He said, “You’re fucking with this investigation. You’re fucking with this city. You’re fucking with this commissioner.”
He paused and looked at me. It seemed like he was almost looking through me. He said, his tone as flat as the line on a dead man’s cardiogram, “And if you put the contents of that bullshit note in the paper, you’re going to pay.”
I said, “We’re going to do what we have to do, with our readers, not you, in mind.”
“Bullshit!” he screamed. “Albert DeSalvo was the Boston Strangler. He admitted it. He confessed to every one of the crimes in minute detail. And now some joker comes along forty years later in the middle of my mayoral campaign, claiming to be the real Strangler, and you and your whole paper fall for it!”
His voice was bouncing off the walls and windows of his cavernous office and rising toward the high ceilings. Without warning, he picked up a binder that said “Strangler Investigation” from the top of his desk and flung it sidearm across the room. It slammed against the far wall, knocking a bronze plaque to the floor — undoubtedly a commendation of some sort. Somewhere in that act there was symbolism, but it would take a much smarter man than me to be able to say what it was.
“You’re messing with my future, Jack.” He was standing up now, hunched over his desk, his voice lower but no less intense. “You’re messing with every dream I’ve ever had. You’re messing with what’s rightfully mine. You’re digging up the past, and trying to bury me in the fucking hole. And you’re wrong. You’re just fucking wrong.”
I stood up as well, partly in anticipation that he might come over the desk at me, partly because I realized that I wasn’t going to get any more than I needed out of him, so this interview was just about done.
“Sorry you feel this way, Commissioner, but I’m going to keep doing my job as you go ahead and do yours.”
I began to turn around and head toward the door. When I took a couple of strides, he said in a voice that was at once soft and hard as steel, “You better watch yourself.”
I turned around and replied, “What did you just say to me?”
“You heard me. You better watch yourself. You think some funny things have already happened? Your friend gets blown away in a CVS? Your life gets threatened?”
He caught himself here, took a long swallow followed by a deep breath, and said, “Like I said, watch yourself. You run that note, be on your guard.”
I stood near the door, staring at him, incredulous over being threatened by the commissioner of the Boston Police Department, and reasonably certain that his threat included an admission that he was behind the prior attempts on my life. Edgar Sullivan’s kind face popped momentarily into my mind.
As I stared, trembling not out of fear but fury, he seemed to understand what he had just said, what he had just done, the import and gravity of it all. He said in a much different tone of voice, conciliatory, yet edging toward desperation, “What can I do to stop you, Jack? What can I do?”
“Do what you’re paid to do. Be a cop. Solve the damned case.” And with that, I turned around and strode out the door.
Outside, I flagged a cab, got into the first one that pulled up, and slid across the backseat to the far door, which I got out of. I flagged another passing cab and got in that one. It’s a little trick I once saw in a James Bond movie, or maybe it was one of the Naked Guns, just in case the first driver was a plant.
My first call was to Hank Sweeney.
“Everything all right with you guys?” I asked.
“Jack, this is some woman,” he replied. “The hair, the eyes, the walk —”
“Hank, all right, get a grip. I’m not looking for a recitation of that which I no longer have. I’ll call you in a while. Keep her safe — and you as well.”
Next call was to my cell phone voice mail. I deleted the progressively urgent messages from Peter Martin — “Jack, for fricking God’s sake, call me” — until I arrived at a woman’s voice sounding at first strained, and then shaken.
“Jack, it’s Deirdre. Deirdre Hayes. Bob Walters’s daughter in Las Vegas. Listen, I was right, I found that other box I told you about.”
I was nodding as if she was actually talking to me.
She continued, “You need to see this stuff, Jack. You really do.”
Now I was shaking my head. It was ten-forty a.m. Good God, by the time I finished with this story, I’d have enough frequent-flier miles to get me to Bali — which might be exactly where I’d need to go to escape Hal Harrison’s wrath.
“I’ll see you soon,” she said. “You’re not going to believe it.”
Maybe I would. After that little session with Hal Harrison, after learning what I had about Mac Foley, there wasn’t a whole lot left in life that was unbelievable anymore.
37
The wind wasn’t so much blowing as howling off the ocean as I stepped out of my car and placed my hand in front of my eyes, trying to block the cold grains of sand that felt like little needles smacking against my face. I pulled a torn sheet of paper from my pocket to double-check the address, stared at the ramshackle single-story cottage with the flaking white paint and the cracked front step, and realized I was in the right place.
It was a forlorn little structure, sitting in a yard of sand directly on the ocean’s edge, part of a cramped row of similarly forlorn little structures. The difference being, all the other cottages were still boarded up for the winter; this one was not only open, it had smoke drifting from the chimney and blowing against the slate-gray sky — a pretty solid clue that somebody was home.
That somebody, I hoped, was H. Gordon Thomas, for a long while the most famous attorney in the United States, a household name, quite literally the epitome of the garrulous Perry Mason — style trial lawyer, portrayed in movies, studied in law schools, mimicked by every ambitious Young Turk who ever stepped in front of a jury trying to win a case.
And here he was living in a falling-down bungalow with mismatched shutters barely adhered to the rotting frame. I had heard that his life had taken an unfortunate turn, but I had no idea — and I don’t think anyone had any idea — that the turn had been this bad.
The most recent newspaper story I had found on him said that the famed lawyer who spent decades jetting around the nation winning acquittals for some of the most notorious suspects in American history had hit drastic times. First, he began drinking. Soon after, he was sued by a suspected European drug lord whom he had represented on a trafficking case, and had lost many millions in the suit. Then he was disbarred in two states, forcing him into a secluded retirement on what was described as family property on Boston’s South Shore.
I walked tentatively across the sand toward the bare front door of that family property, leaned over the one cracked step, and rapped my fist against the thin wood. The wind continued pounding, penetrating my thin coat. Tempests of sand swirled against my body and stuck in my hair. I love all those faux romantics who say they love walking the beach on a winter’s day. It’s like walking along the edge of hell. How can a place so warm and welcoming in the summer be so cold and lonely at just about every other time of the year?
I knocked again, and in turn heard someone moving around inside — the sound of a door shutting, unsteady footsteps, something dropping on the floor. And then the front door slowly opened, revealing a figure I had seen dozens if not hundreds of times in newspaper photographs and on television news clips.
In some respects, H. Gordon Thomas looked very much how I would have imagined — big and barrel-chested, with crystal-clear blue eyes peering through his trademark enormous, owlish eyeglasses. He must have stood six feet four, must have weighed 240 pounds, all of which belied his age, which must have been at least seventy, and probably a few years beyond that.