Cover Story

by Brenda Buchanan

  Reporters are pretty much free of sartorial standards, but a glance in the mirror behind the bar showed my longish hair had been transformed into a cowlicked mess by the winter scourge known as hat head. Finger-combing it behind my ears, I asked about the upcoming trial, figuring he’d be on top of the local chinwag.

  “It’s sad, man. Boothby’s a good dude. Had a lot of troubles. Must have snapped, thinking he was going to lose his kid to the state.”

  “Did you know O’Rourke?”

  “Little bit. Seemed like a regular guy, or at least he tried to be. Liked the ladies, and having a good time.” He nodded toward the other end of the bar. “The big man down over there worked with O’Rourke at the DHHS.”

  Big man was right. Easily six foot five and three hundred pounds, the guy he nodded at was standing rather than sitting, an inscrutable look on his pockmarked face.

  The bartender watched me take his measure. “His name’s Little. Roland Little. Keeps to himself, but he might be up for talking to you.”

  I slid off my stool, grabbed my parka.

  The bartender crowed like a successful matchmaker. “I’ll bring your fish and chips over there.”

  When I said hello, Roland Little grunted without looking away from the TV.

  “Bartender says you knew Frank O’Rourke.”

  He took his time looking over at me, his balding head bobbing like an enormous turtle.

  “Yup.” His attention returned to the screen.

  “Trial starts tomorrow.”

  “No shit.”

  I sipped my beer, turned my own eyes to the screen and pretended to lose myself in the game. After a few minutes the bartender showed up and slid an overflowing plate of fish and chips in front of me. Little pulled his eyes away from the tube long enough to order his own supper, nodding at my plate and holding up two fingers the size of stogies.

  “Make mine a double,” he said.

  He didn’t object when I offered to buy him another beer, but I knew better than to take that as agreement to be interviewed. I took my time eating, savoring the crunchy, salty hand-cut fries. When Little finally spoke, it was in a quiet voice with a pronounced Downeast accent.

  “Why do you care what I think about the trial?”

  “I write for the Portland Chronicle. I’m trying to learn what I can about O’Rourke.”

  More silence. I ate a few more chips.

  “How do you know I won’t peddle you a line of bull?”

  “I don’t.”

  He took a long swig of beer. “Frank didn’t work here long. Year and a half maybe. I didn’t know him well, but guess it got to him pretty quick.”

  “The workload?”

  “The whole fucking job.” Little looked sideways at me, emotion flashing across his moonlike face. “You can’t imagine the hellish things you see every day when you’re trying to protect kids from their own families.”

  The bartender appeared with a platter piled high with fish and chips. Before digging in, Little swiveled his big body sideways and faced me head-on.

  “You fucking better not quote anything I say.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I don’t want to be in your goddamn newspaper. Not by name, not by description. I spend my days trying to make people give a shit about the stuff you’re supposed to give a shit about when you bring a child into the world. It’s a grinding job, and nobody who does it deserves to die.” His flat gray eyes were defiant, as if he expected me to challenge him.

  “Got it,” I said.

  “Good,” he said.

  We ate in silence for a while.

  “If I promise not to quote you, will you tell me how you think it happened?”

  “You mean Frank getting murdered?”

  I nodded.

  “It happened because some people are animals. You cross ’em and they go for your throat. I don’t know this Boothby asshole but if he’s like most parents who are in danger of losing their kids, he thinks protecting them means keeping the DHHS worker far from their door, when we’re probably the best chance the kid has at a normal life.”

  I thought about his answer for a minute, realized it didn’t match the question I asked.

  “That may be why it happened, but how did it happen? How did a social worker end up being stabbed to death when making a house call? Did he have a bad history with Boothby?”

  Little’s eyes receded into narrow slits in his ham-like cheeks. “Are you fucking kidding me?” His booming voice silenced the room. “You want to blame it on Frank, you little...” He shoved his enormous frame away from the bar and put his face way too close to mine. His breath was sour and his clothes reeked of woodsmoke.

  “Don’t cross me, you weasel.” He addressed himself to the rapt crowd. “This guy’s come to town to do a hatchet job on Frank O’Rourke. Do not fucking talk to him.”

  The bartender had come around to our side of the bar by then. Brave or foolish, he had a restraining arm on Little when he pointed to the door.

  “Time to go,” he said, but he was talking to me.

  * * *

  Two-for-two, I thought while I tried to outrace the blasted wind back up the hill. Or oh-for-two, depending how you looked at it. Eddie O’Rourke wanted me to write only laudatory things about his kid brother. Big Roland Little decided on the basis of three questions that I was out to vilify his coworker. In this insular town near the Canadian border, objective questions about Frank O’Rourke’s death apparently were considered attacks on his character.

  It was going to be a long damn week.

  Though the friendly voice of my editor, Leah Levin, would have been welcome, I texted her instead of calling, letting her know I was settled in. Six months earlier, I would have told her of the Speaker’s parking lot antics and Roland Little’s furious eruption in what probably was the town’s only bar, embellishing the stories to make her laugh. But the previous summer I’d become caught up in a story that forced us onto a different footing.

  Leah hadn’t informed the antacid-popping boys in the front office when I was threatened while covering a long-cold case. They nearly wet their collective pants when a man who’d spent four decades thinking he’d gotten away with murder tried to kill me, too. Had they been newspapermen rather than bean counters, they’d have been proud of my role in solving that notorious case. But the suits Upstairs didn’t know shit about journalism. A half a year later they still were leaning on Leah to make sure I steered clear of anything that smelled like trouble. The result was a tacit “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. I knew her job could be on the line if she didn’t report my Machias skirmishes, so I simply wouldn’t tell her about them.

  Chapman Media’s lieutenant in charge of local operations—an aging preppie named Jack Salisbury—hadn’t wanted me to leave Portland at all. He convened a sit-down meeting in early December after Leah announced I’d be spending a week or more in Machias covering the Boothby trial. Salisbury thought it would be sufficient for the Chronicle to have a reporter in the courtroom for the opening statements and closing arguments, and use wire service copy for everything in between. Disgusted, I pulled out the “Paulie Finnegan would be rolling in his grave” argument.

  “The Chronicle is the newspaper of record in this state,” I said. “We can’t abdicate our responsibility to cover an important murder trial in order to save the cost of a few nights in a motel.”

  “The newspaper of record. It sounds so important. And you’re what? A backwoods Bob Woodward?” Salisbury had a scar on his lip that made every facial expression look like a sneer. “It’s 2015, Joe. We can no longer afford to let our reporters go off on little junkets.”

  “A junket? Have you ever been to Machias in January?”

  “It’s a junket when the assignment’s to cover an open-and-sh
ut case.” He pushed his chair back from the conference table. “I’ll be reviewing your expense sheet personally to make sure you’re appropriately frugal.”

  * * *

  The clanking, hissing steam radiator in my room was throwing off waves of beautiful heat. My phone said it was eight forty-five so I speed dialed Christie on her cell. Owning a diner requires her to rise at a hellish hour each morning, so nine o’clock was her witching hour. She picked up as soon as my number flashed on her screen.

  “Say hey, good lookin’.” Her tone defeated the lighthearted greeting, but I completed our corny ritual anyway.

  “Whatcha’ got cookin?”

  “Too damn much tonight.”

  “Theo?”

  “Who else? He ducked out the door as soon as we finished supper. Disappeared before I could ask where he was going and who he’d be with.”

  A few weeks earlier, Christie’s son had morphed from an easygoing, sweet kid into an uncommunicative stranger. Though she’s not a fretter by nature, Theo’s sudden personality shift startled the mellowness out of Christie.

  “You need to consider what goes on inside the head of a sixteen-year-old boy,” I said. “Actually, you don’t want to know. It’s sex. Pretty much 24-7.”

  “I’d be relieved if he had a girlfriend. But he’s not dressing better or showering more often. He slithers around the house with a sneaky look on his face, avoiding eye contact.”

  “Probably because he’s thinking about sex all the time.” I asked about my dog, Louisa, who was bunking with Christie while I was away.

  “She’s such a good girl,” Christie said. “Greets me with a kiss when I come through the door, wags her tail when she hears my voice. It’s good to have a sweet being in the house now that my son has turned into a sullen stranger.”

  “I’ll try to talk with him if you want, but we might want to hold off for now, see if he works it out on his own.”

  “I hate this. Makes me feel like a failed parent.”

  I leaned over and untied my boots before hoisting my feet onto the hassock. “Stop that crazy talk.”

  “I know. It’s boring. So let’s talk about your day. How was the ride Downeast?”

  “Long. No traffic or even moose to keep it interesting. I stopped for gas as soon as I pulled into Machias and bumped into Eddie O’Rourke, who made it known he disliked this morning’s story.”

  “Because you wrote about how his baby brother washed out in one DHHS office after another?”

  “Mr. Speaker didn’t articulate a precise critique. Just glowered and hissed.”

  “That must have been a treat.”

  I’d been planning to tell Christie the whole stupid story, and about big Roland, too, but Theo was giving her enough to worry about. “A reporter who wants to be popular should find another job,” I said.

  “That’s vintage Paulie Finnegan.”

  “You bet. Paulie felt like he was slacking if he didn’t get under the skin of the powers that be. Of course, now that we’re in the infotainment era, it’s all about access to sources and how fast you can tweet, even if they’re peddling bullshit.”

  “Poor Joe. Stressing about the future of journalism again?”

  “You’d be worried too, if people stopped eating bacon and eggs.”

  “Eating bacon and eggs will never go out of style,” she said. “But if it did, I’d adapt somehow, just like you will.”

  “Right now I need to adapt to the Washington County weather. It’s the damn tundra here.”

  “You know what they say about Downeast Maine,” she said. “The only thing more rugged than the coastline is the women.”

  Chapter Three

  Monday, January 5, 2015

  Frank O’Rourke was a handsome son of a gun. Long-limbed and raven-haired, he didn’t look like a state official in his khaki pants and moccasins. O’Rourke’s long-lashed eyes were closed, his handsome face placid. Had there not been a crimson bloom on the chest of his yellow golf shirt, the images fanned across the prosecutor’s desk could have been a catalog model feigning a nap on the front porch of a fishing camp.

  “Damn shame, isn’t it?” Geoff Mansfield leaned back in an old-style wooden chair, studying me as I worked my way through digital crime scene photographs so vivid the metallic scent of blood seemed to hang in the air. No prosecutor in Portland or even Bangor had ever invited me to sit down to chat an hour before jury selection, much less let me see actual evidence, which brought to mind Paulie Finnegan’s saying about unexpected kindness bestowed by lawyers and cops.

  When you smell a rat, watch your step.

  When I’d called around to my courthouse sources to ask about Mansfield, I’d gotten an earful. Experienced prosecutors from the AG’s criminal division try all murder cases in Maine, but Mansfield was nobody’s idea of a high-level trial guy. The consistent gripe was that he routinely blew off the tedious work of evaluating evidence and weaving it into a coherent narrative, relying instead on his good looks and a charming manner.

  A bit more digging revealed that Geoff Mansfield had something his colleagues inside the AG’s office didn’t have—political connections with family roots. His uncle had been a legendary Attorney General who held office through both Democratic and Republican administrations, and his mother was a second cousin to the O’Rourke clan. When the powers-that-be were deciding who would prosecute the man accused of murdering Frank O’Rourke, those two facts must have catapulted Geoff to the head of the line.

  His pale blue eyes studied me across the boxes of files crowding the conference table as he tried to rope me in to his theory of the case. “It’s so damn tragic. Dedicated civil servant, murdered doing what’s got to be one of the most important and most dangerous jobs in the state of Maine.”

  “Sad story for all concerned,” I said.

  “If you mean that the Boothby girl is now an orphan for all intents and purposes, I guess you’re right. I’m sure it’s hard for her, knowing that her father’s a murderer. But once this trial is over and he’s in prison for the rest of his life, she’ll be able to move on. She’ll be a heck of a lot better off living with a normal family instead of her drunken failure of a father.”

  “Sounds like he had a rough time of it after his wife died.”

  “My eyes and ears in the Sheriff’s Department say he had a rough time of it before she died, even before he met her and they had the little girl,” Mansfield said. “He came from a screwed-up family and—no surprise—turned out to be a screwed-up guy. If a damn bait truck hadn’t flipped on Route One, the Sheriff’s Department would have been there to back Frank up when he went to take the girl into custody, and he’d be alive today.”

  Mansfield noticed my puzzled look.

  “A truck driver in a hurry took a corner too fast and dumped several tons of bait all over the road the afternoon Frank was murdered. The accident tied up every cop in the county.” He blew air out from between his lips. “So Frank wound up at the girl’s house all by himself, thinking the cops were right behind him. Boothby wouldn’t have pulled out that fish-gutter if there’d been a deputy standing there.”

  This must be the how part of the story, I thought, watching his fair skin flush as he worked his way into the argument he’d likely been practicing in front of the mirror. I thought he needed to tone down the righteousness a little bit, but it wasn’t my job to give him advice.

  “You’re a distant cousin of the O’Rourkes, right? What was Frank like?”

  “I only met him a few times. He was a few years older than me. A group of us hung around together at family reunions. But I didn’t really know him.” He stood and smiled a let’s-wind-this-up smile. “I’ve been spending a lot of time with his older brothers during my trial prep. They’re in terrible pain. He was the kid brother they adored, and now he’s dead. I�
��m going to do everything I can to make sure his killer spends the rest of his life in prison.”

  “I appreciate the prosecutorial context,” I said.

  Mansfield stood and stretched. He was probably six-three, with plenty of muscle under the shirt and tie. He put a big hand on my left shoulder as we walked together toward the door of his borrowed office.

  “Prosecutorial context is a good thing, Joe. Necessary for complete media coverage. Feel free to stop by during the trial if you have questions. If I’m too busy, Shirley will say so. Otherwise, my door’s open to you.”

  Before I could ask who Shirley was I spotted her across the reception area at a desk cluttered with pink phone message slips. A nameplate identified her as Shirley Beal. In her right hand, she held an oversized coffee mug that said Obey Me.

  I stopped to introduce myself, gesturing at her mug. “I’ll do my best.”

  Shirley had a baritone chuckle. “Good to have that established.”

  In desperate need of a hit of caffeine, I figured I’d better hustle down the hill and find a cup before court was called to order. As I stepped out the side door of the courthouse, two late-model cars—a dark blue Volvo and the Speaker’s black Expedition—wheeled into the lot and pulled into adjacent empty spaces along the far fence. I stepped back inside and stood in the doorway until bodies began to emerge.

  Thanks to my pretrial research, I was able to identify the other two O’Rourke brothers by sight when they climbed out of the Volvo. Patrick was an attorney-turned-real estate developer. His current project involved rehabbing former mills in Lewiston and Auburn into condos and artist lofts, a project on which he was expected to make several million bucks. He had the Speaker’s thickset build.

  Tom was a bachelor radiologist at Maine Medical Center, often pictured in the society pages squiring one gorgeous young woman or another to various benefit events around Portland. Part of his face was hidden beneath a wide-brimmed felt hat.