Anonymous Sources

by Mary Louise Kelly

  Galloni had been sent to ensure it didn’t happen again. And now, despite the chief’s typically subtle promise to break Galloni’s balls if there were any problems, here she was again. Galloni was seen as something of a rising star within the Cambridge PD. But he could not afford another mistake this week. The promotion to lieutenant was recent. If word of this got out, the chief would stick him on night shift from now until Christmas.

  Galloni sighed. He couldn’t decide if it made the situation more or less annoying that the reporter in question was extremely attractive. He’d watched her walk away this morning. Great legs. She looked like she knew it too.

  She was still smiling at him. “Please. Tell me what happened. I have to file a story either way. Help me get the facts right.”

  He hesitated. Goddamn it. Finally he blew the air out of his cheeks and met her gaze. “You are extremely pesky, you know that? I suppose it’s not a fireable offense to tell you it doesn’t look like Carlyle fell from the fifth floor.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, we talked to the students in all those rooms up there. They didn’t know him, never saw him. Now, though, see how there’s a big, round window way up there, another twenty feet up from the fifth floor?”

  She nodded.

  “So there’s a little room up there. Inside the bell tower. Some sort of piano room. You get to it from that H-Entry stairwell. That window was propped open, and the janitor says it shouldn’t have been. So we’re thinking maybe he jumped from there. Or fell. Whatever. Okay, Miss Snoop? Are we done?”

  She stood still for a moment. “Why would he have been up there? He’d already graduated, right? He wasn’t a student here anymore.”

  “Got me on that one. But there were a couple of beer bottles on the floor up there, and the cleaning staff swear that they just cleaned a couple days ago. Nobody’s signed out the key since. Who knows. Maybe this Carlyle kid had a key from when he used to go here. Maybe he was looking for somewhere quiet to hang out and get drunk. The thing that . . .” Galloni stopped and looked away.

  “The thing that what?”

  He shifted and looked uncomfortable. “Nothing. Doesn’t matter.”

  “Come on.”

  “It—you did not hear this from me.”

  “Of course not.”

  “They will hang my ass out to dry if anyone knows you were back here.”

  She touched her hand to her heart and nodded. You have my word.

  He hesitated again, then lowered his voice. “So the guys bagged up the beer bottles, you know, tagged them for evidence, just in case. Might as well, right? And here’s the thing. They dusted for fingerprints, just to be certain this Carlyle kid was up there, that he’d opened the window.”

  “And?”

  “And nothing. Nothing. Not one print. The window, the doorknobs, the banisters all the way down the whole damn seven flights. The whole place was wiped clean.”

  7

  From several hundred feet away, another man was watching.

  He’d watched all morning as people came and went through the great swinging doors of Eliot House. He’d watched the television crews jostle for a shot, and the cops try to shoo them away.

  He clenched and unclenched his fingers and then wrapped them tight around the paper cup of tea he’d bought, now cold. His hands would not stop shaking.

  It was done, wasn’t it? Not a perfect plan, admittedly. Such a scramble. But it was done. The boy was dead. He felt reasonably sure that Thomas Carlyle had not had time to tell anyone what he’d heard, not even had time to suspect much.

  But the man couldn’t have taken the risk, could he? Not after all the planning, the years of training and patience and work. One stupid mistake, and it could have unraveled everything.

  Two nights ago the man had tossed and turned in his bed, realizing the gravity of his error. By dawn he had decided: Carlyle must be silenced. And there was only one way to make absolutely certain of that. The man had never killed before. That was not his role in the network. But he could not see a way around it, and there had been no time. He tried to make it look like an accident. Perhaps he had succeeded; it would be some days yet before the autopsy report was finished.

  The turn of events had shaken him. He had committed murder. The man looked down and made another effort to steady his hands. He should not be here, he knew. But he wanted to know what the people investigating the scene looked like. In case they found something. In case they came after him. As, in fact, one of them did.

  But it took her a while.

  He wouldn’t meet her face-to-face until nine days later.

  8

  The third and final time I sneaked into Eliot House was that evening.

  I’d wasted a couple of hours on an awkward and not particularly fruitful attempt to speak to the Carlyle family. They own one of those mansions set back off Brattle Street. Glossy white paint, wide front steps, gas lanterns framing the door. I’d walked the twenty-five minutes from Eliot House and then cringed as I rang the doorbell. I’m not known for timidity when chasing a story, but it seemed in unspeakably poor taste to impose on a grieving family the day after their son had died, to ask . . . What? What could I possibly ask?

  How do you feel?

  Or:

  Why might he have been drinking alone on the roof of his old college dorm last night?

  Or, worse still:

  Do you know of any reason why your son might have wanted to kill himself?

  Awful. Hideous. They didn’t pay me enough to do this.

  I was rehearsing an opening along the lines of How would you like people to remember your son? when the door opened. To my relief, it was not Mr. or Mrs. Carlyle, but a younger man. Perhaps a friend of Thomas’s. Or a family friend. He stepped onto the porch, half-closed the door behind him, and politely informed me that the Carlyles had no comment, no statement, would not be speaking to the press.

  I nodded, tried again. “I understand. I would rather not be troubling you, really. And I’m so sorry for the family’s loss. But I have to do my job, which is to write a story on what happened, and I want to get it right.”

  I was talking fast, hoping he wouldn’t shut the door in my face. “The statement the university put out said he’d just finished a year abroad in England. Was he back living here, at home?”

  The man stood still for a moment, then shook his head. “No. I mean, he hadn’t had time yet. He’d only just landed. He’d been back in the States for all of three hours, we think. His bags are all just . . .” The man gestured vaguely toward the inside of the house.

  “It was a fellowship year he was doing, is that right? Do you know what he was studying?”

  “Economics, I think. Or history. To tell you the truth, I don’t think Thom was doing all that much studying this past year.” The man smiled sadly. “He’d met a girl. English. She was going to come over this summer. To meet everybody. He told Anna all about her.”

  I noted the name. Anna. That must be Mrs. Carlyle.

  “Thom and Anna are—were—they’re very close. He called her, you know. On the way from the airport, when he landed. To tell her he was home safe. And that was yesterday and then a few hours later she gets a call that he—that it—about what happened.” The man paused, cleared his throat, and turned to go back inside.

  “Thank you. I’m so very sorry.” I heard the bolt slide into place. I started back down the driveway.

  I knew I should head back to the newsroom. Start writing up what I had so far. It was late afternoon and Hyde Rawlins would be stalking the cubicles, chasing down what was on offer for tomorrow’s front page.

  But right now what I had was pretty thin. I didn’t have a sense of what kind of guy Thom Carlyle had been. I didn’t know why he’d fallen from the top of Eliot House. I wanted to be able to picture it, to see what he had seen in the moments before he fell.

  And so I went back.

  THIS TIME NO GUARD WAS posted outside. The television trucks were g
one too. Students were coming and going from the main doors, and I walked right in. The cops must have figured they’d collected whatever evidence they could find, and now dorm life was getting back to normal.

  I checked the courtyard first. By this point I knew where I was going. The dark stain had been scrubbed away, but the ring of police tape was still there. People had left bouquets of flowers. I turned toward H-Entry.

  Here the police tape was gone. I walked up a flight. Another one. No one stopped me. I could hear music from behind one of the doors. Students were home. There was no sign of cops. I kept climbing, but on the fifth floor I hit a dead end. At the end of the corridor was a door marked LEONARD BERNSTEIN ’39, MUSIC ROOM AND TOWER. It was sealed with the POLICE—DO NOT CROSS tape. I jiggled the knob. Locked tight.

  I slumped down against the wall and tried to imagine what had happened here last night. There were three possible explanations. The most likely, surely, was suicide. Thom might have climbed up the bell tower to throw himself from the top. Maybe the tower had some symbolic significance from his undergraduate days here. Or maybe it was just a really tall tower—tall enough to guarantee you wouldn’t survive a fall—for which he happened to have the key. The major problem with this theory was that so far I’d found no reason to believe he’d been depressed. I’d had the Chronicle reference librarians scour his record, his Facebook page, old Crimson cuttings. They’d found no trace of trouble, no hint of anything other than a nice kid with good grades and a lot of rowing trophies. You never know what’s going on in someone’s head. But from a practical standpoint, why would someone bent on killing himself have taken the time to wipe the railings free of fingerprints?

  So maybe it was an accident. He might have been drunk. Leaned out too far, slipped. The autopsy would presumably turn up whatever drugs or alcohol were in his system. Galloni did say they found beer bottles up here. But he’d said a couple of bottles. I found it hard to believe a twenty-three-year-old athlete could have gotten drunk enough off two beers to fall off a roof. And there was still the issue with the fingerprints.

  Which left the most sinister possibility. What if someone else was up here last night? Carlyle had been a big guy. He would not have gone without a struggle. I knew—the yellow cardigan story—that he had landed faceup, eyes open. But what if his skull was already shattered when he hit the ground?

  9

  THURSDAY, JUNE 24

  BY NINE THE NEXT MORNING, I was back at my desk. My byline was front page again in the morning paper. I had the details about Thom Carlyle falling from the bell tower instead of a fifth-floor bedroom. And I’d been the only one to report the fingerprints, or lack thereof.

  I picked up the phone and dialed Lieutenant Galloni. I’d already bugged him twice yesterday to check facts, and I knew he would soon stop taking my calls.

  But the Carlyles weren’t talking. There was nothing more to see at Eliot House. The funeral wasn’t scheduled yet, and the autopsy report might still be a day or two from completion. Meanwhile another Chronicle deadline was looming tonight, and right now I had no leads.

  “Galloni,” he answered.

  “Hi. Alex James here again. Just a quick question.”

  “Look, I really can’t—”

  “I know. I don’t want to get you in trouble. But I thought of something. The key. Didn’t you say nobody had checked it out? From the janitor’s office? I’m still trying to figure out what he was doing up there. You know, how he got up there.”

  “Yeah. Make that two of us,” Galloni said wearily. “But there’s no story with the key. We’ve got it.”

  “You do?”

  “We do. And if you promise to stop calling me, I’ll tell you that it was in Carlyle’s jeans pocket the whole time. Okay? Like I said, he must have had a copy from when he was a student there. Maybe he liked to play piano or something. There’s a big old grand piano up there. Anyway, there’s no mystery about how he got up there. He let himself in. Just wish I knew why.”

  I absorbed this. “And the autopsy report? Any news?”

  “Nope. I told you, it takes a while. They have to do toxicology, tissue testing, all that stuff.”

  “Right. When you get it, will you please let me know?”

  “Absolutely not,” he replied, but it sounded like he was smiling. “Somehow I have a feeling you’ll find out about it just the same.”

  I sighed and hung up. I had the itchy feeling I get when I’m onto something but I don’t know yet what it is. I had to admit I was intrigued. It didn’t hurt that Thom Carlyle turned out to have a famous dad. That guaranteed the story would enjoy front-page prominence for at least a couple more news cycles. The latest rumor from the Washington bureau was that the president himself was clearing his schedule to attend the funeral.

  It didn’t hurt either that one possibility was murder. Terrible for Carlyle, of course, but at this point he was dead either way. And murder would be a much more interesting story to chase than an accident or suicide. Still, the pieces of the puzzle didn’t fit together yet. An apparently talented and popular young man had been alive and chatting with his mother thirty-six hours ago. Now he wasn’t. So far I couldn’t find a good explanation for why.

  IT WAS AN HOUR LATER, after a walk around the block to buy the espresso now cooling on my desk, that it finally came to me what to do next. Or rather, where to go next: England. Carlyle had stepped off a plane from London just three hours before his death. The people he’d spent the last year with would be there. Perhaps some answers were there. I could try to find the English girlfriend, take a look around his room, track down his professors. Maybe Thom had said something to someone. At the very least I ought to be able to pull together some sort of a profile, a bit of color about what his last days had been like.

  I rifled through the papers on my desk. Where was that statement Harvard had issued the night he died? Finally I found it:

  Mr. Carlyle was a magna cum laude graduate of the College and had recently completed a postgraduate year as the Lionel de Jersey Harvard Scholar at Emmanuel College, Cambridge University, in England.

  I smiled. I’d been so preoccupied with trying to make deadline that I hadn’t really absorbed the details. Cambridge University. Emmanuel College. This was a place I knew.

  Cambridge had represented a compromise between my father and my mother. My dad is American. More precisely, he’s a New Yorker, born and bred. Take him beyond the five boroughs and it’s like watching a crack addict deprived of his fix: he just doesn’t function. It remains a mystery to me that he fell for my very Scottish mother. They have lived happily together in Brooklyn for three decades now, but she clings to her Scottishness with the zeal of an expat. I am told I spoke with a broad Glaswegian accent when I started nursery school, despite having never lived outside New York. I do remember being teased for calling pants trousers, and cookies biscuits, and so on, and for expressing astonishment at the notion that potatoes could be eaten in nonfried forms.

  My mother taught me to roll my R’s. Also to cry during Braveheart, to describe raw, rainy days as dreich, and to never buy my underwear anywhere other than Marks & Spencer. But she gave up on convincing me to consider Scotland for university. I was too like my father on that front. We both had our hopes pinned on Columbia. I got in early, didn’t even apply anywhere else. Then, midway through college, the English department nominated me for a fellowship. Junior year abroad at Cambridge University, all expenses paid. My mother leapt. It wasn’t Scotland, but at least it was Britain. Maybe I would meet a nice boy from Edinburgh.

  So I went. I didn’t meet a boy, at least not one that lasted. But I loved it. And now, eight years later, I could picture the streets that Thomas Carlyle had walked, in the weeks before he died.

  THE EDITORS LOOKED SKEPTICAL. THREE of them were gathered in Hyde Rawlins’s office: the foreign editor, the national editor, and Hyde. The Washington bureau chief, Jill Hernandez, was supposedly listening in by speakerphone, but so far she hadn’t sai
d a word.

  “I mean, obviously I’m all in favor of staying out front on this story,” the national editor was saying. “But isn’t whatever happens next going to happen here? The investigation is here. The family is here. The funeral will be here. Shouldn’t you be here?”

  I shook my head. I had anticipated this argument. “The family isn’t talking. We’ve tried. And my police sources”—no need to mention there was only one—“my police sources I can work by phone. I don’t need to see them. The point is, the people Carlyle knew—the people he was hanging out with this past year—they’re all in England. They would know how things were going, what he was thinking. We should be talking to them. And they’ll tell us more in person than if I cold-call them on the phone.”

  “We do have a reporter in London already, you know,” the foreign editor cut in. “Why don’t we have Charlie scoot up to Cambridge and sniff around?”

  The room fell silent at that. Charlie Swift, the Chronicle’s London correspondent, had filed maybe half a dozen stories in the past year. I wasn’t even sure he still worked full-time. Charlie was ancient. He’d secured the London gig decades ago, and subsequent generations of management had failed to dislodge him. I suspected Hyde would have fired him and closed the bureau years ago except that it gave Hyde an excuse to visit London every so often to check up on things. The idea of Charlie Swift’s hoofing it to King’s Cross station, jumping on a train to Cambridge, and producing a front-page scoop within the next forty-eight hours was ludicrous. But the foreign editor persisted. “Also, as I think we all know, the overseas travel budget is not what it used to be. I’ve already had to cut back the Africa famine series. I don’t think we can just be assigning random jaunts without a formal story proposal and paperwork.”