I left Mongillo and Nam at the bar mulling various dessert wines — Moscatos and Brachettos and other types I pretended to know even though I didn’t have a clue. And I headed out the door in hopes of finally putting this long, absurd, and occasionally dangerous day behind me.
My car was already parked right out front, so I fidgeted in my pocket for a ten-dollar bill and asked the valet for the keys.
“I don’t have them,” the kid said.
Great.
“Who does?” I mean, it’s a perfectly legitimate question to ask a professional valet about the keys to my own car.
“He does,” he said, and as he said it, he pointed to someone or something behind me. I turned suspiciously around and found myself face-to-face with none other than Edgar Sullivan.
“Hello, Edgar,” I said. “You’re my designated driver?”
“I’m your guardian angel,” he replied.
He was sitting on a bench tucked amid some shrubbery and surrounded by two ornate buckets that were nothing more than glorified ashtrays. Massachusetts forbids smoking in all public places, and this bench was obviously put here as a little haven for the nicotine addicted. It’s one bad habit I never took up, though perhaps I still had time.
Edgar stood up slowly, the way old men always seem to do, his knee audibly cracking as he breathed a tiny sigh. He smoothed out his pants and walked stiffly toward me, thrusting out his right hand and saying, “I heard you almost melted to death today. I’m you, I’d be really steamed.”
“Didn’t I see you on Comedy Central last week?”
He smiled, not quite embarrassedly, but almost. “You sound like my second wife,” he said.
“Was that the really young one?” I asked.
“No, she was twenty-eight,” he replied.
I left the obvious question unstated.
A few stragglers were leaving the restaurant and handing their stubs to the valets. Others waited patiently and impatiently in the cool night air for their various BMWs, Audis, and Mercedes to be wheeled around. Edgar jingled my keys and said, “Come on, I’ll get you home safely.”
Truer words had never been spoken, but in retrospect, the cost was almost too much to bear.
We were floating down the wonderful riverside highway known as Storrow Drive, talking about nothing and everything at the same time. Ends up, I was learning, the young wife, the third one, was twenty-three years old. The first one was thirty. The fourth was an age-appropriate fifty-four.
“The next meaningful relationship I have is going to be completely platonic — with a dog,” Edgar said. He shook his head and added, “Sounds good when I say it, but don’t bet on it. I can’t help myself. I love wedding days. The celebrations, the well-wishers, the high expectations. It’s the marriages that don’t turn out so well.”
The Charles River was on our left, with Cambridge beyond it. The Back Bay of Boston — a neighborhood, not a body of water — was on our right. We were rolling toward the waterfront when I checked the clock on the car and said to Edgar, “Do you mind pulling off on Beacon Hill for a minute? I want to grab tomorrow’s paper.”
And he did. I wanted to see what the Phantom Fiend would see when he opened the Boston Record in a few hours — or more to the point, what he wouldn’t see, which was his miniature manifesto, if a manifesto can be done in miniature, which I don’t think it can. I wanted to know what he’d be reading instead of his own words, to get some empathic sense of what might set him off, and how.
I requested Beacon Hill because for whatever reason, the Record delivers the third batch of papers fresh off the press to a twenty-four-hour drugstore on the back slope of Beacon Hill. The first batch, by the way, goes directly into the newsroom, and keeping with tradition, the second batch always gets hand-delivered to the newsroom of the Boston Traveler, our main competition. They, in turn, send a stack from their early run over to us.
Edgar pulled off onto Cambridge Street, which isn’t in Cambridge, but go figure. I don’t know if Cambridge has a Boston Street, but I kind of doubt it. He glided up in front of the all-night CVS, stuck the car in a no-parking zone, and turned off the ignition.
“I’m going to run in,” I said.
He opened the driver’s door and said, “Not without me you’re not.”
The navy blue Record delivery truck was just pulling away as we stepped through the front door of the CVS. I can’t vow that this was the most upbeat place in the world at five after midnight. An Arab-looking clerk stood behind the counter reading that month’s Cosmopolitan — the one with the “Seven Sexual Secrets That Men Want to Tell” on the cover. And yes, he was a man, undoubtedly with secrets of his own. There was an elderly woman with a kerchief in her hair checking the use-by dates on every six-pack of Pepsi at a display near the front of the store. Otherwise, the place looked barren.
The Record s were still in a stack near the door, bound by plastic wire. As I leaned down and pulled the plastic apart, Edgar said, “You know what I want? A Hershey’s bar with almonds.”
I replied, “You know what I want? I want to catch the Boston Strangler, I want to save any number of women from their miserable deaths, and then I want to win the Pulitzer Prize.”
Actually, that’s not what I said. What I said was, “Shit, you know what else I need? Some aspirin.”
A more inane conversation had never taken place among two people not married to each other.
Edgar lumbered up to the candy counter in search of his chosen bar. I grabbed a paper and scanned the front page on the very off chance that Justine Steele had changed her mind or that Peter Martin had grown a set of brass balls. Neither appeared to have happened. So I wandered the aisle where the sign said FIRST AID AND PAINKILLERS for something to quell the headache that their inaction, among other things, had caused.
That’s where I was when the killer came into the store, in Aisle 2b, looking for a goddamned bottle of extra-strength Excedrin.
I didn’t hear the door open. I didn’t see what the security camera would later show, which is that once inside the store, he pulled a ski mask over his head. I didn’t see him pull the gun out from the shin-length black trench coat he was wearing. I didn’t see it because I was shopping for a bottle of Excedrin. If so much of being a great reporter is just making sure you’re at the right place at the right time, then I failed miserably here. Or maybe I didn’t, because I’m at least alive to tell about it; it’s all a matter of perspective.
The first inkling of trouble I got was the loud voice calling out, “Don’t do nothin’ stupid.”
I looked up from the aforementioned Aisle 2b and saw the similarly aforementioned man in the black trench coat waving what looked like a semiautomatic pistol. He was talking to the counter clerk. Edgar was standing near a magazine rack off to the side, watching the situation unfold and remaining very calm.
If it was a robbery, I was perfectly willing to let it happen, and I suspect Edgar Sullivan was as well. Let the guy get his $280 or whatever from the till, make off into the night, and buy another week’s worth of heroin to make his miserable life remotely bearable.
But oddly enough, rather than tell the clerk to give him all his cash, he scanned the store, his gaze seeming to pass over Edgar and the older woman in the kerchief, and settling on me, still standing, appropriately enough, in the painkiller section.
“Everyone up here,” he barked. “I need people up here — now.”
His voice was shallower than a robber’s should probably be, and his build was slighter than he probably would have preferred — though his gun was undoubtedly every bit as powerful as the next one.
I didn’t move, or at least not quickly enough. He hollered, “Get up here, now.”
I began moving slowly up the aisle toward the front of the store, sans the Excedrin I came in for. I figured my headache was the least of my problems right now.
As I walked up, I noticed Edgar drifting farther off to the side, away from the cash registers. I saw out of the corner of my eyes the older woman slipping toward the door, and then out. The assailant heard the door open, whirled around, saw her leave, and did nothing but say “Shit” just barely loud enough for anyone to hear.
“Faster!”
I was staring into the distant barrel of the pistol. I don’t think the president of Smith & Wesson had seen as many guns as I had in the last few days. I picked up the pace a bit, but I wasn’t exactly setting a land-speed record. Time, I figured, bought opportunity. I just wasn’t clear what that opportunity was yet, though I had reasonable hopes that Edgar Sullivan might figure it out.
I’d be remiss in not noting that as I walked to the front, my mind flashed over the Starbucks massacre of 1997 in Washington, D.C. — three employees executed in an apparent robbery — and the Blackfriars Pub massacre of 1978 in Boston — five people executed for unknown reasons. Is this what we were destined for tonight?
I kept walking, Edgar kept drifting farther away, the clerk kept standing near the register, being no apparent help whatsoever. When I got to the front, maybe ten feet from the masked assailant, he said, “Get on the floor, facedown.”
This didn’t bode well. I thought about charging him, ramming his midsection, maybe giving him a kung-fu kick to the family jewels. I thought about grabbing one of the oversize bottles of Tide on a shelf within arm’s length and flinging it at his face. Instead, very slowly, still buying time, I descended to my knees, and even more slowly spread out on the grime of the cheap commercial carpet at the front of the Beacon Hill CVS.
I thought it extremely curious that of the four people in the store at the time of his arrival, I was the one to be singled out. But I didn’t think I was in much of a position — meaning facedown on the floor with a gun pointed at the back of my head by a masked assailant — to question why.
I saw him take a few steps toward me, saw his black trench coat swish against his jeans, until I could smell the leather of his dirty tennis sneakers. I heard his gun cock. And I heard a voice — Edgar Sullivan’s voice — shout out, “Drop it. Police officer. I’m armed and I’ll shoot.”
I don’t know if you can feel a gun’s aim leave you, but I’m pretty sure I did. I shifted my face to the other side and saw Edgar, pointing a pistol of his own at the guy who had been pointing a pistol at me.
Edgar repeated, “I said drop it. I’ll shoot you in the balls right now.”
There was a long moment of agonizing silence, during which I poised my body, and without warning shot upward, slamming the masked man in the bottom of the chin with the full force of both my forearms. It was probably stupid, but the alternative, which was nothing, seemed even more so.
He reeled back and toppled over from the shock and the force. The gun dropped aimlessly onto the carpet several feet from his grasp. Edgar pounced on it as if he was twenty-five years old, scooped it up, and put it into the outer pocket of his blue blazer. I jumped on top of our attacker and delivered one ferocious roundhouse punch to the vicinity of his nose, feeling flesh and bone crack on impact. I hoped it was his flesh and bone, not mine.
He groaned and I furiously yanked the mask from his head, revealing a panicked-looking fortysomething guy with a bad haircut and blood gushing from his oversize nose, across his upper lip, and down his chin.
Edgar yelled, “Step back, Jack.” So I did.
Edgar turned to the cashier and shouted, “Call the damned police.”
The clerk, who looked like he had gone into complete shock, turned around and began fumbling with a phone on the back wall.
And that’s when it happened. Edgar Sullivan’s arm was slack at his side, the gun in his hand pointing downward at the floor. The clerk was finally summoning the police. The assailant was still writhing in pain on the ground. I was collecting my breath and my wits. All of us just standing or lying there, playing our respective roles.
In a flash, the bloody intruder reached into his coat, yanked out a second pistol, and fired it. He fired it at Edgar Sullivan, once, twice, three times. The thing is, I remember hearing four shots, and quickly realized why: somewhere in the mix, Edgar returned fire.
His shot hit the perpetrator on the wrist of his shooting hand, causing him to drop the gun in screaming agony. The perp’s blood gushed out of him with such force that it splattered on my cheek.
I looked over at Edgar, who was lying on his side, bleeding from his face, his stomach, and his leg, and raced toward him. As I did, the shooter bolted for the door, screaming all the way out onto the street, his gun still on the floor inside.
“Edgar, we’re getting help,” I cried out. “Help is on the way.”
His eyes were glazed over, fading from life to death. I turned toward the clerk and yelled, louder than I intended, “Did you get hold of the cops?”
He looked at me, panicked, but said nothing.
“Call them again and tell them a man’s been shot!”
He picked up the receiver again and dialed 911.
I got on the floor and cradled Edgar’s bloody head in my lap. I peeled off my sweater and pressed it against the wound near his temple, hoping to stem the flow of blood.
“Help is on the way, pal. Just stay with us, okay? Edgar, just stay with us.”
I tried to sound reassuring, but I probably sounded anything but. My thoughts drifted back to the time Record colleague Steve Havlicek was wounded in a bomb attack on my car, and I sat with him on a Georgetown street waiting too long for an ambulance to arrive. He died a few hours later.
In the distance, I could hear the faint sound of a siren, and announced to Edgar, “Here they are, pal. They’re on the way. They’ll be here in a second.”
No response.
The siren got louder, closer, too slowly.
“Just stay awake for me, Edgar. Don’t go anywhere on me. I want to be toasting you at your next wedding.”
Still no response. His eyes were closed now. I placed a finger under his nostrils and barely felt a breath.
His head was heavy to the point of being — and I don’t like using the expression here — dead weight, his neck slack. His blood was flowing right through my shirt and spilling down my legs.
“Edgar, we’ve got way too much left to do on this story for you to go anywhere, so don’t even think about it.”
The siren was now blaring outside. I could see the flash of blue lights reflected in the front window — a police car, not an ambulance. The doors to the store jolted open as I screamed at the clerk, “Call a fucking ambulance — now!”
In a second, there were two cops flanking me, both of them down on their knees. One of them asked what had happened.
I said, “He was shot three times by a guy who fled out the door about three minutes ago. Bullet wounds in the head, the stomach, and his leg. He’s losing blood. He’s unconscious. He’s barely hanging on.”
Another siren outside, and then another one after that, and still more in the distance. I could see blue lights reflecting in the window, and then red ones, meaning an ambulance was pulling up, thank God.
One of the cops stood up and barked into his radio, “APB for a suspected gunman who fled from the CVS on Charles and Cambridge Streets within the past five minutes.”
He looked down at me and asked, “What’d he look like?”
I still held Edgar’s head in my arms. His face had gone from pained to peaceful, which should have been nice, but instead scared the hell out of me.
“White guy, forties, black trench coat, bloody nose. That’s all I know.”
The cop repeated that into his radio. A whole cadre of police and EMTs burst through the front door. I heard someone drop a stretcher beside me. A guy in a brown uniform knelt down next to me and edged me slowly away from Edgar, saying, “Let me take over from here.” I stood up, and Edgar was surrounded by rescue workers.
The cop who was the first on the scene put his hand on my elbow and asked, “Can I get a word with you?”
We walked a few feet down an aisle that held deodorants and razors on the well-stocked shelves. Don’t ask me why I noticed this; I just did.
“Can you give me a brief account of what just happened?”
That was the cop, doing his job, though at the wrong time. My eyes and my thoughts remained on Edgar. The EMTs had spread him flat on the floor, on his back. One was ripping off his clothing and tending to his wounds. Another was pumping his heart, pushing his forearms down almost violently into Edgar’s chest. A third, a young woman, cupped her hands around Edgar’s mouth and administered mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, that last word appearing to be a misnomer here. Edgar would like that part of the life-saving exercise very, very much. I hoped to hell he realized what was happening.
The EMTs were pumping and breathing feverishly, synchronizing their moves, talking to one another in increasingly loud voices. They did this until they didn’t, until the man pumping his chest placed his ear against Edgar’s heart, lifted his head, and announced to the others, “We’ve lost him. There’s nothing there.”
I pushed past the cop, plaintively yelling, “No! No! Keep trying!”
The three EMTs looked up at me simultaneously. The one on Edgar’s chest climbed off, stood up, and said to me, “I’m sorry. All his vitals have disappeared for too long. He’s gone. There’s nothing we can do.”
I looked down at Edgar Sullivan, sprawled on the floor of a Boston CVS, his clothing haphazardly torn away from his body, and tears immediately began flowing down my face. I thought of the help he had given me in a series of stories I wrote bringing down the mayor. I thought of his various ex-wives, his love of life, the extraordinary wisdom and wherewithal that he brought to his job. I knelt down and kissed his forehead, still warm, and whispered, “Thank you, Edgar. Thank you for everything you did.”
As I got up, the same uniformed officer who had tried questioning me shouted out, “This is a homicide scene. I need to ask everyone to step back and leave the body exactly as it is.”
I stepped away, toward the front counter. The cop walked over and asked the clerk, who had been standing there all this time, what had happened.
“It was a robbery,” the clerk said in a thick accent. “A man in a mask came in and tried robbing the store.”
The cop had a little notebook in his hand, jotting things down in a way not unlike I might have done if I was covering the story — which I wasn’t, but maybe I should have been. He looked at me and asked, “A robbery?”
I thought about that for a long moment. No, in fact, it wasn’t. A robbery would have involved the masked man trying to take money from the cash register. A robbery would have involved the gunman paying closer attention to the store clerk. That never happened. Instead, the assailant seemed hell-bent on executing me.
But was this the kind of information I wanted to share with the police? If I did, it would mean that I’d be thrust even further into the center of a story I was trying to unravel. It might also render me useless, because suddenly I’d be bogged down with detectives, answering questions rather than doing my job and asking them.
So I nodded my head. “Apparently,” I said.
Please note the Bill Clinton — esque answer. In a court of law, it would allow me to worm my way out, even if in the court of common sense, it would still be known as a lie.
Before he pinned me down any further, I changed the subject, saying, “The guy you’re looking for is going to have a gunshot wound to his wrist.” Then I added, “I need some air. I’m just going to step outside for a moment.”
I walked past Edgar Sullivan’s body, my eyes never for a moment leaving his. Another cop held the front door for me. The sidewalk around the store was cordoned off by yellow crime-scene tape and protected by a phalanx of uniformed officers. Police lights still cut through the air, though the ambulance had already left. I leaned against the front of the building and sucked in the cool night air as hard and as fast as I could.
Edgar Sullivan was dead. He died protecting me. And someone was going to pay long and hard for what he had just done.