Strangled (4 page)

Maybe I should just join the Y.

Mongillo looked at the crabcake admiringly, like an accountant looks at a finished tax return, then peered up at me and said, “I’m really sorry, Jack. I really am.”

I shook my head. “I don’t want to advertise this around, but I was having doubts this morning as well. I didn’t think I could go through with it. And then, well, then she told me she couldn’t go through with it. And here I am.”

We both sat in silence. Well, not exactly silence. Mongillo made a long slurping sound as he inhaled yet another oyster.

I took my first sip of wine, prompting Vinny to break the silence. “What do you think?” he asked.

“Kind of a runny nose,” I replied.

He regarded me for another moment and said, “Even as a sympathetic character you’re still a complete jackass.”

“Thank you.”

More silence. Pam came over and took our orders. I asked for a turkey sandwich and a Coke. Vinny ordered a butterflied filet mignon with an extra-large baked potato with a side of creamy spinach. He was supposedly doing that Atkins thing, in that he was eating all the meat he could get his hands on, but I’m not so sure he realized you have to cut out the carbs on the other side of the ledger.

Regarding Vinny, he’s huge, and I don’t mean huge like Tom Brady is huge — tall and broad-shouldered and all that. I mean huge like a wooly mammoth is huge, only a whole lot woolier. The guy didn’t so much have hair on his arms, but fur. His skin always had a sheen to it. His chocolate-colored eyes were the size of doughnuts. His odor was that of a pizza parlor.

And his heart, when you got beyond everything else, was the size of a boulder, though that may not have been in evidence on this day.

He said to me, “I don’t mean to speak out of school, Jack, but Maggie’s smart, she’s gorgeous, she’s got a body with curves like the Tour de France, and she loves you. You’ve probably freaked her out without even realizing it. You can salvage this thing.”

Could I? That question was becoming increasingly more bothersome to me than the other particularly obvious one, which was,
Did I want to?

And there was another nagging question as well: How many good women come along in a single life? I had Katherine, who was the greatest woman I’ll ever know, and the only one I’d wanted to raise children with. There was the alluring Samantha Stevens, perhaps more of a rebound woman than anything else. Of course there was Elizabeth Riggs, who I continued to think about every single day, a woman I undoubtedly would have married but for my inability to get over Katherine’s death. And now Maggie Kane. I’m not sure what went wrong there, with either of us.

Time to change the subject.

The food was delivered to the table, mine by Pam, and Vinny’s by a team of University Club servers carrying his various plates and trays, along with a decanter filled with a maroon-colored wine.

I asked, “What do you know about the Jill Dawson murder?”

Mongillo surveyed all that was his, from the steak to the baked potato to the spinach to what he announced was a Frog’s Leap Cabernet. Then he looked at me and said, “The same as everybody else outside of BPD. Very little.”

He cut his steak in half and checked the center to see how it was cooked. Pam waited by his side to make sure everything was okay. Nobody asked me whether my turkey was properly roasted.

Vinny said, “Found dead in her Beacon Hill apartment on January third. Case unsolved, last that I know. Police are being even more tight-lipped about this one than usual. They ain’t even talking to me. And the people who usually whisper about these things aren’t whispering about these things.”

I don’t know who those people were, but still found this interesting. I took a bite of my sandwich, realized what little desire I had to eat, and put it down. Meantime, Mongillo attacked his steak as if it were about to attack him. I was just hoping that no strangers approached the table unannounced and lost a finger or a limb for their mistake.

So I told him about the license and the note and my call to the cops. He whistled a low little whisper, actually put down his fork for a moment, and said, “Prediction: You and I are about to embark on a wild ride.”

You and I.
For some reason I liked that just then, though I wasn’t exactly sure why. We talked about the story, or lack thereof, for a while longer. He did little to hide his disappointment when I informed him that I didn’t have time for dessert, advised me to leave a good tip when the bill came, and concluded, “Well, even if you didn’t get married, it was still a good excuse to have lunch.”

On the street, Vinny jumped in the first cab that ambled by to head to wherever it is that he goes when he’s not in the newsroom. I stood on the curb, trying to flag another taxi. I checked my cell phone for the time and it was three o’clock.

The thought struck me that I should have been on my way to city hall to marry Maggie Kane. But she was somewhere far away and I was wondering where Jill Dawson’s death was going to take me and where my life might ultimately lead after that. All of which made me feel somewhere beyond empty.

I had experienced indescribably lonely moments in my life — most notably when I returned to my house the night that Katherine died and realized that I would never lead the life that I had always dreamed. And there was the morning that Elizabeth Riggs shook her head at me with tears in her eyes before walking down the jetway at Logan Airport to begin a new life in San Francisco; another woman whom I loved was gone. But even in those times, lonely as they were, the past seemed to provide some small amount of solace, even warmth, like a gentle surf lapping up against soft sand.

Standing on Stuart Street, with a frigid wind cutting through my overcoat and rustling my hair, I began to wonder if my life wasn’t becoming a compilation of mistakes, and if my own past was exposing me rather than protecting me.

A cab finally pulled up to the curb. I settled into the backseat and felt the heat on my face and legs, which probably should have felt good, but really didn’t feel like anything at all. I knew only this much: not in a long, long time had I felt so very much alone.

The
rest of the afternoon, it’s worth noting, was an utter disaster.

Peter Martin and I tried every which way to figure out how we could get some sort of story into print pointing out that the paper had received the original driver’s license of a young woman whose murder remains unsolved. But beyond that one line, there was really nothing else to say. We didn’t know the sender. We knew virtually nothing about the murder. And we had no idea if the sender knew anything more about the murder than we did. The whole thing could have been a cruel hoax.

Or maybe not. So around we went, getting nothing more than dizzy and despondent.

All of which is a long way of explaining that when Mongillo pulled up to my desk around about seven o’clock and advised that it would do me some good personally and professionally to accompany him to what he described as a “well-catered affair,” I had neither the energy nor the wherewithal to say no. I was supposed to be in the first-class cabin of a Boeing 757 soaring toward my honeymoon. Instead, I was bound for a stuffy dinner replete with fake smiles and manufactured small talk. Sometimes, too many times, life just doesn’t seem fair.

They say the most dangerous place in Boston is the position ahead of Vinny Mongillo in a buffet line. Well, all right, maybe
they
don’t say it, but
I
do, so I felt especially vulnerable as I stood beside him at a particularly handsome buffet in the grand ballroom of the old Ritz-Carlton hotel in Boston.

Vinny was actually making moaning sounds as he inspected the contents of each serving dish before spooning huge amounts of food onto his groaning plate. I still hadn’t regained my appetite, which made me look something akin to a dieting debutante. Mongillo kept looking at me like I was completely out of my mind.

We were here, I had come to learn, for Hal Harrison’s time,
time
being the old-school Boston parlance for a retirement party or some such person-specific celebration.

Of course, most retiring cops had their time thrown for them in the overdone environs of Lombardo’s in East Boston or the Chateau de Ville in suburban Randolph. But Harrison’s was no ordinary time. First off, he was the retiring police commissioner. Second, his had been a career doused in glory and seasoned by respect. Third, he was an unannounced candidate for mayor of Boston, so this party actually doubled as a political fund-raiser, meaning Mongillo and I were doubling as working reporters — though the only work my cohort appeared to be doing was lugging around his massive plate.

“Do you mind if I confide something to you,” Mongillo said in a low voice as we approached the end of the line.

My reply didn’t matter, so I said nothing as I spooned a few leaves of lettuce onto the empty expanse of my plate.

“You’re a gold-plated idiot,” he said, looking at the small amount of food I had. “This is great stuff. You’ve got swordfish picatta, you’ve got a rare prime rib, you have twice-baked potatoes, and shiitake mushrooms. The paper’s paying our freight. And you’re eating like Paris Hilton before a day at the beach.”

“I’m just trying to leave a little food for the poor people behind us,” I replied.

He didn’t get it, or maybe he did. In either case, he said nothing.

We took some seats at a table filled with men in tight navy blazers and loosely knotted repp ties — cops all, specifically detectives. You could tell from a mile away. Each one of them knew Vinny by name; each one of them seemed glad to see him; each one of them didn’t have a clue who I was and didn’t seem particularly eager to make my acquaintance. And I consider myself the one who’s in good with the BPD.

As we were settling into our chairs, Vinny called out, “So, been to any good murders lately?”

Everybody laughed. Seriously, they really did.

Some of the cops were asking Vinny how the Atkins diet was going, as if they didn’t already know. I mean, these guys were detectives. A couple of others were talking about so-and-so’s disability pension, and the commander at the academy who was bedding down a couple of the new recruits. I sat in silence, my mind drifting off to my temporarily dismal place in this world.

The cop to my right, maybe making conversation out of pity, said to me, “My grandkid has a hamster that eats more than what you do for dinner.”

Even the mention that he had the kid that I didn’t was like a little dagger in my heart, that’s how bad I was at that moment. I mustered a smile and said, “I thought we were paying by the pound, and seeing what Vinny took, didn’t want the paper to go under.”

He laughed, more politely than heartily, and I can’t say I blame him. He stuck out his hand and said, “Mac Foley, I’m a BPD detective.”

I contained my enthusiasm, due to how recently I had heard his name, and given how he was something more than a mystery man to anyone outside of the department, the guy behind the curtain pulling so many levers in countless murder cases, only to emerge in the light of the courtroom, always victorious.

I said, and calmly so, “I’ve heard quite a bit about you. A pleasure to meet you. I’m Jack Flynn with the
Boston Record.
”

He said, “And I’ve heard quite a bit about you as well — all of it good, some of it very recent.”

He smiled a subtle smile at me, not with his teeth but his lips.

I took another bite of my lettuce, and he returned momentarily to his prime rib. Down the other end of the table, Vinny was telling a joke about a birthing camel and an Egyptian gynecologist — or so it seemed from the parts I couldn’t help overhearing.

Foley said, “So you’ve landed yourself in an official report on one of our murder cases.” He laughed a shallow little laugh, though his facial expression didn’t seem to think he thought that fact was riotously funny.

I replied, “Not intentionally. You get the damnedest things in the mail these days.”

He didn’t laugh at that, and again, I couldn’t blame him. I hadn’t exactly brought my A-game to the Ritz-Carlton that night, and wasn’t so sure I’d have it back for a while.

“How did the detectives treat you?” he asked. He asked this more conversationally than anything else, taking another bite of prime rib before I answered. If I had told him that they had slammed me against the
Record
’s front desk, kicked me in the groin, and hit me in the chest with a stun gun, I think he simply would have nodded and looked right through me.

That said, I give him credit for trying to keep the discussion going. The thing was, I didn’t know where he was leading it, which I found unusual. He basically does what I basically do for a living, except with the benefit of forensics and subpoenas: he gets people to tell them things, even if they might regret it later.

I replied, “I couldn’t believe how much they had to say about the Jill Dawson murder.”

He looked like he was about to choke on a piece of beef, but then I added, “Which was nothing at all.”

He looked at me out of the corner of his eye. I smiled back, a big toothy smile. He didn’t even pretend to think this was funny.

Up at the podium in the front of the grand room — which, now that I think of it, is probably where the term
grand ballroom
comes from — Mara Laird spoke into the microphone and asked for everyone’s attention. Everyone, in turn, gave it to her, not only because she was the acting mayor of the city of Boston, but also because she was a terrific physical specimen — tall, blond, and painstakingly fit from a lifetime spent on the ski slopes of northern New England. Not that I was noticing these things in my current state of gloom, but, you know, you can’t help but notice these things.

Mara had the good fortune of being president of the city council when I wrote a series of stories that cost the previous mayor his job, and after being elevated to acting mayor, she had the better sense of mind to know she wasn’t quite ready to be elected to office. So she stood aside and allowed Hal Harrison, the police commissioner, to launch his campaign, which happened to be against a thirty something multimillionaire hedge fund manager who thought it might be more fun to spend other people’s money running the city government than investing his own in a bunch of boring biotech companies. And he was probably right.

The acting mayor prattled on for a while about some of Hal Harrison’s many successes in keeping Boston safe, while the big-ticket contributors in the crowd wondered what kind of access their money would buy, and the regular cops in attendance mentally calculated the size of the pension he had amassed. Laird went on to introduce the senior senator from Massachusetts, Stu Callaghan, who in turn talked about the old days some four decades before when he was the Massachusetts attorney general and Harrison was a hotshot detective quickly climbing the ranks.

My God, this was worse than watching old home movies; at least there was the possibility of seeing yourself in those. When the waiter came around, I asked, “Could I have a tall glass of hemlock?”

He looked at me quizzically. Mac Foley actually laughed — as in a real-life, full-on, can’t-keep-it-inside laugh. Then I added, “Just kidding.”

“I could use a double one of those myself,” Foley said to me, leaning in. But the warmth quickly vanished. He stood up, kept his gaze on me a moment longer than I expected, and walked away into an unlit corner of the vast room.

Onstage, Senator Callaghan was describing Commissioner Harrison as a “great American,” “civic treasure,” and “courageous crimefighter.” Forget the hemlock and give me a noose. I couldn’t take even another minute of this oral flatulence.

I mean, don’t get me wrong. Harrison was a good enough cop, I’m sure. At least the city never seemed ready to tilt out of control under his leadership. But my God, politicians laying it on thick for other politicians — that I’ve always found to be an unseemly sight.

Across the room, I noticed that Mac Foley had settled into another table and was talking intently to yet another cop in a navy blazer and loosely knotted tie. I think they were talking about me. I think this because at one point, the jackass Foley was talking to pointed right at me and Foley said what looked to be “That’s him.” I don’t think they were trying to pick out the guy in the crowd with the most defined abs. This was most definitely strange.

From the podium, all I heard was more blah-blah-blah, and then amid the white noise and nothingness, I heard a word — or maybe it was a phrase — that struck a nerve. It was as if someone had just slapped me across the face. I quickly dialed back into Stu Callaghan, thinking I must have misunderstood something that he had said.

“…when the city was in crisis, and he was the one to bring order to it all by cracking that case open like an egg, saving lives and creating calm. He put the Phantom Fiend behind bars for the rest of his dangerous life…”

My package. My tip. My note. I looked reflexively toward Mac Foley, who happened to be looking directly back at me, a stern look now, his brow furrowed, his eyes cold. He quickly averted his gaze.

When he did, I got up out of my seat in that crouched way you do when you’re trying to be unobtrusive. The crowd was applauding the senator, who was paying tribute to the commissioner. As I slid past Mongillo, I noticed that he was most definitely not clapping. “I’ll see you tomorrow morning,” I whispered to him. And I was gone. The night had paid off in the oddest way.