Vinny was actually making moaning sounds as he inspected the contents of each serving dish before spooning huge amounts of food onto his groaning plate. I still hadn’t regained my appetite, which made me look something akin to a dieting debutante. Mongillo kept looking at me like I was completely out of my mind.
We were here, I had come to learn, for Hal Harrison’s time, time being the old-school Boston parlance for a retirement party or some such person-specific celebration.
Of course, most retiring cops had their time thrown for them in the overdone environs of Lombardo’s in East Boston or the Chateau de Ville in suburban Randolph. But Harrison’s was no ordinary time. First off, he was the retiring police commissioner. Second, his had been a career doused in glory and seasoned by respect. Third, he was an unannounced candidate for mayor of Boston, so this party actually doubled as a political fund-raiser, meaning Mongillo and I were doubling as working reporters — though the only work my cohort appeared to be doing was lugging around his massive plate.
“Do you mind if I confide something to you,” Mongillo said in a low voice as we approached the end of the line.
My reply didn’t matter, so I said nothing as I spooned a few leaves of lettuce onto the empty expanse of my plate.
“You’re a gold-plated idiot,” he said, looking at the small amount of food I had. “This is great stuff. You’ve got swordfish picatta, you’ve got a rare prime rib, you have twice-baked potatoes, and shiitake mushrooms. The paper’s paying our freight. And you’re eating like Paris Hilton before a day at the beach.”
“I’m just trying to leave a little food for the poor people behind us,” I replied.
He didn’t get it, or maybe he did. In either case, he said nothing.
We took some seats at a table filled with men in tight navy blazers and loosely knotted repp ties — cops all, specifically detectives. You could tell from a mile away. Each one of them knew Vinny by name; each one of them seemed glad to see him; each one of them didn’t have a clue who I was and didn’t seem particularly eager to make my acquaintance. And I consider myself the one who’s in good with the BPD.
As we were settling into our chairs, Vinny called out, “So, been to any good murders lately?”
Everybody laughed. Seriously, they really did.
Some of the cops were asking Vinny how the Atkins diet was going, as if they didn’t already know. I mean, these guys were detectives. A couple of others were talking about so-and-so’s disability pension, and the commander at the academy who was bedding down a couple of the new recruits. I sat in silence, my mind drifting off to my temporarily dismal place in this world.
The cop to my right, maybe making conversation out of pity, said to me, “My grandkid has a hamster that eats more than what you do for dinner.”
Even the mention that he had the kid that I didn’t was like a little dagger in my heart, that’s how bad I was at that moment. I mustered a smile and said, “I thought we were paying by the pound, and seeing what Vinny took, didn’t want the paper to go under.”
He laughed, more politely than heartily, and I can’t say I blame him. He stuck out his hand and said, “Mac Foley, I’m a BPD detective.”
I contained my enthusiasm, due to how recently I had heard his name, and given how he was something more than a mystery man to anyone outside of the department, the guy behind the curtain pulling so many levers in countless murder cases, only to emerge in the light of the courtroom, always victorious.
I said, and calmly so, “I’ve heard quite a bit about you. A pleasure to meet you. I’m Jack Flynn with the Boston Record.”
He said, “And I’ve heard quite a bit about you as well — all of it good, some of it very recent.”
He smiled a subtle smile at me, not with his teeth but his lips.
I took another bite of my lettuce, and he returned momentarily to his prime rib. Down the other end of the table, Vinny was telling a joke about a birthing camel and an Egyptian gynecologist — or so it seemed from the parts I couldn’t help overhearing.
Foley said, “So you’ve landed yourself in an official report on one of our murder cases.” He laughed a shallow little laugh, though his facial expression didn’t seem to think he thought that fact was riotously funny.
I replied, “Not intentionally. You get the damnedest things in the mail these days.”
He didn’t laugh at that, and again, I couldn’t blame him. I hadn’t exactly brought my A-game to the Ritz-Carlton that night, and wasn’t so sure I’d have it back for a while.
“How did the detectives treat you?” he asked. He asked this more conversationally than anything else, taking another bite of prime rib before I answered. If I had told him that they had slammed me against the Record’s front desk, kicked me in the groin, and hit me in the chest with a stun gun, I think he simply would have nodded and looked right through me.
That said, I give him credit for trying to keep the discussion going. The thing was, I didn’t know where he was leading it, which I found unusual. He basically does what I basically do for a living, except with the benefit of forensics and subpoenas: he gets people to tell them things, even if they might regret it later.
I replied, “I couldn’t believe how much they had to say about the Jill Dawson murder.”
He looked like he was about to choke on a piece of beef, but then I added, “Which was nothing at all.”
He looked at me out of the corner of his eye. I smiled back, a big toothy smile. He didn’t even pretend to think this was funny.
Up at the podium in the front of the grand room — which, now that I think of it, is probably where the term grand ballroom comes from — Mara Laird spoke into the microphone and asked for everyone’s attention. Everyone, in turn, gave it to her, not only because she was the acting mayor of the city of Boston, but also because she was a terrific physical specimen — tall, blond, and painstakingly fit from a lifetime spent on the ski slopes of northern New England. Not that I was noticing these things in my current state of gloom, but, you know, you can’t help but notice these things.
Mara had the good fortune of being president of the city council when I wrote a series of stories that cost the previous mayor his job, and after being elevated to acting mayor, she had the better sense of mind to know she wasn’t quite ready to be elected to office. So she stood aside and allowed Hal Harrison, the police commissioner, to launch his campaign, which happened to be against a thirty something multimillionaire hedge fund manager who thought it might be more fun to spend other people’s money running the city government than investing his own in a bunch of boring biotech companies. And he was probably right.
The acting mayor prattled on for a while about some of Hal Harrison’s many successes in keeping Boston safe, while the big-ticket contributors in the crowd wondered what kind of access their money would buy, and the regular cops in attendance mentally calculated the size of the pension he had amassed. Laird went on to introduce the senior senator from Massachusetts, Stu Callaghan, who in turn talked about the old days some four decades before when he was the Massachusetts attorney general and Harrison was a hotshot detective quickly climbing the ranks.
My God, this was worse than watching old home movies; at least there was the possibility of seeing yourself in those. When the waiter came around, I asked, “Could I have a tall glass of hemlock?”
He looked at me quizzically. Mac Foley actually laughed — as in a real-life, full-on, can’t-keep-it-inside laugh. Then I added, “Just kidding.”
“I could use a double one of those myself,” Foley said to me, leaning in. But the warmth quickly vanished. He stood up, kept his gaze on me a moment longer than I expected, and walked away into an unlit corner of the vast room.