was right, of course. I did know that.

  “It had some telephone numbers, foreign numbers. It had the name of a bank—Barclays, and what Hilary thought were account numbers and maybe some routing numbers. It had an address in Ireland, County Cork or County something. I have most of this stuff written down.”

  That ringing sound, like a pinball machine recording a particularly hefty bonus score, I hoped was only in my head. This is what my good friend Tom Jankle had been driving at in our meeting on the patio at Franklin Park. This was also a perfectly plausible motive for the mayor of Boston, Daniel Harkins, to kill this lovely young woman. If he hadn’t, she would be able to tie him to his fugitive son. My mind immediately began racing to and fro determining exactly what else I would need to land a story naming Harkins as a prime suspect into print.

  Of course, none of this explained any connection between my leaked story about Toby Harkins and the paintings to Hilary Kane’s death, or why the Vermeer had been delivered to my news-room three days before. My head was starting to hurt again, even as my heart pumped harder in unseen celebration.

  I stopped her here, asking, “What do you mean, it’s written down? Do you have a printout of the documents?”

  “No, but there is a printout. Hilary thought that’s maybe what would get her in trouble, and I suspect it did. She made a printout, and got a few of the pages, but then the printer either jammed or ran out of paper, and she got the fuck out of there.”

  We’ll excuse her vulgarity for now, and as important, we’ll excuse me being turned on for the slightest flicker of the briefest moment by said vulgarity. Anyone who saw her looking like that, dressed like that, talking like that, would completely understand. I asked, “Do you know where the printout is?”

  She held my gaze with those piercing eyes. “No,” she said. “I was poking around in her apartment, looking for it, but couldn’t find it. She never told me what she did with it.”

  “But what do you mean you have something written down?”

  “When Hilary was killed, obviously I realized this was life and death, so I jotted down what I remembered of what she told me. I stashed it in my locker at the gym.”

  Again, this was one resourceful woman. After I leave the news business, which would probably be sooner rather than later, she could have my job.

  I said, “All right. Sorry to interrupt. Keep going with what you know.”

  She looked off into the dark expanse of the hotel room, collecting her thoughts. Then she refocused on me and said, “There’s not a whole lot more. Hilary opened another file that she said, I think, was slugged ‘TOBY 2.’ It had the names of a couple of law enforcement types written down, their phone numbers, maybe a lawyer or something. I don’t have their names. I don’t think Hil ever gave them to me. They’re on the printout.”

  I nodded. I was sitting on the edge of the bed in a darkened Parisian hotel room as the realization crashed over me like cold seawater on a March day that Daniel Harkins, the longtime, much respected mayor of Boston, had probably had a young woman, a complete and total innocent, killed, for the sole purpose of protecting his own career and the flight of his murderous son. Forgive me for saying this, but in a strictly journalistic sense, I loved it.


  That same mayor, despite regular denials, had apparently kept in close contact with this fugitive son, to the point of either sending him money in Europe—or maybe taking money in return for some favor. Could he have been blackmailing his own child?

  And did this mean that my story didn’t cause her death? That thought, that question, was the nicest one to ponder.

  Maggie Kane looked at me and I looked back at her. In the distance, I heard an ambulance siren, which always sounds a little more frantic in Europe, and it reminded me of the afternoon I had hidden out in her sister’s bathroom only four days before. Seemed like an eternity ago.

  I asked, “How do you know all this?”

  She didn’t hesitate, as if she had been waiting for the question. “Hil was panicked. She wanted to go to the authorities, but she was afraid she might end up going to someone listed on Harkins’s file, and that they’d try to cover the whole thing up—or worse. She didn’t know what to do, so she told me all about it. And together we decided that she should hire a lawyer, and hopefully the money she spent would someday be repaid to her in some way. She had made an appointment to see someone Monday morning, but before she got there, she was killed.”

  She gave me the lawyer’s name, which I didn’t recognize, and I made a mental note to have Peter Martin send a reporter over to the office ASAP.

  Normally, I get an elaborate adrenaline rush when I come into information like the stuff that Maggie Kane was giving me now. I begin writing the top of the story in my mind, I sketch out the questions that I’ll ask the targets, I anticipate the pathetic answers I’ll get in response, I envision how it will look in print, the glory of seeing it above the fold on the front page, the impact it will have as the knowledge rains down on an unsuspecting city.

  But I felt none of that now, just a headache as I tried processing all that I knew in contrast to the more that I didn’t know in the journalistic calculator that was my brain. The question of the moment: Why was FBI Special Agent Tom Jankle leaking to me about the Gardner heist just as the mayor was thinking he might be caught aiding and abetting his own son? Was it coincidence? Did Jankle know? Were they somehow in cahoots?

  “What aren’t I asking you that I should know?” It’s the standard, mop-up question at the end of any friendly interview. Sometimes, oddly enough, it’s where you get the best information, because the subject starts free-ranging thoughts in a stream-of-consciousness kind of way.

  Maggie shook her head, as if to say there wasn’t anything else, only she kept shaking her head, slowly, and after a moment, almost imperceptibly. She just kept looking at me while I looked back at her, her eyes frozen, her face the very picture of resigned fear, and finally she asked a seemingly simple question that might have been the most complicated one I’ve ever heard: “What am I going to do?”

  The first city editor I ever had used to tell me that when a story, and by extension, life, got too complicated, you had to plot a strategy that began with a string of basic, even minute, actions. Complexity breeds inertia, and inertia is the father of defeat, he used to say. So do anything to create the aura and perception of movement, and it will feed on itself.

  So even though I had no idea yet what in God’s good name we were going to do, I said, “First thing, you’re going to get some rest. You’re going to sleep right here on this comfortable bed. We’re going to triple-lock the door, bolt the windows, pull the curtains, and I’m going to push these chairs together for my bed and make sure that nothing in here goes wrong.

  “Then we’re going to wake up and get back to Boston. We’re going to get some protection, professionals, who’ll get us in without incident. We’re going to put you somewhere safe. And we’re going to find out exactly who was behind your sister’s death, and publish all the reasons why. At that point, the authorities will have no choice but to take action, even if it’s the mayor.”

  Sounded good, no? I mean, well-thought, confidently delivered, a real honest-to-goodness plan. Too bad I didn’t believe it myself.

  I kept thinking of Jankle. What did he know that he wasn’t telling me? Why did he reach out to me that first night? Where did the Vermeer come from, and why? Was it merely a ruse intended to take my mind off what I privately believed was the real story?

  Maggie stood up, and as she did, she stumbled, maybe from an exhaustion that I, too, was starting to understand. I jumped up and caught her before she could fall. She was heavy against me, as if she had lost some of her motor control. Rather than pull away, she buried her face in my neck and I could feel the moisture of all of those tears. She wrapped her arms around me and was stone-still. I put my hands on the back of her neck and pressed her tight against me, whispering, “Maggie, you’re going to be fine, and we’re going to catch the bastards who have done this to your family.”

  After several minutes, she pulled softly and slowly away. My mind, like a slide projector, flipped to a scene of too many years before. Katherine had just gotten a call from her sister saying that their father had died of a heart attack. She hung up the phone and whispered the news to me, then buried her face against my chest in utter silence, standing there for five minutes, ten minutes, fifteen minutes, before she reluctantly pulled away. “This is the saddest thing that’s ever happened to me,” she said through her tears, “but I know I can get through anything as long as I have you.”

  To be loved like that, and to be needed, and to need. And look at me now.

  Maggie began to say something, but the phone rang, the sound crashing through the murky angst of the room.

  “You should lie down,” I whispered to her. “You need the rest.”

  When I got to the phone, I hesitated over the receiver, realizing that every conversation seemed to be spinning me in directions I hadn’t even considered a few moments before. I picked it up with a curt, “Yeah.”

  “Fair Hair, tell me the single best thing you’ve ever had to eat.”

  It was, indeed, Vinny Mongillo, and from the background sounds, it seemed he was still at the hotel bar.

  “I don’t know,” I said, unable to conceal my frustration. Truth is, I knew perfectly well. It was called la bête noire, a flourless chocolate cake served with a warm chocolate drizzle in a deep pool of crème anglaise. I had it at a restaurant in Boston called L’Espalier about twelve years before, and have thought of it every day since. But none of that is really the point here.

  “You’ve got to get your ass down here and try this foie gras.”

  My world was spinning out of any semblance of control. Normalcy wasn’t merely foreign, it was outright alien. But there would always be Vinny, unchanging, the rock.

  And then it struck me with no small amount of renewed melancholy that even he was about to take leave.

  “We’ve just had a good break,” I said. “I’ll fill you in in the morning.” Before he could throw out any large number of questions, I gently hung up the phone.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Saturday, September 27

  W e gathered in the glass-walled conference room of The Boston Record, myself and Mongillo fresh off the flight from Europe, though I use the word fresh rather liberally there, as well as Peter Martin, former editor turned publisher Justine Steele, and Edgar, our crack director of security, a tiger in lamb’s clothing. I wanted Hank Sweeney to be a part of things, but couldn’t raise him on the phone.

  We spread ourselves out around the horseshoe-shaped conference table. Several large containers of Mexican take-out food, Martin’s idea of largesse, sat at a side table. One quick question: When editors send for ethnic food for their charges, why can’t it ever be French?

  It actually felt damned good to be back on American soil, and specifically on the commercial carpet of this wonderful newsroom. Some reporters, the worst reporters, never leave the building. They spend all their time on the phone, rarely glimpsing real life, the travails and the triumphs of the people we write about. I tend to spend an inordinate amount of time either on the s
treet or on the road, with a front-row view of the mess that defines so much of modern life. It’s when I come back into the newsroom that I’m best able to make sense of what I’ve seen and work it into a form that the Record readers will understand.

  Anyway, Edgar started us off. “I had a private contractor comb this room two hours ago for bugs, and they found nothing. I’ve had Peter’s, Jack’s, and Vinny’s phones tested for any form of listening or tracking devices, and detected none. Ms. Steele, I can have yours examined as well if you’d like. We’ve doubled our full-time, round-the-clock security detail in the lobby, and the same applies for the parking lot. Ms. Maggie Kane is currently in the presence of a team of trained security guards at an undisclosed location.”

  “Would you tell her to give my best to Dick Cheney?” That was me, Jack, trying to draw a laugh with a little levity, in what I regret to inform turned out to be a dismal failure. In fact, I knew that Maggie was at that very moment in a downtown hotel, along with the former front line of the Nebraska Cornhuskers. Is it normal that I should feel jealous about that?

  Martin, stone-faced, said, “Jack, why don’t you tell us what happened on your all-expenses paid European vacation this week.”

  Yeah, it was just great. I went to Rome and got kicked in the balls and punched in the face and fled to Paris, where a woman laughed at my nudity and I had a room service hamburger and escaped the city with the specter of death looming every which way we looked. But it is, I determined for all of humanity, possible to do the Louvre in under two hours.

  Well, that’s not what I really said. What I did was ignore his attempt at humor just as he did mine. I mean, I was exhausted, harried, impatient, and sore. I had slept in a chair the night before while Maggie Kane was stretched out in all her womanly splendor on the big, firm, king-size bed that dominated not just my room, but my thoughts. I was tired of chasing that which I didn’t yet know, and being chased by a villain who I couldn’t identify.

  So instead, all businesslike, I launched into my spiel. I explained, because Justine hadn’t heard them before, my initial suspicions that I had been set up or duped in the original story portraying Toby Harkins as a suspect in the Gardner heist. I showed them the videotapes of Mayor Harkins and Hilary Kane. I described the bungled breakfast meeting, the assault on the Roman street, the flight to Paris, the unrequited rendezvous at the Louvre, the visit in my hotel room in the dark of a French night. I omitted the precise details of the bathtub moment.