Brian Mcgrory - Dead Line

In the silence, I looked around, at Baker already sprawled out on the cool floor of the deck, at the beautiful woman sitting beside me, at the harbor water glistening beneath us, and thought, in a couple of days, my little family—“our starter family,” as Elizabeth liked to call it — would be no more. Elizabeth would be gone. Forever? I didn’t know, but maybe. Maybe.

I should have been sitting there basking in triumph. Instead, I found myself climbing into a hole of emptiness, a feeling, a state of mind, hell, a state of being, that I knew all too well. I knew it, I lived it, after my wife and infant daughter died on the delivery table a few years before, leaving me with only memories of what I had and a forlorn void in place of what I never got to know, each day of fatherhood represented by another tear shed in that private hell called loneliness.

Did Katherine’s death affect my relationship with Elizabeth? No doubt, there are entire teams of Harvard-educated psychiatrists that couldn’t detail all the ways it did — about why I hadn’t asked Elizabeth to marry me, about why we had split up temporarily the year before, about why, now, with twenty-four hours left in our time together, we couldn’t even have a fully-fledged adult conversation regarding our future time apart.

She saw me staring silently at the water, saw, no doubt, the sad, even pained look that marked my face. She said, “I’m really proud of you, Jack,” and I looked at her and she at me and I suddenly found my throat too thick to risk a response.

She stood up, still topless, always sexy, and she grabbed my hand and pulled me along with her. She left the door open for Baker to come and go at will, and on the rumpled white comforter of our sun-splashed bed, we became lost in an emotional stretch of silent sex. Afterward, as she looked down at me and pushed her face hard against mine, her tangled hair falling around my cheeks and ears, I felt her tears fall from her eyes into mine.

“I love you,” she whispered, but the words, more sad than happy, carried more mystery than finality.

“I love you too,” I replied, but I fear I sounded in some odd way resigned, though to what I didn’t know.

Later, in the kitchen, she poured herself coffee. I ate fistfuls of Cap’n Crunch directly from the box. We avoided talk of her departure as if its very mention would set upon us an unspeakable plague. I knew she would be packing up most of her stuff that day, but what she instead said when I asked her plans was, “I have a lot of things to do around here.”

That radio announcer was still blathering in the background, this time about the weather, then about the traffic.

“The surface roads are jammed all along downtown Boston as police have several major thoroughfares cordoned off for what we’re told is a crime scene, possibly a murder or suicide scene, in the Boston Common. Boston police are confirming that the body of a young woman, in her late twenties, was found with a gunshot wound to her head a little over half an hour ago….”

That’s the first I heard of it. It didn’t really register at the time, though maybe, in retrospect, it did. I flicked the radio off, rubbed Baker’s ears and gave Elizabeth a long, silent kiss good-bye.

W hen I walked into the Record a few minutes before 8:00, Peter Martin was sitting at the desk beside mine scanning the wires, nervous as he’s ever been, which is saying quite a lot. Here’s a guy who drinks black coffee by the bucket just to soothe himself. His idea of a relaxing vacation is visiting the libraries of every twentieth-century president in two weeks’ time. Once, when I had him temporarily convinced that there was more to life than newspapers and politics, he went to an upscale golf school in the Carolinas, one of those blessed places where you sip juice while sitting on a director’s chair with your name hand-embroidered in the back while watching some young club pro demonstrate the importance of the interlocking grip on a pristine driving range. He claimed to love the experience, but he never played golf again.

Anyway, the newsroom looked almost the same as it had when I left a few hours before, only the copydesk was now vacant and a custodian — a cleaning engineer, I think they’re now called — pushed an industrial-size vacuum down the empty aisles. Eight A.M. is at least an hour before most self-respecting reporters are climbing off their futons, and a couple of hours before they’d find their way into work.

“Thank God, I was sure you were going to be late,” Martin said, looking up from his computer screen.

“Good, and you?”

He ignored my attempt at morning humor, stood up, and said, “Let’s go into my office.” I followed him through the mostly dark newsroom in silence.

Inside, the two of us sat across from each other at a small circular conference table in Martin’s glass-enclosed office in the far corner of the newsroom. One wall of windows overlooked the traffic-clogged Southeast Expressway. The other wall overlooked the copydesk. All the furniture, the decorations, the lamps and the accessories, were exactly the way that the previous editor, Justine Steele, had them before she ascended to the publisher’s office the year before. I swear, if Justine had left photographs of her children, Martin would have kept them on his desk.

Martin put his elbows on the glass tabletop and said, “The Traveler doesn’t have a word on this. The three network affiliates are broadcasting our story, verbatim. The radio is quoting liberally from us and attributing everything. So far, we’re all alone. But the whole world’s about to crash our party. The Times is going to come in, the news mags, The Washington Post, the networks out of New York. This is big — huge — and we can’t give anything up.”

He was giving voice to what I already knew, but that’s okay. This story, ours alone for the day, was about to turn into classic gang-bang journalism, the exact kind of story I hated most, when mobs of reporters trample across every possible bit of information, and every shred of context be damned. I nodded. Noticeably missing from Martin’s soliloquy were words of praise for this morning’s performance, but alas, he rarely had the patience for the triviality of commendation. I used to hold that against him; I don’t anymore.

He continued, “So we have to figure out where we go from here.” He looked anxiously out at the empty newsroom and continued, “When people find the time in their busy lives to wander into work today, I’ll deploy as many as it takes to blanket every conceivable angle — the investigation, rewrite a tick-tock of the original heist, another lengthy profile of Harkins, the possibility of any connection to the mayor. What else?”

I remained silent. He knew he had everything covered. Martin resumed speaking.

“Jack, obviously you’re the lead. Hit the investigation hard, do everything in your power to break more news. I don’t have to tell you how to do it. Like all the other times before, just get it done.”

Would that it were so easy. The problem with this business is that in every possible way, it involves constant reinvention, or at least restoration. If there’s a formula, it consists of only this: Hard work — the extra telephone call, the added question at the end of the interminable interview, the long drive to some far-flung town to meet someone who you’re not quite sure will be even the slightest bit of help. Hard work begets luck, and from there, the cycle continues.

“We will,” I said, confident, but not really, and don’t ask me why. Confidence is my trademark, but as I’ve said, these were strange times. Elizabeth was leaving. Something gnawed at me on this story, and as I looked out the window, I saw traffic at a veritable standstill on the highway, and even that inexplicably bothered me.