Mission Flats (23 page)

‘Artie put himself in front of that door,’ he said with a crypto-cooperative look. ‘I did too. We were stupid. The whole thing was unnecessary.’

If there was a sign there, I missed it.

‘Julio, was Danziger—’

‘Ben,’ Kelly interrupted, ‘that’s enough, it’s time to go. Detective Vega, thank you for your time.’

Vega kept his eyes on the football highlights, on the grid where everything was refereed and constantly reordered.

In the car, Kelly consoled me. ‘That was fine, Ben Truman. He gave you a little; he’s not ready to give you more. Don’t worry, we’ll come back. Sometimes it takes time.’

‘He’s still lying.’

‘Yes, he is. But I’m sure he has his reasons.’

Vega’s lying that day was quickly forgotten. In fact, the whole mess was forgotten – Vega, Trudell, ‘Raul,’ the red door, all of it. When Kelly called Caroline to check in, we were informed by SIU that Ray Ratleff was dead, his head blown apart just as Danziger’s had been. There was no longer a case against Gerald McNeese; the only witness against him was dead. And it was going to be tough to blame ‘Raul’ for this one.

21

The body was in Franklin Park, sprawled in the wet leaves under a stone-masonry footbridge. It was covered with a vinyl blanket, but Ray Rat was too tall and his lower legs protruded – pant legs pushed up, skinny shins, Nike high-tops.

A crowd had gathered at the edge of the yellow-taped perimeter. News photographers among them circled around for good angles, pointing their long-lensed cameras at the corpse.

A cluster of detectives stood around the body, chatting, oblivious to the thing at their feet. One was explaining that the secret to a true marinara sauce was to make it with a little bit of sugar in addition to all the other things, the tomatoes, the basil, the oregano, the olive oil; and he ought to know because, though he himself was German-Irish and at one point wouldn’t have known marinara sauce from Heinz ketchup, his wife was off-the-boat Italian and he’d been watching her make marinara sauce a good fifteen, sixteen years . . . I half expected the guy to prop his foot on the corpse as if it were a log.

Kelly introduced himself and asked what was going on.

‘Somebody juiced this guy,’ one of the detectives replied. Older guy with an enormous square slab of a face. ‘It’s a jungle out here. Know what I mean?’ He made a big vaudeville wink, directed it at me.

Kelly kneeled and flipped back the blanket to see Ratleff’s face, or what was left of it. The right eye and eye socket had burst, but the skull and scalp were otherwise intact. Black fluid gleamed in the eye socket and clotted in Ratleff’s glorious Afro. Kelly threw the blanket back over the face, but the image lingered there like the shadowy features on the shroud of Turin.

‘Monkey business.’ The slab-faced cop smirked.

Kelly ignored the comment. ‘When did it happen?’ he asked.

‘Couple hours ago maybe. Rigor is still just in the face and the eyelids.’ He corrected himself: ‘Eyelid.’

‘Any witnesses? Anything?’

‘Nothing. Footprints, but this is a public park, there’s thousands of footprints.’ The cop looked down at Ratleff’s body with a wistful expression. ‘No witnesses. Nobody sees anything around here.’

Twenty yards away, Caroline was enmeshed in an animated discussion with Kurth and Gittens. Kurth’s severe, pitted face was clenched. He seemed to glow like one of those luminous monks by El Greco.

‘How did this happen?’ he was asking, agitated and intense, as we approached.

‘I’m not sure what you mean, Ed,’ Gittens replied.

‘You find the guy and forty-eight hours later he’s dead? How does that happen?’

‘I have no idea, Ed.’

‘How did you find him?’

‘I told you, Ed, I got a tip. Ask these guys.’ Gittens nodded toward Kelly and me. ‘You’re just pissed because you didn’t find him. That’s your problem, Ed, not mine. What can I tell you? You couldn’t find the asshole on an elephant. Is that my fault, Ed?’

Gittens took an insolent delight in tweaking Kurth by calling him Ed. Nobody seemed to call Kurth by his first name. Either that was Kurth’s preference or just the effect of his over-torqued personality. But now Gittens leaned into the word,
Ed,
until it sounded vaguely ridiculous, as any word begins to sound ridiculous when it is repeated over and over.

Caroline intervened. ‘Alright, Martin, that’s enough.’

‘Look,’ Gittens insisted, ‘if Braxton found Ray Rat, it was because Ray fucked up. He came home. Ray knew he shouldn’t have done that but he did it anyway. If you’re suggesting someone in Area A-3 tipped Braxton off—’

‘I’m not talking about anyone else in A-3.’ Kurth glared.

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ Gittens affected puzzlement rather than anger, to signal that he did not consider Kurth a threat. ‘Come on, Ed. If you’ve got something to say, have the balls to come out and say it.’

Ed Kurth began to move forward, but John Kelly stepped between them. He was a head taller than either, and he looked down at them like a disapproving father. ‘That’s enough, both of you. You’ve said your piece.’

But Kurth was unwilling – or unable – to relent. There was a volatile quality to his anger that separated it from Gittens’s. He simply could not shut it off. He continued to stare until Kelly laid his nightstick across Kurth’s chest and ordered him to ‘step . . . back.’

Caroline said, ‘Ed, Martin’s right, you’re out of line. Take a walk, settle down, come back when you’re ready to work.’

It seemed for a moment that Kurth might lose it then and there, and I’m not sure what would have happened if he had. Just how much coiled, violent strength Kurth possessed, I did not know. But surely if he’d gone after Gittens, Kurth would have broken him in two – in front of a crowd that included newspaper photographers. Fortunately, Kurth did not explode. He turned and stalked off toward the green meadows of Franklin Park. It was, frankly, a relief to have him gone.

‘I think he’s going to beat up a tree,’ I said.

‘Ben,’ Caroline warned, shaking her head. Not now.

At times Caroline could sound uncannily like my mother. This is a troubling, not to mention de-eroticizing, thought for any man, and usually I swatted it out of my mind the moment it landed. But that one-word warning,
Ben,
could have come directly from Annie Truman’s mouth. It stopped me cold.

‘It’s Braxton,’ Gittens said matter-of-factly, eyes on Ray Ratleff’s corpse.

Caroline nodded yes.

‘We have motive, opportunity, a signature crime.’

‘I agree, there’s enough,’ Caroline said. ‘Pick him up.’

22

Picking up Braxton was easier said than done. He’d found himself a hidey-hole, and no one – not the cops, not the sliders in Echo Park, not even Gittens’s Red Army of snitches – had any idea where to find him. There was nothing to do but wait. And wait. Eventually Braxton or one of his crew would make a mistake that would expose him. In all, the waiting would last four days.

The delay grated on everyone’s nerves, including mine. Since my arrival in the city, I had been carried along on a current. Events streamed past, stations along the river, and it seemed I would be borne right through to the end. Now the tide slacked and things took on a stanched, dissolute feel. Afternoons, I went with Gittens to the Flats trying to scare up tips. Evenings, I spent at the SIU office or dining with the Kellys or exploring the city, walking the neighborhoods the way my mother used to walk Versailles.

Maybe it was the strange mood of those days, but I decided all at once that I did not like Boston. Something about the place – introverted, parochial, self-doubting – a fit capital for New Englanders, or so I told myself. I could not even appreciate the city’s obvious physical beauty. Of course, in hindsight I see the flaw was not in Boston. I’d been happy there once, even considered it a second home. But now everything was different, and I could never see the city the same way. I just could not put my bags down, not there. I was waiting, for what I did not know.

On Thursday night – day one of this idle, interstitial period – I could not sleep, and around midnight I found myself standing in my underwear before the window of my hotel room, thinking of home. Streetlights in the South End winked below. (I was staying at the Back Bay Sheraton, one of those modern concrete cubes dropped into the nineteenth-century Back Bay like spaceships that crash-landed.) Hungry for a familiar voice, I called the station in Versailles on the pretense of checking up on things.

‘V’says Peace.’

‘Maurice, what are you doing there?’

‘I’m talking on the phone.’

‘Well, I see that, but – They have you answering the phone now?’

‘Mmm-hmm.’

I thought it over for a second. ‘That’s a good idea, Maurice. Whose idea was that?’

‘Dick.’

Dick Ginoux picked up the extension, and he caught me up on the news. Maurice had taken to hanging around the station, and it turned out he was a useful addition, answering phones, sweeping up, and so on. Diane Harned had stopped by that very afternoon to ask how I was doing. ‘I told her you were going to stay down there,’ Dick said. ‘Just about broke her heart.’ As for Dick himself, he had actually made an arrest on a DWI, which doesn’t happen often, since drunk drivers rarely crash into the stationhouse and Dick rarely leaves it.

I missed them all, more than I had expected to.

‘Dick, tell everyone I said hi and I’m doing fine, alright?’

‘Alrighty, Ben. You keep your head down. I’m sure The Chief is proud of you.’

‘Dick, I’m the chief.’

‘I know that, Ben. You know what I mean.’

‘Any word from the AG?’

‘Yessir. They identified Harold Braxton’s fingerprints all over the cabin. Eight different places, something like. I guess he’s your man. And one other thing. Red Caffrey called. Said he figured he ought to let us know, a couple weeks before the body turned up in that cabin, a black kid with a funny haircut pulled into Red’s Gulf station in a white Lexus with Massachusetts plates. The kid bought a map and a tank of gas. Red says he didn’t think nothing of it, except the kid didn’t seem to go with the car, you know? Black kid pulls up in a fifty-thousand-dollar car and . . . well, the kid didn’t even know what side of the car the tank was on. Red says he just got a bad feeling, figured maybe the car was stolen. But the ignition wasn’t popped. The kid had a whole key chain in there. Anyway, Red took down the plate:
I dock
.’

‘I dock?’

‘Yes, sir.
I-D-O-C
.’

‘Did you run the plate?’

‘Well, we can’t get Massachusetts registry records, but there’s no report that it’s stolen.’

‘That’s good, Dick. Do me a favor, go see Red Caffrey again and show him those mug shots. And ask around, see if anyone else saw that kid. And Dick, have you seen my dad?’

‘Haven’t seen him.’

‘Well, swing by the house, would you? He’s in a state, I think.’

It was also during this hiatus that I first met Andrew Lowery, Boston’s District Attorney. This was a command performance. Lowery sent word through Caroline that John Kelly and I were to appear at his office on Friday at nine
A.M.
Such meetings rarely come to any good, and this one was no exception.

We found Lowery at his desk in the Sussex County Courthouse. When we first glimpsed him, the District Attorney was leaning back in his desk chair, feet propped on an open drawer, absorbed in a television news report.

. . . 
police officers continue to comb the Dorchester, Mattapan, Mission Flats, and Roxbury neighborhoods today in search of the slayer of Assistant District Attorney . . .

Andrew Lowery was a slight but handsome African-American man with round wire-frame spectacles, in which at the moment the TV picture was reflected. He wore a blue candy-striped shirt with contrasting white cuffs and collar.

At the door, Kelly cleared his throat.

Lowery waved us in but continued to watch the screen. We waited two or three minutes more while the District Attorney monitored the New England Cable News channel for updates on his own case. (There were actually three televisions mounted in a console opposite Lowery’s desk, but only one of the sets was on.)

When the report was over, Lowery slipped on his suit coat for our meeting. It was, I think, the best-fitting suit I had ever seen, and while I am no expert on such things, I assumed it was custom-made.

‘Thank you for coming,’ he said when we’d sat down at a conference table. ‘I trust you’re getting all the support you need?’

The question was directed at Kelly, but Kelly deferred to me.

‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘we’re fine.’

‘Do you want coffee? Anything?’

‘No, thank you. We’re fine.’

The office was spare and formal, furnished with an expensive-looking Oriental carpet and Bauhaus furniture. Three Harvard diplomas hung on the wall, from the college, the law school, and the Kennedy School of Government. The only hint of the usual Government Office aesthetic was a framed seal of Sussex County, which showed the three mounds on which Boston was originally built by literal-minded pilgrims proclaiming a city on a hill.

‘I know you gentlemen are quite busy’ Lowery steepled his fingers. ‘So I won’t take much of your time. I have a friend I’m quite concerned about. I think you’ve met him: Julio Vega.’

Kelly and I exchanged a glance.

‘I’m told you’ve questioned Detective Vega.’

‘Told by who?’ Kelly asked.

‘A little bird.’

‘And what did your little bird tell you about our discussion?’

His expression unchanged, Lowery turned away from Kelly. Just ignored him. ‘Chief Truman, I hope you’ll understand. I’m going to ask you two to leave Vega alone. He’s not a well man.’

‘Not well in what sense?’

‘In every sense. His mental state – I don’t know what will happen if you two go out and stir up ghosts. I don’t want Vega to make things worse for himself.’