A Confidential Source (19 page)

The cinder crackled in the distance. Whoever he was behind me, he was increasing his speed. Turning slightly, I spotted a
man hooded in gray sweats on the path, running fifty yards back. Men hated it when you ran faster than they did, and always
tried to catch up and pass.

The morning was stubbornly dim, as if the sun would never fully rise, and the gold and red leaves were already beginning to
look muted. I looked over my shoulder and made out that the other runner was tall. Long legs would give him an advantage.

Something about the long legs made me turn a third time. It wasn’t just another runner. It was Matt Cavanaugh in gray sweats.
I shifted up a gear. I was feeling particularly light today, and if there was anybody I’d like to leave in the dust, it was
Matt Cavanaugh.

I was running into the wind now, and the cold air was a force to be reckoned with. I kept my head down, fighting the resistance.
I wondered how much of a runner Matt was—I’d never seen him running on the boulevard before. Of course, a lack of experience
wouldn’t stop him from trying to prove he could beat me. I focused on my elbows, bringing them behind me faster to increase
my foot speed.

The path ended and I plunged onto the asphalt of Butler Street. In the distance, I could make out a single car, stopping for
the traffic light on Angell Street. My side was beginning to ache and my lungs felt tight. I glanced over my shoulder again.
Matt was only about fifteen yards away. The needle in my side began to shoot pain down my legs. Stay cool, Hallie. Focused.
Sprint speed.

Crossing the road, I headed to the sidewalk. I had to slow down to slip my body sideways between two parked cars. I cleared
the hedge of metal and jumped onto the curb.

Gnarled tree roots had grown through the cement, and I stumbled on a crack. Throwing my hands in front of me, I struggled
for balance. Please, God, don’t let me fall on my face in front of Matt Cavanaugh. I caught myself and righted to center.
As if in slow motion, the earth settled underneath me.

“Hallie!” The hood of Matt’s sweatshirt was pushed back, revealing the dark eyes and the off-center nose. Sweat had collected
on his forehead and he wiped it with his forearm. Bending forward, he put his hands to his knees, as if to baby a cramp. “Jesus,
you’re fast,” he said between breaths.

My heart was still running the race, but I sucked in measured amounts of air and tried not to sound winded. “Well, I wasn’t
going to let you
beat
me.”

He was standing erect now, taking me in, the whole picture: racing tights, sweatshirt, ponytail. He seemed to find something
about it amusing.

“What?” I asked. “Don’t you ever race people on the street?”

“Just a little competitive?” he asked, but he was smiling and sounding appreciative.

“I guess.” I made an effort to sound casual, but I was pleased. He was looking at me with sincere admiration, appropriately
impressed with my foot pace. I bent down as if to check a shoelace and played with the knot an extra minute to get my breathing
fully under control. He stood over me, waiting. His legs
were
really long.

I took another breath and stood up. “You run a lot?”

“Every day,” he said, “but usually in the evenings.”

“That’s why I’ve never seen you before. Didn’t know you were a runner.”

“If you did, would you have stopped?” he asked. “Or run even faster?”

At first I thought he was still joking, but then I noticed that his tone had changed. He was looking at me with meaning, a
meaning that eluded me. Flushed with new heat, I looked down at my sneakers, unsure of what he meant by this or how I should
respond.

And then: “How come you didn’t call me?”

He made it sound so plaintive, so personal, that for one brief moment, my thinking blipped: Had I missed a cue? He was the
one who’d taken my number, not the other way around. But luckily, I kept my mouth shut, resisted the temptation to blather.
Because when I looked up from my sneakers, I saw that he’d shifted his posture and crossed his arms. I realized that we were
talking business.

Another flash of understanding: Matt must have the
Chronicle
home-delivered to his apartment. He’d already read my story about Barry Mazursky. Obviously, he wasn’t happy about it.

I crossed my own arms. “I didn’t call you because it was Saturday,” I said.

“I work Saturday,” he said.

Should I have called the attorney general’s office? On a
Saturday?
Just to get another
no comment?
“Why should I call you? You never answer my questions.”

“I would’ve liked a chance to respond to this…this…
conjecture
before you put it in the paper.”

Conjecture.
He meant bullshit but was trying to be professional. Suddenly, I was angry. “No comments” like Matt Cavanaugh never wanted
to trust you with anything close to real information but always wanted a chance to muck up your story afterward.

“Barry Mazursky’s murder had nothing to do with loan sharks,” he said, sounding so earnest that I almost believed him. Or
at least I almost believed that he believed what he said. “Honest.”

Maybe there was too much earnestness, or too much in him that I wanted to trust, but I knew I had to check myself. Matt Cavanaugh,
the flirt at the dairy case, the master of sincerity, was a political animal. His job demanded that he work with Providence
police day in and day out. If they wanted to stall—or let’s just call it postpone—an investigation for a couple of measly
weeks, what difference would it make to him? Justice was slow, anyway.

He was still staring at me, eyes level, determined that I believe him.

Was he trying to charm me? Was I supposed to melt into his sincerity and print a retraction? When I had the victim’s son telling
me otherwise? When I had it all on tape?

I returned the same deep, heart-to-heart look and said, “You want to tell me about it? Give me the real reason Barry was murdered?
I’ll be happy to do another story. Let’s go back to my apartment; I’ll get my notebook.”

I don’t know what I expected from him, anger or more amusement. I got neither. Instead, he shook his head and in a regretful
tone that I wouldn’t be able to get out of my head all day, he said, “Try to believe me, Hallie, the more I tell you, the
worse off you’ll be.”

Leonard was all accolades. He called later that morning after I’d already bought the paper and reread my story several times.
I’d moved on to more mundane matters, and when the phone rang, I was sitting on my bedroom floor collecting the dirty laundry
from the bottom of my closet and sorting it. Not by color, but by urgency.

“My phone lines will be jammed all night!” Leonard’s voice boomed with enthusiasm. “You think I could book you as a guest?”

A guest? The towel in my hand dropped into the nearest pile. “Really?”

“You doing anything tonight?”

My heart was suddenly pounding like a piano. A guest? On Leonard of
Late Night?
I knew enough to wait until the song settled, to force myself to hear the low, cautionary notes. I didn’t want to make any
wrong moves, blow my chances for the investigative team now. “I’ll have to check with my editor.”

“Check,” Leonard said. “But they can’t stop you. Not by contract. We have this issue with the sports reporters all the time.
And it’s good advertising for the paper. Just call me by five o’clock, and promise me you won’t do interviews with any other
stations, radio or TV, first. Okay?”

Any other radio or television stations? Was he serious? I was soaring somewhere over the apartment building, above Providence,
Rhode Island. It might not be Boston or New York, but suddenly, it was a spectacular view.

“You promise?” he pressed.

I gave him my word and threw all my laundry back into a single, unsorted heap on the floor. Then I got dressed in the only
clean shirt and pair of jeans I had left and headed down to the newsroom to find someone who knew where I could find Dorothy
Sacks on a Sunday afternoon.

Dorothy had no husband, no family, no life outside the newspaper, according to Carolyn, but on this particular Sunday in late
October when I desperately needed to talk to her, she didn’t answer her home phone, her cell phone, or her pager.

“Sometimes,” said Roger, the weekend-shift editor who had given me Dorothy’s phone numbers, “sometimes she comes in Sunday
night with leaves all over her jeans, wearing these big, ugly hiking boots.”

“Maybe I should try Nathan at home.”

Roger, an extremely thin, lanky man who had worked nights and weekends forever, looked alarmed. “On a Sunday? Nathan? You
kidding? He’ll freak.”

I tried Dorothy’s pager again and read the entire Sunday paper from cover to cover waiting for her to respond. It was almost
five o’clock when Roger looked over and noticed that I was still there.

Roger was an official of the union and didn’t like it when he thought anyone was working off the clock. “I’m telling you.
They can’t stop you, by contract.”

I must have looked unconvinced because he added, “You want to do it, do it. The publisher won’t mind.”

“Really?”

“Why would he? You’re reminding everyone that the
Chronicle
broke another story. It’ll sell papers.”

With embarrassing admiration, Leonard introduced me to his producer as “the reporter who broke the Mazursky murder.”

Robin, the producer, was in her early twenties, with short, curly hair and about twenty earrings. She cocked her head slightly.
Was she supposed to be impressed? With an amused expression, she guided me to a seat in the studio directly facing Leonard
and instructed me on the correct way to use the microphone.

There was nothing haggard about Leonard tonight. He was wearing the latest in microfiber warm-up suits, and his face was flush
with color, as if he’d just jumped off his bicycle. “After that story of yours this morning, the phones are gonna be lit up
like Christmas,” he said, brandishing a copy of the
Chronicle.
And then, as if it were some kind of mantra, he repeated it to Robin. “Lit like Christmas! Lit like Christmas!”

She offered a nod to his good spirits as she ducked back into the production booth. With the show about to begin, the microphone
before me seemed suddenly ominous. “What if I stutter or something?” I heard myself ask.

Leonard grinned. “Stutter? You didn’t stutter once in the three months that you called in, you want to stutter tonight, go
ahead and stutter. People don’t care. They’ll forgive a stutter. Just don’t go on and on like some kind of windbag.”

“That’s
his
role,” Robin called over her shoulder.

Leonard nodded good-naturedly. “Yes, that is my role.” Then, catching some kind of cue from Robin, his expression changed.
A look of intense concentration came over his face as he listened intently to whatever was coming through his headset. He
began introducing the show. The topic. His guest:
Hallie Ahern.

He left out the part about me being the bureau reporter in South County. Instead, he spouted off every award I’d ever won
in Boston, startling me with his research, and making me sound like such
a big deal
“Welcome to the show, Hallie.”

My throat tightened. “Thank you,” I said, barely getting it out. “I’m glad to be here.”

Still standing, with several microphones of various sizes before him, he started reading directly from my
Chronicle
story. His voice was deep, grave, reverential. Had I really written all that? It sounded so powerful, so earth-shattering,
so conspiratorial with all those pauses and added emphasis.

“Didn’t I tell you something wasn’t right in the Wayland Square shooting? Didn’t I tell you cops were dragging their heels,
covering something up?” he asked. “Listen to this…”

To Leonard’s right, mounted on the wall, was a computer monitor. Within minutes, text began appearing with identifying bits
of information about each of the callers Robin had typed in. The lighting was a dim fluorescent. I squinted to read:

“Magda of North Scituate: ‘Gambling will ruin the state.’”

“Corey of Providence wants state police instead of Providence police to investigate the murder.”

“Ed of Tiverton says the
Chronicle
blows everything out of proportion.”

My stomach tightened on that last remark, but Leonard decimated Ed of Tiverton in about two minutes, calling him one of “Billy’s
groupies.” With a mischievous smile, he concluded the call with the first few bars of the “Tammy’s in Love” song.

Leonard flailed his arms like a conductor, waving people on in their outrage at the slowness of the police investigation,
cutting them off when they voiced doubt that there was a deliberate conspiracy. “Billy will do anything, anything to get this
gambling referendum to pass,” he said. “You’ve got to believe he doesn’t want us thinking about the mob being alive and well
on Atwell’s Avenue. He doesn’t want us thinking about a successful businessman like Barry Mazursky losing it all, even his
life, because of casino gambling. Right, Hallie?”

I was growing uncomfortable. I’d only lived in Providence for four months. Spoken to the mayor only once on the phone. How
was I supposed to know what Billy Lopresti thought? “Well, I have heard him admit that compulsive gambling comes with the
territory.”

Leonard gave me an exasperated look, and I could see that evenhandedness was not a part of the program. “You don’t have to
set aside a special fund for compulsive gambling if you don’t create more compulsive gambling in the first place. Legalizing
a casino is just going to mean more Barry Mazurskys. Gloria from Warwick, welcome to the program.”

Gloria from Warwick began by gushing about how great Leonard was, how he alone really cared about Rhode Island, and about
how he was going to save the state from corruption. Leonard rolled his eyes as if embarrassed, but I noticed that he didn’t
cut any of it off. Through the glass window, I could see Robin, in the production booth. She put her finger to her temple
in a gesture to Leonard that said: If she had to listen to much more, she’d shoot herself.