Brian McGrory - Strangled

“All yours,” I said. And Martin, to his considerable credit, was as sober in his departure as he was in his arrival.

“All right, Fair Hair, I’m thinking of the thinnest-crust pizza we can find, with fresh mushrooms, maybe a little oregano, the cheese melted just perfectly so, all of it washed down with a Chianti so peppery, so authentically earthy, so absolutely Italy, that you’re going to start thinking you have a Vespa parked out front.”

That was, of course, Vinny Mongillo, parking himself in a nearby chair while he tossed one of Huck’s tennis balls high in the air, catching it effortlessly himself. “What are you thinking?” he asked.

“Of you leaving me alone.”

“Oh, come on, my little amigo. So we didn’t have it first. Get over it. We’ll have it best. We’ve got a million other things in that story that no one else will have.”

I sat in silence, watching Huck watching Vinny toss his ball.

Vinny asked, “Did you remember to put a noun and a verb in every sentence? Did you remember to put skinny Vinny’s byline right up high, preferably on top? If you did that, the story’s going to sing like a diva in Las Vegas.”

My phone rang. God bless my phone.

“Flynn here.”

“Sergeant Ralph Akin, Boston Police Department. This call is not on a recorded line, and I’m assuming yours isn’t either. We met overnight when you came to visit your colleague.”

“Hello, Sergeant. Nice to hear from you.”

“Same. Listen, I have a proposition for you. My very excellent friend, Mac Foley, is currently being detained as the commissioner and his lackeys cook up some bullshit charges. Mac would like to chat with you, in person, in the lockup.”

I asked, “What’s the proposition?”

He hesitated. I wasn’t meaning to be difficult, but sometimes I just am. Okay, more than sometimes. Sergeant Akin said, “Could you come over here ASAP and meet on the sly with Foley? That’s the proposition.”

“I’m on my way.”

“Call this number from your cell phone when you near headquarters. Enter through the rear delivery door.”

We hung up and I turned to Vinny and said, “Hold the oregano and watch the dog for me. I’ve got a little more reporting to do tonight.”

As I hustled through the gloomy newsroom, I could hear Vinny saying to himself, “Christ, a guy can starve in this life.”

As I walked up to the darkened delivery bay in the rear of Boston Police headquarters, a garage door rolled up about four feet off the ground and a lone arm extended from the dark environs, beckoning me inside. I crouched down and did as told.

Inside, Sergeant Ralph Akin, a.k.a. Ralphie, was there to greet me, with precisely none of the frivolity he had displayed earlier that day when I was meeting with Vinny Mongillo. In fact, he looked and sounded deadly serious. “Mac Foley is my friend,” he said. “He’s a fantastic cop. Ask anyone in the building. The commissioner is trying to stick it up his ass on the way out the door.”

We walked across the cavernous delivery bay, through a set of double doors, and down a narrow, fluorescent-lit hallway. Akin cut me off, flung open a door on my side of the corridor, and guided me into a tiny room that looked to be the observation area on an interrogation room on the other side of a twoway mirror.

“You’ll have some privacy in here,” Akin said. “I’ll go get Mac.” He paused at the door and said, “The brass is out to dinner. You won’t have a whole lot of time. Listen, Jack, and I think I can call you Jack. Any friend of Mongillo is good enough to be a friend of mine. Like I told you, they don’t make them any better than Mac Foley. He really needs your help.”

I didn’t say anything, though I don’t think he expected me to. In a moment he was gone.

Less than a minute later, the door opened and Mac Foley came walking in, looking far more pissed off than panicked, his expression bringing me back to the prior Monday night, at Hal Harrison’s retirement dinner, when Foley shot me an icy stare from across the crowded ballroom. Who knew then that this is where that brief relationship would lead: a clandestine meeting in the bowels of police headquarters while one party — fortunately not me — stared down the barrel of multiple murder charges.

There were four chairs in a semicircle facing the wall of glass, and Foley sat in the one closest to the door. I sat in the farthest. He said, “Jack, I don’t know what Hal Harrison is telling you I did. I don’t know yet what charges they’re going to file. But you’ve got to understand, you’ve got to believe, whatever it is they’re saying I did, I didn’t do it.”

It was odd, having a cop plead with me like this, turn to me as the ultimate arbiter, understanding the odd power that the Record held on this most bizarre of stories.

I said, “Detective Foley, they found Elizabeth Riggs’s purse crammed away in your neighbor’s trash can. Are you going to say this was a plant?”

He shot me a look of surprise, and then the heat faded from his eyes as he slowly gazed up and down the darkened glass, then at the tile floor in front of him, and finally at the backs of his hands.

“Whatever they’re going to say that I did, I didn’t. Please, you’ve got to trust me on that.”

He didn’t answer my question. It’s also worth noting that his line of argument was painstakingly selected. He wasn’t denying having done anything wrong, only denying doing what they were going to say he had done. It was interesting, if slightly confusing. Though maybe not.

“What are they going to say you’ve done?” I asked.

The question came out perhaps a little louder than I had intended, more aggressive than I might have meant, but truth be told, it was how I felt. Yeah, my gut told me that Boston Police Detective Mac Foley wasn’t one of the bad guys in this case. And maybe some oblique part of my mind told me the same thing. But the facts didn’t speak particularly well for him at the moment, and thus, neither would I.

“It’s a setup, Jack. They’re making me a scapegoat. They’re trying to do to me what they did to Albert DeSalvo forty years ago — pin the whole thing on someone, make all the unpleasant facts go away, and then ride it all to whatever victories they’re chasing.”

I asked, “Did you kill Jill Dawson or Lauren Hutchens or Kimberly May?” Their names rolled off my tongue like those of old friends.

He was standing now, pacing the short part of the room by the door.

“I didn’t kill anyone,” he said, though he said this while staring down at his shoes.

“Did you steal Elizabeth Riggs’s license?”

Silence. He continued to pace. He looked up at me and said, “You need to talk to Paul Vasco. Have you talked to Paul Vasco?”

“Last week,” I said, the words encased in anger as they slipped out of my mouth. I added, “You didn’t answer my question. Did you steal Elizabeth Riggs’s license?”

Abruptly, he slapped his fist against the back of his chair, sending it toppling over.

“You’re asking the wrong questions.” He yelled this more than he said it, his voice bouncing off the hard walls and glass and ricocheting around the room. “You’re asking the wrong fucking questions of the wrong fucking people.”

“Did you steal Elizabeth Riggs’s license?”

He plunked himself down in the next chair over from mine. He looked me hard in the eye. “Jack, I’ve done nothing wrong. You’ve got to talk to Vasco again. You’ve got to tell him that I’m at risk of being charged. You’ve got to get to the bottom of this story, the killings now, the killings then.”

His voice was growing panicked now, his eyes turning wild. “Please, Jack, talk to Vasco. Please.”