A Confidential Source

by Jan Brogan

  She asked me to spell it for her. I also gave her the phone number of the radio station, which I knew by heart. I turned back to the EMT. “He’s going to be all right? Right?”

  “We’re doing our best,” the EMT replied. Not a prognosis, just something he’d said a hundred times before. But he took a second to give me a hopeful look that made me think it might all work out. Someone else snapped the back doors shut and I was left standing with Officer Toland on the sidewalk as the ambulance peeled away, its lights already flashing.

  After a failed attempt to get through to a human at the radio station, Officer Toland asked if I knew of any other way to contact Leonard’s family. I was numb and cold, and wanting to do something that could help. Remembering the pictures of the nephews on Leonard’s refrigerator and the Rolodex on his kitchen counter, I offered to show her where he lived in Bristol.

  “You have a key to his apartment?” Toland asked.

  I remembered what Leonard had said the night before about the extra key hidden in the door molding and nodded.

  Glancing at her watch, she asked me to wait a minute, went back to her cruiser, and consulted with someone by phone. When she returned, she asked if she could follow me to the complex. By the miracle of my reserve tank, we made it there.

  The apartment complex looked lonelier than I remembered: plain brick buildings with very little landscaping and almost no grass. I guided Officer Toland through the maze of buildings to the alleyway that led to Leonard’s building. On one of the second-floor balconies, someone was drying towels on a makeshift clothesline. They flapped like crazy in the wind.

  A lone woman carrying an Apex shopping bag was walking out of Leonard’s building and held the outer door for us. Inside, I stood on my toes and felt above the door frame for the key, trying to act like I let myself into Leonard’s apartment all the time. Luckily, I easily found the key behind a loose piece of molding.

  I took Officer Toland directly into the kitchen. Through the glass slider, I spotted the U-shaped bicycle lock still clinging to the corner post of the balcony. An image of the mangled bike rose in my head and I had to stop, take a breath, and tell myself that Leonard was going to be all right. He would probably be conscious by the time I got to the hospital.

  But then, as I turned to the refrigerator, I saw that the photograph of the nephews and the sister was gone from the door. The Rolodex had been knocked off the counter, and half of the little cards were scattered all over the floor. When I bent to pick them up, I found the photograph underneath the kick plate of the refrigerator.

  Behind Toland, I saw that one of the counter drawers had been left slightly open, and I got a tight feeling in my chest. Had someone been in the apartment? Toland’s expression suggested that she didn’t notice anything odd.

  “You can kind of tell he’s a bachelor,” she said, with a roll of her eyes.

  “It was a lot neater the last time,” I said, my eyes scanning everything now, trying to remember how it had looked the last time I was here. My impression had been of pathological cleanliness that bordered on sterility, but maybe that was just in contrast to my own apartment. Maybe I was overreacting. So far, there’d been no signs of forced entry.

  I decided to check the rest of the apartment before I said anything to Officer Toland. “I’m pretty sure his sister’s name is Ellen, and he said she lives in Connecticut,” I said, handing her the photograph and a stack of address cards from the Rolodex and excusing myself to use the bathroom.

  As I walked through the living room, I saw that one of the decorative pillows was on the floor and one of the back cushions was pulled away from the couch. A wide-screen television system, DVD player, and several additional shelves of expensive-looking electronics were untouched in an elaborate wall system, but a magazine had been knocked off the coffee table. I started down the hallway. I’d never seen the master bedroom before, but something told me Leonard would not leave his nightstand drawer hanging open. I made a quick check of the bedroom windows. They were both locked tight.

  In the spare room, done up as a study, the desk drawers were all pulled open and there were folders and notebooks scattered on the floor. A bronze wastebasket was upside down, with crumpled papers beside it and tape sticking to the carpeting.

  My stomach made a quarter turn. Someone had been searching for the cassette.

  Looking down, I saw my name on a crumpled piece of paper on the floor. I picked it up.

  “Hallie, listen to this carefully. You’ll forgive me.”

  The next line was crossed out. Then:

  “If this doesn’t nail”

  The note broke off here, unfinished. I put it in my pocket and scoured the floor for another, more complete version, but found none. I thought about Leonard’s phone call last night: Don’t worry, Hallie, I promise you that I’m not going to let you down again.

  “I think I got it!” Toland shouted from the kitchen. I walked softly into the bathroom. Then I flushed the toilet and closed my eyes, struggling to breathe slower, think clearly. If someone had found the tape and read this note, they would know Leonard had been intending to give me the story.

  “You said she lives in Connecticut?” Toland asked.

  “Yes!” I shouted through the door.

  I ran the water in the sink, trying to figure out what to do. Should I tell Toland that I thought the apartment had been searched? What would Leonard want me to do?

  I still hadn’t seen any signs of forced entry. No open windows, cracked storms, or broken screens. And the electronic equipment hadn’t been stolen. If I told the police that the apartment had been ransacked, they’d start asking me all sorts of questions. Like what intruders had been searching for. Where Leonard had gotten the tape. Why critical evidence was being withheld from the police. I was pretty sure that was considered its very own crime. I decided that the best thing was to go to the hospital first, see what kind of condition Leonard was in. If he’d regained consciousness, I’d ask him what he wanted me to do.

  Back in the kitchen, Toland had an index card in her hand that she wanted to show me. Leonard had written “Ellen,” with no last name. Several addresses were crossed out and a Connecticut address scribbled in. Four different phone numbers suggested a close, communicative relationship. “I’m pretty sure that’s her,” I said.

  Although anxious to get to the hospital, I had to wait for Toland to finish her call. Pacing the small kitchen with the receiver pressed against her ear, she looked uncomfortable waiting for someone to answer, and I was struck again by how young she looked. But I was surprised by how mature and experienced she sounded once she got Leonard’s sister on the phone. Keeping an even, no-nonsense tone, she suggested that family members get to the hospital as soon as possible, but she did not speak in a way to incite hysteria.

  I gave Toland my phone number, in case she had more questions, and left her to lock up. Racing to my car, I slammed my key into the ignition, twisting it so fast that it locked midway. Calm, I told myself. Control. I turned the key again. The engine turned. I forced myself to back out of the space slowly, carefully.

  The world around me grew sharper, clearer, as I forged ahead. Adrenaline pumped me to the closest gas station where I bought $5 worth of fuel. As I waited for the tank to fill, I said a prayer that Leonard would pull through. Then I snapped the gas cap back on and drove as fast as I could to Rhode Island Hospital.

  For such a big hospital, the emergency room waiting area was small and looked as if it had been set up to discourage contact. Receptionists were practically hidden within smoked-glass booths and patients were called into closetlike offices with thick oak doors that shut behind them. At the far end of the room, I spotted a nurse standing at what looked like a triage desk, but it was behind an observation window. The door to this area was locked.

  I knocked on the glass to get the nurse’s attention, startling a man nearby lying on a stretcher. Frowning, the nurse walked to the door and opened it a crack.

 
“Is Leonard Marianni conscious yet?” I asked her.

  “Are you his wife?”

  “A friend.”

  “I’m sorry. I have to wait for the family. It shouldn’t be too much longer.” She gestured toward the rows of chairs in the waiting room and backed away from the door, letting it lock.

  I hung at the window for a few more minutes, scanning the faces of patients on stretchers, none of them Leonard. A teenage girl propped herself up on her elbows and twisted toward the window, looking beyond me for someone in the waiting room. She looked bored, irritated to be here. How I hoped Leonard’s injuries were like hers, an annoyance: stitches over the brow, a cast for the ankle or forearm.

  I sat down in the middle of a row of chairs, staring intermittently from the television set to an illuminated ad for the hospital featuring several competent-looking doctors and nurses standing together in team formation. The slogan read: “It Isn’t Just Our Technology That’s State of the Art.” I felt a yearning somewhere in my stomach, wanting to believe those doctors and nurses were all determined to save Leonard, to wake him up, make him well. With a little good technology and good care, he’d be home in no time.

  There were a couple of phones near the entryway door and it occurred to me that I should call the paper and tell Dorothy about the accident. Accident? I found myself scoffing at my own choice of words. My heart began beating rapidly. I kept imagining that silver sedan lying in wait for Leonard, following him from his apartment, driving him into the tree. I didn’t care whether there were skid marks or not.

  I was standing at the phone searching my bag for a quarter when a small, dark-haired woman with a lot of jewelry walked in with an elderly woman who had been crying. Even from this distance, I could see the resemblance. Leonard’s sister and mother.

  I turned, openly staring as they approached the first window. The receptionist stood up and gestured for them to continue to the other door, where they were whisked into the treatment area. The paper could wait. I sat down on the nearest seat. About ten minutes later, they reappeared. Both women were crying and clutching each other.

  I knew that expression, which had been on my own face twice in my life. I couldn’t bring myself to approach them, to verify, or to offer sympathy. But I knew. I felt it in the same hollow space that had yearned so badly for everything to be okay. There was no more point in yearning, or praying, or putting desperate faith in a hospital billboard. It was over. Leonard was dead.

  I returned to my car and sat there behind the wheel, unable to move. Across the parking lot and a mass of construction, I could see the entrance to the emergency room and found myself staring at the four ambulances parked side by side. Others would be rushed in, unloaded on stretchers. Others with much worse injuries, with cardiac arrests and hemorrhages, would be whisked behind that glass window. They would be treated by those competent-looking doctors in the ad and would survive. Why not Leonard?

  The nurse had not wanted to answer any of my questions, but I could tell by her expression, her hand gestures, her silence that she considered it strange, medically baffling even, the same way my brother Sean’s death had seemed. Minutes dissolved into a thick, gray background. I finally became aware of how cold it was in the car. When I looked up, the afternoon had become a grim evening and my fingers were numb on the steering wheel.

  I started the car and turned on the heat, waiting to feel blood in my feet and toes. Slowly, anger began to heat through the shock. Leonard’s death wasn’t a freak accident. Someone had murdered him. Probably the same someone who had followed him last night in the silver sedan. The someone who had searched his apartment. The someone who’d threatened to kill me.

  On Eddy Street, I stopped at the first gas station that had a phone booth. After a few transfers, my call finally reached Dorothy. She told me the East Bay bureau reporter had already gotten the details on the accident from police.

  “It wasn’t an accident,” I said.

  “How would you know?” she asked.

  I offered her the abbreviated explanation: When I’d interviewed Leonard Marianni at the vote-no rally in Narragansett, he’d told me about the audiotape from Drew Mazursky. The tape spelled out the reasons for Barry’s murder.

  There were a couple of seconds of silence then. “You know, Hallie, Leonard has always been known for blowing things sky-high, for trying to manipulate the news.”

  “I know. I know, but there’s more.” I told her about the counterfeit scratch ticket I’d bought at Barry’s, about my suspicion that Matt had been involved in a long-term investigation involving the market.

  “Why didn’t you tell me about this earlier today?”

  I explained that I wanted to have all my facts together, that I was on my way to meet Leonard and then had stumbled upon the accident scene. I added that I’d gone to his apartment and that it looked like it had been searched.

  “Did you tell any of this to police?” she asked.

  “Not yet.”

  There was another silence. She didn’t urge me to come forward, drive to Barrington and spill it all to police, though she must have thought about it. There was calculation, an exhale, and a swift change of tack. “I hate to wait a day on this counterfeit-ticket story. How sure are you that there’s a connection?”

  “I know there’s a connection,” I said.

  “Jesus. You think there’s a copy of that tape anywhere? Any other place it could be?”

  I thought suddenly of the brown cardboard box in Leonard’s studio, his archive. “Maybe.”

  “What exactly did Leonard say was on this tape?”

  “He said that the tape explained the real reason Barry was murdered. He said the cops knew all along it wasn’t an armed robbery.”

  “All right. Be careful. I mean, don’t do anything stupid. Don’t put yourself in any danger. But if you think you can get your hands on this tape fairly easily, if you can verify any of that, this would be huge. Christ, this could bump the goddamn referendum coverage off the front page.”

  It was almost seven o’clock when I got to the radio station. The wind howled with dry, frigid air from Canada that whistled right through the Honda as if there were no windows. There were only three other cars in the parking lot. I hoped one of them was Robin’s.

  I fought the wind to the lobby entrance, feeling tired and numb by the time I got to the door. It was open and all the lights to the FM station upstairs were on, but there were no signs of anyone downstairs. A couple of half-empty coffee cups littered the table and the day’s Chronicle was spread open on the couch. I yelled a “hello,” but got no response. I walked slowly through the long, narrow hallway that led to Leonard’s studio and the production booth. I found Robin at the desk, her face red with tears.

  “You know?” she asked.

  I nodded. We hardly knew each other, but she stood and we embraced. The chill in my limbs had moved to my heart and I felt as if I were somewhere in the distance, listening to myself as I told her about stumbling upon the accident scene, seeing the mangled bike. It sounded like a story I was writing about someone else, not about Leonard, not about someone I knew.

  She told me that he’d had a previous heart problem and had gone into cardiac arrest. That his skull had been badly fractured, and even if he’d lived, he’d never have been the same. I kept thinking that she was talking about someone else, someone older, or weaker, or living in a different state.

  I looked past her, through the glass window and into the studio. I had a sudden image of Leonard, standing with his headphones on, refusing to sit down, the way he’d flailed his arms with impatience and cut off the callers. And then I saw his headphones, casually discarded on the desk. Through the numbness, I felt a stab. He’d been trying so hard to get me to forgive him, trying so hard to make amends.

  We sat down, Robin at her desk and me in a chair I pulled in from the office. She had overheard Leonard calling me about the sedan in the parking lot, but she said strange cars showed up in the parking
lot all the time. “Teenagers smoking pot and making out,” she said. She kept repeating that she couldn’t believe Leonard was dead and eventually lapsed back into tears. “At least he died doing what he loved to do,” she finally said.

  “Right.” I wanted to offer comfort, but the blade twisted again. All I could think was that there was no possible upside to getting murdered. It seemed especially cruel to me that anyone should get murdered doing what he loved to do.

  It was freezing in here. I walked back to the little kitchen area to make us both a cup of tea. When I came back with the mugs in my hands, I glanced inside Leonard’s studio again and caught sight of the brown box on the floor, Leonard’s archive.

  I gave Robin her tea and asked if it was okay to look for something Leonard was supposed to give me. “Go ahead. He wanted to talk to you last night in the worst way,” she said. “He seemed frantic about it.”

  Leaving my tea on the desk, I moved to the studio, trying to fight through the numbness. Kneeling on the floor, I thumbed through the box. Leonard wanted me to find the tape. He seemed frantic about it. This was something he wanted, I told myself, something I could do for him. I began diving through stacks of tapes, carefully reading each label. They were each meticulously dated and detailed with the subject of the show. I found a dub of the show I was on. Thinking the man who threatened me might have been recorded even though he was cut from the air, I put the tape in my knapsack.

  I was going through the box a second time—I couldn’t find anything that wasn’t clearly marked as a dub from his show—when I noticed a man at the end of the hall, watching me.

  I froze.

  Robin’s chair was on rollers. She rolled out of her office and into the hall. “Oh,” she said, “I forgot to call you.”

  I stood and walked closer. The man in the hallway was Gregory Ayers. He wore a business suit and tie, and he carried a briefcase that made him look official. Robin had jumped up from her chair and now stood between us.