The two of them were walking and talking. Elizabeth wasn’t wearing or carrying a coat, indicating that they had been in the Oak Bar, which was just closing for the night. They would have walked right by us without noticing, except I said, “Hello there, Elizabeth Riggs.”
She stopped, looked, and allowed a big smile to spread across her face. “Hello there, Jack Flynn.”
At the same time, Mac Foley exclaimed, “I don’t believe it, the legendary Hank Sweeney, in the flesh. Look at you, you look like you could step back into roll call tomorrow.”
Hank smiled. Elizabeth said to me, “What are you doing here?”
“I was about to ask you the same question.”
“The Times has me nipping at your heels on the Phantom Fiend story. Jack, this is really terrifying.”
She was about to find out just how terrifying.
I asked, “Did you lose your driver’s license?”
Hank and Foley began chatting amiably about the old days and the new ones. More stragglers from the Oak Bar wandered past us. Elizabeth gave me a surprised look and said, “Yeah, someone swiped my wallet when I got into Boston this morning. How’d you know?”
“Because I have it,” I said. “I hate to tell you this, though you have no idea how happy I am to be given the chance. It was sent to me by someone claiming to be the Phantom. There was no note, no nothing. The way I took it, the Phantom was telling me that you were his next victim. I’m so thrilled to find you alive that I almost can’t speak.”
She stood in uncharacteristic shock for a long moment, her eyes staring into mine, trying to process what I had just said. Foley glanced over and said, “Hey there, Jack.” Then, to Elizabeth, “Everything all right?”
She didn’t answer. Instead she looked at me, her laudable first instinct always to protect a reporter’s information, rather than share with authorities. I said to Foley, “Just some more dramatics in the case. Your colleagues up on the fifth floor can fill you in.”
Hank spoke up for the first time, saying to Elizabeth, “You’re one hell of a pretty sight for a lot of reasons.”
Elizabeth gave him an exaggerated wide-eyed look, then a kiss on the cheek.
I said to her, “Let me grab you for a second over here.” Not literally. But I pulled her aside as Mac Foley watched us walk a few paces away.
“Listen, the cops are going to offer you protection. I’d just as soon have Hank watch over you. There are too many moving parts, and I can be sure he’s not one of them.”
Truth is, I was so relieved as to be almost euphoric, but at the same time so exhausted as to be a zombie. And yet something, some distant feeling, a little emotional tic, kept tapping at my gut.
She stared me straight in the eyes, her look a cross of confusion and vulnerability, and she said, “I’ll do what you think is best.”
I let my guard down a bit and told her, “I’m just glad you’re okay. This isn’t what I expected to find: you alive, talking to me, the two of us figuring out a plan. This isn’t what I expected to find at all. Thank God I did.”
Elizabeth took a step toward me, maybe cutting in half the distance between us. If I took a step forward as well, there wouldn’t be any distance between us, and maybe that’s what I was supposed to do. But I didn’t. Didn’t matter. She said, “Why don’t you stay here tonight. You love hotels.”
I did, and the invitation was an extraordinary one, the type of offer that could boost your spirits for hours or weeks or maybe longer.
I had been up the entire night before, after Edgar Sullivan was killed. I had flown to Vegas early that morning, hunted through the boxes in the desert heat, jetted back here, met my friend Rover in the darkest sliver of Boston, learned that my ex-girlfriend might be dead, burst into her hotel room, found her alive in the lobby, and now I’d just received an invitation to stay with her.
I was about to answer in the affirmative when the vision of Vinny Mongillo popped into my mind. This isn’t a good thing to have happen at any time of any day, but it’s especially bad when it happens at two-thirty in the morning and essentially means you’ve got to take a rain check on any extracurriculars with a woman you once loved and perhaps still love.
I said, “I’d love to, but believe it or not, this day’s not over.”
She replied, “You’re about to kick the shit out of us on this story, aren’t you?”
She was designated as a Phantom victim. And she’s worried about getting beat in the next day’s paper. No wonder why I feel the way I do about her.
“I hope so,” I said.
With that, I kissed her on the cheek. I told Hank his new assignment was to make sure she stayed alive. Then I gave Mac Foley a long look before I walked out the hotel door.
On the street, I opened up Hank’s back door and beckoned the black Labrador to come with me. I hailed a cab, and the two of us settled into the backseat, sitting side by side.
That little tic was turning into a hard rap, and I was beginning to get a better handle on why.
34
The aging desk sergeant at Boston Police headquarters at Schroeder Plaza barely looked up when he asked, “What do you need?”
What did I need? Where to begin. How about starting with a fresh lead on the Phantom Fiend, a way to tie the murders to the person I believed was in all probability committing them: Paul Vasco.
Then how about giving my dear colleague Edgar Sullivan the final years he deserved in peace?
How about giving me the real Peter Martin back, the one who would never tolerate the publisher checking in with city officials before deciding what to print — or, more relevant in this case, what not to print? How about letting me be just an everyday excellent reporter, and not some mouthpiece for a crazed serial murderer who seems to have emerged some forty years later?
I didn’t think this particular officer of the law was of the mind or place to give me any of this, so instead what I requested was directions to the visiting room in the station lockup. This prompted him to look up at me for the first time in our brief exchange, a weary look on his face. He said in a tone that dripped contempt, “Who wants to know?”
“My name is Jack Flynn. I’m a reporter for the Boston Record.”
He looked at me for a long moment, his eyes wandering across my face. His expression changed as he pulled his glasses off his face and rubbed his eyes. He said to me in a voice that reached toward politeness, “Take that elevator over there down one floor. I’ll call ahead and have an officer on duty meet you there and take you to where you’re supposed to be.”
It was three o’clock now, and as I walked across the hard floor of the wide expanse of the lobby, the sergeant called out to me, “Good luck, kid. You’re doing important work.”
I wish I could have captured that on tape, because trust me when I say that cops don’t ordinarily talk to ink-stained scribes like that.
Downstairs, a similarly aging — and respectful — sergeant met me at the elevator bank and escorted me into a windowless room furnished with only a pair of wooden benches and a row of four plastic chairs bolted to the tile floor. At the far end of the room was a pair of thick Plexiglas windows with a wall phone next to each one, just like you see on TV. I couldn’t believe that in a moment I’d be sitting there talking to Vinny Mongillo through a bulletproof partition.
Fortunately, I never did. Just as I sat down on one of the benches, without so much as a dated People magazine to pass the time, a heavy steel door opened in the far corner, and in walked Vinny Mongillo, shaking a fistful of peanut M&M’s out of the familiar bright yellow bag. He turned around and said to the uniformed cop walking behind him, “Thanks a million, Ralphie. And make sure you tell Jane I said she’s all wet on the mother-in-law issue.”