Read A Confidential Source Online
Authors: Jan Brogan
A Confidential Source
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are
used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2005 by Jan Brogan
All rights reserved.
Mysterious Press
Warner Books
Hachette Book Group
237 Park Avenue
New York, NY 10017
Visit our website at
www.HachetteBookGroup.com
The Mysterious Press name and logo are registered trademarks of Warner Books.
First eBook Edition: September 2009
ISBN: 978-0-446-56506-6
For Bill, for everything
Contents
ACCLAIM FOR JAN BROGAN’S A CONFIDENTIAL SOURCE
I couldn’t have written this book without the help of my writers group, Barbara Shapiro, Floyd Kemske, Thomas Engels, Judith
Harper, and Vicki Stiefel, who put up with my incredibly rough drafts and gave me such great advice and support.
A big thanks goes to Robin Kall, who helped with this book in so many ways: from teaching me about talk radio, to guiding
me through Providence to educating me about the many idiosyncrasies of Rhode Island.
The following people were incredibly generous with their time and expertise: RI Attorney General Patrick Lynch; Retired Police
Chief Augustine Comella; Deputy Chief of the Bureau of Criminal Identification at the RI Attorney General’s office Pasquale
Sperlongano; John DePetro, talk show host at WHJJ; Mitchell Etess, executive vice president of marketing at Mohegan Sun; Laura
Meade Kirk, reporter at
The Providence Journal;
Pamela Hunt, assistant attorney general, Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office; Cheryle Marcus, blackjack dealer at Foxwoods;
Rachel Gould, production assistant at Waterfire; Linda Henderson, library director of
The Providence Journal;
and the folks at the Massachusetts State Lottery. Any mistakes are mine alone.
I’d also like to thank my early readers, Diane Bonavist, Hallie Ephron, Naomi Rand, and Laura Barry. I owe a huge debt of
gratitude to Beth Kirsch for her incredibly generous and methodical editing.
I’d also like to thank Bill Clew for taking me to the casinos and teaching me the correct way to play the slot machines; Bill
Santo and Bob Brogan for help with plot; Tom Brogan for help in legal issues; John Barry and Small House Studios for design
and support of my website; Lannie Santo for help in site research; and Kim Zwetchkenbaum for showing me around the East Side.
Also, I’d like to credit as background sources “Vice and Virtue—The Two Worlds of Buddy Cianci,” by Mike Stanton in
The Providence Journal;
and
Bad Bet
(Random House) by Timothy O’Brien.
Many thanks to my agent Dan Mandel at Sanford J. Green-burger Associates for his patience and guidance; and to Kristen Weber,
my editor at Mysterious Press, for her support.
But most of all I want to thank my husband, Bill Santo. For everything.
1
I
PUT MY
glass of wine down beside the empty cereal bowl on the bar and turned the radio up a notch. Leonard of
Late Night
hated much of what was going on in Rhode Island, but nothing got him going like the referendum to legalize gambling.
“Bookmakers. We’re turning into a state of bookmakers.” His fury filled my apartment, intimate, even in outrage. I sat back
on the bar stool and took a sip of wine. Leonard wasn’t one of those radio jocks who argued just for the sake of it. You could
feel his honesty, his indignation.
Dori from Warwick called in to say that if people wanted to gamble, they were going to gamble. She had a staccato inflection
and added extra syllables. “Why shoul-d-n’t the state getta cut?”
“Well, maybe the state should get in on prostitution and crack then,” replied Leonard, without the slightest trace of any
accent.
Dori must have been a first-time caller. She hesitated, perplexed. “Can we do that?” she asked.
Leonard played the “Tammy’s in Love” theme song, which officially designated a caller as a bimbo, and cut to a commercial.
I began to hunt for my cordless phone. You’d think it would be impossible to misplace a cordless in a one-bedroom apartment
that doesn’t even have a real kitchen, just a Formica bar that carves a galley-type kitchenette out of the main living area.
But I’m not a particularly good sorter of life’s materials. The mail, newspapers, and files from work all end up in stacks
on the floor that I have to navigate around and search under. Finally, I found the cordless in the corner by the closet, on
top of a carton of books I still hadn’t unpacked.
As I returned to the bar stool, I wavered. I
had
called Leonard just last night. Thursday was Cinema Talk, and Leonard and I were both eagerly awaiting news about whether
there would be another
Terminator
movie.
I call myself Mary from Massachusetts, even though I’m Hallie, now of Rhode Island. Working in such a small state, I feel
I have to conceal my identity. Reporters, unless they have their own columns, are not supposed to have such loud opinions.
I put the wineglass down and dropped the phone back in its wall recharger. Tonight, I’d
listen.
I took my cereal bowl and spoon over to the sink, which still held my dirty cereal bowl and spoon from breakfast. I began
washing the bowl, but got distracted when Leonard accepted a call from Andre of Cranston. Andre called even more than I did.
“Gambling destroys more people than drinking,” he said for about the hundredth time.
I’d heard Andre talk about the violent fights his parents had had over gambling, about his father going bankrupt, even about
loan sharks who threatened the family. The stories were so extreme I had to wonder if Andre was for real or some sort of plant
in the calling audience.
Tonight, though, Andre was sticking to politics. “Obviously, if the city can’t develop the Pier Project without legalizing
gambling and opening a casino, it shouldn’t develop it.” Everything was always obvious to Andre.
I dropped the bowl and sponge back into the sink. Despite all the hype about the Providence renaissance, Rhode Island was
in a financial mess, with a massive budget deficit. Couldn’t Andre see how desperately the state needed some new form of revenue?
The male listeners might have written off Dori of Warwick as a bimbo, but not me. There were casinos little more than an hour
away in Connecticut and electronically available at home via the Internet. If people were going to gamble, they were going
to gamble.
Suddenly, I was furious on Dori’s behalf. The fuel of argument flowed through my veins, pulling me directly to the wall recharger.
I grabbed the cordless, the station phone number programmed into my fingertips.
Busy.
I put the phone down on the bar and made myself take a deep breath. It’s not as if there were any official rules about print
journalists calling talk-radio shows, but reporters, in general, were expected to be objective, impartial, detached. The world
was not supposed to know how they stood on the issues, unless, of course, they were experts. Then, the reporter was supposed
to be the featured guest on the talk show. Not the caller.
If I just waited a couple of minutes, someone else would call and defend Dori of Warwick. To distract myself, I reached for
my canvas knapsack, sitting underneath the bar. Hoisting the knapsack onto the bar, I pulled out a lottery scratch ticket
from the inner pocket. A silly long shot, but it afforded a few moments of complete fantasy. I liked the $5 tickets, with
the million-dollar cash prizes, so I could dream about paying off my debts and really transforming my life. Even in the dull
light of the fifties-looking fixture that hung over the bar, anyone could see my life needed transforming.
The only furniture in the living area was a futon in an alcove that was clearly designed for a dining table, a twenty-year-old
Haitian cotton couch, and an oak coffee table and bookshelf that I’d bought unfinished and never stained. I found a quarter
in a cup of change on the windowsill to scratch off the ticket. If I won a million dollars, I promised myself I’d buy new
furniture.
I tried to make myself think about exactly what kind of furniture I’d buy, but some new caller, another man whose name I didn’t
get, was now attacking the mayor of Providence. “What’s he trying to do? Prostitute the city? Pimp for the entire state of
Rhode Island?”
As legalized gambling’s most powerful supporter, Mayor Billy Lopresti was Leonard’s archenemy. A man of incredible charm,
the mayor’s personal popularity and hold on voters were not in the least altered by the fact that his top aide was under investigation
for taking kickbacks. “Anybody planning to vote for this idiotic referendum has to turn the dial,” Leonard was shouting now.
“You are no longer welcome to listen to my show!”
I loved it when Leonard did that, ordering people not to listen to him. As if he didn’t care about ratings as long as he made
his point. Supposedly, it infuriated his talk-show competitors at WPRO and WHJJ.
I dropped the scratch ticket on the counter and reached for the phone. This time, I got through, and was put on hold.
Last month, when I had to cover a charity event, a bike-a-thon to raise money for the Veterans’ Homeless Shelter, I met Leonard
in person. I’d expected a burly man, but he was an ardent bicyclist and had that kind of lean-muscled body. He was younger
than I had thought, midforties, and quiet, as if maybe he didn’t want to strain his voice. He’d told me all about his bike
training, thirty miles every day.
You have to be religious about the mileage,
he’d said. I got the feeling Leonard was religious about everything.
Midway through the interview, I noticed him staring at my press badge. I tried to speak in a throaty timbre just in case he
recognized my voice. I don’t know if he thought I was trying to seduce him with my best Brenda Vaccaro or what, but when he
lifted his eyes, he gave me a strange smile.
Another deep breath and a sip of wine. I’d learned from experience that I needed fortification when I was about to call and
disagree with Leonard. That way, my voice wouldn’t shake in those first few minutes when I realized I was actually on the
air.
“I’m not switching the dial, Leonard,” I said when I was put through. “You can’t order me away!”
“Oh, Mary,” he said, through the telephone line. “You’re not going to give me that old argument about the innocent fun your
mother and aunt have at Foxwoods, are you?”
“People need a little excitement,” I said. “A little hope.”
“False hope,” he said swiftly.
I glanced at the scratch ticket, abandoned on the bar. “A little gambling doesn’t hurt anyone. If it’s in moderation.”
“Oh, please,” Leonard returned.
“There’s no reason all that money—billions of dollars—should go to the Native Americans in Connecticut when God knows we need
it right here in Rhode Island.”
“You’re right. The mob can always use more revenue,” he replied.
“Oh, come on. This’ll be run by the Narragansett Indians, not the Mafia. And there’s gonna be a special state commission—all
sorts of safeguards—”
“You really,
truly
believe that
any
safeguard will keep things on the up-and-up in
Rhode Island?
”
I hesitated. Leonard’s emphasis on
truly
combined with the probing resonance of his baritone made me stop and question myself. What did I really know about Rhode
Island? I’d lived here only four months. “Why not?” I tried to make this sound like an answer instead of a question.
Through the radio, I heard the first few bars of “Tammy’s in Love,” the bimbo theme song. This was followed by Leonard’s voice
booming over the airwaves. “Oh, Hallie,” he said, using my real name. “You are so naive.”
I stood at the picture window of my third-floor apartment, looking down on my neighborhood, at the closed shops and wide sidewalks
of Wayland Square. I listened to a distant siren downtown and the steady hum of the traffic on I-95, and wondered: How freaking
small was this state, anyway?
Outside, it was an especially crisp autumn night. The bright moon somehow made me feel even more exposed, as if nature had
conspired to put me under a spotlight. I went over the many things I’d said to Leonard and his listening audience in the belief
that I was an anonymous voice—an informed and, I liked to think, intelligent opinion. I’d called about legalized gambling,
Patrick Kennedy, and the pedophile-priest controversy. I’d called about bad movies, good restaurants, and the Pawsox. I covered
my face with my hands. The truth was: I’d called about everything.
