A Confidential Source

by Jan Brogan

  He was completely rumpled, in blue jeans and a sweatshirt, and his hair was still mussed up on one side. He was studying me intently, taking in the bandaged ear and leg, shaking his head. “Are you all right?”

  For a moment, he sounded sweet and familiar, like someone I’d known for a long time. Like someone I’d expect to worry about me. Then, he combed his hair with his fingers and stood straight, squaring his shoulders. A prosecutor again. He lifted himself from the door frame and crossed his arms, waiting.

  It took me a moment to realize what he was waiting for. “Obviously, I should have listened to you,” I said.

  He smiled, but without too much triumph.

  The nurse dabbed my leg a second time and my eyes opened wide with pain. Matt moved beside the bed and squeezed my hand. And then he said to the nurse, “Can’t you give her something for the pain?”

  “I’m fine,” I said. “Really. It was just the antiseptic.”

  This reminded the nurse that I needed antibiotics and she set off down the hall. When she’d gone, Matt sat down on the chair beside the bed and, still holding my hand, told me that the Providence police had tipped him off about my distress call. “I’ve been at the station all night, waiting to hear.”

  Then he lowered his voice. “We got those assholes,” he said. “The guy who shot you and the other guy he was with. They’re in custody.”

  A wave of relief. “They were working for Gregory Ayers,” I said.

  Matt didn’t say he knew that already, but the lack of surprise or indignation told me he’d been trying to prove Ayers’s involvement in the ring for some time.

  I thought about the tape, the microcassette in the ivy. It was critical evidence that never should have been in my pocket. That never rightly belonged to me. “The tape…”

  Matt was suddenly at attention, listening carefully.

  “Leonard put a copy in my mailbox. It’s in the ivy along the river, inside an Altoids box, just past the footbridge, the one right before Steeple Street.”

  “On the opposite side from the gondola platform?”

  I nodded.

  A sheen of something came over his eyes. Gratitude, maybe? It almost looked like real affection. Then he offered another squeeze of my hand and was gone.

  CHAPTER

  23

  CHRONICLE REPORTER ABDUCTED.” Written by Jonathan Frizell, the story ran in Monday’s paper, the day after I came home from the hospital. The 24-point headline was placed above the fold along with an atrocious photograph of me in a johnny while I was still in the emergency room.

  That whole next week I was besieged by requests for interviews from television, radio, and even my old newspaper, the Boston Ledger. I granted these interviews sparingly after consulting Dorothy first to make sure I said nothing that scooped our own investigative team.

  Gregory A. Ayers was picked up at home, charged in federal court as a coconspirator in the murder of Barry Mazursky, and held without bail in the ACI, which was within view of his old lottery headquarters. Ayers was also charged with kidnapping, felony assault, conspiracy to defraud the state lottery system, and misappropriation of state funds. He was going to be prosecuted under the federal RICO act, which meant that Matt Cavanaugh would have to turn his case over to the feds.

  It was strange to be the subject of a news event, instead of the reporter, and I had new sympathy, new understanding for the people I’d quoted in the past. Had I gotten it right? Or altered it just slightly to smooth a transition in the writing? I hoped it was the former, because now I could see that people do remember exactly what they said, how that differed from what was in the paper, and what kind of phrase they would never in their life have uttered.

  And the questions were always the same: How did it feel to be abducted? Was I afraid for my life? Was I shocked to discover the evil side of kindly old Gregory Ayers?

  I gave reporters the glaringly obvious answers I knew they needed for their stories and tried my best to be quotable, but privately, I was frustrated. I didn’t want to be the subject of this story, I wanted to be the byline behind it. State corruption of this magnitude was natural fodder for a Pulitzer and here I was forcibly sidelined by my editors, who insisted I take time off to recover.

  And sure, I was lying on my futon with my leg elevated, my sprained ankle still swollen, and both the back of my leg and earlobe sore. And sure, I was still having dreams of the Parka chasing me through orangey smoke so thick I couldn’t breathe or see. But the best way for me to get over the violence and ache of seared flesh was to get back to work. Get on with it.

  Compulsively, I listened to round-the-clock television and radio coverage of the scandal and reread the week’s Chronicle. Nearly all of the stories were written, at least in part, by Frizell, who was a shoo-in for the job on the investigative team.

  Now, after almost a week of forced recovery, I sat restlessly on the futon with Frizell’s latest story on my lap, staring at the art department’s rendition of the $250,000 scratch ticket I’d been offered. The graphic had become a logo for the series.

  “It was probably counterfeit,” Walter said. My mother, who’d spent the first several days with me, had called him and he’d come down from Boston after his shift this afternoon. He was standing at the stove heating up the quart of curried zucchini soup Geralyn had made for me.

  “No. Frizell’s story today said it was legit,” I corrected him. “The governor is launching an investigation into lottery procedures to figure out how Ayers could have identified a winner like that from the inventory.”

  The way a lot of the reporters, especially the television people, covered the bribe made me sound like a hero for not taking it. But not Frizell. His story pointed out that even if I’d made the exchange, given him the real tape, Ayers would likely have tried to kill me anyway.

  I hated to admit it, but Frizell was a good reporter, digging into the details of the story with a thoroughness I had to admire. I began flipping through the rest of the paper to the jump pages to see how many sidebars he’d written, how many stories in today’s paper had his byline on them.

  “You’re pathological. You know that, right?” Walter said. He put a bowl of soup on the coffee table and took the newspaper out of my hands, tapping the inner sections into line and folding it in half.

  Walter was laying the folded paper on the bar when the phone rang. Grabbing the cordless from its cradle, he walked it over to me, on the futon.

  It was Dorothy. “You feeling better?” she asked.

  “Antsy,” I replied. “Very antsy.”

  She wanted me to report to her in the newsroom on Monday instead of returning to the South County bureau. “If you’re up to it, both Nathan and I want you to get started on an in-depth story on how the counterfeiting ring operated. You know, why they went to Barry, where they got the technology, that kind of thing. Apparently, the attorney general’s office has some background info they want to release only to you.”

  “Sure,” I said, trying to sound cool, but my mind was already beginning to whir. If the AG’s office had details it would release only to me, that meant an exclusive. “I’ll be there at eight.”

  There was a pause and then: “Nathan decided that there was going to be such a high volume of investigative stories coming out of this scandal, there may be room for both you and Frizell on the team. He’s willing to try you for a probationary period.”

  As soon as I put the phone down, I jumped up from the futon, oblivious to my ankle sprain, and began hugging Walter.

  It was a long and completely silent hug, a communication that covered years of mistakes, of Chris Tejian and my Boston newspaper career. When I stepped away, I felt incredibly light, as if the bandages on my leg and ankle were off and all my stitches were removed. A penance had been paid, an absolution granted. Walter and I stared at each other, not needing to say a word because we both knew that the burden had lifted. That now, I could take his advice. In this small and crazy state, I could finally start
anew.

  There was a stack of fresh notebooks in my bedroom and I had a desperate urge to outline my plan of attack on the story. As I walked into my room, Walter yelled out that I might want to take it easy on my ankle. “Moderation, ever heard of it, Hallie? Moderation and balance?”

  Two weeks later, my story was the lead on Sunday’s front page.

  The Providence Morning Chronicle

  The Mazursky Murder: Corruption from

  the Casino to the Lottery

  First in a series

  By Hallie A. Ahern

  Chronicle Investigative Team

  He sold his convenience-store chain, tapped out every line of credit he’d ever had, and had been in and out of Gamblers Anonymous meetings for three years. Still, Barry Mazursky could not beat his gambling demons.

  The manager of the Mazursky Markets in Providence who was shot to death last month in the Wayland Square store had accrued more than $150,000 in debts to loan sharks and was a desperate man, his wife, Nadine Mazursky, said in a recent interview.

  That’s how he got mixed up with the state lottery counterfeiting scheme that prosecutors say cost the state $2.5 million in lost revenue and allowed him to pay off all his street loans. And according to the state’s argument, that’s why he was murdered.

  The scheme was fairly simple. Using breakthrough technology from an underground printing firm, a ring of men counterfeited $5 scratch-ticket games. Sale of the tickets was 100 percent profit, and since only losing tickets would be printed, there was little risk. “Who pays attention to a losing scratch ticket? You toss them in the trash or on the ground,” said Assistant RI Attorney General Matthew P. Cavanaugh, who initiated the state’s three-month investigation into the scheme.

  See Mazursky, page B-14

  “So I can’t believe they actually threw in a few fake winners,” Frizell said. It was the Monday after my story ran and he was sitting alone in the Fishbowl with the newspaper spread on the conference table in front of him when I walked in. Dorothy and Nathan hadn’t yet arrived for our meeting.

  “The idea was to increase sales in the Wayland store,” I said. “They were small, ten- or fifty-dollar winners that Barry sold only to regular players like me, who he knew would cash them at his store. The ten-thousand-dollar winner I got was a printing error.”

  “Some error,” Frizell said. He flipped to the jump page and pointed to a sidebar I’d written. “And you really believe this crap? That the mayor knew all about the investigation and that’s why he lied to you about the memo?” Frizell had already written so many negative stories about the mayor’s administration that he couldn’t believe that anything Billy Lopresti said was ever true.

  I tried nonetheless. “The AG’s office confirmed that Providence police had been informed about the counterfeiting investigation and were told to keep a lid on the Mazursky murder probe until prosecutors could get all their ducks in a row. They give high praise to Billy for his cooperation.”

  Jonathan’s expression remained unconvinced. He flipped the newspaper closed to cut off further discussion of my story and launched into an explanation of the piece he was writing for tomorrow: a restaurant owner who made a payoff to a health department lackey who threatened to close him down on trumped-up code violations. More proof that the mayor was unredeemable scum.

  But I didn’t really care about the mayor. Voters had defeated his referendum to legalize gambling by a landslide. Spillover disgust at the corruption of the lottery, most likely, but I preferred to think of it as Leonard’s victory: a memorial and a final tribute.

  Nathan and Dorothy walked in and cut Jonathan off by dropping a bound folder onto the middle of the table. It was an independent audit of the state lottery dating back five years. Messengered over in advance of the press conference, it revealed “irregular practices” and nearly half a million dollars in unaccountable funds.

  In other words, Gregory Ayers had been stealing from the till long before he began counterfeiting. Apparently, his wife, Marge, had both an alcohol and a shopping problem. Whenever she’d succumb to Ayers’s pressure to go on the wagon, she’d punish him for her sobriety by going on a buying binge. Furs, jewelry, handbags, and even a marble fireplace mantel that she had imported from Rome.

  It looked like Ayers had pilfered from the lottery funds to pay his mounting personal debt. As long as he could hire his friendly accounting firm to rubber-stamp the audits, he was safe from exposure, but the referendum to legalize gambling threatened all that. As part of the bill, a new independent gambling commission, which was to include a member of the Narragansett tribe, would conduct annual audits of both casino gambling and the lottery.

  “Ayers had been running the lottery for so long that he started to think that money he gave away was really his,” Nathan said.

  For next Sunday’s segment, he wanted me to explore the theory that Ayers had turned to counterfeiting to try to replace the embezzled money in case the gambling referendum passed. I was to try to reconstruct the whole thing, portray the deterioration of a successful man and the desperation that followed.

  Dorothy pushed the audit across the table to me. “Federal prosecutors have scheduled a new press conference for four o’clock. I think they’re probably going to announce additional charges against Ayers.”

  No one mentioned that covering a four o’clock press conference on a Friday meant that I’d be working until nine o’clock, but it hung in the air. Dorothy knew that I’d started work at seven this morning, but also that I wasn’t likely to complain. Besides being hired on to the investigative team on a probationary basis, I still had mountains of debt to pay and I needed the overtime.

  “About twenty-five inches for tomorrow, then?” Dorothy said. “And maybe a news analysis for Sunday?”

  Jonathan, who was rumored to own a ski condominium in New Hampshire, was already packing up his things, eyeing the door. For a moment, the vision of the $250,000 scratch ticket dangled before me. All that money. The apartment in Back Bay. The arty essays that I could have written in the early afternoon.

  Dorothy was looking at me with an apologetic expression, as if she felt she might have pushed too far. “The news analysis can wait until Monday, if you want…”

  I’d had a full week of forced rest and idle time. And it wasn’t as if I had any other plans. This was my fresh start, my emotional freedom. I realized Dorothy was waiting for an answer. “Don’t worry. I’ll be able to manage.”

  It was almost ten o’clock and I was standing in the last aisle of the Mazursky Market, a salad in one hand and a quart of milk in the other. I was tired from putting in a long day, but still wound up. The stitches in my calf were out, but because of the sprain, I had to wait one more week before I could start running. So I was still working off excess energy and knew that I’d never be able to sleep.

  “I had a problem with your story today.” Matt Cavanaugh’s voice boomed in the quiet aisle.

  I let the door of the dairy case swing shut and turned around.

  He was standing at the end of the aisle, one hand in his pocket, the other carrying a briefcase. The first snow was falling outside and there were snowflakes melting in his hair and on the shoulders of his camel-hair coat. He was still in a suit and tie, dressed for the office, which he must have just left. “You misquoted me.”

  I felt alarm begin to rise. I’d spent two weeks researching that story and had been meticulous in transcribing my notes, especially the notes from my interviews with Matt. I’d double-checked every fact, every quote, three times. “What? What did I get wrong?”

  “I’d never advocate throwing scratch tickets on the ground,” he said, walking toward me. “That’s littering.”

  Now I saw the sardonic smile, the mischief glinting in the dark eyes. I felt such relief that I realized how much I’d wanted his approval on the story—as much as I’d wanted Dorothy’s or Nathan’s. It had been important to me that Matt saw I could get it right.

  Striking a similar tone,
I reached into my knapsack and pulled out my silver tape recorder. “I believe I have that interview on tape. I can play it back for you if you want.”

  “Here?” He looked up and down the empty aisle, as if it were full of people who would overhear.

  “I can turn the volume low.”

  He reached over and I thought he might take the tape recorder from me, but instead it was the salad he removed from my hand. Grimacing at the plastic container, he said, “Do you eat this rabbit food every night?”

  “Almost.”

  He shook his head at my dining habits. And then: “How about we listen to the tape over dinner?” And in case I misunderstood: “A dinner that comes from somewhere else.”

  “Now?”

  “You don’t appear to have other plans.”

  He was grinning. I might have taken offense if it weren’t so painfully true. Or if it weren’t so obvious that he was in the same boat. Just out of work. Alone on a Friday night with nothing to do. I shrugged, nonchalantly, as if to say oh-what-the-hell, hoping he couldn’t read me too well, or hear too much enthusiasm in my footsteps. I put the milk back in the dairy case and slowly, as if it were a sacrifice, returned the salad to the deli.

  Matt waited for me at the register, where the overweight woman from YourCorner Corporation was ringing up a liter of soda and a pack of cigarettes for a boy who might or might not have been eighteen years of age. But Matt wasn’t paying attention; he was peering out the window at the snow falling on Way land Square, waiting for me. Outside, the snowflakes were enormous, the kind that melted into the pavement and left only the lightest frosting on the grass.

  “You ready?” he asked, turning from the window as I arrived. And then, with a glance at the register and that wicked grin: “No scratch tickets tonight?”

  “You know,” I felt compelled to remind him, “I could have practically been a millionaire.”

  He sighed. “I think you mentioned that in your statement.”

  “So it is possible to get rich.”