Brian Mcgrory - Dead Line

I heard a drawer open, papers being ruffled, then the drawer closing. This happened again, and again after that, and then I heard more papers being shuffled on what was probably the top of the desk. And then, once again, I heard nothing at all.

Well, almost nothing. I heard the faint sound of objects being lifted, then silence, then put back in place. And I heard what sounded like sniffling, and the sniffling turned into a low-level sobbing, which then took on the sound of someone actually convulsing in tears, shaking, crying, gulping for air, then exhaling sorrowful, uncontrollable moans. Man or woman, I didn’t yet know, but if this was an FBI agent or a homicide detective, they might have been taking this newfangled victim-compassion thing a little too far.

For at least five minutes, I listened to the heart-wrenching sounds of this person gasping and crying. They blew their nose. Their cell phone rang, but they didn’t answer. They just kept crying, apparently unable to pull themselves together again.

And I simply stood inside this door, leaning against a vanity, feeling both helpless and heinous, not to mention voyeuristic. At this point, it was all I could do not to cry myself, like a single cough in a movie theater setting off a fit of the same.

The person’s cell phone rang again — once, twice, three times, four, and then stopped, the sound echoing around the open expanse of the apartment before disappearing into a canyon of silence. Well, not silence, but sobbing.

And then a voice. It was low, somewhat husky, obviously thickened by all those tears, jarring in a room that hadn’t heard a voice in all this time. It was that of a woman, who said, “Hil. Hil. I should have been there to help you—” As she tried to continue, her words trailed off into a fresh round of tears.

The chair scratched abruptly on the wood floor. I heard a couple of abrupt steps toward the bathroom, then the door pushed quickly open as I stepped back to avoid it. Although I had many minutes to prepare for what was probably an inevitable confrontation, I hadn’t thought it through. I didn’t know what I was going to say. So as she looked at me and I looked at her, I held my hands up in the air in front of me and hurriedly said, “I’m not here to hurt you. My name is Jack Flynn. I’m a reporter for The Boston Record.”

She screamed. Well, maybe it wasn’t quite a scream. She yelped, one of those panicked sounds when a shocked person already under great duress doesn’t exactly know what to do. I could appreciate the feeling right now.

She backed out the bathroom door. I said, firmly, but hopefully not ominously, “I’m not here to hurt you. I will leave immediately if you allow me.”

I heard her sifting around for something, then saw her figure in the door again, this time with a steam iron in her right hand, which she held up as if she were going to fire it at me. Me, I don’t personally use an iron. I send all my shirts to the cleaners. Now I kind of understood why. This thing looked dangerous — sharp and hard, and of course, at times, incomprehensibly hot.

“Please,” I said, taking a step back against the far bathroom wall, the one with the window. “Please allow me to explain what I’m doing here. Again, my name is Jack Flynn. I’m a reporter at the Record. I had a story in this morning’s paper about the Gardner Museum heist. When I heard about Hilary’s death, I suspected she might be in some way involved, so I snuck into”—well, broke into, but this seemed an appropriate time to draw fine lines—“her apartment to find out if I was right.”

We locked gazes, but I had no idea what it is that she saw. How much like Hilary Kane did she look? Enough that I had absolutely no doubt this was her sister, the same woman I saw in the photograph of moving day in front of the apartment. Same eyes, same high cheekbones, same blonde hair except this woman’s was cut much shorter. And here in person, same long, lean body. I’d even call it a killer body, except right now, I’m the one she was in a position to kill. If she did, she’d even get away with it in court.

“Please,” I said. “I know it’s a sad and frightening time for you. I know I shouldn’t be here. But I’m trying to help. Please trust me.”

And still, she stood there in tears. She looked at me and I looked at her, and in the pounding silence, she slowly lowered the arm that held the iron. She said in a very husky voice, “Show me some ID. Don’t make any fast moves.”

I deliberately reached into my front pocket and pulled out the kind of press card that old-style reporters used to wear tucked into the front of their hats. I held it toward her in my left hand, and she took a step closer and took it from me.

With communication established, which in my business is almost always a good thing, I said, “I can give you a business card. It’s in my wallet. My wallet is in a car across the street.”

She looked carefully at the laminated Record ID card in her hand, then up at my face through her teary eyes, then back down at my picture, which, I should point out, wasn’t a particularly flattering one. I vividly recall that Elizabeth and I had a heated argument that morning, and an hour later there I was standing before a white backdrop, snap, snap, getting shot.

“How did you get in?” she asked.

There are basically two types of people in life: Those who hate reporters, and, well, those who don’t. The haters, they’re not always rational people, I’ve found, or for that matter, particularly likable. Ask them what they so disdain about the news media and they’ll tell you we’re all a bunch of lying, parasitic, sensationalistic pigs sucking off the body public. So what’s their point?

Actually, they’re likely to say all this with a rolled-up copy of a tabloid newspaper in their hands, or with plans to get home and watch that ever soothing 11 o’clock news. They hate us, but they watch and read us. They hate us because that’s just what they do in life, and we’ve given them too many good reasons for it. Turn on the TV news and we’re inevitably pictured as an unwieldy horde hollering stupid questions to politicians or criminals — sometimes one and the same — who conveniently ignore us until they hear an inquiry that suits their needs. Cop shows portray us as bumbling nuisances insensitive to anyone or anything but our own deadlines. And the haters, lemmings, just go along, thoughtlessly, hating us because they think that’s what they’re supposed to do.

But then there are others who get it, those who understand that the vast majority of reportage is a solitary endeavor important to the public realm, not to mention the public good. At our best, we provide the public information that it should have, or need to have, or want to have, and on our best days, all three at once. We shine attention on politicians, business leaders, and other notables who go wrong. We keep countless others right out of the simple fear of landing on the front page of the Record’s next issue. We do it seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year, every year for as long as I’ve been alive, and that’s not about to change.

Do we make mistakes? God yes. Do we occasionally embarrass ourselves? Yes again. But in sum and substance, we are a crucial contributor to the common cause, and smart people, most people, recognize that fact free and clear.

Now let me dismount from my high horse and try to figure out on which side of the chasm the striking blonde with the iron proficiency will stand.

“I broke in,” I replied.

“Why?”

“Because I think I might have been used. Because I was afraid that something I wrote, something somebody leaked to me for this morning’s newspaper, might have caused Hilary Kane to be killed. I needed to find out right away, rather than wait for some official statement from the cops that probably wouldn’t tell me nearly what I needed to know.” I added, “So I broke in. It’s wrong. It’s against the law. It’s an invasion of privacy. I understand all that. But I needed to find out what went wrong, and I needed to find out if I caused it.”