And then I told them of Maggie Kane’s assertions about what her sister saw in Harkins’s apartment that night that caused her to be so worried when she left, and that probably brought about her murder within a few days.
When I stopped, I looked from Martin to Steele and said, “So that’s what I got. Sorry I didn’t bring back any souvenirs, but I was tied up trying to save the world as we know it, not to mention something even more important, which is myself.”
Maybe it’s worth noting for no other reason than random kicks—though I don’t like that word much since the encounter on the Roman street—that Martin was attired in a shirt and tie on an autumn Saturday afternoon in a mostly desolate newsroom. Truth is, I don’t ever really recall seeing him in anything but a shirt and tie, as if that’s all he owned. Justine, a well-preserved middle-aged woman of relentless style, was wearing fashionable and casual jeans and what was no doubt an extraordinarily expensive top, even if it looked like you could get the same thing at the Gap for ten bucks. Vinny and I looked like last week’s laundry.
Martin said, as he’s prone to do in these situations, “So give me the lede as you have it now.”
A lede, by the way, is newspaperese for the first paragraph of a hard news story, usually a down and dirty summation of the points that will follow in the body of the work. I thought about that for a moment. Vinny used the time to help himself to more ranchos huervos or quesadillas or whatever it was that was over there. Edgar seemed ready to keel over from boredom, but I think he was just giving it his Columbo act.
I said, “The way I’d write it now is something to the effect of, ‘The city attorney slain earlier this week in the Boston Common Garage had been involved in an intimate encounter with Mayor Daniel Harkins days before her death, according to the victim’s sister.’
“Second graph: ‘During that encounter, the sister said, the attorney happened across seemingly confidential information in the mayor’s personal computer listing telephone numbers and other information about his fugitive son.
“ ‘The mayor,’ ” I said with a little more drama here, “ ‘has previously maintained that he has not communicated with his son in any way in at least ten years.’ ”
Martin gave that kind of exaggerated head nod that said, “Not bad.” He asked, “Now when Harkins wins a libel suit against us, do you think he’d convert this building into a casino or just outright level it and make a parking lot?”
Mongillo laughed, despite himself. Justine stared at me without expression. Edgar looked out the window at the Southeast Expressway. I got Martin’s point.
“I’m not saying we’re there, yet. I’m saying that’s what we’re striving for.”
“I understand,” Martin replied. “Do we have anything besides the sister’s word to go on? You’ve considered, I’m sure, that this could be a setup. She might not be a sister at all, or assuming she is, she might have some vendetta against the mayor. Maybe she had an affair with him.”
My head hurt again, and not from the fall in Rome, which is not to be confused with the fall of Rome. I said, “She says that Hilary took the printout of the information, or at least the sheets that she got her hands on until the printer malfunctioned. She doesn’t know where they are. My best guess is that the Feds or the Boston cops came across them in the sweep of her apartment last week.”
Martin: “Can’t your pal Sweeney call in some chits over at homicide and tell you that?”
I nodded and was about to say that I was trying to reach him when Martin, smartly, added, “But if they had found it, what’s that ex-boyfriend doing sitting in the slammer?”
I nodded again. I can’t say it enough, Martin knows how to cut to the quick faster, with more accuracy, than a plastic surgeon in Beverly Hills.
Out of nowhere, Edgar said, “Let’s see that video of her walking out again.”
We all looked at him for a moment, and without comment, I got up and hit Play again. I mean, at this point, Edgar could have said he needed me to disrobe while he pierced my nipples and I probably would have done it. Anyway, on the screen, there was the image of Hilary again, walking through the lobby alone on her way out the door. Edgar ordered me to stop, and he got slowly out of his chair and ambled toward the screen and pointed at the shoulder bag that she was carrying.
“This could be it, those papers,” he said, and sure enough, what looked to be a couple of sheets of white paper were protruding from her unzipped bag.
“Go to her entrance,” he said. And I did, and there was the bag again, but with no papers sticking out.
Edgar, in a moment of low-key triumph, said as he sat back down, “She took something out of that apartment.”
We all considered this in silence. Well, near silence. Mongillo was eating away, making his usual Vinny sounds. Martin was spooning Mexican food from the serving containers onto a plastic plate.
Justine said, “Well, I think we can agree that we’re not where we need to be. We have video footage, and we have the account of the sister, which entirely involves what a judge would describe as hearsay evidence, though that’s perfectly usable in print. But it is entirely necessary to have some sort of corroboration, and that computer printout would be pretty damned good. Short of that, even a police source saying that they’re investigating the mayor would help us.”
Martin, himself sitting back down now, said, “The question we’re not asking, though, is how do these two unfolding events tie together? At the core, we have Jack’s story naming Toby Harkins as a suspect in the Gardner heist. But that spawns two different stories. First is the return of the Vermeer. Obviously, someone is trying to signal to us that we’re on the money, or not, and I have a good feeling we haven’t heard the last of them.
“Second, we have the death of Hilary Kane and the constant threats to her sister. Why,” and he looked around at each of us here with an uncharacteristically dramatic flair, “would it be in anyone’s best interest to have the Kane sisters dead after—after—the story has already been in print?”
And right there, floating out there above the table, hanging in that gloomy conference room on this otherwise brilliant autumn afternoon, was the question of the hour, of the day, the week even, maybe the month. We all sat in a stumped silence mulling what Martin just said, trying to grab on to the moving parts of the stories and fit them into some semblance of a proper place. I’ll admit, I was frustrated.
And then Mongillo spoke. He took a giant bite of guacamango or whatever the hell they call that green gunk that looks like it came from a dying cat’s intestines. He swallowed, sipped on a bottle of Coca-Cola, and said, “Because maybe Hilary Kane saw something that night in Harkins’s apartment that we don’t yet know about. Maybe the mayor or whoever else is behind her death is afraid that she told Maggie. And maybe it’s on those printouts that we haven’t yet found.”
At that exact moment, I heard the sounds of pieces coming together, fitting snug into preconceived slots, like doors kissing shut or the hood of a car falling closed, as if suddenly, there was a design to what we needed, a rhyme and, if you will, a reason.
I nodded and looked down at the expanse of the shiny table and said without looking at anyone, “Mongillo’s right. Maybe what we already have isn’t what we really need.”
Martin spoke up. “Well, gentlemen, you’re going to have to put this to Harkins. There’s a good chance that we’re essentially about to accuse the mayor of Boston of murder. Much as I like the element of surprise, it would be nice to give him a little bit of notice and maybe see what he has to say.”
He added, “He’s at a nondenominational prayer breakfast in City Hall Plaza at ten tomorrow morning. That sounds as good a place as any to ask him if he’s killed anyone lately.”
Mongillo looked at me and I looked at him and we both nodded. Another classic double teaming in the making, courtesy of The Boston Record. The mayor wouldn’t know what hit him.
And at that point, I had no idea that misfortune was about to gi
ve way to catastrophe.
Chapter Twenty-four
I t began with a voicemail. Melissa Moriarty, my dogsitter, or rather, Baker’s dogsitter, left a message on my work line saying that she had been trying to reach me on my cell phone without any success. She said she needed to talk to me—soon. My mobile phone, it’s worth noting, wasn’t working in Europe, and given my roving ways, she wouldn’t have had any idea where I was staying.
I called the house but got no answer. Mongillo had strapped himself in at his desk with the leftover Mexican food and begun working the phones. Martin returned to his office to mull our plight. Justine went wherever it is that publishers go on a Saturday night, which I’m sure was better than anyplace I had in mind. Edgar was protecting all things Record. So I bolted for the parking lot. I didn’t like the tone of Melissa’s voice, and especially didn’t like that she failed to say at the end of her message, as she usually does, that there was nothing to worry about, or that everything with Baker was great.
In the car, my cell phone rang, and it was her. As soon as I heard her unusually taut voice, I said I was on my way home.
“Get here quick,” she said.
“Is he all right?”
“I, I, I don’t know. I’ve never seen him like this before.” And with that, she started to cry.
I soared along the Southeast Expressway as if I were trying to take flight. I descended into the new tunnels of Boston’s infamous Big Dig, exited downtown, zigged and zagged along some waterfront streets, and screeched to a halt in my condominium building parking lot, all in what I would imagine was record time. I bolted from my car, up the stairs two and three steps at a time, and I thrust the key into the door lock as if I were trying to slay it.
Inside, Melissa stood in the living room with both her hands covering her mouth in fear as the tears rolled down her cheeks. Baker was flopped across the couch, his head down and his brown eyes open as he emitted a constant, low moan that seemed to be emanating from the base of his throat. Trotting through the room, I looked hard at Melissa and she shook her head in silence as she tried to collect herself.
I knelt down on the floor in front of the couch, saying in a soft and soothing voice, “I’m here, pal. I’m here. Everything’s going to be all right.”
Baker acknowledged me with a start. His body seemed to spasm once, and he slowly lifted his head, his big brown eyes glazed over in what was undoubtedly pain. His tail pounded several times against the cushions of the couch—Whump, whump, whump—as he focused his vision on my face.
“No, no, no,” I said softly, smiling at him, though it was a smile as forced as anything I’ve ever done in my life. “Put your head back down. Put it down.” Everything soft, smooth, reassuring.
His head still up, he let out a long, dramatic moan, his lips parting and his snout pointed directly at my nose—his way of telling me about his excruciating pain. I was just inches away from him, and I leaned in even closer and kissed the side of his muzzle. He then gave me a long, laborious lick, the grains of his enormous tongue slowly rubbing against every pore on my face.
His gums, I saw, were discolored white. His tongue was oddly dry. I calmly pressed his head back down on the couch and kissed his ear, whispering, “You’re going to be fine, goofball. You’re going to be fine.” Actually, I wasn’t so sure.
“He hasn’t eaten since you left.” That was Melissa, having gathered her wits, coming up from behind me, speaking in the type of low voice usually reserved for hospital rooms and funeral homes. “He’s barely touched any water. He doesn’t go to the bathroom much; he hasn’t really wanted to go out.”
I looked back at her, but before I could say anything, she knelt down beside me and added, “This dog loves you, Jack. A lot of times, when you go away, he gets depressed. I never wanted to tell you that before because I didn’t want you to worry. It usually just takes a day or two for him to perk up and be playful and want to eat. So at first, I just thought it was normal. But by yesterday, when he was still dragging around, I thought it was strange. And then an hour or so ago, he started with this moaning stuff, and hasn’t picked up his head until you arrived. If you didn’t call, I was about to take him to the vet.”
“Thank you,” I said to her. I didn’t know what else to say. Baker’s always had a weak stomach, and I was still hopeful, though not really, that he had a bad ache or a cramp. But I couldn’t get past the knowledge that I had never seen him act like this.
As Baker moaned and Melissa quietly wept and my entire life seemed to be caving in around me like sand into a formless hole, I gently ran my hands all across his furry body, not knowing what I was looking for until I found it, which was when I reached the soft, pink part of his stomach. There was a protrusion that wasn’t there before. I could touch it, feel it, and when I did, Baker moaned louder and tried but failed to lift his exhausted head.
I said, “I’m going to get him over to Angell.” I was referring to Angell Memorial Hospital, arguably the best animal hospital in the world, located in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston about twenty minutes away. “You’d be doing us a huge favor if you stayed here and called ahead. His doctor’s name is Lisa Stoles. Maybe she’s there and you could talk to her and explain the symptoms, and if not to her, then any doctor on duty.”
With that, I scooped Baker up in my arms and carried him out the door and down the steps. Melissa came outside with me and opened the passenger side door to my car and I gently placed the dog on the seat beside me. He groaned and shot me a frightened look with those enormous brown eyes that were more familiar than anything else in my life, and then he put his chin down against the center console and moaned anew. This, I knew, was not good.
I caressed his head for the entire, tense ride, caressed around his neck, all over his floppy ears. His eyes were at half-mast. I think he was exhausted from the pain. He kept his eyes trained on me, wondering what was wrong, waiting for me to make it better. I kept telling him again and again and again, “You’re the best dog. You’re my best friend.” I’m not embarrassed to say that more than a couple of times, my voice caught with emotion. I could withstand a lot in this life I lead, but seeing my dog in this kind of pain was a little bit more than I could handle.
Baker kept moaning. I kept talking. He had been a massive part of my life for seven years now, sometimes, in my darkest days, the focus of my life, a reason to exist, making me laugh, always pulling me toward that elusive emotion called happiness.
He was my constant companion, introducing me to people, making me appreciate things that, but for him, I never would have otherwise—the smell of fresh turf on an early spring day, the warmth of the March sun, the sunsets over the Charles River, the crunch of leaves on a chilly autumn night.
He was with me the night that my wife and infant daughter died in the delivery room and I returned from the hospital in an uncomprehending daze. He saw me through girlfriends, new apartments, a move from Washington to Boston, huge stories, endless slumps, bouts of sickness, and the occasional job-related wound. He was trained to walk off-leash, to never jump, not to beg, to wait politely outside stores. He loved kids, and as such, would search out mothers pushing carriages along city sidewalks, then calmly walk beside them, always glancing back at me with a look that said, “Why can’t we get one of these?”
He was a scholar of all things me. He would carefully, quietly, read my moods. When I was happy, he would engage me. Those times I was sad, he would entertain me, run his tongue over my nose until I laughed. Always, every day, his entire philosophy could be broken down into three simple words: Count me in. If I was doing it, whether it was errands or a car drive or a day at the beach, he wanted to do it as well. And usually, he did.
When I pulled up to the hospital emergency room, I bolted around the car, opened his door, and lifted him out onto the pavement. When I put him carefully down, his legs buckled and he fell slowly to the ground with a long, loud moan. He stared at me through those frightened eyes with an odd mix
of embarrassment and pain.
I said to him, “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.” I whispered this into his ear, hoisted him back up, and carried him through the automatic doors. Inside, a young man in those pale green hospital scrubs met me in the lobby with a rolling gurney.
“Mr. Flynn?” he asked. I nodded. “Put the dog right down here,” he said, tapping the cold top of the metal cart. I did, and he immediately took off with Baker, me trotting along beside them. Even with all the commotion, Baker’s head remained flat against the surface and his gaze never left mine.
We hurriedly moved through a waiting room filled with people sitting on hard plastic chairs and holding small cages in their laps containing anything from sneezing cats to whining birds. We made our way down a long hallway with painted pale yellow cinder-block walls and the type of shiny linoleum floors that are typically reserved for parochial high schools.
The orderly stopped outside a plain wood door, knocked once, and pushed it open. Inside was a small, bland examination room, with a sink and counter in one corner, a metal table in the middle, a chart that showed various pictures of tapeworms and heart-worms on the near wall, and a light fixture for X-ray shots on the far wall. The young man pushed the cart next to the table and was about to lift Baker from one to the other when I cut in and said, “I’ll do it.” For whatever reason, I didn’t want anyone’s hands on him right now but mine.
Baker sprawled on the table in the same position he had assumed on the couch—stretched out, his head down, his glazed eyes open, a guttural sound emanating from within. The kid asked me a series of typically stupid questions—stupid because the vet would walk in any moment and ask me the same things all over again. I impatiently answered them until I think he began to fear that I might do him some harm, at which point he backed toward the door and said, “I’ll go find the doctor.” And he was gone.
Dead Line Page 23