A Confidential Source (15 page)

I glanced back at the bright pink exit sign and saw my mother and aunt marching past the baccarat tables toward me. The night
was clearly over. I summoned all the bravado I could find. “I’ll be back,” I said to my fellow gamblers. They did not look
impressed.

“We’re going for ice cream; do you want ice cream?” my mother asked.

I did
not
want ice cream. More important, I didn’t want to detail to my mother, or even to myself, how much money I’d lost. “Early
day tomorrow,” I said, throwing my purse over my shoulder.

“Did you win?” Aunt Cecilia asked.

“Broke even,” I said, taking a step away from the table so none of my fellow gamblers could hear me. I wasn’t lying actually.
I
had
broken even if you counted my total gambling experience with the Mohegan Sun winnings.

Luckily, my mother had scored $250 at her favorite machine and was beaming too much to detect any rationalizations. My aunt
was preoccupied with the upcoming ice cream. They had finished gambling for the night. With a full hour to kill before their
bus, they insisted on walking me to the elevator to the parking garage before heading back to Scoops.

My mother’s handbag looked heavy, as if weighted with coin, and her walk, after a long night, was slower than usual. But I
noticed that my aunt, who had nerve damage in her leg, hardly seemed to be limping. When I mentioned this, she responded,
“Even when I lose, this place takes my mind off the pain. My doctor calls it my therapy.”

“Therapy for old people,” my mother quickly added as she pecked my cheek good-bye. “Not for the young.”

*    *    *

By the time I crossed the border from Connecticut to Rhode Island, I was feeling better. I’d been stupid, let myself lose
too much money, but I’d been tense from the beginning and distracted with my mother and aunt there. Who in their right mind
could concentrate under those conditions?

The heat in the Honda had two settings, zero and sauna. I’d already flipped it on and off three times. So I couldn’t make
an extra payment on the loan to my mother, the way I’d wanted. It’s not like she knew about the Mohegan Sun winnings. On a
net basis, I hadn’t actually lost anything from my bank account. It wasn’t like I’d have to miss a car payment or anything.

I pushed the radio button preprogrammed for WKZI but couldn’t make out anything because of the static. It was twenty more
miles before I recognized the grandfatherly voice of Gregory Ayers, the lottery guy, who was apparently the night’s guest
on Leonard’s show. “Legalized gambling will dramatically decrease lottery revenue from video slots and keno. When you figure
the social costs of casino gambling, it’s not a gain. It’s a loss.”

Hearing his voice, I felt cheated. What happened to all that good luck I was supposed to get from rubbing his sleeve? In one
incredibly crummy day, I’d lost $450 and my shot at the investigative team.

I felt the pressure of the day building behind my eyes, and I had to focus hard on the road ahead of me. Jennifer Trowbridge,
the woman from Evening Star Gaming International who’d been dining with the mayor, was Ayers’s counterpoint. She had the confident,
educated tone of someone who did a lot of arguing on national media. “How can you possibly imply that one form of gambling
is okay and another is immoral?”

“It’s not a matter of morality, but practicality,” Gregory Ayers replied. “The state retains more control over the games in
a state lottery than in a privately run casino.”

I didn’t care about the referendum—the question wasn’t about whether gambling was right or wrong, but who got to run it—the
state lottery, or the Narragansett Indians. Why shouldn’t the Narragansett, who’d been massacred so brutally in the Great
Swamp Fight, be allowed to team up with Evening Star Gaming to run their own casino? As long as the state got its cut, why
shouldn’t the Narragansetts get as rich as the Pequots in Connecticut?

But I did care about why Barry was murdered, and that the mayor was trying to cover it up to make sure he got his waterfront
redevelopment and the graft that comes with it.

Ayers began reciting statistics. “More than seven million Americans can be classified as problem gamblers. That’s a five-billion-dollar
drain on the economy. Around Foxwoods, the crime rate has increased three hundred percent—”

Leonard interrupted. “You mean the kind of crime we saw last week with that Wayland Square shooting? I’ve tried to get the
attorney general on the air to talk about that murder, but he’s not returning my calls. They’re being very quiet about that
case, have you noticed?”

Gregory Ayers had not noticed. Or more likely, he did not want to piss off the attorney general. “We don’t need to speculate
about cases we don’t know are related,” he said. “We have plenty of hard data about Atlantic City and Las Vegas and Ledyard—”

Leonard cut him off midsentence to repeat the station’s phone number. “Lines are free, and we want to hear from you: Do you
think Providence police are dragging their heels on the Wayland Square shooting?”

He was practically begging. I looked at the car clock. It was 10:30. Why wasn’t anyone calling in? It occurred to me that
there might be a PC basketball game on television tonight. Still, it was very quiet. Where was Tom of Woonsocket, or Eva of
North Kingstown, or Andre of Cranston?

As I turned onto the Gano Street exit, I was suddenly hearing Andre’s voice quite clearly in my head:
“Gambling destroys more people than drinking.”

Andre, who agreed with Leonard on every issue, but who got particularly worked up about gambling. Andre, who lived in Cranston,
where Drew Mazursky had grown up, and who told heart-wrenching stories about what gambling had done to his family.

The car heat was on sauna now, and the dry heat penetrated through layers of clothing and skin. There was actual sweat on
my forehead. Drew Mazursky’s voice
had
sounded familiar, but not because he was Barry’s son.

I raced back to my apartment and found my knapsack on the floor and began foraging through the notebook and the papers for
my tape recorder. I rewound the tape, slid the volume to high, and clicked the play button. I paced back and forth in my living
room with the tape recorder in my hand as I suffered through my awkward questioning and the slow pace of Nadine’s responses.
Then I realized I hadn’t rewound far enough and started all over again. It was right at the beginning of the tape that I heard
the voice I was waiting for: Andre of Cranston, in Drew Mazursky’s kitchen.

“You sure that’s okay, Mom?”
he asked.

The WKZI radio station was not, as I expected, in an enormous building on a major highway with its call letters advertising
itself. Instead, it was tucked away in a residential neighborhood in East Providence, an odd surprise at the end of a dimly
lit maze of single-family homes.

I’d waited until the top of the hour to call Leonard, when I knew he’d be on a break for the news. He’d told me to come after
midnight, when everyone else had left the station. So here I was at this ungodly hour, with only one other car in the parking
lot and one light shining inside. It felt creepy, lonely, and a little far-fetched. But I had to check my tape against the
show.

The outer glass door of the building was locked. I rang a bell and Leonard emerged from a back room to let me in. He looked
older at this hour, the vertical line between his brows was a little deeper, his skin a rougher surface. But it made him seem
less slick, more appealing. He must have cycled some distance that afternoon because I noticed that one knee looked stiff
as I followed him down a narrow hallway to his studio.

It was a tiny room with huge microphones and tape decks everywhere. Jumbo Dunkin’ Donuts coffee cups littered the desk and
the room smelled as if the carpeting had absorbed the sugar and caffeine. The programming was automated, and Leonard turned
off the studio volume of a syndicated behavioral therapist who was ordering her insomniac callers to turn on the lights and
get out of bed. I sat in the guest chair, but Leonard remained standing. He only had to listen to about a minute of my tape
to decide that the voices matched. “Andre of Cranston,” he said, mostly to himself.

He walked out, beyond the production booth to another small studio or office. I heard the squeal of a file drawer opening,
and then the opening and shutting of what sounded like a closet door. He returned with a shoebox full of tapes in his arms.
“Andre of Cranston is in here,” he said, handing the box to me. “Almost every night.”

Inside the box, the tapes were labeled by subject and date. I saw at least a dozen marked “gambling ref.” I picked one out
at random and Leonard slid the cassette into a deck behind his microphone. Then he sat in his host chair beside the mike and
leaned back, his hands clasped behind his head. Maybe it was the exhaustion of the hour, but he seemed more real to me tonight,
as if he’d left the showman behind.

Considering how often Andre called, it was amazing how many tapes Leonard had to go through—many which contained my voice—before
we got anywhere. Finally, on the fourth tape, Andre of Cranston’s voice filled the room.

On the first segment, he spoke only of his father going bankrupt and the financial ruin of his family. After much fast-forwarding
through tapes, we found another call in which he railed about gambling in general as a sickness. Leonard popped out that tape
and put in another. Midway through the show, Andre called to discuss the crimes caused by gambling. He said he knew his father
borrowed money from loan sharks because he’d seen these animals in his father’s place of business. “Believe me, you can tell
who they are from fifty feet.”

“They have fins or something?” Leonard had joked.

“Yeah,” Andre replied, somehow making it sound ominous. “Real big fins.”

Both Leonard and Andre laughed at this, a cackle that now sounded harsh. The show cut to a commercial and Leonard snapped
off the tape. His head was bent, and I couldn’t read his expression.

“You going to use any of this on your show?” I asked.

“I know you don’t quite believe me, but outing you was a mistake. If I start revealing callers, those lines will go dead.”
He pulled the tape from the machine and put it in my hand. The tape was still warm to the touch.

“This is your lead, not mine,” he said, walking around the desk to drop into a second guest chair beside mine. It was almost
two o’clock in the morning, and we were exhausted. Through the filter of Barry’s murder, the talk-radio stories had a poignancy
I didn’t think either of us would be able to shake.

I held the tape by a corner and stared into its reel, feeling unexpectedly wary. This tape was exactly what Nathan had asked
me to dig up: confirmation from a family member. You couldn’t do much better than an audio confession by Barry Mazursky’s
own son.

I could take the tapes to a voice-recognition specialist to prove I had a match, that Drew Mazursky in his kitchen was Andre
of Cranston on the air. But how would I explain to my editors that I happened to have an archive of taped talk-radio shows
without giving away my connection to Leonard?

Leonard was leaning into my shoulder, peering at the label on the cassette. I noticed the date of the tape for the first time,
in small, neat printing: May 14. The show had been taped more than a month before I’d even moved to Providence.

Our eyes met. Leonard might not know when I’d moved to Rhode Island, but he understood the risk of letting me walk out of
the studio with that tape in my hand. Even the dimmest of editors would need about twenty seconds to figure out that someone
connected with the Leonard of
Late Night
had to have fed this to me, that that same someone was probably my confidential source.

I could see something simmering inside him, and I expected him to get dramatic, to pull the tape from my hand and tell me
this was, after all, the station’s property. That giving it to me could be the ruin of his career. But he didn’t. Instead,
he stood up and walked to the shelf next to the cassette deck, where he’d left the two other tapes that held Andre’s confessions.

“They say good reporters never reveal their sources,” he said, sliding the tapes across the desk to me. “I’ll have to trust
you on that.”

W
HAT DO YOU
have?” Dorothy was standing over my shoulder.

I was downtown in the newsroom library at a bank of computer terminals designated for Internet use.

“A sad story,” I replied. I’d gone to federal bankruptcy court and found that Barry Mazursky had quietly filed for personal
bankruptcy only a year after selling his chain of convenience stores.

It was Friday morning, a week after the shooting. I’d gotten up at six
A.M
. to run and had come to work early. Few people were in the newsroom before eight o’clock and there was a feeling of peace
before the day’s storm. Here in the library, a long, windowless room in the front of the building, only one research assistant
had arrived for the day, and she sat distracted by work at a distant desk. I’d been alone with the database until I’d looked
up and seen Dorothy Sacks standing in front of me.

As the evening city editor, Dorothy often stayed until at least ten o’clock at night and didn’t have to report to work until
just before noon. Carolyn said Dorothy never went home. She said Dorothy was one of those women who should have been nuns,
but instead devoted themselves to the religion of news. At various times, Carolyn had managed to hint that Dorothy was asexual,
a lesbian, and a home wrecker who was carrying on a torrid affair with a copy editor named Harold.

I didn’t quite get Carolyn’s rabid dislike of Dorothy, except that years ago the two women had started at the
Chronicle
the same week. Childless and spouseless, Dorothy’s career had catapulted her to city editor. Carolyn, who had married, divorced,
remarried, had children, and divorced again, had stagnated as a bureau manager.