by Jan Brogan
“Holstrom told me the IDs didn’t match. You said right from the start that you never saw the guy’s face when he came back into the store. All you saw was the back of the parka and the mask. So at first, we figured you might have had the wrong guy.”
“The wrong guy? I might not have seen his face, but I saw how tall he was. I told Holstrom he was a big guy. Over six feet. That parka would have been around Delria’s ankles.”
“Delria was not that short.”
Was he going to argue every point? “I saw him on television. I saw what he looked like.”
“Me, too. He was actually taller in real life. About five feet eight.”
He sounded as if he was rattling off the statistics of a college ballplayer, deliberately focusing on extraneous details. “You know,” he continued, in that same detached tone, “witnessing a murder is an emotional thing; it can affect your perceptions.”
“No shit.”
He ignored this, but continued in that infuriatingly detached tone, as if he was a social worker and I was a case number. “It affects the way you remember things. It affects the way everyone remembers things. And you said you were looking up at him while you were squatting on the floor.”
Discrediting me as a witness, was that the ploy? And then I realized that Matt was bullshitting me. Looking at me with those sincere brown eyes and spouting absolute bullshit. I gave him a cold stare so that he would know I knew it, but he did not shift his gaze.
“And the forensics report? That had to have come back at least a week ago, and it confirmed that the sneaker imprints weren’t Delria’s.” Anger began pumping into all kinds of veins I didn’t realize I had, and I couldn’t stand staying seated on the couch beside him any longer. Rising, I began pacing, setting off in the direction of a small dining area with an antique-looking oak table. It was stacked precariously with legal pads, files, and newspapers in various stages of being clipped.
Beyond, a bow window overlooked the street, providing a clear view of my apartment building. Matt must have known that once I’d figured out Delria was not the guy in the parka, I’d cause trouble. That’s why he’d called me at the office; it was a calculated effort to establish trust. Maybe that was his assignment at work today. Maybe that’s why he hadn’t looked so surprised when I’d shown up on his doorstep.
I pivoted back to Matt, who was now standing. “Why keep it secret? Why not announce it Monday at the same press conference where police tore my story to shreds? Why not clear Delria then?”
He leaned against the back of the couch, arms folded in the nothing-can-really-get-to-me way, but there was more tension in his expression now, as if he was watching a very close basketball game that his team could lose. “Your story was wrong, Hallie. Loan sharks wouldn’t kill Barry. They’d kill someone close to him. Or burn his car, his building. Not kill him.”
The certainty with which he said this put new fury into my heels. I paced back to the living room, stood directly in front of him, in his face now. “You didn’t answer my question. Why not clear Delria at the press conference if police weren’t deliberately stalling, trying to keep the press off track until after the referendum?”
Now, the soulful brown eyes burned with insult. I watched him wrestle with that anger, swallow so that his Adam’s apple dipped and rose. The fold of his arms grew tighter, his sentences shorter.
“Look, there was some confusion, that’s all. Conflicting evidence. Delria’s car was a good match. Cops found eight hundred dollars in cash on the backseat. That was about the same amount the son figured was taken from Mazursky’s cash register.”
“The trace amounts of heroin must have shown up right away.”
“Like junkies never rob convenience stores? It took a little police work to find out Delria was a dealer coming from a sales call in Fox Point—which is probably why he freaked when police started chasing him. And it took a while to get the DNA results on the mask.”
“Two weeks? On a priority case?”
Matt ignored the incredulity in my tone. “DNA can take longer than that if the lab’s backed up. Besides, whether Delria was the guy or not had nothing to do with the referendum or the fact that your story was wrong.”
I had no idea how long it took to process DNA results at the URI lab, but I had a gut feeling that Matt was lying. Something about the way he glanced away after he said it. And he was spending too much of his energy trying to convince me that my story, already retracted on the front page, was wrong.
The couch faced an enormous marble fireplace, and I stared at the stacks of law books on the hearth. Matt Cavanaugh was stonewalling me. Was under instruction to stonewall me, or worse, gain my trust and deliberately misguide me. “And what’s being done to find the guy in the parka? The real killer?”
“The case is still under investigation, Hallie.” The careful, clipped sentences, again. The professional distance. And I knew for sure then, felt it in my heart. He was an integral part of the plan. He must have seen it on my face, because he tried to recover, tried to warm up his voice and return to the personal plea: “Why don’t you just let us do our jobs? Leave it alone—just for another couple of weeks.”
Until the referendum election was over? Or until the guy in the parka could kill me? I was shaking, physically shaking, and I wasn’t sure if it was fear or anger. Was everyone in this godforsaken state connected? The attorney general’s office in league with a corrupt mayor?
I stormed away from him, no choice really but to head back to the dining room, where I had the urge to kick the legs out from under the antique table. Instead, I continued moving as far away from him as I could get, to the bow window, overlooking the street and my building. I could see my bare window, and beyond, the bright light of the fluorescent ring in the fifties-style fixture above the bar. The apartment looked so harsh, so empty, even from here.
I walked back to the couch, reflexively searching for my knapsack under the coffee table, kicking aside a stack of Sports Illustrated magazines, not caring that they toppled. But I hadn’t brought the knapsack or a notebook. Why had I come here, anyway? What made me think that Matt Cavanaugh would ever tell me the truth? I headed to the foyer, but the outer door had an elaborate locking system I couldn’t figure out. I flipped levers and tugged at the door. Matt followed behind me, putting his hand on my arm to stop me.
I spun around, not caring how high my voice was raised, how shrill I sounded. “That night you drove me home from Barry’s wake. That night you had to have known. Why didn’t you tell me that the guy in the parka was running around free? Don’t you think you owed me that courtesy?”
He stepped back, looking stunned. As if he couldn’t understand why all this anger was directed at him. As if he’d been so generous with me and now I was here with a gun in my hand sticking him up for his wallet.
But he was not a man to surrender his cash and credit cards. Recovering, he shook his head, slowly at first, and then with more velocity as he began to add up my offenses. “Jeez, why do you think? Could it be because everything we tell you, and crap that we don’t, ends up in print? Could that be it?”
We stared at each other, a mutual “fuck you.”
“Could it be,” he continued in that same tone, “that the more stories you write warning this guy that we’re looking for him, the harder he is to catch? And maybe, just maybe, there’s more incentive for him to come after you, because you never seem to tire of reminding everybody in the paper and on the radio that you know what this guy looks like.”
I didn’t run the next morning. I told myself that my right hip, which was sore to the touch, needed a rest. That I needed a few days off from the pounding of the pavement. But it was not like me to baby an injury and I knew, even as I stepped over my running shoes to get to the bathroom, that Matt’s anger and sarcasm had done its damage. I wouldn’t be running alone on the boulevard, or anywhere else at six A.M., as long as the man in the parka was free in Providence.
I didn’t want to h
ang around my apartment either, especially since it was the first of the month and my landlord was likely to knock on the door for the rent. I showered, got dressed for work, and ended up at my desk in the South County bureau by a quarter of seven, doing police checks with my jacket on because the heat hadn’t warmed up from the overnight setting.
It was going to be a long day. I drilled through a stack of press releases on leaf-collection day and the Rotary Club’s turkey shoot, and fielded a call from an irate high school football coach who took issue with a sports reporter’s criticism of his failed offense. I called the town clerk’s office to get the week’s meeting agenda and learned that the most controversial issue coming before any of the boards this week was whether or not to give the Young Women’s Club a one-day beer-and-wine license for its holiday fund-raiser.
Carolyn arrived late, having come from a meeting of regional bureau managers downtown, and by that time, I was overwhelmed with the minor details that had defined the morning. She’d picked up two frothy-looking coffees and handed me one with what looked like caramel on the top. I sensed that it was some sort of consolation prize, like the ice-cream cones she bought her daughter when her soccer team lost a game.
I frowned at the froth, afraid to take a sip. “You hear anything downtown about who made the investigative team?”
“Nothing definitive,” Carolyn said, hanging her lime-green ski jacket in the closet as carefully as if it were one of her furs. Then she spotted something on the floor of the closet she didn’t like and kicked it to one side.
“What does that mean?”
“What is all this crap in here?” Carolyn said, digging into the closet and pulling out two large pieces of poster board. She turned them around and displayed some badly glued red and yellow construction paper cutouts that had suffered from their closet storage. It was one of her daughter’s elementary school art projects. “Oh,” she said to herself.
“Carolyn, tell me,” I persisted.
She stuffed the poster board back in the closet and sat down at her desk reluctantly, picking up a stack of interoffice mail and dropping it in her lap. She seemed wearied by her trek to the city, the turf battles she’d had to wage, the expenses she’d had to defend.
“Tell me.”
She sighed, swallowed some coffee, and relented. “Nothing official. But I heard that Jonathan Frizell has been assigned on a temporary basis. Some big story of his is running in tomorrow’s paper.” She met my eye, offering me her full sympathy. “You don’t want to hang out with those idiots in Providence, anyway. I mean, why do they all have to walk around carrying laptops when the newsroom is filled with word processors?”
I shook my head to indicate that I didn’t know. I didn’t care. I was obviously destined to spend the rest of my days in laptop-less exile. I tried the coffee, but it was already tepid, the caramel melted into a swirl of oil. Carolyn’s phone rang and she answered it. I could tell by the long silence and the roll of her eyes that it had to be Marcy Kittner.
“Can’t you get someone else from city to cover, if it’s so important?” Carolyn asked.
And then: “You’re not being fair.”
And finally: “I’ve got a life, you know. I can’t work morning and night.”
There was more silence as she listened, lips pinched, resentment building. “I’ll see what I can do,” she said in a clipped tone. “Bitch,” she added after she’d already hung up the phone.
Frizell, who was supposed to cover an antigambling rally at the University of Rhode Island that night, was putting the finishing touches on the final copy of his big investigative piece. So Marcy wanted Carolyn to cover the rally instead.
It seemed like an odd request. Never in the four months that I’d been here had I seen Carolyn work a night shift. In fact, I’d assumed that was the major perk of being a bureau manager. But I could see from Carolyn’s expression that she was in some kind of a corner.
“I can cover it,” I offered. I’d begun to dread my empty, pinging apartment. And even if only ten people showed up, a political rally was a decent-size story in South County. At worst, it would make the cover of the zone page.
Carolyn didn’t jump on this, a disturbing response.
“I’m free. Why don’t you let me cover it?”
“That’s okay.” Carolyn turned away from me, one hand on her keyboard, the other flicking on the machine.
“Really. You’d be doing me a favor. I’m short of cash this month and could use the overtime. Besides, you know me. I have no other life.”
“Let me think about it,” Carolyn said, watching the computer boot up instead of turning back to me. Her posture was off, too, spine uncharacteristically stiff. The Providence Morning Chronicle logo came up on her screen and she failed to make her usual derisive comment.
And then I knew. “You mean they don’t even trust me to cover a public event?”
With a sigh, she turned back to me. She hadn’t wanted to tell me, but was damn glad I’d figured it out. “Those assholes. They’re still pissed off about the correction.” It all came out in an angry torrent. “And Marcy’s always been vindictive.”
“A public event? Journalism 101?” My voice raised in insult.
Like most people in journalism, Carolyn shouldn’t have been made a manager. She was no good at containment or diplomacy. If I’d wanted to set fire to the office, she’d have handed me a can of gasoline. “Those assholes!”
Seeing her worked up like that toned me down. I became practical. “How are you going to work tonight? Who’s going to watch Deirdre and Katie?”
“I’ll have to drop them with Tom.” He was Deirdre’s father and always late with child support. She spit this solution.
In the heat of this us-against-them fury at the downtown editors, I felt the last of my anger dissipate. One of us had to remain levelheaded. Solution oriented. And, more important, I wanted this assignment more than ever now. “You don’t want to drop the girls off with Tom, and you don’t want to work until eleven tonight,” I said firmly.
Carolyn was not inclined to disagree.
“You could…” I drew this out and watched her closely to gauge her receptiveness. Seeing enough, I plunged on. “You could call Marcy at around two o’clock and tell her the school nurse sent Deirdre home deathly ill.”
I saw a distinct glint in her eye, a consideration of the idea, and a calculation of risk. “You know I can handle this assignment,” I pressed. “You know I won’t let you down.”
I’m not sure if it was belief, pity, or simply a rejection of anything that imposed on her family life, but Carolyn didn’t take long to weigh the morality of my suggestion. She brightened at the thought of besting Marcy and jumped right into the subterfuge. “I’ll wait until four o’clock to call her,” she said with a conspiratorial smile. “That way it’ll be too late for her to get anyone else.”
One of the tasks of reporting a public event is counting the crowd. The tendency is to exaggerate in either direction. If almost no one shows up, there is a pathetic failure to call attention to. If it’s standing room only, it becomes a bona-fide news event.
I was pleased to see that there was no need to exaggerate tonight. The Edwards Auditorium, a rich, old-world hall with tall Palladian windows, was crammed with people. I counted chairs across and multiplied by fully occupied rows. Added fifty for the people sitting in the balcony and another twenty-five for those standing in the aisle. Three hundred, I estimated in my notebook. A decent headline.
Making my way through the crowd to the front, I found a place to lean along the wall. Reporters from two Providence television stations and their cameramen were gathered in front of me. Behind me, a young girl with a notebook announced that she worked for the college paper, the Good Five-Cent Cigar, and asked if I was from the Chronicle.
I nodded and she made a notation in her notebook, as if participating media were somehow relevant. It occurred to me that since news was always scant in the Saturday paper, this s
tory might have a shot at the front page. I scanned the crowd, looking for the Chronicle photographer who was supposed to meet me here. Without a photograph, the rally, no matter how well written, would get relegated to a less prominent position—below the fold, or even worse, an inside page.
Gregory Ayers, the lottery executive director whose arm I had rubbed for luck, was just stepping up to the podium. Onstage, there was an aura of television fame about him, a certain celebrity to his gait, and maybe even a film of hair spray over the silver hair. As soon as he took the microphone, an immediate hush fell over the room, as if he were about to announce the Powerball number.
“We all want to be winners,” he said, with his warm, uncle-like familiarity. The audience applauded with a force that took him aback. It made Ayers shift at the podium, rearrange his index cards, and take a sip of water while the clapping subsided. I realized, for the first time, the power of his personality. He was the guy who gave away money on television, who called out winning numbers and handed out life-altering checks.
“But what I want to talk about today—” There was more clapping and Ayers had to stop again and wait. “What I want to talk about today are all the ways in which we Rhode Islanders are going to lose if this casino-gambling referendum passes.”
The Citizens for a Stronger Rhode Island had packed the hall with gambling opponents who clapped like mad at this. But there were rows of senior citizens—I recognized a few bingo players from South Kingstown—who remained still in their seats, and a row of businessmen whose arms began to fold over their chests.
Ayers began detailing lottery revenues, which were staggering, and where the money went: arts, education, local aid. People clapped after each number, many looking up at him with awe. He was the man who drew winning tickets, the man who gave them an illusion of hope.
Excitedly, I began to formulate headlines for my story: “Lottery Chief Mesmerizes Antigambling Audience.” “Lottery Chief Plays Antigambling Card.” “Casino Gambling Referendum’s Luck Runs Out.”