The Nominee

by Brian McGrory

  “Not an issue,” I said, still looking in the closet, not really meaning it. And me being only human, and humans being what they are, I cast a fresh eye around the room looking for anything male, any sign of even occasional cohabitation. I walked into the bathroom again, this time searching for a razor. But nothing. A single toothbrush in the holder, only makeup on the vanity. Elizabeth was a woman living very much alone, which for a variety of reasons, made me feel better.

  Julie walked out of the bedroom, I assume to give me a little privacy. I looked at the photographs again, at the happiness spilling across my features, but I didn’t think about what a wonderful time that had been in my life, I only thought about how it all ended, how so much seemed to be coming to a premature close these days. My relationship with Elizabeth: over. My wife: dead. My newborn daughter: dead. My parents: dead. And now throw in the publisher ofThe Boston Record who helped make my career. Standing in the bedroom of an ex-girlfriend, to whom I was once on the verge of proposing, my overriding feeling was one of utter loneliness.

  The last time I saw Elizabeth was on the Saturday afternoon that I accused her of having an affair. We had been distant the prior few weeks, and my worries had blurred into suspicions, and perhaps my suspicions served as a convenient excuse—an excuse for my newfound guilt, for my sadness over leaving Katherine, my wife, behind, for being more elastic than my conscience was willing to allow. I had gone out a month before and bought a diamond engagement ring, and with that ring safely hidden in a pair of old sweat socks in my top bureau drawer, our entire relationship began to unhinge.

  One morning I came home from walking the dog and saw that she had forgotten to log off her computer, and on her email account I saw note after note from Travers@aol.com, so I opened one. It was from Lt. Detective Luke Travers, and it was to finalize plans to meet for a drink.

  In the next note he thanked her and wrote about what a great time he had. In the next one he proposed getting together again. After that he mentioned how he could never talk to his own wife the way he could talk to her. And on they went, a bad cliché waiting to ruin a life.

  Or perhaps I had ruined it already. I don’t know.

  Either way, I got dizzy as I was reading them, so dizzy I couldn’t see the words on the screen, but I knew what they meant. I loved Elizabeth, even if I sometimes doubted whether I was ready to have her, or maybe I doubted whether I should be ready even if I was. I wanted to have children with her, someday. I wanted to grow old with her and live and joke and laugh as if we owned the entire world. And yet my history nagged and here she was in the present running around with a married cop having a pathetic, seedy affair. She was probably with him that very minute, a thought that caused me to pick up the keyboard and smash it on the desk. And then I sat on the couch, our couch, thought about Katherine and the baby that we never had, and I cried.

  When she walked into our apartment, I asked her to sit. I calmly explained that the game was up, that I knew she was having an affair, that our relationship was over and that I wanted her to leave. If she needed money, I’d give her money. If she wanted the furniture, she could have the furniture. I just wanted her out of my life.

  “Jack,” she said, her face more panicked than angry, “you’re wrong. You’re absolutely wrong—”

  “Are you sleeping with this guy?” I yelled.

  “Jack, I’m not having an affair, but we have some real problems.”

  She made a move to come sit next to me, to touch me. I pulled away and she flinched back in shock.

  “Don’t fucking lie.”

  “I’m not, Jack. But we have problems.”

  No—but. No—but. No—but. The words, the brutal softness of the denial, punctured my already splintered heart.

  “You have it wrong,” she said, trying to compose herself amid her tears.

  But I didn’t. I knew I didn’t. I knew I didn’t because this is what I did for a living. I looked into people’s eyes, even big gorgeous ones that I loved more than anything in life, and I saw either truth or I saw lies. And here in my own living room with my own girlfriend on an absurdly hot Saturday afternoon in the middle of an endless July, I saw nothing but lies. My life, as I knew it, as I loved it, was over. Again.

  “Get the hell away from me,” I seethed. “And get out.”

  I leaned forward in the chair with my arms on my knees and my hands on the back of my bowed head so she couldn’t see me cry. I sat there in utter silence, wondering what was going to happen next.

  “You’re wrong, Jack.”

  I ignored her.

  “You’re wrong.” She was crying, almost hysterical. I could barely understand her words, they were so soaked by tears. “Wrong. Wrong.”

  My head stayed down. I continued to ignore her.

  Eventually, I heard her get up and walk back to the bedroom. I heard her fumbling around, crying, wheezing. Then there was a stale, stiff silence, until finally I heard the sound of her overnight bag being zipped, soft, yet it seemed to crash through the still apartment like cannon fire.

  She walked back out into the living room. I heard her kneel down and hug the dog, then I heard her quaking in tears as she stood near me.

  “I love you, Jack,” she said, softly, her nose all stuffed and her voice unsteady. It would have made my heart break if it wasn’t broken already.

  “Go,” I said softly, never looking up.

  And she did. I heard her walk to the door and slowly open it. She was convulsing. It sounded like she was leaning against the wall, maybe with her head tucked in her arms, and the door stayed open for several long seconds. Then I heard it softly shut, and the dog came walking back toward me and sprawled out at my feet with a groan, his eyes wide open looking at mine.

  Tears were rolling down my face and onto the floor as I wiped my palms across my cheeks, half expecting her to walk back through the door, wondering if she did, what I’d do.

  Her fault. My fault. Our fault. Or maybe it was just my life, my destiny, to say goodbye, again and again and again.

  I stared back at the dog in the stultifying silence.

  “Never means never, right?” I whispered. And then I broke down in another storm of quiet tears.

  I carefully placed the vacation photograph I was holding back on the dresser and took a long, deep breath, all those images from all those pictures washing over my mind like foamy waves on the Cape Cod shore where her parents used to have a weekend home. I mumbled, “How did you make such a mess of things?” I think I was talking to Elizabeth, but maybe I was talking to myself, given that I was the only one in the room. I looked at the floor for a moment and halfheartedly corrected myself: “How did we make such a mess of things?” I ran my hands across my stricken face, took one last look around her bedroom, and walked down the hallway to the living room, where Julie was pretending to be reading sheets from her listing book.

  “You all set?” she asked me, sympathetically.

  “All set,” I said with a pathetic attempt at a smile. “I’ve got to run to the office. I’ll give you a call in the next couple of days and see about looking at a few more places.”

  And with that, it was time to answer a couple of nagging questions from the recent past.

  Twelve

  Six Years Earlier

  WHEN THE FIRST OFthe network affiliates, WBZ-TV, declared Lance Randolph the winner in his first race for governor, the cheers and chants in the Copley Plaza ballroom were so thunderous that they shook the gold-plated chandeliers above, so infectious that they spread to the fifth floor hotel suite, where Randolph sat glued to the television surrounded by family, aides, and friends.

  “Randolph Two! Ran-dolph Two! Ran-dolph Two!”

  “Alright already,” Randolph said, lifting himself up off a suede-covered wing chair, the smile on his handsome face so broad it could have spread from Boston to the Berkshires.

  “Ran-dolph Two! Ran-dolph Two! Ran-dolph Two!”

  They were screaming it throughout the caverno
us ballroom. They were shouting it in the living room of the presidential suite. His wife was yelling it. His two young ponytailed daughters in their matching velvet dresses were squealing it. Even the kitchen staff in the basement were hollering it, the words echoing off the pots and pans that hung above the industrial stoves.

  He stood in the middle of the room trying to quell the small crowd. His wife nuzzled him on the forehead and whispered into his ear, “Congratulations, governor. You’re the most decent man I know.” His mother pecked him on his cheek and told him in that patently plain way of hers, “You’ve made me the proudest old lady in the world.” Before emotion completely overcame him, he shook a few more hands and shuffled off toward the bathroom to regain his trademark cool.

  Randolph Two.

  The first Randolph, Governor Bertram J. Randolph, was dead, killed a year before in the most mundane of gubernatorial events—the dedication of a state-funded computer laboratory at an inner-city high school in Roxbury, the most crime-ridden neighborhood of Boston.

  At the end of the ceremony, complete with a school marching band, a gang of cheerleaders and a stumbling introduction from an obsessively nervous principal, the governor was led out a side door to meet some of the construction workers who had just finished building the new wing the day before. They stood in a straight line, their hard hats gleaming in the morning sun, like a military unit presenting itself for inspection. The old man, a political institution in Massachusetts, filed down the line, shaking and glad-handing and joking as he so often did. At the end, he turned, gave a long, wide wave, and walked around a construction trailer to his awaiting sedan.

  When he got to within about ten yards of his car, a student with stringy, shoulder-length hair and a long white coat—it looked, in some strange way, like he had just strolled over from biology class—walked toward him, earnestly calling out—“Hey, governor.”

  Randolph smiled, turned, and approached him. The air was filled with dust, the dirt beneath his feet grooved with the tracks of industrial tires. When he was about fifteen feet away, a mere free throw, the kid pulled a semiautomatic machine gun from inside his long coat. He fired not at Randolph, but to his right, at the lone State Police trooper who drove the governor on his official duties. The officer, just forty-four years old, crumbled to the ground, his grayish-blue uniform covered in widening circles of deep red blood.

  Then the boy took direct aim at the governor. An airplane flew overhead, but between the student and the politician, there was a long moment of agonizing, excruciating silence. When he pulled the trigger, he didn’t just fire once or twice, but what the coroner eventually determined was thirteen times in all, each bullet tearing through Randolph’s flesh and exploding into either bone or organ. When the ambulance raced across city streets and over sidewalks a few minutes later heading for the Boston Medical Center, the paramedics inside already knew they were carrying a corpse, not a man.

  The kid, a straight-A student named Denny Bogle, placed the long barrel of the gun against the roof of his mouth and pulled the trigger, dead, his own executioner. Another school shooting in a nation decreasingly stunned by them, but this one an assassination as well.

  The only man spared in the outburst was the governor’s eldest child, Lance Randolph, the Suffolk County district attorney. He was also his father’s most trusted adviser, and as such, often accompanied the governor to various speeches and appearances around the Boston area—father and son, a political dynasty in the making.

  Lance Randolph, the next day’sRecord reported, stood in the middle of the dirt patch when the first shots were fired. During that long moment of silence when the shooter took aim at his father, Randolph bolted toward the governor, screaming “No! No!” He dove on top of his father, draping his own body over the older man’s, but it was too late. One of the paramedics told a television reporter, “We had to pry the younger Mr. Randolph off the governor. He was in some sort of trance or daze, like he was in shock, and wouldn’t get up on his own.”

  Randolph stared hard into the bathroom mirror. His face looked gaunt, the result of a year of hard, nonstop campaigning. But his eyes, his famous blue eyes, still did their youthful dance, and his body, lean from his time on the road, was that of someone two decades younger.

  “You deserve this,” he whispered into the mirror, the freshly splashed cold water dripping down his face. Louder, he told himself, “You deserve it. You won it. It’s yours.”

  He snuck from the bathroom to the bedroom to towel his face off and change his shirt for his victory speech downstairs. It was there he saw Robert Fitzgerald, the regal columnist forThe Boston Record, sitting on the edge of his bed staring intently at a television correspondent reporting amid the whoops and screams of the ballroom five flights below.

  “Natalie, it is utter pandemonium here,” the reporter was saying in an exaggerated scream, a group of Randolph supporters behind him waving signs in no particular rhythm.

  “Well, Robert, we did it, me and you,” Randolph said, his tone familiar and casual. “We got the governorship back. Your words. My genes. And some great policies, too. Now it’s time to see what we do with it.”

  Randolph buttoned his white, monogrammed shirt and looked at Fitzgerald earnestly, awaiting congratulations or an acknowledgement or any sort of reply. Fitzgerald returned the gaze and said, flat, “You feel good?”

  Randolph squinted at him for a moment, perplexed at the point, the underlying meaning of the question. He shook his head and said, “I do feel good. I miss the old man. I wish he were here tonight giving the victory speech, not me. But this is the best thing that a son can do to honor his father’s work and memory and love.”

  He paused, and asked, “You think I’m wrong?”

  The sounds of bedlam blared relentlessly from the television set—horns and yells and excited kids in their twenties shouting at reporters that this was the greatest night of their lives. On the other side of the closed bedroom door was a more restrained purr of revelry, but revelry nonetheless.

  “No, you’re not wrong,” Fitzgerald replied, still sitting, his eyes on the television. “You did what anyone would do, and probably should do.”

  Then he added, “It’s just sad for me.”

  Randolph said, “It’s a bittersweet night for you and me both. I keep thinking, what would the old man say in his speech? What would he tell me to say if he ever saw me elected governor. Then I see his blood. I see it spattered on the cuffs of my shirt. I feel it dripping on the backs of my hands.”

  He stopped, regrouping, collecting his emotions.

  Fitzgerald finally stood up from the bed. Randolph tightened his blue-striped tie, working his hand up the silk to secure it at his neck.

  The television became quiet, then flipped to a panel of analysts in the studio, one of whom was saying, “It’s not quite the Kennedys yet, but the tragedy and the passage of power and the overwhelming popularity sure smacks of a dynastic development tonight, a little bit of history. I’d start watching those young Randolph daughters to see which one has the common touch.”

  Fitzgerald extended his hand out toward Randolph, who shook it, then moved closer into a soft embrace. They patted each other’s backs, and Fitzgerald said, “Congratulations, Lance. Go down there and make your father proud.”

  “I will,” he said. “I will. And I want to make you proud as well.”

  Thirteen

  I’VE ALREADY SHOWN THROUGHmy journey down to Florida that one of the golden rules of good newspaper reporting is to show up, not call up—a journalistic variation of Woody Allen’s 80 percent rule, though I think Woody may have underestimated by a good 10 to 15 percentage points. I can say without a moment’s hesitation that Hank Sweeney wouldn’t have opened up to me nearly as wide as he did if I had simply called him on the phone and asked him questions from afar.

  I bring this up as a proverbial bright idea struck me and I pulled a U-turn in my Alfa Romeo on my way back to theRecord newsroom from my real estat
e appointment. Instead, I headed toward the state medical examiner’s office, where I suspected there might be some answers to a few questions that hadn’t yet been asked, most especially, what did the toxicology test on John Cutter say? If there was ever a time when I could parlay sympathy into pure information, it was now, when my paper and its founding family were in the forefront of the daily news.

  I had roughly a million things clawing at my brain and vying for my time right now, to wit, the Randolph story, the future of the newspaper, the empty publisher’s suite, the guy who had tried to kill me in Florida and where he went, the murder of Paul Ellis, and the nagging mystery of John Cutter. When there’s so much going on that nothing gets done, I find it better to just take them one at a time, and the one I’d take here would be the good Mr. Cutter.

  The M.E. resides in an ancient office building in a dreary downtown neighborhood known as Government Center—dreary even by government standards, ancient even by Boston standards, which means pretty damned ancient, hazardously ancient, falling down ancient, corpses rotting in broken refrigerator lockers ancient. But that’s an entirely different story, one I already did a while back.

  Inside, I asked to speak to the chief spokesman, the unfortunately named—and I’m not making this up—Josh Lyer. I once knew a judge in Connecticut named Aaron Ment—Judge Ment, to those in his courtroom. Baker’s groomer is named Cher. My electrician is a guy by the name of Billy Current. I could go on, but I won’t.

  Regarding Lyer, we had a great deal of contact—he might say excessive contact, dating back a year or so when I reported a three-part series on the unsanitary conditions of the autopsy rooms. I found cockroaches running over the bodies, rats drinking blood spilled from corpses, human tissue discarded in haphazard fashion. We could well be enemies, Josh and I, but I did what no journalism program would think to train a reporter to do: I told him on the eve of the series almost exactly what the first part would say, so he could then use the information to brace his boss. Rather than becoming angry, he appreciated the favor I extended. After the scathing series ran, the state legislature gave the office an additional $7.5 million to clean up the mess and hire additional staff. My pal Josh even called me to say thanks. Some might say he suffered from Stockholm Syndrome. I just said you’re welcome.