A Confidential Source (16 page)

Dorothy dragged a chair over from another desk and sat down to better read from the screen. I noticed that she wore almost
no makeup and did not have a varied wardrobe. It was always the crisp-looking jeans or corduroys and the worn office sweater.
The sweater alone was enough to incense Carolyn.

“Doesn’t actually prove he was gambling,” I said.

“No.”

“He could have been doing heroin,” I offered.

“Or gone on a buying binge at the Home Shopping Network,” Dorothy said. She had a very dry delivery.

Late yesterday, Victor Delria, who had been unconscious, had officially slipped into a coma at Rhode Island Hospital, and
now, a week after the shooting, still no one was charged with Barry’s murder. As each day passed in police silence, my theory
that the shooting was more than just a robbery gained momentum. Nathan even sent me an interoffice memo saying that if I wanted
to work on the investigation over the weekend, I would be compensated for overtime.

Dorothy and I both knew a personal-bankruptcy filing was a pretty good indicator that Barry had a gambling problem, but we
also knew we couldn’t print it. Not by itself. By itself, reporting the bankruptcy filing was an unnecessary invasion of a
dead man’s privacy.

It had to be coupled with an admission from a family member. If, say, a surviving son told us that loan sharks were actually
seen at the store, threatening the deceased, now that could be decent copy. That could be enough to run with.

I thought of Leonard and the trust he’d put in me. Why? I wondered. My father used to do that when I was a teenager, emphasize
his trust in me as a means of guilting me into responsible behavior. But that was an Irish-Catholic tactic. Leonard was Italian.

The library phone began ringing. The research assistant looked up briefly from her desk, but didn’t move to answer it. Through
the open door, I saw Nathan get off the elevator and begin walking briskly toward his office.

“He’s in early,” I commented.

“It’s the investigative-team thing. Everyone on the reporting staff, almost, has asked for an interview.”

I felt a rush of alarm. Had I missed something? Was there a list somewhere I wasn’t on?

Seeing my expression, Dorothy said, “I take it this means you’re interested in the position?”

I nodded and she wrote something on a notepad. With a glance at Nathan’s closed office door, she added, “Don’t worry too much
about the crowd. By union regs, he’s got to interview
everyone.
But he’s getting the busywork out of the way first.”

A second phone began to ring, a high-pitched yelp that cut the ear. The research assistant didn’t seem to hear it. “Should
we answer it?” I asked Dorothy, but she shook her head.

Just then, I saw Jonathan Frizell get off the elevator. He and I had met twice about the Mazursky murder, and he’d said he’d
nose around city hall for me, but so far I hadn’t heard anything. Now, without a glance in our direction, he marched purposefully
in the direction of Nathan’s office.

Dorothy knocked her elbow into mine. “Stop worrying about the competition and focus on the ammunition. What else do you have?”

I rifled through my file folder to find the copy of the Veterans’ Homeless Shelter board minutes Leonard had mailed me. There
were printouts of
Chronicle
stories about the fund-raising drive and the official announcement of Barry’s resignation, but where were the minutes? I
was sure I’d dropped them into the file last night.

The first page of the minutes had detailed a conversation between the board chairwoman and the assistant treasurer calling
for a full audit of the fund-raising drive because of “a $75,000 discrepancy.” The second page, also missing, was of the following
month’s minutes, where the board had unanimously accepted Barry Mazursky’s resignation, with the chairwoman noting, “It’s
for the best.”

With a look of detached amusement, Dorothy watched me search through the file folder. The papers were nowhere in the folder.
The high-pitched phone stopped, then started again. Why wouldn’t the research assistant just answer it? Had I left the papers
home on the bar?

Finally, I found them facing backward and stuck behind another set of papers in the middle of the file. Smoothing out one
of the crumpled corners on her desk, Dorothy scanned the minutes, eyes lighting with interest. After a moment of calculation,
the light faded, and I knew her conclusion. The minutes helped validate my source, but still weren’t enough to justify a story
that could libel a dead man.

Desperate, I plunged on. “I know this sounds a little farfetched, but I’m pretty sure I recognized the son’s voice on talk
radio the other night. I’m pretty sure I’ve heard him talk on the air about his father’s gambling problems before. I mean,
he’s on
a lot.
Andre of Cranston, he calls himself. I recognized the voice.”

“Talk radio?” Dorothy asked.

I couldn’t tell by her tone what she meant by this question. I continued anyway. “Leonard of
Late Night.
You think I should call the station, see if they have any of the old shows on tape?”

“You listen to Leonard of
Late Night?”
The expression in her eyes told me she was reassessing me.

“Sometimes,” I admitted.

She considered this. What it meant about me. My lifestyle. My IQ. I found myself growing defensive. Okay, he was a little
extreme. Especially about the mayor and casino gambling, but he had his reasons. I mentally began counting the number of our
reporters who had appeared on Leonard’s show: reporters who suddenly became experts, columnists who became celebrities.

“Is there a problem with that?”

She looked at me as if her mind had just been far away and had now returned. “I was just trying to figure out how you could
use something like that in copy, even if you could track it down on tape.”

“Oh.”

“I mean, those callers are supposed to be anonymous, right? Isn’t that part of the deal?”

I tried not to sigh audibly. “I guess.”

“I think we better steer clear of talk radio.”

I was in the cafeteria trying to get a cup of coffee when I spotted the
Chronicle’s
obituary writer, sitting alone with two doughnuts.

Somewhere in his midsixties, he was at least fifty pounds overweight and wore the vague and tired expression of someone who
had burned out years ago. Trying to remember his name, I closed my eyes to picture the byline over the last big death in Rhode
Island. An Italian last name: Martino?

This man had never once met my eye when I passed him in the newsroom, but now I remembered that Carolyn once told me that
he’d been a highly regarded police reporter. DiMartino, that was it. His brother was still a sergeant on the Providence police
force.

I stirred cream into my jumbo-size coffee and tried to remember his first name. Anthony? Joseph? Dominic? He was about halfway
down the row of red-vinyl booths that faced the window, his head determinedly in the newspaper, as if to discourage anyone
from attempting conversation.

I remembered that there was something incongruous about his name. That it didn’t go together, didn’t fit somehow. Out of an
air pocket in my brain, the thought descended. It was a young name, a baby-boy-of-the-new-millennium kind of name: Justin,
Josh, Jared? Evan, that was it. Evan DiMartino.

From Carolyn, I knew that DiMartino had been shoved aside a few years ago to make room for a young police reporter who’d since
gone on to the
Los Angeles Times.
It occurred to me that he might instinctively resent all new hires. I decided to take my chances, buying a second coffee
and heading down to his booth with two cups in my hand. “Evan?”

He looked so startled that I immediately heard myself apologizing. “Sorry to bother you, I…” I wanted to hand him the extra
coffee, but suddenly it felt presumptuous, so I continued to clutch two hot coffee cups in my hand. “I was wondering…hoping
I could talk to you.”

Deliberately, he glanced at his watch.

“If you’re not too busy.”

He studied me for a moment, then a connection clicked in his head. “You the new reporter from Boston? The one who was there
when the guy got shot in the store?”

I nodded and offered him the coffee. “I’d like to ask you a couple of questions. I don’t know Providence police very well,
and I could use your help.”

Something in that plea softened him. The resentment disappeared. Curiosity took its place.

Without waiting for his invitation, I slid into the seat. “Mazursky was a compulsive gambler, in trouble with loan sharks.
I have a source who says the mayor doesn’t want that to come out before the casino-gambling referendum. That he’s leaning
on the police department to stall the investigation.”

He opened the lid of his coffee and let out the steam.

“Do you think that if the mayor pressed hard enough, the chief would stall a murder investigation?” I asked.

“Who’s your source on this?”

“A confidential source.”

“Inside the police department?”

I shook my head.

He examined his doughnut as if it had just fallen onto the floor. “Then that’s just speculation. A lot of things can hold
up a murder investigation.”

I nodded with a vague sense of disappointment.

“But that’s not to say the mayor doesn’t have influence.” He brushed the sugar from his doughnut off his fingers and onto
his lap. “Whether the chief would agree to hold up a murder investigation until the vote? Who knows? It’s only—what, a week
and a half? Almost doesn’t count as real corruption.”

Then he focused on something behind me. I turned and saw that three of the youngest male reporters on the investigative team
had walked into the cafeteria together. Two of them carried stacks of files and the third had a laptop with him.

My gaze must have lingered too long. Evan noticed, saw my yearning. “You after Susannah’s job?” he asked.

I shrugged, trying to look only moderately interested, but Evan wasn’t buying it. “Of course you are. And you think this Mazursky
thing is going to get it for you. Move you to the A-list, right?”

“I’m hoping it’ll give me an edge, yes,” I admitted. “But I’m still new to Providence, and I don’t have any sources inside
the police department.”

The three investigative reporters marched past us to a far booth, their eyes focused on the goal ahead, as if we weren’t there.
Their voices rose from the table where they had regrouped, sounding loud and just a little too self-important. I had a flashback
to my high school cafeteria.

“They
need
someone old enough to have a driver’s license,” Evan said, leaning forward. “Otherwise their mothers have to drive them.”

I smiled to show that I appreciated his disdain, and for the first time, he smiled back.

One of the cafeteria workers came out from behind the counter to erase yesterday’s lunch specials from the blackboard. The
chalk squeaked as she began to list today’s soup of the day: “M-U-S-H-R-O-O-M.”

Evan grimaced. “I hate mushrooms. You ever see where they grow?”

I had never seen where mushrooms grew.

“Usually in a pile of crap.” For a moment, he looked disturbed, and I wondered if he was seeing the mushrooms rising from
dung on the forest floor. But his attention had already shifted. “So who’s involved in this case?”

I told him about the patrolman, who’d been the first to arrive at the Mazursky Market, and about Sergeant Holstrom. As an
afterthought, I mentioned that Major Errico had come to the station the following day.

“Errico? On a Saturday?” There was nothing vague or tired in Evan’s expression now. “You sure?”

I described what he looked like, and the way Holstrom had snapped to attention. Evan nodded to indicate that this meshed.
“He say anything?”

I shook my head. “But he came in with a bunch of files under his arm. Files he didn’t want me to see. There was some lettering
on the side.”

“What kind of lettering?”

“Two initials, I think.”

“OC.” This was an answer, not a question.

“Yeah. I think so.”

Evan looked over his shoulder at the guys on the investigative team, and lowered his voice to a gravelly whisper. “Organized
crime. They usually keep those files in a locked cabinet in Errico’s office. He’s the OC guy. He knows who’s who in the organization.
Can pick up the phone and get through to capos if he needs to.”

The squeak of the chalk punctuated this last sentence. Evan turned to make sure no one was within earshot. He waited until
the cafeteria worker walked behind the counter, watching her the whole time as if she were some kind of spy. Then, he continued,
“Errico doesn’t come in on a Saturday to talk about some little convenience-store holdup. He doesn’t get interested in a case
unless they’re pretty damn sure it involves organized crime.”

I
HADN
’
T EXPECTED TO
see Drew Mazursky the next day. I’d gotten up early, run, and was now across the street from my apartment trying to buy coffee
at Starbucks. I was still wearing the enormous gray sweatshirt I’d run in, along with a pair of baggy old blue jeans I’d pulled
from the laundry and an old pair of running shoes with the laces missing. Standing in an incredibly slow-moving line, I was
killing time by looking out the window onto Angell Street when I saw the door to the Mazursky Market open. A woman carrying
a small grocery bag emerged.

I abandoned my place in the Starbucks line and headed outside. Sure enough, two more customers walked out of the market door.
It had reopened. I crossed the street and peered into the store through the glass window. I could see Drew Mazursky working
the cash register.

Drew’s plea for me to back off the story now struck me as ironic. The devoted son who demanded discretion had called talk
radio almost every night to broadcast a litany of his father’s sins. If I had so easily recognized his voice, hadn’t other
people? Like his mother? His sister? His aunt? And I was the one who was supposed to feel guilty?