by Jan Brogan
“Anyone look familiar?”
I flipped over several more pages and moved on to a second book. Finally, in the back, in the right-hand corner of the second row, I saw him. He wore a T-shirt instead of a parka and looked like he might be a couple of years younger. But even though it was just a photograph, I could still feel the mockery, the sneer.
For just a second, my finger froze on the clear vinyl sheath. Then I was jabbing at the Polaroid, pushing the binder across the desk to Holstrom. “That’s him. That’s the guy I saw in the store.”
“You sure?” Holstrom asked. “Take your time.”
“I saw him—ten, maybe fifteen minutes before the shooting. He was in back, by the dairy case. I startled him. He looked me straight in the eyes. I got a real good look.”
Holstrom made no comment. A detail man, he dutifully wrote it all down even though we’d gone through some of this the night before.
“Is that the guy you have in custody?” I asked.
Holstrom pushed the binder back toward me. “You recognize anyone else?”
I’d been so overwhelmed by the sight of the guy in the parka that I had forgotten about the other man in the dairy aisle, the smaller one in the navy jacket and the gray cap. I’d never seen his face, and wasn’t even sure he’d been with the guy in the parka, but I dutifully scanned the mug shots again.
One guy on the bottom had dark, curly hair, but it was too much of a stretch to identify him on that one similarity. I flipped the page back to the guy in the parka. “No. Just this one guy.” I pushed the binder back toward Holstrom again. “Was he in the car?”
Holstrom shifted his gaze upward, as if just noticing the ceiling tile that hung by a thread.
“Okay. Okay, so you can’t tell me.” If I wanted any information at all, I had to stick to the car accident. “But was the guy in the car, the white Toyota Camry—the guy driving to endanger—was he alone?”
Holstrom spoke carefully. “The guy in the car was alone.”
I hadn’t realized I’d been holding my breath until I exhaled. If the man I’d seen fleeing the murder was alone in the car and unconscious in the hospital. If it really was the same man…
I knew then that I had to see his face. I had to make sure that the guy I’d seen last night in front of the dairy case was the same guy who was now incapacitated in the hospital. Then I could breathe again, I could run on the boulevard without looking over my shoulder for hulking figures, without imagining threats in every shadow and on every street.
From my short foray into a hospital public-relations career in Boston, I knew that if this guy was a murder suspect, he would also be under police guard. But I also knew that most hospitals were short staffed on Saturdays and that the visitors’ desk was often manned by a volunteer. It wouldn’t be hard to sneak into the hospital, but what floor?
“You okay?” Holstrom asked.
“Fine.” I smiled to show the appropriate gratitude, to let him know I knew he was giving me information to allay my fears. “You said this guy was unconscious?”
He nodded. “Head injury.”
“Did he need surgery?” If he needed surgery, I could limit my search to the surgical floors.
“Yeah. Something to do with relieving pressure in his cranium.”
“Will he survive?”
“They usually do,” he said, with a roll of his eyes.
I pulled out my notebook. It took only a few minutes to jot down the little that Holstrom had confirmed. I found myself wondering where exactly a police guard would be posted at the hospital—inside the room? Outside in the hall?
“Can you tell me the name of the guy? The car accident victim,” I asked.
Holstrom gave me a look, and I realized I’d made a mistake by calling him a victim. This might again imply that the police cruiser chasing him was somehow at fault. “The reckless, driving-to-endanger guy. The one charged with resisting arrest,” I clarified.
Holstrom rewarded me with an actual name: Victor Delria, twenty-four years old, of Central Falls.
“Prior arrests?”
“Simple assault and an unarmed robbery, two years ago. Driving under the influence, last year, too.”
“But there’s no official connection to the Mazursky murder?” Sometimes in reporting, you have to ask the same question over and over, just to clarify.
“The matter is still under investigation.”
I scribbled this in my notepad to show that I would quote him verbatim. When I looked up, I saw another cop standing in the doorway. The man was dressed casually, in blue jeans and a ski sweater, and was holding a file under his arm, but I could tell by his posture and by the way Holstrom shifted in his seat that the new cop was of higher rank.
“I’m surprised to see you in today,” Holstrom said.
“Just checking in on a few things.” Holstrom introduced him as Detective Major Errico. He was a densely packed man with solid arms and a lined face. His eyes scanned mine, sizing me up.
“Reporter?”
“The one from last night. At the shooting,” Holstrom said. “Hallie Ahern—new to the Chronicle.”
“Ah,” Errico said, as if that explained everything. He looked past me to the photo books on the desk. Holstrom tilted his head slightly. A response of some kind. A communication between them.
“Well, I think we’re about done here,” Holstrom said, standing.
I hesitated to take my cue, but Holstrom’s face was suddenly stony. There was no question, this interview was over. I picked up my notebook from the table. At the doorway, Detective Major Errico acknowledged my departure with a polite nod, but his tense stance transmitted impatience. I glanced at the stack of files under his arm. On the outer corner, I saw some lettering.
He instantly tucked the file tighter under his arm. Outside in the hall, I heard the click of the door closing behind me.
With an extraordinary display of confidence, I told the elderly man at the visitors’ desk that I was a social worker who had left a case file up on the surgical floor. “What floor is that again?”
He looked it up and even gave me a page of printed instructions, which first involved finding the elevator bank.
As I got off the elevator, I spotted a whiteboard with names and room numbers and scanned the list: V. Delria. 603 B. The elevator was in the exact middle of the floor, with two small nurses’ stations on either side and hallways in almost every direction. I sauntered past the first nurses’ station as if I already knew where I was going, turning the corner and heading down the first hallway. Immediately, I could tell the room numbers were going the wrong way, so I backtracked and headed down a hallway in the opposite direction.
As soon as I saw the police guard sitting on a chair outside the room, all my confidence vanished. Adrenaline started flooding my veins. What had I been thinking? That I would just barrel right past him?
I passed the police guard, walking purposefully. At the end of the hall, with nowhere else to go, I ventured into one of the rooms. An older woman was being examined by a man in scrubs. “Sorry,” I said, turning around. “Wrong room.”
If only I had a plan. A plan would be useful. I walked slowly back toward the cop. Someone had pasted Halloween decorations in the hallway. I halted outside a closet door with a witch on a broomstick flying over a full moon. Facing the door, I squinted, as if I needed perspective on fine artwork.
I decided that any attempt to cleverly divert the cop from his guard post would likely end up in my arrest. The thing to do was to identify myself as a brand-new reporter at the Chronicle, tell him it was my first big car-accident story and that I’d been assigned to check on the victim’s current medical status. I had to hope that the room door was open and that I could catch a quick glimpse inside while the cop redirected me to patient information.
A peek, I told myself, all I needed was a peek.
I was heading slowly down the corridor, past several dirty breakfast trays, when I saw the cop rise from his chair. H
e folded his newspaper, put it on the seat, and started walking away from me, toward the elevators. Was he going to lunch? Could a guard leave his post and go to lunch? Wasn’t that some kind of major cop screwup? A miracle just for me?
Slowly, I walked past Delria’s room, noticing as I did that the door was just slightly ajar. I was wearing a cotton sweater and black jeans and could feel sweat trickle from my armpits all the way down my sides.
I heard the elevator doors open and shut and walked to the end of the hallway and peeked around. The cop was gone. I turned, headed straight back to room 603 B, and put my hand on the knob.
I glanced over my shoulder, expecting another cop or a nurse to appear, to grab me by my sweater, pull me away from the door, curse at me for my audacity. But no one came. No one stopped me, so I swung open the door.
It was a private room, dim, with the blinds closed against the sunlight, and empty except for the patient, presumably Victor Delria, sleeping in the bed. He was lying on his back, hooked up to an IV. A pile of blankets blocked my view. I needed to see his face, the sty weighting the one eye. I took a single step inside the hospital room and froze, courage failing me. The room had a pungent odor, like bacteria in a flesh wound.
What if he woke up? What if he looked right at me? Even unconscious, he was terrorizing me. I told myself that the sooner I saw his face, the sooner I could get the hell out of here. On a chair by the window, I saw some kind of jacket bunched up inside a clear plastic bag. The color of the jacket was a muted green khaki.
As I took a step closer to the bed, I became aware of the sound of water running.
Directly to my right, a door clicked open and standing in the doorway of a bathroom was a tall man wearing a blue button-down shirt tucked into blue jeans and a sports jacket. Our eyes met. There was a moment of puzzled recognition.
It was the guy I’d been flirting with at Barry’s, Matt, the quart-of-milk guy, with the dark eyes and nice smile. Only now he wasn’t smiling. I was barely inside the room, but he quickly stepped in front of me, deliberately blocking my path to the patient’s bed. “What are you doing here?” he asked.
What was he doing here? I might have asked, but there was an air of authority about him, something official, like maybe he was a plainclothes cop. It dawned on me that that was why the other cop could leave his post. He had backup. “I just wanted to check—check and see if this was the guy from Barry’s—the guy from last night.”
He looked at me for a long time as he processed all this. My heart started to pound, remembering my aggressive flirting the night before. God, this was awkward. Somewhere in his house was a grocery bag with my phone number on it.
“You’re a reporter?” It was part question, part exclamation.
I nodded.
“Jesus,” he said, shaking his head. Then he put his arms out and backed me completely out the door, so we were standing in the hallway. He was square in front of me, blocking the door, making me aware again of his height, his shoulders. “How long after I left?”
“Five, maybe ten minutes.”
“I’m sorry you had to go through all that.” He had a nice voice, a warm tenor that made you want to believe he meant what he said. I had to make myself focus on the off-center nose instead of the unclouded brown eyes. I took a small step to the left, trying to position myself to see around him. He immediately shifted his weight in the same direction.
“So what are you doing here?” I asked.
As it turned out, Matt Cavanaugh wasn’t a plainclothes cop, but a prosecutor with the attorney general’s office. “And you just happened to be at the Mazursky Market last night?” I asked.
“I told you, I live in the neighborhood.”
There was a moan from the bedroom. Matt turned around, glanced at the bed, and then took another step, to back me farther down the corridor.
“Is that why they assigned you to this case?” I asked.
“One of the reasons.” He looked down the corridor in both directions. We were still alone. “I’m sorry, but you’ve got to get out of here.”
“I just want to get a glimpse of his face. Just a quick peek to see if it’s him and I’ll get out of here.” I gave him my most beseeching look: hopeful eyes, pleading smile, air of can-do optimism. He stared at me for a moment, as if he needed a better read, as if there was something he didn’t quite understand.
Then, I made the slightest gesture, not even a real movement, toward the door, just a change in posture, and his expression grew hard. Not only was Matt Cavanaugh not going to consider my request, but I’d really pissed him off.
“Are you out of your mind? Completely out of your mind? You’re a potential witness. What if he woke up and saw you? Wouldn’t his public defender love that?”
“I thought he was unconscious,” I said, but it sounded feeble, even to me.
“I don’t care if he’s dead. This would taint your testimony.” He stood there shaking his head, as if he couldn’t quite believe that none of this had dawned on me.
“Hey, I’m a reporter, not a prosecutor,” I said in my own defense.
“No kidding,” he said, but he refrained from a blanket criticism of reporters as a subspecies. Instead, he reached behind him and pulled Delria’s door shut so it clicked. Debate over. Subject closed.
I started to turn away, but I hadn’t taken two steps when he touched my arm, forcing me to turn around. His anger, his annoyance, had abated. There was something else in his expression.
I waited, hoping, I guess, for something personal: a reference to our meeting at the Mazursky Market, or maybe an apology that he had to be so gruff. And for a moment, I saw warmth again in his eyes. He hesitated, as if there was something he wanted to say but couldn’t.
“What?” I asked.
The warmth disappeared. Instead, I got a grim warning, cool and professional: “And don’t write anything else about this in the paper. You’re a potential witness, for Christ’s sake. You’re not only screwing up the case, you could be putting yourself in danger.”
CHAPTER
5
FROM THE DATABASE, I learned that the Mazursky Market was a bigger operation than I’d thought. And that despite the way he acted at the register, Barry was no longer the owner.
He had been quite an entrepreneur in the eighties, buying and developing a half dozen markets across the state, but he’d sold out four years ago to a Boston conglomerate. He’d stayed on, working for the new owners, managing three of the Providence stores and acting like he still owned the joint.
The story didn’t specifically give the dollar figure of the transaction, but it seemed odd that a successful entrepreneur would want to stay on afterward to work a cash register at night. I hit the button and waited for the printer to whir out a hard copy of the story. This is a real Rhode Island tragedy, Leonard had said, as if there were a lot more to tell me.
I reminded myself that Leonard was a talk-show host, prone to hyperbole. Maybe he just meant it was a tragedy that a guy like Barry got popped. Certainly there was enough glowing praise about Barry in the database for that story.
A clip from the early nineties cataloged Barry’s impressive civic activities. Two years before he’d sold the convenience-store chain, he’d received an award from the South Providence Neighborhood Association for making improvements to a city block where one of his largest markets did business. In the early 1990s, when a winning Powerball ticket had been sold from his Smith Hill market, he’d donated his 1 percent share of the winnings to a family that had been burned out of their home at Christmas. He’d also helped raise $250,000 for the Veterans’ Homeless Shelter.
I gathered all my printouts from the machine and headed back to the newsroom. Screw Matt Cavanaugh. Trying to tell me what to write or not write about. Did he think that was the appropriate role of the attorney general’s office? Or maybe he thought he had special powers over me because I’d been foolish enough to give him my phone number.
I got mad thinking abou
t his warning. Of course he wanted to scare me into silence. The tighter control he had on the information, the easier it was for him in court. I could not let fear of a small-time, inept, and unconscious crook keep me from a story that could get me a spot on the investigative team.
I must have stomped across the newsroom, because after I dropped my files on the desk, I noticed that two copy editors, the weekend city editor filling in for Dorothy, and Jonathan, who’d just come back from his assignment, were all looking up from their desks.
“Trouble with the story?” Jonathan asked. All four men seemed to be waiting for my answer.
“No,” I said, and sat down. I stared at the blank computer screen in continued fury. After their attention had drifted back to their computer screens, I turned back to Jonathan. “You know anything about Matt Cavanaugh?”
“From the AG’s office?” His mouth twisted into a winking sort of half smile. “Yeah, I’ve dealt with him a couple of times.”
He wanted me to beg for information from his vault. “And?”
“Tight with the cops,” he said. “Political, they say.”
The twisted half smile, combined with the pause, gave the impression that he was just brimming with inside information. “Aren’t they all political?”
He chuckled at my simplicity. “No. A lot of prosecutors are there just to get enough experience and connections to get something high-paying at a private firm. This guy is a career guy. Wants to move up the ladder. Got his eye on the big prize.”
He meant attorney general, an elected position. Suddenly the reason for my interest dawned on him. “Cavanaugh handling the Mazursky murder?” He sounded surprised.
“Something strange about that?”
“Not like him to be handling a piddling little street crime like that.” Jonathan had a very natural way of conveying disdain. Then: “But maybe he’s stuck on the weekend shift. You know, like me, relegated to covering a fucking political rally.”