The Nominee

by Brian McGrory

  “Yes, of course,” I said. “I thought I’d heard the name.”

  From the grandstand, Elizabeth asked Lindsey, “What do you do?”

  She smiled and twirled her hair and said, “I do a little lingerie modeling.”

  I did a double take. She hadn’t told me this. She told me she was a paralegal for Hale and Dorr. As she made the proclamation, she shot a coy glance at Fielder to see his reaction, though she probably would have been better served to look at his crotch rather than his eyes.

  Fielder said, “Wow, I did a little underwear modeling myself.” Of course he did.

  Lindsey giggled, though I’m not sure why. The waiter came and took my card. Fielder sat down at an empty chair without an invitation. Elizabeth poked me in the shoulder and when I looked at her, she made an exaggerated eye movement toward the door like she had done at so many cocktail and dinner parties before.

  “At first I didn’t like it because it would get cold in the studio,” Lindsey said.

  “Oh my God, I can’t believe I’m hearing you say that, because I felt the same way,” Fielder replied.

  Elizabeth hit me again. The waiter brought back the check, as well as two orders of the Tuscan linguine that I had requested to go.

  I asked, “Lindsey, did you drive?”

  “I took a cab, so I’ll just take one home,” she said.

  Fielder: “Don’t be silly, I’ll give you a ride home. You don’t mind a convertible, do you?”

  I rolled my eyes, but the only one to notice was Elizabeth. She laughed softly, then said, “Well, Jay, thanks for dinner.” She was showing exceptional tolerance for a woman who was being completely, overtly blown off by a big league ballplayer and big-time asshole.

  “It was great.” He said this without barely turning around. To Lindsey, he asked, “Did they do mostly front shots, or from behind?”

  Much as I wanted to, I didn’t hear the answer because Elizabeth leaned into my ear and said, “Get me the fuck out of here and I’ll never ask you for anything again.” Seemed like a reasonable deal. So I did.

  Outside, in the fragrant air of a cool spring night, I said to her, “Well you don’t seem too upset about being ditched by one of the city’s most famous and eligible men.”

  She replied, “I’m with another one right now. Life has a funny way of working itself out.”

  Does it?

  As soon as we stepped out of the restaurant, two hulking men in dark clothes began following us, but I should add here that my security detail had begun, and the two men, Gerry and Kevin, were part of it. I turned to them, handed over the containers and said, “Guys, the best pasta in town. As the waiters inside say, enjoy.”

  As soon as we stepped away from them, Elizabeth whispered into my ear, such that I could feel her breath on my skin, “Jack, who the hell are they?”

  “Boston’s finest,” I said in a normal voice. “Long story.” When I turned around, the guys tipped the containers of pasta to me in a show of thanks.

  Elizabeth was walking close to me. After a few paces, she put her hand around my wrist like she used to do whenever we walked or sat on the couch together. She tried to be absent about it, nonchalant, but too much time had passed, and her very touch came as such a surprise that I’m pretty sure I flinched and I know she fumbled.

  “Do you have your car?” she asked.

  We were walking by a Porsche Boxter with the top down. I took a wild stab that it was the ballboy’s car. The license plate—FIELDR—kind of aided my guess.

  “You don’t mind a convertible, do you?”

  “Does it have dog fur all over the seats and remnants of Baker vomit on the floor?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. It’s my favorite car in the world.”

  She kept her hand wrapped around my wrist and walked in step with me, close. I didn’t know where this was going and my brain was too tired from the day to try to figure out if it might be someplace good. I was surrendering to emotion, which wasn’t necessarily a smart thing, but maybe not foolish either.

  As we reached my car and I employed some of my good breeding to open the passenger-side door, a lone figure, a man, came walking out of a little grove of bushes. He was only about ten feet away and I immediately shot a look back at the cops, who were watching us, but they did nothing. I quickly helped Elizabeth into the car—maybe a bit too quickly. Assuming danger, I damn near shoved her inside.

  I slammed the door shut and turned to face the figure, who continued walking directly toward me. I was bracing myself for gunfire, the piercing sound and the resultant pain. I had no idea why the officers weren’t stepping in. Were they already eating their linguine with the Tuscan meat sauce? Were they traitors, my cops?

  He was walking around the front of my car now, looking at me through the dark, this oversized, almost bear-like man, black and full of flesh. He pulled his hand out of his pocket and I flinched, but rather than shoot me dead in the parking lot of Café Louis where I had a heart full of desire and a stomach full of grilled pizza and chocolate cake, he let his fingers fall absently on the metal hood and said, “Damned nice car. Wouldn’t I love one of these.”

  The voice was so familiar, so soothing, and as he emerged from the shadows and into the streetlight, I saw the face of Hank Sweeney.

  I smiled and asked, “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “What, just because I’m sent out to pasture in Florida, that means I can’t come play in the city anymore?” He said this with a whimsical tone and a smile, like he was thrilled to be in his hometown.

  I shook his hand. “Welcome back,” I said.

  “Good to be here.”

  He leaned on the car and reached into his shirt pocket for his cigarettes. I looked over at the bodyguards, who still hadn’t moved. Obviously they knew Sweeney had been waiting. They were probably the ones to tip him off on my whereabouts.

  I opened the car door and gave Elizabeth a head nod to step out. As she did, I said, “Hank, Elizabeth, my, well, former friend. Elizabeth, Hank, a retired Boston Police detective.”

  He looked at her, amused, and shook her hand.

  “Exes, step-kids, half-kids, foster kids, rescue dogs. Things aren’t so simple these days, are they? I don’t know how everybody does it. Christ, I’ve been married to Mother for fifty years come July. She’s all I know, and at this age, she’s all I’ll ever know.”

  “Nice to meet you,” Elizabeth said, flashing her disarming smile.

  Sweeney looked at her, then at me. He seemed to grow aggravated, but I think it was fake. “Why the hell aren’t you still, ahem, friends with this young woman anymore? You lose your mind?”

  Maybe, but also her fidelity.

  Elizabeth said, smiling, “Life’s complicated.”

  “Don’t I know it,” Sweeney replied, leaning back on the hood and nonchalantly lighting his cigarette.

  Interesting as this philosophical exchange appeared to be, I’ll confess to being a little more than a little curious as to why he journeyed a thousand miles aboard a jet plane, tracked me down on a date at one of the nicest restaurants in town, and showed up at my car door unannounced. So I asked him, “Lieutenant, I hope you don’t mind me asking you this, but what the hell are you doing here?”

  He stretched his arms over his head, blew out his first mouthful of smoke, then he yawned.

  “Because I like the weather better up here,” he replied. “Because I like the Red Sox more than the Marlins. Because it doesn’t smell like age and disease. Because people drive at normal speeds. Because there are young people along with the old people.”

  Elizabeth smiled at him—not one of her fake, polite smiles, but a full-on, crinkle-eyed smile. I didn’t.

  Instead, I repeated myself. “Lieutenant, what are you doing here?”

  He looked me flat in the face with his brown eyes that could have been that of a Boy Scout rather than a seventy-year-old man. Then he looked briefly at Elizabeth, and finally, down at the ground.


  “Because there’s something I didn’t tell you,” he said, letting his eyes float back up to mine. “I think we need to talk.”

  Nineteen

  THE TWO OF US,myself and Hank Sweeney, strode through the front gates of the Boston Public Garden and past the statue of George Washington on horseback as the night air turned cool and the glow of the lanterns cast eerie shadows around the bushes and tulip beds that lined the concrete paths. The two plainclothes bodyguards stood watch out of earshot, though hopefully not gunshot, while we took a seat on the exact bench where Paul and I had sat just three days before.

  Three days. Seemed more like three weeks. Hell, three months, or even three years.

  By the way, it will become relevant to note that I had given my former girlfriend my car to take home for the night, or take wherever.

  “How will I get it back to you?” she asked as she sat in the driver’s seat and I stood at the door in the parking lot of Louis. The words were innocent, the tone wasn’t, not when you knew her, which I used to better than anyone else on Earth. I didn’t know if that still held true.

  “You’ll find a way,” I replied.

  As she started the ignition, I heard her say in a low voice, “Maybe I better just take it to your place now.”

  Before I could reply, she was off.

  “So you held out on me.” I said this to Sweeney as I looked him square in the eyes, though I said it with amusement rather than anger or annoyance. Of course he had held out on me. I knew he would before I went down to Florida. I knew it when I was with him. I knew it now. He’s a cop, I’m a reporter, and that’s just what cops do to reporters. It’s one of those unimpeachable facts of life, like dogs licking their privates. They can, thus they do.

  He ignored me, which is another one of those things that cops do to reporters. He looked around the dimly lit park, at the black beneath the trees, at the shadows from the lights, and said, “I used to take my lunch breaks down here when I was just starting out over in District 3, and Mother would come over and meet me from her office. All the high-priced lawyers were out here and the pols from the State House and the rich people from Back Bay and students would lie on the grass and read, and we used to walk around the pond, me in my uniform and her all gussied up from work. Sometimes we wouldn’t even say anything, we’d just walk, and it was the best part of my day. We saw Katherine Hepburn in here once.”

  He paused before adding, “We didn’t have any kids then.”

  My mind and intent were obviously elsewhere, so I asked halfheartedly, “Did your wife make the trip with you today?”

  “Nah,” he answered, softly, but in a tone that said it was a dumb question. “No, she doesn’t travel well these days. The years haven’t been as good to her as they’ve been to me, so she mostly stays put. She likes it down there.”

  “But you don’t.”

  He turned toward me.

  “Son, at my age, it doesn’t really matter what I like or don’t like anymore. I’m just happy to be above ground rather than in it.”

  He looked straight ahead again, his elbows resting on his knees. I’ve said it before, but it’s worth repeating, Hank Sweeney was a large man—not large as in monstrous or freakish, but just big all over, with big hands that led to wide forearms and broad shoulders that framed a barrel chest. You could tell he was handsome in his younger years when he walked around the park in his patrolman’s uniform with his pretty wife clutching his arm. He had probably been a football standout at some local high school.

  I nodded. “I’m starting to know what you mean.”

  There was a long silence between us. He knew I wasn’t interested in talking about his family or his history, and I knew that’s not what he had flown a thousand miles to Boston to discuss. Finally, he said, “Yes, I held out on you, but it might just be meaningless. I didn’t want to get you all in a knot.”

  I said nothing. As a reporter, you never get in the way of someone about to tell an important or interesting or just plain old good story. This, I suspected, would be all of that, so I leaned in and looked at him expectantly.

  Sweeney looked back at me and said, “You remember I told you how I played your old publisher’s case exactly by the book.”

  I nodded.

  “Diagrammed everything, numbered everything. Ordered tests. Christ, you could have taught a class on sudden death procedures just on my reports, they were so perfect.

  “But down in Marshton, you asked if anything at the crime scene raised my suspicions, or bothered me, I think you said. I didn’t answer you, but yeah, something did. It might be nothing. It’s probably nothing, but when you tell me there’s no lab report on it, that really burns my ass hairs.”

  I twitched on the bench. As he talked, his face started to glow, like a little boy who just sprinted toward home plate. I’m not sure if it was from embarrassment or from his self-professed anger. I stayed silent, just watching. He continued.

  “There was a tissue on the bathroom floor.” He paused for effect.

  “It was sitting behind the toilet, as if someone had meant to throw it in and flush it away, but missed.” Another pause. He was very comfortable talking business and procedures and seemed to revel in storytelling. In his line of work, he had a lot of them, and it’s probably good to get them out, to share the emotions of staring at so much death rather than keep it all inside, as I’m sure too many detectives do too much of the time.

  “It caught my eye for a couple of reasons. Most important, the rest of the bathroom floor was so clean you could have eaten a lobster dinner off it.

  “I asked a few questions and learned that the maid had cleaned the bathroom late the previous afternoon, so the tissue was definitely new.”

  I interrupted, asking, “But couldn’t he have just missed the toilet himself?”

  His expression didn’t change. “Of course he could have. He might have just blown his nose and flicked it in the toilet as he turned away and never even known he missed.” Yet another pause.

  “But I did a quick comparison. The tissue on the floor was baby blue. It was a Kleenex, I believe, something that comes out of one of those boxes. There was a box of tissues in the bathroom, about half empty, but the tissues were white, not blue.” He looked at me hard, seeing if I was following. I was, but wasn’t yet as excited as him.

  “The toilet tissue was white, not blue. There was a box of tissues in each of the other two bathrooms in the condominium, but they were all white, not blue. So the tissue on the floor came into the apartment from the outside. Someone brought it in.”

  It all seemed very weak to me, so I asked, “Couldn’t John Cutter have brought it in himself? Maybe that’s the kind of tissue he had at work, or he kept a sleeve in his car, or he stopped and grabbed one at a restaurant that night.”

  “Of course. All good questions. And the tissue was the same kind they had in the public men’s room off the lobby of the Four Seasons Hotel downstairs.”

  As he said this, I glanced to my right and, through the still-bare trees, saw the lights of the Four Seasons hotel glitter in the near distance. It was a beautiful hotel that suddenly took on the aura of a death trap.

  “I asked employees in the hotel restaurant if Mr. Cutter had been in the previous evening for dinner or drinks, and he hadn’t.”

  I said, “But couldn’t he have grabbed the tissue at some earlier point? I mean, surely that tissue could have been in his suit or pants pocket for a while, no?”

  “Again, of course. But I’m still left with the same question I began with.” He paused for a longer break than usual. “I ordered tests to be performed on that tissue, to see what, if anything, was in it or on it. They were fairly routine tests, just to cancel it out for any evidentiary value. But according to your review of the report, that test wasn’t done. Why the hell not?”

  He looked at me, his dark skin blending into the blackness behind him, and I looked back at him, not sure what to say. I couldn’t really feel the c
ool anymore, though all this talk of tissues was making my nose itchy. I’ll point out, probably because my olfactory senses were on high alert, that the park smelled of freshly turned earth.

  I mulled his assertions, his concerns, for a minute as we continued to meet each other’s gaze. I finally said, “So tell me what you expected to find?”

  “What did I expect to find? Nothing, really. Probably just as you said, Mr. Cutter picked the tissue up somewhere else, meant to toss it in the toilet, and missed. That simple. But like I said, show me a dog and I’m assuming it’s a cagey wolf waiting for the right moment to disembowel you.”

  He looked out at the duck pond and the light from the lanterns that danced across the skin of the black, glassy water. Then he set his gaze back on me, somewhat amused now. “You asked me what I expected to find. But you didn’t ask me what I feared I’d find.”

  He was into the theatrics of it, so I played along. I raised my eyebrows and said, “Yes?”

  “I don’t want to raise any red flags, but whoever the hell didn’t do the tests I requested has already done that for me. What I feared I’d find was some sign of poisoning.”

  He paused, arching his back to stretch. Then he added, “Specifically, when someone ingests arsenic, there’s typically a foaming in the nasal passages that manifests itself in the victim’s nose, and occasionally, in their mouth. I didn’t find any visible sign of that foam in or on or near Mr. Cutter, but I just wanted to make sure that a killer didn’t clean him off and mistakenly leave the evidence on the bathroom floor.”

  I sat there stunned and silent and confused and appreciative. A homeless man came walking toward us and the two bodyguards blocked his way and steered him in the opposite direction. I looked up and saw a nearly full moon perched atop the buildings of the downtown skyline.

  Arsenic. The lead police detective on the case had been secretly concerned that someone intentionally poisoned the publisher ofThe Boston Record, so he ordered some toxicology tests. And those tests were never done, or at least recorded, and the apparent evidence is nowhere to be found.