“The Atlanta airport,” she replied. Her words came out flat, uncertain.
“Are you traveling on business?” Soon as I asked this, I felt ridiculous. Maggie Kane teaches third grade.
“No, Jack. Listen, I was about to call you.”
My head was spinning so fast I thought it might fly off my neck. My vision was actually blurred. On what was supposed to be our wedding day, the happy bride-to-be was sitting in the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, and I think it’s a pretty safe conclusion that she wasn’t getting on a plane bound for home. Admittedly, the happy groom was planning to kibosh the whole deal, but that’s not really the point here.
“Jack,” she said before I could say anything. “Jack, I was about to call you. I’m really sorry. I’m, well, I’m just not ready to go through with this right now.”
Just like that.
I mumbled “I’ll call you later,” and hung up the phone. I should have been relieved. I should have told her that I understood what she felt. But what I really felt was angry, and, surprisingly, a little fearful, though of what, I wasn’t exactly sure.
Like I said, I knew it was going to be a big day. I just had no idea why.
3
It’s one thing for a reporter to harbor suspicions in a murder case. Hell, suspicion is the backbone of some of the best and most basic newspaper stories. Is the governor right to say she can balance the state budget without raising taxes? Did the president really not have sex with that woman? Did that priest really have all those young boys’ best interests at heart?
But it’s quite another thing for a reporter to be harboring evidence in a murder case, and evidence was exactly what I seemed to be harboring, as I leaned over my desk and studied the driver’s license photograph of a recently deceased woman I never met by the name of Jill Dawson.
She had big blue eyes and shoulder-length dirty-blond hair that looked like it was cut by one of the more expensive stylists — what do they call themselves these days, coiffures? — on Newbury Street. She seemed to have a quiet confidence, like the eldest child of a happily married couple in an affluent suburb like Newton or Wayland. She probably graduated in the top five percent of her high school class, went off to Haverford or Swarthmore, and still takes a vacation with her best friends from college at least once a year. Some guy was probably extremely happy as her boyfriend or husband — unless, of course, that same guy killed her.
Jill Dawson. Yet another woman I met in the past tense. And looking at her, I bet I would have liked her. A lot.
My little newsroom reverie was interrupted by Peter Martin and Edgar Sullivan, who approached my desk the way a cold front approaches New England, which is to say ominously and silently, and beckoned me into the nearby, glass-walled conference room.
“We have the digital tape, but it doesn’t show much,” Edgar said as he pushed a disc into a DVD player. A plasma television screen mounted on the wall lit up, Edgar pressed a button, and the camera froze on the image of a rather overweight security guard sitting at the front desk of the Record, reading — what the hell is this? — the rival Boston Traveler.
“Aha, we’ve finally caught Scully in the act,” I said, maybe a little too animatedly. Both Martin and Edgar ignored me, which I guess is their right, impolite as that might be.
Well, not exactly ignored me. Edgar began his brief presentation by saying, “Jack, if you could just put a zipper on it for about three minutes, that might be helpful.
“As you can see, this camera is trained on the front desk in the lobby. A camera mounted on the wall behind the front desk facing the other way, but was out of order this morning, which is, of course, our bad luck.”
On the screen, Scully flipped the pages of the Traveler, probably from the gossip column to the horse race results. I took Edgar’s counsel and didn’t say this out loud.
“And here comes our visitor,” Edgar said. He now had a pointer in his hand and pointed out the reflection on the shiny tile floor as the big front door opened, then a shadow which was really little more than a fuzzy glare.
The figure seemed to approach Scully from the side of the desk, as if whoever it was had knowledge of the camera angle and was walking outside the line of vision.
“Here’s where we see actual flesh,” Edgar said. And just like that, an arm appeared on the screen, handing Scully the manila envelope that was delivered to my desk shortly after. The arm was partially concealed by what appeared to be Scully, who barely looked up from his paper. Maybe he was trying to figure out if he had hit the trifecta the day before. The arm disappeared, and the shadow receded out the door.
“And that’s it,” Edgar said. “That’s our courier.”
And probably our murderer, I thought.
Martin said, “We’ll have to turn that over to the cops, even though it doesn’t show anything. But let’s make a duplicate and keep a copy for ourselves.”
Edgar nodded and shut down the DVD player. He said, “We could dust that driver’s license for prints.”
I asked, “You know how to fingerprint something?”
“No idea. I’d send it out.”
Smartly, Martin interjected, “Even if we got any prints off it, which is doubtful, we have no database to run them through. It’d be meaningless to us.”
I sat back in my chair as those two got up to leave the conference room. I said, “So I call the cops with the news of the license. I offer them the tape. They’ll want to talk to Scully. They’ll probably want an original copy of the note. And we get nothing. Peter, right now, I don’t even think we have a story.”
I swear to God, Martin’s nose twitched like the little news rodent he can be, though I’m not sure if it was out of nerves or because he had the scent of something very big. He said, “It’s only ten o’clock in the morning. This cycle’s just begun.”
And with that, prescient as ever, he walked out the door.
My first official call on the case, if there is such a thing that a reporter can make, was to the lieutenant in the homicide bureau of the Boston Police Department, an FOJ (friend of Jack) by the name of Leo Goldsmith.
Leo is just old-school enough that he doesn’t have the current-day mentality nurtured in precinct houses and at daily roll calls that reporters are the real bad guys and that the only time you should ever talk to them is to mislead them.
Back in the old days, from what I’ve been told, cops and reporters used to be comrades in arms. Newspaper photographers and police reporters who cruised the city with a dashboard filled with scanners and a car roof groaning under the weight of antennas would often beat cops to crime scenes. They’d see the same things, crack the same jokes, and at the end of their shifts tell the same stories about the same cases over a pint of beer in some bucket-of-blood bar.
But somewhere along the line, there was a gargantuan split. I think it might be Woodward and Bernstein’s fault. After they brought down a president and, more important, had their work glorified by Hollywood, newsrooms suddenly drew a better-educated brand of reporters who hailed from wealthier backgrounds. They didn’t carry names like Tommy and Billy anymore, but Jonathan and Eric. They took lunch at fancy joints downtown, which I personally don’t have a problem with. But suddenly, the two sides weren’t even speaking the same language, or if they were, they certainly didn’t speak them with the same words. Suspicion eventually, perhaps inevitably, turned to animosity. Now cops and reporters, often seeking similar truths for the same greater cause, are from two different planets.
Because of this, I take no small amount of pride in my ability to relate to my friends in blue, an ability that I’ve used to my significant advantage over my entire career.