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  He leaned back in my chair in a position of faux relaxation—I say faux because Peter Martin, like most of the newspaper people I’ve ever worked with, was never truly relaxed.

  “We’re going to banner it,” he said. “This thing’s going to be the talk of the city tomorrow, the country maybe, and we’ve got it alone. Maybe we even end up doing some good by helping this thing get solved. You ought to feel great.”

  He was right, I should have. I mean, I broke the story of the week, the month even. As important, I broke out of something of a running slump. Journalism, specifically newspapering, is a business that requires constant reinvention and revitalization. Reputations are good, but they can get as old, as quickly, as yesterday’s news. But truth be known, something nagged at me. It all seemed too easy, too pat. One minute I was watching the Sox stick it to the Yankees, the next minute I’m being handed a gift-wrapped bombshell destined for tomorrow’s front page, and from there, the lead story on the network news. I’d have liked to think this is just what it meant to be Jack Flynn, but like I said, something nagged.

  My desk phone rang, the sound crashing through the unsettled gloom of the newsroom—or maybe it was my unsettled mood it was crashing through. The two had become one, as these things tend to do. I fairly jumped through the drop ceiling. Martin, oddly composed, answered it.

  “Yep.” Pause. “Yep.” Pause again. “Then fix it. Good. Good work. Let it go.”

  He hung up, looked at me and said, “That’s the copydesk. You used its possessive as the contraction, it’s, in your seventh paragraph. They fixed it.”

  Let me get this right. I have an exclusive story on a stunning new suspect in the most significant unsolved art theft in the nation, which happened to occur right here in my native city, and some bleached-out copy-editor is making sure all his friends on the desk and higher-ups know that he caught a second-tier grammar mistake deep into the jump? Maybe I really should have gone to law school.

  Anyway, Martin and I stared at each other for a moment from our perches in the center of the otherwise empty room. Behind him, my computer flipped over to the screensaver, and even that minor act sent a little charge through my system.

  He said, “You know we’ve chased down other false leads on this heist over the last few years. The Feds have tipped us off before. Most of them, I assume, involve rank-and-file ass-covering. But this one seems different. We have it alone, and they have an actual name they’re putting into play, not vague references and unclear suspicions. I like this one a lot.”

  I should have too.

  With that, he clasped his hands in front of him in that way he does and stood up from my desk. He slapped me softly on the shoulder, pretending, I think, that he knew how to take part in such fraternal acts. “We need to get right at this in the morning. Let’s meet here by eight. This is going to be a wild ride.”

  A wild ride. One minute I’m at Fenway, an hour later I’m sitting in an FBI office being spoon-fed a story of significant proportions by an agent I didn’t previously know, and an hour after that the thing is done and gone. Again, why didn’t I feel better about all this?

  Somewhere deep inside my psyche, in a place where instinct trumps common sense, I had the vague outline of a reason why. It was the core of the explanation that, at that point, I just didn’t want to know.

  Chapter Five

  Tuesday, September 23

  I sat at the wrought-iron table on our harborfront veranda staring so intently at the front page of the Record that the words seemed to meld into one giant block of meaningless black. Maybe it was the hour, which was 6:00 A.M., or maybe it was my condition, which was exhaustion. I blinked hard, took a long pull of fresh-squeezed orange juice, and looked again.

  “Investigators Eyeing Fugitive in Gardner Heist,” the headline read in a thick, appropriately foreboding font. Under that, in slightly smaller letters, “New leads create link to Toby Harkins.”

  My name, my byline, looked especially large up there on the left side of the front page, over a story that was stripped right across the top—a banner, as we call it in the news biz. On the far right side, the copy-editors cut in with a small photograph of Rembrandt’s Storm on the Sea of Galilee, making it look like we put a whole lot more thought into this venture of reporting this story than was actually the case.

  In general, I make it a practice not to read my stories once they’ve appeared in print, because all you can get is frustrated at some penny-ante change that some nickel-and-dime editor might have made along the line, entirely ruining the otherwise perfect rhythm and flow of your sentences and thoughts. This one I read, mostly because I barely remembered writing it, it all happened so quick.

  And I was doing just that, reading it, when I heard the sliding glass door open behind me, and turned to see a topless Elizabeth Riggs, clad only in a pair of my white boxer shorts, her morning hair a tangle atop her beautiful head, step out onto the balcony and wrap her long arms around my neck from behind.

  “I didn’t hear you come to bed,” she said in her thick morning voice, her warm breath filling my ear. “I didn’t hear you get up. I don’t recall getting what I asked for before you abandoned me last night.”

  It was true, all of it. I tumbled into bed sometime after 2:00 A.M. and a couple of cold beers drunk in the company of my dog Baker in the living room of our condominium. I had needed something to calm me down and help me get to sleep. Then I rose at 5:30 at the first light of early morning, unable to wait for the events of the day.

  The Record, God bless the men and women in circulation, was already waiting on our doorstep, and I sat out here reading it in the growing light of a rising sun. It was cool out, yes, somewhere in the low 60s, but fresh, crisp, vibrant in that way that September is supposed to be.

  “Where were you?” she asked, her mouth still directed against the sensitive parts of my ear. I felt her warm breasts against my neck, her hair against the sides of my face, and I’m not sure why it all made me feel so sad, so vacant, but it did. Actually, I lie. I do know why, it’s just that I didn’t want to confront it. The next day, Elizabeth would be gone, and despite anything on the front page of that day’s paper, despite the whirlwind that was about to come, her departure was the major headline in the periodically sad life of Jack Flynn.

  Without saying anything, I pointed to the story in front of me.

  “Oh my God,” she said. She said this as she pulled her arms back, came around to my side and sat on another chair silently reading the paper. By the way, it’s important to note that our deck was completely private, inaccessible to any pair of eyes on land, though I’ve often been suspicious that voyeuristic yachtsmen, familiar with Elizabeth’s penchant for topless and even naked lounging, drop anchor in the waters just off our building. I scanned the harbor but didn’t see any on that morning.

  She carefully read the story, turning from the front page to the jump—the part of the story that’s continued inside the paper—then back to the front page again. Finished, she trained her enormous blue eyes on me and said, “How the hell did you ever get all this between the time I left you at Fenway and the Record’s deadline?”

  That was, to be sure, a compliment, presented in a classically journalistic way—with an incredulous tone, even a skeptical one, rolled into a question. Before I could answer, there was a knock, or rather a scratch, at our sliding door, and I turned to see Baker, his eyes at half mast and his fur fuzzy on top of his big head from what I’m sure was an unsatisfying half night of sleep, pawing at the glass to join the crowd.

  As I opened the door to let him out, I heard an announcer on the Bose radio in the kitchen reading the news with one of those fake wire tickers sounding behind him.

  “Federal, state and city officials are thus far offering no comment to this morning’s Record report that investigators are eyeing the infamous fugitive Toby Harkins, the estranged son of the Boston mayor, in the 13-year-old, unsolved art heist at the Gardner Museum. The Record reports that au
thorities are still uncertain…”

  I slid the door shut and the voice gave way to the tranquil sounds of a calm morning sea.

  “It was one of those incredible, rare stories where everything falls immediately into place,” I said to Elizabeth, sitting back down at the table beside her. I told her about getting picked up inside the Boston Cab garage, about the meeting with Jankle, about the rush with Martin to get this into print. She asked me a few typically intelligent questions, then focused on the story again.

  In the silence, I looked around, at Baker already sprawled out on the cool floor of the deck, at the beautiful woman sitting beside me, at the harbor water glistening beneath us, and thought, in a couple of days, my little family—“our starter family,” as Elizabeth liked to call it—would be no more. Elizabeth would be gone. Forever? I didn’t know, but maybe. Maybe.

  I should have been sitting there basking in triumph. Instead, I found myself climbing into a hole of emptiness, a feeling, a state of mind, hell, a state of being, that I knew all too well. I knew it, I lived it, after my wife and infant daughter died on the delivery table a few years before, leaving me with only memories of what I had and a forlorn void in place of what I never got to know, each day of fatherhood represented by another tear shed in that private hell called loneliness.

  Did Katherine’s death affect my relationship with Elizabeth? No doubt, there are entire teams of Harvard-educated psychiatrists that couldn’t detail all the ways it did—about why I hadn’t asked Elizabeth to marry me, about why we had split up temporarily the year before, about why, now, with twenty-four hours left in our time together, we couldn’t even have a fully-fledged adult conversation regarding our future time apart.

  She saw me staring silently at the water, saw, no doubt, the sad, even pained look that marked my face. She said, “I’m really proud of you, Jack,” and I looked at her and she at me and I suddenly found my throat too thick to risk a response.

  She stood up, still topless, always sexy, and she grabbed my hand and pulled me along with her. She left the door open for Baker to come and go at will, and on the rumpled white comforter of our sun-splashed bed, we became lost in an emotional stretch of silent sex. Afterward, as she looked down at me and pushed her face hard against mine, her tangled hair falling around my cheeks and ears, I felt her tears fall from her eyes into mine.

  “I love you,” she whispered, but the words, more sad than happy, carried more mystery than finality.

  “I love you too,” I replied, but I fear I sounded in some odd way resigned, though to what I didn’t know.

  Later, in the kitchen, she poured herself coffee. I ate fistfuls of Cap’n Crunch directly from the box. We avoided talk of her departure as if its very mention would set upon us an unspeakable plague. I knew she would be packing up most of her stuff that day, but what she instead said when I asked her plans was, “I have a lot of things to do around here.”

  That radio announcer was still blathering in the background, this time about the weather, then about the traffic.

  “The surface roads are jammed all along downtown Boston as police have several major thoroughfares cordoned off for what we’re told is a crime scene, possibly a murder or suicide scene, in the Boston Common. Boston police are confirming that the body of a young woman, in her late twenties, was found with a gunshot wound to her head a little over half an hour ago….”

  That’s the first I heard of it. It didn’t really register at the time, though maybe, in retrospect, it did. I flicked the radio off, rubbed Baker’s ears and gave Elizabeth a long, silent kiss good-bye.

  W hen I walked into the Record a few minutes before 8:00, Peter Martin was sitting at the desk beside mine scanning the wires, nervous as he’s ever been, which is saying quite a lot. Here’s a guy who drinks black coffee by the bucket just to soothe himself. His idea of a relaxing vacation is visiting the libraries of every twentieth-century president in two weeks’ time. Once, when I had him temporarily convinced that there was more to life than newspapers and politics, he went to an upscale golf school in the Carolinas, one of those blessed places where you sip juice while sitting on a director’s chair with your name hand-embroidered in the back while watching some young club pro demonstrate the importance of the interlocking grip on a pristine driving range. He claimed to love the experience, but he never played golf again.

  Anyway, the newsroom looked almost the same as it had when I left a few hours before, only the copydesk was now vacant and a custodian—a cleaning engineer, I think they’re now called—pushed an industrial-size vacuum down the empty aisles. Eight A.M. is at least an hour before most self-respecting reporters are climbing off their futons, and a couple of hours before they’d find their way into work.

  “Thank God, I was sure you were going to be late,” Martin said, looking up from his computer screen.

  “Good, and you?”

  He ignored my attempt at morning humor, stood up, and said, “Let’s go into my office.” I followed him through the mostly dark newsroom in silence.

  Inside, the two of us sat across from each other at a small circular conference table in Martin’s glass-enclosed office in the far corner of the newsroom. One wall of windows overlooked the traffic-clogged Southeast Expressway. The other wall overlooked the copydesk. All the furniture, the decorations, the lamps and the accessories, were exactly the way that the previous editor, Justine Steele, had them before she ascended to the publisher’s office the year before. I swear, if Justine had left photographs of her children, Martin would have kept them on his desk.

  Martin put his elbows on the glass tabletop and said, “The Traveler doesn’t have a word on this. The three network affiliates are broadcasting our story, verbatim. The radio is quoting liberally from us and attributing everything. So far, we’re all alone. But the whole world’s about to crash our party. The Times is going to come in, the news mags, The Washington Post, the networks out of New York. This is big—huge—and we can’t give anything up.”

  He was giving voice to what I already knew, but that’s okay. This story, ours alone for the day, was about to turn into classic gang-bang journalism, the exact kind of story I hated most, when mobs of reporters trample across every possible bit of information, and every shred of context be damned. I nodded. Noticeably missing from Martin’s soliloquy were words of praise for this morning’s performance, but alas, he rarely had the patience for the triviality of commendation. I used to hold that against him; I don’t anymore.

  He continued, “So we have to figure out where we go from here.” He looked anxiously out at the empty newsroom and continued, “When people find the time in their busy lives to wander into work today, I’ll deploy as many as it takes to blanket every conceivable angle—the investigation, rewrite a tick-tock of the original heist, another lengthy profile of Harkins, the possibility of any connection to the mayor. What else?”

  I remained silent. He knew he had everything covered. Martin resumed speaking.

  “Jack, obviously you’re the lead. Hit the investigation hard, do everything in your power to break more news. I don’t have to tell you how to do it. Like all the other times before, just get it done.”

  Would that it were so easy. The problem with this business is that in every possible way, it involves constant reinvention, or at least restoration. If there’s a formula, it consists of only this: Hard work—the extra telephone call, the added question at the end of the interminable interview, the long drive to some far-flung town to meet someone who you’re not quite sure will be even the slightest bit of help. Hard work begets luck, and from there, the cycle continues.

  “We will,” I said, confident, but not really, and don’t ask me why. Confidence is my trademark, but as I’ve said, these were strange times. Elizabeth was leaving. Something gnawed at me on this story, and as I looked out the window, I saw traffic at a veritable standstill on the highway, and even that inexplicably bothered me.

  I stood up and said to Martin, “What do yo
u know about the dead woman on the Common?”

  Most editors in chief are big-picture people, probably because it’s easier to be that way, just like it’s easier to travel great distances by air than to drive in a car, though high above, you miss all the individual brushstrokes that go into the art of real life. Martin was decidedly different. To be sure, he could think big and ponder the most serious questions in the business, but he also had an insatiable curiosity for the details of even the smallest house fire in Dorchester.

  As if to prove the point, he said, “First reports out say she was a young attorney, maybe thirty years old, found in her car in the garage under Boston Common by an attendant picking up the trash. Single gunshot wound to the head.”

  What the hell was the deal with parking garages lately?

  “Suicide?” I mean, logical question, given that all the lawyers I knew were always saying they wanted to kill themselves.

  “If it was,” he replied, “then she managed to hide the gun.”

  B ack at my desk, I snatched up the telephone, and pulled out the phone number for Tom Jankle, special agent of the FBI. My hope, my expectation, was that if he spoon-fed me the prior night when he only knew me by reputation, then now that we had a track record, he should be ready to spew any remaining information he had. No telling how much chicken I left on that journalistic bone, but my educated hunch was, a lot. A lot.

  A rather imperious-sounding woman informed me, “Special Agent Jankle is not available right now. May I help you?”

  A couple of points here. First, why don’t newspaper people have the word “Special” in our titles? Actually, why don’t we have titles at all? Why can’t I say to someone over the phone, “Hello, this is Special Reporter Flynn calling from The Boston Record blah blah blah.” Actually, here’s why: Because we’d sound like asses, which is exactly how this secretary sounded now.