Strangled - Brian McGrory [13]
Standing on Stuart Street, with a frigid wind cutting through my overcoat and rustling my hair, I began to wonder if my life wasn’t becoming a compilation of mistakes, and if my own past was exposing me rather than protecting me.
A cab finally pulled up to the curb. I settled into the backseat and felt the heat on my face and legs, which probably should have felt good, but really didn’t feel like anything at all. I knew only this much: not in a long, long time had I felt so very much alone.
4
The rest of the afternoon, it’s worth noting, was an utter disaster.
Peter Martin and I tried every which way to figure out how we could get some sort of story into print pointing out that the paper had received the original driver’s license of a young woman whose murder remains unsolved. But beyond that one line, there was really nothing else to say. We didn’t know the sender. We knew virtually nothing about the murder. And we had no idea if the sender knew anything more about the murder than we did. The whole thing could have been a cruel hoax.
Or maybe not. So around we went, getting nothing more than dizzy and despondent.
All of which is a long way of explaining that when Mongillo pulled up to my desk around about seven o’clock and advised that it would do me some good personally and professionally to accompany him to what he described as a “well-catered affair,” I had neither the energy nor the wherewithal to say no. I was supposed to be in the first-class cabin of a Boeing 757 soaring toward my honeymoon. Instead, I was bound for a stuffy dinner replete with fake smiles and manufactured small talk. Sometimes, too many times, life just doesn’t seem fair.
They say the most dangerous place in Boston is the position ahead of Vinny Mongillo in a buffet line. Well, all right, maybe they don’t say it, but I do, so I felt especially vulnerable as I stood beside him at a particularly handsome buffet in the grand ballroom of the old Ritz-Carlton hotel in Boston.
Vinny was actually making moaning sounds as he inspected the contents of each serving dish before spooning huge amounts of food onto his groaning plate. I still hadn’t regained my appetite, which made me look something akin to a dieting debutante. Mongillo kept looking at me like I was completely out of my mind.
We were here, I had come to learn, for Hal Harrison’s time, time being the old-school Boston parlance for a retirement party or some such person-specific celebration.
Of course, most retiring cops had their time thrown for them in the overdone environs of Lombardo’s in East Boston or the Chateau de Ville in suburban Randolph. But Harrison’s was no ordinary time. First off, he was the retiring police commissioner. Second, his had been a career doused in glory and seasoned by respect. Third, he was an unannounced candidate for mayor of Boston, so this party actually doubled as a political fund-raiser, meaning Mongillo and I were doubling as working reporters — though the only work my cohort appeared to be doing was lugging around his massive plate.
“Do you mind if I confide something to you,” Mongillo said in a low voice as we approached the end of the line.
My reply didn’t matter, so I said nothing as I spooned a few leaves of lettuce onto the empty expanse of my plate.
“You’re a gold-plated idiot,” he said, looking at the small amount of food I had. “This is great stuff. You’ve got swordfish picatta, you’ve got a rare prime rib, you have twice-baked potatoes, and shiitake mushrooms. The paper’s paying our freight. And you’re eating like Paris Hilton before a day at the beach.”
“I’m just trying to leave a little food for the poor people behind us,” I replied.
He didn’t get it, or maybe he did. In either case, he said nothing.
We took some seats at a table filled with men in tight navy blazers and loosely knotted repp ties — cops all, specifically detectives. You could tell from a mile away. Each one of them knew Vinny by name; each one of them seemed glad to see him; each one of them didn’t have