The Nominee

by Brian McGrory

  To a man, and, okay, woman, though there aren’t many of those, they are more moneyed than the average cop because of all the overtime calls in the godforsaken hours of the early morning. Homicide isn’t a 9–5 job. Many of them wear bespoken suits and expensive Italian ties to make certain that no one confuses them with their carefully regimented brethren cops on the street or the suspects they’re so eager to throw in jail. They are at the top of the order, the fighter pilots of the police force, and they want you to know it.

  I walked down the small driveway aside the perfectly neat little lawn, which, all in all, wasn’t exactly what I had expected of someone who had reached such an august position. The air wasn’t just hot. It was like climbing inside a pig’s anus and sloshing around in his lower intestine, that’s how hot and humid it was. I felt little streams of sweat carve lines in the drying dirt on my forehead. Still, his side door sat open, with only an aluminum screen door separating Sweeney from the thronging masses, which in this case, was me, so I knocked on the metal border. Within seconds, I could see the vague outline of a large black man ambling toward the door in that stiff gait that some older men have—heavy on the left side, then heavy on the right. As he got closer, I could see he was holding a newspaper in one hand and had reading glasses slung low over his nose. Maybe this is what all those consultants mean when they tell us reporter types that our readership was literally dying off.

  “Yes?” he said, slowly with a hint of amusement.

  It occurred to me that they probably got their fair share of traveling Bible salesmen, life insurance peddlers and snake oil con men in these parts, and given my current appearance, I probably looked like the worst of the lot.

  “Mr. Sweeney?” I asked.

  He kept the screen door closed between us. “That’s me,” he said, his amusement transforming to skepticism.

  Already, from his tone and stance, I knew I could at least engage him, and if I could engage him, then chances were vastly improved that I could sway him, and possibly, eventually, move him. Far better he be like this than some by-the-numbers, just-the-facts-ma’am Joe Friday types who wouldn’t tell me if my shirt was on fire unless Rule VIa., second paragraph in the Department Handbook told them that even in retirement, they were required to.

  I gave him my most polite voice, shaped and sorted from years of schooling at the hands of strict nuns in the parochial schools on the not-so-mean streets of South Boston.

  “Sir, you don’t know me, but my name is Jack Flynn, and I’m from Boston.”

  He replied, “Yeah, I do. You’re the writer for theRecord. You used to be in Washington, and now you do a lot of investigative stuff. Liked your stories on the president.” Real casual, almost matter of fact, like it was the most normal thing in the world that I’d show up at his house covered in swamp water to shoot the breeze. Still, the door remained shut between us.

  “I am, and thank you,” I said, unable not to smile at the guy. I regained my footing. “Please pardon my appearance. I just had an unfortunate incident in your town’s namesake marsh. I’m hoping you might be able to help me.”

  Still no invitation, or even a move to open the door, which did not bode well. If he didn’t shake my hand or make direct eye contact without a screen between us, it would be one hell of a lot easier for him to send me on my way.

  “Me help you?” He started laughing a chesty laugh. “An old guy like me living in a swamp village in this hellish outback can help a young buck like you? I can’t wait to hear this.”

  “It’s about our former publisher,” I said, calmly, sincerely. “John Cutter. Some questions have arisen, and I think you might be able to answer them.”

  He just kind of stood there behind that screen like a priest in a confessional.

  I asked, “Is this a bad time or do you have a few minutes to talk.”

  “Son, I ain’t got nothing but time.”

  The door stayed shut.

  I had an idea. “I want to show you something,” I said, and turned around and trotted to the car, grabbed that day’sRecord and a printout of the news clipping on John Cutter’s death, and returned, hoping to bait him outside.

  I’m brilliant. He pressed on the handle, turned back into the kitchen and yelled, “Mother, I’ll be in the yard for a minute,” and came outside. Breakthrough.

  He was, indeed, a very large man, not fat, just big all over, tall with broad shoulders and a barrel chest and something of a gut that didn’t look bad and almost looked good, given the enormity of his frame. He had a full head of grayish-black hair, dark and crinkled eyes, skin the color of bitter-sweet chocolate, and an expression on his face that said there wasn’t an awful lot in this life that he hadn’t already seen.

  I shoved my dirty hand out, and he looked at it for a short moment and shook it. Then we sat on a pair of plastic, KMart-quality lawn chairs around a matching table, and he scanned the headlines.

  “Used to read this damned thing every day,” he said to me, slightly amused again. “Now I only see it when someone brings it down for me. I miss the Red Sox.”

  “Well, you haven’t missed much these last couple of seasons.”

  He didn’t reply.

  I said, “I’m going to be honest with you. There are some lingering doubts, suspicions even, at the very highest levels of my newspaper that John Cutter’s death wasn’t from natural causes five years ago.”

  I stared into Sweeney’s eyes, and he stared back at me, squinting a bit in the midday sun, which seemed to bother him not a whit. Me, the mud was washing down my face in rising rivers of sweat, which I kept trying to wipe off with my filthy hands.

  I continued, “But the paper never asked the questions it probably should have asked back then. It never pushed the investigation as hard as it should have been pushed, maybe out of a fear of appearing too self-serving, of seeking preferential treatment.

  “Probably it was a heart attack, but I just wanted to come down here and make sure that’s what you really, truly believed.”

  Sweeney sat in silence for a moment, looking at me and then the newspaper clip in front of him.

  Finally, he said, “Son, that was the last case of my career, my last day on the job, and probably the most famous victim I ever had. Everyone knew your publisher.”

  He paused to pull a pack of cigarettes out of his chest pocket, lit one and took a long, leisurely puff.

  “Some people never forget a face. I never forget a crime scene. Sometimes that’s not so good, not when you’ve seen the crimes I’ve seen—blood spattered everywhere, pretty young girls with crushed heads, kids shot dead before they ever made their First Communion, babies burned by their dads.”

  That last one seemed to catch him for a moment. “Some dads,” he said, shaking his head and looking down.

  He continued, “In this one, I think it was the old man’s housekeeper who found him in the morning. Stop me if I’m wrong here. She called one of the building managers. The building manager called 911, and a uniformed officer was there within about six minutes.

  “He looks the place over and it all seems fine, but then he finds out from the manager who the dead guy is and he’s saying to himself, ‘Aw, shit.’” He paused. “Sorry, by the way. I don’t mean to make light of it.”

  I shook my head to show I wasn’t offended.

  He took another puff, blew the smoke off to the side, and continued. “He realizes that reporters and politicians are going to be crawling up our butts on this one, so he does everything by the book. He seals off the room and he calls for homicide, just in case. It’s exactly what you’re supposed to do in a sudden death. I’m cleaning out my desk and I get a call directly from the commissioner himself telling me to head up the crime scene. I get there, and because of who the victim is, I, in turn, do everything right by the book. I numbered every item in the room. I diagrammed the whole place—damned nice condominium, if I remember right. We photographed extensively. We dusted. And I ordered a battery of tests.

&n
bsp; “This is my way of saying, if the M.E.”—medical examiner—“came back and said it was a heart attack, which obviously he did, then it was a heart attack. I supply them information. They’re the ones who make determinations.”

  Interesting, but an extraordinarily unsatisfying answer, on multiple levels, so I asked, “Okay, but did you have any reason to believe it was something other than a heart attack?”

  “Son, I’m a crotchety old man. Put a duck on the table and I’ll assume it’s a pigeon in disguise. It’s why I don’t mind saying that I was pretty good at what I did for all those years. You have to be that way in homicide. You’re not dealing with the church choir.”

  I seemed to remember writing a story once about how a member of a church choir in Chelsea bashed his wife’s skull in, but didn’t see the need to raise that issue just then.

  Instead, I asked, “But did you specifically see anything in that room that raised suspicions?”

  He looked away at nothing in particular and grimaced, I think, reflectively, though when you’re old, there’s always the possibility that something actually hurts.

  He said, “In this case, there were no outward signs of a struggle. There were no visible injuries on the victim. There was nothing obviously disrupted in the apartment. It comes down to what the toxicology tests say. I assume they showed no signs of a narcotic?”

  He was asking me. I wanted him to tell me things.

  I looked back at him and said squarely, “I don’t know what the toxicology tests say. I assumed you knew. You were the investigating officer.”

  “But you’ll remember, that was my last day. I was as surprised as anyone that they gave me the case, knowing I was on the way out the door. Those tests take a couple of days to complete. I was gone by the time they came back, which is why I assume they came back negative and that’s why the M.E. determined it was a heart attack. They had to have come back negative.”

  I nodded. “And there was nothing else in that room that bothered you?”

  “Well, there was a dead body. That always kind of bothers me.” He had a nice twinkle in his eye, like he was starting to like the company, someone new to hear his old patter.

  “Nothing else?”

  He grimaced again and shook his head. Was he holding back? Was there some microfiber somewhere on the bed, a pillow out of place, a drop of blood on the kitchen floor? No way to know, not yet. But I would.

  We sat in mutual silence for an elongated moment until I decided I had squeezed him for everything I could, at least at this sitting.

  I changed the subject. “You don’t mind this heat, huh?” By then, all the mud had washed down my face and onto my neck. He, meanwhile, looked like an ad for Johnson’s Baby Powder, if they used old, overweight actors.

  “The heat!” He said this loudly, like I was telling him about it for the first time, like the guy was angry with me.

  Then he said, “I hate the fudging heat. But what are you going to do? I’m old. This is Florida. It’s where I belong, I guess.”

  I got up and we shook hands. He asked if he could keep the newspaper. “Homesick,” he said. “Mother will want to read the obituaries.”

  I asked, “You mind if I call you if something comes up?”

  “Go ahead,” he said. Then he looked me over for a long moment and asked in a whimsical tone, “What happened to you?”

  I replied, “I was chased into a swamp about fifteen miles back by a guy with a gun who had been following me from the airport.”

  He simply shook his head slowly as he looked straight ahead at nothing in particular. He said with a newfound determination, “Call me with the toxicology results.”

  And right then, I knew it wasn’t a request, but a challenge. Questions were popping up all around me like August corn on a Nebraska prairie, blocking my clear view, and with it, my perspective. Right then, I knew it wasn’t just a good idea to get those test results, but something I had to do.

  Six

  AS THE LATE AFTERNOONbreeze turned brisk across Boston Harbor, I was somewhere far beyond thrilled to get out of the ill-fitting Wal-Mart khakis and $12 golf shirt I had bought on my way back to the West Palm Beach airport, even more thrilled to get into that cramped houseboat shower to wash the Eau de Florida Swamp off my body and out of my hair. I had sat silently in a middle seat on the USAirways flight back north, the nice gentlemen on either side leaning considerably away from me. They should be entitled to a free round-trip ticket to anywhere in the world, Envoy Class.

  Oh well. I took Baker out for a quick walk with promises of a longer romp that night—though probably not back to the North End basketball court. I had seen so many guns in the last twenty-four hours that I was starting to feel like Charlton Heston and didn’t need to tempt the presence of any more.

  I hadn’t yet reported the shooting to the authorities because I had too much work to do in Boston and didn’t want to be detained any longer than necessary in Florida. I also didn’t want the Florida State Police to get out in front ofThe Boston Record quite yet on a story that could have considerable impact on my newspaper, assuming that my merry gunman was in some way connected to John Cutter’s death.

  On the drive to work, I couldn’t help but think of how change was now encompassing, if not overwhelming me. Maybe this would be one of my last forays into the newsroom, because why would I want to stay and watch theRecord —myRecord —sold to a cost-cutting chain and gutted like a freshly caught tuna on a deep-sea fishing boat?

  But what to be at this tender age. Being a reporter is like getting a Ph.D. in philosophy, meaning, it doesn’t really prepare you to do anything else, except, perhaps, public relations, but what right-thinking person would ever want to do that? Perhaps I should be a plumber, the problem being, I don’t like small places and don’t actually know anything about pipes. A fireman? I don’t like the heat. A carpenter? I don’t own a hammer and the only thing I know about a Phillips is that it’s the surname of a boarding school that would never have admitted me, and rest assured, they didn’t teach carpentry. I still held hope, not to mention trust, in Paul’s abilities that these would be purely hypothetical questions.

  It was a little past fiveP.M. when, sitting in rush hour traffic, I caught a glimpse of the sun’s rays doing a little two-step across the massive windows of theRecord building, and I’ll confess here and now, with Paul’s warning of a possible sale still rattling around my brain, I wasn’t quite prepared for the flood of memories that this familiar, even mundane, sight so powerfully unleashed.

  I thought of my first visit to the newspaper. I was eight years old. My father was aRecord pressman spending yet another weekend working another overtime shift in his dark green, ink-stained apron. I remember being entranced at the sight of the hulking machines whirling around in creation of that day’s paper—the sounds of the presses, the smell of the paper, the splotches of black ink everywhere you looked.

  I thought of the lede—a newspaper word meaning the first paragraph of a story—to my first front-page story, headlined “Dare Jump Death” (“Two Quincy teenagers, acting on a dare from a small group of friends, jumped sixty feet to their deaths yesterday in the frigid waters of an abandoned granite quarry”). I thought of the crackle of gunfire at Congressional Country Club a couple of years ago that led to me breaking the biggest story of my life, not to mention one of my right ribs.

  I knew I had one more good one to come, at least while the paper was under Cutter-Ellis control: the embellished record of Governor Lance Randolph—a story getting better by the moment as the nice radio announcer informed me that President Clayton Hutchins had officially nominated him that afternoon to be attorney general. I had already been researching the Randolph story out for a little more than a week, and rushed back from Florida, among other reasons, to work on it.

  I found myself with a cross of conflicting emotions—short-term excitement over the Randolph story, long-term dread over what was about to happen to my newspaper, and a very pronoun
ced apprehension at who out there was trying to kill me for reasons that I didn’t yet know. I was confused and a little bit disoriented. I looked forward to stepping inside the familiar environs of the newsroom at the critical deadline hour.

  Pulling beyond the unmanned guard shack into the paper’s side parking lot, I saw a Boston Police cruiser idling at a horizontal angle, its overhead lights flashing and its headlights pulsing, blocking the way. This was a bad afternoon for a foreign dignitary to be visiting our editorial board. I thought, too much to do, too much at stake, to be worried about the overzealous whims of the Secret Service protecting the King of Guam, though wait a minute, isn’t Guam one of ours? Where the hell is Guam, anyway?

  As I slowly approached the car, the young cop leaning on it gruffly waved me off and barked, “Turn around. This is off-limits.”

  I rolled down my window, contemplating whether to explain to the gentleman that this was a private way, owned and operated by the good people ofThe Boston Record, and he’d be best to get the hell out of the way.

  Instead, I said, “Afternoon, officer. I work here. I’m just trying to get through to the parking lot.”

  “Did you hear me?” he said, his voice as sharp as a Swiss Army knife blade. “I said there’s no traffic beyond this point.”

  I have already been blessed with a vital dislike, even disdain, for authority, and the idea of a rookie cop directing traffic at a newspaper was like a cat suddenly gaining entry to a mouse hole, not that I regard reporters as a bunch of mice, or even any other kind of rodent, but you get the picture.