Mission Flats (39 page)

‘Look, can we not make a big deal of it? I’m beat. I’ll file a report tomorrow.’

‘Not make a big deal? Are you insane?’

I didn’t answer.

‘Ben, are you okay? You sound kind of spacey’

‘I’m fine. Something’s going on and I don’t know what it is. You’ll check on the kid?’

‘Ben, I’m coming over.’

‘No, don’t do that.’

‘You’ll let Harold Braxton come but not me?’

‘Caroline, please. I’m tired. I just don’t want to play that whole scene. I don’t want to write a report, I don’t want twenty cops in my room. We’ll talk tomorrow.’

‘I won’t tell anyone. I’ll come, just me.’

As much as I wanted to see Caroline, I did not want to do it right then. I needed a chance to compose my thoughts, to sort things out first. ‘Caroline – Look, you and I have to talk. I mean, really talk. I just don’t have the energy to do it right now.’

‘I just want to see if you’re alright.’

‘I know. But – don’t take this the wrong way – you’re hard work.’

At the other end, the mouthpiece rustled against her chin. ‘That’s not true.’ A pause. ‘I’m just going to come and see if you’re okay, then I’ll leave.’

‘Caroline, I just got through saying—’

‘I know, Ben, but see, I’m not asking you for permission. I’m telling you, I’m coming. You can think I’m a bitch if you want to.’

‘I didn’t say that.’

‘Is there anything you need?’

‘A restraining order.’

‘Ha ha.’

‘Caroline, you know, we’re not gonna . . . you know.’

‘Oh, Jesus, Chief Truman! Don’t worry, I won’t take advantage of you.’

‘That’s what I mean about hard work. Stuff like that.’

‘What? I’m sorry. I was just teasing.’

‘Well I don’t want to be teased, alright? I’ve had a rough few days here, in case you haven’t noticed.’ I caught the note of whining in my voice. ‘Can you just turn it off for one night?’

‘I’m coming.’

It was like telling the cat to stay off the sofa. ‘Alright, fine, come. Bring some booze, as long as you’re making the trip.’

Thirty minutes later, Caroline was at the door with a bottle of Jim Beam.

She poured a glass, thrust it at me, then retreated to a corner chair, where she made a gesture of surrender, hands up, fingers splayed, as if to say
I’m keeping my distance.

I stood at the window, at the spot where Braxton had looked out. There was an atavistic simplicity to this view of the city. Under a full moon, the South End stretched for long, low blocks of eighteenth-century brownstones, and the steeple of Holy Cross Cathedral was still the highest structure in sight. Somewhere off to the northwest was Mission Flats. And superimposed over all of it was my own face reflected in the glass.

‘Are you bleeding?’ Caroline asked. She pointed to a streak of blood on the door.

‘That’s not mine. It was some monster Braxton had with him.’

‘What happened?’

‘You’re not going to believe this, but I hit him.’

‘I’m impressed.’

‘Don’t be. I think I broke my hand.’

The whiskey scraped a little going down but it warmed my stomach. ‘Did you take care of that thing with the little girl?’

‘It’s all set. They’re bringing her to her grandmother’s now. She wouldn’t talk to anyone at the station. They didn’t know what to do with her.’

‘Good, I’m glad. Thank you for doing that.’

I peered out the window a moment longer.

‘Ben, is something bothering you?’

‘No, I’m fine. They didn’t touch me.’

‘I meant, are you upset about something?’ But she thought better of pursuing me. Leaning forward, she said, ‘Maybe you don’t want to talk about it. I’ll go if you want. I see you’re not hurt.’

‘No, stay. I mean, if you want, you can stay’

Caroline leaned back again, pulled her knees up, and sat curled in the chair. She was wearing jeans and a baseball jacket, and even this simple outfit she invested with stylishness. There was always something about the way this not-quite-beautiful woman wore her clothes that compelled me. I have no doubt that if she were wearing the
PROPERTY OF BUFFALO SABRES
T-shirt that I had on at the time – a relic as dingy and thin as a moth’s wing – she would have looked elegant in it, too.

‘What are you thinking about?’ she asked.

‘I’m just feeling a little lost, that’s all.’

‘Why lost?’ I didn’t respond and she prodded, ‘Say it.’

‘My mother’s dead.’

She tilted her head in a sympathetic way, and I hurried to cut her off before she could offer the usual sticky condolence. ‘I’m just still getting used to the idea. My mother’s really dead.’

Caroline waited for more, but how could I explain it? How could I convey the three-dimensional reality – the skin, the warm breath, the voice – of the person who’d vanished? What would the obscure, lost history of Annie Truman mean to someone who’d never met her?

‘There’s a lake in Versailles,’ I said to the window, ‘called Lake Mattaquisett, very beautiful, very cold in springtime. We have a home movie of my mother floating on a tire tube in that lake. She’s wearing a yellow bathing suit and she’s pregnant with me. We used to pull out the movie projector on rainy days and we’d watch it. In the movie she’s young, maybe thirty or so, a little older than I am now. She’s laughing, happy. I have that image in my memory. I’m not sure why’

‘Because you miss her.’

I nodded.

‘I’m sure she was proud of you, of how you turned out.’

‘I guess.’

‘Ben, I’m a mother too. Trust me, she’d be proud of you.’

‘I think she’d be happy I came back here, to this city. She’d get a kick out of this, too, what we’re doing.’

‘What are we doing?’

‘Flirting. Or not flirting, whatever it is. She’d love this.’

‘Are we flirting, Ben?’

‘I don’t know. Aren’t we?’

She pretended to fiddle with a thread.

‘Do you know your dad goes to your sister’s grave every day?’

‘Yes.’

‘Every day. Still.’

‘It gets better, Ben. It takes time.’

‘That’s just what your father told me.’

I sipped some more, the warmth of the bourbon streaming through me now.

‘Ben . . . I don’t feel like I owe you an apology for last week. But I hope you understand. I had to be careful. At the time it seemed like Gittens was right about you and Danziger. You had motive, means, opportunity.’

‘Sometimes you have to forget all that Agatha Christie crap, Caroline. You have to look at the person too.’

‘Okay. I guess that’s right.’

‘The other thing is, about when my mother killed herself—’

‘Ben, I don’t want you to tell me anything about that. You’ll put me in a terrible position.’

‘We have to get past it sometime.’

‘Ben, please, don’t. I mean it.’

‘Okay’ I tapped a knuckle against the window. ‘You know, last winter my mother got in a car accident. She wasn’t supposed to be driving at all. We weren’t supposed to let her. I used to unhook the battery cables so the car wouldn’t start. But somehow she got it started. Either I forgot or she figured it out. Maybe someone helped her reconnect the battery, someone who didn’t know what was going on. My mother could be . . . insistent. Anyway, she got all the way out to I-95. Who knows how. I guess she just kept driving and driving. Maybe she was lost. Or maybe she was trying to drive all the way down here, to Boston, to come home. She was born here, did I ever tell you that? She loved this place.’

My eyes began to seep.

Caroline was silent.

‘Somehow she wound up on the wrong side of the highway. She was going north in the southbound lanes. She must have gone on the wrong ramp or got confused by the signs or something. It must have been terrifying, all those cars coming at her. She drove into a concrete bridge support.’

Caroline made a soft, startled sound.

‘She was okay. Bumps and bruises. She had a black eye. It took forever to heal. The car was totaled. My dad had a fit.

‘That was when she decided. She said, ‘I don’t want to be a vegetable, Ben. I’d be
mortified
.’ That’s the word she used, mortified. She said she did not want to go through it alone and my father was not someone she could turn to, not for that kind of help. She was—’

‘Ben, please. Don’t do this.’

‘She got a book. That was Anne Truman: She researched the whole thing. The Seconal, she had a doctor friend. I won’t tell you his name. He gave her an anti-nausea drug too, so she could keep it all down.’

‘Ben, I don’t want to hear this. I can’t.’

‘There were ninety pills. We had to empty them all into a glass of water. Ninety red gel-capsules, one by one. They didn’t want to dissolve. We had to keep stirring and stirring.’

‘Ben—’

‘It was supposed to taste bitter. She said you were supposed to chase it with something to dull the taste. Jell-O or applesauce or something. She used bourbon.’

Caroline walked over to the window where I was standing. She stood in front of me, close, and said, ‘Ben, stop. I
can’t
hear this.’

‘I need you to understand.’

‘I do understand.’

‘Mum said, “Ben, hold my hand.” So I held her hand. And she said, “My Ben, my Ben.” And she went to sleep.’

‘Ben, no more. For your own sake, please. Please. I understand.’

I brushed my eyes. ‘Do you?’

‘I understand,’ she whispered.

We kissed, leaning against the window. It was a different – better – sort of kiss, because this time Caroline gave herself to it completely.

44

I woke up early the next morning, just after dawn, and stood by the window. The city was gray, the sky above it a dark slate that was reluctant to brighten. I drew a circle on the glass with my finger, a little greasy circle around the area I took to be Mission Flats.

‘What are you doing up?’ Caroline said.

‘I need to find out more about the Trudell case.’

‘Why?’

‘Because Braxton said – Where can I find more information?’

She groaned. ‘You’ve already seen the files.’

‘There has to be more.’

‘Ben, it’s too early—’

‘I can’t sleep. I keep thinking there has to be more. What else is there?’

‘Do we have to talk about it now?’

‘No. Sorry, go back to sleep.’

‘Try the detectives’ notebooks.’

‘Good.’ I thought a moment. ‘Wait – what detectives’ notebooks?’

‘Homicide detectives keep notebooks on every investigation. It’s routine. Sometimes there’s information in the notebooks that doesn’t make it into the reports. You might find something there.’

‘Where are they?’

‘Archives, I imagine.’

‘Okay, then I need to see those notebooks. Can you get me into the archives?’

‘Not right this minute.’

‘Alright, when it opens, then.’

Without lifting her head or even opening her eyes, she said, ‘Ben, all the Trudell files are privileged. They’re not circulated. Lowery saw to that. You’ll need to file a request with Archives, and it probably won’t be granted. You could file a Freedom of Information request with the AG, but it would take a while.’

‘How long is a while?’

‘Six months. Maybe a year.’

‘A year! We don’t have a year.’

‘What can I tell you.’

‘You can tell me how I get in to see those notebooks today’

One of Caroline’s eyes popped open. She propped herself on one elbow. ‘Chief Truman,’ she said carefully, ‘if this case ever comes to trial, it will be important that the prosecutor not be aware of any improprieties in the way evidence is obtained. And it would be unethical for me to tell you how to evade the public-records laws.’

‘Right. Sorry. I shouldn’t—’

‘What I will say is this: If – I said
if hypothetically
– you needed to get those records without the proper clearance, the best way would be to take my dad with you and see a man named Jimmy Doolittle over at Berkeley Street. And you would never ever tell the prosecutor that you got those notebooks illegally, because then she would have an ethical obligation to report it to the court.’

‘Um, what might I tell the prosecutor?’

‘What you might tell the prosecutor is that an anonymous person provided the notebooks to you, or better yet a dead person like, say, Bob Danziger. And you would have to be prepared to say that under oath. Is that all clear?’

‘Crystal. Thank you, Counselor.’

Her head dropped back down on the pillow. ‘My dad was a good detective. He’ll get you in. If you wanted to get in to the Pope’s underwear drawer, he could get you in.’

‘I’ll keep that in mind. You never know.’

‘Ben, maybe you should come back to bed. The archives won’t open till nine.’

‘I’m not feeling very tired.’

Eyes closed, she grinned and said, ‘Me neither.’

45

Jimmy Doolittle was the archivist of the Boston Police Department, overseeing a musty basement room blocked in with cardboard boxes and steel shelving. In these last few days of the Berkeley Street headquarters, the Records Room was even more chaotic than usual. Files had been boxed up and boxes stacked up, ready for the moving vans. These same boxes would soon be re-interred at the new headquarters or at a state archive facility, but for now there was an appealing sort of clutter here. It was like an old antiques shop – you wanted to open some of these musty boxes just to see what was inside. Someday very soon, of course, boxes like these will disappear altogether as police reports are increasingly maintained on computers, but most Boston cops still scratch out their reports longhand or whack them out with IBM Selectrics, which seems to me a very good thing.

John Kelly tapped on a desktop bell, the type you might see in an old hotel, and a voice deep in the warren of boxes growled, ‘I hear ya, I hear ya.’ When he emerged, Doolittle pointedly removed the bell from the counter.