Strangled - Brian McGrory [4]
“Who’s been in here?” Foley asked him, nodding toward the bedroom.
The cop ticked off five different names, hesitating as he went on.
Foley said, “Get everyone assembled into the front room. We’re going to need to talk about discretion.”
With that, he pulled the bedroom door closed, but the past had already escaped.
2
There are big days and then there are big days, the latter totaling maybe a dozen in an entire life. I’m talking about the kinds of days that can be called to mind for better or for worse years after the fact — wedding days, divorce days, birthdays of children, the death days of parents, the days that coveted promotions were given or dreaded pink slips handed out. In other words, transformative days that alter the direction of an entire life.
This, by way of explanation, would be one of those days.
I was scheduled to be married. The lucky woman? One Maggie Kane, who entered my life approximately a year before, and then every bit as quickly fled from it. When I finally caught her in the Sixteenth Arrondissement of Paris in a story too complicated to get into here, I vowed to myself that I would never let her go.
So much for that vow. Now I wanted nothing more than to let her go. Problem was, I was due to marry her in about seven hours. I’m not saying that I’m normal, just desperate, and the whirring hands of Father Time were hardly in my favor.
It was 8:00 a.m., March 21. I stepped from wind-whipped Hanover Street, the main thoroughfare through Boston’s North End, into Caffe Vittoria, the oldest and best coffee shop in town and the anchor to my morning routine. I’d order a double cappuccino, take my place at a window table to read the morning papers, listen to some of the ancient goombahs tell me that I write like the Irish cook, and then head off to the newsroom of the Boston Record, where I’d spend another day digging another journalistic ditch until I finally had a hole big enough to bury another villain. Next day, I’d do it all over again. It may not be much, but I consider it a pretty good life.
A life, mind you, that I suddenly realized I wanted to hang on to, in all its ever-so-subtle glory and unsubtle individuality.
“You look like a man about to lose his freedom.”
That was Kenny, the server who works the espresso and cappuccino machines like Arthur Fiedler used to work the Boston Pops — except Arthur had a shock of white hair where Kenny has none, and Arthur had a refined build, while Kenny looks like he just stepped off the pages of Steroids Monthly. At your neighborhood Starbucks, he’d be called a barista, or maybe that’s a venti. I don’t know. At Vittoria, given that he’s about six feet four inches tall and even his eyebrows seem to have muscles, most people simply call him “sir.”
“No, just my virginity,” I replied.
Wedding day. Virginity. Get it? Everyone in the joint doubled over in knee-slapping hilarity.
Well, okay, nobody doubled over in any sort of hilarity. Actually, they didn’t even laugh. Truth is, I’ve known them all too long and too well, these faux crotchety old guys with names like Sal and Vinny, and they’ve heard too much of my schtick before. Why I even continue to try is testament to my true spirit of American optimism. Either that, or I can’t help myself.
Kenny put a big cup of cappuccino on the counter for me before I even asked, along with my usual bagel, and I retired to my regular table in the window, opened up my New York Times, and didn’t — or maybe couldn’t — read a word. The lead story was about another car bomb explosion at a checkpoint in Iraq that I couldn’t pronounce. I scanned down the page and was surprised I didn’t see a headline that said something like, “Jack Flynn about to surrender life as he knows it.” Drop head: “Is he nuts?”
A guy named Tony, a retired plumber, put his pastry down at a nearby table and called out, “Jack, this is a wonderful thing you’re doing. It’ll be great to get another marriage under your belt. You’ll get