Brian Mcgrory - Dead Line

There was a long pause as I stopped talking, and she simply looked at me.

“You did,” she finally said, and with that, she turned around and walked out the bathroom door. I heard her footsteps keep going. I heard the apartment door open, then close. She was gone, but my reporter’s instincts, already in overdrive, told me it wouldn’t be for long.

It was the teeth of the lunch hour, so to speak, when an unapologetic Hank Sweeney—“I just assumed she lived in the building”—and I breezed through the front door of the University Club and took a table in the far corner of the half-filled dining room.

This wasn’t the leisurely, wine-soaked lunch that the other diners — mostly stockbrokers and institutional investors who already had the flavor of the day’s Dow — were sharing. I needed information and I needed some counsel, and I needed it fast. The clock was pounding toward 1:00 P.M., an hour when all good reporters already had a rough draft of the next day’s story in the computer monitor of their minds. Me, I had only questions to ask of people I hadn’t yet called, as well as a sense of gloomy guilt so large and ominous it could envelope an oversize cow.

Still, I’m not a good reporter. I’m a great one. Just ask me. Which is why the passage of time didn’t bother me as much as it did, say, Peter Martin, who kept ringing my cell phone approximately every nine seconds, no doubt, in his words, to find out where the flying frick I might be and did I have the time in my busy day to bother writing a follow-up story about the biggest theft in the history of the fricking world?

Or something like that. I couldn’t be sure of the exact verbiage because I didn’t answer the calls. I’d get to him soon enough.

My favorite waitress, Pam, glided over to the table with menus and I pointed at Hank, who, by the way, was the only black in the room not carrying a tray or wearing an apron, and said, “Burger?” He nodded, looked at Pam and said, “Medium, please.”

“Same,” I said, and added, “And bring a third one for our late-arriving friend, rare, with extra everything. And we’re in something of a rush, Pam.”

As if he sensed a countdown toward good food, Vinny Mongillo appeared in the distant doorway, spotted us without trouble, and sauntered through the room like he owned it, even stopping and chatting with a couple of the more familiar captains of industry along the way. It makes no sense that a man of his considerable girth can actually saunter, and yet he does, he does. He makes every motion seem so natural, right down to the clap he gave me on the side of my shoulder as he said, “Jesus, Fair Hair, your voicemail was so dire it made it sound like one of the mean third-graders stole your Halle Berry lunchbox.”

I ignored that, which I do with so much of what Mongillo says. He exchanged greetings with Sweeney, calling him, unless I heard wrong, “Brother Hank.”

I said to Mongillo, without elaboration or any need for it, “Spill. I need everything you know and everything you suspect on the Kane murder.”

He shook his head, not in a way that denied my request, but more like how a kitchen contractor immediately searches out the negative in even the simplest undertaking. “You want a faucet in your sink? Oh, boy, I don’t know, especially with the way the tile is cut and the pipes are shaped and the light fixture hangs down.” And then he comes up with an answer that he knew all along.

Vinny’s like that as well. He always has the answer. He just wants to make sure you know the obstacles he overcame to get it.

So here we go. “You want to talk tight-lipped,” he began. “Jesus mother of an unforgiving Christ. The press release was a total of one paragraph. One. The homicide cops never came over to the tape to talk to us hacks. The briefing at headquarters lasted all of two-and-a-half minutes, and involved the commissioner reading a statement that said nothing and walking away from the podium without answering any questions.”

I glanced over at Sweeney, retired homicide lieutenant with the Boston PD, and he seemed enraptured by his view from the other side, actually leaning over the table, his big chin resting on the back of his right hand. He wasn’t completely familiar with the whole Mongillo extravaganza quite yet and this probably wasn’t the time to warn him.

Mongillo kept talking as Pam filled our water glasses and placed a basket of bread on the table.

“Here’s what they want you to know,” he said. “They want you to know that the victim’s name is Hilary Kane. She’s twenty-nine years old. She’s a lawyer for the city. She was shot once in the temple and once in the back of the head as she sat in the driver’s seat of her car, a 2002 Saab 9–3 four-door. She was dead virtually immediately.” He paused here for effect, then added, “And the police, of course, also want you to know that they’re pursuing numerous leads.”

That last bit is a line, and a rather ridiculous one, written into the end of every police press release. I looked back over at Sweeney, who seemed to take no offense.

Mongillo reached over for a hunk of bread, spread a heaping wad of butter on it like it was good for him, and took a longing bite. After he chewed for a moment, he said, “Here’s what the police don’t want you to know.” And with that, he looked at the two of us conspiratorially.

“They don’t want you to know that they’re in some bizarre shit-fight with the FBI over the evidence in this thing. The city beat the Feds to the girl’s apartment by about an hour, then they argued so hard about where the evidence should go that bosses had to be called in from both sides. My understanding is that there’s a U.S. attorney preparing to walk into U.S. District Court by three this afternoon seeking a temporary restraining order against Boston PD from mucking with any materials, meaning possible evidence, pulled from the victim’s apartment.”

Mongillo paused for another bite of bread. I took the opportunity to pose a question, the answer to which I already pretty well knew, at least partially. Or maybe not. “Why the hell is the Bureau getting involved in a local murder?” I asked.

Mongillo looked at me in that way an impatient teenager might look at his tagalong little brother.

“Gee, good question. You ever thought about being a reporter?”

Luckily, the hamburgers arrived at that exact moment, and any prospect of tension gave way to the joys of gastronomy — and believe me, with Hank Sweeney and Vinny Mongillo involved, virtually any gastronomy is a joyous occasion, and when the food is on someone else’s tab, namely mine, it’s nearly transcendental.

Mongillo took a monstrous bite into his burger, chewed methodically, then said, “It’s the question of the hour. I’ve got about two dozen calls out on it. I’m not getting any answers back, at least not yet, anyway. Obviously, either the victim or a suspect that we don’t yet know about is in some way linked to a federal case.”

Yeah, the Gardner Museum heist. So I told him, in utmost confidence, of my visit to her apartment that afternoon. Sweeney sat there eating, taking it all in.

When I was done with my soliloquy, Mongillo looked at me bemused and said, “A B&E on Beacon Hill. Christ almighty, Fair Hair’s turning into quite the bad boy.”

As he made reference to my lawbreaking ways, I felt my insides begin to churn, until I realized it was actually my cellular telephone vibrating in the breast pocket of my jacket. I glanced at the number — Peter Martin’s, again — and ignored it.

I shook my head sadly and said, “I wish I could laugh about it. The fact is, I think I caused an innocent person to die.”

Vinny was midbite as I said this. He stared at me as he chewed, and when he was done, he said in an uncharacteristically soft tone, “You’re serious, aren’t you?”