Brian Mcgrory - Dead Line

I nodded. “Unfortunately, I am.”

“Tell Vinny.”

“I’m not sure yet what there is to say. I get leaked information, spoon-fed, really, by a senior government official I’d never previously met. I get it into the paper under the crush of deadline. I wake up the next day and a lawyer with the city, a young woman, is shot dead in the Boston Common garage. Sorry, Vinny, but I don’t believe in coincidence. I work for a newspaper. I’m not allowed to. That story triggered something, and in this case, it was a gun.”

Vinny shoved a couple of Chef Kelly’s handcut French fries into his mouth, which inexplicably made me wonder why chefs get this lyrical little title that precedes only their first name. Reporter Jack. I just can’t picture it.

Vinny was quiet. Check that. He wasn’t speaking, he was chewing, which is anything but quiet. I looked at Hank, who stared back knowingly at me, though what he knew I wasn’t sure right then. In the absence of anything else, I said, “I may have caused a young woman’s murder.”

That hung out there like a storm cloud before a hard rain. It hung out there until Hank audibly cleared his throat and said, “Jack, if all this worst-case scenario jazz is right, you didn’t cause anyone to die. You didn’t leak the story. You didn’t pull the trigger. You don’t know what the story behind the story really is.”

I replied, in a sharper tone than I intended, “So what you’re saying is that I was probably just used.”

Hank nodded.

I pounded my closed fist on the table, so that the plate with my mostly uneaten hamburger rattled against my water glass, and a few of the nearby diners, fearing some rapid downturn in the NASDAQ, reached in unison for the Palm V’s to check the latest numbers.

Hank Sweeney had just given voice to my unspoken fears, and I looked at him hard and all but hissed, “That’s worse. That’s much worse. I’m too good to be used. I’ve been doing this too fucking long to be used. I’m supposed to use people. I’m not supposed to be the one who’s used — especially not in the death of a young woman.”

Vinny started to say something and I cut him off, looking from one to the other, then out into an empty expanse of dining room at nothing at all.

“I’ve invested my adult life, my entire career, my very sense of identity, in pursuit of the truth. Sometimes it’s unpleasant. Sometimes it gets downright nasty. Sometimes the truth isn’t anything that you ever want to have anything more than a passing familiarity with. But still, you have to learn it. We have to let the public know it. Even at its worst, it’s a bedrock, an immovable foundation, a place from which to build or mend.

“And now, by doing what I’ve always done, believing what I’ve always believed in, I might have caused someone to die. I pursued truth, and Hilary Kane is dead. So tell me this: How do I ever justify what I do for a living now?”

Silence, at least at our table. In the background, you could hear the idle chatter of the working rich as they bade each other fond farewells until the evening cocktail hour would bring them together, perhaps in the very same place.

I looked at Hank, who stared complacently back at me. As we did this, it was Mongillo who absently pushed his plate a few inches toward the middle of our table and said, “Suppose you have it inside-out, Jack.” He paused here for a moment and we locked in on each other’s gaze. “Suppose,” he said, “that you didn’t print the truth at all?”

Did someone just pull the pin on an old-fashioned hand grenade? His words seemed to explode across the linen tablecloth, through the thick bone that needlessly protected my brain, and into that tiny part of my body, my nature, that occasionally commits an act called thought.

“Suppose,” Mongillo continued, knowing full well he was on something of a roll here, “that you were used so bad that it wasn’t even with truth, but with lies.”

I didn’t know whether to throttle him or hug him. I didn’t know whether to embrace what he was saying, or be repulsed by it. I didn’t know which was better, or more accurately, worse: to have the truth lead to someone’s death, or to have been set up with a deadly lie.

I felt my phone vibrate again, and then I felt it stop. I felt a pit in my stomach, and then I felt it go away. I felt all eyes staring directly at me, then I felt like I was very much alone. More than anything else, I felt the need to peel back the layers, to uncover the deceptions, to clarify the distortions, to confront the lies in search of an immovable truth.

“I need your help,” I said, hitting the edge of the table with my open hand, softly, not hard. As I said this, I looked from Mongillo to Sweeney. Each of them looked back at me and solemnly nodded.

“Someone’s going to pay,” Mongillo said, “And I want to be there to collect.”

Spoken like, well, Mongillo.

Sweeney said, “I’ve got more time than a turtle crossing the Mojave.”

Speaking of time, I checked my cell phone and saw it was close to 1:30 P.M., close to panic time for ordinary reporters.

“Thank you,” I said to each one of them, more sincere than I usually sound, which probably isn’t hard. “Then this would be the point in the life of a story when we make a plan.”

Right then, the nattily dressed Jason Buick, the appropriately obsequious manager of the club, approached our table with an air of apologetic urgency, as well as a cordless telephone.

“Jack, sorry to interrupt, but I’ve got a call here from a Mr. Peter Martin, who says he has an important news matter to discuss with you.”

“Mr. Peter Martin thinks that a change in the weather is an important news matter.”

“I heard that,” Martin said when I put the phone up to my ear.

“How are you, Peter?”

“I might be better if my best reporter might take a fricking moment and answer his fricking cell phone when I call him on it to talk about the biggest story in the nation today. Short of that, I’m not doing all that fricking well.”

I hate the word frick, by the way. I mean, be a newsman. Just say the real thing.

“I’ve been in meetings.”

That last line came out weak, the tone even weaker than the words. Reporters don’t go to meetings, at least this reporter, though I did meet the victim’s sister, or at least someone who I believed to be the sister, at the apartment. I was meeting Mongillo and Sweeney at the time of the call.

Martin said, his words and voice less accusatory: “I’ve got all hell breaking loose.” He paused for a flicker of a moment, then added, “And not just in the usual way.” That’s Martin’s code for: Jack, listen closely.

“Go ahead,” I said.

“I got a call a short time ago, a few minutes, maybe five minutes. It was from a young woman. She sounded really afraid, but coherent, not frantic or anything. She said she had tried to call you several times but only got your voicemail. So she called the switchboard looking for you. Barbara tried you on your cell phone, but you didn’t pick up. She thought the call sounded important, so she sent the woman to me.”

Barbara has an eye for news like Dean Martin had a taste for whiskey. She runs what’s known as the Record’s message center, sitting behind a big, circular panel in the front of the newsroom, answering phones, sending out pages, patching calls through to reporters traveling out of state and abroad. She hears sob stories from the public, tales of utter woe and incomprehensible tragedy. Then she makes sense of them, either blocking liars or searching out reporters for the callers who she believes are telling important truths. All this is to say, I listened even harder now.

Martin continued, “So the woman says to me that she’s in danger, that someone is stalking her. I’m thinking, yeah, give me a piece of news there, honey. Then she says, ‘I can’t go to the police. I need to speak to Jack Flynn. He’ll know why.’ ”