by Jan Brogan
The car honked a second time and I put the car into gear, following a Volvo station wagon carefully down Angell Street, trying to pay attention to my driving so I wouldn’t sideswipe anyone. But I was wild inside, a frantic mess, trying to keep it together until I was downtown, safely parked, where I could listen, rewind. Listen again.
The Chronicle had no parking lot. I drove around the building three times looking for a space, my heart pumping louder and more recklessly each time. It was Saturday, for Christ’s sake. Saturday, and no street parking? Finally, I began to see beyond my windshield and noticed the people walking together in clusters on the sidewalks. And then I remembered WaterFire. Tourists were already beginning to gather for the evening’s event.
I couldn’t think about WaterFire now. All I could think about was listening to the tape. I turned and began heading away from the river and the tourists to what was sometimes called the DownCity section. It was only five or six blocks from WaterPlace Park, but it might have been on a different planet. This old commercial district was still in transition. Abandoned department-store buildings, only partially restored, housed funky nightclubs and the kind of social-service agencies that were closed on the weekend. The streets would be empty at this hour.
There were plenty of spaces on Westminster Street and I parked in front of Lupo’s Heartbreak Hotel, a nightclub that was especially dark and barren in daylight. I locked my car doors and grabbed the tape recorder from the seat and rewound the tape, starting all over again.
“Jesus, this is a lot of inventory,” Barry began.
I didn’t go cold this time, didn’t give way to chills from the dead. Instead, I turned up the volume and closed my eyes to listen.
“Your sales slacking off?” another male voice responded. It was a mature bass that sounded seriously concerned.
“No. Just… you know… well, maybe a little,” Barry replied.
There was a long silence. “The fifty-dollar winners in the same place in the book?” Barry asked. There was a shuffling sound.
“Yeah,” the other male voice replied.
“You sure these were checked?”
“We had one bad print run. Don’t worry. We threw the entire batch out. The problem’s been fixed,” the man said, sounding annoyed.
There was a skeptical chortle from Barry. A horn honked in the background and I realized they must be in a car driving somewhere. And then it got quiet, as if the car had entered a garage. I heard something mechanical and then the sound of something being tossed on a dashboard. “Fucking rates in here,” the other man said. A couple of seconds of silence and then: “There’s a space.”
I couldn’t tell who was driving, but I imagined Barry parking the car. The car engine was shut off. The other man spoke in a harsh, accusatory whisper: “There’s a lot more money to be made on this. You losing your nerve?”
“I’m not losing my nerve,” Barry whispered back. “Just make sure there are no more screwups.”
There was a click and then empty tape. I found myself marveling at Barry. Not his criminality, but his acting ability. If he was making this tape, he was already in league with Matt, wired for the attorney general’s prosecution, but he sounded like a crook with legitimate crook concerns, pissed off rather than defensive.
There was another click and then a different voice thanked Barry. After a minute, I heard the sound of coins hitting the dashboard. The engine noise grew louder and I heard traffic sounds again. “Did you see that article in the Chronicle? Business section. It was about this high-tech scanning equipment you guys just bought,” Barry said after a bit.
You guys. I stopped the tape, rewound it, and played it again. I remembered a story about some Rhode Island technology company leading the Sunday business section not that long ago. The company that made all sorts of lottery equipment. You guys. Did that mean the unidentified male voice actually worked for the lottery?
The buttons on this machine were so tiny that I always worried about hitting the wrong button and recording over the tape by mistake. I checked three times before hitting play.
“That scanning equipment isn’t going to affect these tickets. No one is going to scan a losing ticket,” the male voice said. “I’m telling you, we got rid of the bad batch. Stop being a pussy.”
“I’m not worried about the Smith Hill or South Providence stores. But I’m not gonna sell any more of these in the square. There’s a reporter for the Chronicle lives across the street, she’s buying more and more tickets here all the time.”
Shit. That was me.
“The fucking president of the printing company that makes the legit tickets couldn’t tell the difference. These are exact copies. And the focus group went wild for this game. This fucking little green leprechaun. I’m telling you, there’s money to be made.”
There was a shuffling sound, the rustling of paper, followed by more empty seconds on the tape. “Okay. This looks good. I gotta get back to the office; drop me off at my car,” the man said.
Then I heard the first note of strain in Barry’s questioning. “Hey, how about copying that new ten-dollar game that’s coming out? All that radio advertising you been doing, I got customers already asking for that one.”
Either I imagined the strain in Barry’s tone or the lottery guy was too distracted by his envelope of cash to notice it, because he answered this one directly, with the same slightly smug tone. “You kidding? That’s the fucking point of all that advertising.”
* * *
I listened to the tape three times before I fully grasped it. Before I realized all the implications, and understood. The lottery agent. The focus groups. The advertising. This guy was able to get the counterfeit production ramped up so that it was timed to lottery advertising. This was an inside scam.
I popped the tape out of my microcassette recorder and held it in my hands. It was so small, so valuable, so vulnerable to damage; I was suddenly afraid to put it in my knapsack, where it could get lost among the notebooks, tampons, and twisted papers. I had to get it to the newsroom quickly, safely, this audio proof, this explanation of not one, but two murders. I found a box of Altoids in my purse, poured out the mints, and tucked the tape inside the small metal box. Stuffing it into the front pocket of my blue jeans, I looked up and down the street to make sure no one was around.
The only human forms were the angular-looking people drawn on the window front of Lupo’s Heartbreak Hotel. They were life-size sketches pasted to the glass where retail mannequins had once roamed. They were supposed to be hip, colorful partygoers, but the artwork had a harsh, menacing feel. I got out of the car, trying not to look at them as I turned the corner.
I headed down Union, a narrow street between tall, empty buildings. Two drunks stood together midway down the block and held their palms up for money as I passed. I shook my head, walking briskly, as if they weren’t there. “Bitch!” one of them shouted.
Scanning doorways nervously, I picked up my pace. The Chronicle building was only a couple of blocks away. On Washington, the cross street, I halted. It was bumper to bumper with traffic; WaterFire tourists searched the streets, desperate to park. I wove my way between cars to the other side.
As I was passing Murphy’s, a local pub and deli, someone knocked on the window, startling me. I turned around and saw Gregory Ayers at the door, waving. He was dressed in the kind of tweedy sports coat he wore on television, a pair of pressed corduroy pants, and thick-soled shoes. His face looked younger, brighter than it had just last night. Was he here alone? With his wife?
“I just left a message for you at the paper,” he said.
At first, I thought it might be about Leonard’s death, but his tone sounded businesslike. I gave him a blank look, but inwardly my mind began to rev. As head of the lottery, Ayers had to have been informed about my counterfeit scratch tickets by now. I glanced at “The Lot” emblem on the window. Murphy’s sold tickets; maybe Ayers was here on business, or as part of an investigation into the counter
feits.
“I need to talk to you,” he said, lowering his voice so that it was almost a whisper in my ear. “We’d like to track down the people responsible as quickly as possible.”
His breath smelled just slightly sour, as if he’d had a beer, but his eyes were sharp, focused, waiting for my response.
“Right,” I said, trying to sound calm, but my heart was beating a million miles a minute. Did he suspect that the counterfeiting was an inside job? If he needed my help, maybe we’d be able to bargain, maybe I’d get information out of him.
“You got a minute?” Ayers gestured toward the innards of the restaurant. It was a favorite lunch spot of reporters during the week, but on Saturday, at this hour, the only people inside would be at the bar.
I didn’t have a minute. I had a tape in my pocket, evidence of incredible magnitude and a lead on the biggest story in Rhode Island. My feet twitched to get out of here, run, not walk, to the newsroom. I wanted to play the tape for Dorothy before it somehow dissolved. I wanted her to call Nathan on his day off. I wanted editors to huddle together over possible headlines. I wanted to shout “Stop the presses!” at the top of my lungs, the way they did in the movies.
But I was torn. I knew that in another hour, after I’d calmed down and fashioned a rudimentary draft of a story, I’d be on the phone trying to hunt Ayers down. What was the name of the lottery agent who had the Wayland Square territory? I’d have to ask him. Which lottery employees had access to focus-group reports?
“Just a minute of your time,” he pressed.
A black Cadillac was waiting on the other side of the street. It was a new, small model and gleamed in an official way. A driver sat behind the wheel, and it occurred to me that it was waiting for Ayers. Who knew where he would go from here, if I’d be able to catch him later tonight?
I followed Ayers inside, past the deli, to a table in back near the bar. Half the bar stools were still upside down on the bar from last night’s cleaning. Two men sat at a table, eyes upward, fixed on the keno screen. We took a table near the window, overlooking Union Street. Ayers sat in front of a nearly full beer glass and a half-eaten corned-beef sandwich and pushed both away. Behind him, not one, but two enormous vending machines offered scratch tickets instead of candy.
“I’m so sorry you had to go through all this,” he said when I was seated. “You want anything to eat? A beer?” His eyes scanned past me for a waitress.
I shook my head. “Please, I don’t have a lot of time.”
“Okay. Okay, I understand. Just tell me this. I hear you bought the tickets at the Mazursky Market in Wayland Square. When?” he asked. “Recently?”
I’d answered this question for the state police, nailing the exact day, underscoring that it was the night of Barry Mazursky’s murder. Surely they’d communicated the information to Ayers. I wondered if he was doing what I often did, asking questions to which I already had the answers—an introductory softening up. “Two weeks ago. The night Barry Mazursky was murdered.”
He looked over his shoulder; I wasn’t sure at what. The empty bar stools? The keno screen? When his eyes returned to mine, he nodded, a deliberate and solemn register of a terrible tragedy, but it seemed false somehow. There was something missing from his eyes, some depth he couldn’t achieve. I realized why his face looked younger today. There was a layer of orangey makeup on his cheeks and a dusting of powder. He must have been shooting a commercial today or made some other kind of lottery television appearance.
“I’m so sorry you were cheated by this scheme.” When he frowned, a deep vertical line in his forehead created a sudden rut in the pancake makeup. He looked old again and asymmetrical.
The door opened and two men entered the restaurant and walked past the deli and tables, straight to the bar. I heard the sound of stools being pulled off the bar and righted on the floor.
“Any idea how the counterfeiters were able to produce such good copies?” I asked.
Ayers ignored my question. “It must have been a terrible disappointment for you.”
He gazed at me in a way that was supposed to have meaning, but again, the depth was missing and I had trouble understanding what it was he was trying to convey. Compassion? Sympathy?
“It had to be a crushing blow when they told you it was a fake,” he continued.
“Yeah,” I said, “that’s one way to describe it.”
“I’m sorry about that,” Ayers said. The rut in his forehead deepened.
I shrugged.
“You know, a counterfeit operation of this kind could really hurt lottery revenues—at a time when the state really needs the money,” Ayers said.
I gave him a look. Was there a point to his reiterating the obvious? I got the feeling he was still acting for the commercial, as if he were under a bright light. I glanced over my shoulder, almost expecting a camera, a crew. I didn’t have time for this. I needed to take control of the interview. Get the hell out of here. “Who is the lottery agent in that territory?”
Did I imagine that his eyes narrowed? “I’m not sure,” he said, slowly. “I’ll have to look that up.”
He hadn’t done that already? Hadn’t looked up the agent’s name first thing after he got word of the scam from the state police? “I was thinking that the agents were in the best position to know that something was up. Wouldn’t sales of legitimate lottery scratch tickets have suffered in those stores?” I asked.
His expression changed, so swiftly, so artificially, it was as if the makeup artist had been in, the face redrawn. “Well, you’re right about the effect on state ticket sales. But the state suffers in other ways. Not just past sales, but publicity about this could hurt revenues horribly in the future, affect the programs we finance.” His eyes sparkled significantly, and I knew suddenly that all questions up until now had been filler. The point of this interview wasn’t to get information out of me. The point was to try to get me not to write the first-person counterfeit-ticket story.
“Premature publicity wreaks havoc on an investigation at this stage,” he continued. “I was hoping that you and I could reach some kind of agreement.”
Postponing the counterfeit story another day in exchange for giving me the exclusive? Under ordinary circumstances, it was not an unrealistic offer, but not when the counterfeiting could be connected to two murders. “I don’t think I can make that kind of agreement.”
He frowned and the rut in his forehead returned. There was a long silence. I started to get up. Clearly, our meeting was over. But he gestured for me to sit down. “Please, just a minute more of your time.” Reluctantly, I dropped to my seat.
And then, reaching into his jacket pocket, he pulled out something and slipped it across the table. It was a scratch ticket. “Frankly, I think the lottery has a responsibility to you. It owes you—”
This threw me. “It owes me?”
“The counterfeit ticket. You bought it in good faith.”
My mouth must have dropped open. Was he saying that the lottery owed me money?
“You had a winning ticket. You couldn’t have known you were buying a counterfeit.”
Ten thousand dollars. My heart began to race. Ten thousand dollars. Was he saying he’d give me that much money?
He studied the ticket on the table. He didn’t say a word, but he didn’t need to.
I lowered my voice. “Are you telling me that’s a ten-thousand-dollar ticket?”
“I have no way of knowing,” he said. “Any genuine ticket has the same chance of winning as any other. It could be the two-hundred-fifty-thousand-dollar ticket.”
He picked up the ticket from the table, held it to the light of the window, and chuckled. It was the same laugh he used on television after he announced a lottery winner, just before he clapped the winner on the back. His eyes gleamed with his trademark grandfatherly generosity. And I realized two things: one, that Ayers was holding a ticket worth a quarter of a million dollars, and, two, that he’d never say it out loud.
; I stared at the bright bit of paper in his hands. He intended to give it to me. But clearly not just for a one-day postponement on a story. His eyes met mine, a moment passed. One of the men at the bar coughed. From the deli in front, a cash register jingled open. Ayers withdrew the ticket a half inch. “I’ve seen you, you know, at Mohegan Sun, the blackjack tables. I know you’ve had a few setbacks.”
Stunned, I stared at him. How could he know all this unless someone had been following me? My heart stopped in its cavity. The chambers did not beat. The world did not spin and time moved backward instead of forward. If he’d been following me, he knew I had Leonard’s tape.
“I saw you at Leonard’s studio, remember?” he said, as if echoing my thoughts. And then, in a very low voice, a barely audible whisper, he added, “We found the only other copy.”
The search of Leonard’s apartment. Our eyes met. Now his were full of depth, full of intent.
“You saw me pick up a dub from the show I did last week. That’s all.”
“Right,” he said, smiling. “A dub.” There was another silence, and then he pushed the ticket toward me. “I’d like to replace your counterfeit ticket as a gesture of goodwill.”
Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. I could pay off all my father’s medical bills. My mother wouldn’t have to sell her house. My rent would be paid, my debts obliterated. My palms tingled, and I felt the same kind of excitement I felt at the blackjack table when I sensed that the deck had turned in my direction. Two hundred fifty thousand dollars. It wouldn’t matter if I didn’t make the investigative team. I could quit the bureau job. Freelance. Move back to Boston. Write a freaking book.
Through the window, I saw the black Cadillac waiting outside on Union Street. Besides the driver, I noticed another form, a man, sitting in the backseat.
In front of me, the vending machines displayed the full variety of scratch tickets and my gaze landed on the latest version of the Green Poker Game and its lucky leprechaun. You had to be pretty high up at the lottery to have the focus-group report. “I wouldn’t stand on the same podium as Gregory Ayers,” Leonard had said the night of the rally.
