A Confidential Source (32 page)

“He said that the tape explained the real reason Barry was murdered. He said the cops knew all along it wasn’t an armed robbery.”

“All right. Be careful. I mean, don’t do anything stupid. Don’t put yourself in any danger. But if you think you can get your
hands on this tape fairly easily, if you can verify any of that, this would be huge. Christ, this could bump the goddamn referendum
coverage off the front page.”

It was almost seven o’clock when I got to the radio station. The wind howled with dry, frigid air from Canada that whistled
right through the Honda as if there were no windows. There were only three other cars in the parking lot. I hoped one of them
was Robin’s.

I fought the wind to the lobby entrance, feeling tired and numb by the time I got to the door. It was open and all the lights
to the FM station upstairs were on, but there were no signs of anyone downstairs. A couple of half-empty coffee cups littered
the table and the day’s
Chronicle
was spread open on the couch. I yelled a “hello,” but got no response. I walked slowly through the long, narrow hallway that
led to Leonard’s studio and the production booth. I found Robin at the desk, her face red with tears.

“You know?” she asked.

I nodded. We hardly knew each other, but she stood and we embraced. The chill in my limbs had moved to my heart and I felt
as if I were somewhere in the distance, listening to myself as I told her about stumbling upon the accident scene, seeing
the mangled bike. It sounded like a story I was writing about someone else, not about Leonard, not about someone I knew.

She told me that he’d had a previous heart problem and had gone into cardiac arrest. That his skull had been badly fractured,
and even if he’d lived, he’d never have been the same. I kept thinking that she was talking about someone else, someone older,
or weaker, or living in a different state.

I looked past her, through the glass window and into the studio. I had a sudden image of Leonard, standing with his headphones
on, refusing to sit down, the way he’d flailed his arms with impatience and cut off the callers. And then I saw his headphones,
casually discarded on the desk. Through the numbness, I felt a stab. He’d been trying so hard to get me to forgive him, trying
so hard to make amends.

We sat down, Robin at her desk and me in a chair I pulled in from the office. She had overheard Leonard calling me about the
sedan in the parking lot, but she said strange cars showed up in the parking lot all the time. “Teenagers smoking pot and
making out,” she said. She kept repeating that she couldn’t believe Leonard was dead and eventually lapsed back into tears.
“At least he died doing what he loved to do,” she finally said.

“Right.” I wanted to offer comfort, but the blade twisted again. All I could think was that there was no possible upside to
getting murdered. It seemed especially cruel to me that anyone should get murdered doing what he loved to do.

It was freezing in here. I walked back to the little kitchen area to make us both a cup of tea. When I came back with the
mugs in my hands, I glanced inside Leonard’s studio again and caught sight of the brown box on the floor, Leonard’s archive.

I gave Robin her tea and asked if it was okay to look for something Leonard was supposed to give me. “Go ahead. He wanted
to talk to you last night in the worst way,” she said. “He seemed frantic about it.”

Leaving my tea on the desk, I moved to the studio, trying to fight through the numbness. Kneeling on the floor, I thumbed
through the box. Leonard wanted me to find the tape.
He seemed frantic about it.
This was something he wanted, I told myself, something I could do for him. I began diving through stacks of tapes, carefully
reading each label. They were each meticulously dated and detailed with the subject of the show. I found a dub of the show
I was on. Thinking the man who threatened me might have been recorded even though he was cut from the air, I put the tape
in my knapsack.

I was going through the box a second time—I couldn’t find anything that wasn’t clearly marked as a dub from his show—when
I noticed a man at the end of the hall, watching me.

I froze.

Robin’s chair was on rollers. She rolled out of her office and into the hall. “Oh,” she said, “I forgot to call you.”

I stood and walked closer. The man in the hallway was Gregory Ayers. He wore a business suit and tie, and he carried a briefcase
that made him look official. Robin had jumped up from her chair and now stood between us.

“I’m so sorry, I should have called you to cancel,” she said, “I forgot you were supposed to be our guest tonight. I…” She
looked back at me, helplessly.

I moved down the hall, beside her. “You haven’t heard?” I asked Ayers.

He shook his head.

“There’s been an accident,” Robin began.

His face grew very still, but he did not register shock. At his age, Ayers was no longer surprised by people’s deaths. Robin
had started crying again, so he reached into his jacket and offered her a handkerchief. It was neatly pressed, old-fashioned,
possibly monogrammed. She held it in her hand, not knowing what to do with it.

Ayers gestured for her to keep it. Reaching for my hand, he told me how very sorry he was about Leonard. I thought about the
night at Raphael’s when we’d all been in the bar together, the night that I’d rubbed Gregory Ayers’s arm for luck. How full
of life Leonard had been that night. How full of persuasion. No one that young should die that abruptly. Not Leonard. Not
my brother, Sean. A blade twisted inside me and tears began to burn behind my eyes. I blinked them back and quickly left the
station.

I
PULLED INTO
my parking space, turned off the ignition, and stared squarely out the window at my apartment building.

I thought about climbing those dark stairs to my empty apartment to spend the night awake, listening for sounds. I turned
the key in the ignition and started the car again. More than anything, I wanted to go to a casino, where it would be bright
and loud and crowded all through the night.

I glanced at my fuel gauge, which was nearing empty again. What was I thinking? I didn’t have enough money for gas, let alone
the blackjack table. I shut the engine off and opened the car door. A sudden image of the mangled bike broke into my head
and I slammed the door shut again.

Reaching into my pants pocket, I pulled out the crumpled note I’d found on Leonard’s floor. “Hallie, listen to this carefully.
You’ll forgive me…. If this doesn’t nail”

Whoever had found the tape must have read the note, must have known Leonard had been trying to get it to me. They had to wonder
how much I already knew. How much Leonard had already told me.

I might have stayed in the car longer except that the temperature had dropped at least ten degrees, and it occurred to me
that breaking into my car was a lot easier than breaking into my apartment. I took several steps on the asphalt, toward my
front door. The light above the door illuminated the entry-way.

My brain jumped into video mode, projecting a male form into the hallway. The man was huge, wearing a parka and pressing himself
against the wall, waiting. I could almost feel the huge arm grab me around my neck, the metal gun barrel at the back of my
head. I shook my head, trying to shut off the picture machine. Something large snapped behind me. I whirled around. In the
dark, I saw a branch hanging like a broken arm from a tree.

Past the tree, a man was turning the corner. He was running a slow jog, an end-of-the-workout pace, past Starbucks and onto
Elmgrove. He wore a familiar-looking hooded sweatshirt and had a very long stride.

“Matt!” I screamed across the street.

He stopped, looked back over his shoulder toward Starbucks. I shouted a second time and he finally turned my way.

Before I’d worked out what I was doing, I was across the street, meeting him on the sidewalk. He was panting from his run,
rubbing sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand and regarding me with curiosity. “What’s going on?”

I stood there shivering from both cold and fear. I glanced back at the hanging tree limb, not knowing how to explain.

“You all right?” Matt asked, taking a step closer.

“You heard about Leonard Marianni?” I asked.

“The bike accident?”

I was watching Matt’s reaction carefully, looking for some flash of understanding, but he gave nothing away. “Yeah.”

“Was he a friend of yours?” The question sounded sincere and just a little surprised.

“Sort of,” I said, realizing that there were things I couldn’t tell Matt, that I’d have to adapt the story. “I was supposed
to meet him today,” I heard myself lie, “to get the follow on a vote-no rally I covered yesterday. I got stuck in the traffic
holdup—you know, because of the ambulance. I had to identify him for police.” My voice broke off.

“You want to go for a drink somewhere?” he asked softly.

I nodded.

“I’ve got to change; you want me to meet you at your apartment?”

“No!”

He looked across the street at my apartment building and then swiftly up and down the street. “Why?”

I didn’t answer.

“Someone come after you?”

I shook my head. “I heard a noise, probably just a branch snapping in the wind. I’m just a little spooked… after all that’s
gone on today.” I saw the mangled bicycle again and closed my eyes.

“All right. All right.” His voice was his best feature, warm like a blanket. “Why don’t you come upstairs and wait for me
while I change? Or better yet, I think I have beer in the fridge.”

His apartment smelled of pizza. It looked messier than last time, as if way too many meals had been eaten while watching television
on the corduroy couch. The number of files had multiplied on the dining-room table, and there was now also a laptop and a
printer, with several extension cords plugged awkwardly into the wall.

Matt guided me to the couch in the living room and cleared a pizza box from the coffee table. He left with the box and returned
with two beers and a take-out coffee cup filled with brown liquid. He put both a beer and the take-out cup in front of me.
“I’m out of mugs. But it’s brandy, warmed in the microwave. If I were you, I’d drink that first.”

He might have ridiculed all my false bravery earlier that day on the ride from the state police barracks, but he didn’t. Instead,
he dragged the corduroy La-Z-Boy chair close to the couch and sat opposite me, leaning forward, elbows on his knees while
he studied me. I realized then that his sarcasm was a veneer.

The take-out coffee cup had been rinsed, but I still inhaled the leftover scent of coffee with my swallow of hard alcohol.
The burning in my throat was comforting.

“All right. What exactly has you so freaked out?” he finally asked.

I tried to think of what I could say that wouldn’t say it all. I took another sip of the brandy and told him about the silver
sedan. How Leonard had called me at the bureau and told me that he thought he was being followed.

“Why did he think someone was following him?” Matt asked.

I studied his face. There was nothing artificial in his expression, nothing brimming in his eyes. If Matt was searching for
the same audiotape, he had no clue Leonard had gotten hold of it. I did not offer to make the connection. “He didn’t say,”
I lied.

Suddenly, his expression changed. Leaning so far forward in his chair that our knees practically touched, he grabbed my shoulders
and searched my eyes. “What do you know that you’re not telling me?”

“Nothing. I don’t know anything.”

“But you suspect something; what is it?”

I looked away.

“You think he was
murdered,
don’t you?”

“I’m… I’m not sure.”

He let go of my shoulders and leaned back in the chair, looking at me as if he needed perspective. “You went to his apartment
to interview him for a story, a follow-up on
yesterday’s
rally? What happened to the counterfeit-scratch-ticket story? To all your theories about the Mazursky murder? You just put
those aside?”

I ignored the tone and nodded. He folded his arms and stared at me, his eyes darting between thoughts. Then something else
lit in his eyes. “You must have gone to Leonard’s right after I dropped you off at the lottery.”

I might have said I stopped at the newspaper first, but I didn’t think that would gain me anything. I took another sip of
brandy and felt it in the pit of my stomach. Vaguely, I remembered that I hadn’t eaten lunch.

“To work on a story about
yesterday’s
rally?” His sarcasm was getting a little thick, so I didn’t respond.

“And Leonard Marianni called you afterward to tell you he was being followed, but not why? But somehow you are now convinced
he was murdered—and that the murderer was coming after you next?”

“I never said that.”

“If you told me what really happened, why you were going to meet Leonard and what he had to do with these dirtbags who are
after you, maybe we could actually catch these people and put them behind bars. You know,
before
they got a chance to kill you.”

I was tired and hungry and sick of being scared. I thought about laying it all out: from the audiotape I couldn’t find to
the note on the floor of Leonard’s ransacked apartment. But I remembered the conversation I’d had with Dorothy. The long and
pointed silence. The part where she deliberately did not advise me to go to the police with my suspicions. I stalled by taking
another sip of the brandy, swallowing. Then, I spotted the logo on the side of the take-out cup: the Mazursky Market. I thought
suddenly of Drew. Wouldn’t he have made a copy of the tape before he gave it to Leonard?

“It was just all the wind howling outside,” I said, standing up. “And all your warnings. I let it get to me, but I’m okay
now.”

He stood up, too. “No, you’re not okay. You’re incredibly stubborn and blindly ambitious.”