Strangled - Brian McGrory [104]
The EMTs were pumping and breathing feverishly, synchronizing their moves, talking to one another in increasingly loud voices. They did this until they didn’t, until the man pumping his chest placed his ear against Edgar’s heart, lifted his head, and announced to the others, “We’ve lost him. There’s nothing there.”
I pushed past the cop, plaintively yelling, “No! No! Keep trying!”
The three EMTs looked up at me simultaneously. The one on Edgar’s chest climbed off, stood up, and said to me, “I’m sorry. All his vitals have disappeared for too long. He’s gone. There’s nothing we can do.”
I looked down at Edgar Sullivan, sprawled on the floor of a Boston CVS, his clothing haphazardly torn away from his body, and tears immediately began flowing down my face. I thought of the help he had given me in a series of stories I wrote bringing down the mayor. I thought of his various ex-wives, his love of life, the extraordinary wisdom and wherewithal that he brought to his job. I knelt down and kissed his forehead, still warm, and whispered, “Thank you, Edgar. Thank you for everything you did.”
As I got up, the same uniformed officer who had tried questioning me shouted out, “This is a homicide scene. I need to ask everyone to step back and leave the body exactly as it is.”
I stepped away, toward the front counter. The cop walked over and asked the clerk, who had been standing there all this time, what had happened.
“It was a robbery,” the clerk said in a thick accent. “A man in a mask came in and tried robbing the store.”
The cop had a little notebook in his hand, jotting things down in a way not unlike I might have done if I was covering the story — which I wasn’t, but maybe I should have been. He looked at me and asked, “A robbery?”
I thought about that for a long moment. No, in fact, it wasn’t. A robbery would have involved the masked man trying to take money from the cash register. A robbery would have involved the gunman paying closer attention to the store clerk. That never happened. Instead, the assailant seemed hell-bent on executing me.
But was this the kind of information I wanted to share with the police? If I did, it would mean that I’d be thrust even further into the center of a story I was trying to unravel. It might also render me useless, because suddenly I’d be bogged down with detectives, answering questions rather than doing my job and asking them.
So I nodded my head. “Apparently,” I said.
Please note the Bill Clinton–esque answer. In a court of law, it would allow me to worm my way out, even if in the court of common sense, it would still be known as a lie.
Before he pinned me down any further, I changed the subject, saying, “The guy you’re looking for is going to have a gunshot wound to his wrist.” Then I added, “I need some air. I’m just going to step outside for a moment.”
I walked past Edgar Sullivan’s body, my eyes never for a moment leaving his. Another cop held the front door for me. The sidewalk around the store was cordoned off by yellow crime-scene tape and protected by a phalanx of uniformed officers. Police lights still cut through the air, though the ambulance had already left. I leaned against the front of the building and sucked in the cool night air as hard and as fast as I could.
Edgar Sullivan was dead. He died protecting me. And someone was going to pay long and hard for what he had just done.
29
The first nonstop flight from Boston to Las Vegas leaves at 7:10 in the morning, and the passenger list isn’t exactly a roster of Boston’s social register. There were guys in tank tops, women with fanny packs, kids with two days’ worth of snot hardened around their noses. And this was first class,