A Confidential Source (20 page)

“What I wanna know,” said Gloria, finally getting to the point, “is how many other people steal from these charities that
are always hitting the rest of us up for money? How come they let board members just put the money back? How come they don’t
get arrested for that? Doesn’t anybody in this state care about the little guy who sends in the donation checks?”

Praised or not, Leonard didn’t want to talk about Barry Mazursky’s crimes. He immediately started scanning the computer monitor
for new callers. “Compulsive gambling does crazy things to people, Gloria. Remember, Barry Mazursky was a victim, let’s let
him rest in peace.” He hit another button and clicked her off the line. “Tony from Providence, welcome to the program.”

“How did this reporter find out the mayor was involved in this?” Tony asked. “I mean, how do newspaper reporters get their
hands on the mayor’s personal e-mail, anyway? Isn’t that a violation of privacy? And how do we know for sure that Providence
police aren’t just screwing up by themselves?”

“Sources have their own reasons for leaking information to the newspapers,” I began. “As a public figure—”

“Because who else but the mayor has his entire career riding on this?” Leonard said, cutting me off. “Who else glides around
town with casino executives and has this kind of influence with the police department? You think Billy wants to bite the bullet
and reduce his bloated budget? Oh no. He needs cold, hard cash to keep pushing the renaissance and promoting himself. He’s
like a slot machine himself, he
craves
casino revenue.”

“So how did the
Chronicle
find out?” Tony asked.

I opened my mouth to answer, but Leonard waved me silent. “Our guest, Hallie Ahern, is the reporter who was actually there
in the store when Barry Mazursky was murdered. She’s been saying from the very beginning that this wasn’t just an armed robbery.
That whoever killed Barry Mazursky that night came in with the express purpose of shooting him. That police are not being
aggressive enough in this investigation.”

“I didn’t actually say that—”

“Oh, I read that story,” Tony said. “You stepped in the blood, right?”

“Uh, yes, but—”

“Thank you, Tony, we have time for one more call before Hallie Ahern from the
Chronicle
has to leave. George on a cell phone, you’re on WKZI with Leonard of
Late Night.
”

“I want to talk to the reporter—” I thought I heard him say. But his voice was low, and static cut off the last part of his
sentence.

“George, we have a bad connection,” Leonard said.

“—
Chronicle,
” was all I could hear.

“George, you must be in a dead area,” Leonard said. “Maybe you should call back tomorrow night.”

“I’m not calling back tomorrow,” George said. “I’m just calling today to tell that
Chronicle
reporter—” His words dissolved, and for a moment, there was complete blankness. But I’d caught something hostile in his tone.
Through the glass window of the production booth, I could see that Robin, too, had gotten the drift. She stood up and gestured
to Leonard with a slice across the neck to cut off the caller. He ignored her.

“We’re running out of time here, George, and this static is terrible,” Leonard said. “News is up next. Quickly, George, what
did you want to say?”

Robin was waving at him, but Leonard didn’t sever the connection, didn’t hit the button to disconnect the phone and cue the
news. He gave George another second, another chance at the last word.

There was more static and then startling clarity. “I’ll give you news to report,” George said. “You tell that
Chronicle
bitch, she’s next.”

The station had a five-second delay and Robin edited the threat from the air. “Just some nut,” Leonard said.

Robin agreed. “Usually, they threaten to kill Leonard.”

But I was completely rattled, and they both knew it. Leonard offered to follow me home if I was scared, but I declined. I
wasn’t about to spend the night alone in my apartment wondering if George-on-the-cell-phone would make good on his threat.
So instead, I called my mother from the station and told her the heat in my building wasn’t working. Then I drove to Worcester
in under forty-five minutes, watching my rearview mirror for lights the entire ride.

My mother still lived in the same modest colonial I’d grown up in, and she’d left a door to the garage open. I crept in, immediately
locked the door behind me, and set the alarm before I climbed the stairs to my old room.

The quilted bedspread was turned down and my mother had put the day’s
Worcester Telegram
on the nightstand, but I took no comfort in the welcome. I pulled down the blinds of both windows and left the light on in
the closet. Just like when I was a kid, only now the monsters weren’t in my head, they were threatening me on the radio.

Fully clothed under the blankets, I slept fitfully, waking up with a lurch at three
A.M
., wondering where I was. I sat up, hand on my heart, as if I could control the panic from the outside. Finally, my eyes adjusted
to the dark and I made out a pleated lampshade on the bureau and three trophies lined up, side by side: high school swimming;
sophomore, junior, and senior year. I was at home in my bedroom in Worcester. Safe.

But it took a full hour of talking to myself, reminding myself of how fear expanded at night, before I could pull my hand
off my heart and trust myself in a horizontal position. Eventually, I drifted back to sleep.

Luckily, my mother had a garden-club meeting in the morning, so she had only a few minutes to scrutinize the dark circles
under my eyes before she had to head to the senior center. “You’re not sleeping again?” she asked, gathering her files and
a foil-wrapped loaf of her apple bread.

My mother, who considered Walter her own personally canonized saint for having helped me through my sleeping-pill problem,
would still never stop worrying about my insomnia, no matter how many years had passed.

I blamed my dark circles on the “buzz” of working late. In the old days, this would have elicited a lecture about my unhealthy
“obsession” with my career, but ever since my hiatus from the business, my mother had decided I was happier and healthier
obsessed. Luckily, it never occurred to her that I could write a story that might prompt a death threat.

In the middle of the night, it had seemed absolutely clear that someone was out to get me. If Barry Mazursky’s murder was
a hit, it meant there was an organization behind it: an organization that would want to protect its members from being identified
in court by a witness. But in daylight, with the sunlight streaming into my mother’s orderly kitchen, I was more inclined
to believe Leonard and Robin. Surely it was a crank call. I mean, would a real, true mobster bother to tip you off ahead of
time? On the radio? Wasn’t that just a
little
unprofessional?

“Come back tonight if that landlord doesn’t fix the heat,” my mother said. “I’ll make your favorite stuffed cabbage leaves
with caraway seeds and we’ll get a movie.”

I nodded and she turned to go. But as she did, a pamphlet fell from one of her folders and slid on the floor. I picked it
up and saw that it was from a real estate company. It was an assessment of how much my mother’s house was worth.

My mother grabbed the pamphlet from me a little too swiftly and I got a strange feeling in my stomach. “You’re not thinking
about selling the house, are you?”

“It’s getting to be a lot of work,” she said matter-of-factly. “And they say those Briarwood condominiums are very nice.”

Briarwood, an elderly housing complex? I was incredulous. “You’re going to leave your gardens?”

She shrugged to express that at a certain age, one must accept such things. But there was something about the way she avoided
my eyes and turned to the door. Something nervous and out of character. A lot of work? My mother could spend three solid hours
wheeling piles of dirt from one garden to another and then come inside and cook a turkey dinner. She was also deadly suspicious
of condominium fees, and I’d heard her say several times that she’d rather die than live anywhere surrounded by a bunch of
old people. And then, I realized: My mother, a woman who never lied, was lying to me.

As she took her taupe-colored trench coat from the closet, my mother’s usual steady movements were rushed. The belt to her
coat fell to the floor and she scrambled to pick it up.

“What’s going on? Why are you selling the house?” I asked.

“Hallie, please, I’m going to be late for my meeting.” With obvious agitation, she crushed the cloth belt into a ball, stuffed
it into a pocket, and put her coat on. She yanked her purse off the hook by the door, and heaved it over her shoulder.

I thought suddenly of that night at Foxwoods, how all those slot-machine coins had weighed down her handbag. “Oh my God, Mom.
You haven’t gotten yourself into trouble gambling, have you?”

She stopped, clearly stunned. But when she turned, it was not with the expression of someone who’d been found out. It was
with the expression of someone who couldn’t believe her own daughter could be so stupid. “How could you possibly suggest I’d
be so irresponsible? Didn’t I show you the cosmetic bags?”

“Then what? What on earth would make you want to move?”

My mother had something hard and tight inside her that rarely yielded to interrogation. But now, she sighed. “It’s very expensive
maintaining a house like this, Hallie.”

This wasn’t it, and we both knew it. My mother and my father had paid off the mortgage years ago. And it was clear from the
chronically slow drain in the upstairs shower and the aging stairway carpeting that my mother didn’t lavish a lot of money
on home maintenance.

She met my eyes, challenging my disbelief. My mother was fierce about her independence, and I wouldn’t have been surprised
if she’d turned on her heel and stormed out the door. But she didn’t. An expression of futility crossed her face and she sighed
again. “You have no idea how many medical bills I still have to pay from your father’s illness.”

She gestured toward the metal file cabinet she kept in the kitchen. “Sixty-five thousand dollars for treatments insurance
wouldn’t cover. The accountant suggested I take out a mortgage.” She added, “You know how I hate mortgages.” A wisp of hair
escaped from a bun she wore at her neck and she swiped at it. “I’m too old for these kinds of problems. So I thought, why
not just sell the house? Get out from under?”

She said this in an apologetic tone, as if she were letting me down. I wanted to cover my face with my hands in shame. How
long had she been struggling with this burden? How clueless and self-centered had I been? But I couldn’t make it worse by
letting her see how guilty I felt. So instead, I hugged her and told her that any decision she made was fine with me. “Just
don’t rush into anything, okay?”

“I never rush,” she said, pulling away and recovering a bit of her fierceness. She lifted herself into her shoulders and headed
to the door. And then, as if our conversation had never taken place, she turned and pointed to the frying pan of scrambled
eggs she’d left on the stove, letting it be known that it would be a personal insult if I didn’t finish them.

When she was gone, I stood staring out the picture window at the gardens, lovingly mulched with a thick layer of straw to
protect root systems from frost. My mother needed money to pay my father’s medical bills and I couldn’t help her. I was thirty-five
years old and still nothing but a drain.

After quickly wolfing down the eggs and thoroughly washing the pan so my mother wouldn’t rewash it when she got home, I told
myself that the only thing to do was to head to the newsroom. This was not the time to cower in fear, but to capitalize. I’d
just broken an important story; I’d been on the front page, above the fold, and a guest on talk radio. I needed that job on
the investigative team and that step-raise. In deliberate mimicry, I lifted myself into my shoulders the way my mother had
and headed upstairs to change.

Midmorning, the newsroom was always a hive of high energy, desks full, phones ringing, keyboards clicking. But something special
was going on, I could feel it as soon as I got off the elevator.

It was like going from an air-conditioned room into the heat. A story of some sort was fueling the room. About a dozen reporters
gathered around the city desk, attention riveted on the three televisions that were hung on a shelf suspended from the ceiling.
I saw Evan standing, arms folded, in the outermost part of the ring.

“What’s going on?”

Evan looked at me twice. I’d gone home first to shower, and since I had almost no clean clothes left in my closet, I’d been
forced to put on a cotton oxford shirt with a button missing at the wrist and a wool skirt I wore only for sober events like
funerals. It was a bit more formal than my usual reporter attire, but it seemed better than asking for a promotion in yesterday’s
blue jeans.

“A bunch of people are at city hall protesting the mayor’s support of the referendum.”

“How many?”

“They’re saying a couple hundred.” The way everyone was looking at me, there was only one implication.

“Because of my story?”

“And the radio show,” he said and gestured to the televisions. “Didn’t you see the press conference this morning?”

“The mayor?”

“And Providence police.”

There was no way I could have anticipated a rebuttal press conference only twenty-four hours after the story first hit the
street. Still, I wished to God I hadn’t let my fear run me out of town. “I slept at my mom’s last night, in Worcester,” I
explained.

“Nathan’s looking for you.” Evan gestured to the front of the newsroom, toward the Fishbowl, which was standing room only
with editors and assistants. “You’ve created quite a stir,” he said, in a dry way that could have been either a compliment
or a criticism.

I glanced one last time at the television. The camera had shifted to three women carrying placards.