Mission Flats (30 page)

Kelly pulled him away from the wall and slammed him back against it. He pressed the nightstick against Braxton’s throat.

‘That’s enough!’ Max Beck shouted. I had not even seen the lawyer enter. His face was red and already, at ten in the morning, his tie was pulled down to his sternum. ‘Put that man down!’

‘Yes,’ Lowery said, coolly. ‘Put him down, Lieutenant Kelly.’

Kelly complied. He straightened his sport coat and asked me if I was okay.

‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘I’m fine, it wasn’t like that.’

‘It’s an A.B.P.O.,’ Kurth said. ‘Good. Now we can hold him.’

It would surely have gone that way, of course – a swift arrest, an arraignment that morning at the B.M.C., a prohibitive bail. It would have gone that way but for one thing: The District Attorney was there and he had a broader agenda.

‘What do you say, Chief Truman?’ Lowery asked. ‘You’re the victim here.’

Before I could answer, Gittens blurted, ‘Harold, if you ever lay a hand on a cop again—’

‘Detective Gittens,’ Lowery soothed. He gestured with his hands, palms down:
Calm down.
‘Chief Truman, what do you want to do about this?’

Braxton was staring at me.

Kelly watched too, with an attentive frown.

Lowery said, ‘Chief Truman?’

‘Let him go.’

31

Kelly agreed to reinterview Julio Vega with me. I told Kelly the fact that Danziger had reopened the Trudell investigation still nagged at me. So did Vega’s evasiveness when we’d asked him about it earlier. Kelly accepted these explanations, or seemed to.

At Vega’s shabby little house in Dorchester, there was no answer when we knocked at the front door.

‘We’ll wait,’ the old man announced.

‘But we have no idea where he is.’

‘Precisely why we’ll wait, Ben Truman. No sense chasing him all over creation.’

In his thirty-odd years as a policeman, John Kelly had probably spent ten just waiting. It was part of the job. Movie cops never wait around much. They dart from clue to clue like hummingbirds because they only have two hours to solve each crime. In reality, policemen wait for radio calls and they wait for speeders and they wait for breaks. In courthouses, on street corners, in parked cruisers. Walking around in circles, driving around in circles. They are bored. They stamp their feet on cold nights.

‘How long do we wait?’

‘Till he turns up.’

‘What if he doesn’t?’

‘Oh, he’ll turn up soon,’ Kelly said. He glanced up at the sky as if Julio Vega might drop from above. ‘Let’s take a walk.’

‘Good idea. Why don’t we play a round of golf while we’re at it?’

‘There’s time, Ben. We’ll have a little walk.’

We strolled toward Dorchester Avenue, Kelly looking blithe, me anxious. He pulled out his nightstick, which he kept tucked in his belt at the small of his back. Holding it by the leather strap, he twirled the truncheon absently, as he had in Versailles, with that repetitive rhythm of whirring and palm-slapping. Two revolutions clockwise,
slap!
Two counterclockwise,
slap!
The rhythm matched our steps.
Whir, slap! Whir, slap!

I should say here, again, that I do not pretend to be objective in my description of John Kelly. I tend to form bonds of loyalty quickly or never, and I’d decided long before that Kelly was a man I liked and admired. Maudlin as it sounds, I felt closer to him than the scant few days we’d spent together would seem to justify. So admittedly my view of Kelly that morning was clouded by affection. That said, as we walked along Dorchester Avenue, he seemed to me the distilled essence of a policeman. You could have dressed him in a gray flannel suit or surgical scrubs – hell, you could have dressed him in clown makeup – and still people would say, ‘There goes a cop.’ Until I met him, I’d never thought that was a quality to be admired.

Spin,
slap.

‘There’s something I don’t understand, Ben. This morning Braxton asked for you – you specifically – just so he could proclaim his innocence and then attack you? It doesn’t make sense.’

I ambled along in silence.

‘Then you told Lowery you had no idea what Braxton was up to.’

Spin,
slap.

‘I may have told a little white lie there.’

‘Ah. Lot of that going around.’

‘When he jumped me, Braxton whispered in my ear. He said, “Find Raul.” He said this all has something to do with Artie Trudell. And he mentioned another name – Fazulo?’

‘Fasulo.’

‘Fasulo. You know who that is?’

Kelly ignored the question. ‘Why did you hold that back?’

‘Because Braxton told me I was being set up.’

‘Did you believe him?’

‘I don’t know. Kind of, yeah. Like you said, he went to a lot of trouble to get the message to me.’

Kelly grunted,
hmm.

‘I should have told. I shouldn’t be keeping things from other cops.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous. We don’t work for the Boston police. We’re conducting our own investigation. You tell them just as much as you want to tell them. They have information they’re not giving us. That’s how it works. Welcome to the brotherhood of law enforcement.’

‘I meant, I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.’

‘Well. You’ve told me now.’

We walked a little ways in silence.

‘Do you know who Fasulo is?’

‘Who Fasulo
was,’
Kelly corrected. ‘The only Fasulo I ever heard of died a long time ago, in
’77
or ’78. He killed a cop. Frank Fasulo and another guy – what was his name? Sikes, something Sikes. The two of them were juiced out of their minds. They tried to stick up a bar in the Flats called the Kilmarnock Pub. It’s gone now, the Kilmarnock, and not missed. Bucket of blood, that place was. Fasulo and Sikes went in just after closing, they stuck a gun in the bartender’s face, told him to empty the register. Only they took too long and a cop in a patrol car wandered in. They jumped him and—’ Kelly took a few steps before continuing. ‘Well, Fasulo was a hard case. He’d been in and out of Walpole, Bridgewater . . . Rapes, armed robberies. There are guys like that, just . . . vicious, animals, psychopaths. Not many, but they’re out there. There’s nothing for it except to kill them.’

The comment surprised me. I didn’t see Kelly as the hang-’em-high type.

‘Sounds bad, huh? Well the truth is, our system is built to punish crimes after the fact. We’re helpless to prevent a crime before it’s committed, even if everyone sees it coming. Everybody who ever ran into Frank Fasulo knew he’d kill someone someday. He was a homicide waiting to happen. But all we could do was wait for it to happen, then go in and clean up the mess. It shouldn’t be that way.’

‘So he killed the cop who interrupted the stickup?’

‘He raped him. Then he killed him. Then he danced around the bar and celebrated.’ Kelly stopped spinning the nightstick. ‘Well, this is all a long time ago, Ben Truman.’

The spinning and walking resumed.

‘So what happened?’

‘We – the police – tracked down Sikes in a hotel a day or two later. We had this military sort of unit then. “Tactical Patrol Force,” they were called, TPF. Helmets, black outfits, the whole shebang. It was big in those days. Every city had one. They stormed the hotel room and shot Sikes dead. Fasulo jumped off the Tobin Bridge a few days later, which was probably the only sane thing he ever did.’

We were coming into a charmless intersection anchored by a scruffy used-car dealership, which consisted of a portable office, a half dozen compact cars, and hundreds of little triangular vinyl pennants. Beside us was the euphonious Pleasant Spa. (In the old Boston dialect, a convenience store was referred to as a
spa,
and you still see the word in store windows around town.)

Kelly stopped to survey. The nightstick twirled. Spin,
slap!

‘How do you do that?’

‘This?’ Spin,
slap!

‘Yeah, how do you make it . . . ?’

Kelly regarded the stick as if he hadn’t noticed it was spinning until that very moment. ‘I don’t know. You just . . .’ Spin,
slap.

‘Show me. Do it slow.’

Spin.
Slap.

‘You just kind of let it fall away from your wrist a little, then yank it by the strap here.’

‘Let me try.’

‘Do you know how long I’ve had this thing?’

‘Come on, it’s not the crown jewels. It’s a stick. Let me try.’

He passed it to me and I slipped the leather strap over my hand. I tried to imitate him, letting the baton fall forward then snapping it back toward my chest. The free end flashed up in my face. I ducked.

‘Nice and easy, Ben Truman. Don’t knock yourself out.’

‘Do me a favor. If I do knock myself out, just in case – shoot me.’

‘Nice and easy’

The club wobbled through a complete revolution and I grabbed it. The trick seemed to be that it did not turn in an even circle. The weight was unbalanced (the free end was thicker and heavier), and the strap introduced enough play that the axis of rotation shifted constantly. Plus, the thing was barely shorter than your arm, so it threatened to whack you in the head every time it passed.

‘Harder than it looks,’ I said.

‘Here, you better give that thing back before you hurt yourself.’

32

‘You again.’

Julio Vega leaned his shoulder against the door frame. The ex-cop tried to fix his filmy eyes on me but they were sluggish; he let them wander to a spot on my chest somewhere.

‘What is it now, Maine? Gittens send you back for more?’

‘No, sir. Gittens doesn’t even know I’m here.’

‘Of course he does.’ Vega snorted, then padded off barefoot.

Kelly and I followed him to the same room where we’d spoken ten days before. Vega fell into one of the sweat-slicked wing chairs and returned to his television show, ESPN SportsCenter.

There was something disquieting about Vega’s appearance. It wasn’t simply that he was drunk or exhausted – though he was obviously both drunk and exhausted. Something was missing, something had gone out of him. Whatever it is that hangs behind the curtain, behind the gristle and bone of the face, whatever it is that animates the eyes and nose and mouth, it had simply left. I could imagine Vega removing that pouchy, unhandsome face and laying it down like one of Dali’s liquid clock faces.

‘Have you been drinking, Julio?’ I asked.

‘Course I been drinking.’ He blew a scornful little sniff. Stupid question.

‘I need to talk to you about Raul.’

No response.

‘I said we need to talk.’ My voice was too loud, as if I could reach him by shouting.

‘Hey, Maine, I’m drunk, not deaf.’

Kelly and I exchanged glances. What was wrong with this guy?

‘Julio, what did Frank Fasulo have to do with the raid on the red-door crackhouse?’

‘Frank Fasulo? What the fuck you talking about?’

‘That night you raided the apartment with the red door, the tip from Raul had something to do with Frank Fasulo, didn’t it?’

‘Man, I don’t even know who Frank Fasulo is.’ He watched basketball highlights on the screen.

‘Tell me about the night you and Artie Trudell did that raid.’

‘I told you already, I got nothing to say about that.’

‘Julio, that isn’t gonna fly anymore. We’re going to talk about it.’

He shook his head. ‘Nothing to say, homes.’ The words were defiant, but Vega’s tone was not. He was reciting lines he’d rehearsed over and over, an actor walking through a part he’d played for too many performances.

‘Julio, I need to know who Raul was.’

Vega ignored me.

Kelly said, ‘Alright, that’s enough of this bullshit.’ He switched off the TV with a slap. ‘You’re going to cut this shit out and answer the man’s questions.’

‘Who the fuck you think you are?’

‘Shut up.’ Kelly turned to me. ‘Ask him again.’

Vega started to rise from his chair, presumably to turn the TV on again.

With the tip of the nightstick, Kelly nudged him back into the chair. ‘Sit down.’

‘Who the fuck are you? Turn the TV back on, man.’

‘You want me to turn it off for good?’ He raised the nightstick as if to smash the screen.

‘Hey
HEY
HEY!’ Vega appealed to me: ‘What is this? Like good cop, bad cop?’

‘I said shut up. Ben, ask.’

‘Hey, didn’t your boy here tell you?’ Vega’s voice was soft, aggrieved. ‘I’m a cop.’

‘A cop? Is that what you think you are? A cop?’ Kelly wagged the nightstick at him. ‘You’re not a cop, you’re a disgrace. Don’t you ever call yourself a cop.’

‘What are you talkin’ about?’

‘You broke the code, Julio.’

‘What code?’

‘You sold out your partner.’

‘I didn’t sell out no one. Artie got shot.’

‘Yes, he got shot, and
then
you sold him out. You let his killer walk. You sinned.’

‘What are you talking about, “sinned”? I
loved
Artie.’

‘Then why did you let Harold Braxton get off?’

‘Me and Artie, we were like brothers, man—’

‘Who put Artie in front of that door?’

‘I don’t know. It was . . .’

‘It was what, Julio?’

‘We had a tip.’

Exasperated, Kelly stepped in front of the chair and leaned over Vega. The old man looked like some Grim Reaper come to collect Vega’s mortal soul. ‘That’s right, you keep it to yourself. Protect Raul, whatever you do. I don’t know if you’re a coward or if you’re crooked or just stupid, but I never thought I’d see a cop protect a cop killer.’

‘I’m not!’

‘What is it, Julio? Raul was your snitch, is that it? Your snitch killed your partner, is that what you’re afraid everybody is going to find out?’

‘No, I, I—’