Free A Confidential Source by Jan Brogan Page A

from somewhere?”
     I asked. “You seem familiar.”
    The wife chortled.
    The man gave me a moment to guess. Nothing came to me.
    “Think Powerball,” the wife said.
    “Of course.” I realized it was Gregory Ayers, who ran the Rhode Island state lottery. He was on radio and television all the
     time, awarding checks to the lottery winners and announcing new scratch-ticket games. In the television ads, people were always
     rubbing his arm for good luck. I felt oddly excited standing this close to him, like maybe he could affect my game.
    “Go ahead,” he said, offering his arm. “Everybody asks. It’s okay.”
    “Ev-er-y-bo-dy,” the wife echoed.
    I touched his cardigan. Was that static or the zing of good fortune? I couldn’t tell.
    From the corner of my eye, I spotted Leonard working his way through the crowd.
    “Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t,” Gregory Ayers said, looking pointedly at Leonard.
    “Very funny,” Leonard said, and chucked Ayers’s shoulder. “Nice to see you again, Marge.” He kissed her.
    It often amazed me how everybody but me seemed to know everybody else in Rhode Island. But now, it dawned on me that Gregory
     Ayers’s lottery commercials played on Leonard’s radio station all the time. And now that I thought about it, I remembered
     that Gregory Ayers, too, was an opponent of casino gambling, one of the only state officials to take a stand.
    Leonard was only about five foot seven, but because of his lean build and the way he carried himself, he seemed taller. Unlike
     me, he was dressed to blend into the restaurant, looking effortlessly sophisticated in a gray turtleneck and casual black
     wool pants. He embraced me as if we were longtime friends. “Have you met Hallie?” he asked, turning to Ayers. “She’s the reporter
     who wrote the story about the Mazursky murder.”
    I thought I saw Gregory Ayers stiffen at the word
reporter,
and I recalled that one of our columnists had recently done a piece criticizing him for “hypocrisy” when the “King of Lottery”
     came out against casino gambling. But instantly, his face softened. “What a story,” he said, shaking my hand.
    “I never shop in those little market stores,” Marge offered. An enormous diamond-and-emerald ring on her finger knocked her
     martini glass askew, sloshing gin onto the cuff of her husband’s cardigan sweater.
    He grabbed a cocktail napkin, dunked it in a glass of water, and began dabbing it off. Then he glanced at his wife and shook
     his head sadly. “It’s going to be a long wait,” he said, and then with a very deliberate look at Leonard, he gestured to the
     dining room. “You might not want to stay.”
    Leonard turned toward the dining room and his expression grew dark. Following his gaze, I saw that while most of the customers
     looked like young twenty-year-olds on dates, there was an older, more boisterous group taking up three tables toward the back.
     In the center of this group, Billy Lopresti, mayor of Providence, was slugging back something in a snifter.
    He was a funny-looking man, small and stocky, with olive skin, surprised-looking eyes, and hair dyed a shoe-polish shade of
     black. Years ago, he’d been a popular radio talk-show host at Leonard’s station, and he was still quick with a wisecrack.
     He didn’t just have voter support, he had fans.
    As we watched, a young woman in a sleek black dress, sitting at a nearby table, stood up, walked over to the mayor’s table,
     and planted a kiss on his cheek. The room cheered.
    “Apparently, it’s his birthday,” Ayers said.
    Billy Lopresti had been mayor forever—since the early 1990s—but I’d heard that it wasn’t until last year, after he’d wept
     so openly, so disarmingly at his wife’s funeral, that people had taken to calling him by only his first name. “You gotta give
     Billy credit for the renaissance, he really cares about Providence,” a caller would say. “Billy’s got so much compassion