Was there life after journalism?
Should I give it up and take a job with McCracken?
Should I stick with it and go to work for Mason?
Or should I go for the money and take over for Whoosh if the gambling bill failed?
It was nearly a week before I stopped obsessing about myself and started wondering about more important things.
Would McCracken or Parisi be able to trace the source of the e-mail?
Would the cops find Mario before Marco Alfano put a bullet in his head?
Did Mario kill Romeo Alfano and make off with the two hundred grand? Despite what Whoosh had told me, I still thought yes. But if Mario didn’t do it, who did?
Then something else occurred to me. What the hell had been in that grocery bag the Providence cops had lugged out of my apartment?
On Friday, McCracken called with one of the answers. The IP address belonged to a computer in the Providence Public Library reading room. After we hung up, I rang Parisi.
“What now, lover boy?”
“I hear the IP address is a dead end.”
“No comment.”
“The governor told you who snapped the photo of us at Hopes, right?”
“So?”
“Is that enough to make an arrest?”
“For what? Last I checked, photography isn’t illegal.”
“It ties Grandison to the audio file. They were both in the same e-mail.”
A ten-second delay. And then, “It’s not probative.”
“Why not?”
“All it tells us is that she, or maybe somebody she gave the picture to, sent the e-mail. Doesn’t prove she planted the listening devices.”
“Any leads on the money from Romeo Alfano’s briefcase?”
“No comment.”
“Why do you keep saying that? I’m not a reporter anymore.”
“The answer to my prayers.”
“I got a guy who swears Mario doesn’t have it.”
Ten seconds this time. “That so?”
“Yeah.”
“What guy?”
“I’m not saying.”
Five seconds. “Seen Whoosh around lately?”
“All the time.”
Ten seconds. “Any idea who else could have the money?”
“No.”
“I’ve been wondering if maybe it’s you,” he said. And then he clicked off.
There was no reason to keep going to the Vipers’ tryouts. I wouldn’t be writing about that for The Dispatch anymore. But what the hell. I didn’t have anything better to do on Saturday.
In the locker room, the players weren’t calling me “grandpa” anymore. Now it was “sexy grandpa”-and a few other things that were pornographic in nature. The ribbing was good-natured, so I took it in stride.
As we staggered onto the court, Coach Martin pulled me aside.
“I was worried you weren’t going to show this morning.”
“Almost didn’t.”
“When the news broke, management ordered me to cut you, but I talked them out of it.”
“Why would you do that?”
“Because you’ve been doing a great job with Jefferson and Benton. I also talked them into giving you this,” he said, and handed me an envelope.
I tore it open. Inside was a check for twelve hundred dollars.
“What’s this for?”
“Compensation as a temporary member of the coaching staff. It covers what you’ve done so far and for working with the guys today and next Saturday.”
“That’s the last day?”
“It is.”
“Told Jefferson he’s made the team yet?”
“Not yet.”
“What about Benton?”
“We’re still talking that over. With Cartwright on the shelf, we need a backup point guard, but the kid’s awful small.”
“So’s Nate Robinson,” I said, “and he’s been in the NBA for years.”
Before getting down to work, I slipped back into the locker room and folded the check into my wallet. It was more than enough to cover my next rent payment. That gave me a few weeks of breathing room to ponder what the hell I was going to do with the rest of my life.
41
Tuesday morning, Fiona and I huddled in her office. Just outside the door, the press assembled in the State Room, a spacious hall where Rhode Island governors conducted bill signings and addressed the public. It had been more than a week since the sex story broke. More than a week without a word from the governor. More than a week in which the scandal was allowed to swell to Clintonesque proportions.
With nothing but the photo and video to sustain them, media outlets, both local and national, had kept the story alive with a frenzy of absurd interviews and speculation. Fox News assembled a panel of psychologists to discuss the supposed sex addiction that had caused the governor to throw away her promising political career. Providence TV reporters hunted down my ex-wife and former girlfriends and pestered them with questions about my sexual history. CNN padded its coverage with still pictures and video of other political sex scandals from JFK’s Mob moll to Anthony Weiner’s dick pix. Iggy Rock went on the air with a rumor that Fiona had presided over weekly orgies with hookers and lobbyists, and he dared the governor to come on the air and deny it. An “Impeach the Whore Governor” Facebook page swelled with followers. And Rush Limbaugh crowed that Attila the Nun was now Attila the Slut.
Only the wiser heads at The Daily Show and The Colbert Report exercised restraint, directing their mockery at the journalism feeding frenzy.
To stir the pot, Fiona directed an underling to phone Channel 10’s Logan Bedford with a not-for-attribution tip that I’d gotten her pregnant and that she had sneaked off to Trenton for a secret abortion. The reliably unreliable Bedford went right on the air with it. Laura Ingraham, the syndicated talk-radio shrew, and Reverend Crenson, a Republican gubernatorial candidate, promptly denounced Fiona as a baby killer. Devereaux, the GOP front-runner, declined to comment, preferring to let the press do the dirty work for her.
According to a new Providence Dispatch/URI opinion poll, the governor’s previously record-high approval rating had plummeted to a record-low 22 percent.
Shortly before ten A.M., the governor’s administrative assistant stuck her head in the door to tell us that the stage was set. Reporters for The Providence Dispatch, The Pawtucket Times, the local Associated Press office, and eight Rhode Island radio stations were present. Others from The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Time, Newsweek, The Huffington Post, and The Drudge Report had shown up from out of town. And CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, and the four local network TV affiliates would be broadcasting the press conference live.
“Ready for the show?” Fiona asked.
“You bet.”
I took her arm, pushed the door open, and escorted her toward a lectern that had been placed in front of the State Room’s dominant feature, a life-size Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington. TV lights clicked on. The lectern bristled with microphones. We walked slowly through the room, giving the reporters ample time to shout their questions:
“Do you admit the affair?”
“Is it true that you had an abortion?”
“Are you going to resign?”
“What’s your boy-toy doing here?”
And a cacophony of others I couldn’t make out.
Fiona took her place behind the lectern with me at her side. She didn’t speak, letting the questions wash over her. And then she beamed, looking at once chic and businesslike in a forest-green tailored suit. After a minute or so, she finally bent to the microphones and said, “Shhhhhhhh.”
The shouts gradually subsided.
“Thank you all for coming,” she said. “It’s especially gratifying to see so many members of the national press here this morning. We don’t often get this much attention in Little Rhody.