Richardson’s phone rang. It was Reardon.
“Hi. Just wanted you to know I was getting ready to leave. It’s almost nine in case you hadn’t noticed. I’ll buy the drinks if you’ve got your story done.”
“This won’t be finished until tomorrow, Terry. I’ve got to think about what it means, or what I might have to say now, considering everything I wrote about the Tarantinos last week. But I’d love a drink. Meet you in the lobby in five minutes.”
* * *
For some reason he couldn’t explain, Reardon chose to bypass the closer establishments and walk the three blocks over to Chi-Chi’s. They sat side by side in a booth, near the front of the bar. He listened patiently as Jenna took the devil’s advocate position that Arena was falsely accused of what happened and then forced to commit suicide before he could publicly deny the charge.
“Maybe the Tarantinos arranged this whole thing,” she said. “They could do it easily. Baldacci was ready to say anything he was told, just to stay alive. All Sal Tarantino had to do was speak to Dave DePaolo in Cleveland. It’s just been wrapped up too fast and too neat, Terry, don’t you think?”
He didn’t agree with her. He said that she had essentially broken the case open by realizing that Cardella was the target that night. “Don’t you see what happened? Your story put tremendous heat on the Tarantinos, especially the way you connected the Family to Doug Fiore’s campaign. The Tarantinos recognized the killings as the work of a professional—you told me that yourself after you met with them. They probably asked the other Families to check and see whether one of their men was AWOL on the Monday that Cardella and Niro were shot.”
“And you think DePaolo found out about Baldacci?”
“Absolutely. It’s my guess that Baldacci blabbed to someone about the job—maybe a girlfriend, who knows? Whoever it was didn’t want to sit on that information, and told one of the DePaolos about it. The Cleveland family was able to do a big-time favor for Sal Tarantino when they learned the details. I’ll bet they gave Mr. Balls a pretty good idea of how dim a future he had if he didn’t come back here and tell the cops the truth. He knew the jig was up. He did what he did because he had no choice if he wanted to stay alive. If the Tarantinos weren’t involved in Cardella’s death, there’s no reason to believe that Arena was set up by anyone. Case closed.”
Terry finished the beer in his glass with a long gulp. “I guess now I know why Arena postponed our meeting that night.”
Jenna looked at him quizzically. “What are you talking about?”
“Richie and I had a date to meet Tommy here at seven o’clock that night to talk about the drivers’ contract at the Herald. Didn’t I tell you that before?”
“No, you didn’t. That means Arena knew that Cardella would be here. What happened?”
“I got a call in my office about 6:30 or so saying that Tommy would be fifteen to twenty minutes late.”
“From him?”
“No. It was a woman. I assumed it was his secretary.”
Jenna frowned. “I doubt she’d still be working at 6:30. Go on.”
“I called Richie’s office to tell him, but he wasn’t there. I didn’t bother to call over here and leave a message. I guess I figured he’d wait until we got here. It was after seven o’clock when I left the Herald. I heard all the sirens on my way over. A few minutes later Arena saw me as I was moving around the back of the crowd.”
“Where was he?” Jenna asked.
Terry leaned over to his left so that he had a clear view out the front window of Chi-Chi’s. “Almost directly across the street, in front of the deli.”
Jenna got up and walked toward the door. She returned a minute later and picked up her briefcase. “The deli’s still open. Give me ten minutes, okay?”
* * *
The manager of Saul’s Delicatessen, whom Jenna asked to see, was Saul, the owner. She soon learned that Saul, his counterman Morris, and the waitress Marge were the same people who were working there the night of the shooting across the street. Jenna took a picture of Arena out of her briefcase and showed it to them. Marge recognized him immediately.
“He came in with another man,” she recalled, “and they ordered coffee at the counter. A few minutes later he called me over and offered me a five-dollar bill to make a phone call for him. All I had to do was read a message he’d written down on a piece of paper, something about his being late for a meeting.”
“Was it to a man named Reardon?”
“I don’t know. He dialed the number, listened for a few seconds and then handed me the phone.”
Marge’s face showed the effort of struggling to recall everything. “He didn’t look like the kind of guy who threw money around, but I knew there were plenty of reasons some people wanted to avoid talking with someone else. I didn’t notice when his friend left because I was busy with a few tables. I think he was gone before this same guy in the picture used the pay phone again.” She started wiping an area of the counter that already looked clean to Jenna. “Then it was just a few minutes afterwards that the police and ambulances were here on the street.”
Richardson went over to the telephone. It hung on the wall in a corner of the store, just a foot from the front window, at the other end of the deli from the entrance. Looking across the street, she could see Chi-Chi standing behind the bar, talking to two men sitting on stools opposite him.
* * *
Jenna slipped back into the booth. “You’re right,” she told Terry, “case closed,” and passed on to him what she just learned.
“Now that we can be sure Arena was involved,” she continued, “the only question is why?” Jenna leaned on her elbow, her hand at her mouth. “Maybe it’s got something to do with that federal hearing he was supposed to have next month. I’ll check it out. Meanwhile, I have to throw a couple of big fish back into the water.”
“What does that mean?” Terry asked, smiling at her.
“It means I’ve got to take the Tarantinos off the hook.”
92
CYRIL BERMAN WASN’T WAITING to see what Richardson put in her next column. As soon as word of the Baldacci confession came over the news, he put a call in to Dan McMurphy from Karp’s Lincoln. Their appointment was moved up from three o’clock the next afternoon to ten in the morning. Berman wanted a full apology to the Fiore campaign for being linked indirectly to Richie Cardella’s death. And he wanted it to come from the Herald itself, not just its blundering political reporter.
* * *
The entrance to the Herald ’s third floor newsroom was located directly across the corridor from the building’s two elevators. A receptionist sat at a white metal desk just outside the door, several feet away from a long wooden bench that provided seating for up to eight people. A venetian blind hung inside the door, its louvers pulled taut. The large glass windows of the room, on either side of the door, were coated with a green-colored substance that prevented anyone in the corridor from looking at what was going on inside. In the five minutes that Berman sat alone on the bench, waiting to be called, the movement of people in and out of the room was constant.
Shortly after ten o’clock the telephone on the blonde receptionist’s desk buzzed twice. She put down the magazine she was reading, opened the door and pointed Berman toward Dan McMurphy’s office. It was situated in the back of the newsroom, at almost the farthest point from where Berman stood. He could see from a distance that McMurphy’s work area was framed by three glass walls, two of which extended into the newsroom from the side of the building and were joined in front by a third, in which the door was located.
The reporters, whose cluttered desks were arranged by twos, back to back, all looked busy either entering information into their personal computers or engaged in telephone conversations. They ignored Berman as he moved from aisle to aisle in his diagonal path across the room. No shades or blinds screened McMurphy from anyone working there.
McMurphy opened the door just as his visitor arrived at it. H
e introduced himself with a strong handshake, showed Berman where to sit, and moved to the large executive chair behind his desk. Berman intended to start slowly. He wanted to review the substance of Richardson’s recent columns and then, after a brief reference to the remarkable events of the preceding day, move toward the extraction of an apology from the newspaper. Unfortunately, McMurphy never gave him the chance.
“If you’re thinking of asking the Herald for some sort of an apology,” the editor began, “forget it. I approved everything Richardson wrote, Mr. Berman, and it was right on the money as far as who the real target was that night. Her story broke the case wide open, which was to your candidate’s best interest. Half of Rhode Island suspected that the Tarantinos were involved in what happened, and that wasn’t going to help you in the election.” McMurphy’s eyes emphasized the point he was about to make as he stared hard at Berman. “Especially since Richardson uncovered how close your guy used to be to Tarantino junior. I’m sure she’ll make it clear to our readers right away that Cardella’s murder had nothing at all to do with politics. That’s all we can do for you.”
They talked for no more than ten minutes. Berman argued that the paper had already damaged Fiore’s reputation with the unfounded insinuations that were printed. “The election’s just five days away,” he said. “I want to be sure before I leave here that the coverage won’t continue to be unbalanced, weighted in Singer’s favor the way it has been. Look, I’m not asking to see Richardson start repenting in print because the ridiculous things she imagined got shot down yesterday. Fiore can take care of himself on that score. But there are some damn important issues in this campaign. Fiore and Singer are on opposite sides of the fence on a number of things, especially the right way to fix the State’s economy and the casino gambling issue. That’s what they’ll be debating more about tonight, and it’s what you folks ought to get back to writing about in your stories.”
Berman never intended to threaten the newspaper with a lawsuit, and McMurphy’s opening salvo forced him to give up any hope of Fiore receiving an apology in a Herald editorial. What he set his sights on was reminding the news editor that his paper lauded Fiore’s economic plan at an earlier date and spoke out against State-operated gaming parlors on a number of prior occasions. He was working his hardest to lobby McMurphy’s support for a Fiore endorsement in the Sunday edition. When the conversation ended, McMurphy wished him good luck in the election but didn’t accompany him back through the newsroom.
In the corridor, Berman was putting on his raincoat when a young man stepped out of one of the elevators. Its flashing green light indicated that it was going up. “Hold the door,” the man said to another passenger, and hurried over to the receptionist’s desk. “This is for McMurphy,” he told her, handing her a large interoffice mail envelope from among a number he was carrying. “He’s been calling the pressroom for it all morning, so let him know it’s here. Tell him it’s the Singer endorsement.”
93
ROOM SERVICE BROUGHT LUNCH for four to Cyril Berman’s suite at one o’clock that same Thursday. At first Berman thought it smarter to let Fiore go into the debate against Singer that night without the weight of the Herald ’s endorsement decision on his shoulders. Later that morning, he changed his mind and revealed the bad news to Fiore, Walsh and Karp at the same time. He solicited their input, wondering out loud whether there was any route of attack Doug could take that they hadn’t tried yet.
Karp was overjoyed at the events of the previous day. He was certain before then that his status and reputation were in free fall, hurtling toward the bottom of a pit. Suddenly, everything was made right again by the confessions from Baldacci and Arena. Karp could forget about the denials he composed and rehearsed many times in his head. Now he was only regretful that he possibly damaged the Fiore campaign by revealing information about its finances to Jenna Richardson.
“I think we’ve got to attack the Herald,” Karp told the group. “A preemptive strike. As long as we know they’re going to endorse Singer, Doug should make it sound like they were out to get him all along. He can find some way in the debate to give Richardson hell for raising all kinds of phony innuendos without any facts to support them. Then he could say that the Herald brass was obviously pressuring her to write those stories.”
“Lester’s absolutely right,” Walsh said. “Doug shouldn’t just let this thing die. He ought to take advantage of the fact that the whole State of Rhode Island may be watching on TV tonight. I say he should demand an apology from the paper to the Tarantino family, and a separate apology to the Fiore campaign for even hinting that we were aware of a plot to kill Cardella.”
“Good idea,” Karp said.
“There’s some danger in speaking up for the Tarantinos,” Walsh continued, “but the fact remains that Richardson dragged them into the gutter before Baldacci showed up. I think the people would respect Doug for taking their side in this thing. The point I’m trying to make is that we want to convince the voters the Herald ’s the one wearing the black hat for the way it handled this. If we can do that, there could be one hell of a backlash in our favor when they come out Sunday endorsing Singer.”
“Doug?” Berman’s voice indicated that he was open to any idea Fiore had. But silence followed, and he tried again. “It sounds to me like Lester and Russ are making a good argument,” he said. “What do you think?”
Fiore filled his coffee cup with French fries and ate them as he paced around the room. “I’ll say all that stuff if you guys want, but in my opinion it won’t make much of a difference. We need something we can hit Singer with that will stick to him and make him smell, like dogshit on the bottom of his shoes. We’re losing this fucking thing, and blaming it on Richardson and the Herald won’t help us. The only thing everyone will remember next Tuesday is that Singer got their endorsement. Unless we can come up with something on him that will shock the shit out of the voters, that endorsement will kill us.”
Fiore’s use of crude language no longer surprised the men on his team. He spoke that way more often as the election got closer. Berman realized that his candidate’s panic over the probability of losing the election was responsible for the way he spoke, but considered it wiser to simply ignore it than to make an issue of it. The bigger problem was that he knew there was nothing out there that would have the knockout effect Fiore was looking for. As he told Doug earlier, Singer came out “as pure as the driven snow” in everything they checked on him personally.
But he was concerned about what Fiore said and the anger in his voice when he talked to them. He had no doubt Doug had reached the point where he would use anything he could come up with, even if it was immoral or unethical (with the possibility of its also being illegal) to try and damage Singer in the eyes of the voters. Berman recalled Fiore’s earlier show of panic just before the primary. He was eager then, even after learning that Richie Cardella was shot by an assassin, to go ahead with a negative campaign against Cardella in an effort to reduce his opponent’s lead in the polls. He knew for certain now that where once Fiore set out and prided himself on running a campaign he could always be proud of, that objective was no longer in play. All he wanted at this stage was to win, at whatever cost to the truth or to his adversary. Cyril intended to tell Walsh and Karp what he thought and to warn them that Fiore could go off the deep end.
“Don’t forget that Warwick, Portsmouth, and Pascoag have already come out for you in their editorials,” Walsh was saying. “And we’ll probably pick up some others this week. So the Herald backing Singer might just even things out.” He knew how weak it sounded as soon as he said it.
Fiore stopped moving and looked at Walsh. “Tell me, Russell, would you trade Warwick, Portsmouth, Pascoag and a few maybes for the Herald ’s endorsement?” The question reeked with sarcasm. When Walsh didn’t answer, Fiore continued. “You’d give your left testicle to get it and so would I.” There was silence from the others. Doug saw the opportunity to try and relieve whatever
resentment his tone of voice had caused. “In fact, if I was as old as you, Russell, I’d give both testicles if it would help.”
It worked, and everyone laughed.
“What about Singer’s wife?” Karp asked innocently. “She’s in your firm, Doug. Is there anything we can use against her that could rub off on him?”
Fiore paced halfway around the room before answering. “I don’t think so. The ironic part is that she’d probably volunteer it if she had something. I happen to know Carol Singer would give anything to see her husband lose this race.” Even as he spoke the words, the germ of an idea began taking hold, one that he soon believed could put him behind the governor’s desk at the Statehouse.
94
THE DEBATE WAS SCHEDULED to begin at eight o’clock and take place in ’64 Hall on the campus of Providence College in the Elmhurst section of the city. Berman didn’t schedule any speaking engagements for Fiore that afternoon. He wanted him to rest up and rehearse the answers he’d give to the questions they anticipated being asked. Instead of using a panel made up of writers and broadcasters, the debate sponsors decided to let all the questions come from preselected members of the audience attending the event.
When Fiore’s three man “brain trust” left the suite to take a break at the bar on the Biltmore’s mezzanine level, Cyril gave Doug two hours to relax before they’d return to go over the issues with him. Fiore telephoned Pat Hanley immediately and told her it was important for them to meet right away. She was delighted to hear his voice and agreed to be in Room 606 in a half hour. He used the time to put details on the idea he had minutes earlier.
They weren’t able to be together for several weeks, but Hanley didn’t need any apologies. She understood that the final leg of the campaign demanded all Doug’s time. He embraced her and kissed her after she locked the door, and held her hand as they walked toward the sofa. They sat down next to each other and exchanged pleasantries for several minutes.
My Honorable Brother Page 43
