A Confidential Source (24 page)

I headed to the shower, trying to wash this refrain away. I stood under the water until it went cold, hoping to rinse off
all traces of myself. The woman with poor judgment. Chaser of Bad Luck. Loser by Catastrophe! But when I toweled off, I felt
no better.

All my laundry was still sitting, unwashed, in the bag, so I hunted through my closet until I found an old jeans skirt I never
wore because it was too short and a turtleneck shirt I had intended to turn into a cleaning rag because of a chocolate stain
on the sleeve. Looking at myself in the mirror was a mistake. At thirty-five, I still looked immature, with clothes that didn’t
fit, hair that was too long for my face, and eyes that would never be shrewd.

My stomach was mostly empty, my legs still shaky, and I was exhausted from lack of sleep, but luckily, I’d left a twenty-dollar
bill at home in my bureau drawer. So I stripped the sheets off both the bed and the futon, gathered the towels from the bathroom,
and stuffed them into my already full laundry bag. The good thing about being back in the bureau, I told myself, was the convenience
of the strip-mall Laundromat and the abundance of slow news days. I’d clean and dry every piece of clothing, every towel and
every bedsheet I owned. It seemed critical, all of a sudden, that I had clean clothes to put on, that my life, at least, had
that much order.

By eleven o’clock, I’d finished the spelling-bee story for Thursday’s regional education section and skipped out of the office
to start my laundry. I was alone in the bright, canary-yellow Laundromat with hurtling hot water sanitizing my underwear and
the rhythmic churning of my sheets and towels in the dryer.

There were ten minutes left on the dryer, and normally, I’d go back to the office, but I was tired of putting on a happy face
for Carolyn, tired of pretending I was a perfectly competent person whom she could trust. I dropped to a seat on the plastic
bench. Listening to the rhythm of the machines, I stared blankly out the glass window onto the vista of the strip-mall parking
lot: the South Kingstown Apothecary, the Peddler’s Five, and Fraser’s Liquors, the storefronts of my small, getting-smaller,
world.

I wondered how I was going to manage. Peanut butter sandwiches from home instead of take-out Greek salads from Poppy’s. I
could put off electric and telephone bills and pay the minimum credit card payments. Still, there was no way I could make
rent. I tried to pull the numbers out of my head, but I couldn’t. I kept multiplying my take-home pay by weeks, subtracting
the cost of gasoline, car payments, and groceries and falling short for another month and a half. When I’d moved in, Hal Andosa,
a landlord who often came to the door
personally
to collect, had emphasized the importance of prompt rental payments. I’d been quick to assure him that I’d never in my life
been a day late with the rent.

If my father were still alive, I could go to him for a loan. My Irish father, who in his own day had thrown away a few dollars
in the pub, would’ve given me the required lecture on responsibility but quickly conspired to keep it from my mother. I winced
again remembering her detailed advice about good gambling that night at Foxwoods.

I tried to concentrate on the comforting rhythm of the machinery, but I was distracted by two men in the parking lot getting
out of a Chevy Lumina and heading toward the liquor store. They had the swift, purposeful movements of people who knew for
sure they needed a drink. Wearing jackets of the sporting variety, big leather arms and some sort of football-or hockey-team
logo on the back, they looked like the kind of guys who called radio sports programs and argued passionately about bad trades.
I always wondered what kind of people bought liquor in the mornings.

The same kind of people who played blackjack at a casino until two
A.M
.,
a voice inside my head said. The same kind of people who called Leonard of
Late Night
every single night.

A dryer stopped abruptly with a grunt. I looked around, almost expecting to see my sheets spit out onto the floor. Two thousand
dollars in a casino. What was I going to do?

Never go to a casino again,
the little voice continued. Had I listened every night to Leonard’s show and not picked up that gambling was addictive? Or
had I assumed, for some unknown reason, that the addictive part didn’t apply to me? I knew now that I had to give up all forms
of it, even the little scratch cards and the Powerball tickets. I had to face what I’d known all along: Moderation wasn’t
one of my personality traits.

I had a vision of Drew that day at the market, standing behind the register and staring off into those aisles of bad memories.
His father’s gambling had caused him so much pain. Leonard might have been lying about the loan sharks, but not Drew. That
had come from his heart.

I took a deep, cleansing breath of soap-scented Laundromat air and tried to exhale those thoughts from my system. There was
nothing I could do to make it up to Drew, or to Barry. I was off that story, forever. The practical side of me had to accept
that or I’d be completely lost.

Laundry was constructive: a good first step, a simple task I might be able to accomplish. But as I began emptying the dryer,
I realized I’d overloaded it again. Everything from the sheets to my sweat socks was still twisted and damp.

The change machine was out of order, so I decided to go to the liquor store for more quarters. I passed the two sports-radio
guys in the parking lot as they practically danced their way back to the Chevy Lumina. I heard the first bars of a heavy-metal
song before the doors slammed and the car tore out of the parking lot.

Opening the door to the liquor store triggered a computer-chip gizmo that belted out a throaty “Ha!Ha!Ha!” from a sinister
goblin. Mrs. Fraser, who was on her knees unpacking a case of wine into a wrought-iron rack, looked up from the floor. She
was a divorced woman in her early fifties with tight gray curls and defined biceps. She wore a short-sleeved T-shirt over
three-quarter-length leggings, and the kind of high-top aerobics sneakers that went out of style in the eighties. Because
it was Halloween, she’d added a black velvet witch’s hat.

I waited for her to finish heaving the last of the bottles into the rungs before asking if she could make change. The last
time the Laundromat change machine was out of order, Mrs. Fraser had begrudgingly parted with her quarters. This time, she
popped back behind the cash register and opened the drawer with a big smile on her face. “See those guys who peeled out of
the lot?” she asked without waiting for an answer. “I almost didn’t sell one of ’em a scratch ticket ’cause I thought he was
underage. But the big one in the Bruins jacket had ID. Wouldn’t you know, he bought a winner? Five grand.”

That got my attention. “Five grand. Really?” I took the quarters. “On what game?”

“Caesar’s Palace Two. Just got it in this week. You played it yet?” She could barely contain her excitement. “They’re promoting
it like crazy on the radio. Pays up to one million dollars. Been selling like mad.”

“On a one-dollar ticket?” I heard myself say. Buying a scratch ticket
was
gambling. I knew that. Buying one would be like betting on horses instead of on cards. Still, I now had two dollars in laundry
coins in my hand.

“You wanna try one?” she asked. “Maybe the goblins and ghosts will bring you good luck.”

Ghosts. Barry had sold me an earlier version of the Caesar’s Palace game the night he died. One of the tickets I couldn’t
find in my apartment.
“I’m telling you, I have a feeling about you and Caesar,”
he’d said.

Barry would have considered this a message. Maybe it was Barry himself sending me the sign. Signs didn’t show up too often.
They had to be followed.

I cupped the quarters she’d just given me. Two dollars. A voice urged me to save the change for the Laundromat. Another voice
said I could just toss the damp clothes from the dryer into my car’s backseat and let the sun finish the job.

Mrs. Fraser pushed a Halloween bowl of Tootsie Rolls and Red Hots on the counter toward me. “Sometimes I think the odds are
better with these new games.”

That was exactly what Barry had said about the new games. If I won $5,000, all my financial problems would be over. I could
repay my mother and my credit cards and have something left to celebrate. And it wasn’t like the casino, it wasn’t like I
could lose it all. I’d only be risking a couple of dollars.

Mrs. Fraser was gazing at me with the pleased look of someone who knows she has just sold something. I got a good feeling,
as if she knew just how badly I needed a shot of good luck. One last scratch ticket, why not?

But then the throaty “Ha!Ha!Ha!” of the front-door goblin startled me, as if deriding my thoughts. A man about my own age,
wearing plaster-splattered overalls and a painting hat, walked in. He wanted to know if the store carried Narragansett beer
and whether there was any cold. With that same sales smile, Mrs. Fraser pointed to the cooler in the back of the store.

Her eyes returned to mine. Although she didn’t say anything, I saw her disapproval of the man’s on-the-job drinking, something
about the level way she looked at me and didn’t blink. I felt myself retract, my chest drop into my stomach, my fingers clench
the quarters in my palm. Alcohol, gambling, compulsive calls to late-night radio—it was all the same. When Mrs. Fraser stood
on her toes to pluck a ticket from the plastic dispenser, I stopped her.

“Not feeling all that lucky today.” I dropped the quarters into my skirt pocket and forced myself to walk out the door.

When I got back to the office, my phone was ringing. Carolyn gave me a skeptical look. “How much laundry did you have, anyway?”

“Too much,” I said, taking off my jacket. She gestured toward my phone. “Answer it. It’s been ringing on and off for the last
half hour. Driving me crazy.”

I knew who it was. Leonard had already left two voice-mail messages: one before I’d gotten here this morning; and one when
I was at the Laundromat putting in my first load of clothes. He kept saying the same thing: that he’d gone overboard because
the cause was so important, that he felt a “personal responsibility” to stop casino gambling in the state. If I picked up
the phone and heard him claim the moral high ground one more time, I was going to slam down the receiver. I didn’t want to
have to explain to Carolyn who deserved that kind of treatment.

The ringing stopped. I left my jacket on the hook and slipped into my chair. The silence was large and welcome. Carolyn looked
at me closely now, studying my relief. “Whoever it is isn’t going to give up, you know. They hang up when they get the voice
message. They dial again like they’ve got nothing better to do.”

“How obnoxious,” I said.

“Yeah.” Her eyes did not leave me.

The silence continued, and after another minute, I grabbed a stack of press releases and began typing: “South Kingstown elementary
school teachers are urging all students to bring in their excess candy to school the day after Halloween. The candy will be
donated to the women’s shelter in Newport.”

Carolyn shifted her attention to her computer. I knocked off a second press release about a weight-loss clinic at the University
of Rhode Island. The phone rang again.

Turning around, Carolyn said, “I don’t know what boyfriend you’re trying to ditch, but you can’t work at a newspaper office
and
not
answer the phone.”

I could pretend it was a wrong number. I could announce that this wasn’t the features department, but the South County bureau,
a common misdial, a digit apart. “South County, Hallie Ahern,” I said, businesslike, into the phone.

But it wasn’t Leonard. It was Matt Cavanaugh.

My stomach did an emotional pivot. Carolyn was still watching me. “AG’s office,” I mouthed.

“I was wondering if you’d heard the news,” Matt said. His voice had a warmer quality than I would have expected given my current
standing with the law-enforcement community. “About Victor Delria.”

That he was not a hit man? Or in any way associated with organized crime? It was a little late in the day for Matt to be rubbing
my face in it. “What news?”

“He died about an hour ago. Rhode Island Hospital. I thought you’d want to know.”

I was struck silent. Not by Delria’s death. He’d been in critical condition for some time, but by the gesture. Despite the
complete and total idiot I’d made of myself, Matt Cavanaugh had called me first with the information.

I didn’t tell him that I had to pass this tip on to the city desk, where Dorothy would assign it to a reporter she could trust
to get it right. He must have assumed that I had to get right to work on it, because he didn’t go into what it meant for his
case, or for my role as a witness.

“Thank you for tracking me down,” I said.

There was a pause, as if this gratitude confused him. Or maybe he was about to say something, but changed his mind. “No problem,”
he said, and swiftly hung up.

At home, there was another voice message from Leonard pleading with me to call him back. The second was from Walter, who explained
that his gig the next night was early and that he’d be at my apartment around midnight. It occurred to me that I might be
able to borrow money from Walter, who now owned three cabs in Boston and was generous by nature.

Of course, I’d have to confess to him about the gambling, and that could be worse than telling my mother. But worse in a different
way. With my mother, I’d feel like a failure as a grown-up. With Walter, I’d get the spin on how failure was human, but I’d
have to make all sorts of promises that my conscience would force me to keep.

I knew I’d screwed up, but Walter was a rabid twelve-step disciple. Secretly, he felt
everyone
was in need of some sort of program. The idea was that you were always vulnerable to everything, and even if you weren’t,
you were supposed to go to meetings to provide inspiration to those who still were. He’d be on the phone in seconds scouring
Providence for Gamblers Anonymous meetings that I’d have to attend.