Mission Flats (43 page)

It struck me then that Gittens was the perfect cop for Mission Flats. He was a natural broken-field runner, with just the supple temperament for that chaotic, unbounded place. When the rules did not work, he bent them. When the facts did not fit, he bent them too. And in general that was a necessary – even a good – thing. Without people like Gittens, the system would jam. But all that sophistication made Gittens tougher to decipher than Franny Boyle had been. He was certainly a better poker player than Franny I’d been bluffing when I said all this information had come from Danziger’s files. In fact it had come from Vega, Braxton, and Beck. I’d bluffed, but Gittens had not revealed his cards. Unlike Franny, Martin Gittens did not have a tell. He was indignant at the suggestion he’d done anything wrong – and guilty or not, who wouldn’t be?

He said, ‘What do you intend to do with all these . . . theories about the Trudell thing?’

‘I’m not sure. I still don’t know who the shooter was. For all I know, maybe it was Braxton after all. All the rest is just – I guess it’s just the way the game is played around here.’

Gittens tore up the cooperation letter and dropped the shreds into the water. They caught in the reeds. Some landed in open water, where after a time they sunk. I was offended at the gesture, but when Gittens spoke again, his voice was so reassuring that I knew he’d torn up the document for my own good. Some secrets should remain just that.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘be careful out there. There are people who don’t want the case reopened. Important people.’

‘So I’ve been told. But what can I do? I can’t just stop.’

‘Knowing when to stop is part of the job, Ben. We’re not supposed to answer every question, we’re not supposed to follow every lead to infinity. There isn’t time. Our job is just to solve the case in front of us then move on to the next one. At some point you have to just stop.’

51

Gittens was right, of course. Mysteries always remain. In any murder, a hundred tiny enigmas – what was the victim doing there?, why did he cry out (or not cry out)?, why did the killer drop the weapon?, why did he linger at the scene? You can swat at these gnats all day, to no real purpose. Homicides, with their randomizing violence and missing eyewitness, simply breed mysteries. Most are insignificant, and investigators learn to live with them. A case is ‘solved’ when the essential fact – the killer’s identity – is established. There are no drawing-room scenes in which the suspects are gathered and the sleuth delivers an immaculate, all-explaining solution. Gittens was right: The world is a messier place than that.

So I was prepared, after my conversation with Gittens, to accept a little uncertainty. If Artie Trudell was worried about something in the weeks before he died, we’d probably never know what it was, and there was no reason to think it mattered. Frank Fasulo and the Kilmarnock case; and ‘Raul’ and the red door and the Trudell murder; the killer who’d moved Danziger’s dead body looking for something – in all likelihood no one would ever know the truth about any of them, and maybe none of it mattered. The Danziger murder was solved. The hard evidence pointed to Harold Braxton, all of it. The rest was just background noise – rumor and gossip and tips. I had to accept that.

There was one mystery, though, one of those gnats I could not resist swatting. Alone among the witnesses, Franny Boyle still had not come clean. I left Gittens and went straight downtown to find him.

I parked on Union Street and began to make my way on foot, past Faneuil Hall and the statue of Samuel Adams, past City Hall with its looming concrete geometries, and out into the open space of City Hall Plaza.

This is a plaza in name only. It is too big and featureless, too empty to be a plaza. Rather, City Hall Plaza is a void. A barren, windy clearing the size of four or five football fields completely tiled over with red bricks. It is not a place where you linger. It is a place where you quicken your step to get across to the other side.

And that is precisely what I was doing, quick-stepping my way across the red bricks toward Cambridge Street. My thoughts were on Gittens – had I judged him unfairly? – and on the history of this real estate – on the loopy urban planner who decided fifty years ago to bulldoze Boston’s honky-tonk old Scollay Square and replace it with this monochromatic pinball table – specifically I was thinking that Bomber Harris was not half as thorough in leveling Dresden, and congratulating myself on the cleverness of that remark, thinking perhaps I would find a way to repeat it to Caroline, to impress her – all of which is to say, the usual slurry of thoughts was burbling through my mind, I was thinking of many things and of nothing – when a little burst of brick exploded at my feet like a land mine.

My first thought was that someone had thrown a stone or that a rock had fallen from a building. But there was no one nearby, and the nearest building was fifty yards away.

I heard a hiss, then a ghost slammed my left arm in the triceps with a hammer. The arm jumped across my chest. My jacket sleeve was torn and the arm was bleeding. There was a dull, swollen pain in the muscle –
my
muscle! – a pain that blossomed only after a delay, after that first unbelieving moment.

It was not until the third bullet raised another plume of brick dust that I accepted the obvious: Someone was shooting at me.

My brain whited out. There was no thought at all, only the primal urge – run.

I ran. At first toward Cambridge Street, away from the shots. But the only shelter on this fucking tabletop was the subway entrance, a bricked-over bunker behind me. So I doubled back and ran for that, even though this path took me back toward the shooter.

People bustled around the subway entrance. Lawyers and secretaries, office workers finishing a long day. They turned to see me running. They had not noticed the gunshots. There had been no
bang!
to alert them. The small crowd regarded me – a man sprinting toward them, his arm bleeding – an odd sight but as yet no cause for alarm. A yuppie in a suit smiled tentatively as if there might be some kind of joke, a punch line.

In a dead run, I pulled my pistol and racked it. This was a bit of action-movie flapdoodle I ought to have skipped. I had no idea where the shots were coming from and, in any event, how could I shoot back with so many people around?

Now, ironically, it was my gun that triggered a panic.

There was a scream. The commuters pushed back into the mouth of the subway entrance, then, when the lobby filled and they could not get past the turnstiles, they burst back out of the doors and scattered, screaming.

I did not bother to show my badge or announce I was a cop. I ran.

I reached the subway entrance and crouched against the wall. My arm was throbbing now, my shirtsleeve heavy with wet blood.

In the token booth, the clerk pressed himself against the back wall. His eyes were locked on the gun in my hand, his mouth hung open in a perfect O.

‘It’s okay,’ I told him. ‘I’m a cop.’

‘You want me to call the cops?’

‘No!’ I snarled. ‘No cops.’

I pressed my arm to stanch the bleeding and riffled through the possibilities. Who would take a shot at me? Braxton? Another gangbanger? Gittens? After all, I’d offended him just minutes earlier with questions about the Trudell case. But none of them made sense. Braxton had made me his confidant. And as far as I knew, Gittens was still in the Flats. With no ready explanation, paranoia set in.

I stepped up to the token window and tried to engineer an ordinary transaction, as if the events of the previous sixty seconds had never occurred. ‘One please.’ I fished in my pocket for a dollar to buy a token but I came up empty. ‘Jesus, I don’t have any cash. Sorry.’

The clerk gaped. He had not budged from the back wall. ‘It’s okay, buddy,’ he assured me, ‘you can go around.’

52

By the time I made it to the Special Investigations Unit, the pain in my arm had subsided, but my sleeve and left hand were wet with blood. When I appeared in her doorway, Caroline jerked back in her chair.

‘Ben! Oh my God, what happened to you?’

‘I think I got shot.’

‘You
think
?’

‘I guess. It’s never happened before.’

She rushed off to get a first-aid kit, then we sat on her couch so she could clean the wound with alcohol and a gauze pad. She ordered me to strip off my jacket and the bloody shirt. I was still wearing the same
PROPERTY OF BUFFALO SABRES
T-shirt I’d worn the night before, when Caroline had come to my hotel room. If she noticed this, she didn’t mention it.

‘It just grazed you,’ she said, presumably to calm me down.

‘It
grazed
me? I got
shot
.’

‘Well, you didn’t really get
shot
shot. It’s a scrape.’

‘Excuse me, I was under the impression that when a bullet hits you, that means you’ve been shot.’

‘Okay, Ben,’ she said, ‘you got shot. I meant, you’re okay.’

‘Caroline, don’t do that.’

‘Do what?’

‘That thing you do, with getting your way.’

‘I just said you got shot. I’m agreeing with you.’

‘I know, but it was the way you said it.’

She frowned at me. ‘Sorry. Just trying to help. You’re right, you got shot.’ She dropped the gauze into the first-aid kit, then said, ‘I’m on your side, Ben. You know that.’ She gave me a look to reinforce the point, aiming her eyes at mine until I acknowledged that I did know it – she was without a doubt on my side. ‘Don’t forget it,’ she said.

‘Sorry, I’m a little freaked out here.’

We kissed, for no particular reason except something told us to, and I understood – in a way I had not quite until that moment – that as difficult as it was to get close to Caroline Kelly, she was one of those selective, ferociously loyal people who, once they have taken you in, will stand by you through the most desperate times. Such people have few acquaintances and many friends. They withhold their affection because it costs them so much to give it so completely, and because they never – ever – revoke it. If you are lucky, you may meet one or two of them in your life.

From a desk drawer, Caroline produced a sweatshirt and tossed it to me. Long strands of her dark hair clung to the sweatshirt, which had the Boston PD logo and the slogan
AMERICA
’
S
FIRST POLICE DEPARTMENT
.

‘Thanks.’

‘It’s okay. I give one to everyone who shows up here with a gunshot wound.’

As I was putting on the sweatshirt, Caroline picked up the phone.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Calling the police.’

‘No.’

‘Oh, Chief Truman, don’t be ridiculous. We have to report this.’

‘Absolutely not.’

I gave her a look and she hung up the phone. ‘You’re being paranoid. Why would anyone want to shoot you?’

‘Maybe they don’t like hicks.’

‘You’re no hick.’ This she said in a dismissive voice, lest I mistake it for a compliment.

‘It’s the Trudell thing. Somebody doesn’t want me sniffing around that case. Is Franny here? I need to talk to Franny. He’s the only one left, and he’s been lying from the start.’

‘He’s in his office.’

I got to my feet.

‘Wait,’ Caroline said. She reached for the phone again.

‘I said no cops.’

‘I’m calling my father.’

‘Good. Okay, good. Get him in here.’

‘Ben, can I suggest one other thing? Call Kurth. Franny won’t try anything with Kurth there. He wouldn’t dare.’

‘Jesus, Caroline. Don’t you think that guy’s a little
 . . .
?’

‘I know, he’s a little odd. But, Ben, if there’s one cop you can trust, it’s Kurth.’

53

Franny seemed to be waiting for us. He was horribly transformed in the few hours since I’d seen him. He slumped behind his desk looking exhausted and ill and desperately sad. I thought he might even have been crying – his face was glazed with damp sweat like tears – but tenderness was so far from Franny Boyle’s character that I presumed instead that he was simply drunk, which no doubt he was.

Franny did not stir when we appeared in the door. He gazed at each of us in turn: me, Caroline, John Kelly, and Kurth. ‘Looks like the gang’s all here,’ he said. A beer bottle was pinched between his thighs. He lifted it to take a swig. ‘You guys want one? Just don’t tell the boss – I don’t want to lose my raise.’ Then a shadow passed over his face and the kidding stopped. The bravado was just too much effort to keep up and, at this point, why bother? ‘I been wondering how long it was gonna take you.’

‘Franny,’ I said, ‘you want a lawyer here?’

‘Again with the lawyer. No, Opie, I don’t need a lawyer.’

His eyes drifted to the wall behind me. ‘I ever tell you about my first homicide, Opie? It was when we had real gangsters, the old North End types, not these Asian kids. The real goombahs. My victim, they found him chained to a pile under this pier down near the Red Falcon Terminal, on the waterfront there. They took him down under the pier at low tide and they tied him to the pole and left him there while the tide come up. That’s old school, baby. We never solved it. Nobody would talk. What the hell – I wouldn’t have talked either.’ He slumped further in his chair. ‘I think about that guy all the time: chained there, watching the water come up. Nothing he could do. Just sit there and watch it.’ He wiped an invisible tear from his cheek and looked at me as if I were very far away.

I turned away from his face.

On the desk was the picture that had been hanging in Danziger’s office, the Special Investigations Unit as it was composed in the mid-eighties – Assistant DAs Bob Danziger and Franny Boyle, Detectives Artie Trudell, Julio Vega, Martin Gittens, about a dozen others – hanging on each other, brimful of confidence. The bomber crew assembled on the airstrip for a snapshot before their last, doomed run.