Brian Mcgrory - Dead Line

I listened for a moment to the stern September breeze slapping at the balcony door and an antique mantel clock ticking toward my meeting with Jankle and the general din of a restless silence. Then I said, “My wife died during childbirth.” And I proceeded to tell her the whole story, about the pains during the delivery, about the frantic command to leave the room, the look on Katherine’s face, the frightening hour in the waiting room, the doctor summoning me into a conference room, pulling the sheet from my wife’s face and kissing her damp, cool forehead good-bye.

And then I told her how it had all affected me, and as I was telling her, I seemed to be telling myself. I couldn’t have a normal relationship. I couldn’t commit myself for reasons that I couldn’t quite understand, even to someone who I knew I had once loved. That said, I told her about my recent visit with Elizabeth, about the general angst of it all, about my fears that this many years later, I should be moving on, and wasn’t.

As I talked, Maggie had her feet on my couch, her knees tucked under her chin, her arms wrapped around her shins. When I was done, she unfolded herself and stood up and walked over to where I was leaning forward in my chair. And she kissed me, on the forehead, her hand on my temple. I felt moisture from her eyes as she allowed her face to linger against mine. She was crying, or maybe weeping, not over her loss, but over mine.

She stepped back and looked at me and said, “I had no idea.”

I said, staring back into her eyes, “I had no idea about yours.”

She walked back to the couch and reached into her leather bag groping around for God only knew what. She pulled out a cell phone, held it in front of her and said, “It’s everywhere, the loss is. This is Hilary’s phone. I found it this morning and the very sight of it almost sent me over the edge.”

My eyes immediately flashed from sad to shocked. It’s as if I heard drums sounding in the room, saw rockets blaze by. The air even seemed to change temperature.

Trying to remain calm, trying not to cause alarm, I asked, “Why do you have your sister’s phone?”

“When she was at my place the day before she died, she forgot it.” She smiled and added, “That’s just her. She was always leaving keys, gloves, her purse, anything that wasn’t attached to her body.”

“May I see it?”

She leaned forward and handed it across the coffee table to me. I looked carefully at the darkened face of the Motorola flip phone. I pressed the power button, wondering if it had the juice to turn on. Immediately, lights lit up. Words and numbers flashed across the small screen. Then everything settled back into the typical symbols and figures and the phone fell dark again.

I was transfixed, almost embarrassingly so. When I realized this, I looked at Maggie and said, “Do you mind if I just play with this for a moment and see if there’s anything worthwhile?”

She shrugged and said, “Go ahead.”

I knew beyond any doubt that the police and the FBI had already culled through her home, office, and cellular telephone records trying to discover who she called in the hours and days before she was killed. I also knew that as a reporter, I had no shot at these records. The phone itself, though, was an entirely different animal, or in this case, opportunity.

I played with some buttons until I finally got the phone to list the last ten incoming calls. I scanned through them quickly. Some had names assigned to them, others were just numbers, still others said Restricted, meaning the caller wasn’t identified, not to Hilary when she answered, not to me now.

I pressed a few more buttons and the last ten outgoing calls appeared on the screen in the same general pattern — some with names, like “Maggie” and “Laura,” and others with just numbers. One of those numbers struck me as vaguely familiar, but for the life of me I couldn’t pinpoint why.

I got up and grabbed a legal pad out of the kitchen and wrote all the names and numbers down. Then I came back into the living room and asked Maggie if I could hold on to the phone for safekeeping. She agreed.

I quickly banged out a call to Vinny’s cell phone, figuring, since his flight took off in a matter of minutes, that he’d be impossible to reach. He picked up on the first ring with his typically curt, “Mongillo.”

“I need a favor.”

“I need a drink. Peter Martin has me in a middle seat in fucking coach. These fucking chairs were built for runway models, not for real people with real appetites.”

I didn’t touch that one. Instead, I told him I had a few telephone numbers that I needed identities assigned to.

“Give ’em to me. Make it quick before they make me turn off the phone.

I read him the unidentified numbers in question. He hung up without so much as a good-bye or a good luck.

I checked the clock and realized it was twenty minutes until my rendezvous with Tom Jankle.

“Where are you staying tonight?” I asked Maggie.

She had been sitting on the couch watching me, and she shrugged, as if it didn’t matter, as if she didn’t care.

“Not a big planner, are you?” As soon as I spoke the words, I regretted them.

She met my gaze and replied, “I haven’t really had the chance to be since my sister was killed.” She said this matter-of-factly, not accusatorily, God bless her.

I nodded. “I’ve got to go out for a while. I’m going to lock you in. Put the deadbolt in place, and plan on spending the night here. If you’re in bed when I get back, I’ll grab the couch.”

She started to say something, then stopped, smiled, and said softly, “Thank you, Jack.”

And like that, I was gone, wary not of what I didn’t know but of what I did.

I stood outside Gate A of Fenway Park on an increasingly breezy late September night looking up and down the darkened street for my destiny, which would come in the form of a rather peculiar FBI agent by the name of Tom Jankle.

This exact spot, on this precise night, could have been ground zero of Boston’s longest hopes and most heartfelt dreams. The Major League baseball playoffs began on this day, and a couple of hundred miles to the south, the Yankees were playing a team that didn’t really matter, and the various members of the Red Sox were watching it all on national TV. And here I was, standing outside the ballyard watching yesterday’s litter float past in the unfriendly breeze. The desolate scene was a metaphor for my life. Or again, maybe that’s an analogy. As Peter Martin might say, who gives a flying frick.

Nine o’clock, the designated hour, eventually gave way to 9:30, and the only people I saw were the occasional testosterone-charged gaggle of college fraternity members making their way toward Landsdowne Street for another night of beer guzzling at the area’s clubs. No sign of Jankle, and thus, no sign of hope. It was all beginning to remind me of that endless wait outside the Louvre two days before — two days that felt like a month. At least that concluded reasonably well, even if a perfectly gorgeous woman openly laughed at my nudity.

So there I stood, the wind blowing harder, the air growing colder, my nerves ever more frazzled, when a navy blue van slowly turned left onto Yawkey Way, lumbered past me on the opposite side of the street, then banged a U-turn and pulled up to the curb. When the side panel door slid open, I flinched, half expecting — or maybe more than half expecting — that I was about to be gunned down with or without cause right outside of Fenway Park.

Instead, I heard the easy voice of Special Agent Tom Jankle casually say, “You look cold out there.”

“You would too if you’d been made to wait for more than half an hour.”