A Confidential Source

by Jan Brogan

  Another reporter might have gone to Barry’s home and tried to get a response from his wife or son, both of whom I’d seen around the store, or the older daughter I knew he’d adored. But after my brother, Sean, died suddenly of acute cardiac arrhythmia at age thirty-five, abbreviating a brilliant legal career, a brilliant life, I lost all heart for barging into a newly bereaved family’s home and asking them how they “felt” about losing their loved one.

  Just terrific? I mean, what were they going to say? You never got over it; certainly I’d never stop missing Sean, the older brother I’d looked up to, the friend I’d loved above all others, and it had taken me two years and a twelve-step program to finally come to peace with the abruptness of his death. But the next day? After a mere twenty-four hours of trying to believe the person you love, with your very DNA, no longer exists? Most of what Barry’s family was feeling right now was pure physical shock.

  Since it was Saturday, no one would be working at the offices of the Your Corner Corporation, the Boston company that had bought the markets from Barry. I found the name of the company’s top officials on the company’s website and tracked down the vice president at his Back Bay home. He told me Barry was a “great entrepreneur and a great manager,” and said there were no problems or surprises after the purchase.

  I drove to the Mazursky Market, which was still closed to the public, and hunted Wayland Square for a neighboring merchant who had known Barry. The woman who owned the bookstore where I’d bought my maps of Providence when I first moved was more than happy to talk to me. She was outraged that something like this could happen in a safe neighborhood and wanted to talk about what a great guy Barry was. “Such a good husband to Nadine, such a good neighbor.”

  A short-order cook behind the counter at Rufful’s, a luncheonette where I often went for my BLT breakfast, recognized me from my preference for rye bread. “You knew Barry, right?” he asked.

  I had a sudden picture of Barry the first day I’d walked into the market. His left arm was in a sling and he insisted on bagging my purchase with his one hand, all the while telling me about his car accident and treatment at the hospital. Then he leaned across the counter and extended his cast, an inky maze of names. “I can tell you’re gonna be a regular customer. You have to sign or it won’t be complete,” he’d said.

  “He was a good guy,” the cook told me. He was about my age, but had an air of responsibility about him, as if he had a stake in the business. “A good guy who did a lot for the community. And what thanks did he get?”

  I used the quote for the last line in my profile: Barry Mazursky, family man, entrepreneur, pillar of the community. I felt uneasy, rereading it, all that unmitigated praise. It was hard to get anyone to say anything remotely critical about a dead guy. I tried for balance, pointing out in my story that although I was friendly with him, I didn’t know him well.

  By five o’clock, Jonathan had filed his story on the antigambling rally and gone home. I’d already sent my five-paragraph follow on the car accident, Victor Delria, and police refusal to name him as a suspect; but my story about Barry, technically finished, remained open on my computer screen.

  I picked up the phone and tried Leonard at the radio station, but the woman who answered the phone wouldn’t give me his home phone number. If he really knew anything truly newsworthy, why would he share it with me? Wasn’t I competing media?

  I reread my profile about Barry one more time, closed my eyes, and hit the send key.

  My uneasiness about Barry’s profile was short-lived. Roger, the weekend city editor, loved the story, and pooh-poohed my suggestion that we hold it a day so I could get to more sources.

  “This is perfect. He comes alive. A human,” he said. “It’s like you can see him behind the cash register.”

  More important, it was a slow news day. Aside from the antigambling rally, nothing had happened anywhere in the state. Originally slotted for the metro page, my profile of Barry was needed on page one. The adrenaline rush carried me through the copyediting.

  Afterward, I still had a couple of hours to kill before I was supposed to meet Leonard. I was outside, headed to my car, when I noticed the throngs of people walking toward Union Station. Six o’clock was too early for it to be a dinner crowd.

  Then I remembered Water Fire. It was a semiregular evening event in warm weather, and I’d heard there was an autumn performance scheduled for tonight: one hundred small, floating bonfires on iron braziers were lit up and down the river after sunset, with music piped into the air. It was something like fireworks, only classier. Carolyn liked to take her dates there in the summer to stroll along the riverside park in the crowd, and had been after me to check it out. Raphael’s was spitting distance from the river. It seemed a good way to kill time.

  It was unusually warm for an October evening. On the other side of Dorrance Street, police were shepherding herds of pedestrians through the intersection. By the time I cut through Union Station to the Wall of Hope, an underpass to the park, it was clogged with people stopping to admire the memorial of hand-painted tiles that decorated each wall of the tunnel. I was trying to politely maneuver around a family with two double strollers when I heard the striking of a gong.

  Suddenly, music filled the air. A haunting opera gave me chills despite the cotton sweater I wore. I followed the people ahead of me into the park and pushed to the rail to look down on the water basin.

  The river, which ran through the downtown to the bay, was narrow and still, so much like a canal that the effect was Venetian, especially with the gondolas transporting tourists around. Five slim black boats slinked through the still water toward the wood-piled braziers, which were maybe ten feet apart, up and down the entire length of the river. Each time the people aboard these boats leaned out to light another brazier with a torch, a cheer erupted from the crowd. The lighting and applause created their own path down the river.

  I stood there, watching the flames, embers escaping and reflecting on the water, creating a mournful orange glow. The music, piped into the air by unseen speakers, was moving and I felt the sadness of it in my bones. I missed Boston, and thought of all the times I’d gone to hear the Pops on the Esplanade. In Boston, if I looked into a crowd like this long enough, I could find someone I knew.

  A young couple, arms slung around each other, stopped next to me along the rail to watch the procession of the boats. I thought of Matt Cavanaugh, the feeling of his hand on my shoulder, the way he’d hesitated, as if there was something else he wanted to say.

  Chris Tejian had broken my heart, seduced me as part of his ill-fated public-relations campaign to win acquittal. It had very nearly destroyed me. After that, I never thought I could trust any man. Last year’s disastrous one-month fling with a bartender, who turned out to be dating every other cocktail waitress in the bar, didn’t do anything to restore my faith. But there was something steady about Matt’s eyes, something genuine in the tone of his voice that I wanted to believe in.

  A broad-shouldered woman, loaded with shopping bags like a pack animal, pushed her way up to the rail and slammed an enormous handbag into me. I caught it in my ribs.

  The woman apologized, calling herself “the clumsiest woman alive.” She leaned over the rail, beside me, pronounced the flames lovely and launched into a long explanation about how she’d wanted to put these shopping bags away in her car first, but her husband had taken off with the keys. This was what I liked about Rhode Island. With very little provocation, complete strangers were telling you the stories of their lives.

  “He’s just got to have it all his way, you know?”

  I thought of Matt Cavanaugh and nodded to indicate that I shared the universal female understanding of the shortcomings of men. She seemed pleased. “Better go find him, I guess.” She transferred her shopping bags to one arm and disappeared into the crowd. I stood there staring at all the couples and families strolling along the fire-lit river, lonely again.

  Then, as if to help me o
ut, the music shifted. The melody was no longer aching with love lost, but marching forward with a warlike progression. Screw Matt Cavanaugh and the way he had of looking so intent. He was a nonstarter. A prosecutor. A future politician, for Christ’s sake. I pulled myself off the rail, away from the burning river with its ephemeral flames, toward the solid ground of the parking lot.

  CHAPTER

  6

  I’D NEVER BEEN to Raphael’s Bistro, in the renovated Union Station, but I’d read about it in the paper. It was a fashionable place where the mayor liked to lunch with his top aides. Our living section had done an article on the restaurant’s decor, which was very Manhattan, and said it was the place to wear sleeveless black dresses and stiletto heels. I was wearing jeans and a cotton sweater.

  I got there a few minutes early. The restaurant, all blond maple and uncluttered retro, was packed and I had to make my way through a throng of people to find an empty place to stand at the far end of the bar. I ordered a club soda with lemon and scanned the room. Young couples mostly. A lot of sleek twenty-something women wearing Wilma Flintstone-type tank tops with only one shoulder. Their dates’ wardrobes varied, from casual to business suit, but all looked very Armani. I caught a drift of male cologne.

  Ten minutes passed painfully. I felt awkward at the bar, and tried for a moment to pretend I was back at Skipper’s Landing in Boston, a fish place on Rowes Wharf where I’d finally taken a job serving cocktails. Although the job was a disaster, at least I knew everyone, from the bouncers to the problem drinkers to the distributor who tried to sell us more Mount Gay rum.

  A man to my left looked at me as if I was getting in the way of his cigarette smoke. I stood on my toes to check the door so he would know I was waiting for someone. It was the life of a reporter to meet strange people in strange places, but I had a gnawing suspicion that Leonard wouldn’t show up. That I’d dreamed the phone call this morning.

  Directly to my right sat an older couple, a silver-haired man in a cardigan sweater and pleated corduroys who had a long, earnest face and looked vaguely familiar. His wife, sitting on a stool beside him, wore a full-length mink, despite the warm weather. She downed a martini and glanced at me with a dazed expression. For lack of anything better to do, I ate the lemon that had come in my club soda.

  “How can you do that without wincing?” the man asked. His voice, a clear bass, was kindly.

  I had to smile. “I like sour things.”

  “Then you’ll like us,” the wife said. She sounded drunk.

  “Marge,” the man said quietly, as if to steady her.

  His voice was familiar, too, but I couldn’t place him. I kept thinking he was someone’s grandfather or uncle, but I didn’t know anyone in Rhode Island well enough to have met a close relation like a grandfather or an uncle. “Do I know you from somewhere?” I asked. “You seem familiar.”

  The wife chortled.

  The man gave me a moment to guess. Nothing came to me.

  “Think Powerball,” the wife said.

  “Of course.” I realized it was Gregory Ayers, who ran the Rhode Island state lottery. He was on radio and television all the time, awarding checks to the lottery winners and announcing new scratch-ticket games. In the television ads, people were always rubbing his arm for good luck. I felt oddly excited standing this close to him, like maybe he could affect my game.

  “Go ahead,” he said, offering his arm. “Everybody asks. It’s okay.”

  “Ev-er-y-bo-dy,” the wife echoed.

  I touched his cardigan. Was that static or the zing of good fortune? I couldn’t tell.

  From the corner of my eye, I spotted Leonard working his way through the crowd.

  “Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t,” Gregory Ayers said, looking pointedly at Leonard.

  “Very funny,” Leonard said, and chucked Ayers’s shoulder. “Nice to see you again, Marge.” He kissed her.

  It often amazed me how everybody but me seemed to know everybody else in Rhode Island. But now, it dawned on me that Gregory Ayers’s lottery commercials played on Leonard’s radio station all the time. And now that I thought about it, I remembered that Gregory Ayers, too, was an opponent of casino gambling, one of the only state officials to take a stand.

  Leonard was only about five foot seven, but because of his lean build and the way he carried himself, he seemed taller. Unlike me, he was dressed to blend into the restaurant, looking effortlessly sophisticated in a gray turtleneck and casual black wool pants. He embraced me as if we were longtime friends. “Have you met Hallie?” he asked, turning to Ayers. “She’s the reporter who wrote the story about the Mazursky murder.”

  I thought I saw Gregory Ayers stiffen at the word reporter, and I recalled that one of our columnists had recently done a piece criticizing him for “hypocrisy” when the “King of Lottery” came out against casino gambling. But instantly, his face softened. “What a story,” he said, shaking my hand.

  “I never shop in those little market stores,” Marge offered. An enormous diamond-and-emerald ring on her finger knocked her martini glass askew, sloshing gin onto the cuff of her husband’s cardigan sweater.

  He grabbed a cocktail napkin, dunked it in a glass of water, and began dabbing it off. Then he glanced at his wife and shook his head sadly. “It’s going to be a long wait,” he said, and then with a very deliberate look at Leonard, he gestured to the dining room. “You might not want to stay.”

  Leonard turned toward the dining room and his expression grew dark. Following his gaze, I saw that while most of the customers looked like young twenty-year-olds on dates, there was an older, more boisterous group taking up three tables toward the back. In the center of this group, Billy Lopresti, mayor of Providence, was slugging back something in a snifter.

  He was a funny-looking man, small and stocky, with olive skin, surprised-looking eyes, and hair dyed a shoe-polish shade of black. Years ago, he’d been a popular radio talk-show host at Leonard’s station, and he was still quick with a wisecrack. He didn’t just have voter support, he had fans.

  As we watched, a young woman in a sleek black dress, sitting at a nearby table, stood up, walked over to the mayor’s table, and planted a kiss on his cheek. The room cheered.

  “Apparently, it’s his birthday,” Ayers said.

  Billy Lopresti had been mayor forever—since the early 1990s—but I’d heard that it wasn’t until last year, after he’d wept so openly, so disarmingly at his wife’s funeral, that people had taken to calling him by only his first name. “You gotta give Billy credit for the renaissance, he really cares about Providence,” a caller would say. “Billy’s got so much compassion for the seniors.” And what Leonard hated most of all: “If Billy thinks this casino thing is so good for the city, then it’s a good thing for the city.”

  The mayor stood up, gestured to an elderly woman at a nearby table, pointed to his cheek. In a trained politician’s voice that carried in a crowd, he said, “What? Don’t you love me anymore?” The elderly woman blushed at the attention, the mayor walked over to her and kissed her square on the mouth, and the dining room roared.

  It wasn’t until the mayor sat back down that I noticed the others at his table: an older man with gray hair tied in a ponytail, wearing blue jeans and a dress shirt, and a woman in a business suit. I’d seen both their pictures in our paper.

  “That’s the chief of the Narragansett Indians and Jennifer Trowbridge from Evening Star Gaming International,” Leonard said with disgust.

  The mayor whispered something to Jennifer Trowbridge, who leaned in close so she could hear what he was saying over the restaurant din. Then they both looked up at the bar and peered in our direction. The mayor raised his snifter and the three of them clinked their glasses in a toast. Instead of taking a drink, Billy Lopresti threw his head back and laughed.

  I got the distinct impression he was laughing at Leonard. Leonard must have thought so, too, because when the hostess came toward us to tell us our table was ready, he
shook his head. “I lost my appetite,” he said, and then to me: “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  We left Ayers and his wife at the bar and took Leonard’s car, a Saab with one of those stand-up bike racks on the roof, over the highway to Federal Hill. This was Providence’s famed Italian neighborhood and a source of endless restaurant possibilities.

  Leonard, the man who talked nonstop on the radio every night, was silent, obviously injured, and I didn’t know what to say to him. On the one hand, I was with a man I’d talked to just about every night for the last three or four months. On the other hand, all that talk had been on the air.

  He said nothing until we were under the big, bronze-pinecone archway that was a gateway to Atwell’s Avenue. He pointed to a building on his left. “You see that?”

  I looked out the car window: a city block, restaurants, real estate office, private home, tattoo parlor. “What?”

  He pointed to a small building right in the middle of the first block, with a low roof and a small sign that looked like it might advertise a lawyer.

  “The one with the blue door?”

  “My uncle was shot to death in that doorway,” Leonard said. “It happened when I was a kid, but I never forgot it. They never arrested the guy, but everyone knew who it was. He worked for one of Patriarca’s bookies.”

  “Your uncle had gambling problems?” I thought I was starting to understand Leonard’s antigambling obsession.

  He shook his head. “No. His father had gambling problems. They killed my uncle to impress upon the entire family that they were serious about getting repaid.”

  There was no appropriate response to the enormity of that revelation. I mumbled a vague condolence and wondered why he’d told me this. What did Leonard want from me? What did he think I could do for him?

  We traveled another block in silence. I stared out at the crowds on the sidewalks. Couples, young professionals, and tourists hurried into restaurants. Valets stood in the street, eager to park each new BMW and Cadillac that pulled up. It was hard to imagine anyone getting shot in any of these affluent doorways.