Mission Flats (36 page)

Gittens led us to the Dumpster in the basement of the C Building in the project. On the side was a label from the Zip-A-Way Waste Disposal Company on Mission Ave, where Bobo made his home in a Dumpster, albeit a much nicer Dumpster than this one.

‘Up you go,’ Gittens told me cheerfully.

‘What is that, “up you go”?’

‘Well, somebody’s got to get in there.’

‘Well, it’s not going to be me.’

‘It’s your case,’ he said. ‘Happened in Ver-sigh.’

‘But this was your idea.’

‘That’s why you have to get in there. I can’t do everything.’

I struggled for a counter-excuse. The only thing that came to mind was
But I’m the guest.

Gittens offered a pair of rubber gloves from his coat pocket. ‘Come on, Ben, we don’t have time. Upsy-daisy.’

My eyes bounced around the Dumpster. All around it, sticky fluid was candied to the floor. I checked my shoe bottoms.

‘Isn’t this what you wanted?’ Gittens said. ‘Bright lights, big city?’

I snapped on the gloves and hoisted myself into the open mouth of the Dumpster. The garbage chute filled it from the back, so the front was relatively empty. I slid down the angled front wall of the Dumpster until my feet hit the steel bottom. The garbage bags pressed around my shins in a comforting way, maternal, bosomy.

‘Look out for the rats,’ Gittens advised.

My eyes bulged.

‘Kidding,’ he said.

The banter was such pleasure. It had the feel of an oblique, manful offer of friendship. A restoration, a re-acceptance.

I rustled through the loose items, newspapers, grease-stained paper bags, scraps. A method quickly developed: grab, glance, toss it out of the Dumpster, grab, glance, toss.

‘So,’ Gittens said, ‘do you feel a little different about your friend Braxton now?’

‘He was never exactly a friend. But yes. I guess you knew the truth about him all along. The last ten years anyway.’

‘I’ve known the truth about Harold Braxton longer than ten years.’

‘Since the Trudell thing, I meant.’

‘What makes you say that?’

I poked my head out of the Dumpster. ‘I spoke to Julio Vega.’

‘Did you?’

‘I did.’

‘When was that?’

‘Few days ago.’

The information can’t have come as news to Gittens; it had reached all the way to District Attorney Lowery long before. But Gittens made a surprised face – eyebrows raised, mask-of-tragedy frown – as if he’d never heard about it.

I explained, ‘I was looking through Danziger’s files. Turns out he was looking at the Trudell thing. I figured I’d better find out what he was so interested in.’

‘So what did Julio have to say?’

‘He said Raul was your snitch.’

Gittens smiled a cryptic smile.

‘Is it true?’

‘Off the record? Yeah, of course it’s true.’

‘How come you and Julio never told anybody?’

‘Who were we going to tell?’

‘The judge, the DA.’

‘We told everyone who needed to know.’

‘Including the DA?’

‘Put it this way, Ben: Julio and I did what we thought was best for the case and for Artie. We made a judgment call. We did our job, we protected the case.’

‘Does that mean you told the DA or not?’

‘It means we did what we thought was right.’

I pulled out a crumpled copy of
Newsweek
and made a show of reading the address label, holding it over the lip of the Dumpster to see it in the light. A moment to think. At length, I tossed the magazine on the floor with all the other trash.

‘Why didn’t you just give up Raul?’ I asked.

‘What is this? What are you trying to say, Ben?’

‘Nothing. I’m just saying. If you’d given up the snitch, maybe the case wouldn’t have gone south.’

Gittens eyed me. ‘I tried to give him up. I turned this neighborhood over and shook it. I couldn’t find him. Julio told the judge that.’

‘What about his name?’

‘I didn’t have his name. Jesus, Ben, it’s not like getting a tip from your stockbroker. These are vagrants. They appear, they disappear. They change their names like you change your socks. Raul didn’t have a name, he didn’t have an address, he didn’t have a phone number. How could we produce him? What were we supposed to do? What would you do?’

I did not have an answer.

‘We did what was right,’ Gittens insisted. ‘The judge fucked up. He didn’t understand the situation.’

‘Maybe. Then again, you didn’t tell the truth.’

‘Oh, Ben, come on, this isn’t kindergarten.’

‘I’m just trying to figure it out, is all.’

‘Alright, well let me help you figure it out. A cop was dead, a good cop who happened to be a friend of mine. Harold Braxton blew Artie Trudell’s head right off his shoulders. What was I supposed to do? Go to the judge and say, “Your Honor, Julio Vega might have left out a detail on the search warrant. Raul was really my snitch, not Vega’s. So go ahead and dismiss the case, Your Honor, let Braxton walk.” Would that have been the right thing to do, Ben? Would it?’

At Gittens’s feet, the concrete floor was crumbling. He picked up a chunk of concrete the size of an apple and flung it against the wall, where it burst.

He shook his head. ‘Who are you to lecture about the truth? You of all people. Did you tell the truth when you came down here? Did you tell us everything about your mother’s case? About why Danziger went to Maine in the first place? No, you did what you thought was right. You tried to make things come out the right way.’

‘You’re right. I’m sorry’

‘You should appreciate what I’ve done for you, Ben. It was one of my snitches that gave up the truth in this case. Otherwise you might be looking at life in Walpole.’

‘You’re right. I’m sorry, I spoke out of turn.’

Gittens stood with hands on hips, unsure whether to stay or go. With his sport coat pulled back, I could see the nylon holster on his belt. It crossed my mind that if he shot me here in this Dumpster and closed the lid, I would probably never be found. I would be trucked to a landfill and buried among the plastic bags. I shook away the image. It was crazy.

‘Hey, Gittens, it’s ancient history. I’m just trying to get it all straight.’

‘You want to know what happened? I’ll tell you what happened. Julio wanted credit for the pinch because he wanted to make sergeant and maybe get out of Narcotics someday, maybe get out of the Flats altogether. Simple as that. Same as everybody else wanted. All I did was pass him a tip from this rat I had. Happens all the time – you hear something, you pass it along. Cops help each other. That’s how we survive.’

‘I’m sorry I brought it up. I wasn’t accusing you of anything, Martin.’

Gittens shrugged to signal all was forgiven. No offense taken. But then he picked up another chunk of concrete and fired it at the wall. ‘I need to get some air. Just finish this, Ben.’

We left the Grove Park complex – empty-handed, alas – and returned to Area A-3 to sort through the garbage bags we’d collected. At the station-house we tore open the plastic bags one by one, spilled the contents out on a conference table covered with newspaper, and searched for bits of paper that could be linked to Braxton. We stood on opposite sides of the table, barely speaking.

‘Is police work always this glamorous?’ I ventured finally. An invitation to conversation.

Gittens acknowledged the comment with a smirk but said nothing.

He and I had never been friends exactly, and for a while – when he’d suspected me in the Danziger case – we’d even been adversaries in a professional way. But this little frisson of tension between us felt like something new. This felt more personal. I had broken trust by questioning his role in the Trudell case, and now a cool cordiality descended between us. My own mood suffered too, and when we finally did uncover a trove of Braxton’s trash – including a credit-card slip bearing his signature – there was a sense of anticlimax.

‘Looks like you did it again,’ I congratulated him.

‘Ten years too late, right?’

We were on different terms now.

40

One hour later, in an unmarked cruiser, John Kelly and I sat staring at a small apartment building – surveilling it, in Kurth’s word. At some point, according to the garbage evidence, Braxton had stayed here. Now our assignment was to ascertain whether he came or left in the hours before the police stormed the building. A few miles away, Caroline was at Mission Flats District Court getting the warrant. The moment she got it, under the paranoid rules of engagement that governed in Mission Flats, we would rush to carry out the search before anyone in the Area A-3 stationhouse could warn Braxton we were coming. In the meantime there was nothing to do but wait, surveil, and hope the fluttery feeling in my stomach did not worm its way south to my bowels.

‘You nervous, Ben Truman?’

‘Yup.’

‘Good. If you’re not nervous, you’re stupid.’

‘You nervous?’

‘I’m too old to be nervous.’

Across the street was number 111 St Albans Road in Mission Flats, a mold-green clapboard structure with two entrances, each apparently leading to several apartments. The building sat atop a mortar-and-pudding-stone foundation, which leaned precariously to the left so that one imagined the building sliding right off it like a fried egg slipping off a plate.

We sat there awhile. And then awhile longer.

Kelly produced an apple from his coat pocket and began munching. He gazed out the windshield, blithely unconcerned with 111 St Albans Road or, apparently, anything else. It was hard to focus with all that apple-crunching. I pulled my gun and fussed with it. I checked the clip, pressed it back into place, racked the slide once. One round up. Better safe than sorry. I sighted along the spine of the gun to a mailbox.

‘Put the gun away,’ Kelly said to the windshield. He popped the apple in his teeth to free his hands, then he took the pistol, removed the clip and the chambered round, and handed it back unloaded. ‘The gun’s fine. Leave it alone.’ He returned to munching and gazing out the windshield. ‘You’ll do fine, Ben Truman.’

‘How long do you think she’ll be?’ I meant Caroline. ‘How long does it take to get a warrant?’

‘It takes what it takes.’

I nodded. ‘You ever shot anyone, Mr Kelly?’

‘Sure.’

‘How many?’

‘I don’t know. A lot.’

‘A lot?’

‘In Korea. We didn’t keep count.’

‘I mean when you were a cop.’

‘Only one.’

‘Did you kill him?’

‘God, no. Shot him in the ass.’

‘I’ve never shot anyone, you know.’

‘I figured.’

‘I can’t even shoot a deer. You ever seen a deer get shot?’

‘No.’

‘Well I did, once. It’s bloody. I figured the thing would maybe stagger around and grab his chest and fall over. You know, “Good night, sweet prince” and that’s it. Forget it. I shot this big buck and we came up and he was lying there, still alive. He kept kicking his feet, trying to get up. His eyes kept blinking. He was scared, you could tell. I was supposed to shoot him again. I couldn’t do it. One of my buddies had to finish him off.’

‘It’s not like shooting a deer, Ben.’

‘I don’t even like to fish—’

‘Ben!’

I slid the clip back into the Beretta and Velcro’d the gun into the holster on my belt.

After a time I said, ‘I talked with Gittens today. He fessed up, told me Raul was his snitch, just like Vega said. I keep thinking: Maybe it doesn’t matter. So ten years ago Gittens passed along a tip – so what? And then I think: Danziger never knew Gittens was involved.’

Kelly gave me a blank look.

‘Remember you said good cops do bad things for good reasons, and bad cops do bad things for bad reasons? Well, arresting Braxton is a bad thing.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘It just doesn’t feel right.’

He stared out the windshield. ‘Look, Gittens is a good cop. Let’s wait and see what happens. For now, just make sure you get home tonight in one piece. That’s all you should be worried about.’ He opened his door to drop the apple core on the curb. He tried to drop this comment out the door too: ‘Caroline will kill me if anything happens to you.’

‘What? What does that mean?’

He gave me a look. ‘Ben Truman, you may be too dense to make it as a detective.’

‘What? Tell me!’

‘It means she’s thirty-seven years old, she has a son at home. A lot of guys don’t want that. It’s not easy for her. Where’s she going to meet a man?’

‘You know, Mr Kelly, don’t take this the wrong way, but maybe she doesn’t want to meet a man.’

‘You think she’s gay?’

‘No. It’s just, maybe she doesn’t want to get married. Maybe she likes her life the way it is.’

‘Jesus, you think she’s gay’

‘Trust me, she is not gay’ Then: ‘I mean, I don’t catch a gay vibe off her. I have a pretty good sense of these things.’

‘So you’re just not interested in her.’

‘I’m just saying, I think she wants to be out on her own right now. She’s like a man that way’

‘“She’s like a man”?’

‘With the independence, not . . . the other thing.’

‘I look at her and she’s beautiful. Don’t you think she’s beautiful?’

‘Oh she’s—’ I puffed my cheeks and exhaled heavily, the way a mechanic does when you ask him how much it will cost to rebuild the engine in your Saab. ‘She’s very, very attractive, yes,’ I said carefully.

‘I just don’t want to see her wind up alone, that’s all.’

‘Well, you don’t have to worry about Caroline. I think she can take care of herself.’

‘Everybody tries to look that way, Ben Truman, but nobody can really take care of themself. Not even Caroline.’

‘Maybe.’ I shrugged, uneasy with the topic. ‘Anyway, if she knew you were talking like this, she’d kill you. Besides, I don’t think she’s especially interested in me.’