AT SIX A.M. RYAN WAS AT THE MICROPHONE. THIS TIME EMMA WAS IN
the studio chair next to him, Ryan’s cohost having surrendered his seat to her for the first segment of
Jocks in the Morning.
After the producer gave the signal, Ryan began the show with his own twist on the lines Emma had scripted.
“Any Bruins fans out there?” said Ryan.
Emma shot him a curious look, but Ryan put her at ease with a smile that told her not to worry.
“As a boy from Texas,” he told his listeners, “I didn’t dream about growing up to be a hockey player. Baseball was in my blood. My granddaddy played catcher for the Alpine Cowboys in the heyday of semipro ball, back when just about any town in Texas with more than two gas stations had a team. If you called my daddy right now, he’d tell you how his old man took him out to the barn when he was a boy, stuffed his catcher’s mitt with pecan shells, and threw fastballs until his little hand was tough enough to catch Nolan Ryan with the wind at his back.
“But living in New England, you learn to love hockey as much as baseball. Any old-timers out there remember a Boston Bruin tough guy named Eddie Shore? Once, in a game long ago, Shore didn’t like the way a Toronto player stood him up at the blue line, so he got even with a vicious hit from behind to a player named Ace Bailey. Bailey slammed headfirst to the ice and fractured his skull. Folks said it sounded like a watermelon splattering on pavement. The benefit game played in Bailey’s honor the following season evolved into today’s NHL All-Star Game, and Ace went on to the Hall of Fame. But he would never play hockey again. That cheap shot from Shore ended a spectacular career.
“I woke up feeling a little bit like Ace Bailey this morning, and I have a purple knot on my forehead to prove it. In just a few minutes, Jock and I will take your calls about the worst cheap shots in sports history. But right now, let me tell you about the one I took last night.”
Ryan’s producer was suddenly signaling him with two raised fingers. Several phone lines were lit up, but the expression on her face and the timing of the interruption made caller number two’s identity clear.
“Looks like my story will have to wait. Got a call I need to take,” he said, as he hit the button. “Babes, is that you?”
“Yes,” Babes said on the line. “Tell the police not to bother tracing this call. I’m at a pay phone, but I’ll be long gone by the time they get here.”
It seemed like paranoia, but when Ryan glanced at Emma, she seemed to confirm that the trace was already under way.
“Don’t worry about that,” Ryan said into his microphone. “But—”
“You have to help me,” said Babes, his voice strained. “I’m hungry, I’m tired, and I don’t know where to hide anymore.”
“I can help you,” said Ryan.
“I just want you to tell the police to stop looking for me.”
“I can’t do that, Babes.”
“I didn’t kill Yaz!”
“We know. That’s why you should come home,” said Ryan.
“I can’t. He’s going to kill me.”
“Who is going to kill you?”
Babes’s voice was racing, the words coming too fast. “Him. The guy. That man who killed Yaz. Why else would he come looking for me at the—” He stopped himself.
“At the what?” said Ryan.
“I can’t tell you my hiding space. I might have to go back there.”
A big part of Ryan wanted to pursue the location of the hiding spot, but something else was more pressing. “Babes, do you have any idea who the man is who came looking for you?”
“No.”
“Did he sound Russian?”
“I never heard his voice.”
“Is it the same guy you saw at the crash?”
“No. Totally different guy.”
“If you saw that man again—the drunk driver who took Chelsea’s cell phone out of her hand—could you identify him?”
“Yes. I told you all this last time. That’s what got Yaz into so much trouble with the blackmail. I know exactly what the guy looks like. I know his name.”
“Can you tell it to me?”
“No! Do you want me to end up like Yaz?”
Perhaps Ryan was pushing too hard, putting pressure on Babes to reveal information that he was not ready to divulge. But Ryan couldn’t help it. “I need you to tell me his name, Babes.”
“I can’t! He’ll kill me!”
“Not if you say his name on the radio he won’t. Once the cat’s out of the bag, there’s no point in killing you.”
“Are you sure?”
Ryan glanced at Emma, but he already knew what she was thinking. “You have to go public. He killed Yaz to keep his name a secret. So let out the secret, and then there’s nothing he can do.”
“Okay,” said Babes. “You should…”
“Should what?” said Ryan.
“You should…look for…”
“Look for who?” said Ryan.
Babes took a moment, as if the wheels were turning in his head.
“Go ahead,” said Ryan.
“Look for…a nicer nose ring,” said Babes. He hung up, and there was silence on the air.
Ryan was sure that his listeners had interpreted Babes’s remark as the equivalent of “Go fly a kite.” But Ryan knew better.
“We’ll break for a commercial now,” said Ryan. “Jock will be here to take your calls when our show returns. I’ll see you knuckleheads tomorrow morning.”
He switched off the microphone and looked at Emma.
“We have some work to do,” he said.
“We?”
“Yeah,” said Ryan. “How good are you at anagrams?”
BRANDON LOMAX’S HAND WAS SHAKING ON THE STEERING WHEEL.
He needed a drink, but he refused to feed that beast. He had to keep a clear head—and not solely because he was cruising up the interstate toward Boston.
Babes was going to name him—he could feel it.
Lomax’s campaign manager had called at 6:30
A.M.
to tell him about
Jocks in the Morning.
By the grace of God, when Ryan pushed for the name of the drunk driver, Babes had chickened out and told Ryan to go pick his nose, or something like that. But it was only a matter of time until Babes would find his nerve and blurt out the name.
And then it would be over for Brandon Lomax.
His cell rang. It was his wife, Sarah, on his truly private line.
“I thought you were going to a staff meeting,” she said.
“I…uh…”
“The truth, Brandon. You rushed out this morning claiming to have some early meeting that you’d completely forgotten about. Twenty minutes later your campaign manager calls the house and wants to know where you are. What’s going on?”
Caught. More lies would have been pointless. “I need to talk to Ryan James. Man to man.”
Sarah didn’t argue, but the reservations were palpable in her voice. “Are you sure you want to do that?”
“I’m not going to talk to him about the anonymous tips. I have the inside story there already. But this blackmail stuff is preposterous. Babes has to be making that up.”
“Do you think…”
“Do I think what?”
“Could the blackmailer have called someone on your staff? Someone who spoke on your behalf—without you knowing about it?”
Lomax checked the exit signs on the interstate. He was getting close. “Do you mean Josef?”
“It’s just a theory. He has an awful lot invested in your winning. Then along comes Babes and his anonymous tips, and all could be lost.”
“All is
not
lost,” he said, his tone harsher than intended. “That’s why I need to speak to Ryan and get this straight.”
“But he must know all about the tips that say you were the drunk driver. If Babes hasn’t told him, Emma probably has. What are you going to do if he confronts you with that?”
“I can handle it, Sarah.”
“I’m not sure you can, sweetheart. Not when your answer is that you were in a state of drunken blackout and don’t remember anything about the night of the crash. I’m your wife, and I’m not even sure I…”
He waited for her to finish, and if he hadn’t been speeding down the interstate at that very moment, he would have closed his eyes to absorb the blow. “Not even sure you believe me—is that what you were going to say?”
“It’s not that I think you’re lying. Maybe you’re suppressing something—subconsciously, I mean—for reasons that have nothing to do with alcohol. I don’t know. I just don’t know.”
He sensed her struggle, but he wasn’t about to change his mind. “It will all work out. I’ll call you when I leave Boston. Love you,” he added, and then he said good-bye and hung up.
Lomax checked his GPS monitor. He was nearing the point where the northbound interstate and several other major thoroughfares ran parallel to an equally wide swath of railroad tracks, creating one big congested artery that fed into endless road construction. The mechanized voice from his dashboard was directing him west, toward Ryan James’s house in the South End. Lomax switched off the GPS and took exit 20 into South Boston. He had a specific bar in mind, but he wasn’t in search of a drink.
He wanted his memory back.
South Boston—Southie to its residents—had a long Irish Catholic history, and even with recent arrivals of Albanians, Lithuanians, and other ethnic groups, it would hardly be unusual to see a hand-painted mural that read
WELCOME TO SOUTH BOSTON
in English and
FÁILTE GO MBOSTON DHEAS
in Irish. The east side, closer to downtown, had seen some gentrification, but the west side remained a hardscrabble neighborhood. Some of America’s oldest public housing was in South Boston, including three of the six most dangerous in the entire city. One was on West Broadway—not too far from a bar called The 6 House.
Lomax stopped his car across the street and gazed out his driver’s side window. Last year’s Christmas lights were still hanging from the front canopy, but they were unlit. The 6 House was closed.
It was here that Lomax’s trouble had begun—three years earlier, on the night of Chelsea James’s accident. Back in the day, The 6 House was known as the Triple O’s, a hangout for James “Whitey” Bulger, a Southie native, the older brother of the Massachusetts State Senate president, and a notorious organized-crime boss who fled with his favorite mistress and about $40 million on the eve of his indictment for racketeering. Even after the Bulger era, the Irish American mob continued to keep a tight grip on local bookies and gambling. Once upon a time, Lomax had felt that grip—almost literally—around his throat. At a table behind those darkened bar windows, he’d pleaded for more time to pay. His debt collectors were a couple of muscle-bound thugs with Southie accents straight out of
The Departed
, and even though old Triple O’s was long gone, Lomax had been well aware that he was in the same building where Bulger’s heavy-handed collector, Stephen “the Rifleman” Flemmi, used to deal with deadbeat debtors. Lomax had arrived wearing a hat and sunglasses, praying to God that no one would recognize the Rhode Island attorney general. Those smart-asses had been so smug.
Goon number one: Tell your daughter to suck my dick and we’ll call it even.
Goon number two: Say what? Lick-’em-and-leave-’em Jenny doesn’t do you for free?
The bastards had laughed in his face, given him another “twenty-four hours,” and walked out, leaving him alone at the table to figure out how he was going to come up with the cash. Lomax ordered a scotch. And another one. Then several more. Finally, a bottle. That was the last he remembered.
Seeing the bar again this morning didn’t jog anything loose from his selective memory. He still had no idea how he and his car got from South Boston to Providence on the night of Chelsea’s accident.
He cranked the engine and headed west over the Broadway Bridge, literally to the other side of tracks, beyond Interstate 93 toward the South End. He drove past the Boston Herald Building, and he could only imagine the field day they would have over another Rhode Island politician headed for the slammer. The era of former Providence mayor Buddy Cianci, his tomato sauce, bad toupees, and RICO conviction had long passed. They needed fresh meat.
I’m screwed
, he thought as he sat at a traffic light.
His blackout aside, logic, if not the lost DNA evidence, pointed to Lomax as the drunk driver. Why else would Babes have waited three years to contact Emma? Only recently was Lomax’s face all over the TV and newspapers as a front-running candidate for the U.S. Senate. Seeing Lomax over and over again must have finally prompted Babes to tell Emma, “I know who did it.” On the other hand, according to Lomax’s sources, the subsequent e-mail message—complete with details about the vomit, yet lacking any of the pedantic verbiage that was typical of Babes’s writing—could not possibly have come from Babes.
All of which left the proverbial sixty-four-thousand-dollar question: If Babes wasn’t pointing the finger explicitly at Lomax, who was?
Lomax parked on the street and headed up the sidewalk. Braddock Park was a typical leafy residential square in the South End, where even a resident might walk into the wrong redbrick nineteenth-century row house if he didn’t check the address. The uniformity of the bowfront architecture gave the neighborhood its character and integrity. Added personality could be found in the ornamental details of doors, windows, and wrought-iron balustrades and railings. Small gardens and balconies lent more charm. Lomax was oblivious to it all as he climbed the steep stoop to the second-floor entrance of the James residence.
He rang the doorbell and waited. No one answered. Ryan had announced midshow that he was finished for the day, and when Lomax called the radio station, the receptionist confirmed that Ryan had left early.
Lomax was about to ring the bell again when he heard footsteps inside. The lock clacked, and the door opened. An attractive Latina with sweat on her brow and a warm but tired expression on her face was looking back at him. Lomax surmised she was the housekeeper.
“Can I help you?” she said.
“I’m looking for Ryan James.”
She suddenly appeared nervous. Lomax assumed that she recognized him from his campaign commercials or the news.
“Mr. James is not here.”
Lomax was about to ask the next logical question, but a brain hiccup put him on an entirely different track. He suddenly realized that the woman wasn’t nervous because she recognized him. She was afraid that he would recognize
her.
“You work for Connie Garrisen,” said Lomax, it finally clicking.
“Yes.”
“You were there,” he said.
“Excuse me?”
“Yes. You were with Connie Garrisen three years ago.”
She smiled awkwardly. “Three years is a long time, sir.”
“You were definitely there,” he said, the memory flooding back to him. “I was too drunk to drive, but I was afraid that if I called a cab the media might get wind of the Rhode Island attorney general stumbling out of that Southie bar. So I called Connie for a ride home. I knew he’d be driving south for the PawSox game. I waited in my car. When he finally showed up, he had his housekeeper with him. That was you.”
“No sé,”
she said, her English suddenly escaping her. But Lomax knew it was only out of loyalty to her boss.
“Thank you,” he said, and he sincerely meant it. Then he turned and headed down the stoop.
“Señor
, you want me to tell Mr. James you came?”
“No,” said Lomax. “I’ll take it from here.”