A Confidential Source (26 page)

I pivoted back to Matt, who was now standing. “Why keep it secret? Why not announce it Monday at the same press conference
where police tore my story to shreds? Why not clear Delria then?”

He leaned against the back of the couch, arms folded in the nothing-can-really-get-to-me way, but there was more tension in
his expression now, as if he was watching a very close basketball game that his team could lose. “Your story was wrong, Hallie.
Loan sharks wouldn’t kill Barry. They’d kill someone close to him. Or burn his car, his building. Not kill him.”

The certainty with which he said this put new fury into my heels. I paced back to the living room, stood directly in front
of him, in his face now. “You didn’t answer my question. Why not clear Delria at the press conference if police weren’t deliberately
stalling, trying to keep the press off track until after the referendum?”

Now, the soulful brown eyes burned with insult. I watched him wrestle with that anger, swallow so that his Adam’s apple dipped
and rose. The fold of his arms grew tighter, his sentences shorter.

“Look, there was some confusion, that’s all. Conflicting evidence. Delria’s car was a good match. Cops found eight hundred
dollars in cash on the backseat. That was about the same amount the son figured was taken from Mazursky’s cash register.”

“The trace amounts of heroin must have shown up right away.”

“Like junkies never rob convenience stores? It took a little police work to find out Delria was a dealer coming from a sales
call in Fox Point—which is probably why he freaked when police started chasing him. And it took a while to get the DNA results
on the mask.”

“Two weeks? On a priority case?”

Matt ignored the incredulity in my tone. “DNA can take longer than that if the lab’s backed up. Besides, whether Delria was
the guy or not had nothing to do with the referendum or the fact that your story was wrong.”

I had no idea how long it took to process DNA results at the URI lab, but I had a gut feeling that Matt was lying. Something
about the way he glanced away after he said it. And he was spending too much of his energy trying to convince me that my story,
already retracted on the front page, was wrong.

The couch faced an enormous marble fireplace, and I stared at the stacks of law books on the hearth. Matt Cavanaugh was stonewalling
me. Was under instruction to stonewall me, or worse, gain my trust and deliberately misguide me. “And what’s being done to
find the guy in the parka? The real killer?”

“The case is still under investigation, Hallie.” The careful, clipped sentences, again. The professional distance. And I knew
for sure then, felt it in my heart. He was an integral part of the plan. He must have seen it on my face, because he tried
to recover, tried to warm up his voice and return to the personal plea: “Why don’t you just let us do our jobs? Leave it alone—just
for another couple of weeks.”

Until the referendum election was over?
Or until the guy in the parka could kill me? I was shaking, physically shaking, and I wasn’t sure if it was fear or anger.
Was everyone in this godforsaken state connected? The attorney general’s office in league with a corrupt mayor?

I stormed away from him, no choice really but to head back to the dining room, where I had the urge to kick the legs out from
under the antique table. Instead, I continued moving as far away from him as I could get, to the bow window, overlooking the
street and my building. I could see my bare window, and beyond, the bright light of the fluorescent ring in the fifties-style
fixture above the bar. The apartment looked so harsh, so empty, even from here.

I walked back to the couch, reflexively searching for my knapsack under the coffee table, kicking aside a stack of
Sports Illustrated
magazines, not caring that they toppled. But I hadn’t brought the knapsack or a notebook. Why had I come here, anyway? What
made me think that Matt Cavanaugh would ever tell me the truth? I headed to the foyer, but the outer door had an elaborate
locking system I couldn’t figure out. I flipped levers and tugged at the door. Matt followed behind me, putting his hand on
my arm to stop me.

I spun around, not caring how high my voice was raised, how shrill I sounded. “That night you drove me home from Barry’s wake.
That night you
had
to have known. Why didn’t you tell me that the guy in the parka was running around free? Don’t you think you owed me that
courtesy?”

He stepped back, looking stunned. As if he couldn’t understand why all this anger was directed at him. As if he’d been so
generous with me and now I was here with a gun in my hand sticking him up for his wallet.

But he was not a man to surrender his cash and credit cards. Recovering, he shook his head, slowly at first, and then with
more velocity as he began to add up my offenses. “Jeez, why do you think? Could it be because everything we tell you, and
crap that we don’t, ends up in print? Could that be it?”

We stared at each other, a mutual “fuck you.”

“Could it be,” he continued in that same tone, “that the more stories you write warning this guy that we’re looking for him,
the harder he is to catch? And maybe, just maybe, there’s more incentive for him to come after you, because you never seem
to tire of reminding everybody in the paper and on the
radio
that you know what this guy looks like.”

I didn’t run the next morning. I told myself that my right hip, which was sore to the touch, needed a rest. That I needed
a few days off from the pounding of the pavement. But it was not like me to baby an injury and I knew, even as I stepped over
my running shoes to get to the bathroom, that Matt’s anger and sarcasm had done its damage. I wouldn’t be running alone on
the boulevard, or anywhere else at six
A.M
., as long as the man in the parka was free in Providence.

I didn’t want to hang around my apartment either, especially since it was the first of the month and my landlord was likely
to knock on the door for the rent. I showered, got dressed for work, and ended up at my desk in the South County bureau by
a quarter of seven, doing police checks with my jacket on because the heat hadn’t warmed up from the overnight setting.

It was going to be a long day. I drilled through a stack of press releases on leaf-collection day and the Rotary Club’s turkey
shoot, and fielded a call from an irate high school football coach who took issue with a sports reporter’s criticism of his
failed offense. I called the town clerk’s office to get the week’s meeting agenda and learned that the most controversial
issue coming before any of the boards this week was whether or not to give the Young Women’s Club a one-day beer-and-wine
license for its holiday fund-raiser.

Carolyn arrived late, having come from a meeting of regional bureau managers downtown, and by that time, I was overwhelmed
with the minor details that had defined the morning. She’d picked up two frothy-looking coffees and handed me one with what
looked like caramel on the top. I sensed that it was some sort of consolation prize, like the ice-cream cones she bought her
daughter when her soccer team lost a game.

I frowned at the froth, afraid to take a sip. “You hear anything downtown about who made the investigative team?”

“Nothing definitive,” Carolyn said, hanging her lime-green ski jacket in the closet as carefully as if it were one of her
furs. Then she spotted something on the floor of the closet she didn’t like and kicked it to one side.

“What does that mean?”

“What is all this crap in here?” Carolyn said, digging into the closet and pulling out two large pieces of poster board. She
turned them around and displayed some badly glued red and yellow construction paper cutouts that had suffered from their closet
storage. It was one of her daughter’s elementary school art projects. “Oh,” she said to herself.

“Carolyn, tell me,” I persisted.

She stuffed the poster board back in the closet and sat down at her desk reluctantly, picking up a stack of interoffice mail
and dropping it in her lap. She seemed wearied by her trek to the city, the turf battles she’d had to wage, the expenses she’d
had to defend.

“Tell me.”

She sighed, swallowed some coffee, and relented. “Nothing official. But I heard that Jonathan Frizell has been assigned on
a temporary basis. Some big story of his is running in tomorrow’s paper.” She met my eye, offering me her full sympathy. “You
don’t want to hang out with those idiots in Providence, anyway. I mean, why do they all have to walk around carrying laptops
when the newsroom is filled with word processors?”

I shook my head to indicate that I didn’t know. I didn’t care. I was obviously destined to spend the rest of my days in laptop-less
exile. I tried the coffee, but it was already tepid, the caramel melted into a swirl of oil. Carolyn’s phone rang and she
answered it. I could tell by the long silence and the roll of her eyes that it had to be Marcy Kittner.

“Can’t you get someone else from city to cover, if it’s so important?” Carolyn asked.

And then: “You’re not being fair.”

And finally: “I’ve got a life, you know. I can’t work morning and night.”

There was more silence as she listened, lips pinched, resentment building. “I’ll see what I can do,” she said in a clipped
tone. “Bitch,” she added after she’d already hung up the phone.

Frizell, who was supposed to cover an antigambling rally at the University of Rhode Island that night, was putting the finishing
touches on the final copy of his big investigative piece. So Marcy wanted Carolyn to cover the rally instead.

It seemed like an odd request. Never in the four months that I’d been here had I seen Carolyn work a night shift. In fact,
I’d assumed that was the major perk of being a bureau manager. But I could see from Carolyn’s expression that she was in some
kind of a corner.

“I can cover it,” I offered. I’d begun to dread my empty, pinging apartment. And even if only ten people showed up, a political
rally was a decent-size story in South County. At worst, it would make the cover of the zone page.

Carolyn didn’t jump on this, a disturbing response.

“I’m free. Why don’t you let me cover it?”

“That’s okay.” Carolyn turned away from me, one hand on her keyboard, the other flicking on the machine.

“Really. You’d be doing me a favor. I’m short of cash this month and could use the overtime. Besides, you know me. I have
no other life.”

“Let me think about it,” Carolyn said, watching the computer boot up instead of turning back to me. Her posture was off, too,
spine uncharacteristically stiff. The
Providence Morning Chronicle
logo came up on her screen and she failed to make her usual derisive comment.

And then I knew. “You mean they don’t even trust me to cover a public event?”

With a sigh, she turned back to me. She hadn’t wanted to tell me, but was damn glad I’d figured it out. “Those assholes. They’re
still pissed off about the correction.” It all came out in an angry torrent. “And Marcy’s always been vindictive.”

“A public event? Journalism 101?” My voice raised in insult.

Like most people in journalism, Carolyn shouldn’t have been made a manager. She was no good at containment or diplomacy. If
I’d wanted to set fire to the office, she’d have handed me a can of gasoline. “Those assholes!”

Seeing her worked up like that toned me down. I became practical. “How are you going to work tonight? Who’s going to watch
Deirdre and Katie?”

“I’ll have to drop them with Tom.” He was Deirdre’s father and always late with child support. She spit this solution.

In the heat of this us-against-them fury at the downtown editors, I felt the last of my anger dissipate. One of us
had
to remain levelheaded. Solution oriented. And, more important, I wanted this assignment more than ever now. “You don’t want
to drop the girls off with Tom, and you don’t want to work until eleven tonight,” I said firmly.

Carolyn was not inclined to disagree.

“You could…” I drew this out and watched her closely to gauge her receptiveness. Seeing enough, I plunged on. “You could call
Marcy at around two o’clock and tell her the school nurse sent Deirdre home
deathly
ill.”

I saw a distinct glint in her eye, a consideration of the idea, and a calculation of risk. “You know I can handle this assignment,”
I pressed. “You
know
I won’t let you down.”

I’m not sure if it was belief, pity, or simply a rejection of anything that imposed on her family life, but Carolyn didn’t
take long to weigh the morality of my suggestion. She brightened at the thought of besting Marcy and jumped right into the
subterfuge. “I’ll wait until four o’clock to call her,” she said with a conspiratorial smile. “That way it’ll be too late
for her to get anyone else.”

One of the tasks of reporting a public event is counting the crowd. The tendency is to exaggerate in either direction. If
almost no one shows up, there is a pathetic failure to call attention to. If it’s standing room only, it becomes a bona-fide
news event.

I was pleased to see that there was no need to exaggerate tonight. The Edwards Auditorium, a rich, old-world hall with tall
Palladian windows, was crammed with people. I counted chairs across and multiplied by fully occupied rows. Added fifty for
the people sitting in the balcony and another twenty-five for those standing in the aisle. Three hundred, I estimated in my
notebook. A decent headline.

Making my way through the crowd to the front, I found a place to lean along the wall. Reporters from two Providence television
stations and their cameramen were gathered in front of me. Behind me, a young girl with a notebook announced that she worked
for the college paper, the
Good Five-Cent Cigar,
and asked if I was from the
Chronicle.

I nodded and she made a notation in her notebook, as if participating media were somehow relevant. It occurred to me that
since news was always scant in the Saturday paper, this story might have a shot at the front page. I scanned the crowd, looking
for the
Chronicle
photographer who was supposed to meet me here. Without a photograph, the rally, no matter how well written, would get relegated
to a less prominent position—below the fold, or even worse, an inside page.