Brian Mcgrory - Dead Line

I looked at him blankly, and he added, “It’s a recorded conversation between Dan and Toby Harkins, August eighteenth. It will be self-explanatory.”

He unceremoniously hit the Play button, and silence ensued. I don’t know why, but I thought of Rosemary Woods, President Nixon’s secretary, erasing a critical tape for eighteen of the most repugnant minutes of silence that any right-minded American might ever hear. Finally, I heard a voice say, simply and abruptly, “Yeah?”

It sounded like the younger, more felonious Harkins had just answered the phone.

“It’s your old man.”

“Hey, old man.”

“Listen, you have the paintings all rounded up?”

“Everything’s under control.”

“You have all of them?”

“Yeah, except for two. I sold them for cash. We’re going to need it.”

“And the plan is still in place?”

“Everything’s like we talked about. I just need to think it through a little more and line up all my ducks.”

“It is, Toby. It is. All right, I’ll be in touch.”

And with that, the line went dead.

Jankle shut off the recorder and asked me, “You want to hear it again?” I did, and the second time through, I took careful notes, a veritable transcript of the short conversation. When the tape was finished, he carefully placed the recorder back in the metal case and said, “So they had a plan, father and son. We know this much. We know that the father knew the location of the son. We obviously know they were in direct contact. Unfortunately, we haven’t been able to eavesdrop on their conversations since.”

I asked, “What if the plan was to surrender?”

Jankle pursed his lips and sucked in his cheeks as he considered what I had just said.

“Doesn’t gel with anything else that we have,” he replied. “And if they were surrendering, why sell two priceless stolen treasures? Basically, Dan Harkins, the mayor of Boston, is already complicit in that. He also knew where a fugitive was hiding, a murderer, and instead of turning him in, he helped him stay on the lam.”

I nodded. Everywhere I looked, everything I heard, seemed only to add to the ambiguity of it all. Or did it?

I played the taped conversation over in my mind. I ran through the crystal clear images of the videotape of Harkins and Hilary walking through the lobby, and of Hilary nervously leaving half an hour later.

There’s no question, this tape, reported in the Record, would devastate Dan Harkins’s career, his future, his life, as would the existence of the videotape. I pretty much had him dead to rights, so to speak, with a federal law enforcement source saying he had been under electronic surveillance for the past six months. So why wasn’t I rushing to print with this? Could it be that in the wake of my massive fuckup with the previous story, that my journalistic trigger finger was freezing, and that I wasn’t doing my job? It had never happened to me before, this reportorial impotence, and I didn’t like the feeling one bit.

I asked, “What else?”

Jankle, his head down, looked at me sidelong. You could hide a family of Koreans in his mustache, it was so thick. He said, “Well, we didn’t see it coming, but somehow that leak got us some of the paintings back. We’re pretty damned happy about that. I feel like I owe you, which is why I’m giving you this. And if it makes you feel better, and I hope it does, we will go after Hilary Kane’s killer with a vengeance, and maybe even find a way to prosecute in federal rather than state court.”

That did make me feel better, because I had the lingering sense that no one gave a damn about her amid the ass-covering and accusations.

He added, cryptically, “We’re not so sure Boston PD is taking any of this very seriously.”

He was looking at me expectantly, though I wasn’t sure why. So I asked the obvious, which is often what we do in the sometimes majestic and occasionally mundane business of reporting the news. “What do you mean?”

Jankle replied, “We have a suspicion that maybe the locals, some detectives, tipped off the mayor that he was under surveillance, and that’s why we haven’t been able to grab him on tape. Truth is, we always had suspicions in this case that there was too close a relationship between Boston PD and Toby Harkins, and that he might even have been tipped when his indictment came down, which is how he knew to flee.”

Lights went on, not in the park, but in my head. Pieces began flying into place, fitting together. Hank Sweeney flashed in my mind, that morose look on his face as he walked through the jetway door bound for anywhere but Boston, escaping a past that I was now starting to understand. It was coming clear that he had helped Toby way back when, and now he couldn’t bring himself to tell me.

I looked at the face of my cell phone, which told me it was 9:55 P.M. I was terribly sad for Hank but rejuvenated by the revelations on the story. I had about two hours to the drop-dead deadline of the final edition. I suddenly felt the driving need to get something in print.

I asked, “You’re reachable on your cell if I need you in the next couple of hours?”

“At your service,” Jankle replied.

With that, I got up and walked along the aisle and down the ramp of the darkened park. It was the bottom of the ninth, tie game, my turn at bat. Sorry about the cliché, but hey, how often am I the star performer at Fenway Park?

I always know I’m hyped on a story when I’m constantly writing and rewriting the lede on the keyboard of my brain, and that’s exactly what I was doing as I pushed through the steel door and out onto Yawkey Way on my way to take down the sitting mayor of one of America’s great cities.

Yes, he had denied any involvement in Hilary Kane’s death and his son’s illegal flight, and yes, he was convincing in that denial. I would include that prominently in my story, and allow the readers — smart people, mostly — to make up their own minds. Daniel Harkins’s version would be set against a veritable treasure chest of information — that he had a sexual tryst with a murder victim three nights before she died, that the victim had seen potentially criminal material on his personal computer, that he had an irrefutable tie to his fugitive son, and that he had been the target of a federal investigation for at least the past six months.

As I played this out, I became a little bit embarrassed and aggravated that I had taken so long to jump into print with the story, but those feelings were overcome by the kind of intense emotional drive that takes over amid all such blockbuster stories. I was, to say the least, jazzed.

On Yawkey Way, I saw the navy blue van still idling at the curb. The breeze still blew in from the east. Traffic was light. People were nowhere to be seen.

I headed toward Kenmore Square, to flag a cab that would take me to the Record. On the way, I belted out the number to my voicemail, and there was Vinny Mongillo, still on the ground at Logan, telling me that the number I had given him was to the Boston office of the FBI. Ding ding ding. Hilary Kane had talked to Tom Jankle before she died. Why is it that every step forward in this damned story is followed by a step back, and that every revelation only prompts more questions.

Then I called Peter Martin’s office, and despite the fact it was ten o’clock on a Sunday night, he, of course, picked up the phone on the first ring.

I said, “We’ve got the FBI saying they’ve had the mayor under investigation for six months for ties to his son, and they’ve allowed me to hear a recording of an incriminating telephone conversation between the two. We can’t afford to hold back anymore.”

He asked a few of his typically pointed, always-on-the-mark questions. He was a true newsman, even if he looked more like an actuary. At the end of the brief conversation, he said, “All right. I’m going to go tear up the front page. I’ll let Justine know. You have about ninety minutes to make this work.”