Strangled - Brian McGrory [145]
That was, of course, Vinny Mongillo, parking himself in a nearby chair while he tossed one of Huck’s tennis balls high in the air, catching it effortlessly himself. “What are you thinking?” he asked.
“Of you leaving me alone.”
“Oh, come on, my little amigo. So we didn’t have it first. Get over it. We’ll have it best. We’ve got a million other things in that story that no one else will have.”
I sat in silence, watching Huck watching Vinny toss his ball.
Vinny asked, “Did you remember to put a noun and a verb in every sentence? Did you remember to put skinny Vinny’s byline right up high, preferably on top? If you did that, the story’s going to sing like a diva in Las Vegas.”
My phone rang. God bless my phone.
“Flynn here.”
“Sergeant Ralph Akin, Boston Police Department. This call is not on a recorded line, and I’m assuming yours isn’t either. We met overnight when you came to visit your colleague.”
“Hello, Sergeant. Nice to hear from you.”
“Same. Listen, I have a proposition for you. My very excellent friend, Mac Foley, is currently being detained as the commissioner and his lackeys cook up some bullshit charges. Mac would like to chat with you, in person, in the lockup.”
I asked, “What’s the proposition?”
He hesitated. I wasn’t meaning to be difficult, but sometimes I just am. Okay, more than sometimes. Sergeant Akin said, “Could you come over here ASAP and meet on the sly with Foley? That’s the proposition.”
“I’m on my way.”
“Call this number from your cell phone when you near headquarters. Enter through the rear delivery door.”
We hung up and I turned to Vinny and said, “Hold the oregano and watch the dog for me. I’ve got a little more reporting to do tonight.”
As I hustled through the gloomy newsroom, I could hear Vinny saying to himself, “Christ, a guy can starve in this life.”
As I walked up to the darkened delivery bay in the rear of Boston Police headquarters, a garage door rolled up about four feet off the ground and a lone arm extended from the dark environs, beckoning me inside. I crouched down and did as told.
Inside, Sergeant Ralph Akin, a.k.a. Ralphie, was there to greet me, with precisely none of the frivolity he had displayed earlier that day when I was meeting with Vinny Mongillo. In fact, he looked and sounded deadly serious. “Mac Foley is my friend,” he said. “He’s a fantastic cop. Ask anyone in the building. The commissioner is trying to stick it up his ass on the way out the door.”
We walked across the cavernous delivery bay, through a set of double doors, and down a narrow, fluorescent-lit hallway. Akin cut me off, flung open a door on my side of the corridor, and guided me into a tiny room that looked to be the observation area on an interrogation room on the other side of a twoway mirror.
“You’ll have some privacy in here,” Akin said. “I’ll go get Mac.” He paused at the door and said, “The brass is out to dinner. You won’t have a whole lot of time. Listen, Jack, and I think I can call you Jack. Any friend of Mongillo is good enough to be a friend of mine. Like I told you, they don’t make them any better than Mac Foley. He really needs your help.”
I didn’t say anything, though I don’t think he expected me to. In a moment he was gone.
Less than a minute later, the door opened and Mac Foley came walking in, looking far more pissed off than panicked, his expression bringing me back to the prior Monday night, at Hal Harrison’s retirement dinner, when Foley shot me an icy stare from across the crowded ballroom. Who knew then that this is where that brief relationship would lead: a clandestine meeting in the bowels of police headquarters while one party — fortunately not me — stared down the barrel of multiple murder charges.
There were four chairs in a semicircle facing the wall of glass, and Foley sat in the one closest to the door. I sat in the farthest. He said, “Jack, I don’t know what Hal Harrison is telling you I did. I don’t know yet