So did I know what he meant? Yes, in the abstract, because I’ve spent too many hours imagining what I lost that day—the bottomless joy and the aching challenges and the everyday heartbreaks that might never be mine, all as I repeatedly warned myself that you can only miss what you once actually had.
But to his specific question, what was I supposed to say? Reveal my thoughts? Recount my most intimate travails? Share my agony? No. Instead, I met his stare and simply said, “Not yet.”
He nodded his head, though he understood exactly no part of my answer.
He said, “Well, Jack, when it happens, it changes you forever. They brought me in and had me wash up and when I held Toby for that first time, I never wanted to let go. Never.”
He was smiling then, but not a warm smile, more nostalgic, bittersweet. His voice trailed off as his gaze moved downward again. I kept my eyes focused on his, and thought I saw them begin to glisten.
“Still don’t.” When he said this, his voice was so thick, his tone so hushed, that I had to lean in to listen.
He fell quiet again, and we both sat in absolute silence, the only sound being the occasional rattle of a radiator on the near wall and the distant murmur of what were no doubt nurses talking and laughing at their station. This canyon, I refused to bridge. He had brought me to that visitor’s lounge for a reason that he had yet to reveal, so I sat there waiting for him to give me something more.
Finally, he looked across at me again, his face sideways, his ear almost parallel with the floor. His eyes, in fact, were wet, and he said quietly, “Maybe some men could walk away. Maybe you’ll be one of those guys. Your kid didn’t turn out according to the plan. The newspapers are clawing at you to make sure you’ve cut all ties. So you do, and you go on with your own career.”
Another long pause, as he turned from me to the wall straight ahead, his stare giving way to a vacant gaze. “I never could,” he said. “Toby’s pretty definitely a thief and probably a drug lord and maybe a killer, but he’s still the same human being that I held in my arms in this hospital thirty years ago. It’s a cliché, but he is my flesh and blood, my creation. How am I supposed to walk away from that?”
I suppose I should have been writing this stuff down. The three-term mayor of Boston, Daniel Harkins, was admitting to me a long-term lie, at the same time opening up multiple avenues of questions over whether he had aided a fugitive and possibly benefited from his crimes.
I sat those few chairs away blanketing him with my gaze, waiting to see if he wanted to take me further. I committed some of his comments to memory, repeated them over and over in my mind, not wanting to pull out a pen and a pad for fear it would inhibit him.
He looked spent. He actually appeared to have shrunk within the elegant confines of his navy suit. He just kept staring down, the fingers of his two hands entwined in front of him. I was about to speak, to delicately ask him some questions that needed to be answered, when he said, “And now you’re going to tell me that by trying to be a father to the worst possible son, by never forgetting that little boy who I held for the first time in this very hospital, that I’m going to lose my political career.”
Probably, but I’d argue—though perhaps not here and now—that it wasn’t simply fatherhood that would do him in, or even his wayward son, but the lies. It’s been said ad nauseum that in politics it’s never the crime so much as the cover-up, and this might be another prime example how.
I said, “But the fact you knew about the artwork and didn’t take any action is a total abrogation of your public responsibility as a citizen, and more so of your position as mayor. By being passive, you were essentially complicit. That’s a reportable story.”
He turned now and stared at me. “So you’re saying that a father should turn in his son, just call the cops and say, ‘Here’s where he is. Go arrest him. Let him spend the rest of his life in jail.’ ”
I thought about that for a long moment, and this time it was me looking at the floor and the mayor looking at me. I didn’t know the answer. I think I knew what I’d do, which is maybe pretty much the same thing that Harkins did, which is nothing. Or was it nothing? Because the point here was whether he aided and abetted, whether he, as the FBI intimated, actually played a role in making money off the art.
“Did you know about the Gardner art?” I asked.
“I learned about it within the past couple of months.”
“Did you know Toby’s location?”
“I learned that in the past couple of months as well.”
“Did you kill Hilary Kane?”
“No.”
“Did you reach out to Toby, or did he reach out to you?”
“I reached out to him.”
“But once you learned where he was, once you came to realize what you had, you thought it was fine to leave your murderous son who’s on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list free with a dozen priceless treasures.”
“You’re missing the point, Jack. You’re missing the entire point. I would never turn him in. I’m constitutionally incapable of doing that—”
“You lied.” I said this in a louder voice than I had meant.
“But I was about to do something different, something better. I was on the brink of negotiating the return of the art. And after he gave up the paintings, he was going to surrender.”
My eyes opened wide in shock, though probably no wider than my mouth. I sat there staring at him staring at me. There was a buzzing, churning, gnawing silence between us. And then Harkins added, “But then you printed your story on the front page of the Record, and the whole deal, the entire thing, went to hell.”
Chapter Twenty-nine
I n newspaper-speak, we call this a he-said/she-said, the type of story where accusations and counteraccusations are flung and refuted with reckless disregard, always by people who seem a little loose around the lips. The frustrating part is that few of the charges are supported by documents; facts often give way to anger; reality is what the readers want to make it.
In this case, my operating theory remained largely unchanged. Mayor Daniel Harkins got drunk. He invited a young woman in a bar up to his condominium in the Ritz for a visit. Sex, power, and booze are hardly a new combination, yet a perennially fascinating one just the same.
Once in the apartment, she saw something that nobody aside from the mayor was intended to see (and I’m not talking about his Johnson): evidence that Harkins knew about his fugitive son’s role in the Gardner Museum heist. She reported it to authorities. She told her sister. She made a printout. And she ran.
A few days later, the mayor killed her. Maybe it was mindless rage. Maybe he feared a public campaign on her part—interviews on the network morning shows, sit-downs with the Record and The New York Times, appearances on Nightline, that would torpedo his chances for being appointed to the Senate seat. Another thought occurred to me as well. Maybe he hadn’t read the paper yet that morning. She was murdered early, before eight, and maybe he thought he was killing her before she said a word to anyone about what she saw.
I was playing this through my mind as I sat in a taxicab heading from Jamaica Plain to City Hall, where my car remained parked. The mayor, bless his bared little soul, saw no need to give me a lift back into town, which was probably just as well, because as soon as he stalked out of the hospital waiting room, I used the time alone to furiously scribble every quote I could remember on the note pad that I hadn’t wanted him to see.
The story that I had at that point wasn’t that the mayor had killed Hilary Kane. No, that would be too clean, and journalism, specifically newspaper reporting, is a dirty, grimy undertaking. But I could—and probably would—write a story saying that Boston Mayor Daniel Harkins had spent time alone in his apartment with a woman who was found murdered less than three days later, according to videotapes obtained by the Record. The second graph would read as follows: During the thirty-minute early morning visit, the victim saw a file on Harkins’s personal computer that detailed the
mayor’s awareness of his son’s possible involvement in the Gardner Museum heist, according to a family member of the victim.
Then the denial, that Harkins said Sunday that he was trying to broker the return of the dozen masterpieces, and was trying to convince his son, federal fugitive Toby Harkins, to surrender to authorities.
He could deny until the cows came home, until Rembrandt and Vermeer and everyone else hung again on the Gardner’s walls, but it would be too late. The compilation of events, from the drunken tryst to the secretly held information to the taint of murder to the obvious pattern of previous lies, they’d kill him politically. He might be able to hold on to office until the next election, but by every possible and practical measure, Daniel Harkins’s career would be over. No Senate appointment, no reelection, nothing. He couldn’t even get a job as a mayoral driver. He’d probably have to become a lobbyist.
If he really didn’t kill Hilary Kane, would this be fair? I don’t know. Is it fair that my daughter died at birth and his son lived to take other people’s lives? Is it fair Hilary Kane died for doing the right thing? Is it fair that her sister is now living in constant fear?
Still, something bothered me about all this, and yet again, the feeling came from my gut, just as my hesitance did at that first story a week before. Looking into Harkins’s incredibly sad eyes at the hospital, there was something innately believable about what he said and the way he said it. I’ve been around liars every day of every week of every year of my career, and pride myself on my ability to spot them a mile away. Some reporters are great interviewers. Others are poets at the keyboard. My greatest asset, I believe, is an ability to peer into the human soul and discern fact from fiction. Harkins’s was a muddle, and it made me uneasy as I thought about the events and the consequences to come.
So what I needed were documents. The only documents to be had were the printouts from his computer. It was time, I came to realize, to acquire them, but the question was, how?
And the answer was, two ways. One, Maggie Kane could rack her brain and figure out where her sister might have hid them. And two, the hopefully sobered-up Hank Sweeney could call on his many contacts at Boston PD to tell me if they were taken during the initial search of Hilary’s apartment five days before.
My cell phone chimed. When I picked up, it was the unfailingly straightforward voice of Peter Martin, saying, “Your girl said she’s had enough of confinement. She’s going to get herself killed.”
My girl? Confinement? Sounds like I’m ripe for a grand jury indictment, followed by a splash on the cover of the Traveler, “Spiraling Journo Finds Bottom.” I asked the first question that popped into my addled mind: “Huh?”
“Maggie Kane. She says she’s had enough of the security, the hotel, the hiding. She says she’s heading back to work tomorrow and going on with her life.”
“Did you point out that her sister’s still dead and the killer, despite what police might think, isn’t behind bars?”
Martin said, “I did, though maybe not in your inimitable way. That said, I’m not going to argue too hard about saving $400 a night in hotel bills for her and her bodyguards, and another $1,000 a day in security costs.”
Ah, that’s my Peter. Rome is burning, and he’s worried about the water bill.
He said, “You should also know, the cardinal raced over to Mass General about thirty minutes ago to deliver what the television stations are reporting are the Last Rites to Senator Stiff. He might be dead and gone come tomorrow, and the governor seems to have every intention of appointing a replacement by the time the Senate reconvenes on Tuesday.”
As I’ve said before, there are some days, stories, when the timing could not possibly be more exquisite. Calls are returned early. Documents come available in the middle of the day. Key reporters for the opposing paper are out of town or chasing down false leads. And then there are stories like this one when the timing conjures images of a multiple car crash, with fire shooting into the air and body parts strewn about a blood-soaked stretch of road. If it can go wrong, it will. The rush is on, calls aren’t returned, answers are never what you had assumed. But no matter. The paper comes out every single morning whether you have what you need for a good story or not.
Speaking of which, Martin asked, “How’d it go with the mayor?”
“Interesting. Very interesting.”
“He spoke? What’d he say?” You could almost hear him get breathy with excitement, as if I were a woman and he asked me what I was wearing.
I told him—though just about the interview, not about my navy blazer and pale blue tie.
At the end of my summation, he said in that unnaturally calm way of his, “So we have it. We can get it into print.”
And he was right, for all the reasons I had previously recounted to myself—the video, the timing, the denial, the revelation. It would become a national story the second the morning Record hit the doorstep of the Associated Press office and they flung it across the world on their wire.
So why didn’t I feel better about this?
I said, “I’m on my way in shortly. Let’s talk about it a little bit more when I get there. You should inform Justine that we’re about to tie the mayor of Boston to a murder investigation so she doesn’t choke on her morning doughnuts.”
Martin said, “Will do. And do you realize in the Monday paper, the Record will be reporting the return of a priceless Rembrandt and the distinct possibility that the long-time mayor of Boston is or should be a suspect in the slaying of a young city worker?”
The guy was as jubilant as I’ve ever heard him. I had a role in both these stories, so again, why wasn’t I as happy?
When I arrived in my own car, I sat in the driver’s seat for a long moment trying to figure out what I needed to do first. In newspapering, the mornings are when you develop ideas. The middle part of the day is the time to gather information. The late afternoon is when you inevitably get your brains beaten out sitting at the computer trying to write what you know into some form of readable prose. Evening is when it’s someone else’s problem, namely the editors, and later, the copy editors who delight over finding the tiniest mistakes.
I was supposed to be in the gathering mode, but needed to stop my wheels from spinning and head in an affirmative direction. That’s when my phone rang. It was Mongillo, telling me in that gloating way of his, “Hey, Fair Hair, remember that big pile of clips that you had sitting on your desk on the Gardner heist?”
“Yeah?”
“You ever read them?”
“What’s your point, Vinny?” The answer, he already knew. No, I hadn’t read them, partly because I was running all over the world, namely because I didn’t give a rat’s furry ass about the Gardner theft, truth be known. What I cared about was why Hilary Kane was dead.
“My point is this: I know most of the stuff in the clips already, but one thing jumped out at me as potentially useful. On the third or fourth day of our coverage, the paper makes mention that Boston Police Detective Sergeant Hank Sweeney was one of the primary investigators, serving as a liaison between local and federal authorities. After that, we never mention him again. Why haven’t we been debriefing him now?”
A good question. The thought struck me like a bolt how uncharacteristically unhelpful Hank had been over the course of this story.
Before I could respond, Mongillo added, “I just tried him on his cell. No answer.”
I said, “I’ll find him.” And I was off.
Hank Sweeney lives in a high-ceilinged, parlor level, one bedroom apartment on Washington Street in Boston’s South End, a neighborhood that used to be on the frontier of danger and is now considered one of the most fashionable addresses in town. From his front door, he was just a few minutes in one direction to Roxbury, which was predominantly black, or in the other direction to Tremont Street, where some of the hottest victualers in Boston lined up along what was known as restaurant row.
“I get my people, I get your people, I get people
who I don’t even know what they are,” he used to tell me. “I love it.”
Less than two years before, Hank was living alone in a prefabricated house in a mosquito-infested Florida development situated on what must have been the very edge of hell, if not actually in it. This is what he thought retirement was: aching boredom, overbearing heat, unending loneliness. And then I showed up on his doorstep, innocently enough, looking for a little bit of help on a murder case that had never been solved. He came up to Boston to give me more than everything I’d need, then never went back home. Best as I knew, his bed still sat neatly made in Marshton, just the way he had left it.
Now he was, in the polite vernacular of a decidedly impolite business, a law enforcement consultant. He didn’t do the gumshoe work of a private eye. He didn’t pack a weapon. He didn’t put himself in harm’s way, Vinny Mongillo’s dinner fork aside. What he did was advise well-heeled clients—and their attorneys—on how they could gain access to critical information and how they might be able to press the right buttons at police headquarters to make things happen in their favor. He did it selectively, and he did it well, and he did it on occasion for me—for free. But now that Mongillo raises the point, not so much on this case.
He had guided me on the argument unfolding between Boston PD and the FBI on Mount Vernon Street that afternoon, and he was the one to deliver the videotapes that incriminated Harkins a few afternoons back. But day in, day out, my good friend Hank Sweeney was not generally to be found.
So I decided to do just that—go find him. I pointed my car in the direction of his apartment and was there in a matter of minutes. I called him from my cell phone outside, but raised no answer on his home phone or his cell phone. I heard the former ringing from the street, but not the latter.
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