The Nominee

by Brian McGrory

  I regarded him for a moment, this big lump of a man with the barrel chest and the black, baby face. How many murders had he solved in his life, how many killers were sitting in some dank cell on this very night because of his dogged work, how many families felt at least a glimmer of justice with all their sorrow—dozens? Hundreds? More?

  And now, here he was a victim. John Cutter was a victim. Paul Ellis was a victim. I’m an intended victim. The question, the maddening question, was, why? Who was this dead man just a few feet away?

  He looked at me looking at him and said in a voice louder than before, “Get out. For me, for you, for your newspaper, get out.”

  I stood up hesitantly, my legs stiff from all the crouching of the last couple of hours, my fists aching from whatever it was that I struck. I raced over to the box, grabbed the report and the bag with the tissue and shoved them down the back of my pants. I placed the box back carefully in the cabinet from whence it came and shut the doors.

  Back at Sweeney, I crouched down. His eyes were closed again. “Wake up,” I said. “They’re here in a moment.”

  He opened his eyes at half-mast. One hand was still draped over his open wound. The other was sprawled at his side with the gun.

  “Go,” he whispered.

  “You’re a great cop,” I said. “And a better man.” I kissed his cheek as his eyes fluttered shut. I took one final look at my victim then ran for the door.

  I was halfway down the hallway when I heard what sounded like a battalion of cops and EMTs bounding down the stairs. I yanked open a nearby closet door and stepped inside. A rat skittered across my exposed feet. My face was surrounded by heavy spiderwebs housing God knows what kind of animals—though I presume spiders. I stood frozen until the rush of footsteps gave way to silence, opened the door, and briskly walked toward the stairs.

  In the lobby, as I emerged from the doorway, probably with cobwebs on my face and spiders crawling through my hair, a uniformed officer gave me a suspicious look.

  “Grimmer than I ever could have imagined down there,” I said to him. “I think they’re going to need your help.”

  He gave me the once over and headed for the stairs. And with that, I raced for the alley, wiser, older, weaker, and more desperate than I had ever been before.

  Thirty-One

  Friday, April 27

  ISTOLE A SIDELONGglance at Vinny Mongillo standing innocently beside me at the rental car counter at West Palm Beach International Airport, a rotund presence gabbing away on his cell phone with another faceless official back on Beacon Hill, and turned my attention to the pretty young thing with the lazy accent in the unfortunately unflattering brown Hertz jersey.

  “Good idea,” I said. “I’ll go ahead and get the full-sized.”

  As we made our way from the airport, which, by the way, was crowded with happy tourists arriving from points north for a spring weekend in the sun, Mongillo cupped his hand over the phone and said to me, “If you see a Perkins, stop. Best waffles in America.” Next thing I heard, he was saying into the phone, “Fuck him and the patronage cart he rolled in on.”

  My patience for these theatrics was running thin, mostly due to the exhaustion brought on by the fistfights, the gunfights, the garish discoveries. Just another day in the life of Jack Flynn, intrepid reporter. Right? Well, I hoped not.

  Anyway, here I was, destined for Marshton just four days after the last such sojourn almost got me killed, and the man I had initially come to visit was now lying near death—because of me.

  Why had I returned? Logical question. The best way to answer that is to explain what happened after I left Sweeney the night before:

  First, I paid on a Northeastern University criminology professor by the name of Avi Dents. Get it? Evidence. Just kidding. I’m punchy. His real name is Sam Brookstone, a longtime source of mine. Still in my stocking feet, I brought John Cutter’s folder to his house, pleaded with him for confidence, and asked him to tell me what it meant.

  He’s a rather owlish guy, almost trying to look the role of the academician, with tufts of hair that rise far off a mostly bald scalp, and large, thick glasses. He was wearing a cardigan sweater. Alan Dershowitz looks outright suave in comparison. I mean, who wears a cardigan anymore? Even Mr. Rogers went off and retired. He invited me into his library as he scanned the report, took a long puff on an overly fragrant pipe, and said to me, “The victim in this report was poisoned to death, I dare say murdered.”

  That confirmed what I pretty much already knew. Two Cutter-Ellis’s down, one Flynn to go.

  All of which still left something of an accommodation problem. To be more specific, I had abandoned my nice police guard, and I imagined that Gerry and Kevin weren’t terribly pleased about that. They also realized, no doubt, that wherever Sweeney was, I had been as well—a fact that could land me under arrest. Keep in mind, I had just stolen state property, to wit, John Cutter’s toxicology test results. I had shot a man in the face. I fled the scene. So I called Gerry from my cell phone and left him a voicemail saying I was fine and would be in touch in the next day or two. I called the hospital and was told that Sweeney was in intensive care and had slipped into a coma.

  What I needed was a pair of shoes and a place to sleep, if only for an hour or two. So of all places, I returned to Long Wharf, toThe Emancipation, God bless her. It had been two days since I’d been there; long time no sea. Sorry. Nathan was gone, dead; Baker was still staying with friends in the nearby town of Weymouth; Kevin and Gerry knew how much I hated the place, so I didn’t think they’d look for me there. I didn’t sleep a wink, less from fear than the incessant rocking.

  Around threeA.M. , I heard footsteps along the dock. Someone rapped on my window. I should have been frightened. I should have been reaching for some form of a weapon. Instead, I yelled, “Who’s there?”

  “It’s Mongillo.” I knew it was really him because it sounded like he was chewing on something.

  I was wide awake, walked out on deck, and asked, “How the hell did you know I was here? I thought I was hiding.”

  He put the better half of a Slim Jim in his pocket, if there is such a thing, and said, “A good guess. People are worried about you.”

  “Who?” I asked. Serious question. Who was left to worry?

  “Well, the cops who were supposed to be watching you, for starters, but I guess they’re more worried about their jobs.”

  Sitting under a moonless sky in the throat of a deadly night, we hatched our plan to travel to Florida together. If Mary Mae was as fragile as Sweeney says, I didn’t want to give her the news of her husband on the telephone, because it could well kill her. The trip would devour precious time, but I felt the need to go see her in person.

  Then I told Mongillo about my encounter with the goons on Charles Street, and my belief that Campbell might be a ruthless businessman, but wasn’t a brutal killer.

  By sevenA.M. , before I even got a chance to see our page-one story in theRecord that morning, my cell phone rang with a rather agitated Benjamin Bank on the other end and a conversation that went like this:

  Bank: “I can’t believe you ran that story before you talked to us.”

  Flynn: “Why wouldn’t you believe it? I told you that’s exactly what we were going to do.”

  That was followed by silence, which was followed by his exhortation that the governor, traveling to Washington for a round of courtesy calls on Capitol Hill, had to see me that afternoon, and couldn’t do it in Boston, as previously planned.

  “It has to be done in person,” he said.

  So we added Washington to our travel agenda. Vinny insisted on coming along for the entire ride to help protect me, though what he’d do in the face of danger, I wasn’t exactly sure. Vinny, like any good reporter, also wanted to be where the story was, which was Washington. And like any good reporter, he likes an expense account meal at a good restaurant, and they had plenty of those in Washington as well.

  All of which brings us to Marshton. I p
ulled in front of Sweeney’s mint-colored house with the spotless little yard. Mongillo hung up his phone with a look of horror on his face and said, “This is where people go to retire? Mother of God, I’m upping my 401K contribution to the full ten percent on Monday.”

  I ignored that and said, “Wait here. I want to chat with Mrs. Sweeney alone.”

  “Leave the car running and the AC on or I’m going to melt away to nothing in this fucking heat.”

  Not likely, but he knew that already. It was a little after elevenA.M. and as Mongillo already pointed out, the sun was like a tortuous act of an unmerciful hell probing the very depths of our collective soul. I ambled down the driveway, past the Buick Park Avenue that was parked exactly as it had been a few days before, and up to the side door.

  I pulled open the aluminum screen door, and unlike last time, the main door was shut tight and, as I found out when I gently tested the knob, locked. I rang the doorbell and heard it chime on the other side of the thin glass window. I waited and listened, but saw and heard nothing move inside.

  So I repeated the act—doorbell, wait, listen. Nothing. She might be an invalid, I thought, so I should take my time, keep my powder dry, which in this weather, was impossible. I stood in the raging heat for a few minutes, moving around a bit on the stoop just to create some semblance of a breeze, then I rang one more time. After that, I rapped on the glass window of the door, increasingly harder after I continued to get no response. Obviously, she hadn’t driven anyplace, because their car was still here. Maybe she was in the backyard hanging laundry or cooling off a blueberry pie. The problem with that theory is that molten lava wouldn’t cool in this climate.

  Still, I walked to the back of the house, where there was, indeed, a short clothesline, though nothing hanging on it, and a small patch of grass that looked like it hadn’t been mowed in a couple of weeks. I walked up to one of the windows of the house and looked inside. It was their bedroom. The double bed was perfectly made up, some of his clothes were folded on a nearby chair, and a plaque with Sweeney’s badge and a letter of commendation hung on the far wall, next to a small mirror. This room essentially told me nothing, though the portable air conditioner in the adjacent window did. It was off, pretty much assuring that no one was inside.

  I walked around to the far side of the house, within easy sight of the neighboring house. I glanced quickly in at what appeared to be the living room. There was a television, about a nineteen-incher. Across from it sat a Lazy-Boy recliner, next to a side table holding a large-sized Mr. Goodbar, opened. The carpeting was standard issue Berber. The assorted prints and paintings on the wall were of the type you’d buy in a suburban shopping mall.

  “Can I help you with something?”

  It was the frail voice of an elderly woman, and I turned slowly around to see exactly that—a lady of maybe eighty-five years, maybe five feet tall in a loose-fitting housedress, standing on the edge of her driveway with, okay, a gun. She had it pointed at roughly my left testicle. I don’t think she could see all that well, and her hand appeared unsteady—two facts that I wasn’t sure improved my current plight.

  I mean, as a kid, my mother didn’t even let me play guns or war or cops and robbers or anything else with perceived violence and easy, simulated deaths. Now, in the last five days, everyone I meet seems to be packing heat and are all too willing to use it.

  “Hi there,” I said, almost too happy. I clasped my hands in front of me, not wanting the woman to get an itchy trigger finger because she thought I was reaching into my pocket. At the same time, I was protecting, nominally, the family jewels.

  “My name is Jack Flynn. My identification is right out there in my car—” I made an exaggerated pointing motion toward the Buick LeSabre—“and I’d be thrilled to go get it and show you if you’d like. I’m from Boston, and I’m looking for Mrs. Sweeney.”

  “You some salesman?” she asked. She talked out of the side of her mouth in a tone that showed she was remarkably unimpressed. Her skin was tanned as leather, but looked even darker, framed, as it was, by her white hair. I noticed that the quaint housedress had a repetitive print of buff surfers on their boards with the phrase, “Hang Ten.” Hadn’t heard that one in a while.

  “I’m not. I’m a family friend. I’m here to see Mary Mae.” I thought that by using her first name, that might seal the deal.

  The woman said, “You’re no family friend. Go the hell back from whatever slime pit you came.” With that, she cocked the revolver and held the gun out further from her face.

  I shook my head and said, “Whatever you say,” and began walking slowly around the front of the house. What an assassin in Boston couldn’t accomplish, a woman octogenarian in Florida might.

  I’ll confess more than a small amount of relief when I arrived at the car unharmed and snapped open the door. Mongillo was yakking on the phone and barely gave me a look. I started the car up and sped around the block, prepared to hear the sound of a tire exploding or the back windshield shattering at any given moment.

  When I was young, there was an old lady down the street, Mrs. Irving, who used to hand out Hershey Kisses to the neighborhood kids and we’d gather round and listen to her stories about the days of milk-men and tabletop radios. Nowadays, they threaten you with Smith & Wesson revolvers. Times change, not always for the better.

  None of which I explained to Mongillo, because he never hung up. I pulled around the corner, jammed the car in park, hustled out the door, and cut through a neighbor’s yard to arrive back at the Sweeneys’ side door, safely out of sight of Granny Clampett.

  I felt around the top rim of the door molding for a hidden key. Nothing. I checked in and around a nearby bush. Nada. I felt beneath the front bumper of the car for one of those magnetized compartments that holds keys. Again, nonexistent. I came up with the absurd idea of checking under the doormat, a straw rectangle that said “Welcome” on it. And there it was, the house key. What kind of cop hides a key under a mat? Probably a retired and overly trusting one.

  When I opened the door and walked inside, I nearly staggered back from the heat. All the windows were sealed shut, and the place had that medicinal kind of Ben-Gay odor to it that causes a reflexive limp and a sore rotator cuff.

  “Mary Mae?” I called out, still standing in the doorway, my voice somewhere between conversational and a soft holler. No response. I remained just inside the front door in case she was also a Smith & Wesson groupie. Everybody else these days was carrying; no reason to expect she wouldn’t be. These retirees probably had a shooting range next to their shuffleboard court. I called her name again, only louder. The words, though, seemed to get caught in the thick air and fall to the linoleum kitchen floor like a wet rag. In the oppressive heat and the stultifying silence, I was pretty much convinced there was nobody home.

  I walked through the neat little kitchen with the plain countertops, tin spice canisters, and GE appliances, into a small front dining room with a formal but inexpensive looking table that had the appearance of never being used.

  I felt a set of eyes on me, causing me to peer cautiously around the room, expecting to find Ma Barker or whatever her name is from next door. Then I realized the eyes were part of a collection of photographs on the internal wall. I’ll admit, this burglary thing is relatively new to me, even as it’s getting old.

  The pictures, in fact, were the only sign of life in an otherwise antiseptic room, so I stopped for a long moment to gaze at them, unsure what my next move would be. On top, there was Sweeney’s son, I think he said his name was Michael, standing in the driveway of a two-decker house in what was probably the middle-class Hyde Park or West Roxbury neighborhood of Boston, his hair buzzed short, a big smile on his handsome face, a cadet’s uniform on his muscular body. My bet is that he was on his way to his first day at the police academy.

  The next photograph down showed him in his dress blues against a ruffled velvet curtain in a dimly lit auditorium on what must have been graduation day, serious an
d proud beneath the stiff brim on his new police cap, his body rigid in pose. The shot below was that of father and son, the younger in his patrolman’s garb, the elder in a long drab-tan raincoat that a detective might wear on television, leaning on a desk and laughing at the camera in the confines of a police station somewhere in Boston.

  And beside the pictures, this poem, placed in a simple black frame:

  A Parent’s Regret

  Someday, joy will replace the greatest pain

  That anyone should ever have to endure.

  Until then, until you meet your child in heaven,

  A life of tear-stained somedays.

  —Anonymous

  Don’t I know it. I swallowed hard and walked from the dining room, past a front door that looked like it was never used, into the living room that I had seen from outside the house when I ran into the pit bull of a woman from next door. This room had more of a lived-in feel, beginning with the reclining chair that had deep grooves in the cloth cushions. The candy bar I had noticed from the window was melted and goopy from the heat. A pair of remote controls sat on the side table along with an oldTV Guide. I didn’t know people still readTV Guide, but I didn’t know people still ate Mr. Goodbars, either. Maybe it’s a Florida thing, or a retiree thing, which I guess is the same thing.

  Anyway, on the carpet next to the chair sat an uncovered shoebox containing various scraps of paper and clipped newspaper stories, so of course, I reached inside and pulled some out. The first one was a three-paragraph announcement in theParkway Daily Transcript, a little neighborhood newspaper, saying that Michael A. Sweeney had graduated from the Boston Police Academy and been stationed to Precinct 4 in the South End. I don’t know why that gave me a pang of pride, but it did. I sifted through a program for the academy commencement exercises and a letter from the commissioner assigning Sweeney to the street narcotics unit.

  Then I saw a yellowing clip from theRecord that was dated from five-and-a-half years before, a front-page story with the headline, “Officer, Minister Killed in Botched Mattapan Drug Raid.” The lede of the story went on to explain how a young narcotics officer was shot and killed and a city reverend died of an apparent heart attack during a drug raid on the wrong apartment in a Mattapan tenement house. The reporter, Jacob Stein, went on to identify Sweeney by name in the third paragraph. John Leavitt, who was then the police superintendent in charge of detectives and the narcotics squad, expressed regret for the two deaths and said, “This tragic incident is under thorough and intensive investigation. We will find out what went wrong, and we will take all proper punitive and corrective measures.”