“So how’d you guys end up here?” Rick asked. “I don’t get it.”
The two were silent.
“Were you following me in the car?”
Silence.
“Did you put a GPS on my car?”
Marlon said, “Tell him about your brother, Santiago.”
Another pause, then Santiago said, “My brother works at the Chevy dealer in Arlington.”
Rick remembered Santiago showing up late with his car, horn blasting. “You guys LoJacked my car! That’s what took you so long!”
They both laughed uneasily.
“Son of a bitch,” Rick said.
“We wasn’t gonna rip you off,” said Santiago. “We just know you got all this money and shit.”
“And you wanted to find out where I put it,” Rick said.
The two were silent again. He didn’t know what to think about this. It was creepy, anxiety-provoking how easily they were able to find him, but he was hardly in a position to complain. They’d saved him from whatever the Irish gang intended.
He owed them something.
32
By ten o’clock the next morning, Rick was at the offices of TheBoston Globe, the time he knew Monica Kennedy usually got there. He stopped at security on the ground floor and called Monica’s desk. She told him to meet her at the top of the escalator.
He took the elevator up to the second floor, where the newsroom was located, and waited there for her. A sports reporter he knew from his time at the Globe gave him a wave and kept walking. Finally, Monica appeared, a brown folder in her left hand. She didn’t hand it to him. Instead, she said, “What do you want it for, Hoffman?”
He shrugged. “Personal curiosity.”
“You’re not working on a story. If you’ve got some angle on this, it’s my work.”
“Who would I be writing it for-TheShop ’n’ Save Gazette? Come on, Monica.”
“You got something on Alex Pappas?”
He didn’t want to lie to her. And if he did lie, that wouldn’t be so easy. Investigative journalists are skilled at seeing through lies, especially ones as good as Monica Kennedy.
“It’s about my dad. Because I think he must have run into trouble on this.”
“What kind of trouble?”
“I don’t know. But in any case, this is personal. It’s about my dad and Alex Pappas. But look, if anything interesting happens to pan out on this, any live story, we can share.”
“Share?”
“It’s an old, dead story that you looked into and found nothing on. I’m not trying to show you up and I’m not trying to compete with you.”
“All right, all right,” Monica said, her suspicion momentarily allayed. Now she sounded only annoyed. She handed him the file folder and turned away to leave.
“So tell me something,” he said. “You know anything about any Irish gangs in Boston?”
“The Irish mob? In Boston? Not since Whitey Bulger’s heyday. Twenty, thirty years ago. Nothing on them in years. Why, you got something?”
He shook his head. “Could we talk about this story for a couple of minutes? You got time for a quick cup of coffee upstairs in the cafeteria?”
“No, sorry, I don’t.”
“Okay, two minutes, then.” He waited for a vaguely familiar-looking reporter to pass by, nodding at Monica. “What made you think there might be a Big Dig angle to it?”
“I don’t know, the Ted Williams Tunnel had just opened. I figured something might have happened. And look, ten years later something did happen, right?”
She was talking about an incident in July of 2006 when part of the ceiling of another new Big Dig tunnel collapsed, wounding the driver of a car and killing his wife. After a long investigation it turned out to be a problem with the epoxy used to fasten the panels to the ceiling.
“True,” he said.
“But when I talked to the cops, I figured it was probably a DUI. End of story.”
He nodded. “So what would Pappas have to do with a DUI? What would he care?”
“The rumor in the Dominican community was that something had gone wrong with the newly built tunnel, and that’s what caused the accident. I made some calls and got nothing on that, and then Pappas calls me. He’s working for some consortium of businesses called the Boston Common Alliance-the businesses involved in the Big Dig-and he wants to make sure this story doesn’t get misreported. Look, I knew what he was up to, and I approached him with the normal amount of skepticism, but he turned out to be a useful source. He got me the police report. He greased the wheels with Boston police, made sure I got callbacks right away. I wasn’t going to turn away help like that.”
“Okay.”
“You find out something, you make sure to loop me in, right?”
“Right. Will do.”
“I mean it.”
“I got it.”
He wondered if she could tell he was lying.
33
Rick sat in his car-a Ford Taurus rented from Enterprise Rent-A-Car in Central Square-in the Globe parking lot and read through Monica’s file. It was thin, a collection of scrawled notes on scraps of yellow legal pad paper and pink While You Were Out phone message slips and photocopies of documents like the Boston police report on the accident. Her handwriting was atrocious. It took him a few minutes of studying the hieroglyphics before he was able to decrypt it. She’d done interviews with neighbors of the dead family, a schoolteacher who’d taught the fourteen-year-old daughter, and sources in the Boston police. Somehow she’d put together an article about the death of an immigrant family from the Dominican Republic in a terrible accident in the brand-new tunnel.
One of the clips in the file was a Globe Metro desk dispatch on the accident, the first report to hit the paper, a day after it happened. The article was only a paragraph long and was by a junior Metro desk correspondent Rick knew, a woman who’d accepted a buyout and left the Globe some years ago to write a novel but hadn’t met with much success.
JAMAICA PLAIN FAMILY DEAD IN TUNNEL CRASH
By Akila Subramanian
Globe Correspondent
A Jamaica Plain family of three was killed in a single-vehicle collision in the Ted Williams Tunnel at about 2:15 a.m. on Monday, according to police. The driver, Oscar Cabrera, 36, of Hyde Square in Boston, was killed along with his wife, Dolores, 35, and their 14-year-old daughter Graciela. The cause of the crash was not immediately released. Speed did not appear to be a factor in the accident, police said.
That was all at first. The plain facts, but not too many of them.
Then Rick could see in Monica’s notes her attempts to come up with some sort of investigative angle.
CRASH HOW?? was written in big letters on a yellow lined page ripped from a legal pad covered with doodles (mostly bad drawings of horses) and various phone numbers and phrases like traffic signals? and Lane markings??? Next to that: SINGLE CAR COLLISION-wall? Drunk? Scrawled in her crabbed script on a While You Were Out message was suspected DUI pending BAC. That meant that the police were speculating the accident had been caused by drunk driving but they’d know for sure when the blood alcohol levels came back in the pathology report.
As he parsed her other scribblings, it became evident that Monica was stumped trying to figure out how a car could have crashed in the tunnel without hitting another vehicle. Was the accident caused by something in the tunnel? Some problem with the lane markings or the traffic patterns? A concrete stanchion placed where it shouldn’t have been? But her interviews had apparently turned up nothing.