Mission Flats (48 page)

The body stirred. Its legs bicycled slowly in the sand.

Braxton and my father stared down at it.

‘It’s the only way out,’ I told them.

My father looked up at me. His features were fallen, his lips parted slightly.

I said, ‘It’s the only way.’

I heard my voice – so self-possessed, so calm – and was surprised by it. I was anything but calm. Something was loose inside me, some wild energy I could not control and did not wish to. I glanced around for the nightstick. Where was it? I’d heard it hit the sand – I’d
heard
it!

Gittens groaned and struggled to his knees.

I looked again for the nightstick. Where the fuck was it? I needed it now!

Gittens dragged himself toward the lake with an indistinct grunt. In his hair, there was blood salted with grains of sand.

I said to my father, ‘What now?’

He did not answer. Just blinked at me, frowning. Creases sunk into the skin near his mouth, and sad little blankets gathered around his eyes, and rain fell on his face.

I couldn’t look at him. I turned to Braxton: ‘What now?’

Braxton gestured with his chin toward Gittens, who was attempting to raise himself on all fours. He said, ‘You want me to do it?’

I told him no.

Gittens sprawled forward. His forearms were in the water now.

Braxton said, ‘It’s the right thing.’

I stood over Gittens, hooked my arms under his chest, and heaved him forward into the shallow water. The cold revived him. He pushed up with his arms to lift his head and shoulders out of the water. It was only a foot or so deep. With my right hand on the crown of his head, I pressed him down into the water. He shook his head free and came up with a gasp, thrashing wildly. His yellow raincoat glimmered. My hands gripped his skull, fingers over his ears, thumbs squeezing down on the occipital bone, the little bony horn at the back of the skull. I pressed his face all the way down into the sand. A thin screech bubbled from the water. It cut through the sound of his thrashing. High-pitched, like a baby’s cry. It was the worst sound I’ve ever heard.

Epilogue

It is nearly a year now since that night by the lake. A year since I decided to set down these events on paper, to work out for myself the how and why of it. To make my confession.

No doubt you want to know how the story ends. The details. The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, as the lawyers say. You want the answers. Okay, then.

They found Martin Gittens’s body in Boston Harbor, submerged in the muck off Battery Point in the Flats. The coroner’s report noted that his lungs were filled with freshwater, not the brackish stuff of the harbor. But nobody seemed too troubled by this inconsistency, not after the rumors began to float up – rumors of Gittens’s own history, of Fasulo and Trudell and, yes, Bob Danziger. Once everyone – prosecutors and editorial writers and good citizens alike – reached an unspoken agreement that Gittens had committed these murders, the detective’s own drowning seemed a less urgent matter. Rough justice and all that. Best not to look too close. It is, technically, still an open investigation. A cold case.

Suspicion for Gittens’s murder fell briefly on Harold Braxton, until it was revealed that Braxton was in custody in Versailles, Maine, at the time. Had anyone bothered to check the lockup in Versailles that night, they would have found the cell empty, Braxton and Chief Truman both gone, unaccounted for until nearly sunup. But nobody did check. And nobody did notice the soaked carpet in the back of the Bronco, where we laid Gittens’s body under a blanket for his last ride to Boston. As for Danziger’s murder, all charges against Braxton were dropped within a couple of weeks, and, so far as I know, Braxton vanished, with Ed Kurth in pursuit like The Furies.

Andrew Lowery is still the District Attorney for Sussex County and will, no doubt, be mayor of Boston someday. He’ll be a damn good one, too.

As for John Kelly, his ancient nightstick sits on my desk as I write this. But Kelly is gone. Hit from behind by a drunk driver as he waited in line at a toll booth on the New Hampshire Turnpike. The driver was seventeen and blew a .20 on the Breathalyzer. He walked away from the accident unharmed. Kelly was buried next to his wife and daughter, Theresa Rose, forever ten years old.

I escorted Caroline to the funeral on a raw, drizzly morning. There was a perceptible change in her face that day, a naked bewilderment. It was unnerving to see her so shaken, but I understood it. She had not expected her father to die, had not thought he was capable of it. I recognized the emotion – the selfish terror that infuses mourning – because I’d been feeling it myself for the better part of a year.

I have seen Caroline many times since then. I don’t know what will come of it except an exorbitant phone bill and a few more miles on my crappy old Saab. For now, it’s enough just to go down there and be with her. Caroline cooks, I take Charlie to Red Sox games. It is the closest thing I have to a home.

On one of these visits, Caroline gave me a present: a heat-sealed plastic bag containing the drinking glass from the Ritz-Carlton. The glass was smudged with my ninhydrin-stained fingerprints. ‘Smash it,’ she said. I told her I couldn’t. It was the last thing my mother ever touched. ‘Smash it,’ she said again. I never did.

There are, of course, secrets I have not shared with Caroline – family secrets about the Trumans’ own wild streak, about the deaths of Bob Danziger and Martin Gittens at our hands. I have not told her that I can still feel Gittens’s scalp twisting in my fingers, still hear that water-muffled yawp he emitted. I know I can’t have Caroline while I keep my secret; at the same time I can’t tell her the truth and expect her to stay. But I’m not ready to see her go yet, so I say nothing.

In August, Caroline and Charlie finally came up to Versailles and we rented a cabin on the lake. Caroline took to the lake just as my mother had. When she swam, I had a notion the lake was embracing her, welcoming her. And in my mind’s eye I saw that flickering movie of my pregnant Mum as she floated on an inner tube and waved to the camera,
Hi, Ben!
At the end of that week, I remember, Caroline stood knee-deep in the lake, hands on hips, and took in the view. Concentric rings of water, hills, and clouds. She said, ‘It’s pretty to be here. Everything is so clean, so clear.’

I said, ‘We need DAs here, too, you know.’

She laughed. ‘Yeah, okay, Ben. It’d be like living on Mars.’

‘Well,’ I told her, ‘that’s a start.’

My father? The stain of Danziger’s murder has stayed with him. He’s managed to climb back on the wagon and stay there, but his heart has given him trouble. In the spring, he asked me for a job as a volunteer in the department so he could have something to do. He said, ‘I’ll be a crossing guard, a file clerk, anything.’ I told him no. Sanctimoniously, I told him the murder was not the end of his life, but it did unfit him for police work. It was a moment of high hypocrisy, and eventually I relented and allowed him to hang around the station. After a few days he stopped coming, though. In June, he moved to a neighboring town. The Chief’s exile was a source of puzzlement around Versailles. People assume he’d died a little when his wife passed, as spouses often do. It was a misperception I did nothing to correct. I do not know if it is possible for Dad to find forgiveness for what he did. But I expect he will outmuscle his troubles, eventually, and get on with his life. It’s the Truman way.

And me. I am still the chief in Versailles, though I don’t know how much longer I will stay. The town deserves better. In the meantime, I have made it a habit to walk a beat, as John Kelly would insist I do, though the only beat in this town is Central Street, all two blocks of it. I’ve taken that stroll twice a day, every day, stopping to chat at the Owl and McCarron’s and the General. For a while I carried Kelly’s nightstick on these rambles. I even spun the thing, or tried to.
If you carry it right,
Kelly said –
if you carry yourself right – you’ll never have to use it.
It was a bit of police wisdom I wanted to hang on to, but I couldn’t believe it anymore. Not with the touch-memory of Gittens’s head in my hands, not with him thrashing between my legs in one foot of water. No. I don’t carry the nightstick anymore. It sits on my desk or in a drawer. Maybe I’ll give it to Caroline. Or Charlie. I don’t want to have it around.

So those are the details, the ‘facts.’ That is how the story ends.

But the story never ends, does it? History – the rolling wave of incident after incident, propelled by currents of chance and luck and coincidence – streams right along with no regard for beginnings or endings. The only true end is the present moment, the seething forward edge of the wave.

So let me bring you right up to the present. As I write this, it is September. The summer temporaries have all returned to their winter jobs, and the department is back down to Dick and me. Disgorged of the summer people, Versailles is back to its population of several hundred. It is foliage season again, but that’s no real bother. The leaf stalkers are an older crowd than the summer tourists, and they’re generally nice people, even the flatlanders from Taxachusetts. It is a quiet time.

I am at the station, alone at my desk. It is dusk but I haven’t turned on the lights yet. It feels comfortable in the gloom.

As soon as I am finished here, I’m going down to the lake for a swim. This is the best time of year for it, my mother always claimed. In the evening the air is chilly, but the water is still warm after a summer under the sun. In fact, the air and water temperatures are close enough to create an illusion: while you are night-swimming, at certain moments you can’t tell air from water, and in the darkness there is a sense of zero gravity, of weightlessness. On my way to the lake, I will pass right by the spot where Bob Danziger’s cabin stood. (The cabin itself has been razed, not for health reasons but because it was considered unrentable. I sometimes use the spot for a parking place.) I will leave my clothes in the Bronco and walk right into that water, let it take me in and envelop me, and swim out to the center, stroke by stroke, to the deepest part.