With that, Martin said, “My office in twenty minutes.” As he walked away, he shook the Strangler’s note in his left hand and said, “I’m going to need this until then.”
I was on the telephone with the Las Vegas Police Department, trying to ascertain the cause of death of Bob Walters, or at least their version of the cause, when I saw them walking along the outer edges of the newsroom.
They were two middle-aged guys in ill-fitting suits with bad haircuts, meaning they were cops — detectives, actually, maybe homicide. I could spot them a mile away. It’s as if every cop over forty in the city went to the same barber, the one they had since childhood. For that matter, they all seemed to have the same tailor, the one who thought it better to keep their cuffed pants nice and short.
These two gentlemen were accompanied by one of Edgar Sullivan’s minions, who led them in silence toward Peter Martin’s office. I watched as they paused briefly outside Martin’s office before being escorted in. At that point, I couldn’t see them anymore — until, that is, they came walking back through the newsroom just a few minutes later. This time one of them was carrying an envelope in his hairy hand.
At that point, an e-mail flashed on my screen from Martin, asking to convene a meeting.
When I walked into Martin’s office, Publisher Justine Steele was already there, sitting in one of half a dozen upholstered chairs that surrounded a perfectly forgettable coffee table. Martin sat in a chair facing her. Right behind me, Vinny Mongillo walked in carrying a brown bag with what smelled like cat excrement, but ended up being an Italian cold-cut sub slathered in various oils and spices.
As he unwrapped it on the coffee table, I think I saw Justine physically gag. Martin reflexively reached for a stash of paper napkins inside a desk drawer. I said, “Jesus Christ, Vinny, it’s ten-thirty in the morning. What the hell are you doing with that crap?”
“Crap?” he replied, incredulous. “These are some of the finest cured meats that money can buy, shipped here straight from Genoa, Italy, by artisan chefs. The hell you talking about crap? And I’ve been up since five a.m., so this is like your late afternoon.”
I can’t argue with that. Actually, I probably could, but Martin interjected. “All right, we need to figure out fast how we’re going to handle this letter. Let me bring you up to date on what we’ve already done.”
I was tieless and jacketless. I don’t know why I bring that up, except for I rolled up my sleeves and let my bare forearms rest against my knees, and as I did, a little piece of pickle came flying off Mongillo’s sub and landed in the little hairs below my wrist. I flicked it on the carpet and stared at Martin.
“Jack, as soon as I got the copy of the letter from you, I, of course, flagged Justine.” Martin nodded toward Justine as if none of us knew who she was. The two of them gave each other a funny look, though not funny in the ha — ha — that — Jack — Flynn — is — sucha — riot kind of way.
“Justine, in turn, felt it important to alert Mara Laird about the existence of this new correspondence. I agreed with her on that. We got pummeled pretty hard in the Traveler today, I believe unfairly so, about not being cooperative enough with police. We want to make sure we look like we’re doing everything in our power to help them catch this killer.”
At this point, Martin was slowly easing into that Zen-like tone that he gets, the one with the exaggerated sense of calm. Justine listened to him intently. Mongillo finished the first half of his submarine sandwich and lit into the rest. I sat in still silence, starting to get slowly pissed off, though why, I wasn’t quite sure yet.
Martin continued, “Justine, do you want to fill us in on your conversation with the mayor?”
It all sounded rehearsed. Justine nodded, looked from me to Mongillo and back to me again, and said, “She’s not thrilled with this — or with us. The conversation was brief. She put me on a conference call with Hal Harrison, and the two of them said that if we publish that letter, as the writer of it wants us to do, we will push the city of Boston into a state of what they called ‘unwarranted chaos.’ ”
As she said those last two words, she looked down at a sheet of notes she had in her hand.
She continued, again looking down. “They said we would be ‘seriously impeding’ their investigation — again, their words. They said they need another day or two to” — she gazed down again here — “ ‘fully develop some promising leads.’ And in no uncertain terms, they said that if we go ahead and print that letter, we should never again expect to receive help on breaking stories from Boston PD, or, for that matter, from city hall.”
Mongillo guffawed. Or maybe he was choking on his mortadella. Either way, he said, “How could you tell if Boston PD becomes unhelpful?”
A good question, or rather a point. Martin nodded; Justine said and did nothing. Martin broke a brief but strained silence and said, “Jack, give us your take.”
So I did. I gave him exactly what he expected to get.
“I’ll be honest with you,” I began. “First, I understand that we had to turn that letter over to the cops; I just wish I had been consulted on it. Second, I didn’t realize we were consulting with the acting mayor on editorial policy and decisions. From here on in, should I plan to run all my stories past Mayor Laird to make sure they meet with her approval?”
Steele frowned. Martin was about to interject, but I continued before he got the chance.
“Third, as the Phantom Fiend points out, that blood he’s talking about will be on my hands, so I’ll be up front by saying I’m in favor of getting this thing into print as soon as possible, tomorrow being barely soon enough. Maybe we ought to even consider putting it out on the website today, though he didn’t ask us to do that, so that could screw things up.
“And fourth, there’s already blood all over the floor — Bob Walters’s blood, Kimberly May’s blood, Jill Dawson’s blood, Lauren Hutchens’s blood, Joshua Carpenter’s blood. This thing broke on a Monday. It’s Friday now. Boston PD has had a week on this, with a stream of clues provided by us. You really think another twentyfour or forty-eight hours is going to change the scope and direction of their investigation? Or do you think they’re just worried about the additional pressure?”
I paused and looked from Peter Martin to Justine Steele, then added, “And let’s assume for a moment that it’s the latter. Is it really our job to take pressure off the cops, or is it our job to put pressure on them?”
There was a moment of silence. Well, not entirely silence. Mongillo chomped on the last few potato chips, then noisily balled up the sandwich wrapper and let it sit on the table.
Finally, Steele asked, “Who’s Bob Walters?”
I explained his former position, then I shared the details of my Las Vegas trip — his drunken wife, his theories on the Strangler, and then Bob Walters being carried out of his house in a black body bag that shone brightly in the desert sun.
I haven’t even tried taking a step in a year.
Why on that one day would he have ever thought to have tried? The likely answer: he didn’t.
Mongillo, fully nourished now, piped up. “I’m with Jack on this. Since when do we hold shit back? Since when do we climb in the sack with the cops, rather than serve as a check on them, and without even a promise of exclusive information if this thing pans out? Since when do we not warn the damned public about what we know, when we know it?”
He paused, seemingly getting more wound up, then added, “This shit is life and death. This isn’t some journalism exercise about confirming a source. This is about letting women know they’re in dire danger out there.”