“So today’s the big day,” he said. “The long walk down the short aisle. Do you, Jack Flynn, take this woman to be your lawfully wedded wife —”
I cut him off with a simple “Not now, Peter. I don’t think it’s going to happen.”
He didn’t say anything at first, and I thought he might have been thinking about his two wedding days and the failed marriages that followed, and the fact that he wakes up every day now very much alone, married, as the cliché goes, to his job. Instead, he said with an unvarnished tone of hope, “So you mean you might be available to write today?”
Everyone — absolutely everyone — has their own agenda in this breaking story we call life.
“I have to sort a few things through, Peter,” I said, my own tone betraying some incredulity that I have not an ounce of doubt he failed to detect. “I’ll let you know if I’m up.”
He hesitated again, and I saw his eyes form a squint and his lips start to move as if he was about to ask a question, when the aged and lovable Edgar Sullivan, director of Boston Record security, ambled through the room and arrived at my desk.
“Special delivery for Jack Flynn,” Edgar announced, his tongue inside his cheek, where it often is.
Martin flashed a look of relief over the fact he now had the perfect excuse not to wander into the deep, dark forest of my personal life. Without so much as a good-bye, he spun on his heels and walked quickly toward his office.
Edgar handed me a manila envelope. “This was just dropped off at the front desk.”
I looked at the envelope for a moment, bearing only my name on the cover. It wasn’t handwritten, but rather in small typeface, which struck me as somewhat odd, but not necessarily alarming. In other words, I was wondering why Edgar had brought it up himself.
Which is when he said, “I hear today’s a big day for you, Jack. I couldn’t be happier. She’s a wonderful woman. You’re doing exactly the right thing.”
He was standing over my desk. I was sitting. The room behind him was a half-lit haze of empty expanse. I replied, “I’m not going through with it, Edgar.”
Without hesitation he said, “In that case, you’re doing exactly the right thing.” He said this with the slightest little smile forming in the wrinkles around his mouth.
And you wonder why I love the guy.
I leaned far back in my chair as he leaned against my desk. “How long have you been married?” I asked.
“Forty-seven years —” he replied proudly, as he absently stretched his arms over his head and locked his fingers together.
“That’s really wonderful,” I interjected.
“To four different women,” he finished.
Ah. It’s probably worthwhile to point out here that Edgar looked like a cross between Ward Cleaver and the Maytag Repairman. I mean, he looked like he had dinner waiting on the table every single night that he walked through the door at 6:00 p.m. sharp. Saturday night, he and the missus would go to a movie. Sunday morning was church. They called the kids on Sunday nights. Needless to say, I was somewhere between bemused and floored, or maybe a combination of the two.
“How long to the current one?” I asked.
“I’m currently between wives,” he said, a mischievous look in his eyes.
“Okay, the most recent one.”
“Seven years. It was a pretty good run. The one before was my personal record — fourteen years. My first and second ones were thirteen years apiece.”
“You have trouble when you get into the early teens, huh?”
“It’s hell,” he said with a big smile. He stood straight up, slapped my thigh, and said, “Jack, whatever you do today, you’ll do the right thing.” And he was gone.
As Edgar limped off, I pulled the envelope open and dumped the insides on a bare patch on my desk. Out slid a folded sheet of paper and a slightly heavier placard of some sort.
I picked up the heavier object, which turned out to be a Massachusetts driver’s license for a woman by the name of Jill Dawson, who, if my math was correct, was thirty-two years of age. She wasn’t smiling, but she had the kind of practiced closemouthed camera look that I had been trying to acquire for about thirty years with precisely no success. A good-looking woman, to say the least, with a certain softness to her. She had the look of someone who might volunteer at the local animal shelter while dating the star quarterback of the local NFL franchise.
I looked inside the envelope and saw nothing else, so I unfolded the small piece of white paper that was lying on my desk. The words were in the same kind of printed font as my name on the cover.
“You’re going to help me get the word out or other women will die.”
Two blank lines below that were the words “The Phantom Fiend.”
It was written just like that — no commas, no periods, no real sense. I read it and then reread it and for good measure read it again. I looked at the envelope for any other markings I might have missed, but saw none. This was likely some stupid prank, yet I felt a pit growing in my stomach, growing into the size of an orange, then a grapefruit, then something bigger.
Obviously, prank or not, a few questions needed to be answered — for instance, what was the word? What other women would die? Who was the Phantom Fiend? Why was he sending this to me? And most urgently, given his use of the word other, did this mean that Jill Dawson was already dead? If she wasn’t, was she about to become an unwitting target?
Jill Dawson — the name was unsettlingly familiar. I’d heard it. Maybe I had read it. I quickly started typing into the Record’s online library system, but got one of those maddening dialog boxes on my screen that said it was down for weekly maintenance. So I snatched up the phone and punched out a number to an old source at Boston Police headquarters in Schroeder Plaza.
“Sergeant Herlihy here,” the voice on the other end of the line said.
“Reporter Flynn here.”
“Mother of God. Let me put you on hold for a sec. I need to call my wife and tell her I’m talking to someone famous.”
This is the kind of bullshit I put up with every day in my valiant and unswerving pursuit of news.
“If you can knock off the stand-up comedy routine for half a second,” I told him, “I have a quick question.”
“For a celebrity reporter, anything.”
“The name Jill Dawson mean anything to you?”
Sergeant Kevin Herlihy, a longtime source of mine dating back to when I was a young crime-and-grime reporter and he was a cop walking a pretty dangerous beat, mulled over that question for a moment, or at least he mulled over whether he wanted to answer it.
After a moment he said, “Check your own morgue. Murder victim. Found dead in her Beacon Hill apartment on January third. Case unsolved, last that I know. Homicide has revealed very little information, even to us grunts in uniform.”
“As always, thank you.”
I quickly hung up before he had a chance to take a parting verbal jab.
What had started as a pit was now a watermelon. I was holding the driver’s license of a murdered woman, along with a note that said there’d be more victims unless I helped get some mysterious word out.
I hated to say it, but this certainly solved one problem, or, more accurately, delayed it. I snatched up the phone and punched out the cell number to Maggie Kane. I expected to get her voice mail, but instead she picked up on the third ring. I heard an announcer’s voice in the background cutting through the din of commotion, telling people something about a final boarding.
“Maggie, hey there.” I paused, still listening to that announcer. “Hey, where are you?”