“Keep it under six on the Richter scale, okay?” Eddie said, dryly. “Or you could be crushed by a falling armoire.” He bent—ouch! damn back was still creaky—and twisted his beer bottle into the pebble roof. Then he rolled a ball into position with the club and addressed it. The club was a four iron, the identical brand Eddie played, the weight of it familiar. He lined up the shot, eye on the ball.
“What the hell happened with the shooting story?” Eddie said.
Whack. Pebbles sprayed up in a cloud. The ball sailed over the safety wall and started down the street below, then sliced hard right and banged off a Dumpster in an alley, ten stories down. The blow echoed through deserted streets.
“You’re not rolling your right hand over,” Phife said. “The club face is too open at contact.”
Eddie lined up another shot.
“I got pressure from Keyes to downplay the story. I did my best with it.”
Whack. The ball tailed left and plopped into the Merrimack Canal, which paralleled the street. “Well, your best sucked. There’s no excuse for what ran under my name. You should have pulled my byline.”
Phife shouted back, “You try dealing with the pressure I get.”
“Pressure to make me look like an idiot?”
Phife took a sip of beer, and then answered in a calm voice, “This ain’t a fight worth losing. I’m telling you—a friend as always, and the only man in this sordid town that wants to save you from yourself.”
Eddie was in no mood for movie quotes. “Casablanca?”
“Clockwork Orange.”
“What are you saying? That I’ll get fired if I complain?”
Phife guzzled beer. When the bottle came down, he seemed glum. “There’s something going on, man. Something I’ve never seen before.”
“Is that another goddam quote? I’ve had enough tonight.”
Phife whispered, “Not a quote.” He glanced around the roof. “This isn’t the first time I’ve felt the pressure to rewrite basic crime stories, only now it’s getting worse. Keyes didn’t say it straight out, but he made it clear that the rewrite order came from the publisher’s office.”
“From Templeton?”
“Yup.” Phife shivered. “That guy creeps me out. It’s always pitch black in his office. And his voice—like Satan’s little brother.” He tried to drink and dribbled beer down his coat.
“Why would Templeton care about a shooting in the Acre?”
“Who knows? But I’m starting to wonder if we’ve gone from reporting the news to managing it.”
Eddie lined up another ball. “Like with Danny’s death?”
Phife nodded. “Keyes pissed on any discussion about Danny at the morning news meeting. He pulled Spaulding off a sexy budget story. He put our rabid attack dog—and you’ve seen Spaulding, the way he foams around the mouth—he put him on a feature about kids painting flower planters.”
Eddie’s hot anger cooled to something hard and heavy in his chest. Now he was curious. What was going on at The Empire? He swung the club and shot the ball into the safety wall. It ricocheted back, clanged off the satellite dish and sent Phife sprawling. Eddie shrugged. “Fore.”
Phife smiled and shook a fist in the air. “You did that on purpose!”
“I wish,” Eddie said.
“I screwed up, Ed.” He paused, frowning. “I’m sorry.”
“That new girl must be something.”
Phife grinned again. “I’ve had some late nights.”
Eddie grunted and lined up another ball. Even a pro can take a bad swing. A motorcycle screamed up the street below. “Do you know what Danny was working on when he died?” Eddie asked.
“No. He didn’t publish much the last month. I assumed he was on a project for some other editor. Why?”
Eddie took a practice swing. Gordon was his best friend in Lowell. “I met that new detective today.” He told Phife about his conversation with Detective Orr, and about the computer crash.
Phife rubbed a day’s worth of whiskers on his chin. “I’d love to know what the cops think they have, but Spaulding tells me the investigation is airtight—absolutely no leaks.”
“Let me take a run at it tomorrow,” Eddie said. “I know a back door.”
“Okay. If questioned, we are sewage workers on our way to a conference.”
Eddie knew that quote. “The Life of Brian.”
“Very good. Of course, if Keyes finds out you’re poking around on this against his orders, you’ll be covering the Landfill Committee.”
“I can handle Keyes,” Eddie said, sounding more confident than he was. “I want to know how Danny died. The cops know something, and I’m going to find out what.”
Eddie lined up another shot and took a slow, measured swing. The ball sailed true, bounced in the middle of the street and rolled out of sight.
Phife clapped his hands once. “There’s hope for you yet, Bourque.”
Chapter 5
“Eeaaaaa!”
“Eeaaaaa!”
The General’s whine woke Eddie from a dream involving two female golf pros and a bubble bath in a satellite dish. He understood the interruption to mean it was precisely six o’clock. Breakfast time.
Sleep. Need more sleep. He ignored the cries.
But General VonKatz had no snooze button. He stood on Eddie’s chest and pawed his chin. Eddie lay still. The General flicked a claw on his bottom lip.
“Ow! I’m up,” Eddie yelled. The clock read ten past six. Hmmm, maybe he did have a snooze button.
The refrigerator that morning held two bottles of Sam Adams beer, a can of Guinness stout, a bottle of spicy mustard, two slices of smoked turkey cold cuts, a chunk of provolone and whipped cream in a spray can. Eddie split the turkey with General VonKatz and ate the cheese himself. For dessert, he had two shots of whipped cream in the mouth. That day, the morning of Nowlin’s wake, Eddie chose a coffee roast from Costa Rica, a light bean with a nutty flavor. The caffeine numbed a mild headache left over by the three Rolling Rocks he had drunk with Phife.
Eddie grabbed his business suit from the closet and laid it on the bed. He had last worn the gray two-piece to his job interview at The Empire. Size forty-two long. The jacket was snug in the shoulders. The wool trousers, thirty-two inches in the waist, still fit well, which nobody would see under the poorly fitting jacket.
It felt funny to wear a suit to work. Eddie’s usual style could be called business rumpled—a cotton dress shirt apparently laundered on the “wrinkle” cycle, faded khakis and a Jerry Garcia tie. But the whole Empire staff had dressed up today. Some were going to the ten o’clock calling hours for Nowlin. Eddie had promised Melissa he’d walk her to the funeral home for the afternoon session.
At the office, Eddie’s voice mail held two messages, both from City Councilman Eccleston. No details, though. Eddie made a mental note to call Eccleston, which he promptly forgot in his haste to persuade an old friend to penetrate the secrecy around the Nowlin investigation. He dialed the Lowell District Office of U.S. Representative Hippo Vaughn.
“It’s Bourque,” he told the receptionist. “Is he here today, or in D.C.?”
“The congressman is down there, Eddie. I’ll patch you through on our office line.”
Sure, let the taxpayers pay for this long-distance call to Washington.
Eddie spoke to the press guy in D.C., and then waited on hold. Vaughn’s hold music was a loop tape of Boston Red Sox play-by-play calls by announcer Dick Stockton. Eddie waited on hold a long time, thinking about the first time he met Hippo Vaughn.
It was late August, during his internship at The Empire. The Red Sox were on cable, so Eddie had settled into a downtown pub decorated with sports memorabilia, three dartboards, and two TVs. He watched the game with a working-class crowd of Red Sox fans. At one Guinness stout per hour, this was a four-beer game. When the Sox blew a ninth-inning lead, plumbers, carpenters and truck drivers—thick-armed men with c
urled lips and bad beer buzzes—stormed from the bar and onto the cobblestones of Middle Street, in search of human skulls to crack in frustration—each other’s, perhaps. The loss had ended Boston’s playoff chances. There would be another year without a championship.
Eddie liked his skull the way it was; he had waited at the bar and ordered coffee. As the crowd cleared, he had noticed an old man alone at a table across the room. His white hair was nearly transparent, like fine fishing line. He was impossibly skinny, like the Mister Salty pretzel guy, come to life and aged into his eighties.
The man had pushed himself up on a bone-colored cane with a sliver knob. His spryness made the cane seem like a prop. “All hail the goddam Red Sox,” he yelled bitterly to nobody in particular.
The old man had pushed through a wreckage of chairs to the back of the bar. There, he peeled from the wall a giant foam finger—a ballpark souvenir. He stuck his hand in the mitt and waved it around, shouting: “All hail the mighty Red Sox.”
He spotted Eddie watching him.
“Dr. Baseball will be right with you, young man,” he had hollered to Eddie. “Just bend over for your annual Red Sox prostate exam.” He jabbed the giant finger in Eddie’s direction.
Eddie leaned to the bartender. “Time to shut that guy off.”
The barkeep shook his head. “He only drinks tea.”
Was this guy for real? Eddie ordered the man a tea and waved him over. His name was Hippo Vaughn Pulaski. He went by Hippo Vaughn. And he believed he was cursed.
Momma Pulaski had delivered him eleven minutes after the Red Sox forced the final out to win the 1918 World Series, four games to two. His parents, both fans and delirious with joy that day, could not have imagined that Boston’s win marked the start of a championship drought that would stretch to the next millennium.
Poppa Pulaski wanted to name his son after Carl Mays, the winning pitcher in the deciding game. But his mother’s heart had melted for a hard-luck loser on the Cubs, who had allowed just three runs in twenty-seven innings but still lost two games in the ’18 Series. His name was Hippo Vaughn.
And with that moniker she had cursed her infant son to a life of obsessive overachieving. Hippo Vaughn Pulaski drove himself to overcome the bad karma of the name. He didn’t fear obstacles, he steered for them: bombing runs over Germany, medical school, and then law school. He passed the Mensa test, then refused to join. In his spare hours, he invented doodads for the electronics industry, and made enough dough to buy the Broadway theater at which he met his ballerina wife. He retired as a Superior Court judge with sixteen unblemished years on the bench.
But as Vaughn neared the end of a long life, he realized he was probably the oldest person drawing breath never to have experienced a Red Sox championship.
Missed it by eleven minutes—that epitaph horrified him.
At the bar that night, Eddie and Hippo talked about Fisk’s home run in Game Six in ’75, and Joe Morgan’s appalling single in Game Seven. They commiserated about the “Boston Massacre” in ’78, about Mike Torrez and Bucky Dent, Stanley’s wild pitch, and about Mookie and Buckner. Vaughn told Eddie about the “William’s shift” in ’46, and Bob Gibson’s domination in ’67.
And they talked about life: how Hippo had persevered when his only son vanished in Vietnam; how Eddie’s big brother had destroyed the family when he went to prison.
The day after they had met, Vaughn had declared himself a candidate for Congress as a Democrat. He never explained why he ran. Possibly he did so because some fool told him he could never win. Few voters knew him, but four million of your own bucks will buy a lot of name recognition.
Senior citizens liked the candidate’s wrinkles. Younger voters liked his resumé, his harmless eccentricity and the way he talked. Sure, he was rich now, but he had grown up blue-collar and never forgot the language. Cuss words slipped from his lips, and he worked the Red Sox into every speech. It became his trademark.
His Republican opponent, a purebred from Concord, was ahead in the polls when he tried his own off-the-cuff Red Sox reference. He referred to Carl Yazstremski as a center fielder, and the polls flip-flopped overnight.
A click cut off the recording and Vaughn picked up the line. “So sorry about Danny,” the congressman said.
They talked about Nowlin for a while, what a nice kid he was. That led Eddie to the point of the call. “I need Danny’s autopsy report,” he said. “It’s sealed up. Spaulding can’t get it from the cops, and neither can I.”
Vaughn was silent a moment. Then he growled, “Living Christ almighty, Bourque. You want me to undo the Babe Ruth trade too?”
“The Sox could use another RBI guy. But of the two, I’ll take the report. Unless you don’t think you can get it.”
Eddie set the telephone receiver on the desk and listened to the congressman’s tirade of profanities. Even when Vaughn knew you were playing him for a favor, the man could not stand to be doubted.
Chapter 6
Reporter Russell Spaulding threw his own work on his desk. His hands tensed into claws, which he dragged over his bald scalp, scratching little channels through the sheen of sweat on his head.
“My flower planter story—on page one,” he said to Eddie. He picked the paper back up and smacked it on the desk like he was killing a fly. “This is why I couldn’t do my budget story. This crap.” He sighed and slumped in his chair. “This place is going all to hell.”
Spaulding was a chunky cop reporter with a shaved bullet head, gray eyes, and an in-your-face intensity. He was known around the newsroom as “A.K. Forty-seven,” after the Russian assault rifle, because someday Spaulding was going to snap and climb a clock tower with one. Spaulding’s best feature was his healthy contempt for the people he covered. There was no danger he’d go native and start referring to city officials as “we” and “us.” As in, “So chief, did we get that grant to overhaul the radio room?” Once a reporter jumps that fence, so goes objectivity.
Eddie stood on his tiptoes and spoke to a sprinkler head in the ceiling. “For the benefit of the stenographer secretly recording this conversation through a hidden microphone, let me say for the record that it was Russell Spaulding who said this place is going to hell. And Eddie Bourque certainly does not agree with his lies.”
Spaulding chuckled, and then suddenly sobered. “Keyes is coming,” he said.
The boss had a lollipop in his mouth and a one-page fax in his hand. “Nice job on the planter story,” he said.
Spaulding frowned. He seemed unsure if the compliment was meant to be sarcastic. “Now you can turn me loose on my budget story.”
Keyes wrinkled his nose and shook his head slightly, as if sending back some caviar not to his liking. “Not ready for that one yet,” he said. “The publisher has something more immediate for you.” He glanced at the fax. “McGruff the Crime Dog is visiting classrooms at Varnum School tomorrow, and we want you there. Looks like a cute feature, right up your alley.” Keyes cocked his thumb and aimed his index finger at Spaulding like a gun. Pooh! He shot him.
The reporter known as A.K. Forty-seven took a deep breath. Eddie glanced around to make sure the exits were clear. A.K. repeated his instructions, slowly. “McGruff the Crime Dog? At an elementary school?” A red wave washed over his scalp. He trembled and squirmed, like a guy trying to get comfortable in the electric chair. His voice was calm. Too calm. Eerie. “Let’s make sure I understand, all right? I’m trained as an investigative journalist—hell, that’s why you hired me. And I have a lead on a story about an alleged misappropriation of taxpayer money.”
Spaulding swallowed a few times, and then got much louder. “But I can’t do that investigative story because I gotta write an important feature about McGruff.” He shouted this next part. “McGruff—the crotch-sniffing, ball-licking, leg-humping Crime Dog!” He threw up his hands. “Dammit, Frank. If you won’t let your pit bull start any fights, why keep me around?” He snatched the press release from Keye
s and spun around in his chair.
Keyes twirled the lollipop and pretended to just notice Eddie. “Oh Bourque, haven’t seen your byline too often lately. Do you still work here?”
“Hard to tell after what happened to my last story.”
Keyes got angry and more direct. “Then maybe you should write more often. We have other reporters who produce three stories a day.”
Eddie shrugged. “Would you rather I explored the depths of one good story, or the surface of three? If we only report what’s obvious at first glance, we’re no better than TV news.”
Keyes took the lollipop from his mouth, a red one, and shook it at Eddie. The gesture was meant to be menacing, but there is simply no way for a grown man to intimidate another man with a lollipop. “Television is taking our readers,” he barked. “According to our marketing polls, people think TV is more trustworthy than us. And that TV news is more pertinent. So take a lesson.”
He marched off.
Eddie muttered, “He’s dumbed-down our coverage and we’ve lost readers. So his answer is to give them more of what they don’t want.”
“For the record, that was Eddie Bourque speaking,” Spaulding said, with a glance to the sprinkler head.
Eddie deadpanned, “As a reader, Russ, I’m interested to know how McGruff drives the squad car with his snout out the window.”
A.K. Forty-seven gave Eddie the finger over his shoulder without turning around.
***
Eddie spent an hour on the phone with City Council candidates, prepping for his election analysis. The candidates essentially were divided into two camps, the incumbents, and the reform slate. The incumbents supported spending public money on major revitalization projects. The reformers wanted to shore up public services and spend more on schools. They said the private sector should pay for brick-and-mortar development. Eddie could see why Manny Eccleston had been so cautious with his tip—nobody on the reform slate would ever support the destruction of the Acre.
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