A Confidential Source (34 page)

Then I heard the first note of strain in Barry’s questioning. “Hey, how about copying that new ten-dollar game that’s coming
out? All that radio advertising you been doing, I got customers already asking for that one.”

Either I imagined the strain in Barry’s tone or the lottery guy was too distracted by his envelope of cash to notice it, because
he answered this one directly, with the same slightly smug tone. “You kidding? That’s the fucking point of all that advertising.”

*    *    *

I listened to the tape three times before I fully grasped it. Before I realized all the implications, and understood. The
lottery agent. The focus groups. The advertising. This guy was able to get the counterfeit production ramped up so that it
was timed to lottery advertising. This was an inside scam.

I popped the tape out of my microcassette recorder and held it in my hands. It was so small, so valuable, so vulnerable to
damage; I was suddenly afraid to put it in my knapsack, where it could get lost among the notebooks, tampons, and twisted
papers. I had to get it to the newsroom quickly, safely, this audio proof, this explanation of not one, but two murders. I
found a box of Altoids in my purse, poured out the mints, and tucked the tape inside the small metal box. Stuffing it into
the front pocket of my blue jeans, I looked up and down the street to make sure no one was around.

The only human forms were the angular-looking people drawn on the window front of Lupo’s Heartbreak Hotel. They were life-size
sketches pasted to the glass where retail mannequins had once roamed. They were supposed to be hip, colorful partygoers, but
the artwork had a harsh, menacing feel. I got out of the car, trying not to look at them as I turned the corner.

I headed down Union, a narrow street between tall, empty buildings. Two drunks stood together midway down the block and held
their palms up for money as I passed. I shook my head, walking briskly, as if they weren’t there. “Bitch!” one of them shouted.

Scanning doorways nervously, I picked up my pace. The
Chronicle
building was only a couple of blocks away. On Washington, the cross street, I halted. It was bumper to bumper with traffic;
WaterFire tourists searched the streets, desperate to park. I wove my way between cars to the other side.

As I was passing Murphy’s, a local pub and deli, someone knocked on the window, startling me. I turned around and saw Gregory
Ayers at the door, waving. He was dressed in the kind of tweedy sports coat he wore on television, a pair of pressed corduroy
pants, and thick-soled shoes. His face looked younger, brighter than it had just last night. Was he here alone? With his wife?

“I just left a message for you at the paper,” he said.

At first, I thought it might be about Leonard’s death, but his tone sounded businesslike. I gave him a blank look, but inwardly
my mind began to rev. As head of the lottery, Ayers
had
to have been informed about my counterfeit scratch tickets by now. I glanced at “The Lot” emblem on the window. Murphy’s
sold tickets; maybe Ayers was here on business, or as part of an investigation into the counterfeits.

“I need to talk to you,” he said, lowering his voice so that it was almost a whisper in my ear. “We’d like to track down the
people responsible as quickly as possible.”

His breath smelled just slightly sour, as if he’d had a beer, but his eyes were sharp, focused, waiting for my response.

“Right,” I said, trying to sound calm, but my heart was beating a million miles a minute. Did he suspect that the counterfeiting
was an inside job? If he needed my help, maybe we’d be able to bargain, maybe I’d get information out of him.

“You got a minute?” Ayers gestured toward the innards of the restaurant. It was a favorite lunch spot of reporters during
the week, but on Saturday, at this hour, the only people inside would be at the bar.

I didn’t
have
a minute. I had a tape in my pocket, evidence of incredible magnitude and a lead on the biggest story in Rhode Island. My
feet twitched to get out of here, run, not walk, to the newsroom. I wanted to play the tape for Dorothy before it somehow
dissolved. I wanted her to call Nathan on his day off. I wanted editors to huddle together over possible headlines. I wanted
to shout “Stop the presses!” at the top of my lungs, the way they did in the movies.

But I was torn. I knew that in another hour, after I’d calmed down and fashioned a rudimentary draft of a story, I’d be on
the phone trying to hunt Ayers down. What was the name of the lottery agent who had the Wayland Square territory? I’d have
to ask him. Which lottery employees had access to focus-group reports?

“Just a minute of your time,” he pressed.

A black Cadillac was waiting on the other side of the street. It was a new, small model and gleamed in an official way. A
driver sat behind the wheel, and it occurred to me that it was waiting for Ayers. Who knew where he would go from here, if
I’d be able to catch him later tonight?

I followed Ayers inside, past the deli, to a table in back near the bar. Half the bar stools were still upside down on the
bar from last night’s cleaning. Two men sat at a table, eyes upward, fixed on the keno screen. We took a table near the window,
overlooking Union Street. Ayers sat in front of a nearly full beer glass and a half-eaten corned-beef sandwich and pushed
both away. Behind him, not one, but two enormous vending machines offered scratch tickets instead of candy.

“I’m so sorry you had to go through all this,” he said when I was seated. “You want anything to eat? A beer?” His eyes scanned
past me for a waitress.

I shook my head. “Please, I don’t have a lot of time.”

“Okay. Okay, I understand. Just tell me this. I hear you bought the tickets at the Mazursky Market in Wayland Square. When?”
he asked. “Recently?”

I’d answered this question for the state police, nailing the exact day, underscoring that it was the night of Barry Mazursky’s
murder. Surely they’d communicated the information to Ayers. I wondered if he was doing what I often did, asking questions
to which I already had the answers—an introductory softening up. “Two weeks ago. The night Barry Mazursky was murdered.”

He looked over his shoulder; I wasn’t sure at what. The empty bar stools? The keno screen? When his eyes returned to mine,
he nodded, a deliberate and solemn register of a terrible tragedy, but it seemed false somehow. There was something missing
from his eyes, some depth he couldn’t achieve. I realized why his face looked younger today. There was a layer of orangey
makeup on his cheeks and a dusting of powder. He must have been shooting a commercial today or made some other kind of lottery
television appearance.

“I’m so sorry you were cheated by this scheme.” When he frowned, a deep vertical line in his forehead created a sudden rut
in the pancake makeup. He looked old again and asymmetrical.

The door opened and two men entered the restaurant and walked past the deli and tables, straight to the bar. I heard the sound
of stools being pulled off the bar and righted on the floor.

“Any idea how the counterfeiters were able to produce such good copies?” I asked.

Ayers ignored my question. “It must have been a terrible disappointment for you.”

He gazed at me in a way that was supposed to have meaning, but again, the depth was missing and I had trouble understanding
what it was he was trying to convey. Compassion? Sympathy?

“It had to be a crushing blow when they told you it was a fake,” he continued.

“Yeah,” I said, “that’s one way to describe it.”

“I’m sorry about that,” Ayers said. The rut in his forehead deepened.

I shrugged.

“You know, a counterfeit operation of this kind could really hurt lottery revenues—at a time when the state really needs the
money,” Ayers said.

I gave him a look. Was there a point to his reiterating the obvious? I got the feeling he was still acting for the commercial,
as if he were under a bright light. I glanced over my shoulder, almost expecting a camera, a crew. I didn’t have time for
this. I needed to take control of the interview. Get the hell out of here. “Who is the lottery agent in that territory?”

Did I imagine that his eyes narrowed? “I’m not sure,” he said, slowly. “I’ll have to look that up.”

He hadn’t done that already? Hadn’t looked up the agent’s name first thing after he got word of the scam from the state police?
“I was thinking that the agents were in the best position to know that something was up. Wouldn’t sales of legitimate lottery
scratch tickets have suffered in those stores?” I asked.

His expression changed, so swiftly, so artificially, it was as if the makeup artist had been in, the face redrawn. “Well,
you’re right about the effect on state ticket sales. But the state suffers in other ways. Not just past sales, but publicity
about this could hurt revenues horribly in the future, affect the programs we finance.” His eyes sparkled significantly, and
I knew suddenly that all questions up until now had been filler. The point of this interview wasn’t to get information out
of me. The point was to try to get me not to write the first-person counterfeit-ticket story.

“Premature publicity wreaks havoc on an investigation at this stage,” he continued. “I was hoping that you and I could reach
some kind of agreement.”

Postponing the counterfeit story another day in exchange for giving me the exclusive? Under ordinary circumstances, it was
not an unrealistic offer, but not when the counterfeiting could be connected to two murders. “I don’t think I can make that
kind of agreement.”

He frowned and the rut in his forehead returned. There was a long silence. I started to get up. Clearly, our meeting was over.
But he gestured for me to sit down. “Please, just a minute more of your time.” Reluctantly, I dropped to my seat.

And then, reaching into his jacket pocket, he pulled out something and slipped it across the table. It was a scratch ticket.
“Frankly, I think the lottery has a responsibility to you. It owes you—”

This threw me. “It owes me?”

“The counterfeit ticket. You bought it in good faith.”

My mouth must have dropped open. Was he saying that the lottery owed
me
money?

“You had a winning ticket. You couldn’t have known you were buying a counterfeit.”

Ten thousand dollars. My heart began to race. Ten thousand dollars. Was he saying he’d give me that much money?

He studied the ticket on the table. He didn’t say a word, but he didn’t need to.

I lowered my voice. “Are you telling me that’s a ten-thousand-dollar ticket?”

“I have no way of knowing,” he said. “Any genuine ticket has the same chance of winning as any other. It could be the two-hundred-fifty-thousand-dollar
ticket.”

He picked up the ticket from the table, held it to the light of the window, and chuckled. It was the same laugh he used on
television after he announced a lottery winner, just before he clapped the winner on the back. His eyes gleamed with his trademark
grandfatherly generosity. And I realized two things: one, that Ayers was holding a ticket worth a quarter of a million dollars,
and, two, that he’d never say it out loud.

I stared at the bright bit of paper in his hands. He intended to give it to me. But clearly not just for a one-day postponement
on a story. His eyes met mine, a moment passed. One of the men at the bar coughed. From the deli in front, a cash register
jingled open. Ayers withdrew the ticket a half inch. “I’ve seen you, you know, at Mohegan Sun, the blackjack tables. I know
you’ve had a few setbacks.”

Stunned, I stared at him. How could he know all this unless someone had been following me? My heart stopped in its cavity.
The chambers did not beat. The world did not spin and time moved backward instead of forward. If he’d been following me, he
knew I had Leonard’s tape.

“I saw you at Leonard’s studio, remember?” he said, as if echoing my thoughts. And then, in a very low voice, a barely audible
whisper, he added, “We found the only other copy.”

The search of Leonard’s apartment. Our eyes met. Now his were full of depth, full of intent.

“You saw me pick up a dub from the show I did last week. That’s all.”

“Right,” he said, smiling. “A dub.” There was another silence, and then he pushed the ticket toward me. “I’d like to replace
your counterfeit ticket as a gesture of goodwill.”

Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. I could pay off all my father’s medical bills. My mother wouldn’t have to sell her
house. My rent would be paid, my debts obliterated. My palms tingled, and I felt the same kind of excitement I felt at the
blackjack table when I sensed that the deck had turned in my direction. Two hundred fifty thousand dollars. It wouldn’t matter
if I didn’t make the investigative team. I could quit the bureau job. Freelance. Move back to Boston. Write a freaking book.

Through the window, I saw the black Cadillac waiting outside on Union Street. Besides the driver, I noticed another form,
a man, sitting in the backseat.

In front of me, the vending machines displayed the full variety of scratch tickets and my gaze landed on the latest version
of the Green Poker Game and its lucky leprechaun. You had to be pretty high up at the lottery to have the focus-group report.
“I
wouldn’t stand on the same podium as Gregory Ayers,”
Leonard had said the night of the rally.

Gregory Ayers, head of the lottery, was a small-time crook who had risked his position, his state celebrity, for a penny-ante
counterfeit scheme? It seemed too bizarre to believe, but Leonard had obviously known about it. That’s why he’d attacked him
on the air—even though Ayers had been his only ally. Ayers reached into his pocket, pulled out a quarter, and handed both
the quarter and the ticket to me. “See if you’ve won, Hallie.”

Despite my intention, my fingers twitched to take the ticket. I was desperate to scratch off the silvery latex, to see the
boxes unveiled in my favor. I told myself that I wasn’t committing to anything. I was just agreeing to scratch the card.