The Nominee

by Brian McGrory

  “You haven’t run your Fitzgerald story yet,” I told her. It was an obvious point. If she had run a Fitzgerald story, it would have been in her paper already.

  “It’s ready. I have it. But I didn’t want to do that to you right now. So I quit.”

  She didn’t want to do that to me, so she quit. Forgive me for repeating, but it took a moment to sink in, the enormity of what she just said.

  Around us, everyone returned to their tables and seats after the chaos surrounding Mongillo’s stint—well, everyone but Mongillo, who I saw out of the corner of my eye standing at the bar with the band’s drummer and lead singer, laughing and carrying on in that way he always does.

  “You shouldn’t have quit,” I said.

  “We do a lot of things in life we shouldn’t do.” She spoke, again, without moving back, hardly moving at all. “We shouldn’t shut people out of the present because of something that happened in the past.” She said this casually, just presenting the words to me, unconcerned with how I might feel.

  I asked, “What else?”

  “I shouldn’t have left that day. I shouldn’t have agreed so readily to part ways with you. I should have fought you every step, refused to vacate our apartment, refused to get out of your life. Because your life is my life. Because my life is your life. I haven’t stopped believing that, feeling that, not even for half a second. You might be a jackass, but you’re my jackass, and you’re always supposed to be my jackass. Always.”

  My mind, for whatever bizarre reason, flicked to her apartment, to the fact it was void of even the hint of a man except for the pictures of me. I thought about those last awful moments together, the zip of her luggage in the bedroom, the slow sound of her footsteps, the muddled sobs as she buried her face in Baker’s muzzle, then the melancholy click of our front door. What was she thinking as she stood in the hallway, tears streaming down her face, a future so markedly different from the expectations of her past?

  I asked, “Then why did you cheat on me?”

  Still, she didn’t move. Our faces were no more than a foot apart.

  “I didn’t,” she replied. “And you know I didn’t. You wanted to believe I did, for whatever contorted reasons. You couldn’t function with me, Jack. The past got in the way. Your feelings for Katherine wouldn’t allow you to completely give yourself to me, and that’s understandable. That’s something we could have worked on. But then you fabricated this relationship in your mind, made yourself believe I was unfaithful, because that made your decision to split more definitive in your mind, more rational.”

  Great, I was getting intense psychotherapy, entirely free of charge, right here for the whole world to watch and hear in the environs of a Washington jazz bar.

  She added, “And part of it was my fault. He’s a cop, a detective. I was stringing him along, using him. I needed information on Fitzgerald, about how he lied in print on a famous, failed drug raid a few years ago. I thought Travers could help me. I couldn’t let you know. So I panicked that day. I was ashamed. And I walked out when I shouldn’t have. Given the situation, I just didn’t know what else to do.”

  Anyone else have any surprises they’d like to spring on yours truly today?

  Working a story on Fitzgerald and stringing Travers along. Made sense, if only to another reporter, of which I was one. I stared down at the floor for a long moment, trying to scrutinize the seemingly inscrutable. Then I looked around the crowd for a moment just to buy a little bit of time.

  What must the people around us have thought, the occasional guy, just out of college, squeezing past us with two Budweisers and a pair of kamikaze shots for himself and his best pal, the two of them doing nothing more that night than bouncing from one bar to the next, not a worry in their simple little world.

  In the silence, she said, “Jack, I’m incapable, constitutionally incapable of cheating on you. I thought about it. I had, for lack of a better word, an emotional connection to this guy. I severed that connection the day you kicked me out. I put the Fitzgerald story aside, and now that I’m back on it, now that I have it, I don’t want it at all. Travers, he means nothing to me, just some guy trying to get more from me than I ever wanted from him, which pretty much defines any guy but you.

  “But Jack, you have to look within. You have to figure out how to get over what happened to you in that hospital nearly four years ago, because it’s consuming you. I can only imagine how devastating that must be to lose the one you love, to have her die on what is supposed to be the greatest day of your life. And believe me, Jack. I never intended to replace Katherine. But sooner or later, you have to move on. You have to ease up on yourself. You have to allow yourself to understand that you can’t spend the rest of your life consumed by grief. You have to let someone else in, and I was hoping to be that someone, now and always.”

  “Why’d you quit theTraveler ?”

  “I had a choice: put the story about Fitzgerald in the paper, knowing it would hurt you and theRecord to no end, or walk away from it, knowing that in some small way, I might be helping you.”

  “What does the story say?”

  She shook her head. “I can’t tell you that, Jack. I can quit theTraveler, but I can’t be completely unfaithful to it. I got the story on their dime. I’m not going to hand it to the competition. It deals with an old drug raid. I don’t yet have all the specifics. The paper doesn’t either. You need to find it out on your own.”

  My cell phone rang on the table. I stepped over and picked it up and saw from the caller identification that it was a Boston Police number. I said, “Yeah.” It was Luke Travers on the other end.

  This is one of life’s little ironies. I don’t know why that lightened my mood, but it did. Okay, so I do know why that lightened my mood.

  “The name you’re looking for is Eric Glass. On the street, he just goes by ‘Glass.’”

  “What street might that be, because I need to find him?”

  Travers hesitated on the other end. He replied, “I just helped you all I can.”

  “Good for you. I’ll say the same thing when I try to fit your name and the word ‘moron’ into our lead headline tomorrow. And you know what? When I do, I’ll be doing the entire city a favor.”

  “He usually hangs on the corner of Boylston and Harrison downtown. It’s his territory, for crack and girls.”

  I hung up before my naturally sunny disposition overcame me and I thanked him. I turned back to Elizabeth. It ends up I didn’t have very far to turn. She had followed me the few paces over to the table and positioned herself right against me, her face again about a foot from mine. Her eyes searched my eyes. Her mouth seemed to be drawn to my mouth.

  I said, “You shouldn’t have quit. I really didn’t need you to do that.”

  She said, “I did it for you, Jack.”

  God, how I wanted to tell her how I felt. I wanted to move my head the six inches it would take to meet her in the middle of this dwindling divide. I wanted to hold her, then tell her everything that was going wrong and ask her to help me figure out a way to make all of this right.

  But here’s what I said instead: “I can’t deal with us, Elizabeth. I can’t get the present straight, never mind the past. I’ve already lost enough to last a million lifetimes, and right now I’m at risk of losing a whole lot more. Thank you for your help, but right now, I just need to be alone.” And I turned and walked away.

  Ask me why I did and the only thing I could say is that I had a devoted belief that a broken trust, like a cracked mirror, can never be properly repaired, that once a relationship is tormented in the way ours had been, even if we summoned the intense energy to put it back together, everything that would happen in that relationship would be viewed through the prism of its absolute worst moments. The good would always be tempered. The bad would seem that much worse. I wanted something fresh, easy, without the history, the miserable memories. And not to sound too altruistic—I thought she deserved better than what I had to offer. Who wants
to see everything from the warped perspective of a tragic past?

  So I kept walking. I stopped at Mongillo, who was still leaning on the bar with a couple of members of the band, and said, “You’re an asshole for giving me up.”

  He looked at me and said, “Don’t be a bigger asshole and walk out of here.”

  “Watch me.”

  After a few steps, I turned back around and told him, “We’re on the 6:30A.M. flight. We have urgent work to do together in Boston tomorrow morning. If you’re not at the airport, I will fucking kill you.”

  And I headed for the door. On my way, I turned and looked at her through the crowd, standing in the exact spot she had been, looking back at me. We kept our eyes on each other’s for a moment until finally I turned away, pulled open the door, and stepped out into the warm Washington night. As I flagged a cab, my cell phone rang and I looked down at it, figuring—all right, hoping—it might be her. But it was aRecord number on the caller identification.

  “Jack Flynn,” I answered.

  “Jack, it’s Amelia Bradford, Paul’s secretary.”

  Amelia, it’s worth noting, is a perfectly preserved and uncommonly proper woman in her early sixties, unflappable by any measure. Because of that, her tone—something between concerned and panicked—seemed not so much surprising as alarming, especially when you factor in that she was calling at ten o’clock on a Friday night.

  “Amelia, what’s wrong?” I asked.

  “Jack, I’ve found something. I’ve found something very strange and I don’t know what to do about it. I know how Paul thought of you, so I think you should see it right away. Can you come down to the newspaper?”

  “Amelia, I’m in Washington tonight, stuck here because of a cancelled flight. What do you have? I’ll be in Boston by tomorrow morning.”

  “I think it’s a clue, Jack. I found it cleaning out Paul’s office this evening. It’s something you should look at, but I don’t want to go into it over the phone.”

  “Where will you be in the morning?”

  “Here, in the office, continuing to box everything up and clean it out. It’s so terribly sad, Jack, and it only feels worse with all this indecision.”

  I replied, “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  Would it be that life was that easy.

  Thirty-Four

  Saturday, April 28

  BOSTON’SCOMBATZONE ISN’Twhat it used to be, which believe me, is very good news, because it used to be the seediest half dozen square blocks in all of New England—grimy streets lined with decidedly downscale strip clubs, porn theaters with sticky floors, and $2 peep shows with strung out whores begging through glass walls for $5 tips.

  At twoA.M. on a Saturday morning, with the rest of the city in its Puritan-induced slumber, the urine-stained streets of the zone were jammed with traffic, mostly with cars from the suburbs carrying a lone male driver on a journey one part hedonistic and two parts pathetic. Step into an alley, any alley, and you could get yourself a $20 hooker in mesh nylons and a chunk of crack. Just hope to hell that the hooker is a woman and the crack is actually some relative of cocaine, and hope even more that you can get yourself out of that alley alive.

  No more, or at least not as much. These days, a glittering Ritz-Carlton Hotel looms some forty stories overhead, aside a second tower chock full of million dollar condominiums with extraordinary views over the historic Boston Common, the Public Garden, and the Charles River beyond.

  The strip bars are mostly gone, but for one new upscale club and an inexplicable little holdout, The Glass Slipper, situated on a side alley where few people ever think to go. A better name for the joint might be The Orthopedic Shoe, given the age of the—ahem—girls who test their limited skills at the art of exotic dancing there. The movie houses have been boarded up or converted into Chinese restaurants and small groceries. If the streets are jammed late at night, it’s usually with couples coming into the neighborhood for some pork fried rice or chicken lo mein.

  But like anything else in life, there are a few people who don’t understand that the party’s over and the rest of the world has gone home or moved on. Guys with mullet haircuts and Igloo coolers filled with cans of Budweiser still roll through the zone at any odd hour, because that’s where they heard they were supposed to go. They are easy prey with easy money, looking for a few minutes of oral sex and a sniff of cocaine. Maybe someday they, too, will be able to let the 90s go. But for now, they make life that much better for the likes of Eric Glass.

  Mongillo and I arrived at the corner of Essex and Harrison streets at about 9:15 on Saturday morning, fresh from our flight into Logan Airport, though fresh isn’t a word I’d use to describe either the neighborhood or my current state. We could have split up, but until I got my police protection back, Mongillo didn’t want to leave my side, and I wasn’t about to push him away. No, he wasn’t likely to scare off any would-be killer, but just the fact that he would serve as a witness might. Besides, that stunt with Elizabeth aside, I liked the guy, and life was better with him around.

  We got out of the cab in a stream of sunshine and took a long, skeptical look around us. There were condom wrappers in the gutter. My eyes drifted toward a discarded hypodermic needle balanced on the grate of the storm drain. Trash floated by in the spring breeze. A homeless man wrapped in the remnant of a commercial rug staggered toward us, but just kept walking by, repeating to himself, “The cock-sucking ozone’s going to kill me.”

  Mongillo took a long, hard sniff at the air, his considerable nose pointing up toward a robin’s egg blue sky, and exclaimed, “Ah, the smell of commerce.”

  Actually, the smell was of urine, but that’s okay. I dialed a cell phone number, and within a few minutes, a gleaming Lincoln Continental with heavily tinted windows pulled up to the curb. The driver and front seat passenger, two thugs in ill-fitting black suits, both stepped from the idling car and silently approached us. To the more cynical among us, this may have appeared to be a good old-fashioned rubout. To me and Mongillo, it’s a way to make a living.

  The men patted us down in absolute quiet, then the larger of them—tough as that distinction was to make—knocked once on the rear car window and said, “It’s okay, boss.” The door opened, and Vinny and I slid in next to a gentleman named Sammy Markowitz.

  A word about Sammy: dangerous. Here’s another: criminal. And some more: ruthless, conniving, depraved. But hey, he returns my calls, so I like him. Cops like to say that when you’re trying to bust the devil, you don’t rely on saints for inside information. For reporters, it’s much the same deal.

  Sammy, truth is, was an old source of mine, the provider of key information for a series of stories many years before that led to the indictment of a dozen cops in the city of Chelsea and the recall of the mayor. A little more than two years ago, he gave me key information while I uncovered a major Washington scandal. In Massachusetts, and seemingly in the nation, if there was crime, Sammy Markowitz’s sticky fingers were somehow on it.

  He was short and bald with a few day’s worth of haphazard growth on his face, a clone of Don Rickles if Rickles wasn’t quite as handsome as he is. He spent his days sitting in the back booth of his appropriately named Chelsea cocktail lounge, The Pigpen, playing gin rummy, sipping Great Western Champagne, and counting the day’s receipts of one of the largest, most efficient bookmaking operations in America.

  “Jack,” he said, giving me an awkward hug, “I want you to know, you’re becoming like another son to me, and if you call me at the last minute again in urgent need of help, I’m going to have you killed, just like you were my son.”

  I laughed. I think that’s what you’re supposed to do at these moments, though I’ve never really been sure. I introduced him to Vinny, who gave me a strange, sidelong glance.

  Sammy said to Mongillo, “I’ve got a fat daughter, a big pig of a woman. I should set you two up.”

  Vinny didn’t reply. I cleared my throat and said, “I wish I bedded all the women that Vinny
does.”

  Sammy looked at me and said, “I don’t like to be seen out here with you, you know? The cops are looking for you. There was a hired hitman looking for you. Christ, a guy could get hurt just being near you.”

  He handed me a manila envelope, looked up into my eyes and said, “This is what you need. Now listen to Sammy. Be careful now. And come by and see me sometime. We might be able to help each other out.”

  Maybe, or maybe not. Before I could decide, or even thank him, the back door opened again and the goon beckoned us outside. Vinny struggled out, and I followed. The door slammed shut, the goon got in the front and the car sped away, a glint and a gleam in the springtime sun.

  I tore open the envelope and looked at two pictures, one a computer printout of a mugshot of Eric Glass, the other an apparent surveillance shot of Glass. He was an oddly good-looking guy, with light black skin, deep set eyes, his hair done in cornrows. The accompanying printout said he was five feet ten inches tall, 165 pounds, with brown eyes.

  Also in the package was a photograph of an equally handsome guy, with short wiry hair, a chiseled black face, and a police uniform on—Michael Sweeney.

  I had many questions to answer on this day, but one thing I’ve learned in this business is that it doesn’t do any good to try to answer all of them at once. So here I was trying to find out what went wrong in that drug raid five years ago. Did Robert Fitzgerald publish a lie, and if so, what and why? What drove Hank Sweeney to abandon his retirement, risk his life, and come to my side?

  With the aforementioned pictures in hand, Mongillo and I walked into a fabric store that fronted the corner. The signs on the dirty windows were written in both English and Chinese, the English ones reading, “Best selection in Boston,” and “Buy ten yards, two free.”

  As the two of us walked into the shop, the door hit a bell and two startled elderly Chinese women turned and looked at us from behind a counter. One of them, no more than four feet six inches tall, came walking around the counter, right up to us, and said, “May I help you?”