A Confidential Source (8 page)

Chris Tejian had broken my heart, seduced me as part of his ill-fated public-relations campaign to win acquittal. It had very
nearly destroyed me. After that, I never thought I could trust any man. Last year’s disastrous one-month fling with a bartender,
who turned out to be dating every other cocktail waitress in the bar, didn’t do anything to restore my faith. But there was
something steady about Matt’s eyes, something genuine in the tone of his voice that I wanted to believe in.

A broad-shouldered woman, loaded with shopping bags like a pack animal, pushed her way up to the rail and slammed an enormous
handbag into me. I caught it in my ribs.

The woman apologized, calling herself “the clumsiest woman alive.” She leaned over the rail, beside me, pronounced the flames
lovely and launched into a long explanation about how she’d wanted to put these shopping bags away in her car first, but her
husband had taken off with the keys. This was what I liked about Rhode Island. With very little provocation, complete strangers
were telling you the stories of their lives.

“He’s just got to have it all his way, you know?”

I thought of Matt Cavanaugh and nodded to indicate that I shared the universal female understanding of the shortcomings of
men. She seemed pleased. “Better go find him, I guess.” She transferred her shopping bags to one arm and disappeared into
the crowd. I stood there staring at all the couples and families strolling along the fire-lit river, lonely again.

Then, as if to help me out, the music shifted. The melody was no longer aching with love lost, but marching forward with a
warlike progression. Screw Matt Cavanaugh and the way he had of looking so intent. He was a nonstarter. A prosecutor. A future
politician, for Christ’s sake. I pulled myself off the rail, away from the burning river with its ephemeral flames, toward
the solid ground of the parking lot.

I
’
D NEVER BEEN
to Raphael’s Bistro, in the renovated Union Station, but I’d read about it in the paper. It was a fashionable place where
the mayor liked to lunch with his top aides. Our living section had done an article on the restaurant’s decor, which was very
Manhattan, and said it was the place to wear sleeveless black dresses and stiletto heels. I was wearing jeans and a cotton
sweater.

I got there a few minutes early. The restaurant, all blond maple and uncluttered retro, was packed and I had to make my way
through a throng of people to find an empty place to stand at the far end of the bar. I ordered a club soda with lemon and
scanned the room. Young couples mostly. A lot of sleek twenty-something women wearing Wilma Flintstone-type tank tops with
only one shoulder. Their dates’ wardrobes varied, from casual to business suit, but all looked very Armani. I caught a drift
of male cologne.

Ten minutes passed painfully. I felt awkward at the bar, and tried for a moment to pretend I was back at Skipper’s Landing
in Boston, a fish place on Rowes Wharf where I’d finally taken a job serving cocktails. Although the job was a disaster, at
least I knew everyone, from the bouncers to the problem drinkers to the distributor who tried to sell us more Mount Gay rum.

A man to my left looked at me as if I was getting in the way of his cigarette smoke. I stood on my toes to check the door
so he would know I was waiting for someone. It was the life of a reporter to meet strange people in strange places, but I
had a gnawing suspicion that Leonard wouldn’t show up. That I’d dreamed the phone call this morning.

Directly to my right sat an older couple, a silver-haired man in a cardigan sweater and pleated corduroys who had a long,
earnest face and looked vaguely familiar. His wife, sitting on a stool beside him, wore a full-length mink, despite the warm
weather. She downed a martini and glanced at me with a dazed expression. For lack of anything better to do, I ate the lemon
that had come in my club soda.

“How can you do that without wincing?” the man asked. His voice, a clear bass, was kindly.

I had to smile. “I like sour things.”

“Then you’ll like us,” the wife said. She sounded drunk.

“Marge,” the man said quietly, as if to steady her.

His voice was familiar, too, but I couldn’t place him. I kept thinking he was someone’s grandfather or uncle, but I didn’t
know anyone in Rhode Island well enough to have met a close relation like a grandfather or an uncle. “Do I know you from somewhere?”
I asked. “You seem familiar.”

The wife chortled.

The man gave me a moment to guess. Nothing came to me.

“Think Powerball,” the wife said.

“Of course.” I realized it was Gregory Ayers, who ran the Rhode Island state lottery. He was on radio and television all the
time, awarding checks to the lottery winners and announcing new scratch-ticket games. In the television ads, people were always
rubbing his arm for good luck. I felt oddly excited standing this close to him, like maybe he could affect my game.

“Go ahead,” he said, offering his arm. “Everybody asks. It’s okay.”

“Ev-er-y-bo-dy,” the wife echoed.

I touched his cardigan. Was that static or the zing of good fortune? I couldn’t tell.

From the corner of my eye, I spotted Leonard working his way through the crowd.

“Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t,” Gregory Ayers said, looking pointedly at Leonard.

“Very funny,” Leonard said, and chucked Ayers’s shoulder. “Nice to see you again, Marge.” He kissed her.

It often amazed me how everybody but me seemed to know everybody else in Rhode Island. But now, it dawned on me that Gregory
Ayers’s lottery commercials played on Leonard’s radio station all the time. And now that I thought about it, I remembered
that Gregory Ayers, too, was an opponent of casino gambling, one of the only state officials to take a stand.

Leonard was only about five foot seven, but because of his lean build and the way he carried himself, he seemed taller. Unlike
me, he was dressed to blend into the restaurant, looking effortlessly sophisticated in a gray turtleneck and casual black
wool pants. He embraced me as if we were longtime friends. “Have you met Hallie?” he asked, turning to Ayers. “She’s the reporter
who wrote the story about the Mazursky murder.”

I thought I saw Gregory Ayers stiffen at the word
reporter,
and I recalled that one of our columnists had recently done a piece criticizing him for “hypocrisy” when the “King of Lottery”
came out against casino gambling. But instantly, his face softened. “What a story,” he said, shaking my hand.

“I never shop in those little market stores,” Marge offered. An enormous diamond-and-emerald ring on her finger knocked her
martini glass askew, sloshing gin onto the cuff of her husband’s cardigan sweater.

He grabbed a cocktail napkin, dunked it in a glass of water, and began dabbing it off. Then he glanced at his wife and shook
his head sadly. “It’s going to be a long wait,” he said, and then with a very deliberate look at Leonard, he gestured to the
dining room. “You might not want to stay.”

Leonard turned toward the dining room and his expression grew dark. Following his gaze, I saw that while most of the customers
looked like young twenty-year-olds on dates, there was an older, more boisterous group taking up three tables toward the back.
In the center of this group, Billy Lopresti, mayor of Providence, was slugging back something in a snifter.

He was a funny-looking man, small and stocky, with olive skin, surprised-looking eyes, and hair dyed a shoe-polish shade of
black. Years ago, he’d been a popular radio talk-show host at Leonard’s station, and he was still quick with a wisecrack.
He didn’t just have voter support, he had fans.

As we watched, a young woman in a sleek black dress, sitting at a nearby table, stood up, walked over to the mayor’s table,
and planted a kiss on his cheek. The room cheered.

“Apparently, it’s his birthday,” Ayers said.

Billy Lopresti had been mayor forever—since the early 1990s—but I’d heard that it wasn’t until last year, after he’d wept
so openly, so disarmingly at his wife’s funeral, that people had taken to calling him by only his first name. “You gotta give
Billy credit for the renaissance, he really cares about Providence,” a caller would say. “Billy’s got so much compassion for
the seniors.” And what Leonard hated most of all: “If Billy thinks this casino thing is so good for the city, then it’s a
good thing for the city.”

The mayor stood up, gestured to an elderly woman at a nearby table, pointed to his cheek. In a trained politician’s voice
that carried in a crowd, he said, “What? Don’t
you
love me anymore?” The elderly woman blushed at the attention, the mayor walked over to her and kissed her square on the mouth,
and the dining room roared.

It wasn’t until the mayor sat back down that I noticed the others at his table: an older man with gray hair tied in a ponytail,
wearing blue jeans and a dress shirt, and a woman in a business suit. I’d seen both their pictures in our paper.

“That’s the chief of the Narragansett Indians and Jennifer Trowbridge from Evening Star Gaming International,” Leonard said
with disgust.

The mayor whispered something to Jennifer Trowbridge, who leaned in close so she could hear what he was saying over the restaurant
din. Then they both looked up at the bar and peered in our direction. The mayor raised his snifter and the three of them clinked
their glasses in a toast. Instead of taking a drink, Billy Lopresti threw his head back and laughed.

I got the distinct impression he was laughing at Leonard. Leonard must have thought so, too, because when the hostess came
toward us to tell us our table was ready, he shook his head. “I lost my appetite,” he said, and then to me: “Let’s get the
hell out of here.”

We left Ayers and his wife at the bar and took Leonard’s car, a Saab with one of those stand-up bike racks on the roof, over
the highway to Federal Hill. This was Providence’s famed Italian neighborhood and a source of endless restaurant possibilities.

Leonard, the man who talked nonstop on the radio every night, was silent, obviously injured, and I didn’t know what to say
to him. On the one hand, I was with a man I’d talked to just about every night for the last three or four months. On the other
hand, all that talk had been on the air.

He said nothing until we were under the big, bronze-pinecone archway that was a gateway to Atwell’s Avenue. He pointed to
a building on his left. “You see that?”

I looked out the car window: a city block, restaurants, real estate office, private home, tattoo parlor. “What?”

He pointed to a small building right in the middle of the first block, with a low roof and a small sign that looked like it
might advertise a lawyer.

“The one with the blue door?”

“My uncle was shot to death in that doorway,” Leonard said. “It happened when I was a kid, but I never forgot it. They never
arrested the guy, but everyone knew who it was. He worked for one of Patriarca’s bookies.”

“Your uncle had gambling problems?” I thought I was starting to understand Leonard’s antigambling obsession.

He shook his head. “No. His father had gambling problems. They killed my uncle to impress upon the entire family that they
were serious about getting repaid.”

There was no appropriate response to the enormity of that revelation. I mumbled a vague condolence and wondered why he’d told
me this. What did Leonard want from me? What did he think I could do for him?

We traveled another block in silence. I stared out at the crowds on the sidewalks. Couples, young professionals, and tourists
hurried into restaurants. Valets stood in the street, eager to park each new BMW and Cadillac that pulled up. It was hard
to imagine anyone getting shot in any of these affluent doorways.

Leonard must have read my thoughts. “People like to think the mob is a thing of the past,” he said. “The FBI beat them down
with RICO, the old
omertà
loyalty gone by the wayside. Junior Patriarca not the man his father was. That’s what everyone likes to think. But you know,
Junior’s grown up. He’s not so inept anymore. And this is Rhode Island. We don’t change that quick.”

He looked at me with meaning, and I wasn’t sure if this had to do with the mayor, the casino-gambling referendum, or Barry
Mazursky’s murder. I didn’t get a chance to ask him to elaborate, though. We’d pulled up to a restaurant with a faux stone
exterior and small neon light that said
THE BLUE GROTTO
, and a valet was jumping for our car.

I followed Leonard inside the restaurant, where everything was old-world formal. The waiters wore tuxedos and I could hear
the sound of a man crooning what sounded like some kind of love song. Three middle-aged Italian men stood together at the
bar drinking what I assumed was Sambuca. After Leonard’s introduction to the neighborhood, it was hard not to think in stereotypes.

The host led us into a quiet and ornate dining room with brass sconces on the walls and chandeliers with crystal pinecones
in them. We had to walk around the balding troubadour singing a mournful ballad to a young couple who had their hands clasped
together on the table.

We sat at a corner table under a framed tapestry of two Roman-looking women. It was almost nine o’clock, and by now I was
starved for both food and information. “The swordfish looks good,” I said, snapping shut the menu and folding my arms on the
table.

“Hmm,” Leonard said, studying his menu.

“You going to tell me what’s going on?” I prodded.

“With the mayor?” He looked up and smiled, as if I would believe an encounter that had so clearly disturbed him was no big
deal.

The balding troubadour was heading toward our table. I waved him away. “Yeah, with the mayor. With Barry Mazursky. With the
mob history of Atwell’s Avenue.”

“Billy Lopresti wants me to think that nothing I say on my show can touch him,” he said in a low voice. “That he finds my
opposition to gambling amusing. That I’m an unworthy opponent.”