Mission Flats (19 page)

‘Who’s this guy?’ I asked.

Caroline stood next to me. (She smelled faintly of soap and powder, and my eyes pulled toward her.) She followed my pointing finger to the big guy with the beard. ‘That’s Artie Trudell. He was killed a long time ago. Harold Braxton was charged but he got off.’ She continued to scrutinize the photo. ‘Look how young Bobby was.’

Robert Danziger must have been in his late twenties, early thirties when the picture was snapped. Not more than a year or two out of law school, with no idea what lay ahead. He probably felt bulletproof with the weight of Artie Trudell’s arm on his own bony shoulder. There was no way to predict the countless branchings that would lead to his own death. Was Danziger already moving inexorably toward that cabin in the Maine woods? Or was there still time to pursue an alternate fate? To leave the DA’s office, say, or stop practicing law altogether. Or simply to leave Boston – to remove himself from Harold Braxton’s murderous path. Every life carries an allotment of what-ifs, but the questions become more fraught when a life ends badly. Of course, no one predicts a bloody death for himself. We all expect to die in bed. But a percentage of us will not; a percentage of us will die violently or too soon. Those people are traveling along their own chain of incident right now, ignorant, free to alter their fate if only they knew it. We are all blithe and unaware, as Danziger had been when he posed for this picture twelve years earlier, and some of us will die just as he did.

‘So what does SIU do now if it’s not an anti-narcotics unit anymore?’

‘Complex investigations. We still do narcotics stuff, but we handle other things too. White collar, public corruption, gang cases, cold cases. We also handle cases where BPD has a conflict of interest.’

‘I thought cops were supposed to have a conflict of interest with bad guys.’

‘I mean where the cops are the bad guys.’

‘Oh.’

Caroline straightened the photo on the wall.

‘What about Danziger?’ I said. ‘What kind of cases did he do?’

‘A little bit of everything. When you’re in a unit this small, that’s how it works; everybody does everything. Bobby coordinated all the anti-gang stuff, but he took other cases too.’

She led me to a conference room next door to Danziger’s office. Manila folders and cardboard boxes were stacked along a wall. The waist-high pile of papers stretched six or eight feet across. ‘These are Bobby’s files, everything he was working on when he died. If Braxton had a reason to kill him, there ought to be something relevant in here . . . somewhere. It’s kind of a needle in a haystack.’

‘That’s not a haystack,’ I sighed, ‘it’s a farm.’

‘Well then, you should feel right at home.’ She smirked.

‘I’m from Maine, not Kansas.’

‘Whatever.’

I spent the rest of the afternoon in that conference room, sifting through Danziger’s case files. It made lurid reading. There were a dozen or so files involving police corruption of one kind or another – a cop charged with extorting blow jobs from prostitutes in the Combat Zone (the report quoted him,
Don’t you say no, don’t you say no to me);
a half dozen narcotics detectives who helped themselves to $30,000 from a stashpad in Mattapan; an evidence officer who got hooked on the cocaine that passed under his nose every day on its way to the evidence locker; another group of narcotics detectives who beat up an African-American drug dealer, only to find the dealer was actually an undercover Boston police officer
(I’m a cop! I’m a cop! Look at my badge!).
Among the crooked-cop files, there was one that stood out, not because it was so serious but because it was so trivial.
Commonwealth v. Julio Vega
was a perjury case in which the defendant pleaded guilty and accepted a year probation. The case had been closed five years earlier, in 1992, and the file jacket was empty. Why would Danziger still be monitoring a case so petty, years after it had been closed? I set the empty file folder aside.

The bulk of Danziger’s case load was in anti-gang prosecutions. So I began looking for defendants I recognized as members of Braxton’s gang: Gerald McNeese, June Veris, Braxton himself. The cases ranged from ordinary drug pinches to more chilling crimes. June Veris, the guy I’d seen dealing in Echo Park the day before, emerged as a particularly sinister character. In one incident, Veris had used a chunk of concrete to crush the hands of a member of the Mara Trucha, a Salvadoran gang. Both hands were reduced to a mash; all the tiny bones were shattered. The attack was payback for Mara Trucha’s selling rock in Echo Park, clearly Mission Posse territory. Veris was never prosecuted, because there were no witnesses, including, miraculously, the man whose hands were flattened. That pattern – an outrageous crime followed by an acquittal or even an outright dismissal of charges – was repeated over and over again. Whatever mayhem the Posse was responsible for, so long as they confined their activities to Mission Flats, charges were rarely filed. Witnesses who lived there simply refused to testify.

As the hours passed, my sense of outrage over the goings-on in Mission Flats began to wane. It became easier to blame the victims who would not come forward to testify. How could Danziger or anyone else help them if they would not help themselves? To judge by these documents, Braxton’s name rarely appeared in the files. Danziger had no open cases pending against him and none in the offing.

By two o’clock, my eyes were fogged over. Caroline came by to check on me and deliver a can of Coke.

‘You read enough police reports yet, Ben?’

‘Let me ask you something: Where do cops learn to talk this way?
I alighted from my vehicle.
Who the hell alights from a vehicle? Why can’t they just say they got out of the car?’

‘It’s cop-speak. All police reports sound like that.’

‘Mine don’t. My reports are beautiful.’

‘Chief Truman, you sound like a crotchety old Down-easter.’

‘I’m no Down-easter. Just crotchety’

She smiled, though it appeared to be against her better judgment.

‘Who’s this Julio Vega? There’s a file here with nothing in it.’

‘Julio Vega? Come here, I’ll show you.’

I narrated in cop-speak: ‘The law-enforcement personnel alighted from their chairs and initiated foot traffic to the office of the victim.’

‘Enough,’ Caroline called over her shoulder.

‘Sorry. It’s catchy once you get started.’

In Danziger’s office, she stood before the photo of the Special Investigations Unit circa 1985 and pointed to a handsome Hispanic man sitting in the front row, right next to Gittens. ‘That’s Julio Vega.’

‘He was a cop?’

‘He was in Narcotics in Area A-3, which is basically the Flats.’

‘Why did Danziger have a file on him?’

Her finger moved from Vega to Trudell, the red-bearded giant who had his arm draped over Danziger’s shoulder. ‘Vega and Artie Trudell were partners. Vega was standing right next to Trudell when Trudell got shot.’

‘Shot by Braxton.’

‘Right. Vega saw his partner get killed. It was a terrible case.’

‘What does that have to do with a perjury file on Vega?’

‘It’s a very long story.’

‘I’ve got time.’

‘It’s a big file, I’m warning you.’

‘How big could it be?’

Caroline’s mouth turned up in a smile. She looked like a cat who has just noticed the canary’s cage is open. She went to a cabinet and began unloading boxes, folders, transcripts, notebooks. We lugged the papers to the conference room, where they swamped the surface of the table.

‘I thought you said it was big,’ I cracked.

She left me there with the file on Artie Trudell’s murder, a case that had been closed nearly a decade. Why Danziger had kept all these materials – other than his friendship with the victim – I did not know. But I quickly fell to the task of sifting them and, out of old habit, trying to see the events in real time.
To be there.
I’d done similar reconstructions before, as a would-be historian, before my life was interrupted – before my mother’s illness mooted all my own plans for the future. This was the essence of historiography, piecing together a moment in time from primary sources. I had done it a hundred times. When I was in school, it had all seemed like a very romantic adventure: I was a time traveler, riding the matrix of time and place. Poring over the ten-year-old file on Artie Trudell’s murder, that adolescent, almost physical sense of transport did not return, but some of the old pleasure did. For the next few hours I was lost in the events of a decade earlier. There was even a little flush of confidence about my abilities as a policeman, for what is a detective but a species of historian?

17

From the prosecutor’s file in the case of
Commonwealth v. Harold Braxton
(1987).