Strangled - Brian McGrory [36]
I thought of the look on Mac Foley’s face from across the room the night before, the fury in Commissioner Harrison’s voice as he warned us off that day, the grotesque way in which poor Lauren Hutchens was splayed across that chair, the notes that were so brief but said so much.
And I thought too that a knife, any knife, especially this knife, was like that proverbial double-edged sword. The closer I got, the more danger I would undoubtedly find myself in.
11
I was in the middle of this dream when I was awakened by the ringing telephone. I looked at the digital clock beside my bed and it said 5:40 a.m. The first thing I thought was that I had to get myself to Suffolk Downs that day and bet the trifecta, my mind was working on that kind of level. I mean, this was a very meta moment, but meta what, I wasn’t sure.
Second thing I thought of was that I was going to ring Peter Martin’s scrawny little neck, because there was absolutely no one else in the world this could be, and there was precisely no good reason for him to call. I reached for the cordless phone and mistakenly knocked it to the floor, where it kept ringing, ringing, ringing — the sound penetrating through my eye sockets and into my skull. When I finally grabbed it and said hello in a voice still thick with sleep, all I heard in return was a dial tone.
I flopped back down in the dark room, muttering to myself, “That goddamned bastard.” In other words, a terrific way to start the new day.
Seconds later, the phone rang anew. “What,” I said.
“Turn on the radio.”
It was, as predicted, Peter Martin, failing in what was becoming too typical a way to wish me a good morning or to inquire about my relative health or spirits, or even offer an apology for not prevailing on the publisher to run the most important story in the city that day. No, just an order to listen to the radio.
“There’s a lot of stations on the radio,” I replied, caustic now.
“Any special one I should find?”
“FM 99. The Barry Bor Show. Hurry up.”
Even in my foggy state, I didn’t like where this was heading. Barry Bor was a dim-witted cross between Howard Stern and Bill O’Reilly, minus their refined manners and classic good looks. He made hundreds of thousands of dollars every year by basically insulting people and saying outrageous things. He was a hero to morons; a guilty pleasure for quasi-smart people on their morning commute to work; a torturer of politicians; a flagellator of the rest of the Boston and national press. Everyone, in his mind, was stupid — everyone, of course, but him.
I’ll put aside the obvious question of what in God’s good name Peter Martin was doing listening to Barry Bor at five-forty on a weekday morning. The guy needed more help than was probably possible — Martin, not Bor, though probably Bor as well. I quickly hung up the phone, grabbed the remote to my Bose clock radio, and turned to FM 99.
“Ladies and gentlemen, you are the chosen ones who know intuitively when you tune into this show each and every morning that you’re listening to something special, something that only the elite thinkers in this city can truly comprehend. And now you can be more assured of that fact than ever before. Could I ever possibly feel more vindicated?”
Lying in bed, Bor’s admittedly sonorous voice filling the room, I felt a pit in my stomach. Whatever this was, it wasn’t going to be good.
“Before we go on, let’s make a few stipulations. Let’s accept as fact that what the stupid analysts on all those fatuous cable shows call ‘the mainstream media,’ let’s accept that it’s really not all that mainstream anymore. What those liberal blowhards at papers like The New York Times and The Washington Post and the Boston Record and at the network news shows like CBS and NBC, what they are is tired, old, biased curmudgeons — liars, plagiarists, unreliable navel-gazers who wouldn’t know a piece of news if it crawled up their fat asses as they sit at their desks reading The New Republic