A Confidential Source

by Jan Brogan

  As I turned onto the Gano Street exit, I was suddenly hearing Andre’s voice quite clearly in my head: “Gambling destroys more people than drinking.”

  Andre, who agreed with Leonard on every issue, but who got particularly worked up about gambling. Andre, who lived in Cranston, where Drew Mazursky had grown up, and who told heart-wrenching stories about what gambling had done to his family.

  The car heat was on sauna now, and the dry heat penetrated through layers of clothing and skin. There was actual sweat on my forehead. Drew Mazursky’s voice had sounded familiar, but not because he was Barry’s son.

  I raced back to my apartment and found my knapsack on the floor and began foraging through the notebook and the papers for my tape recorder. I rewound the tape, slid the volume to high, and clicked the play button. I paced back and forth in my living room with the tape recorder in my hand as I suffered through my awkward questioning and the slow pace of Nadine’s responses. Then I realized I hadn’t rewound far enough and started all over again. It was right at the beginning of the tape that I heard the voice I was waiting for: Andre of Cranston, in Drew Mazursky’s kitchen.

  “You sure that’s okay, Mom?” he asked.

  The WKZI radio station was not, as I expected, in an enormous building on a major highway with its call letters advertising itself. Instead, it was tucked away in a residential neighborhood in East Providence, an odd surprise at the end of a dimly lit maze of single-family homes.

  I’d waited until the top of the hour to call Leonard, when I knew he’d be on a break for the news. He’d told me to come after midnight, when everyone else had left the station. So here I was at this ungodly hour, with only one other car in the parking lot and one light shining inside. It felt creepy, lonely, and a little far-fetched. But I had to check my tape against the show.

  The outer glass door of the building was locked. I rang a bell and Leonard emerged from a back room to let me in. He looked older at this hour, the vertical line between his brows was a little deeper, his skin a rougher surface. But it made him seem less slick, more appealing. He must have cycled some distance that afternoon because I noticed that one knee looked stiff as I followed him down a narrow hallway to his studio.

  It was a tiny room with huge microphones and tape decks everywhere. Jumbo Dunkin’ Donuts coffee cups littered the desk and the room smelled as if the carpeting had absorbed the sugar and caffeine. The programming was automated, and Leonard turned off the studio volume of a syndicated behavioral therapist who was ordering her insomniac callers to turn on the lights and get out of bed. I sat in the guest chair, but Leonard remained standing. He only had to listen to about a minute of my tape to decide that the voices matched. “Andre of Cranston,” he said, mostly to himself.

  He walked out, beyond the production booth to another small studio or office. I heard the squeal of a file drawer opening, and then the opening and shutting of what sounded like a closet door. He returned with a shoebox full of tapes in his arms. “Andre of Cranston is in here,” he said, handing the box to me. “Almost every night.”

  Inside the box, the tapes were labeled by subject and date. I saw at least a dozen marked “gambling ref.” I picked one out at random and Leonard slid the cassette into a deck behind his microphone. Then he sat in his host chair beside the mike and leaned back, his hands clasped behind his head. Maybe it was the exhaustion of the hour, but he seemed more real to me tonight, as if he’d left the showman behind.

  Considering how often Andre called, it was amazing how many tapes Leonard had to go through—many which contained my voice—before we got anywhere. Finally, on the fourth tape, Andre of Cranston’s voice filled the room.

  On the first segment, he spoke only of his father going bankrupt and the financial ruin of his family. After much fast-forwarding through tapes, we found another call in which he railed about gambling in general as a sickness. Leonard popped out that tape and put in another. Midway through the show, Andre called to discuss the crimes caused by gambling. He said he knew his father borrowed money from loan sharks because he’d seen these animals in his father’s place of business. “Believe me, you can tell who they are from fifty feet.”

  “They have fins or something?” Leonard had joked.

  “Yeah,” Andre replied, somehow making it sound ominous. “Real big fins.”

  Both Leonard and Andre laughed at this, a cackle that now sounded harsh. The show cut to a commercial and Leonard snapped off the tape. His head was bent, and I couldn’t read his expression.

  “You going to use any of this on your show?” I asked.

  “I know you don’t quite believe me, but outing you was a mistake. If I start revealing callers, those lines will go dead.” He pulled the tape from the machine and put it in my hand. The tape was still warm to the touch.

  “This is your lead, not mine,” he said, walking around the desk to drop into a second guest chair beside mine. It was almost two o’clock in the morning, and we were exhausted. Through the filter of Barry’s murder, the talk-radio stories had a poignancy I didn’t think either of us would be able to shake.

  I held the tape by a corner and stared into its reel, feeling unexpectedly wary. This tape was exactly what Nathan had asked me to dig up: confirmation from a family member. You couldn’t do much better than an audio confession by Barry Mazursky’s own son.

  I could take the tapes to a voice-recognition specialist to prove I had a match, that Drew Mazursky in his kitchen was Andre of Cranston on the air. But how would I explain to my editors that I happened to have an archive of taped talk-radio shows without giving away my connection to Leonard?

  Leonard was leaning into my shoulder, peering at the label on the cassette. I noticed the date of the tape for the first time, in small, neat printing: May 14. The show had been taped more than a month before I’d even moved to Providence.

  Our eyes met. Leonard might not know when I’d moved to Rhode Island, but he understood the risk of letting me walk out of the studio with that tape in my hand. Even the dimmest of editors would need about twenty seconds to figure out that someone connected with the Leonard of Late Night had to have fed this to me, that that same someone was probably my confidential source.

  I could see something simmering inside him, and I expected him to get dramatic, to pull the tape from my hand and tell me this was, after all, the station’s property. That giving it to me could be the ruin of his career. But he didn’t. Instead, he stood up and walked to the shelf next to the cassette deck, where he’d left the two other tapes that held Andre’s confessions.

  “They say good reporters never reveal their sources,” he said, sliding the tapes across the desk to me. “I’ll have to trust you on that.”

  CHAPTER

  10

  WHAT DO YOU have?” Dorothy was standing over my shoulder.

  I was downtown in the newsroom library at a bank of computer terminals designated for Internet use.

  “A sad story,” I replied. I’d gone to federal bankruptcy court and found that Barry Mazursky had quietly filed for personal bankruptcy only a year after selling his chain of convenience stores.

  It was Friday morning, a week after the shooting. I’d gotten up at six A.M. to run and had come to work early. Few people were in the newsroom before eight o’clock and there was a feeling of peace before the day’s storm. Here in the library, a long, windowless room in the front of the building, only one research assistant had arrived for the day, and she sat distracted by work at a distant desk. I’d been alone with the database until I’d looked up and seen Dorothy Sacks standing in front of me.

  As the evening city editor, Dorothy often stayed until at least ten o’clock at night and didn’t have to report to work until just before noon. Carolyn said Dorothy never went home. She said Dorothy was one of those women who should have been nuns, but instead devoted themselves to the religion of news. At various times, Carolyn had managed to hint that Dorothy was asexual, a lesbian, and a home wrecker who was carr
ying on a torrid affair with a copy editor named Harold.

  I didn’t quite get Carolyn’s rabid dislike of Dorothy, except that years ago the two women had started at the Chronicle the same week. Childless and spouseless, Dorothy’s career had catapulted her to city editor. Carolyn, who had married, divorced, remarried, had children, and divorced again, had stagnated as a bureau manager.

  Dorothy dragged a chair over from another desk and sat down to better read from the screen. I noticed that she wore almost no makeup and did not have a varied wardrobe. It was always the crisp-looking jeans or corduroys and the worn office sweater. The sweater alone was enough to incense Carolyn.

  “Doesn’t actually prove he was gambling,” I said.

  “No.”

  “He could have been doing heroin,” I offered.

  “Or gone on a buying binge at the Home Shopping Network,” Dorothy said. She had a very dry delivery.

  Late yesterday, Victor Delria, who had been unconscious, had officially slipped into a coma at Rhode Island Hospital, and now, a week after the shooting, still no one was charged with Barry’s murder. As each day passed in police silence, my theory that the shooting was more than just a robbery gained momentum. Nathan even sent me an interoffice memo saying that if I wanted to work on the investigation over the weekend, I would be compensated for overtime.

  Dorothy and I both knew a personal-bankruptcy filing was a pretty good indicator that Barry had a gambling problem, but we also knew we couldn’t print it. Not by itself. By itself, reporting the bankruptcy filing was an unnecessary invasion of a dead man’s privacy.

  It had to be coupled with an admission from a family member. If, say, a surviving son told us that loan sharks were actually seen at the store, threatening the deceased, now that could be decent copy. That could be enough to run with.

  I thought of Leonard and the trust he’d put in me. Why? I wondered. My father used to do that when I was a teenager, emphasize his trust in me as a means of guilting me into responsible behavior. But that was an Irish-Catholic tactic. Leonard was Italian.

  The library phone began ringing. The research assistant looked up briefly from her desk, but didn’t move to answer it. Through the open door, I saw Nathan get off the elevator and begin walking briskly toward his office.

  “He’s in early,” I commented.

  “It’s the investigative-team thing. Everyone on the reporting staff, almost, has asked for an interview.”

  I felt a rush of alarm. Had I missed something? Was there a list somewhere I wasn’t on?

  Seeing my expression, Dorothy said, “I take it this means you’re interested in the position?”

  I nodded and she wrote something on a notepad. With a glance at Nathan’s closed office door, she added, “Don’t worry too much about the crowd. By union regs, he’s got to interview everyone. But he’s getting the busywork out of the way first.”

  A second phone began to ring, a high-pitched yelp that cut the ear. The research assistant didn’t seem to hear it. “Should we answer it?” I asked Dorothy, but she shook her head.

  Just then, I saw Jonathan Frizell get off the elevator. He and I had met twice about the Mazursky murder, and he’d said he’d nose around city hall for me, but so far I hadn’t heard anything. Now, without a glance in our direction, he marched purposefully in the direction of Nathan’s office.

  Dorothy knocked her elbow into mine. “Stop worrying about the competition and focus on the ammunition. What else do you have?”

  I rifled through my file folder to find the copy of the Veterans’ Homeless Shelter board minutes Leonard had mailed me. There were printouts of Chronicle stories about the fund-raising drive and the official announcement of Barry’s resignation, but where were the minutes? I was sure I’d dropped them into the file last night.

  The first page of the minutes had detailed a conversation between the board chairwoman and the assistant treasurer calling for a full audit of the fund-raising drive because of “a $75,000 discrepancy.” The second page, also missing, was of the following month’s minutes, where the board had unanimously accepted Barry Mazursky’s resignation, with the chairwoman noting, “It’s for the best.”

  With a look of detached amusement, Dorothy watched me search through the file folder. The papers were nowhere in the folder. The high-pitched phone stopped, then started again. Why wouldn’t the research assistant just answer it? Had I left the papers home on the bar?

  Finally, I found them facing backward and stuck behind another set of papers in the middle of the file. Smoothing out one of the crumpled corners on her desk, Dorothy scanned the minutes, eyes lighting with interest. After a moment of calculation, the light faded, and I knew her conclusion. The minutes helped validate my source, but still weren’t enough to justify a story that could libel a dead man.

  Desperate, I plunged on. “I know this sounds a little farfetched, but I’m pretty sure I recognized the son’s voice on talk radio the other night. I’m pretty sure I’ve heard him talk on the air about his father’s gambling problems before. I mean, he’s on a lot. Andre of Cranston, he calls himself. I recognized the voice.”

  “Talk radio?” Dorothy asked.

  I couldn’t tell by her tone what she meant by this question. I continued anyway. “Leonard of Late Night. You think I should call the station, see if they have any of the old shows on tape?”

  “You listen to Leonard of Late Night?” The expression in her eyes told me she was reassessing me.

  “Sometimes,” I admitted.

  She considered this. What it meant about me. My lifestyle. My IQ. I found myself growing defensive. Okay, he was a little extreme. Especially about the mayor and casino gambling, but he had his reasons. I mentally began counting the number of our reporters who had appeared on Leonard’s show: reporters who suddenly became experts, columnists who became celebrities.

  “Is there a problem with that?”

  She looked at me as if her mind had just been far away and had now returned. “I was just trying to figure out how you could use something like that in copy, even if you could track it down on tape.”

  “Oh.”

  “I mean, those callers are supposed to be anonymous, right? Isn’t that part of the deal?”

  I tried not to sigh audibly. “I guess.”

  “I think we better steer clear of talk radio.”

  I was in the cafeteria trying to get a cup of coffee when I spotted the Chronicle’s obituary writer, sitting alone with two doughnuts.

  Somewhere in his midsixties, he was at least fifty pounds overweight and wore the vague and tired expression of someone who had burned out years ago. Trying to remember his name, I closed my eyes to picture the byline over the last big death in Rhode Island. An Italian last name: Martino?

  This man had never once met my eye when I passed him in the newsroom, but now I remembered that Carolyn once told me that he’d been a highly regarded police reporter. DiMartino, that was it. His brother was still a sergeant on the Providence police force.

  I stirred cream into my jumbo-size coffee and tried to remember his first name. Anthony? Joseph? Dominic? He was about halfway down the row of red-vinyl booths that faced the window, his head determinedly in the newspaper, as if to discourage anyone from attempting conversation.

  I remembered that there was something incongruous about his name. That it didn’t go together, didn’t fit somehow. Out of an air pocket in my brain, the thought descended. It was a young name, a baby-boy-of-the-new-millennium kind of name: Justin, Josh, Jared? Evan, that was it. Evan DiMartino.

  From Carolyn, I knew that DiMartino had been shoved aside a few years ago to make room for a young police reporter who’d since gone on to the Los Angeles Times. It occurred to me that he might instinctively resent all new hires. I decided to take my chances, buying a second coffee and heading down to his booth with two cups in my hand. “Evan?”

  He looked so startled that I immediately heard myself apologizing. “Sorry to bother you, I…�
�� I wanted to hand him the extra coffee, but suddenly it felt presumptuous, so I continued to clutch two hot coffee cups in my hand. “I was wondering…hoping I could talk to you.”

  Deliberately, he glanced at his watch.

  “If you’re not too busy.”

  He studied me for a moment, then a connection clicked in his head. “You the new reporter from Boston? The one who was there when the guy got shot in the store?”

  I nodded and offered him the coffee. “I’d like to ask you a couple of questions. I don’t know Providence police very well, and I could use your help.”

  Something in that plea softened him. The resentment disappeared. Curiosity took its place.

  Without waiting for his invitation, I slid into the seat. “Mazursky was a compulsive gambler, in trouble with loan sharks. I have a source who says the mayor doesn’t want that to come out before the casino-gambling referendum. That he’s leaning on the police department to stall the investigation.”

  He opened the lid of his coffee and let out the steam.

  “Do you think that if the mayor pressed hard enough, the chief would stall a murder investigation?” I asked.

  “Who’s your source on this?”

  “A confidential source.”

  “Inside the police department?”

  I shook my head.

  He examined his doughnut as if it had just fallen onto the floor. “Then that’s just speculation. A lot of things can hold up a murder investigation.”

  I nodded with a vague sense of disappointment.

  “But that’s not to say the mayor doesn’t have influence.” He brushed the sugar from his doughnut off his fingers and onto his lap. “Whether the chief would agree to hold up a murder investigation until the vote? Who knows? It’s only—what, a week and a half? Almost doesn’t count as real corruption.”

  Then he focused on something behind me. I turned and saw that three of the youngest male reporters on the investigative team had walked into the cafeteria together. Two of them carried stacks of files and the third had a laptop with him.