Strangled (3 page)

After a moment he said, “Check your own morgue. Murder victim. Found dead in her Beacon Hill apartment on January third. Case unsolved, last that I know. Homicide has revealed very little information, even to us grunts in uniform.”

“As always, thank you.”

I quickly hung up before he had a chance to take a parting verbal jab.

What had started as a pit was now a watermelon. I was holding the driver’s license of a murdered woman, along with a note that said there’d be more victims unless I helped get some mysterious word out.

I hated to say it, but this certainly solved one problem, or, more accurately, delayed it. I snatched up the phone and punched out the cell number to Maggie Kane. I expected to get her voice mail, but instead she picked up on the third ring. I heard an announcer’s voice in the background cutting through the din of commotion, telling people something about a final boarding.

“Maggie, hey there.” I paused, still listening to that announcer. “Hey, where are you?”

“The Atlanta airport,” she replied. Her words came out flat, uncertain.

“Are you traveling on business?” Soon as I asked this, I felt ridiculous. Maggie Kane teaches third grade.

“No, Jack. Listen, I was about to call you.”

My head was spinning so fast I thought it might fly off my neck. My vision was actually blurred. On what was supposed to be our wedding day, the happy bride-to-be was sitting in the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, and I think it’s a pretty safe conclusion that she wasn’t getting on a plane bound for home. Admittedly, the happy groom was planning to kibosh the whole deal, but that’s not really the point here.

“Jack,” she said before I could say anything. “Jack, I was about to call you. I’m really sorry. I’m, well, I’m just not ready to go through with this right now.”

Just like that.

I mumbled “I’ll call you later,” and hung up the phone. I should have been relieved. I should have told her that I understood what she felt. But what I really felt was angry, and, surprisingly, a little fearful, though of what, I wasn’t exactly sure.

Like I said, I knew it was going to be a big day. I just had no idea why.

It’s
one thing for a reporter to harbor suspicions in a murder case. Hell, suspicion is the backbone of some of the best and most basic newspaper stories. Is the governor right to say she can balance the state budget without raising taxes? Did the president really not have sex with that woman? Did that priest really have all those young boys’ best interests at heart?

But it’s quite another thing for a reporter to be harboring evidence in a murder case, and evidence was exactly what I seemed to be harboring, as I leaned over my desk and studied the driver’s license photograph of a recently deceased woman I never met by the name of Jill Dawson.

She had big blue eyes and shoulder-length dirty-blond hair that looked like it was cut by one of the more expensive stylists — what do they call themselves these days, coiffures? — on Newbury Street. She seemed to have a quiet confidence, like the eldest child of a happily married couple in an affluent suburb like Newton or Wayland. She probably graduated in the top five percent of her high school class, went off to Haverford or Swarthmore, and still takes a vacation with her best friends from college at least once a year. Some guy was probably extremely happy as her boyfriend or husband — unless, of course, that same guy killed her.

Jill Dawson. Yet another woman I met in the past tense. And looking at her, I bet I would have liked her. A lot.

My little newsroom reverie was interrupted by Peter Martin and Edgar Sullivan, who approached my desk the way a cold front approaches New England, which is to say ominously and silently, and beckoned me into the nearby, glass-walled conference room.

“We have the digital tape, but it doesn’t show much,” Edgar said as he pushed a disc into a DVD player. A plasma television screen mounted on the wall lit up, Edgar pressed a button, and the camera froze on the image of a rather overweight security guard sitting at the front desk of the
Record,
reading — what the hell is this? — the rival
Boston Traveler
.

“Aha, we’ve finally caught Scully in the act,” I said, maybe a little too animatedly. Both Martin and Edgar ignored me, which I guess is their right, impolite as that might be.

Well, not exactly ignored me. Edgar began his brief presentation by saying, “Jack, if you could just put a zipper on it for about three minutes, that might be helpful.

“As you can see, this camera is trained on the front desk in the lobby. A camera mounted on the wall behind the front desk facing the other way, but was out of order this morning, which is, of course, our bad luck.”

On the screen, Scully flipped the pages of the
Traveler,
probably from the gossip column to the horse race results. I took Edgar’s counsel and didn’t say this out loud.

“And here comes our visitor,” Edgar said. He now had a pointer in his hand and pointed out the reflection on the shiny tile floor as the big front door opened, then a shadow which was really little more than a fuzzy glare.

The figure seemed to approach Scully from the side of the desk, as if whoever it was had knowledge of the camera angle and was walking outside the line of vision.

“Here’s where we see actual flesh,” Edgar said. And just like that, an arm appeared on the screen, handing Scully the manila envelope that was delivered to my desk shortly after. The arm was partially concealed by what appeared to be Scully, who barely looked up from his paper. Maybe he was trying to figure out if he had hit the trifecta the day before. The arm disappeared, and the shadow receded out the door.

“And that’s it,” Edgar said. “That’s our courier.”

And probably our murderer, I thought.

Martin said, “We’ll have to turn that over to the cops, even though it doesn’t show anything. But let’s make a duplicate and keep a copy for ourselves.”

Edgar nodded and shut down the DVD player. He said, “We could dust that driver’s license for prints.”

I asked, “You know how to fingerprint something?”

“No idea. I’d send it out.”

Smartly, Martin interjected, “Even if we got any prints off it, which is doubtful, we have no database to run them through. It’d be meaningless to us.”

I sat back in my chair as those two got up to leave the conference room. I said, “So I call the cops with the news of the license. I offer them the tape. They’ll want to talk to Scully. They’ll probably want an original copy of the note. And we get nothing. Peter, right now, I don’t even think we have a story.”

I swear to God, Martin’s nose twitched like the little news rodent he can be, though I’m not sure if it was out of nerves or because he had the scent of something very big. He said, “It’s only ten o’clock in the morning. This cycle’s just begun.”

And with that, prescient as ever, he walked out the door.

My first official call on the case, if there is such a thing that a reporter can make, was to the lieutenant in the homicide bureau of the Boston Police Department, an FOJ (friend of Jack) by the name of Leo Goldsmith.

Leo is just old-school enough that he doesn’t have the current-day mentality nurtured in precinct houses and at daily roll calls that reporters are the real bad guys and that the only time you should ever talk to them is to mislead them.

Back in the old days, from what I’ve been told, cops and reporters used to be comrades in arms. Newspaper photographers and police reporters who cruised the city with a dashboard filled with scanners and a car roof groaning under the weight of antennas would often beat cops to crime scenes. They’d see the same things, crack the same jokes, and at the end of their shifts tell the same stories about the same cases over a pint of beer in some bucket-of-blood bar.

But somewhere along the line, there was a gargantuan split. I think it might be Woodward and Bernstein’s fault. After they brought down a president and, more important, had their work glorified by Hollywood, newsrooms suddenly drew a better-educated brand of reporters who hailed from wealthier backgrounds. They didn’t carry names like Tommy and Billy anymore, but Jonathan and Eric. They took lunch at fancy joints downtown, which I personally don’t have a problem with. But suddenly, the two sides weren’t even speaking the same language, or if they were, they certainly didn’t speak them with the same words. Suspicion eventually, perhaps inevitably, turned to animosity. Now cops and reporters, often seeking similar truths for the same greater cause, are from two different planets.

Because of this, I take no small amount of pride in my ability to relate to my friends in blue, an ability that I’ve used to my significant advantage over my entire career.

“I’ve got something for you, and I’m hoping you’ve got something for me.”

That’s how I opened the bargaining session with Lieutenant Leo Goldsmith. He may not have realized it, though probably he did, but a set of negotiations were about to take place, and he represented one side of it.

“What I’ve got is about one minute,” he replied. “We’re getting called out on another case.”

All right, this wasn’t going exactly as planned. The thing about reporting is that few things ever do. The one phone number you need will always be the unlisted one. The crucial official that you need to supply the last key fact in a story is invariably going to be away on vacation, probably in a Third World country, often on a river cruise without any use of a phone. The file you need in federal court is inevitably the one that’s inexplicably missing.

“Jill Dawson,” I said.

Before I could continue, he interjected. “I’ve got nothing on that one for you. Absolutely nothing. And take that at face value. I’m not being told anything about the case, and best as I can tell, the decisions on that one are being made way above my pay grade.”

“I’ve got her driver’s license,” I said. “It was delivered to me at the
Record
this morning with a note that appears to have been written by her killer.”

Silence. A long silence, which turned into a longer one, until Goldsmith sighed loudly and said, “I’m going to inform the detective running the case, Mac Foley. He’s going to send someone over to pick this stuff up and we’ll want to talk with you. Make yourself available.”

I said, “You know I’m always available for Boston’s finest.”

“Jack, take my advice: Don’t screw around on this case.”

He was serious. At least he sounded quite serious. His words lacked any trace of the locker-room-style bullshit that we’ve exchanged over the past ten or so years.

I tried to match his intensity. “Lieutenant, I’m not screwing around. I’ve done the right thing. I’ve called you about the license. I’m hoping you’ll do the right thing in return.”

I was hoping for an answer. What I got was the sound of a phone hitting the cradle. This negotiation was going to be a little more protracted than I had hoped.

There’s not a whole lot you can do in life to hurt the great and famous Vinny Mongillo, the second most talented reporter at the
Boston Record
. You can insult him, which I often do, but insults merely roll off his olive skin like water off a duck’s behind, or however that phrase goes. You can ignore him, and he barely notices. But the one thing you can’t do is cancel a meal with him. I’m afraid that might actually send him into an institution.

Which explains why noontime found me walking through the august doors of the University Club on the edge of Boston’s Back Bay for our prescheduled lunch. This was supposed to be a celebratory send-off right before my wedding. That wedding was, as we say in the business, yesterday’s news — or perhaps no news. Now, circumstances and decisions had made this an entirely different affair, though Vinny didn’t know that yet.

When I walked into the dining room, he had already parked his enormous frame in a corner booth and was talking with a man in a jacket and tie about two opened bottles of white wine that were sitting prominently on the table. Vinny, by the way, had just become something of an oenophile — a fact that made dining with him virtually impossible.

“Apples,” Vinny said as I slid onto the bench across from him. “I taste apples. Tart apples.”

The man in the jacket and tie snapped his fingers and said, “You nailed it. That’s exactly what it is. Try this one.”

With that, he poured a little wine into a second glass, and Vinny picked it up and pushed his long nose toward the liquid without taking a sip.

“I thought I’d smell more oak than I do,” Vinny said, looking up at the man respectfully.

I rolled my eyes and also looked up at the guy in the jacket and tie and said, “I’ll have a Fresca.”

He ignored me. So did Vinny. It was like I never arrived. Vinny took a sip of the wine and exclaimed loudly, “That is a fantastic finish.” He looked across the table at me for the first time and said, “You’re going to love how this goes with our oysters. By the way, say hello to Pedro, the new wine director at the club.”

Before I could say anything, Pam, the best food server in the city, arrived at the table with what looked like an ocean’s worth of freshly shucked oysters and said to Mongillo, “The chef culled out the very best ones for you.” To me, “Oh, hey, Jack. Great to see you.” Her tone didn’t quite match the meaning of the words, if you know what I mean.

And then came Chef Bill, padding through the dining room in his tall hat and chef whites straight toward our table, or more specifically, toward Vinny. By the way, I have the same feeling seeing a chef in a dining room as I have watching a pilot wander the cabin of an airplane: Enough of the meet-and-greet, grip-and-grin, feel-good stuff. I’d feel a lot better if they were back where they belonged.

“Mr. Mongillo, we’re so delighted to have you back,” Bill said to Vinny. Vinny beamed in return. I might as well have been a stain on the white linen tablecloth.

“My favorite restaurant in town,” he replied.

That’s just great. It’s probably worth noting here that I was the one who was the member in good standing at the University Club. In other words, I was the one who paid the significant monthly bills, who spent my monthly dining room minimum, who tipped the entire staff each Christmas — or, to use the politically correct term, holiday season. Vinny suggested eating here as often as he could, fully realizing that the dining room doesn’t accept cash, meaning he would never face the burden of a tab.

Chef Bill returned to the kitchen. Vinny said to the wine director, “Why don’t you decant the cab, Pedro. The nose had a tiny bit of funk to it.” And then we were alone.

To me, Mongillo raised his glass of white wine, the one with the fantastic finish, and said, “To matrimony. To Maggie. To a lifetime of happiness. The gods are forever smiling on you, Fair Hair. I can’t believe you’ve scammed your way to another great woman.”

The funny thing, and I mean that not in any literal way, is that nobody had actually poured wine into my glass. I didn’t even have any water. Vinny didn’t seem to notice. He was too busy sucking down a chilled oyster and dreamily exclaiming, “And I can’t believe I scammed my way into a Wellfleet and Chardonnay combination this good.”

I said, “I’m not marrying Maggie today.”

He sucked down another oyster and took a sip of wine, his eyes intently on the food and drink rather than on me.

Finally, he looked up and said, “We’re still going to finish lunch, right?”

I ignored that. He eyed my face and said, “You’re serious.”

I nodded.

He said, “Can I ask you something.” Pause. “Are you fucking stupid?”

I kept my look trained on his. “It’s not a big deal,” I said, which, of course, was a lie, and a rather obvious one. “I’ve got a story breaking, and we’ve had some complications, Maggie and me.”

“The complication meaning you’re acting like an asshole again, pulling a classic Jack.”

Truth is, I probably would have been, if Maggie hadn’t pulled a Jack before I had the chance. So in a rare moment of revelation, I said, “I do have a story going. But Maggie needed some more time.”

He finally sucked down the oyster that he had been holding in his fingers all this time. Pedro came back and refilled Mongillo’s wineglass. He put the bottle down and walked away, leaving me to pour my own. Pam showed up with a crabcake on a small plate, placed it in front of Mongillo, and said, “Chef wants you to try his new aioli sauce.”