by Jan Brogan
My gaze must have lingered too long. Evan noticed, saw my yearning. “You after Susannah’s job?” he asked.
I shrugged, trying to look only moderately interested, but Evan wasn’t buying it. “Of course you are. And you think this Mazursky thing is going to get it for you. Move you to the A-list, right?”
“I’m hoping it’ll give me an edge, yes,” I admitted. “But I’m still new to Providence, and I don’t have any sources inside the police department.”
The three investigative reporters marched past us to a far booth, their eyes focused on the goal ahead, as if we weren’t there. Their voices rose from the table where they had regrouped, sounding loud and just a little too self-important. I had a flashback to my high school cafeteria.
“They need someone old enough to have a driver’s license,” Evan said, leaning forward. “Otherwise their mothers have to drive them.”
I smiled to show that I appreciated his disdain, and for the first time, he smiled back.
One of the cafeteria workers came out from behind the counter to erase yesterday’s lunch specials from the blackboard. The chalk squeaked as she began to list today’s soup of the day: “M-U-S-H-R-O-O-M.”
Evan grimaced. “I hate mushrooms. You ever see where they grow?”
I had never seen where mushrooms grew.
“Usually in a pile of crap.” For a moment, he looked disturbed, and I wondered if he was seeing the mushrooms rising from dung on the forest floor. But his attention had already shifted. “So who’s involved in this case?”
I told him about the patrolman, who’d been the first to arrive at the Mazursky Market, and about Sergeant Holstrom. As an afterthought, I mentioned that Major Errico had come to the station the following day.
“Errico? On a Saturday?” There was nothing vague or tired in Evan’s expression now. “You sure?”
I described what he looked like, and the way Holstrom had snapped to attention. Evan nodded to indicate that this meshed. “He say anything?”
I shook my head. “But he came in with a bunch of files under his arm. Files he didn’t want me to see. There was some lettering on the side.”
“What kind of lettering?”
“Two initials, I think.”
“OC.” This was an answer, not a question.
“Yeah. I think so.”
Evan looked over his shoulder at the guys on the investigative team, and lowered his voice to a gravelly whisper. “Organized crime. They usually keep those files in a locked cabinet in Errico’s office. He’s the OC guy. He knows who’s who in the organization. Can pick up the phone and get through to capos if he needs to.”
The squeak of the chalk punctuated this last sentence. Evan turned to make sure no one was within earshot. He waited until the cafeteria worker walked behind the counter, watching her the whole time as if she were some kind of spy. Then, he continued, “Errico doesn’t come in on a Saturday to talk about some little convenience-store holdup. He doesn’t get interested in a case unless they’re pretty damn sure it involves organized crime.”
CHAPTER
11
I HADN’T EXPECTED TO see Drew Mazursky the next day. I’d gotten up early, run, and was now across the street from my apartment trying to buy coffee at Starbucks. I was still wearing the enormous gray sweatshirt I’d run in, along with a pair of baggy old blue jeans I’d pulled from the laundry and an old pair of running shoes with the laces missing. Standing in an incredibly slow-moving line, I was killing time by looking out the window onto Angell Street when I saw the door to the Mazursky Market open. A woman carrying a small grocery bag emerged.
I abandoned my place in the Starbucks line and headed outside. Sure enough, two more customers walked out of the market door. It had reopened. I crossed the street and peered into the store through the glass window. I could see Drew Mazursky working the cash register.
Drew’s plea for me to back off the story now struck me as ironic. The devoted son who demanded discretion had called talk radio almost every night to broadcast a litany of his father’s sins. If I had so easily recognized his voice, hadn’t other people? Like his mother? His sister? His aunt? And I was the one who was supposed to feel guilty?
On Saturday mornings, the Mazursky Market always had doughboys to sell alongside the doughnuts. Enormous puffs of fried dough, they were delivered fresh by a Federal Hill bakery. People came from all over the neighborhood to get them while they were still warm. Even standing outside, I could smell the grease and powdered sugar.
From my vantage point, I could see the spot on the floor where the blood had been. The wood had been cleaned and polished and the toppled magazine rack righted. I closed my eyes and saw the wound in Barry’s forehead oozing. Suddenly, I felt nauseous.
I ran a couple of fingers through my mostly uncombed hair. Why go in? It wasn’t like I was prepared to cross-examine Drew Mazursky. Like I had an actual plan. The best thing to do would be to go home and come back when I’d showered and had a chance to think about what I was going to say.
The glass door swung open. A man leaving with three coffees in a tray leaned his back into the door to hold it open for me. There was a line of people at the register, and I could slink in behind them without Drew seeing me. If I didn’t go in now, I might never get up the courage.
I ducked into the store, heading to the deli section in back, where the U-Serve coffee stand was set up. Crowded with people, the store was completely safe this time of day, I told myself. The least likely place in the world for a murder.
A woman I’d never seen before was working the deli counter, and another line of people waiting for her to make egg-and-bacon breakfast sandwiches had formed. Once these customers got their sandwiches, they had to go up to the register to pay for them. It could be ten minutes before there was a quiet moment in the store to talk to Drew.
I poured myself a large, vat-size coffee and was searching among the lids to snap on the right size when I saw another woman, this one wearing a shirt with a “YourCorporation” emblem on it, bring out a stack of premade salads.
I stared at the square, lidded containers, again feeling the plastic crushed in my hand. Time stopped and I felt as if I were coated in film. Customers chatted with each other, but I couldn’t hear them. I saw them through a thick windshield. I was separated from everyone in the store, stuck in place, alone, waiting.
The moment stretched. My fist tightened on the plastic coffee lid. Someone coughed, breaking the sound barrier. And I realized that I’d been waiting for a gunshot.
My eyes darted back and forth, scanning the aisle. I looked for someone suspicious, with thick features or slouched posture. I couldn’t help but think of the guy who’d been with Delria, the guy in the gray cap, with the thick, dark hair running down his neck. But there was no one thuglike in the store today: just a father in rumpled blue jeans and a baseball hat with a two-year-old at his side and, beyond them, two teenage boys with skateboards, heading toward the register.
I turned down a middle aisle, hoping to hide among the Italian canned goods and packaged breads until the crowd of customers thinned. I pretended to search among the variety of anchovy pastes, trying to slow my breathing, to get a grip and clear the bad programming from my brain.
I knew that I couldn’t let myself give this fear its own life, allowing my imagination to invent a monster. I wasn’t even completely certain that the man in the gray cap had even been with Delria and now I was letting him terrify me.
I put the anchovy paste back on the shelf. Clearly, it wasn’t good for my mental health to hang around this market for too long. Memories were feeding the monster, nourishing the panic.
I needed to go to the register and pay for my coffee. If there were too many people around, I’d just say hello to Drew, reestablish myself as a regular customer, and get the hell out of there. I could come back later, when I was calm.
As I turned up the aisle to the front of the store, I halted at what had become a gridlock. Custom
ers, coming at the register from all directions, clustered together, forming an uncertain line. I found myself pushed back, to the corkboard on the wall where Barry had pinned community notices. Among them, I saw a “VOTE NO on PROPOSITION #3” flyer in the trademark red and black colors. I could tell by the way the red lettering had faded to orange that the flyer had been hanging there exposed to the sunlight for a long time. For a moment, I was struck by the irony of Barry Mazursky, of all people, coming out against legalized gambling in Providence. Then I realized that Drew must have put it up.
I thought of his talk-radio passion. Andre of Cranston might be a loudmouth, but he’d been honestly devoted to stopping the casino-gambling referendum. If I could resurrect this passion in Drew, I might be able to get him to cooperate with my story.
At the register, Drew was bagging an unusually large order and didn’t notice me until I put my coffee down on the counter and pointed to one of the remaining doughboys.
Throughout the transaction, he kept his eyes level with mine. His expression read: What do you want now? But he didn’t speak except to ask me for two dollars and fifteen cents.
“Can we talk, later?” I asked, handing him the money.
“I have nothing to say.” His eyes were now on whoever was standing behind me.
“There’s been a development,” I said.
His eyes returned to mine. “What kind of development?”
I struggled to think of something that had changed. I leaned forward and whispered, “Victor Delria is in a coma.” It was lame, already reported in the newspaper.
Drew raised his voice so that all the customers could hear. “So?”
A woman standing behind me coughed impatiently and shifted her basket of groceries from one hand to the other. “So there may never be an arrest,” I continued to whisper. “Especially not before the referendum election.”
For a moment, I thought I saw a flicker of interest in his eyes, but maybe I imagined it. “Nothing I can do about it,” he said in a disinterested voice.
Having overcome my anxiety, forced myself into the store, and waded through my panic in the anchovy aisle, I was not about to surrender now because of Drew’s withering tone. “No, but I think getting out the real story could have an impact on the vote.”
For a second, his eyes narrowed, as if he were considering this or trying to gauge my sincerity. But just as quickly, his face grew hard; he wasn’t going to fall for this kind of crap from a newspaper reporter.
“Right.” He redirected his gaze to the woman behind me, gesturing for her to move up in line. She began unloading her cart on the counter, forcing me to step aside.
Two other people moved into line behind her, and all three of them looked at me. I became aware of my oversize sweatshirt and uncombed hair. Drew’s gaze shifted from me to his other customers, a deliberate eye movement that said he didn’t really know me, but could tell I was a nut.
I racked my brain for something else to say, something that would make him want to deal with me. I leaned forward on the counter as if to say something confidential, but knocked a box of Jell-O with my elbow. It flew off the counter and onto the floor.
Drew coughed a derisive laugh.
“Excuse me?” the woman with the groceries said. She was wearing a tennis skirt over warm-up pants.
“Sorry.” I bent down to retrieve the Jell-O. “Just one minute,” I pleaded as I handed the woman the box.
“You’re holding up the line,” Drew said.
I leaned forward again, more carefully this time, attempting to get close enough so I wouldn’t have to shout, but he backed away, practically into the magazine rack. “I have a better description of him now,” I heard myself say.
“Better description of who?” a man in back asked another customer. Drew threw up his hands as if he had no idea what I was talking about. He looked at the other customers for sympathy; he couldn’t believe all that he had to endure.
Blood flowed to my face. This writing me off as a nuisance, a nut, was infuriating. I wanted to make Drew take me seriously, make him understand. “Don’t you want to know the description?” I asked.
“Not really,” Drew said.
“He looked like a fish,” I said, in a voice loud enough to include all the customers in line. For emphasis, I repeated: “A fish.” Fully convinced of my insanity now, the woman in the tennis skirt put her hand over her mouth to quash a snicker.
I smiled a bit crazily as I strained to remember how Andre had said it on Leonard’s show: “Not just any fish. He looked like one of the big fish who eat the little fish.”
“There’s lots of those around,” someone behind me remarked.
“I heard a guy on talk radio describe him as a shark.”
The other customers looked both baffled and amused, but the alarm sounded for Drew. His expression froze. His breath may have stopped.
“A shark you could spot from fifty feet,” I said. “A shark with real big fins.”
“Later,” Drew had said between clenched teeth. “Later, we can talk.”
We agreed on three o’clock. I waved to the other customers, who looked confused by the exchange, and I headed home to shower. I went to the newsroom, made a few phone calls to the police, borrowed a staff recorder to make a copy of the tape, and got back to the market in the lull of midafternoon.
The store was practically empty. Drew was sitting on a stool behind the cash register, smoking a cigarette and watching a hockey game on one of those tiny portable television sets. He stubbed out the cigarette as I opened the door.
I handed him a copy of the tape of Leonard’s show. He took it nervously, the evidence of all his passion, and gazed for a moment at the inner reel. He turned it over, as if it might look different on the flip side.
“I realize you’re still in shock,” I continued, “and you don’t want to talk to me now. But do me a favor and just listen to the tape. Think about how much you wanted to stop casino gambling—and about the ammunition you have now.”
Suddenly, the young boy I’d seen in Drew was gone. He looked aged by conflict and compromise. He reached over and snapped off the television set. The store was completely silent.
“I lost my brother a few years back. I know it’s hard when you lose someone so suddenly—”
He shook his head as if to correct me. As if to say that he’d been expecting something like this to happen for years. “My father’s been in a lot of trouble.”
I said nothing, hoping that if I remained absolutely still, he would continue. Drew shifted his gaze beyond me, into the aisles of the store. Clearly, he had an inventory of painful memories stocked on those shelves.
As I flipped the notebook open, Drew stared at the clean page. “The guy from the attorney general’s office keeps telling us not to talk to anyone but him.”
Was that my imagination, or was there resentment in his tone?
“You’re talking about Matt Cavanaugh?” I asked.
He nodded and pulled back from the counter. “Everything I say to you, everything that gets put in the paper, hurts his case later down the road.”
There was no mistaking the meaning. Drew resented that Matt was so focused on his case. I had to be cool. I had to make sure I didn’t sound completely focused on my story, my shot at the investigative team. “I don’t know what the AG’s office is up to, but I have a source who tells me that Providence police will deliberately stall this investigation until after the referendum vote.” I kept my tone level. “Do you want that?”
Drew met my eye. “You know from that tape I don’t want that.”
Pressing him now would be a mistake. He’d see through any self-serving claims I made about this being an opportunity, a chance to effect his politics. Instead, I walked to the wall where I’d found the faded “VOTE NO on PROPOSITION #3” flyer. “Did your father put this up, or did you?” I asked.
I didn’t hear his answer. Behind me, a door opened. Startled, I whirled around, an automatic response,
a memory, a flinch. I heard the door shut and the shuffle of feet. I looked up. It was only an elderly man. He gave Drew a puzzled look and headed down the aisle.
“You all right?” Drew asked me. There was recognition in his expression, and I knew he’d flinched a few times in his own life.
“Yeah.” But my heart rate had not returned to normal.
He glanced down at the tape I’d given him, sitting on the counter. I could see him wondering exactly which stories it told, how much I already knew about his father. Maybe he decided it didn’t matter. When he looked up, his expression was not one of defeat but of resolve.
“You’ve got to promise to leave out the part about talk radio.”
“You haven’t adequately addressed the cover-up angle,” Dorothy said. The assistant editor working the Saturday shift had called her at home, and she’d come into the newsroom twenty-five minutes later.
“But I’ve got two sources saying that Mazursky was killed because of gambling problems. One’s a family member—just like Nathan asked.” We both had a copy of my story in our hands.
“Nathan also made it clear that there was no point running this kind of story unless we can prove the mayor’s deliberately stalling the investigation for political reasons.”
“Jonathan hasn’t been very helpful,” I said.
There was complete silence. Dorothy knew, as I’d learned, that Jonathan was not known for being a “team player.” He was working his own investigation, which involved some woman who said she’d paid a cash bribe to Lopresti’s right-hand man to get her son into the Providence Police Training Academy. Clearly, Jonathan didn’t want to waste any time on a competing corruption story that might upstage his.
“I got a confirmation from the son, for Christ’s sake.”
She didn’t answer. She was standing at my desk with the printout of the story still in her hands. She grabbed a Bic pen that was stuck inside the spiral ring of my notebook, oblivious that it was severely chewed, and began poring over the draft for about the fifth time.
