The Nominee

by Brian McGrory

  He looked up suddenly from the rug, looked directly into my eyes. He said, “I tried to do the right thing. And in the end, it led to nothing but a pack of disgusting lies.”

  I asked, in a sympathetic voice, “What about Commissioner Leavitt?”

  He chuckled, but it was a rueful little snicker, not anything funny. “He was there, at the school, right after it happened. He was the head detective then, a superintendent. Like I said, he knew there was no extra clip on the ground. He knew that Lance Randolph’s story was an utter sham. So he blackmailed me. When he got into trouble on that botched drug raid, he called me and struck a deal. ‘What harm,’ he asked me, ‘is there in blaming a dead kid for a raid gone inexplicably bad.’”

  Here, I couldn’t help myself. “The harm,” I replied, “is when that dead kid’s mother sticks a revolver in her mouth and blows her brains out because she knew the newspaper and the cops were lying about her only child, but there wasn’t a damned thing she could do about it.”

  He looked passively at me and nodded. “Exactly as I’ve always told you, Jack. That every word we write will have consequences for people we don’t even know and often can’t even imagine. I lost sight of that one true thing.”

  I sat there in the dim light, exhausted. Fitzgerald leaned against the back of his chair and began rocking, partly in an attempt, I think, to soothe himself, partly just out of raw relief. Neither of us spoke for several long moments, until I said, “Robert, you know I have to go into print with this.”

  He replied, “I know you do. And for the record, Jack”—here, a slight smile crossed his lips—“I know it’s nothing personal. The truth is just what we do, or are supposed to do.”

  More silence. If he was going to kill me during this visit, if he planned to pull a weapon from his pants or a desk drawer and shoot me in the head as Paul Ellis had been shot when he had the same information that I had now, then this would be just about the time. But he continued to rock, his head back, his hands in his lap, his eyes looking down at the floor.

  I asked, “Robert, did you kill Paul?”

  He didn’t seem surprised by the question. He didn’t even appear offended.

  “No,” he answered, still rocking, still gazing at the floor.

  “Did you kill John Cutter?”

  Again, no expression of surprise, not even over the assertion that John Cutter had been murdered rather than died of a heart attack. He shook his head and simply said, “No.”

  He was lying. Or at least I thought he was. Or maybe I wasn’t really sure.

  At that precise moment, we heard the door open downstairs, the whoosh of outside air coming in, then the sound of someone padding up the wooden steps.

  Fitzgerald looked at me and I looked at him.

  “The Avon Lady?” I asked.

  Then I saw the look of surprise that flashed across his face as he gazed toward the door, and I knew it would be nothing so simple.

  Thirty-Nine

  SPEAK OF THE GOVERNOR,I turned fully around in the leather chair to see the figure of Lance Randolph, who stood in the doorway, his arms crossed, looking blankly back at the two of us.

  “Hello, Robert,” he said from across the room. “And hello, Jack. The two of you come together to figure out how to cover up so many years of published lies?”

  Quite the opposite, obviously, but I felt no compelling need to explain that to him, not now, anyway. Instead, just for kicks, I stood up and said, “Governor, this is a private conversation. Is there something we can help you out with?”

  He began walking toward us. I’ll confess, I didn’t like the fact that he was alone. As the nominee to be the attorney general of the United States of America, he should have been accompanied by FBI bodyguards. The fact there were none with him meant he had intentionally snuck out by himself for purposes that I think I was beginning to understand.

  The other thing I didn’t like was the gun that he pulled out of his belt, a smallish looking pistol that I suspected could still do a large amount of damage. My razor sharp mind scanned back to that speech he made at the Four Seasons five years back about stricter gun controls, and I wanted to remind him that he might be in violation of his own beliefs and perhaps laws. I didn’t.

  My jaw was somewhere down around the floor. Here I had been thinking, for every good and obvious reason, that Robert Fitzgerald was the cause of Paul Ellis’s and John Cutter’s deaths. But standing in front of me was a man with a gun who had every bit as much at stake—and arguably more—than the reporter who lied on his behalf. There’s a lesson there in reporters and politicians getting too close, overly chummy, but at that particular moment, I’d be damned if I could figure it out.

  Fitzgerald stood up and said, “Lance, put the damn gun away before someone gets hurt.”

  There were already four dead, not including Mary Mae Sweeney, and Hank Sweeney lay in critical condition in Massachusetts General Hospital. I think Fitzgerald was a little behind the times with his assertion, but again, I didn’t bother pointing that out.

  “Drop it, Randolph, or I’ll break your fucking nose.”

  That, by the way, was me, feeling a surge of testosterone as I brought the disparate pieces of the puzzle into a clear image, and that clear image had Randolph as the killer of two publishers of my newspaper, two men I greatly admired.

  Seven years ago, Randolph had directly benefited from a monumental Fitzgerald lie about his actions at the Roxbury school where his father died. Five years ago, he would have seen his career crash and burn if John Cutter had followed through on his apparent plans to publicly oust Fitzgerald for fabrications. Flash ahead to this week. Paul Ellis, like John, intended to fire Fitzgerald, and Paul, like John, was now dead.

  It doesn’t take the inventor of the Singer sewing machine to see a pattern here. In that pattern, I was apparently next in line. This was another classic Fitzgerald lesson come to life—there’s always a story behind the story, and it’s only the best reporters who can find it. Of course, Fitzgerald never told me that he was personally a part of the story behind the story, but no good would come of holding that against him now.

  Randolph, still walking in our direction, glared at me and seethed, “Sit down.” Fitzgerald promptly did as told. I mean, Baker could come over here and take lessons, he sat that quickly. I remained standing, glaring back at the governor.

  He stopped five feet from me, pointed the gun in my general vicinity, and said, “Robert, what did you tell him? Did you fill his impressionable little head with more lies?”

  Fitzgerald replied, “I told the truth, Lance. And the truth feels damned good.”

  Randolph laughed a shrill, hollow laugh. “The truth? What the hell do you know about the truth? You’ve been lying so long you don’t know deception from reality anymore.”

  One of the knocks on Randolph was that he wasn’t good off the cuff, that he appeared nervous at unscripted events. But I have to hand it to him, that was a pretty good line, and events don’t get any less scripted than this one, or at least I hope they don’t.

  He looked at me and said, “I told you to sit.”

  I replied, still standing, “Give me the gun.”

  He screamed, “Sit down!” His words bolted through the dimly lit room and throbbed off the painted walls. I remained standing.

  He continued to point the gun toward me, but turned to Fitzgerald and said, “Robert, if you had kept your mouth shut, everything would have worked out fine.”

  Randolph, by the way, armed with a gun, his cheeks flared red, his blond hair messed up, looked nothing like the self-entitled, spoiled frat boy that many of us in the Massachusetts press corps knew him to be. To the contrary, he appeared purposeful and determined—exactly what you want from your politicians, only without a gun in their hands.

  Randolph said, “My old man told me that you can never control the press, but you should never let the press control you. Look at me. I’ve made both mistakes. But you people are vipers. You strike for
no good reason. You love to make people suffer. You get your kicks out of watching people fall.”

  Yeah, what’s his point? Actually, that’s not what I was wondering. What I was wondering was how do I get that gun out of his hand, make my exit, and file for the Sunday paper. This might be one of the more trying deadlines I had ever encountered, assuming I would live to tell about it.

  For reasons that were momentarily unclear, Fitzgerald stood up. I remained standing. Randolph looked from one to the other. He said to me, “By my count, you should have been dead five days ago.” By my account, five days ago would have been Monday, the day the gunman tried to kill me in that Florida swamp. Another piece of the jigsaw falls into place.

  We all stood there like awkward guests at an excruciatingly bad cocktail party. Of course, one of us held a gun in his hand, so it would have had to be an NRA reception. I caught a glimpse of my microcassette recorder, which was still on the table, resting on a short stack ofColumbia Journalism Review —blending into the top cover. Never had I benefited so much from a magazine I thought too highbrow. The recorder, best as I could tell, was still recording, and I don’t remember anyone in here saying that anything was off the record.

  “So I’ll do it myself,” he said to me, his eyes showing fury.

  At that moment, Fitzgerald charged at Randolph. Randolph swerved toward him and fired his gun. The bullet grazed Fitzgerald’s shoulder and smashed through the window. And still, the old guy came. He slammed into the governor, who staggered backward and toppled to the floor.

  Miraculously, Randolph held onto the gun, held onto it like it was a campaign contribution in the final weeks of a costly race. He held onto that gun like it was the only thing that mattered in his life, and at that moment, it probably was. Fitzgerald writhed on the ground in agony, grabbing his bloody shoulder. I jumped into the fray, because lately, that just seems like what I do. I got on top of Randolph as he rolled over and tried to get away. I had my right arm around his neck and my left arm on his gun hand as we both groped for control of the weapon. At that point, enter Vinny Mongillo.

  There I am struggling in the middle of the office with the trigger-happy governor who would be the attorney general of the United States if he wasn’t a murderer, and my colleague Vinny charges at us like he’s a starting linebacker for the University of the Depraved. Randolph gave me a ferocious elbow to my Johnson or my Clinton, whatever it’s called these days, causing me momentarily to lose my grip on his arm. He fired the gun at Vinny, the deafening sound immediately crashing into its own obnoxious echo.

  He missed.

  Think about that for a moment. Think about Vinny Mongillo, his sheer size, his proximity to the weapon, his straight path at the man at the end of it. And Lance Randolph missed. Granted, you don’t have to take a shooting test to be the lead law enforcement officer in the United States of America, but maybe you should, and if you did, this errant shot alone should disqualify him. Vinny kept coming, Randolph was about to fire again, but I regained my wits and gave him a roundhouse punch to the temple, bringing him quickly to the floor, the gun falling aimlessly, harmlessly on the Oriental rug. Mongillo pulled up short just before knocking my nose somewhere into the back of my neck. I swooped down, grabbed the pistol, and pointed it at Randolph’s head.

  He lay on the ground, groaning and semiconscious, like a presidential candidate at the end of the New York primary. I handed Mongillo the gun, ran to the coffee table, and grabbed the tape player, which, much to my relief, was still recording. Somewhere, the gods of journalism shine down on me, even as they’re about to take my newspaper away. I went over to Fitzgerald’s desk to call 911, then hesitated with the receiver in my hand. If the wrong Boston cops arrived, all hell could break lose, or more accurately, all evidence could be contorted and concealed. I didn’t want to call the FBI, because they’re the ones that let Randolph out of their sights. Everybody’s got an angle, and none of them seemed to help my cause.

  So I said to Mongillo, “Let’s put him in the closet.”

  “Put him in the closet? You can’t just put him in the closet.”

  “Why not?”

  Mongillo stood over him, gun in hand, his shirt untucked from the fit of physical energy. He shrugged and replied, “I don’t know. Maybe we can.”

  I needed some time. I needed some time to get over to the newsroom, write a story detailing what happened that night, including the salient facts of Fitzgerald’s lies and his firing, and get them in the Sunday paper.

  Once the presses were rolling, let the cops come in. Let Commissioner Leavitt arm Randolph with an Uzi submachine gun and set him free, for all I care. Everything would work out fine, because there’s nothing better than enlightenment, no weapon better than public attention, a lesson I vividly recall learning from Fitzgerald so many years ago.

  Speaking of whom, he saved my life, Robert Fitzgerald did, after almost causing me to lose it a couple of times before. He was sitting back on his rocking chair, holding his arm, watching the bedlam unfold with his jaundiced reporter’s eye.

  I said to him, “Drop you off at the hospital, Robert?”

  He shook his head. “No, Jack. You’re on deadline. I’ll take a cab over. I’ll be just fine.”

  You’re on deadline. I love that answer. Once a newspaperman, always a newspaperman, even when you’ve strayed far across that sometimes smudged black line.

  Mongillo picked up the governor, who was coming to, but not entirely there. I patted him down in search of more weapons, and found none. Mongillo placed him in Fitzgerald’s coat closet and I wedged a chair under the doorknob.

  Fitzgerald walked out ahead of me. I told Mongillo, “Don’t move. I’ll call your cell when I’m done. I’m going to need about an hour.”

  “What if he tries to escape?” Mongillo asked.

  “Do what you always do,” I replied.

  He gave me a curious expression, his big eyebrows raised on his giant forehead. I smiled and added, “Shoot from the hip.”

  Forty

  Two weeks later

  SOI’M SITTING ATa bar in a small town outside of Springfield, Massachusetts, when the man on the next stool wearing a Nomar Garciaparra tee shirt turns to me and says, and I quote, “The press sucks.”

  For originality, I’d give him a two, maybe a three, tops. For insight, something far higher.

  “You know, I think you might be right,” I said.

  “What do you do?”

  “I’m a reporter.”

  He took a big swallow of cold Budweiser and turned silently away to watch Evil Knievel’s youngest son try to jump twenty-three motor homes, I think Southwinds, on the television above the bar.

  Not that I can blame him—my fleeting friend, not the younger Knievel. All around us was the living evidence of his intuitive assertion. The traveling media circus, bored of the ruthless governor and lying reporter in Boston, had packed up their camera gear, their light poles, their immense makeup cases, loaded them onto their satellite trucks and driven a couple of hours west to the latest story of national import.

  And this one was a rager—Hollywood starlet returns to her childhood home to visit her estranged mother for the first time in ten years, and said mother ends up dead of an apparent asphyxiation. You had celebrity, mystery, small-town values rubbed raw by big city problems. Plus there was nothing else going on, anywhere. For God sake, get me rewrite.

  Before all this, the circus had been in Washington covering Chandra Levy’s disappearance, and before that, Monica Lewinsky, and before that, Boulder, Colorado, on the killing of that little girl who was far too young to ever be a model, and before that, Los Angeles and the O.J. Simpson trial, all along just giving the public what they want, or what we think they want, or what they don’t know they want until they see it on TV or read it in print.

  A guy came up to the bar. He had black-framed glasses on his under-sized head, a boy’s regular haircut, and three pens in his shirt pocket. He waved a twenty in the air and
said in a nasally voice that made him sound like he was a year shy of high school, “Bartender, bartender.”

  I turned to my bar mate who continued to ignore me and said, “A news producer, guaranteed.”

  When the bartender came over, the producer’s cell phone rang and he picked it up and blathered incessantly, self-importantly, about satellite time and the night’s standup and the glorious fact that the victim’s sister broke down and cried in an impromptu interview.

  Maybe Lance Randolph really was right. Maybe we are all vipers.

  I ordered another beer and a bag of Chee-tos. The kid droned on into his phone. The bartender moved on to someone else. Another glamorous moment in the noble pursuit of news.

  For the record, I made deadline that night two weeks ago. I made it by racing back to the paper in the delivery truck, bounding into the newsroom, and typing as fast as my lardy little fingers would carry my thoughts. Working with the body of the story that I had put together that afternoon, I wrote of Fitzgerald’s myriad indiscretions, his admissions, his forced resignation. I wrote how he blamed the wrong cop for bungling a drug raid five years before, and how he repeatedly gave Lance Randolph more credit than he ever deserved. I described the unfolding scene in Fitzgerald’s office with the governor and the handgun and the apparent reference to the shooting attempts of your faithful correspondent that occurred earlier in the week. Then I linked them all, artfully and carefully, to the murders of Paul Ellis and John Cutter that came before. And then, of course, I had an entirely separate story on the Cutter death and the evidence of murder that we found two days before.