There were no niceties in this conversation, no veneer of humanitarianism, no attempt at an emotional connection. We were about nine months and a broken heart away from that, and the year could never be taken back and the heart never repaired.
“My understanding,” he said, “is that you were like the son that Paul Ellis never had.” He looked me in the eye, and when I met his stare, his look shifted down to a few sheets of paper he held in his hand. What he said was an overstatement, but I had to give him credit for at least immediately discerning that we had had a special relationship.
He continued, “It’s early, but right now, we don’t have a whole lot. We don’t even have much in the way of theory. We’ve determined that the victim was confronted in the parking lot. He either dropped his briefcase in the roadway area, or he flung it at his assailant. If it was the latter, there’s a chance of retrieving DNA evidence from the briefcase, and we’re in the process of having that examined now.
“The victim was either led to an area between the trucks, or more likely, fled from the roadway to the trucks, with the killer in pursuit. Based on loose sand and dirt on the victim’s clothing, and the imprints left on the ground, it appears he spent some amount of time beneath one of the trucks, presumably in hiding. Ultimately, as you know, he was shot three times at very close range—a few inches—in the forehead. From the blood splatter, it appears he was standing when he was shot. The M.E. is positive he died instantly, and he’s believed to have died sometime yesterday morning.”
I didn’t like Travers calling him “the victim,” as if, dead for a day, Paul had already lost his identity in life, and was no longer known for his great accomplishments, but rather for the violent manner in which he left us. But I was too drained to correct him, and too stunned by the realization that I was probably the last human being, his killer aside, to see him alive.
I was picturing the old guy, in extraordinarily good shape, running for his life in the sun-splashed lot where I had parked every day for the last however many years. I imagined the look on his handsome features, the thoughts racing through his agile mind when the killer raised the gun to his forehead. I tried to shake these visions to concentrate on what Travers was telling me.
Travers: “At first blush, the killer doesn’t appear to have left a whole lot behind. We’ve taken some shoe imprints, but they’re vague at best. The coroner will go over the victim’s body carefully to make sure there’s nothing in the fingernails or anywhere else. And there’s the briefcase. Other than that, we canvassed every square inch of the area with our very best guys, and have come up dry.”
He paused, looked at me carefully, and said, “So the question is, Why?
“Is it a random act of robbery? Maybe that’s exactly what it is, but I don’t think so, because why here, in the parking lot of a newspaper with one of the most prominent members of our community?”
Travers continued, “Is it an assassination? Possibly, but that gets us back to the why question. Why does someone want to murder the publisher of the town’s major newspaper in broad daylight. This isn’t the busing era anymore, thank God.”
Another long pause, during which his eyes seemed to dissect mine. Then he said, “So I’ll ask you, Why?”
I just shook my head and stayed silent. I knew I was supposed to tell him what I knew, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it, either physically or emotionally. I couldn’t share anything with him, couldn’t confide, couldn’t crack a window even the slightest bit, not after what we’d been through. He asked, “When’s the last time you saw Paul Ellis alive?”
“Yesterday morning, at about sevenA.M. on the Public Garden.”
He looked surprised. He calmly said, “Go ahead.”
“Before I do, I have a recommendation for you.”
Travers said, “Yes?”
“Get off the case. You do, and I might suddenly turn into a fount of information. But not until then.” I said this in my flattest voice with my most direct tone.
Before I was even done with my helpful suggestion, Travers was shaking his head.
“Not going to happen,” he said, locking stares with me. “This is my assignment, my case, and I’m going to solve it, and any history that you think—think—we might have is just that: history. It’s not going to get in the way on my end, and I’d suggest you don’t allow it to get in the way on yours.”
Far easier said than done, as will quickly become obvious. Hatred can be a mountain, with jagged peaks and virtually insurmountable terrain.
I said, “You’re making a mistake, and I’m going to make damned sure you pay for it.”
He ignored that last remark. “So why did you see Paul Ellis yesterday morning on the Public Garden?”
I paused, began to talk, hesitated some more, and said, “Nothing that I care to share with you here.”
Anger flashed through his eyes. “You can either share it with me or with a grand jury. Your choice.”
“I’ll take the grand jury,” I replied. “Smarter people, and better looking.” He didn’t mention the third option, which was detailing what I knew in the pages of my newspaper. In fact, I was already mapping out my lede and first few paragraphs in my mind, as reporters tend to do.
He stood up abruptly and strode to the conference room door. He turned around and said, “You could help yourself and help the Cutter-Ellis family by helping me.” He lingered for a moment, seeing if I had something to say. In the gush of silence, he walked away.
Ten
THE NEWS-GATHERING CRAFTis hardest when there isn’t actually any news, when over-talented reporters are forced to work the phones and the city to make something out of nothing in order to fill the seemingly endless pages of the next day’s issue. It is at its most delightfully stressful best when news is exploding all around us, when there is an unabashed certainty of a public’s thirst for information, as there no doubt was in the mysterious death of Paul Ellis. And theRecord, as so many thousands of times before, would be the paper that all of New England turned to the next day for the best information.
All of which is to say, the newsroom at eightP.M. , on an extended deadline, was electric. Teams of reporters worked every conceivable law enforcement source they had, and some they didn’t. They shouted, begged, pleaded, and negotiated over the phone, they staked out the crime scene, the police headquarters, the FBI’s Boston office. Along with the news, we had a lengthy obituary marked for the front page, an elaborate profile of the Cutter-Ellis family, a who’s who among the investigators. What we didn’t have was the truth.
So I sat down at my desk and wrote what I had just refused to tell Travers. I detailed the Sunday morning meeting with Paul Ellis, his warnings about the takeover, his hopes that he could somehow find a way to avert it. I was, I’m quite certain, the last person he saw while he was alive, his killer aside. Of course, I left out his suspicions over John Cutter’s death, and made no mention of the threat on my life.
As part of the story, I called the headquarters for Campbell Newspapers in Moline, Illinois, to seek official comment about their takeover bid. A young, snitty spokeswoman informed me that the company officials would have no comment, and not to take their lack of comment as any confirmation of their interest in buying theRecord. Thank you very much.
When I gave the story directly to Justine Steele, the editor-in-chief, she turned white as she read it—a good thing to have happen in a newsroom.
“Do the cops know this?” she asked.
We were sitting in her corner office, she behind her wide desk, me in a settee on the other side. The view was of nothing more glamorous than the cars shooting by on the Southeast Expressway and a scantily clad woman in a seductive pose on a nearby Gap billboard. I shook my head.
“Don’t you think they should know this?”
I said, “Well, they’ll know it tomorrow.” That answer having not quite cut it, I broke an awkward silence by adding, “I also know that Paul loved nothing more in life than when theRecor
d broke major news. I think he’d get something of a kick out of this.”
Steele raised her eyebrows and smiled as she continued to look at the printout in front of her. “I’m never going to say no to an exclusive,” she said.
I said, “If I give this to the police, someone over there leaks it to one of the local TV stations, or more likely, theTraveler, and they in turn have a field day with it in tomorrow’s paper. I think theRecord ought to let the public know about what’s going on with theRecord, on our own terms.”
She nodded and said, “I think you’re right.”
That decision behind us, I said, “There’s something else.”
By the way, time was hardly an ally here. As I said, we were on deadline. The story was somewhere north of enormous. The room was controlled chaos. But typical of Justine, she was an island of calm, and as such, she gave me an expectant nod. I continued.
“Someone took a shot at me this morning.”
Her face grew alarmed, but she remained silent.
“Someone I don’t know. I was in Florida, just west of West Palm Beach. The guy was following me in a car. I pulled over into a rest area and he pulled over too. When I approached him, he didn’t like that and he chased me around the building, into a swamp, and shot at me.”
Now Justine looked bewildered. She shook her head and said, “I don’t get it. First, what the hell were you doing in Florida? Second, did this guy shoot at you out of anger, or was he following you with premeditated plans to kill you?”
Ah, a good newspaperwoman, asking the two questions that cut to the heart of this matter.
I replied, “Confidentially, and I mean that, I was in Florida because Paul told me yesterday morning that he feared his cousin, John Cutter, died of suspicious causes five years ago. I tracked down the homicide detective who’d been on the case, retired now, and paid a visit to him.
“On question two, I really don’t know. Like I said, the guy appeared to be following me. But I don’t want to jump to conclusions. Maybe I just ticked him off in the parking lot. But I don’t think so.”
She rubbed her hands across the smooth skin of her face. “Jesus Christ. Do you think we should hire you protection?”
Interesting proposition, but I declined it, perhaps foolishly so.
As I got up to leave, I turned around in her doorway and said, “That was a great hit that Fitzgerald had yesterday on Randolph. I think I’ve got something to add to it. I’ve been working on a story that says Randolph inflated his prosecution record back when he first ran for governor.”
As I spoke, Justine leaned forward and I got a look on her face as if I just put a plate of prime rib in front of her, medium rare, only in this case, it was something better.
I continued, “The best I can tell, I think he just plain exaggerated the numbers to make him look like he had the best record of all the district attorneys in the state.”
“How close are you?” she asked.
I knew, on the one hand, that we wanted to get this into print as fast as possible, before any of the national media parachuted into town and discovered the same. On the other hand, the story, once printed, would be scrutinized every which way from a fiery hell—by Randolph’s aides, Randolph himself, the White House, and the Senate Judiciary Committee, which had to approve his nomination. It had to be so clean that you could bathe with it.
“I need a couple of days to plug holes and get a few facts straightened out.”
She began standing up and said, “Take the time, but if you get a whiff of competition on it, flag me.”
As I walked out her office door, Steele said to me in a decidedly more sympathetic tone, “Jack, watch yourself. And let me know whatever I can do to help.”
Eleven
Tuesday, April 24
WELL, EVERY DAY BRINGSsomething different. Yesterday, for instance, brought murder and mayhem. Today might bring some answers, but at the very minimum it should bring a new apartment, because murder or no murder, mayhem, or inner serenity, I was off this boat in just a few day’s time. Perhaps this is what Fitzgerald—Robert, not F. Scott—meant when he said life is for the living—even the most mundane parts of it.
What F. Scott said was, “So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight,” a gorgeously constructed line that was starting to have special meaning for me.
I woke early, planted myself on a rickety old picnic bench in a grassy park along the edge of the park, and studied the myriad stories in the morning papers about Paul Ellis and his family, all while sipping a fresh-squeezed orange juice under a shower of springtime sun. TheRecord was jarringly complete, including my own front-page story on Paul Ellis’s eleventh hour bid to block an ongoing attempt by Campbell Newspapers to buy his family newspaper. It was the biggest news break on the biggest story in town, as well as the first time in my career I’d ever felt anything but elated at giving readers something they couldn’t get anywhere else. TheTraveler, meanwhile, was uncommonly kind, aside from their screaming front-page headline, “Cursed!” They quoted unidentified police officials pointing to the likelihood of a robbery attempt gone awry. In some ways, I hoped they were right.
It was what the paper had inside that was more bothersome. Anchoring its daily gossip column, “Scene and Heard,” was a fat item about theRecord ’s own Robert Fitzgerald, a regular target of snide attacks from sundry second-tier reporters in this town.
The section was headlined, “Untruths and No Consequences.” This, I knew, would not be good. It went on to detail how Fitzgerald had written a story the previous month about a pair of twins who had been placed in a foster home as four-year-olds some thirty years ago, were separately adopted, and met by coincidence when they moved to the same neighborhood of an unnamed Boston suburb. They each had children of their own and were talking about their backgrounds at a local park when they came across the stunning truth that they were sisters.
In the original story, Fitzgerald used what he said were the women’s real first names, but withheld their last name on their request, as well as the town to which they moved.
But in this gossip item, theTraveler said it went through all state adoption records by hand from the year in which the girls would have been pulled from the foster home and found no one with their first names. It also quoted retired state officials from that era as saying it would be highly unlikely, if not downright improbable, that sisters would be split up like that. “Either the world is lying, or once again, Robert Fitzgerald ofThe Boston Record is,” the item concluded.
It felt like the roller coaster of life had just jumped off its tracks. I crumpled the pages up and slam-dunked them into a nearby trash can, where, for my money, the thing belonged. This wasn’t exactly what my paper needed right about now, which was probably exactly why theTraveler was doing it.
I punched out Fitzgerald’s home number on my cellular phone.
“Robert, you see theTraveler today?” I asked.
He sighed. “I ignore theTraveler, even when I read it. And yes, today I read it.”
There was a slightly awkward pause between us, and he said, “Jack, the women exist. The story is true. One of them called me up herself to—”
I cut him off. “Robert, there’s absolutely no need to explain anything to me. I just called to say that there’s no question in any intelligent person’s mind that a bunch of jealous twits get their kicks out of attacking someone who has risen to the top of the field. That’s just what we do in this business, Robert, at least the worst of us. We just try to bring people down.”
“Thank you, Jack. I won’t let them, but I am getting tired of it all. Someday soon might be the right day to retire.” He paused again, then said, “And you ignored my advice on going to the police with your information about the takeover bid but I must say, that was one hell of a story you had on the front page.”
And so forth. I complimented him on his eloquent front-page profile of Paul in that day’s paper, and we hung up with plans to talk that af
ternoon.
First on the day’s agenda, a longstanding appointment with a real estate agent in Back Bay, followed by a day of working on the Randolph nomination and Paul Ellis’s murder. I made a quick call on my cell phone to the city desk, where I was told that no arrests had occurred and no news was made overnight.
My next call was to Mongillo. It was only sevenA.M. , a good hour before most reporters would begin the long process of rousing themselves awake. But I knew from experience that Mongillo was slogging away on the treadmill of the Boston Sports Club, a headset over his huge, sweaty crown as he dialed out the first of his many dozens of phone calls for the day.
“What are you hearing?” I asked.
He was breathing hard, wheezing at times. I heard him gulp in air to collect himself.
“Jesus Christ, Fair Hair. The fucking cops are apoplectic over your story today, throwing around words like ‘obstruction of justice.’”
“Yeah, well, the hell with them.”
“I keep hearing about bad blood between you and Travers. I’ve got to hear the full story. Anyway, yesterday they had nothing. Starting this morning, they’re all over this Campbell connection. They already have two detectives out at Logan catching a flight to Chicago to interview Terry Campbell. I’ve got calls out right now, and will hit you on the phone soon as I learn more.”
He added, “And by the way, you see Scene and Heard today? I don’t like to say I told you so. Actually, fuck that. I do like to say I told you so. And I did.”
“Bullshit,” I said. “That was weak, and you know it. They’re just out to kick us when we’re down.”
“I don’t know,” he said, in an almost taunting manner.
I steered the conversation someplace more pleasant and productive. “Hey,” I said, “we’ve got to get together today on the Lance Randolph hit. I’ll show you the records I have and we’ll divvy up the work. We need to get it in the paper as soon as possible.”
The Nominee Page 9
