All Souls (29 page)

Then O'Leary and McNeely found their black scapegoat. They targeted a petty criminal and junkie named Willie Bennett, holding him up to the press as public enemy number one. In the end, though, there was no black carjacker. Charles Stuart jumped to his death from the Tobin Bridge, once the truth started to come out: He'd murdered his own wife, and shot himself to make the hoax more convincing. O'Leary and McNeely's heroic investigation fell apart. Now the newspapers said the witnesses' testimonies against Bennett had been falsified, coerced, and that drugs had been planted on some witnesses to put them at the cops' mercy, so they would sign whatever testimony they had to sign, saying that Bennett had bragged about the murder.

As I sat in O'Leary's dirty office, with piles of disorganized paperwork and posted headlines about this being Boston's worst year ever for homicides that brought few arrests, it all became clear. Steven was just another easy target. His arrest would bring weeks of splashy
Boston Herald
headlines and a feather in the cap of the harassed detective. And Stevie was white, so no one could claim racism with this case.

When Johnnie showed up with a Southie lawyer, Steven was formally charged with murder in the first degree. It was Thursday night and Stevie couldn't be arraigned until morning. He'd have to spend the night locked up. They handcuffed him and took him to Station 6 to await transport to an overnight juvenile lock-up. We walked behind Stevie, and when we all came out of the dilapidated homicide building, the camera crews had the bright lights back on and were about to film Stevie being led to the paddy wagon in cuffs. The police didn't say anything; they just posed with Stevie. “He's fucking thirteen years old!” I yelled. I knew it was illegal to identify juvenile defendants. Stevie had become the city's youngest homicide suspect, fitting into the media's current trend of portraying a generation of child “superpredators.” “Steve, don't worry,” Seamus yelled to him as he was escorted into the wagon.

When we got to Station 6, Stevie was excited to see us, as if it had been a month instead of a half hour. His voice was a little calmer now, but his hands were still trembling when he wiped his eyes and said something about having bad luck. “Does Ma know yet?” he asked. “She's gonna go crazy.” Then he started crying again. He said he hoped the detectives would talk to Mrs. Viens soon, “They'll straighten it out.” I didn't have the heart to tell Stevie we'd already seen the Vienses on TV saying they thought he'd killed Tommy, that there was no way their son committed suicide.

Stevie was sitting on top of a table in a small box of a room, wearing his baggy basketball shorts and swinging his skinny legs nervously. We all tried to change the subject a few times, talking about basketball or what lotion Steven might try to get rid of the pimples he was starting to get. But every subject brought Steven right back to stories about Tommy, funny ones about Tommy's pranks in the neighborhood. Like the morning he'd knocked on the door, asked me in the most innocent voice if Stevie was home, and then whipped three eggs at my head while running down the stairs. Tommy always reminded me of Kevin. You had to love him.

Then Seamus interrupted, asking with worried lines in his forehead, “Steve, what happened before you found Tommy shot?” Everything turned serious again, and that's when I asked the question I'd been needing to ask: “How did Tommy know about Johnnie's guns?” Steven and Seamus told me they'd seen Johnnie's Navy Seal duffel bags with the guns in them, and had bragged about them, and that after that kids would go up to the apartment when Johnnie wasn't home, on what they called “gun hunts.” Tommy had found the guns, but as far as Seamus and Stevie knew, there was no ammo. Seamus and Stevie still couldn't figure out where the bullet that killed Tommy had come from.

The two began to go over that day for us. Seamus said Tommy had come to the apartment while Steven was still sleeping. Seamus took a shower, and when he came out Tommy was on the telephone. He slammed the phone down saying, “Hey, some cop on the phone said he's gonna come up here and arrest me.” Seamus said he didn't believe Tommy. “Let him come, I'll grab one of Johnnie's guns and shoot him,” Tommy said, getting more worked up. When the telephone rang again, Seamus picked it up and was told, “If you kids don't stop pranking those adult sex lines, I'll come up there and make you stop.” The voice said he was a police officer, and knew they were at John MacDonald's apartment at 8 Patterson Way. Seamus said he apologized, telling the guy that he didn't know Tommy was calling the party lines.

Tommy continued to dance around, talking about how he'd grab one of Johnnie's guns, hide in the second apartment, and shoot the cop when he came through the door. Eventually Seamus left to go to the noon movie, telling Tommy not to touch Johnnie's guns, “or we'll all get our asses kicked.”

By then Stevie had come out to watch TV with Tommy. “ ‘The Price Is Right' was on,” Steven told us, excited that he could add something to the story. Stevie said that Tommy told him the whole thing about the cop, and then started calling the party lines over and over, each time getting disconnected. Stevie said he didn't pay much attention, except to laugh when Tommy started swearing at the moderator before she could disconnect him again. Tommy hung up the phone. “You think that cop would come up here?” he asked Steven. But Stevie told us that he was too tired to get into all the excitement about cops and Johnnie's guns.

Steven said Tommy seemed to get bored with “The Price Is Right” and kept carrying on about the cop on the phone. He asked if he could go to the kitchen for a cup of water. Stevie shrugged his shoulders, wondering why Tommy would ask permission in our house. “He walked toward the kitchen, looked at me out of the corner of his eye, then made a sharp turn, jumped on the washing machine, and reached up to the shelf.” Stevie said Tommy pulled out the .357 Magnum.

“Put it back!” Stevie screamed as Tommy ran into the second apartment of our breakthrough. But Stevie said everything was quiet; Tommy was hiding. “Johnnie's gonna come home and be pissed!” Stevie yelled into the rooms cluttered with broken-down furniture. But there was no response, not even a movement to give away Tommy's hiding place. Then Stevie told us he gave up, thinking Tommy would come out of hiding if he just ignored him.

“The Price Is Right” ended and the midday news came on. “Let's go out,” Stevie said he yelled, shutting off the television. Nothing. Just silence. Then the blast.

“How the fuck did he find the ammo?” Johnnie asked, pounding the wall. Johnnie told us that he'd hidden the ammo separately, in a pouch, under a pile of old shoes in Ma's closet in the other apartment.

Steven said he walked through the narrow passage into the second apartment, and saw only the .357 on the floor. There was no sign of Tommy. He said he grabbed the gun, and that's when he heard the noise underneath the chair tipped over in a corner.

“What noise?” I asked. Steven couldn't talk anymore. He started crying again. “What noise?” I asked again. “He was trying to talk.…” Steven could barely get the words out himself. He was hyperventilating again, taking deep breaths and wailing from a hell that I couldn't begin to imagine. He finally told us that he turned the chair over and found Tommy, and all he remembered, he said, was the sound of gurgling, and a moan, like Tommy was trying to say something. The bullet hole was in his head, and a puddle of blood was growing around the two of them. “He was my favorite person, we were like brothers.” Then Stevie laughed through his tears as he said, “We were trying to figure out how I could miss the plane back to Colorado. He didn't want me to go back.”

I asked straight out if Tommy had ever talked about killing himself. Steven snapped at me, “You didn't know Tommy like I knew him. No one did. He'd never kill himself.”

“Then what happened?”

“I don't know.”

On the morning of the arraignment, nothing felt real. I'd stayed up all night at Mary's apartment drinking a bottle of whiskey to get back that numb feeling I'd had after Kevin died, and flicking the cable TV channels every time another gun appeared on the screen. But there were guns on every channel, so I turned the TV off and paced the floors drinking, while Seamus, Mary, Jimmy, and their two kids slept. Seamus kept getting up, pretending to go to the bathroom, checking up on me, and asking questions about Stevie. I hid the bottle and sent him back to bed, telling him to stop being such a worrywart. I was worried too though, even though the cops said Stevie would be kept on a suicide watch, “given the circumstances.”

It seemed like the sun would never come up as I paced, watching through the window for the faintest hint of dawn. I got dressed for the arraignment. When we all finally went to the Southie courthouse, we were dying to see Stevie again. He was kept in a holding cell downstairs that morning, a dingy cold room with a toilet overflowing with what looked like generations of shit from nervous defendants.

After getting five minutes with Steven, I ran out to the corner store to get a pack of cigarettes and started smoking away as soon as I got them. News reporter types, with a pad and a pen, started hovering around me, staring and wondering who I was in relation to Tommy's death. As I lit up my smoke, the radio on the counter started broadcasting about Boston's youngest murder suspect, my own little brother, “in a case that has shocked city officials.” I ran out of the store. It was hot out and a taxi driving by the courthouse was blasting the rest of the story, about how the defendant came from “a troubled family.” I felt as if I was outside my own body—nothing seemed real. On my way into the courthouse, a group of older men sat around reading the
Herald
and talking about the tragedy, and saying how it would make Southie look bad.

Eventually, Stevie was brought up to the courtroom and stood in the defendant's box. The judge arraigned him for murder in the first degree. He pleaded not guilty, and was put on $250,000 bail. That was that.

“Where the fuck are we gonna get $250,000 bail?” I asked out loud. Johnnie
shhh
ed me, explaining that it was $250,000 surety, meaning if you owned a house or anything worth that much, you could put that up. But that it meant $25,000 if we used cash. “Oh,” I said. I was relieved for a second. Then I said even louder, “Where the fuck are we gonna get $25,000?”

When we went to the cell after the arraignment, Steven was crying again. “He thinks I did it!” he said, talking about Mr. Viens; he'd seen Tommy's father sitting far away from us in the courtroom. I couldn't answer him. Steven had a bruise on his neck, and explained that he had gotten a beating the night before in the transport van. He said it as if it was nothing, just another part of his bad luck. He said that some older black teenagers had beat him once they found out he was from Southie. “What did the cops do?” Mary asked. Stevie shrugged his shoulders. “They laughed.” Stevie himself attempted a laugh now too, but his face was vacant, as if he didn't know how to feel about anything anymore.

The next day's
Boston Herald
said that Stevie was “stoic” in the courtroom, that he'd shown no emotions, or as they put it, “no remorse.”

Eddie McGlaughlin had arrived at the courthouse wanting to help out. We all followed him into the office of his new attorney, Al Fallon. Fallon was a fast talker, and my head was already spinning. He told us there was nothing to worry about, that the police had already done so many illegal things in this case that all they'd want now would be to cover their asses before letting Stevie go. “The two-and-a-half-hour interrogation without a lawyer or legal guardian present was illegal,” he said, throwing on his coat and rushing us out of his office just when I was getting comfortable enough to ask a question. “But … ,” I said. He halted all questions, saying we just had to wait for the results of the gunpowder tests done on Steven's hands the day Tommy died.

Mary, Joe, Johnnie, and I scraped up the $25,000 to bail Steven out, emptying our life savings. We were all relieved to see Stevie walk out of the Department of Youth Services, into whatever freedom he might hold on to, while we hoped for this big mistake to be cleared up.

I made Mary come back into the apartment with me, one last time, to gather up my belongings. The neighbors cleared a path and stared silently as we walked up the front steps. Being in that apartment again was like being in a house on fire. I gathered up what I could, as if I was in the middle of an emergency—and I was. I could feel it all moving in on me. I ran out of my bedroom with two full trash bags to rush Mary out the door. I felt out of breath. “What are you doing?” I asked her, watching her bend over to clean something. “There's brain on the floor,” she said calmly, as if she was at work in the OR. That's when my knees went. I fell onto the couch and for some time couldn't move a limb. I could barely get up the strength now to make it out that door. But I did, and it was the last time I ever saw our old home. I swore I'd never come back to Southie again.

I spent the rest of the summer with Seamus and Stevie, hiding out in a cottage on Cape Cod we'd rented from one of Johnnie's new Southie friends. We came back to Boston once in a while for pretrial hearings and visits to Fallon's office; or else to visit Mary, who'd also abandoned Southie once and for all, moving to Quincy. Other than those journeys, we sat in the cottage and talked about the fatal day over and over again, trying to figure out what had happened to Tommy, what was going on in his head when he hid out, and how the gun might have accidentally gone off. Steven wasn't allowed to leave the state, so Ma came to Cape Cod for a few weeks. She talked and talked about her own theories. I felt I was suffocating in the stories. Steven was free, but he wasn't really. None of us were. We were drowning in it. Steven couldn't wait for the gunpowder tests to come back from the FBI in Washington, proving that he hadn't shot the gun.