Dead Line

by Brian McGrory

“He’ll tell you that.”

  “I’m not going anywhere but in my car.”

  He moved a step closer and said, “You don’t have to go anywhere. He’ll talk to you on the phone.” And with that, he pulled out one of those exceptionally little cell phones. When he punched out a number and put it up to his ear, the thing looked ridiculous set against his fat, whiskered face.

  My car door was still open. The keys were in my hand. Sweeney’s folder was still shoved down the back of my pants. The occasional vehicle circled the lot in search of a space.

  He handed me the phone.

  I said, “Bob’s Shoe Repair Shop, where you’ll never get callous service.”

  There was silence on the other end of the line, until a man’s hesitant voice said, “Is this Jack Flynn?” I tell you, these guys were far too easy.

  “In the voice and flesh. What do you want?” I said this abruptly, impatiently, with not a whit of fakery. I was feeling abrupt and impatient.

  The man on the phone said, “Hold the line, please.”

  With that, there was a series of clicks and tones, as if a call were getting patched through to some faraway place using technology that I would never in a million years be able to understand. After a few seconds, another man’s voice came on the line, clear as a bell, all fresh and easy.

  “Jack, that you?”

  He talked as if he were steering his BMW along a windy country road on a Saturday afternoon on his way home from shooting a 78 at his private country club, this guy did, happy-go-lucky, loosey-goosey, entirely relaxed.

  “It is. What can I do for you.”

  “Jack, this is Toby Harkins calling. Listen, thanks an awful lot for taking a moment to chat. I appreciate that very much.”

  I have sat in the Oval Office with presidents. I have dined with senators, quarreled with governors, reported from every one of our United States, traveled to six continents, all on the wings of a simple phrase: I’m a reporter for The Boston Record. But never, ever, in a career that suddenly seems prematurely long, have I been on the horn with the FBI’s most-wanted fugitive, a guy whose mug shot adorns the post offices in the biggest metropolises and the tiniest farming towns, arguably the most pursued criminal in the world.

  So I said, “Toby, you never call, you never write. I’m really pissed off at you.”

  He laughed—politely so, in almost a hail-fellow-well-met kind of way. I had never met Toby Harkins, never before talked to him, never even seen him, pictures aside. His reputation was that of someone who could turn on his charisma the way a beautiful woman can selectively, suddenly tantalize you with her good looks. He ruled, they say, with two parts fear and one part charm, captivating those he couldn’t make cower. And I could hear all the evidence of that in my few seconds on the phone with him so far.

  “Hey, Jack”—always using my name, like we’re old friends—“I’ve got a little business proposition for you.”

  He paused here, and I asked, “Is this one of those things I’m not going to be able to refuse?”

  He laughed again, but not as much as before. I suspect that on my third attempt, funny as it would no doubt be, he wouldn’t be laughing at all, and the messenger monkey beside me would probably slug me in the head.

  “You can do anything you want with it, but I hope you see it as in your best interest to accept it,” he said, still light, familiar, but with a subtext.

  I didn’t reply—no need—so he added, “I hear there’s some interest in me back in Boston.”

  He laughed a little. I didn’t.

  He said, “I’ve got a story to tell,” he said. “I want to tell it to you. I want you to print it verbatim, your questions, my answers, like one of those Q and As that newspapers sometimes run. I’ve been keeping up with the papers, you know. I’ve read your stuff on me being a suspect in the Gardner heist.”

  Now mind you, a couple of thoughts were occurring to me during this bizarre moment, the most prominent of which was, how did I know this was really Toby Harkins on the other end of the line? So I asked, “How do I know this is really Toby Harkins?” I mean, that’s what I do, I’m a reporter; reporters ask questions.

  He replied, “Right now, you go on faith, then you agree to meet face-to-face; when you do, you’ll see it’s me.”

  A car pulled up to where we were standing and the driver, an elderly balding man with what looked like his wife beside him, motored down his window and asked, “Are you gentlemen leaving?”

  “Get the fuck out of here before I break your fucking face.” That was Ape-man, who didn’t quite seem ready for prime time yet.

  Harkins said, “If you follow my conditions, if you meet with me, if you run my quotes as I say them, in their entirety, and if you hold off writing about my father until you and I get together, then I’ll make arrangements to have returned to you all the remaining artwork stolen from the Gardner Museum. It’s a pretty good position for you to be in. You get an exclusive story from the country’s most wanted fugitive, and you get credit for steering priceless paintings and drawings back to their rightful place.”

  He made a good point, well articulated, clearly thought through. Problem is, I didn’t like someone, anyone, telling me how to do my job, what I could write, and more important, what I couldn’t. So I said, “Sounds interesting, but I think what you want is an ad, not a story. I can switch you over to the main line. When you get the recording, just press 2 for the advertising department.”

  Of course, I couldn’t switch him over, and of course, I didn’t want to lose this exclusive. It would be my best chance to find out why Hilary Kane had died, and at whose hand. It was secondary, but I also didn’t want to forfeit the chance to bring all the stolen art back to the Gardner’s walls. But I didn’t want to seem like a pushover, an easy target.

  Harkins said, “You don’t get it then, Jack.” This Jack thing was just starting to bug me, but I let it ride for now. “I have a hell of a story for you. You’re going to want to print my quotes as I say them, like when you guys run transcripts of speeches by the president or the governor.”

  “Toby, you ain’t the president or the governor. You’re a killer who’s running for your life, and now you’re asking me to help you out.”

  I have no idea why I was saying what I was saying. It was one of those times when your mouth gets ahead of your brain and fails to display any sort of restraint. There was a long pause on the other end of the line, before he finally said, aggravated now, “Jack, I guarantee it will be one of the biggest stories you’ll ever write. You get the art back. You get me in an exclusive. You’ll get the truth about my father’s involvement.”

  A long pause, as I pretended to think things through. The only hitch was the deal with the mayor. Could this be a coordinated family attempt to get the story held just long enough so he could get his Senate appointment?

  I said, “I can’t guarantee yet that I’m going to hold the story on your old man, but you’ll know by tomorrow if it runs or doesn’t run. If we get together, when?”

  His voice was tight. He wasn’t used to people challenging him, casually refusing orders, telling him that his fate rested with somebody else. He said, obviously trying to control his anger, “Within the next twenty-four hours. My people will be in touch with you. We’ll do it at a secret, secure location, for obvious reasons. You’ll be thoroughly searched for any sort of transponder or locating device. If you’re carrying one, you’ll be killed. If you’re followed, you’ll be killed. If you alert authorities, you’ll be killed.”

  “I’m sensing a theme here.”

  “If you do everything right, you’ll be a hero.”

  He hung up. The familiarity, the jocularity, was done and gone. He didn’t even say good-bye. I handed the phone back to the building-size man beside me, who, likewise, turned and walked away without a parting word.

  “I wonder if they make that suit in your size,” I called out to him. I mean, the buttons on the damned jacket were so strained they were da
ngerous.

  He just kept walking, never turning around. I got into my car, the most exhilarated I’d been since Hilary Kane’s death. The return of the artwork, yeah, that would be good, but far better than that was the educated hunch of mine that Toby Harkins would have something damned interesting to say.

  Chapter Thirty-two

  I t wasn’t until I got to my desk in the newsroom of The Boston Record that I placed the manila folder before me and slowly, nervously, opened it up. The room around me was coming to life, with copy editors trickling through the door for their evening shift and the volume on the City Desk televisions turned loud as unnecessarily frantic announcers teased the top stories on the upcoming six o’clock news.

  I looked over toward Vinny Mongillo, but he wasn’t there, and Peter Martin failed to herald my arrival as he’s prone to do. In the distance, I saw them gathered in the glass-walled conference room. Martin had a remote control in his hand and was clicking it at one of the televisions as if he was the first and only person to ever use such a device. Mongillo had his fist buried deep in a bag of what looked to be Fritos. The last time I saw someone eating Fritos, it was my colleague Steve Havlicek, who has since died. I tell you, people were fleeing my life like it was a rancid swamp.

  I stared down at the first page of a printout. It was a Word file, thank you Bill Gates, a simple sheet with the words, “Toby Has,” at the top, in boldface, underneath which was a list of eight pieces of art which had been taken from the Gardner. Two of them had already been delivered to me, The Concert and the Storm. Below that, also in boldface, were the words, “Toby Can Get,” followed by two other pieces. Finally, in boldface, was the description, “Already sold,” with two more works listed underneath.

  I turned the page and there was what appeared to be a new, separate printout, this one containing a list of bank names and account numbers, wiring numbers, bank deposit box locations and specific branches, along with multiple men’s names that immediately struck me as aliases for one Toby Harkins. Some of the bank locations were in London, others in Ireland. At the bottom was the word, in all capital letters, “CURRENT.” That was followed by an address in Dublin. Below that was the word “more,” in parenthesis, but when I turned the page, there were no others.

  I sat in a bewildered silence for a long moment as the news blared at the City Desk—something about Senator Stiff Harrison—and editors consulted with their weekend reporters and Barbara at the message center repeatedly announced, “Call for Vinny Mongillo.”

  Assuming Hilary Kane had turned over to whatever authorities she visited all that she retrieved from Daniel Harkins’s printer, then Toby Harkins’s involvement in the Gardner theft was the smallest trifle that they had. Far more important was the rock-solid evidence of a connection between the sitting mayor and the fugitive son, and more important than that, they had apparently up-to-date information on the location of America’s most-wanted fugitive.

  I played this out in my mind. It was understandable, perhaps, that they didn’t want to leak his location, because by doing so, they might simply be scaring him away, pushing him to flee farther into the unknown. That said, I didn’t get the leak from Special Agent Tom Jankle until probably two full days after the FBI had received the printouts from Hilary Kane. Wouldn’t that have already given the Bureau enough time to capture its suspect?

  And wouldn’t the FBI also recognize that if the mayor was involved, which he obviously was, that he would have immediately alerted his son about the information floating around in the public realm? If his son was in the process of escaping anew, wouldn’t it be better to blanket the public with information about where he’d just been, in hopes of new clues as to where he might be heading?

  Or was it something else entirely? In almost any criminal case involving nearly any public disclosure, law enforcement almost always conceals at least one pivotal detail. Earlier in my career, I covered a series of killings in the old Massachusetts mill towns of Lawrence and Lowell. Women were found dead with their ring fingers severed but left at the scene. The police released this detail, but left out another key fact: that the killer placed an identical band upon every severed finger—rings which, ultimately, led to his capture. Later, I asked the chief detective on the case, Why? Why not fully disclose? He told me that they always leave something out for two reasons: to know if future killings are committed by the chief suspect, or by copycats; and to be able to weed out the surprising number of serial confessors who have nothing to do with the crimes.

  So now what? My stomach was in knots. My head hurt. I missed my dog, my wife, my ex-girlfriend, my friend Hank. As much as anything, I missed the confidence of knowing that almost anything I did with a computer keyboard would somehow, in some way, turn out right. At that moment, I had no such confidence at all. Just ask Hilary Kane, which you can’t, and therein lies my main point.

  I closed the manila folder and brought it into the conference room, where Martin, Justine Steele, and Mongillo were enraptured by the nightly news. I looked at the screen and saw a television reporter with a nasally voice that was destined to leave her forever on the weekend shift say, “And now, Luke, we’ll cut live inside to Senator Harrison’s press spokesman, Giles Hunt.”

  The scene immediately cut to the fat-faced Giles at a podium with the Massachusetts General Hospital insignia on it. He was looking down, reading over some notes, and then he suddenly looked up into the cameras and said solemnly, “I have a very brief announcement, and then I’ll make the hospital’s chief physician available for any medical questions. At 5:12 P.M. today, Senator Herman Harrison passed away here in his hospital room, surrounded by his wife and children. He died in peace. As many of you know, doctors had stopped administering a chemotherapy regimen last week when it became apparent that the drugs were no longer staving off a cancer that had spread to most of his vital organs. Over the past twenty-four hours, the senator was lucid, but in a great deal of pain. During that time, he made a telephone call to the governor asking that she immediately name a successor upon his death, rather than extend the typical courtesy of not appointing someone for several days. There are key votes on Capitol Hill this week, and Senator Harrison wants the interests of Massachusetts and of America fully represented. The senator’s wife, Evelyn, has indicated that she is not interested in serving out the remainder of his term, nor are any of his children.

  “On a personal note, it’s a very sad day for us all. The staff is feeling a deep sense of personal loss for a man that many of us have worked with for over a quarter century in public service. We also feel for the family, and yes, for the public, for the loss of such a great public servant.

  “Now I’d be willing to entertain any questions for myself or for Dr. Bucik.”

  Martin muted the sound and turned to me with a mix of excitement and relief. My eyes stayed riveted on the television, not on Giles or Dr. Bucik or anything to do with Stiff Harrison, who really was stiff now, but on the reporter asking the first question, a woman named Elizabeth Riggs.

  She was standing in the second or third row with a carry-on bag over her shoulder, obviously just off a morning flight from the West Coast. The New York Times, no doubt, assumed she was familiar with the political geography of Massachusetts, and quickly dispatched her to cover this unfolding saga. I don’t specifically remember receiving a call from her about a return home, but I’d focus more on that later.

  Martin, sitting down, said, “The Storm on the Sea of Galilee story is done. The painting is with the scientists, who say that initial tests show it’s authentic. Beyond that, you’ve just seen what happened on the tube. We have Amy Contras”—a very competent State House reporter—“on the story of Harrison’s death and the governor’s likely next step. This makes the Mayor Harkins story that much more urgent. Tomorrow morning, the governor will likely appoint him to fill the Senate seat. We need that story in the paper.”

  He sat there looking at me, as did Justine on the other side of the table. I took a sea
t next to Mongillo, who continued to crunch away on the Fritos, though he took a second to hold out the open end of the bag toward me. As any adult would have done, I declined.

  I slid the manila envelope across the table toward Martin and Steele and said, “This will probably interest you.” Always better to be understated with editors, I find. That way, you only excite, never disappoint, when they see the real goods. Overpromising is the worst thing you can do in the news business, and probably in life as well.

  “These are the two files that I believe Hilary Kane pulled from Harkins’s home computer a couple of nights before she died. The first file, that’s the genesis for our leak, the story linking Toby to the Gardner thefts. But the second file, far more fertile, was never mentioned to me, and hasn’t seen the light of publicity.”

  I fell quiet. Mongillo walked around the table and read silently over their shoulders. Barbara kept beckoning him, and he continued to ignore her.

  A few minutes later, Martin looked at me. He was either scared or jubilant, I’m not sure which. Maybe both. Mongillo kept reading and crunching, and when he was done, gave one of those long, low whistles. “Fair Hair’s got himself the goods,” he said softly.

  Martin said, “So we have him dead to rights. We’ve got him.” He clenched his fists into little balls on the table as he spoke as if he were about to punch at the air.

  I replied, “It would seem that way, yeah, but for a couple of problems. First, we have no proof that these printouts are authentic. They were given to me by way of guidance. They’re nothing official. They’re not stamped with any sort of police evidence marking. So I’d be loath to quote directly from them.”

  Martin asked, “Who gave these to you?”

  I grimaced to myself and replied, “If we use them, I’ll tell you. But give me a little bit of time before I do.”

  Martin unfurled his fingers and put them up to his puffy face. He said, “But you could use them as the basis of questions for Harkins, no?”