Brian Mcgrory - Dead Line

My desk phone rang, the sound crashing through the unsettled gloom of the newsroom — or maybe it was my unsettled mood it was crashing through. The two had become one, as these things tend to do. I fairly jumped through the drop ceiling. Martin, oddly composed, answered it.

“Yep.” Pause. “Yep.” Pause again. “Then fix it. Good. Good work. Let it go.”

He hung up, looked at me and said, “That’s the copydesk. You used its possessive as the contraction, it’s, in your seventh paragraph. They fixed it.”

Let me get this right. I have an exclusive story on a stunning new suspect in the most significant unsolved art theft in the nation, which happened to occur right here in my native city, and some bleached-out copy-editor is making sure all his friends on the desk and higher-ups know that he caught a second-tier grammar mistake deep into the jump? Maybe I really should have gone to law school.

Anyway, Martin and I stared at each other for a moment from our perches in the center of the otherwise empty room. Behind him, my computer flipped over to the screensaver, and even that minor act sent a little charge through my system.

He said, “You know we’ve chased down other false leads on this heist over the last few years. The Feds have tipped us off before. Most of them, I assume, involve rank-and-file ass-covering. But this one seems different. We have it alone, and they have an actual name they’re putting into play, not vague references and unclear suspicions. I like this one a lot.”

I should have too.

With that, he clasped his hands in front of him in that way he does and stood up from my desk. He slapped me softly on the shoulder, pretending, I think, that he knew how to take part in such fraternal acts. “We need to get right at this in the morning. Let’s meet here by eight. This is going to be a wild ride.”

A wild ride. One minute I’m at Fenway, an hour later I’m sitting in an FBI office being spoon-fed a story of significant proportions by an agent I didn’t previously know, and an hour after that the thing is done and gone. Again, why didn’t I feel better about all this?

Somewhere deep inside my psyche, in a place where instinct trumps common sense, I had the vague outline of a reason why. It was the core of the explanation that, at that point, I just didn’t want to know.

Tuesday, September 23

I sat at the wrought-iron table on our harborfront veranda staring so intently at the front page of the Record that the words seemed to meld into one giant block of meaningless black. Maybe it was the hour, which was 6:00 A.M., or maybe it was my condition, which was exhaustion. I blinked hard, took a long pull of fresh-squeezed orange juice, and looked again.

“Investigators Eyeing Fugitive in Gardner Heist,” the headline read in a thick, appropriately foreboding font. Under that, in slightly smaller letters, “New leads create link to Toby Harkins.”

My name, my byline, looked especially large up there on the left side of the front page, over a story that was stripped right across the top — a banner, as we call it in the news biz. On the far right side, the copy-editors cut in with a small photograph of Rembrandt’s Storm on the Sea of Galilee, making it look like we put a whole lot more thought into this venture of reporting this story than was actually the case.

In general, I make it a practice not to read my stories once they’ve appeared in print, because all you can get is frustrated at some penny-ante change that some nickel-and-dime editor might have made along the line, entirely ruining the otherwise perfect rhythm and flow of your sentences and thoughts. This one I read, mostly because I barely remembered writing it, it all happened so quick.

And I was doing just that, reading it, when I heard the sliding glass door open behind me, and turned to see a topless Elizabeth Riggs, clad only in a pair of my white boxer shorts, her morning hair a tangle atop her beautiful head, step out onto the balcony and wrap her long arms around my neck from behind.

“I didn’t hear you come to bed,” she said in her thick morning voice, her warm breath filling my ear. “I didn’t hear you get up. I don’t recall getting what I asked for before you abandoned me last night.”

It was true, all of it. I tumbled into bed sometime after 2:00 A.M. and a couple of cold beers drunk in the company of my dog Baker in the living room of our condominium. I had needed something to calm me down and help me get to sleep. Then I rose at 5:30 at the first light of early morning, unable to wait for the events of the day.

The Record, God bless the men and women in circulation, was already waiting on our doorstep, and I sat out here reading it in the growing light of a rising sun. It was cool out, yes, somewhere in the low 60s, but fresh, crisp, vibrant in that way that September is supposed to be.

“Where were you?” she asked, her mouth still directed against the sensitive parts of my ear. I felt her warm breasts against my neck, her hair against the sides of my face, and I’m not sure why it all made me feel so sad, so vacant, but it did. Actually, I lie. I do know why, it’s just that I didn’t want to confront it. The next day, Elizabeth would be gone, and despite anything on the front page of that day’s paper, despite the whirlwind that was about to come, her departure was the major headline in the periodically sad life of Jack Flynn.

Without saying anything, I pointed to the story in front of me.

“Oh my God,” she said. She said this as she pulled her arms back, came around to my side and sat on another chair silently reading the paper. By the way, it’s important to note that our deck was completely private, inaccessible to any pair of eyes on land, though I’ve often been suspicious that voyeuristic yachtsmen, familiar with Elizabeth’s penchant for topless and even naked lounging, drop anchor in the waters just off our building. I scanned the harbor but didn’t see any on that morning.

She carefully read the story, turning from the front page to the jump — the part of the story that’s continued inside the paper — then back to the front page again. Finished, she trained her enormous blue eyes on me and said, “How the hell did you ever get all this between the time I left you at Fenway and the Record’s deadline?”

That was, to be sure, a compliment, presented in a classically journalistic way — with an incredulous tone, even a skeptical one, rolled into a question. Before I could answer, there was a knock, or rather a scratch, at our sliding door, and I turned to see Baker, his eyes at half mast and his fur fuzzy on top of his big head from what I’m sure was an unsatisfying half night of sleep, pawing at the glass to join the crowd.

As I opened the door to let him out, I heard an announcer on the Bose radio in the kitchen reading the news with one of those fake wire tickers sounding behind him.

“Federal, state and city officials are thus far offering no comment to this morning’s Record report that investigators are eyeing the infamous fugitive Toby Harkins, the estranged son of the Boston mayor, in the 13-year-old, unsolved art heist at the Gardner Museum. The Record reports that authorities are still uncertain…”

I slid the door shut and the voice gave way to the tranquil sounds of a calm morning sea.

“It was one of those incredible, rare stories where everything falls immediately into place,” I said to Elizabeth, sitting back down at the table beside her. I told her about getting picked up inside the Boston Cab garage, about the meeting with Jankle, about the rush with Martin to get this into print. She asked me a few typically intelligent questions, then focused on the story again.