The Nominee

by Brian McGrory

  Twenty-Eight

  SITTING IN THE CARwith my police escorts, I still had no idea where I was going, today or in life, so I did what any red-blooded American would do in this age of endless technology: I sat back and listened to my cellular telephone messages.

  First up was Cal Zinkle, saying, quite simply, “Zinkle here. Call me.” That’s four more words than he spoke on my behalf at the board meeting. Next was Luke Travers, followed by Brent Cutter, then Robert Fitzgerald, and my ex-girlfriend. A veritable all-star lineup. I rubbed my free hand across my face, wondering what had happened to this once promising life of mine. Next was Benjamin Bank, the chief political adviser to Governor Lance Randolph, leaving an oblique message asking me to call him. Lastly, Vinny Mongillo’s voice came on the phone informing me to call him within the next five minutes or he’d squeeze my testicles until they popped like gas bubbles.

  That represented a negotiation I didn’t want to lose, so I called him first. He snapped up the phone in typical fashion.

  “I’m hearing all bad things,” he said.

  Leave it to Vinny to have sources within theBoston Record ’s board of director’s executive committee.

  “Then you’re hearing right.”

  “Brent Cutter wants to sell us all out? A member of the founding family? You know what we do to those people where I come from? We slap’em around, then we execute them, then we bury their useless fucking bodies in a shallow roadside grave.”

  “You know what we do in my culture? We give them the silent treatment, then refuse to buy them a round next time we see them in the neighborhood bar. To each his own.” I think I liked his way better.

  Mongillo said, “I’ve been thinking more about our conversation about Fitzgerald. I want to put some stuff in writing. You coming in here?”

  Am I going in there? Suddenly, it seemed like the exact right place to go for reasons I couldn’t quite explain.

  “Yeah, I’ll be there shortly. How’s the Randolph story going?”

  “I’m writing it right now.”

  From a rapid-fire series of calls, I learned that Fitzgerald, too, knew the committee meeting was an unmitigated disaster, and wanted to get together for a drink to discuss it. Our executive committee, a sieve. I put him off for a day. Travers pressed me for information and wanted to make sure I wasn’t planning any other published revelations. He sounded earnest and a little uncertain. When I asked if he had any leads yet, there was a long pause, followed by the wishful words, “Soon, soon.”

  My former girlfriend informed me that theTraveler didn’t have the Fitzgerald story solid enough to go with the following morning. I cavalierly told her they never would, but I think she detected the change in my tone, the lack of sure-fire confidence. I hung up before the conversation could stray from official business.

  Benjamin Bank, interestingly, told me that the governor would like to meet with me tomorrow. I asked him if he could do it right away because we were preparing a story for the next day’s paper. Also, I had a spare hour to kill ahead of the larceny that Sweeney and I had on our dance card for that night.

  Bank said it would have to be in the morning, early, before he and the governor left for Washington for a round of courtesy calls on Capitol Hill.

  “You should hold your story until the two of you talk,” he said.

  Another typical politician, firmly believing that the entire world revolves around their tiny little concerns, that oceans will part for their boss and that reporters will hold their stories until blessed with a private audience.

  I said, “That’s not going to happen. We’re in print tomorrow. If you want to be a part of it, if you want to have your say, have the governor call me or Mongillo. You have our numbers.”

  “You publish, and you’re screwed.” A different sort of take on that whole publish or perish standard.

  “I assume Mongillo has told you what this is about. He’s detailed the allegations, right?”

  “He has, and you can’t cold-cock us with this bullshit at three in the afternoon and expect answers within twenty minutes. You owe us a day.”

  “I owe you nothing. If your guy wants to talk, and he should, have him call.”

  He spoke with a tone less confident and more desperate. “Hold your apples and we’ll give you something that you’re going to find very, very interesting.”

  Hold your apples? Who uses that phrase anymore? I said, “Terrific. So give it to me today, and we’ll be all set. Everyone benefits.”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “Then make sure you read theRecord.”

  He began speaking again. I said, “Benjamin, I love this kind of intellectual stimulation, but I have to call my urologist.”

  We hung up, which left Zinkle and Brent Cutter.

  “Thanks for your warm endorsement at the meeting today,” I told the former. “Christ, you had me blushing so bad I almost had to excuse myself from the room.”

  He replied, “Jack, it was over before it ever began, and I’m not going to squander myself on a lost cause. That’s not a bad deal you were offered, becoming editor for the next three years. You ought to think hard about it. We’re not going to cut anything any better.”

  I asked, “Did the committee vote yet?”

  “We discussed it in detail, but delayed a vote for a few days. But it’s foregone, Jack. You’re a reporter, not a publisher. We can’t run the enormous risk of a shareholder suit. The paper’s going to get sold.”

  “Hey Cal,” I said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Fuck yourself.” And I hung up.

  And then there was Brent Cutter. I put the phone back in my suit pocket. Fuck him too.

  The sedan pulled up in front of 60 State Street in downtown Boston. Gerry and Kevin got out ahead of me and escorted me through the lobby and onto the elevator. I pressed the button for the thirty-fourth floor.

  I was paying a surprise call on the rhythmically named Adelle Adair, the senior partner at the Boston law firm Horace & Chase who had hung up on me two afternoons before. Adelle had been Randolph’s senior prosecutor when he was the Suffolk County district attorney. I figured it couldn’t hurt to give her a heads up on the story of the inflated conviction rate, and she had helped me on a story or two from years gone by.

  I convinced the receptionist to give her a call—no small feat in itself. Once the call was made, I was summoned to her office.

  “What could I possibly have done to be honored by such a visit?” she asked with a smile as I came through the door, forgetting our conversation earlier in the week. Her office was typically magnificent, with impeccable views of Boston Harbor. She invited me to sit down opposite her desk, and she sat down in her regular chair.

  I cut right to the chase. “I have a proposition. You wink and nod at me, and I leave you completely out of a story we’re about to pop.”

  “I like propositions,” she said coyly. She could get away with this because Adelle was something of a looker, even in her late forties. “Go ahead.”

  I said, “We’re going with a story tomorrow saying that Lance Randolph inflated his conviction record when he was district attorney. You were his first assistant. Did he?”

  She looked at me and said nothing.

  I said, “A wink or a nod.”

  She didn’t make a move. Finally, she said, “We’re strictly off the record?”

  I nodded. She said, “He did, though not anything outrageous. I didn’t find out about it until after the fact, when the figures were in the paper. The numbers were tightly held in our office.”

  “Did you question him? Confront him?”

  She shook her head.

  “Why not?”

  She looked around her office again in an exaggerated fashion and flashed me another smile. “Because a few months after the figures were in the paper, I got a call from some law firms, including this one, asking me to come head up their criminal departments. Suddenly I was hot property. And the lie was on Randolph, not me. I j
ust went with the flow.”

  I nodded and got up. She stayed seated and said, “So I’m right to understand that a deal’s a deal, and I won’t see my name in print.”

  She was right. A deal is a deal.

  I strode through the newsroom feeling a pathetic kind of silence in my wake—a little bit of pity mixed with a lot of morbidity. It was deadline in the middle of a huge news week, meaning the place should have been rocking and rolling. Try the blues instead. I walked past my own desk and straight into Justine Steele’s corner office and asked what we had for morning.

  She gave me the rundown—an update on the Paul Ellis murder investigation, a feature on family-owned papers that have been bought out by large chains, etc. I was to sit with a reporter, who was going to play catch-up with theTraveler on Nathan’s murder and the tie-in to Paul Ellis and me. The cops were playing ball on it, and I had to as well. She said Mongillo was finishing up the Randolph story, though the governor himself was declining to address the specifics. His only quote, she said, was a warning that, “Statistics can be contorted.” No shit, governor.

  “Hopefully you’ll get something better than we already have. Can you get him tonight?”

  “I asked, and they said no. If that changes, I’ll flag you. I did, though, speak to one of his former aides, who off-the-record tells me that our reporting is correct.”

  Back at my desk, Mongillo was the lone reporter courageous enough to approach me—too courageous, perhaps. “I thought I read somewhere that you were dead,” he said, that dumb grin spilling over his ample face.

  “News of my death has been greatly exaggerated,” I replied. “What I’m going through might be worse than death. It’s torture.”

  He handed me a printout of our co-bylined story, with a lede that said, “Governor Lance Randolph, in his two campaigns for statewide office, exaggerated his success in prosecuting criminal suspects when he served as the Suffolk County district attorney, according to aBoston Record study of available criminal justice statistics.”

  Second paragraph: “During gubernatorial campaign debates, and on his campaign literature, Randolph repeatedly presented voters with a much higher conviction rate of murderers, rapists, and armed robbers than he had, according to the statistics. Time and again, he campaigned on the foundation that he was the most successful prosecutor in Massachusetts at putting criminals behind bars, though the hard numbers show that he was, in reality, somewhere in the middle of the pack.”

  And on it went from there, for about a thousand glorious words, providing an explicit contrast between the numbers Randolph presented during his campaigns and his actual conviction rates. Granted, this wasn’t a stain on a blue dress or an undercover FBI agent bearing bribes as an Arab sheik, but it could well be enough to cost him the nomination to be attorney general. The public doesn’t like a liar, especially a liar in law enforcement who’s piping numbers about crime.

  The story said Randolph’s spokesman declined to respond to questions. I think Randolph and Bank truly believed we were going to give it the proverbial first blink and hold the story for a day. No way. I read it straight through, nodded at Mongillo and said, “Great job bringing it together. I talked to a lawyer downtown today who used to work for him. That lawyer tells me we’re on the mark. This guy could be screwed.”

  We both walked over to his computer and I watched him hit the “Send” button. The story was on its way toward tomorrow’s front page.

  With that, he reached into his drawer and pulled out a crispRecord envelope, unsealed, and said, “Glad you like. Problem is, Randolph’s not the only liar in town. Here’s a half dozen examples of Fitzgerald’s fabrications. It will stay between me and you until you decide whether you want to bring it up the ladder.”

  I didn’t want to tell him then that I absolutely abhor heights.

  I was walking down Charles Street in the heart of what realtors call historic Beacon Hill, having just given Kevin and Gerry the slip and suddenly wishing I hadn’t. A few minutes earlier, I had left my newspaper through the loading docks, ducked into a company car, and drove downtown. Knowing there was someone who was actively wishing, and in fact, willing me, dead, I didn’t necessarily like being without bodyguards, but I’ve learned that if you want to commit a breaking and entering, it’s usually—though not always—best not to bring the police along.

  So there I was walking along a brick sidewalk heading for my rendezvous with Sweeney when a Mercedes Benz pulled to the side of the road and out stepped a pair of goons who looked like a couple of researchers forSteroid Quarterly. I kept walking, and they fell in behind me.

  I quickened the pace. So did they. Too soon, they flanked me on either side, a fact which should have worried me but really didn’t because of all my fellow strollers heading to their opulent condominiums and townhouses after another hard day at work. Witnesses, as I’ve said, diminish the prospects of crime, though Kitty Genovese might argue otherwise.

  The guy on my left cut me off, and the one on the right not so gently guided me up Myrtle Street, a residential side street.

  “You boys looking for the Diet Workshop?” I asked as they prodded me up the street between them. I don’t know why I said this. Sometimes these things just come out of my big mouth.

  Again, the guy on the left, the real creative one, stepped in front of me and blocked my path. The guy on my right dug his fingers into my side, such that I thought he might rip out my kidney and liver and eat them right in front of me.

  I stood almost paralyzed by pain, but hell-bent on not letting them see it. As one guy squeezed my internal organs, the other whispered into my ear, “If you don’t drop the Campbell story, we won’t be nearly so nice next time.” I nodded. I think. I was on the verge of losing all bodily control.

  And then he let go. Just as quickly as they arrived, they were gone. I leaned against a gaslit street lamp and gave the pain a long minute to ebb away. I just learned one thing in that last violent episode. Terry Campbell might have been an asshole, even a criminal, but he wasn’t a killer, because if he was a killer, I would now be dead.

  When I walked into Joe & Nemo’s on Cambridge Street on the backside of Beacon Hill, our designated rendezvous spot, Hank Sweeney was sitting at one of the cramped tables wearing a black turtleneck and a pair of dark gray slacks, looking like a male model in the April AARP newsletter. His legs were tucked under the chair and he stared intently at an Italian sausage lathered in peppers and onions. He took a ravenous bite and, while chewing, noticed me for the first time.

  “My favorite food in the world,” he said, his mouth still full. “I’d have this every night, but Mother doesn’t let me go near the stuff. Says it’ll clog my arteries and cause an early death. I tell her, it’s too late for me to die young.”

  He laughed and took another bite.

  “Go order one,” he said, looking toward the counter. “It’s on me. You can’t commit a felony on an empty stomach.”

  “I’m all set,” I replied, feeling my tender side.

  He looked disappointed, enough so that I said, “Ah, maybe you’re right.” I went up and got one, and, on his orders, brought him another.

  As we both ate our sausages across the Formica table, he went over the plans with me—entry through the rear door that I had exited two days before, use a pair of penlights he had to make our way through the lobby, access the stairs to the basement, and then use a more powerful flashlight that he also had to find the evidence room.

  “There’s one nighttime security guard in the building,” he said. “Imagine being the night guard at a morgue? I’d rather flip burgers at McDonald’s, and the pay’s probably better. Anyway, I’m reliably told that he spends ninety-nine percent of his shift in a third-floor office watching television. I would too if I were him. My understanding is that he never goes down to the basement, so I don’t get the sense we’re under any sort of time constraint.”

  “Who are you, Clyde Barrow? You ever think you wasted a lot of time
on the right side of the law?”

  “Quite the opposite, my boy. Carrying a shield helped me get inside the mind of the criminal and understand the mechanics of the crimes they commit.” He paused and looked at his half-eaten sausage submarine, then back at me and said, “That’s why so many of my brothers go bad. They think they have it all figured out, and they know the other side pays better.”

  He chewed, I chewed, a lot of pretty young blondes walked past the storefront windows on their way home to their cozy Beacon Hill apartments, looking in at what must have appeared to be a pretty unique pair, this older black man decked out in what could have been a catsuit, and his scared-looking younger friend. It was 8:30, pitch dark.

  I took the last bite of my sausage and said, “I still wish you’d let me do this alone. You’ve got a lot more on the line than I do, and you know how other prisoners are when they have a cop in their midst. You’ll be the most popular bitch in the pen.”

  He looked me up and down. “Ah, it’d feel nice to be desired again.” He finished his sausage, swallowed, and said, “And you really expect me to let you go it alone. Christ”—he started pulling this pseudo-mad thing again—“look at you. You dressed for a B&E like a college sophomore going home to meet his girlfriend’s mother. The Good Humor Man doesn’t dress in lighter clothes than you.”

  I looked down at my Banana Republic khakis, then back at him and said, “These are my lucky pants.”

  “Yeah, great. We’ll be lucky to get out of there alive.”

  “Seriously,” I said, “you’ll lose your pension. You depend on that. Your wife depends on it. You have kids? They’re probably trying to ratchet up their inheritance.”

  He looked down at the table and his tone became softer, crumbled. “Somebody disobeyed me.” He looked me in the eye now. “And that might mean somebody got away with murder on my watch, and they ain’t going to get away with it.”

  We both fell quiet. We watched as a pair of uniformed cops came through the door, ordered hot dogs, and walked out without paying a dime. They never even offered money. Sweeney’s face became as dark as his turtleneck shirt and he started to get up to go after them, but then sat back down.