At that exact moment, a woman behind me said, “Who the hell are you?” She wasn’t yelling, but each word was as firm as a rod of steel.
I whirled around to see an overweight fiftysomething darkskinned woman in those green medical scrubs that were fashionable to wear many years ago, though I suppose they don’t go out of fashion if you’re in the business of making people well. Sometimes I feel like I’m in the business of making people unwell, or even dead, but that’s a concern for another time.
I gave her the whole Jack Flynn thing. She was uniquely, and might I add bizarrely, unimpressed.
“He can’t be bothered by no reporter.” She said “reporter” as if she was spitting on an already littered sidewalk. I could have pointed out that, in fact, by talking to that reporter, Bob Walters was probably happier than he had been in months or years. I could have said that I, like her, was in the business of saving lives, and Bob Walters was helping me do it.
Instead I said, “We were just wrapping up. If you could excuse us for a moment.”
Walters was still coughing, though not quite as loud or hard as he had been, and he continued to hold the mask over his face. The health worker walked around me to the oxygen tank, turned a knob, and more oxygen came out into the mask with a large swooshing sound. Walters closed his eyes in relief.
She said to me, “He’s done. Get the hell out.”
Maybe she was right, maybe he was done, but the problem was, he had left one key fact dangling at the end of an unfinished sentence. I turned back toward Walters and said, “Sir, the name of the victim’s family?” He pulled the mask off his face and let forth with a phlegm-covered rapid-fire coughing fit. The health worker shot me a look that would kill a weaker man and shrieked, “Get the hell out. Now!”
I looked at Walters, but his eyes were deadened again, staring straight ahead. His body was convulsing in coughs that he was trying unsuccessfully to contain. “I’ll drop by later, Lieutenant,” I said.
He didn’t say anything or do anything in response. He didn’t even look at me. As I walked out the door, I dropped my business card on his soiled side table. He seemed to be in an ongoing struggle for his life.
Downstairs, Mrs. Bob Walters still sat at the kitchen table, staring now at an empty bottle of vodka. I didn’t say anything. Really, I couldn’t say anything. As I walked out the back door, she never even looked up.
17
I had twenty-eight voice mails on my cell phone when I dialed in from the rental car, and immediately assumed that twenty of them were from Peter Martin. Ends up I was wrong. Twenty-one of them were from Martin. By the fifteenth one, he was reduced to pleading: “Call me.” Voice mail sixteen: “Call me now.” Voice mail seventeen: “Fricking call me now.” Voice mail eighteen: “Fucking call me or you’re fired.”
Voice mails nineteen and after continue in that same general tone and theme.
I got five messages from other media outlets, including The New York Times and The Washington Post, wanting to interview me about my correspondence from the Phantom Fiend. There was a message from Boston Police Detective Mac Foley, sounding anything but happy with my reportage in that morning’s paper. The one remaining voice mail came from Vinny Mongillo, providing me a list of his favorite Vegas restaurants and offering — or was it threatening — to fly out and join me for what he described as “a little dinner and an evening of gaming.” Such is the adventurous life of an intrepid reporter on the road.
None of the messages, perceptive minds might note, were from anyone identifying themselves as the Phantom Fiend. For that matter, I was also lacking a voice mail from one Maggie Kane, who almost became Maggie Kane Flynn, though not really.
I was about thirty minutes from the Strip, not including traffic, so it wasn’t worth my while to go back to the hotel. Instead, I pulled off the road into the parking lot of a lush golf club named Dunes East, even though there wasn’t a dune within a hundred miles of the place, and called Martin back. He, of course, picked up the phone on the first ring and promptly explained that the city of Boston was unraveling at the seams.
Police, he said, held a press conference at Schroeder Plaza to say they were unconvinced that a serial killer was on the loose, and publicly complained that the Record had published its story before any of the correspondence could be — their word here — “authenticated.” I’m not really sure how you authenticate a note from an anonymous person, and I don’t think they knew either. But you can bet that the blow-dried reporters on the six o’clock newscasts wouldn’t be probing this particular point as they repeated the complaints verbatim. Also, you can bet that Jill Dawson and Lauren Hutchens wouldn’t have had any doubt about the existence of a serial killer, if they were still around to have doubt, which is once again the point.
Those aforementioned television reporters were chronicling a massive run on pepper spray and mace by women, as well as a surge in demand for area locksmiths, according to Martin. One particularly creative reporter even did a stand-up from the Animal Rescue League’s dog shelter, where she reported a sudden spike in dog adoptions by the city’s female population.
There weren’t any other new developments on the story, Martin said — no more calls to the Barry Bor Show that morning, no blog postings, no new deaths — at least none we knew about yet. Maybe the Phantom was all mine again. We can only hope, right?
Martin told me that Edgar Sullivan wanted to speak to me, but was in a meeting for the next twenty minutes and would call back. I briefed Martin about my Walters meeting and promised to be on an eastbound plane by nightfall.
I then called back a few of the print reporters who had left me messages earlier in the day. To each of them I explained off the record about the various notes but said I was forbidden from talking for attribution, which in a way was true; I had forbidden myself. The TV people I didn’t bother with, knowing full well they wouldn’t have bothered with me.
And I hung up. I checked the dashboard clock and it read 10:50 a.m. I figured it would be safe to return to the Walters’s house at about noon — safe meaning that the Abu Ghraib guard who doubled as his home health care worker would be gone by then. At least I hoped she would be.
I listened to more voice mails on my work machine, but again, nothing from the Phantom Fiend or my phantom fiancée, though I wonder if that title expires with an unrealized wedding day, or whether, like retired ambassadors, we carry the moniker for life. I kind of doubt that, but the thought made me realize I was getting punchy.
Sitting in the front seat of my rental car, I had nothing to do but wait, and as I did just that, temptation finally overwhelmed me, sending me in the direction of the immaculate driving range where half a dozen or so guys were hitting golf balls. I grabbed a five-iron out of a bag of extremely expensive demo clubs, approached a pile of golf balls stacked into a pyramid, and began to hit.
My first shot of the new golf season faded hard to the right, but it didn’t feel bad. The second was a little fat, the third a bit thin. The fourth shot clicked effortlessly off the clubface, long and straight, as did the next, and the one after that.
The morning sun was high in the sky, warm without being overwhelming. The air was clean and crisp, the sky an ocean blue, dare I say the color of my eyes. I was starting to feel pretty damned good.
I traded in the five-iron for a pitching wedge and lobbed balls at a flag about a hundred yards away, one after another falling just to the right or the left — not bad for a New Englander swinging for the first time at the end of a brutal winter. I thought of so many of my more memorable rounds — my father teaching me the game on the tenth fairway of the Number Two course at Ponkapoag outside of Boston; the day at Congressional Country Club in Maryland with the president of the United States when shots rang out and we both ended up bloodied in the sandtrap on the sixteenth hole; the late Sunday afternoon shoot-out on the hallowed links of Pebble Beach with my best friend, Harry Putnam, as we celebrated his impending nuptials.