Ferren slapped the table with his palms as he stood up. “Good. Then it’s almost show time. Come with me. The president would like to see you for a few minutes before we head out.”
Bank clapped Randolph on the back. Ferren flicked open the door. At this moment, Randolph should have felt elated. But what nagged at him was a sense that he might have just lost all control.
Eight
IALL BUT STAGGEREDinto the newsroom, my mind soft and my body weak, drifting past one messy metal desk after another, every frantic reporter in a state of deadline panic, until I finally arrived at mine. I stripped off my jacket and slumped deep into my chair.
I put my head in my hands and took a quick assessment of my situation, trying to add structure to a life that was whirling out of control. Not to sound too selfish here, but I was pretty much in the process of losing just about everything I had of any value, including not just my job, but my life. Add to this the fact that we didn’t have a natural successor to the publisher’s office at a time when we needed one most. This may explain why Paul had spent so much energy trying to recruit me to the executive suite. To say the very least, things were not good. In fact, I couldn’t picture them being any worse, unless, of course, I was the one who was dead.
I was flailing away in this deep pool of self-pity when I felt a presence along the edge, and looked up to see the rather rotund figure of Vinny Mongillo standing beside my desk, no doubt ready to throw me a lifeline.
He wrapped his arm, all damp and beefy, around my neck and jerked my head against his heaving stomach, saying in a determined, monotonic voice, “We’re going to get that cocksucker, Jack, and when we do, we’ll string him up by his shriveled balls.”
I pulled my head away, politely so, not wanting to offend him. This was Vinny’s version of a condolence call. The Irish bring a casserole and say the Rosary. Wasps offer a handshake and a sympathetic grimace. Italians like Vinny vow to rip people’s private parts off. Right now, I think I liked his approach best.
Regarding Vinny, he’s my best friend in the building, pure and simple, a veritable olive-colored mountain of a man with a constant sheen of perspiration on his brow and the forever odor of a well-made pepperoni pizza emanating from parts of him that no decent-thinking person ever wants to see. I actually think he steps out of the shower sweating.
Which is fine, because he’s also one of the best reporters ever to grace the pages ofThe Boston Record. He sits in a custom-built, extra-wide chair at an impeccably neat desk in the heart of the newsroom, working a pair of side-by-side telephones, hanging up one only to take a call on the other, always asking, “What’s new? What d’ya have? What can you tell me? C’mon, you’re fucking with me,” the receiver tucked between his flabby cheek and his puffy neck while his fingers furiously dance across the computer keyboard with information, insight, or gossip from yet another well-placed source.
His is not the quiet work of documents and musty records. No, it’s all based on human relationships, on the spoken word, the little nod, the off-the-record guidance. People tell him things because people tell him things. If they don’t, they believe someone else will, and they figure it’s better to leave their own mark. Fear, and the exploitation thereof, is one of the most unheralded tools of the journalism trade.
If I were ever to become editor of this paper, assuming there’s still a Cutter-Ellis paper here to become editor of, I’ll pay him a king’s ransom just to spend the rest of his career doing exactly what he does now, because his is the kind of work that’s impossible to teach others to do. You either have it or you don’t. No one taught Secretariat or Seabiscuit how to run.
Anyway, he rested his enormous girth on my desk. His plaid shirt was opened at the collar and rolled up at the sleeves, showing a fleshy neck and forearms that resembled flank steak wrapped in brown butcher’s paper. He wore a wrinkled pair of sturdy, brown pants that he buys at a specialty store for large-sized tradesmen.
“Justine”—Steele, the editor in chief—“held a quick staff meeting and gave us the basics. I’ve made some calls,” he said, his big brown eyes probing my blue ones. “I talked to Leavitt about ten minutes ago, and he assures me up and down that he has every possible detective on this thing, all his best and brightest. Right now, they’re leaning toward robbery, but they have a team going door-to-door in the area to see if anyone saw anything. Every detective is pressing every one of their informants to find out what they know. They’re going to canvass the neighborhood, track down anyone who might have been walking a dog, maybe even set up a roadblock to find out if anyone saw absolutely anything at all. He says they’re sparing no expense.”
I nodded. Truth is, the flow of information almost felt like intravenous medicine, making me feel slightly, slowly better, even if I couldn’t explain why.
Vinny knew my relationship with Paul. As a matter of fact, he had dedicated no small amount of time giving me shit about it, calling me the teacher’s pet and the like. He could see, or at least sense, that he was helping, so he continued, still monotonic, like a Pentagon briefer hinting at distant troop movements on the eve of a war, “I also talked to Randolph today after he arrived in Washington.” The governor.
He paused, then said, “Randolph says he’s put state cops on the case, their major crime squad, and he’s personally made a call to the mayor and to Leavitt guaranteeing cooperation and promising there’ll be none of the usual turf battles or glory grabs.”
Another pause, as Vinny’s eyes fell on mine. He added, “And Randolph also says he talked to the FBI director, and the feds are prepared to play an active role in this. They’ll make their laboratory available, their databases, their agents, profilers, whatever we need, all on an expedited basis. All they need is a phone call asking their help.”
We looked at each other for a moment, two inherently, intrinsically different people tossed together into this crazy business of news and words, and now friendship and tragedy. “Jack,” he said in that convincing, reassuring way of his, “this thing’s going to get solved.”
I nodded my head again and absently ran my fingers through my hair.
“I loved the guy,” I said. He nodded. “I can’t picture what this paper is going to be like without him.” He kept staring at me, his face growing sad as he considered what I was saying.
I thought about telling him about yesterday morning’s meeting, about the possibility that the paper would no longer be under family control. I felt like I needed to tell someone. But I held it in, mostly because I know Mongillo well, which means I know that as a good reporter, he might trade my information for more information from his sources, even if I told him in the strictest confidence. He wouldn’t be able to help himself.
So what I said was, “We need some answers to this thing, fast.”
We both sat there in a stultifying silence, the room coming to life all around us but the air between us dead.
I looked up at him looking down at me. Usually our conversations existed at no higher plane than the utterly banal—quips and insults and jabs and jokes. As a matter of fact, I think this is the longest exchange that didn’t involve him calling me “Fair Hair,” which was probably testament to what we really had between us, the battles we had fought together, the places we had both been.
“You and I have to get to the bottom of this thing. We can’t just count on the cops and we can’t sit idly by while the paper is transformed above us. Paul had asked me for my help, and now I’m asking you for yours.”
He placed his massive hands, the size and color of catchers’ mitts, on each of my shoulders, and I could feel the dampness of his palms soak into my previously crisp white shirt. What are you going to do?
“How many times have I saved your sorry ass before?” he asked.
I said, “Have you begun scrubbing Terry Campbell?”
“Just barely, but I assume you want me to put that aside for now.”
I replied, “Just the opposite. Look at him harder than ever. I�
�ll explain why very soon.”
With that, he pushed his face toward mine. I quelled any vague notion of panic and allowed the scene to unfold. He pressed his enormous lips against my temple, his oily skin causing my hair to mat against my scalp. And he kissed me. I mean, for God’s sake, he really kissed me.
“Everything’s going to work out, Fair Hair,” he said softly, withdrawing. “We’re both too smart to have it any other way. At least I know I am.”
As he stalked off toward his own desk, I sat back and took in the soothing frenzy of the newsroom, the various editors racing around assigning excited reporters to every conceivable facet of the biggest murder to happen in this city in years. Normally I’d be all over the room, chatting up my colleagues, working the phones, looking for a news break of my own. But perhaps because they knew of my tight relationship with Paul Ellis, the editors were cutting a wide swath around me.
By the way, it’s not a pretty place, the newsroom, not unless your idea of pretty is a collection of cheap, scratched furniture as far as the eye can see, all of it covered—even in the age of the DVD—with old newspapers, reams of documents, yellowed press releases, never-read faxes. The sounds were that of clicking keyboards and conversational rumble, marked by the occasional verbal glare of a television set and Barbara, the receptionist, calling out over the loudspeaker, “Holding a call for…”
Pretty? No. Try beautiful. Truth is, newspapers represented the one constant in my life, the place where I had grown up, come of age, then began the brisk, byzantine march through adulthood. Women came and went. Beliefs sometimes changed, goals and ambitions were altered in ways subtle and serious. But always, always, there was the newsroom, where a motley collection of skeptical and, yes, sometimes cynical reporters and editors gathered every day of the week, every week of the year, in a regal pursuit of truth. And the truth is what we needed now.
Too soon, every penny-ante politician in town would be talking to every nickel-and-dime television reporter about their love and respect for Paul Ellis, who, by the way, they barely knew. Too soon, the police commissioner would be issuing statements expressing “confidence” that his department would “administer justice” as his detectives were given time to “pursue strong leads.” Meanwhile, for all anyone knew, his investigators lacked even the hint of a valid clue.
But in this room, we looked beyond the words to the reality, beyond the contortions to the truth. Our collective bullshit meter was set on high as we probed and measured, worked the phones, pored over documents, researched history and peered into the fog of the past and shadows of the present, sometimes successfully, other times not, but always in the name of what was new and what was right. Usually, anyway.
But it’s different when you’re part of the story—woefully different, I was quickly learning. Now I sat at my desk amid the furor wondering if word of the paper’s imminent sale would somehow leak out, and what it might have to do with Paul’s murder and the attempt on my own life, not to mention John Cutter’s death five years ago, though I guess I just did, and for increasingly good reason.
Out of the haze of my mind, I suddenly noticed Brent Cutter standing a few feet away—Brent Cutter of the Cutter-Ellis publishing family, Brent Cutter as in, John Cutter’s son. Like many Boston Irish of my generation and the one before, I’ve been accused from time to time of being something of an Anglophile. But here was Exhibit A in why Irish was best. Brent was more than a few years older than me, a creature solely and completely dedicated to the pursuit of cold, hard cash, an untalented nudge of a self-entitled man who knew the journalism business like I know a woman’s needs, which is to say, not at all. He was born on third base and thought he hit a triple, in title the Cutter-Ellis Publishing Company’s president, but more like a CFO, and I used to picture him sitting in his cushy office on the executive floor constantly punching the keys to one of those calculators with a roll of printer tape, but barely able to write so much as a memorandum to share his thoughts with his many underlings. I’d be surprised if he read the newspaper every day except to take note of the number of ads.
He was, according to Paul Ellis, always the first to recommend layoffs at any prediction of a recession, only to be overruled, thankfully, by the publisher. He insisted on reviewing every weekly expense voucher turned in by every reporter and editor, and would think nothing of kicking them back with the handwritten scrawl across the top of the page, “Is it really necessary for a reporter to dine at the Four Seasons?”
I thought so, yes, but that’s not really the issue right now.
Of course, every other month he’d jet off to the Caribbean or the capitals of Europe for a two-week vacation in another five-star hotel, ostensibly to relax after all the hard work he was doing back in Boston.
Screw him. To be honest, I don’t think I’d ever seen the guy in the newsroom before, except for one time two years ago at a going away party for retiring editor Bob Appleton, when he no doubt came down to make sure we didn’t spend too much of the company money on free food for reporters and editors.
Still, the hour was a difficult one, so when he showed up at my desk, I stood and greeted him politely. “It’s terrible, Brent,” I said. “But everything’s going to be all right.”
He nodded. He was a tall guy with a thick head of jet black hair that he always wore slicked back like a Wall Street financier, a Gordon Gecko type. He wore custom-fitted suits and handmade shirts with expensive cufflinks—an accessory I’ve always regarded as remarkably inane. To a few narrow-minded women, he was no doubt good-looking and confident. To me and other right-minded individuals, he was a self-involved prick. I hope I didn’t just say that out loud.
He nodded in that overly assured way of his but it was so painfully obvious that he was scared out of his wits, way out of his league, and that any reach for calm was a failing act. He said, “I’ve got the cops coming in to see me, a detective by the name of Travers. Luke Travers. What do you know about him.”
Luke Travers and Brent Cutter. Put them together and you’ve got nearly half a personality. I wish I could watch through a one-way mirrored wall.
“You’ll like him,” I said.
He gave me a curious look, so I added, “He’s fine. By the numbers, reasonably straightforward. He’s not going to solve the O-ring problem on the space shuttle, but if the case is obvious, he’s the guy to crack it.”
“So he’s not going to try to pull a fast one on me, right? No need for me to get a lawyer?”
Interesting that the family member feels the need to have counsel in his first meeting with the law. I replied, “If you think you need a lawyer, then by all means, I’d secure one. If you didn’t do anything wrong, which I’m sure you didn’t, why bother?”
He nodded again, visibly nervous now. Brent’s idea of adversity was a long line at the chairlift in Aspen.
“You’re right,” he said, gravely. “I’ll let you know how it goes.” And he turned around and walked out, careful not to touch the piles of discarded newspapers that lay all over the room.
I sat at my desk and let my mind wander back to the previous morning, to the look on Paul’s face when he told me about the forced sale. Then I thought of the way he looked on the gurney, the holes in his forehead, the vacancy of his eyes.
With that, the memories came flowing back. I remembered the first time I met him. My own father, Arthur Flynn, was, by any estimation, a wonderful man, thirty-two years an overnight worker in theRecord ’s pressroom, presiding over the publication of the paper five days a week with more pride than any editor in the newsroom. He’d carry the paper home each morning as if he was holding the Holy Bible, place it carefully on the kitchen table, and slowly, methodically turn each and every page while he ate his English muffins and sipped his black coffee, reading the stories, analyzing the photo reproductions, and gauging the ink counts. Every time I came downstairs, ready to head to school, he’d look up at me amused and say, simply, “TheRecord ’s here.”
My fathe
r died before he could see me enter the business. He had fallen ill with cancer my senior year in high school. He was the night pressroom foreman, and Paul Ellis, then the president of the company, came to our house in South Boston one afternoon to visit him. I’ll never forget it. He drove himself, in a Ford LTD. He walked across our tiny front yard, knocked on the door, and when I answered it, he said simply, “Hi, I’m Paul Ellis. I work with your dad.”
Work with your dad. The guy owned the entire newspaper, and he’s telling me he worked with my dad. It was love at first sight.
Then he’s sitting next to my father and I’m in the other room and I hear him say, “Art, you’ve given your life to my family paper. I fully expect you’re going to get better and come back to work, but in case you don’t, you’ll continue to collect your disability pay right until your pension kicks in. I also want you to know, I hear you have a smart boy here. I’m going to pay for him to go to college wherever he wants. I never want that to be a worry for you.”
My father was so overcome that he couldn’t even offer a reply.
Paul Ellis. Along with his cousin, his predecessor, John Cutter, he took what was a perfectly average newspaper and transformed it into a national force. He hired the best editors, spent lavishly on some of the country’s most gifted writers, myself included, and during times when other newspapers were shrinking their news holes to save money, he expanded ours, making it nearly as coveted a workplace and respected an institution as the vauntedNew York Times.
And he found that good journalism was good business. Five years after he started, his investments began paying off, and his paper quickly became the dominant paper in the Boston market, the publication of choice for those in the city and the growing suburbs. TheRecord, quite simply, fulfilled its name, becoming the newspaper of record in New England. Readership soared, as did advertising. Flush with money, the journalism just kept getting better.
I was twenty-four years old, a young reporter with a suburban Boston paper, when he called me at my desk one day and, in a formal sounding voice, said, “Mr. Flynn, this is Paul Ellis of theRecord. I want to make you a job offer. I’d like you to come to my newspaper and be a general assignment reporter.”
The Nominee Page 7
