Dead Heat (10 page)

Now that little guy with the pink face standing under the streetlamp, he might be the flunky Donagher had stationed nearby with water.…

As the crowd went crazy, shrieking, singing, climbing trees for a better view, the world class runners passed—the sleek thoroughbreds, the thin whippets, the models for the rest. TV cameras perched on the top of the hill transmitted every detail cross-country.

The talk turned to records. Were they on a record pace? Could there be a record with this blasting sunshine, this heat, this dryness? A tiny dark woman, a doctor or nurse, said authoritatively that on a day like this, each runner would need ten ounces of fluid every fifteen minutes, not to mention salt.

In other races, once the winners went by, the crowd diminished, the excitement dulled. Not so in the Boston Marathon. The crowd grew steadily, many of the new arrivals bearing signs and banners.
WE LOVE YOU, 345.
GO, BOBBY! TULANE TRACK CLUB
. Family and friends congregated, waiting for their own winners. The Hill was a place where encouragement was needed.

The runners came thick and fast now, each raised fist eliciting a cheer, each new face cause for celebration. The question asked now was, where's the first woman?

Not until 1972 had women been allowed in the marathon. Before then, the athletic union, in its wisdom, had decided that women weren't made for endurance sports; the most a woman could be expected to run was 100 meters. Not that women hadn't run the marathon before '72. As far back as '51, a Canadian woman had sneaked by the ruling board. And Cambridge's Sarah Mae Berman had been in the thick of things for years. Roberta Gibb had run in '66, shocked by the AAU's dictum that “women are not physically able to run long distances and furthermore, they are not allowed.” But they were all unofficial contestants, right up until the infamous K. Switzer—
K
for Kathy, unbeknownst to the male guardians of gender purity—had run with an official number, a number that was almost forcibly ripped off her chest by the outraged race director.

Now the women were in to stay, breaking two-thirty, passing a lot of the men. No one seemed upset by it. It gave the crowd something extra to cheer about when Charlotte Teske went by with her motorcycle escort, something more to wonder about. Where was the supposedly front-running Grete Waitz?

First wheelchair, first man, first woman. Still the crowd stayed, waiting for family, for friends, for all the winners to pass by: the conquerors of middle-aged spread, middle-aged torpor, vanquishers of cigarettes and emphysema. And always the crowd waited for Johnny Kelley, forever young.

A cheer rang out, louder than any since Charlotte Teske had passed. Brian Donagher crested the hill, Pete Collatos at his side. Sweating, winded, Donagher thrust both hands in the air. The crowd lifted him on. Exhausted, he glowed.

“Hey, Brian!” The call came from a woman Spraggue had noted briefly when he'd considered who in the crowd was likely to play Sir Galahad to a thirsting stranger—a tall woman with creamy, pale skin, wearing a long skirt, more formally dressed than the other spectators. She bounded out of the crowd, took a few running steps, waved a blue-tinted plastic water bottle in Donagher's direction and hollered, “I voted for you in every election!”

Donagher, who'd been glancing around as though expecting someone or something, flashed her a grin, and, to the delight of the crowd, altered his course to accept her offering. The woman's heavily lipsticked mouth opened and closed as she strained to keep up with Donagher's slightly slackened pace. Those near her laughed, but Spraggue was too distant to hear the words she addressed adoringly to the senator. Spraggue studied the pantomime; the woman urged Donagher to take the water bottle and run with it, not to bother about returning the bottle to its rightful owner.

“Finish in under three hours and I'll vote for you again!” the woman said loudly. She had a deep friendly voice with the faintest trace of an Irish brogue.

Donagher sped on. Spraggue saw him squeeze at the straw-topped bottle before the profusely sweating Collatos held out a hand for it. They shared the water as they ran. A shout went up: “Donagher! Donagher! Donagher!”

Then the two were out of sight and the cameras that had followed the celebrity runner since he came up the hill, panned back to catch the next human wave.

The finish line. That was the next challenge: getting there. Viewing the crowd, Spraggue feared that he'd been overly sanguine about mobility on Patriot's Day. He took stock.

The car was temptingly close. But once in the car, once downtown, he'd need a place to park—and those, on Marathon Day, were impossible to find. The garages were jammed, closed for the most part. The out-of-town tourists, fed up and amazed that a city would have no provision for parking, would have taken up all the favored tow zones. He didn't believe in blocking fire hydrants or snatching slots reserved for the handicapped. He could park at the police station on Berkeley Street.… No, Menlo might hear of it and haul him in again.…

There was nothing for it but a combination of running and public transportation.

The mass of people heading toward the finish line would dash over to Lake Street and the Boston College line. So Spraggue went in the other direction, downhill to Beacon Street and the last stop on the Cleveland Circle line.

He didn't jog, he raced. The exuberance of the runners was contagious and he put all his pent up energy into the run, making the two miles in well under fifteen minutes, delighted with himself.

And, wonder of wonders, a trolley! There was one stopped dead at the end of the line, the last few stragglers hopping aboard! Spraggue turned on a last burst of speed and made it onto the steamy car before the double door banged shut.

The trolley was stuffed, jammed to suffocation. Spraggue considered the alternatives and decided that a few inches of cattle car would do, as long as it got him downtown to the finish line. He found fifty cents in his pocket, then had to scramble around to locate another quarter. The fares went up so quickly and erratically on the Green Line, you never knew what to shove in the box. And they didn't accept dollar bills.

After a two-minute wait, the car lurched forward. It immediately halted, for no other purpose than to tumble the standing passengers around, then pitched forward again, swaying uncertainly down the track.

From the right-hand windows, the passengers could see the runners as they veered onto Beacon Street. It was an advertisement for good health: Get out there and run and you won't have to endure the stench and unsteadiness of the Green Line!

The runners, though they were by no means the fleetest, traveled faster than the trolley. Unlike their elite predecessors, they were feeling it, slogging along on automatic pilot, with blistered feet and frozen faces, barely able to respond to the crowd's encouragement. In infrequent gaps in the row of spectators, one could see a runner sitting on the curb, pouring water over his head. One man had his shoes off and two attendants splashed water on his bleeding feet.

He hoped the trolley wouldn't tilt with all the passengers bunched up to one side, trying to see out the filthy windows.

Spraggue heard the siren as they passed Washington Street, craned his neck to see where it came from. A fire on Marathon Day could be a disaster, if blaze and engines were separated by the line of runners.

No fire. Collatos could have told him that by the siren, but Spraggue had to wait until he saw the ambulance. It raced up the wrong side of Beacon Street and must have come to a halt nearby because the siren kept blaring in his ears. The train rumbled on for a few hundred feet more, screeched to a stop.

Spraggue, near the front of the car, could see that this was no ordinary traffic-light delay. The police car was pulled across the tracks, blue lights flashing. The MBTA driver gave a deep sigh and leaned back in his seat, shrugging his shoulders and issuing a general curse. The passengers on board groaned as one.

Spraggue asked the driver to open the door. Even if he had to walk the rest of the way in, he was determined to get to the finish line. He started to run, but then he saw the ambulance and the circle of policemen, and curiosity made him delay.

He joined the outer edge of the circle in time to see the man lifted and placed on the stretcher. He could hear the hum of the crowd: Why didn't these runners prepare for the damn race? Some of these jerks couldn't run around the block, much less—

As they lifted the stretcher, he recognized its occupant: Donagher, prone, white-faced, and unconscious. Spraggue froze. Stopped thinking. Almost stopped breathing. Where the hell was Collatos?

“What happened?” He asked the question of the crowd in general. No one knew. Of course there hadn't been any shooting. Just collapsed. Must be the heat. He pressed the radio to his ear, but the commentator rattled on about the wind and the amazing two-second win by Alberto Salazar over Dick Beardsley.

“Where will they take him?” Spraggue hollered to a white-shirted ambulance attendant.

“Red Cross at Coolidge Corner,” a woman shouted back. “I think.”

Spraggue started to run. Coolidge Corner couldn't be more than a mile away. His feet moved faster than his thoughts. They were stuck on overwhelming relief, relief that there had been no sniper, nothing but a little heat stroke, a setback in the campaign but no tragedy. He wondered where Pete Collatos was. Had the two men agreed that if one went down, the other would finish the race? Hell of a way to bodyguard.

His aching legs told him he must have covered at least three quarters of a mile, when he saw the same silent circle, heard the same siren.

The body on the ground wore Collatos' number. The faces in the circle were grim. Two men, one a perspiring runner, the other a samaritan from the crowd, performed CPR in a regular, hopeless rhythm. A third man grasped Collatos' wrist. He mumbled to himself, shook his head, glanced anxiously about for help.

The red and white ambulance, marked Massachusetts Bay Para/Medical, skidded as it came to a halt. A man and a woman in tan uniforms jumped out, leaving the doors flung wide. The woman took in the situation at a glance, opened the rear door, removed a strecher. One of the CPR administrators yielded to the tan-uniformed man. In seconds, Collatos was on the stretcher, wheeled to the mouth of the ambulance, swallowed. The woman rigged an IV as the vehicle sped off. The civilian who'd given CPR sat on the curb, looked ready to vomit. The runner who'd given aid patted him on the shoulder, rejoined the race.

Spraggue, his heart pounding as if he'd run the full course, his mouth as dry as if he'd eaten sand, stripped off his T-shirt and used it to pick up the blue-tinted plastic water bottle that lay next to a drain near the curb, where it must have fallen from Collatos' shaking hand. He turned and took a few running steps back toward Heartbreak Hill, stopped.

The tall woman who had handed Donagher the bottle would be gone; he could feel it in his bones.

TWELVE

On the day of Pete Collatos' funeral, spring took a giant step backward into February.

The tulips dotting the grounds of the New Calvary Cemetery in Mattapan lay flat against the earth, their petals defeated by the chill gusty wind. A field of glistening black umbrellas, useless against the slanting downpour, blossomed instead, under a dour gray sky.

Media representatives were there en masse, shielding their cameras and their waterlogged spiral notebooks. They'd been there all along.

FIRST MARATHON CASUALTY IN 86 YEARS! the intial headline had screamed. SENATOR'S ILLNESS LINKED TO MARATHON DEATH had followed. And then, with the question mark accented in heavy black ink: AMPHETAMINE POISONING CAUSE OF DEATH? And so on. Continued on page 18. And photographs … endless photographs. Of a squinting Collatos, proudly displaying his gold detective's shield. Of Donagher, attempting a weak smile in his hospital bed. Nothing too petty or too personal to escape the heavy-handed public embrace.

By the day of the funeral, the headlines had moved on. The mysterious marathon death was relegated to the Metro pages, where the columns of print contracted, grew more speculative, finally disappeared. Juicier items: murders, rapes, airline crashes, coups d'état—all the ugliness of life that is passed off as the day's news, conspired to erase the reality of Collatos' death.

What media coverage remained ensured a large turnout at the funeral. People who would have stayed away entirely or slipped off after the Mass at St. Columbkille's, followed the solemn cortege down Market Street, lured by the TV cameras.

Donagher, Spraggue thought, with grudging admiration, would have come, illness or no, TV cameras or no. The politician stood, head bowed, immobile, at the graveside. He'd lost weight in the past week; his clothes hung on him. Not surprisingly; he'd been admitted to Beth Israel Hospital with a temperature of 105 degrees and blood pressure registering 250 over 140. Four days he'd been hospitalized.

Behind the senator, his pastel wife, Lila, and Murray Eichenhorn, his campaign manager, held a whispered conversation. Eichenhorn kept jerking his head around, searching the crowd, nervously shifting his weight from one foot to the other. Spraggue wondered if the man envisioned another attack on Donagher, was terrified that he might be in the line of fire. A sniper would have had to be suicidal to take a shot at Donagher here, with half the funeral company wearing the dress blues of the Boston Police.

Candidate Frank Bartolo would never have ventured out to the cemetery to freeze in the rain if it weren't for the TV cameras. Spraggue had seen him conversing with Governor Edwards after the Mass, noted the governor's vehement nods and jabbing pointed fingers as he explained to his protégé the wisdom of denying Donagher a monopoly of the six o'clock news. The governor had attended the Mass to bestow his charismatic presence on the less than assertive Bartolo, to ensure that the cameras recorded the fact that the influential governor and former State Representative Bartolo were inseparable. He'd managed to turn the church ceremony into a tasteless parody of a wedding: pews on the right for supporters of Donagher, pews on the left for the bridegroom, Frank Bartolo, the governor's puppet.