Cover Story

by Gerry Boyle

  Praise for Gerry Boyle’s Cover Story

  “Gerry Boyle delivers a powerful story with deft dialogue and detail.”

  —San Antonio Express-News

  “Boyle’s snappy prose stops just short of hard-boiled, letting some poignancy slip into his characters’ plights . . . Powerful.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “Boyle’s dialogue is crisp, poignant, and often witty . . . An excellent series.

  —Maine Sunday Telegram

  “The Jack McMorrow mysteries are some of the best regional sleuth tales on the market today.”

  —Midwest Book Review

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  COVER STORY

  First Islandport edition / May 2016

  All Rights Reserved.

  Copyright © 2000 by Gerry Boyle

  ISBN: 978-1-939017-78-9

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2016931851

  Islandport Press

  P.O. Box 10

  Yarmouth, Maine 04096

  www.islandportpress.com

  books@islandportpress.com

  Publisher: Dean Lunt

  Cover Design: Tom Morgan, Blue Design

  Interior Book Design: Teresa Lagrange, Islandport Press

  Cover image courtesy of iStock / Copyright © JJRD

  Printed in the USA

  For Vic

  There is no odor so bad as that which arises from goodness tainted.

  It is human, it is divine, carrion.

  —Henry David Thoreau

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Cover Story could not have been written without the generous assistance of Jeanne Boyle, a truly intrepid city planner; and of Joy and Willie Rodriguez, who graciously showed me their piece of Brooklyn. Very special thanks go to my literary agent, Helen Brann, who provided steadfast support and invaluable guidance.

  INTRODUCTION

  Readers used to ask, “Why exactly did Jack McMorrow leave the New York Times and move to Maine?”

  “It’s a long story,” I’d say. “Why don’t you ask him?”

  After a year or two, I asked him myself. The result was Cover Story, which takes place mostly in New York City, and has McMorrow revisiting his old haunts, a former lover, a cop friend named Butch—the world he left behind. Thomas Wolfe famously warned us that we can’t go home again. McMorrow should have known better.

  I lived in Manhattan for a short time many years ago, working for a book publisher until, by mutual agreement, we parted ways. I didn’t know the New York that McMorrow and Butch knew: latenight crime scenes with bullet-spattered victims, handcuffed perps in Kafkaesque courtrooms. So I had to learn it.

  Researching this book, I spent some time in Manhattan. I rode the subway, back and forth, uptown and downtown, walked from downtown to the Bronx. I stood in corridors outside courtrooms and watched the defendants strut past, the embodiment of bravado. I followed them into court, saw bravado battered by harsh reality.

  I hung out at a housing project in Red Hook, in Brooklyn, got buzzed in and let myself out. Selected the scene of one of the book’s crimes in an apartment house in Washington Heights, walked the hallways and listened to the conversations, smelled the cooking smells. And it was there that I first imagined one of McMorrow’s former girlfriends, a woman named Christina who wants to start up where they left off.

  Mostly I learned about McMorrow—a little more about what makes Jack tick.

  Some readers may think that writing five novels with the same central character ought to be sufficient to know that character inside and out, as well as you know yourself. I’ve found that’s not the case at all, and I look forward to each outing and the chance to divulge something new about McMorrow. In fact, if I thought I knew all there was to know about Jack and Clair, Roxanne and Sophie, I’d be less inclined to spend all of this time with them. In each story something is revealed about them that surprises me. It can be an episode from their past, or a reaction to an event in the present. My hope is that readers are struck by these revelations as much as I am.

  Indeed, there are many places in these novels where I don’t know what’s coming, or how McMorrow will react. As I sit at my writing desk and watch the story unfold, I’m more viewer than director as I channel Jack.

  This was the case in Cover Story more than most, largely because this is a story about inner demons. We all have some, I think—some of us more than others. And some of us are better than others at shutting those demons away, refusing to listen to their haunting whispers in the middle of the night.

  I knew Jack had shadows in his past. This was clear in his debut in Deadline, when he threw himself into fights, drank more than he should, chased bad guys into dark alleys, literally and figuratively. At that point, McMorrow didn’t fully confide the missteps in his past, and I didn’t press him. Instead, I let him reveal his inner self bit by bit, book by book. Fifteen years after I wrote Cover Story, I’m still learning things about Jack. In Straw Man, the McMorrow in progress, we’re having conversations about violence and justice and even faith. Jack is surprising me in this new story more than ever.

  But back to those demons, because Cover Story is full of them.

  What were the events that shaped McMorrow? Why did he leave the fast track of the New York Times to move to the woods of Maine? Why did he trade Manhattan for Maine mill towns? Why did he cut himself off from his past? Why is he so hell-bent on righting wrongs? What is he thinking when he vanishes into that dark place in his head?

  In this novel, more than others, McMorrow lets us peek into that place. He lets down his guard and seems occasionally vulnerable. He wonders about his life’s course, even lets himself consider what it would have been like if he’d stayed with Christina, his artist girlfriend of the New York years. But then Jack yanks the curtain shut. It’s time to get to work.

  There are villains on every street corner in Cover Story, and they’re especially dangerous. They come in all shapes and sizes, from all walks of life. When I was writing the book and McMorrow was going up against these formidable foes, I actually wondered how he’d survive. There was one of him and dozens of them. And set against the big-city backdrop, it was hard to tell who was good and who was bad, where the next bullet would
come from. The demons aren’t all in the past.

  I hope you enjoy this trip down a particularly dangerous memory lane, and that you’re rooting for McMorrow all the way. In this one he needs all the help he can get.

  —Gerry Boyle, October 23, 2014

  NEW YORK CITY, SEPTEMBER 1968

  It was the year he was ten, a new boy in a new school who had taken to long walks home, enjoying the solitude after a long day with his blue-blazered tormenters.

  That September afternoon, he poked along. Into the park, out of the park, found an umbrella in a trash can and pretended a stiletto popped out of the end. He was still carrying the umbrella, twirling it like Fred Astaire, when he decided to continue past his street and visit his father at work.

  It was five more blocks uptown, then up the steps, through the lobby and past the Tyrannosaurus rex. As always, he flitted through the museum like a bird through a familiar thicket, skipping up the marble stairs, darting around corners, giving a brief wave when his father’s colleagues passed.

  But on this day there was something odd about the place. An emptiness, an ominous echo to his footsteps. A gray-haired woman he’d seen many times before turned as he hurried past. She didn’t say hi, didn’t call his name, just looked at him like she felt sorry for him. Had his father told her about the big kids at the new school?

  He wondered as he trotted down the last long corridor. Why would his father tell her? Had he told the whole place that his son was being picked on? The boy frowned at the thought, and then he rounded the corner and there was another woman, the younger one who worked with his father on the beetles and looked sort of like one, with her big nose.

  She walked toward him, with that same weird expression, and he stopped and she touched his shoulder and looked at him like he was sick. And he said, “What?” But before she could answer, Butch came from behind her and put an arm around his shoulder and hurried him away, back down the corridor the way he had come.

  Butch was his museum friend, two years older, a freckle-faced public-school kid who was allowed to wear dungarees with the knees ripped out. It had always been just the two of them, waiting for their fathers, the beetle man and the security guard. And Butch always led the way into some sort of adventure, filching food from the cafeteria, shadowing pretty girls through the darkened exhibits.

  Jack was Tom; Butch was Huck.

  But this day Butch was different, too. Serious. Intent. Leading Jack down the hall, his broken umbrella no longer twirling, until they turned in to an alcove behind a marble bust of some long-dead explorer. And Butch looked down at Jack, keeping one hand on the younger boy’s shoulder.

  “They’re gonna try to keep you in the dark, Jackie,” he said. “ ’Cause that’s what grown-ups do. That’s what they did to me with my ma. They treat you like you’re an idiot.”

  “What?” Jack said. “What’s the matter?”

  “It’s your dad, Jackie. He had a heart attack. A real bad one. They took him to the hospital. They think he might make it, but he might not.”

  “My dad?” Jack whispered, his own heart nearly stopping.

  His dad could die? No, he couldn’t. He mustn’t. No, they couldn’t let him.

  “No,” he said.

  His eyes welled with tears. His lower lip started to tremble. His legs began to buckle, and he felt like he was going to be sick. He let go of the umbrella and it clattered on the floor.

  Butch, who had lost his mother at seven, put both hands on Jack’s shoulders.

  “Yeah, it’s tough, Jackie,” he said. “But that just means you’re gonna have to be tougher. This is just one of those things that happens, you know? You can’t give up. You just suck it in and keep going. You got that? I’ll help you out, buddy. I’ll be there for you. Now let’s go.”

  So they headed for the hospital, two boys on the subway. And when they got to the waiting room, they found Jack’s mother. The floor around her chair was littered with tissues, like petals fallen from a flowering tree. She sat on one side of Jack and Butch sat on the other. Butch offered M&Ms. Jack’s mother offered Kleenex. But Jack didn’t need the tissues because on the way up in the elevator, Butch had given him more advice: Guys don’t cry in public.

  So Jack didn’t. And his father lived, with a fragile heart the doctors said had been damaged by some jungle parasite contracted during a collecting trip. And when the older boys at school said Jack’s father had heartworm from kissing a dog, he fought them until he was exhausted and bloody, the playground gravel ground into his face. When Jack told Butch, he waited outside Jack’s school with his public-school friends.

  The prep-school kids never bothered Jack again.

  “You can always count on me, Jackie,” Butch said. “And I can count on you. Sometimes there’ll be things you can do for me. We’re gonna stick together, ’cause we’re buds. Like brothers. You remember that.”

  Many years later, Jack McMorrow did.

  1

  It was late afternoon, sultry and sooty with an occasional drip from an air conditioner falling on the sidewalk like the first drop of summer rain.

  Times Square was overrun, not by the hustlers and hookers of my time, but by tourists. Hand-holding couples, families with children, all stared into the shop windows, gathered in clumps to eye the menus outside the restaurants. And when they ventured in, they kept their bags from FAO Schwarz and Planet Hollywood close to them. They ordered in loud voices as though the waiters, because their accents were unfamiliar, must be hard of hearing.

  I walked with them, from 57th Street down Eighth Avenue. Like kids on a field trip, we gazed up at the walls of the glittering canyon: the streaking lights, flashing Vegas billboards, strobes that blipped from rooftops like muzzle flashes. The colors were brighter, gone digital in my absence. The streets were clean, the people were smiling and laughing, and even the one or two remaining topless places seemed shiny and wholesome as supermarkets.

  At the corner of 45th Street, I paused and looked down the street as the crowd swept by. In the old days, the roaring 1980s, I would have been accosted by men selling women, by women selling themselves, by people who presumed that because I was male and apparently alone, I wanted to go to a place where people wore flea collars and beat each other with rubber hoses.

  Sometimes I’d gone along.

  I’d had coffee with runny-nosed, crack-addicted prostitutes. Interviewed doormen at clandestine backstreet clubs. And those excursions I turned into stories for the Times, where I was a metro reporter. I covered some city politics, education for a time, but I was most at home on my forays into the jungle of humanity. I’d drop by the precincts, ride with the detectives, venture into the world where there were two types of people: those who were pursued and those who did the pursuing.

  And I’d listen to them all and scribble in my notebook, then hurry back to the newsroom by subway, by cab, but always walking the last blocks through Times Square so that I could feel the city before I sat down to write.

  That night I walked the same route, down to 43rd Street, across Eighth Avenue, and halfway down the block. I paused in front of the glass doors, stepped aside as a photographer burst outside and trotted up the street, his camera bag bouncing on his hip. I didn’t know him, but I felt the urge to call out: Where are you going? I’ll come along.

  But then I took a deep breath and pushed inside. The door swung shut behind me and the dissonant symphony of New York was replaced by a marble-walled hush.

  One of the security guards looked up. He nudged the other one. They stood with their hands on their holstered hips and looked me up and down.

  “Well, look what the cat dragged in,” the first guard said.

  “Mr. McMorrow himself,” the other guard said.

  “Holy Toledo,” the first guard said. “Where you been, buddy?”

  “He went to New Hampshire and joined a commune,” the second guard said.

  “It was Maine,” I said, smiling as I approached the counter. “And I didn�
�t join anything.”

  “Well,” the first guard said, “you always was a little antisocial.”

  He grinned and we shook hands. His name was Gerard. His partner’s name was Dominic. They wore blue uniforms and silver hair.

  “How’s it going, guys?” I asked.

  “Same old, same old,” Gerard said. “You know, it’s the Times.”

  “Changes course about as fast as an oil tanker,” Dominic said.

  I remembered Dominic saying that before.

  “You guys look good.”

  “You, too, McMorrow,” Dominic said. “All that fresh air and pine needles must agree with you. What’s it been? Three, four years?”

  “Seven. The first four you didn’t notice I was gone.”

  “Sure we did,” Dominic said, coming around the counter. “Then the next three we forgot all about you. So whatcha been doing? You find something to write about up there in Maine?”

  “Only when I can’t find honest work.”

  “You coming back?”

  “Maybe some stringing in northern New England.”

  “Gonna interview a few moose or what?” Gerard said.

  “I could. Had a cow moose and a calf in my backyard most of the summer.”

  “Whatcha got?” Dominic said. “A goddamn estate?”

  “No, just woods. Where I live, the woods sort of go on forever.”

  “I’d like that,” Gerard said.

  “I wouldn’t. Gives me the heebie-jeebies,” Dominic said. “You seen that movie Deliverance, haven’t you?”

  We grinned.

  “At least in the city, they shoot you in the backside. No, you can have that country stuff. I like the sound of a goddamn siren every little while, you know? Tells you everything is under control. Up there in the woods, in the goddamn dark, bugs and noises . . .”

  Dominic shuddered. Gerard put his pen to the clipboard on the counter.

  “Who you seeing, Jack? We gotta fill this in, ’cause technically you’re a visitor.”

  “Technically and otherwise,” I said. “Ellen Jones. National desk. Newsroom still on the third floor?”