Present Day Monday, November 6
There is nothing like a funeral to spur a dreaded bout of introspection. First off, I defy anyone who has ever sat at such services to say they haven't looked around the room and wondered how many people they might attract to theirs, what the mourners might say, how sad those closest to you would be. I mean, I admit, I joined the National Press Club just so it would take up another line of my obituary and because maybe the club's board of governors might feel compelled to show up at the church, even though they had never met me and I don't even vote at the club elections.
I bring this up because as I gazed across the vast expanse of the Sacred Heart Church, at the hundreds upon hundreds of people crammed into the pews to mourn Steve Havlicek's passing-the Little League coaches, the fellow PTA members, the governor of Massachusetts, the entire congressional delegation, the high school and college classmates, the kids who grew up on the same block, the Neighborhood Watch members from down the street, I couldn't help but fear that my own death wouldn't lure any more than a few of Boston and Washington's better-known bartenders and the couple of interns who I used to take out to lunch as another excuse to use my company credit card.
Second, these occasions serve as an abrupt reminder of our own mortality, especially this one, especially for me. I don't think I need to remind anyone, I was supposed to be in that car when the bomb went off. I was supposed to be dead. The only thing that saved me is my mediocre memory-forgetting the tape recorder-and a sense of courtesy that harks back to a more chivalrous time. Had I pulled the keys out of the ignition and left Steve Havlicek in the cold to open my front door, I'd be somewhere between heaven and hell right now, the good Lord and Satan engaged in a game of dice to determine my eternal destiny.
Martin had warned me not to travel to Boston for Havlicek's memorial service. Well, screw Martin and his warnings. I felt like I didn't have a whole lot left to lose. So come Monday morning, I snuck out of the Jefferson through the kitchen, hailed a cab to Baltimore-Washington International, the farthest away of D.c."s three airports, and grabbed a flight to Logan.
Anyway, like I said, the funeral, held in Havlicek's native Boston neighborhood of Roslindale, was packed. Margaret Havlicek, in a dignified black dress, sat in the first row, flanked on either side by her two children, both of whom, notably good-looking, seemed to have more of her genes than his, at least from an aesthetic point of view.
The publisher of the Record was there, as were all the top editors and representatives from the other major newspapers. Everyone knew Havlicek, and to know him was to like him. I knew that better than anyone.
Despite the sickening session with Appleton and Martin the day before, I was treated with an utmost sense of respect and dignity, even if I had been ordered to stay away. Margaret Havlicek had even called me in Washington and asked me to deliver a short eulogy. Once I was there, General Ellis, the publisher, pulled me aside and lauded what he described as my "constant acts of heroism" on the story. Appleton himself stopped at my pew as he walked slowly down the long aisle and put his hand on my arm. I quelled my first impulse, which involved a kidney punch.
For me, if I looked beyond the languid angst of it all, the forever sadness that would mark this day, it was good just to be out of that goddamned hotel room. I mean, I love a nice hotel as much as anyone, and more than most. But I had been held captive at the Jefferson Hotel all day Sunday, not even allowed to leave to visit my recuperating dog, who, by the way, seemed to be doing better, according to Kristen and Dr. Parins.
In church, Havlicek's oldest son, Paul, walked slowly up to the altar to deliver the first eulogy of the morning. He told of how his father never missed a single one of his baseball games as a kid, how he would fly home through the night to drive him to hockey practice in the cold predawn hours of a Boston winter morning, how he took an adult course in advanced calculus at Roxbury Community College just to help him with his homework in advanced-placement math. He recalled how his sister's junior high gymnastics coach quit in the middle of one season. I remembered that. The coach was actually indicted for having sex with a minor, but Paul wisely left that part out, given the surroundings and the occasion. So with the season on the brink of shambles, Steve Havlicek stepped in as the new volunteer coach, even though he knew about as much about gymnastics as Elvis knew about weight control. For the next month, he left work early every day. He told the team if they won the division title, he would learn how to do a backflip. They did, and he did, though he had a lot more trouble than the group of young women.
As Paul left the altar, there wasn't a dry eye in the house, nor a face that saw a wide smile. His departure was my cue to speak, and I walked to the front of the church, the guy who could and probably should be dead instead. Perhaps, I thought as I walked in the eerie silence of the massive church, it had been time for me to join Katherine in some form of afworld. Perhaps I had defied destiny by mistake.
That aside, I told the gathered mourners of my first days at the Record, of this funny man named Havlicek who immediately insisted that I take him to lunch so he could show me the ropes, but was so busy eating that he only had time to tell me what a great guy he thought I was, and oh, yes, I could feel free to use the company credit card to pay the tab. After that, though, he was always the first one with a compliment, a suggestion, a bit of valuable advice.
In the last week, I saw more of him than I ever thought possible. That line seemed to raise a few chuckles. I talked about his brutal work habits, his ability to stay up around the clock, his commitment to the story, his steady stream of scoops, his unfailing good news judgment, his generosity as a colleague.
I mentioned the moments before the explosion, how he looked at me in my living room and asked if I would change my life if I inherited a couple of million dollars. Some people in the church laughed, understanding that it was a typical Havlicek question. I described his answer, how he said he wouldn't change a thing. This whole endeavor, he said, is too much fun, too worthwhile, to alter even a single part.
"Margaret, he loved you more than most people realize is possible, and we need only look around this church today to see the breadth and depth of the love so many people felt for him. Steve," I said, as the sounds of sobbing rippled through the cavernous room, "it's been not just a pleasure, but an honor. You were the best I've ever met."
As I walked past the thirty or so rows of pews to my seat near the back, I passed Samantha Stevens, standing on the end, watching me intently, tears streaming down her cheeks.
After the service, I stood in the back of the church, in a crowd of Record reporters, and watched sadly as Stevens walked by, alone. She circled back around and approached timidly, silently, searching my eyes with hers. Speaking so softly that she barely moved her lips, she said, "Drinker doesn't like to lose."
I thought that an odd thing to say. Lose what?
I replied, "Who killed Havlicek? Who planted that bomb?"
She shook her head slowly and sadly. "I don't know."
"How did you know I was arriving at National Saturday night, and why did you meet me?"
"I just wanted to see you. I called Havlicek up, and he told me when you were coming in."
That answer nearly caught me short, but I refused to let it. Through gritted teeth, I asked, "Why did Curtis Black or Tony Clawson try to kill the president?"
She continued to stare at me, not coldly, but with heart. "I don't know."
I was growing angry, seething, but still quiet. "What is it you know?"
"I only know that I was never involved in anything to do with that explosion, or with Drinker. And I only know that I don't want to see you hurt in any way at all."
And with that, she turned and walked slowly away.
My third point about funerals, that perhaps I should have made earlier, is that they make me think of everyone else who has died in my life.
In the cemetery, as the priest droned on too far away for me to hear, I thought of my father in the pressroom of the Record, putting in an honest day's work for an honest day's pay. I thought of my mother, dying of a broken heart after my father's death.
And of course, I thought of Katherine, who was supposed to be here with me during difficult times like these, my constant companion for my entire life. We should be preparing for another holiday season, making plans for family visits, keeping a camera nearby for our baby's first steps. Instead, I had no one to share with, nothing to look forward to, not even a steady job.
What I did have, though, were bodyguards, two of them whom I paid $300
apiece, plus airfare, to join me on this Boston excursion. In their somber suits, at least they were dressed like the mourners, and their presence allowed me some comfort, though I still found myself peering around suspiciously at the gathered crowd.
Which is exactly what I was doing when Gus Fitzpatrick emerged from a cluster of people and walked slowly my way with his trademark limp. I held my hand out, and he shook it silently, then reached his other arm around and rubbed the back of my shoulder.
"It's really nice to see you, Gus," I said, and this was one of those occasions when I really meant it.
"It's really nice to see you," he said. "Thank the good Lord you're alive."
He looked me up and down and then said something that rocked me to my core.
"Nothing is still as it seems," he said, staring me in the eye. "Do not yet believe anything that they tell you."
My jaw dropped in an almost stereotypical way. The identical words of my anonymous informant, Paul Stemple, rang through my mind.
"Gus," I replied, trying to maintain composure. "Do you know what you're saying?"
He nodded and remained quiet.
"What's going on here?" I asked, my tone urgent but my voice low, so as not to attract attention.
Gus stood silently.
In the void, I said, "Havlicek is dead." Well, admittedly, I was speaking the obvious, given that his casket was sitting about twenty yards away in front of the hole where it would momentarily be placed.
But in newspapers, that's often what we do, state the obvious. Why else a front-page headline that reads "Reagan Beats Mondale"?
"I feel horrible about that," Gus said. "You know I do."
I bore in on Gus. Gus bore in on me. He finally shifted his gaze to look over my shoulder, and I glanced back to see the priest throwing holy water on the casket and sprinkling it into the hole in the ground.
The burial was unfolding about thirty yards away, a good-sized chip shot, outside of easy hearing range.
I felt, to say the least, confused. My mind raced through every crucial moment of this case, but I couldn't find Gus's footprints anywhere and had no idea why he was here now. I didn't even know enough to ask anything, so I repeated myself, saying, "Steve Havlicek is dead." As I said it, I was surprised to hear my voice crack.
More silence, until Gus said, "Come with me, Jack."
I thought about Martin and Appleton huddled amid the mourners, about their orders for me to return immediately to Washington, about my dubious status at the newspaper. I looked at my bodyguards and gave them a little hand signal to follow me. Then I thought about Havlicek, about the way his grip loosened on my hand Sunday morning in the unforgiving aftermath of the explosion, about his wife's voice on the other end of the line when I told her that her husband was dead.
So I nodded at Gus, and he, for no apparent reason, nodded back at me, and we disappeared over the other side of the hill, meandering among the ancient oak trees and tombstones.
The two of us stood on the end of the Boston Fish Pier in a remote loading area beside the ancient brick auction house as the pale November sun seemed ready to surrender to the chill of another New England winter. On one side of us, the magnificent city skyline rose toward the heavens, the steel-and-glass buildings splashed with light.
On the other side, the harbor sparkled and rippled in the autumn breeze. Planes from Logan Airport thundered overhead as they ascended to destinations unknown.
Gus looked at me and spoke for the first time since the graveyard.
"Are you familiar with Paul Stemple?" he asked.
"I saw him yesterday morning," I said. "He's dead. Murdered." Here he was, a man who held secrets that could probably shake our democracy to its core, and his passing was marked only by a newsbrief in the Washington Post under the headline "Capitol Hill Transient Slain."
Gus grimaced and shook his head slowly. "I had a feeling," he said.
Much as I love Gus, standing there watching him, I couldn't contain my anger, even with the prospect of an imminent explanation. "As I've said, Havlicek is dead. I couldn't have been warned about this? You couldn't have helped us out-some real goddamned help-instead of this pseudo-intellectual gamesmanship?"
We had driven from Roslindale to the waterfront in collective silence, the only sound in Gus's car being the all-news AM radio station broadcasting blurbs from a speech President Hutchins had delivered that morning in Cleveland, Ohio, on the eve of the election. The reporter said that after a final blitz from Detroit to New York City, Hutchins would be back at the White House tonight. Democratic nominee Stanny Nichols, the reporter said, was spending election eve scouring the crucial electoral state of California for last-minute support.
When we had arrived at this barren concrete loading zone, Gus simply got out of the car and stood in the brisk outdoors air. I, of course, followed him.
To my pending question, he stayed silent, either thinking about what I had asked or ignoring me. I only became angrier. What, he hadn't prepared for this moment? After all this, he didn't know what he was going to say?
I glared at Gus in a way I never thought I could or would and said,
"What the hell is going on here? What the hell is going on?"
Gus leaned back against the hood of his car, a navy Oldsmobile bought with cash, no doubt-money saved from decades of hard work alternating between the evening and overnight shifts in the pressroom. He looked extraordinarily uncomfortable in his shirt, tie, and jacket, and it struck me that I hadn't seen Gus dressed this way since Katherine's funeral. Then it occurred to me to put that thought out of my mind right now. I had to concentrate on the issues at hand.
Lingering silence. Endless silence.
I said, "Gus, you brought me here to tell me something. What is it?"
"This isn't easy," he said. He fell quiet again, and I regarded him more closely-the long forehead on such a short man, the fatherly eyes, which at the moment held the anguished embarrassment of a child, the leathery skin baked from too much sun over too many summers, the way he stood with one leg always bent at the knee because the other leg was two inches shorter.
He broke my train of meaningless thought and said, "I know Curtis Black."
This time I stayed quiet, waiting, expecting.
He said, "I know Curtis Black. The guys in that armored car robbery, they fled Hanover Street in one getaway car with the money, drove along the waterfront, and came to this very spot. I met them here in a second car, and we all drove from here down to a storefront in Providence, where we split up the cash. My take was somewhat smaller than the rest because I wasn't at the scene."
I looked at him in shock. Gus, my Gus, a common criminal, part of a gang of killer armored car robbers. A man died that day, a young husband, a father, if I remembered right from the newspaper clips, shot in the neck during a heist on Hanover Street. And Gus was a part of it-not the direct cause, if he could be believed, but an accessory nonetheless.
Gus stood there watching me. My mind became a blur. So many questions to ask, so little ability to ask them. I was, in the parlance of the pop psychology that so many of my journalistic colleagues indulge in, conflicted. On the one hand, I didn't want to believe what he was saying. I didn't want him to be involved in anything like this. On the other hand, if he was, he would be forthcoming with the explanations I needed to this seemingly inexplicable, impenetrable mess.
"I don't get it. If you were involved, why weren't you arrested like the others? Why didn't you go to prison? How did you end up at the Record?"
Gus was still leaning against the car, almost sitting on the hood, his arms crossed. I was standing facing him.
"Black didn't give me up," Gus said. "When he turned government's witness, he denied there was a second getaway driver. Two of the other guys, probably hoping to get leniency, kept insisting to the feds there was another driver, but they didn't even know my name. It came down to Paul Stemple. He fired a shot that day, but meant to aim high-a warning shot. The guy next to him, name of Manupelli, fired a shot too. Stemple was always racked by guilt over the possibility that he killed the guard, that the whole thing was his fault. So he refused to give me up because he knew I didn't have anything to do with the death.
The U.s. attorney himself asked Paul if there was a second getaway driver, and Paul told him no."
I shot a glance toward my bodyguards standing by their rental car about forty yards down the pier, though perhaps shot is the wrong word to use at this point. I don't know. I didn't feel like I knew much of anything anymore, even as I was learning new things by the second. I returned my gaze to Gus.
Gus said, "So I went to your old man. We knew each other growing up.
I told him I was desperate, that I was in a lot of trouble, that I needed his help. I mean, I didn't get involved in this robbery just for kicks. I'd like to tell you I needed the money to pay for something for the kids or medical bills or something. Something. But I needed it because I got in some gambling trouble, and if I didn't come up with some cash, I was going to be in some serious health trouble, maybe even dead."
Standing here on the Boston Fish Pier at high noon on election eve, I mused that you know people, but you don't really know them. You know them now, so you think you've known them always, as if everyone follows the same cookie-cutter path in life from young adulthood on to marriage, parenthood, or whatever. In fact, what you see or even imagine is little more than an outline, a silhouette, and perhaps a deceiving one at that. What you don't see is the text and the texture, the private drama that makes up a human life.
I was both stunned and spellbound. I didn't say anything-one, because I couldn't, and two, because I didn't want Gus to stop. Never interrupt the steady flow of crucial information to hear yourself speak.
Gus took the silent bait. "Black didn't give me up, and I owed him for that. But Black didn't give me up for a simple reason. Had he given me up, I would have made a pretty damned good government witness. I couldn't have been involved in the shooting. I didn't mastermind the thing. I was just a grunt driving a car, trying to make some dough to keep my legs from getting busted. Had I been a federal witness, Black would have gone to jail."
He paused only long enough to look me hard in the eye and catch his own breath. This whole thing seemed to be like penance for Gus. I suspect he regarded me as some sort of keeper of the truth, being in the newspaper business and all, and here he was letting the truth be known for the first time, so many years after the fact.
"So I owe something to your father. He was a shift supervisor at the Record, and he got me a job when I needed it most. And I owe something to Mr. Stemple, and here I am taking care of two debts by trying to help you." A pause, accompanied by a watchful gaze over my face, then,
"Does this make sense?"
"It does, yeah, if I knew what it is you were trying to help me with.
I don't mean to beat a dead horse, but one of the two reporters on this story was killed. And the other one, me, despite all your attempts to help, has more questions than answers. I know Curtis Black is involved. I know he tried to assassinate the president of the United States. But I don't know why, and I don't have proof. In other words, so many days and so much tragedy, and I can't even get a news story out of this. So nothing personal, Gus, but you haven't done a whole lot by me yet, not, at least, as much as you probably intended."
Gus looked at me in a curious way, speaking, it seemed, without talking.
"You have it partly right," he said.
I whirled toward him and asked, pointedly, "What do you mean by that?"
He fell mute. I softened my tone. "Gus, you want to help. I trust you on that. So help me. No more hoops. No more hurdles. No more being cryptic. Help me."
There was more than a hint of desperation in my voice, but at this point, so what? Gus stood up a little straighter, though his leg was still bent in that familiar way it always is.
He said, "You know Curtis Black went into the witness protection program, right? We've established that."
I nodded.
"So he gets a new identity. I don't know what happened to him in the program. I heard he vanished-abandoned his new, government-issued identity and got a third identity on his own."
This coincided with the government records that I had seen the previous morning, which showed that Clawson vanished in 1988.
Gus continued. "So he's running around, and no one knows who he is: not the government who gave him a free ride on a felony murder offense, not the guys he betrayed and put away for the rest of their lives.
"No one knows who he is," Gus continued. "No one knows where he is."
I asked finally, "So then why does Curtis Black take a shot at the president?"
Gus looked at me long and hard, leaving the sensation that he was looking through me, into my mind, willing information to me.
"He doesn't," Gus said, still staring at me. Abruptly he turned around, opened his car door, reached beneath his seat, and pulled out a copy of that morning's Boston Record. He shut the door and held out the front page in front of me.
I looked at a pair of side-by-side colorful photographs taking up much of the top half of the page. The first one was of Senator Stanny Nichols working a ropeline at an event in Los Angeles, leaning over the yellow tape, both his hands stretched out for the thronging crowd of Democratic supporters to shake. The second one, right beside it, was of President Clayton Hutchins standing behind a podium on the tarmac of the Milwaukee airport, a lineup of fully uniformed policemen standing behind him in an anticrime event, and behind them the distant outline of Air Force One.
Gus pointed slowly at Hutchins, his finger lingering on his face for a few seconds. He looked me in the eye and slowly, somberly, said,
"That's Curtis Black."
And just like that, so many pieces fall into so many empty places, a picture suddenly emerging from all the disparate parts, though it didn't yet become entirely clear. I stared at the photograph, then at Gus.
"He's had some cosmetic work done," he said. "He's worked on his speech patterns, his Boston accent. But it's him. We knew it was him, but we couldn't be sure, so from prison, Paul sent a message to him when he was vice president, through a brother-in-law who was a big fund-raiser. The message said simply, "Paul Stemple knows and needs to be pardoned." And lo and behold, he was."
My head was swimming, my hands visibly shaking, my voice weak from mental exhaustion.
I asked, "So if Black is the president, not the would-be assassin, and all the other men in the gang are dead or in jail, then who shot at Black, and why?"
Before he could open his mouth to answer, I felt another piece of this nearly completed puzzle jamming into place. No one shot at Hutchins.
Someone shot at me. I was the first man struck. Drinker was right when he floated that theory, though for all the wrong reasons. I was the intended victim of someone who was trying to maintain Hutchins's secret.
Gus said, "We can't prove it, but my belief is that it was you they were gunning for, not Hutchins. From what I've heard inside the Record, you were nosing around on this pardon early on, and they must have been trying to get you out of the way. Someone was. I just don't know who."
There was a long silence between us. The chill breeze continued to rustle through my suitcoat, though I didn't actually feel cold. Planes continued to rumble overhead, though I didn't hear a sound.
"Why didn't you just tell me all this to begin with?" I asked, a dose of aggravation seeping into my voice. "We could have avoided a lot of tragedy."
Gus shook his head slowly and looked down at the ground, then back up at me. "I think I have a pretty good idea about how you work. God knows, I've been watching you since you were greener than a meadow.
I've known you a long time, Jack. If I just gave you what I had, anonymously, you would have dismissed me as some sort of crackpot and never checked the information. If I had come to you on the record, I would have destroyed my entire life. My wife doesn't know about this armored car heist. My daughters, they don't know about this armored car heist. You're the best reporter I know. I wanted you to figure this out on your own, without my direct involvement, and come to the answers yourself. It almost worked."
I said, "So you won't go on the record? I need you on the record on this."
Gus shook his head slowly. He said, "I just can't. I busted my hump to recover from where I was. I've made a life for myself. I'm happy.
My wife is happy. I can't destroy all that now."
"Who killed Havlicek and Stemple?" I asked.
"That part, you're going to have to learn on your own. It's either Hutchins or the FBI. I just can't tell you who."
Standing there, I suddenly felt the driving urge to get somewhere fast, though I wasn't quite sure where I needed to be. I was sitting on information that no one else in the world had, but I wasn't quite sure how to let anyone else know.
I nodded slowly to Gus. I couldn't well be angry, but I was somewhere shy of appreciative. "I've got to get out of here," I said.
"You have what you need?"
I don't think he meant luggage. "I have, I think, whatever I'm going to get."
I looked back at my bodyguards and gave them a wave to approach. Their car started, and they raced up to where we were standing. Gus took a step toward me, reached his arm out to hug me, and I fell into his embrace. As we stepped back from each other, he looked me in the eye and said, "You're a man of words. Me, I'll never be able to tell you how sorry I am. For everything."
He smiled and hit me softly on the shoulder with his open fingers.
Then he added, "You're on your own now, and for you, with your talents, that's not a bad place to be."