Lesser Evils

by Joe Flanagan

  Elliott led Warren into a conference room. Mounted on the wall were large framed photographs of President Eisenhower and Governor Furcolo. “Why did you take us off the Weeks case?” Warren said.

  “Lieutenant Warren, it is not a reflection on you or the department. I simply chose to have it followed up by people whom I happen to believe have the most experience with this sort of thing. That’s all.”

  “What is it you think we do down here?”

  “Well, you don’t handle missing persons cases every day.”

  “And the state police don’t either. Not down here.”

  “Captain Stasiak has handled several. Not to mention his experience with the rackets.”

  Warren opened his mouth to speak, but Elliott cut him off. “It’s got nothing to do with you personally, professionally, or any other way. It’s a matter of using the best tools at my disposal. I have a job to do.”

  “It’s a slap in the face, Elliott.”

  “I wish you didn’t feel that way.”

  “It makes me look bad. It makes my department look bad.”

  “That wasn’t my intention. I have a man at my disposal who has done this kind of thing, not once but several times. I’d be a fool not to use him. And forgive me for pointing this out, lieutenant, but it’s not your department. Not yet.”

  Warren felt his temper rise instantly. “I’m acting chief, Yost. That means I’m chief right now, while you’re taking my responsibilities away from me.” He was almost shouting.

  Elliott spoke back sharply. “I have discretion on how this thing gets handled.”

  “Well, maybe you forgot that I have a couple of experienced investigators and it’s not the first missing persons case they’ve seen either.”

  “I’m not going to argue this with you.”

  “My men know the Cape and they know the locals.”

  “Then you’ll be a valuable resource to the state police. I can let them know you’ll be at their disposal. Let’s not let our pride get in the way.”

  Warren looked at the district attorney. He was on the verge of saying something about personal ambition, about Elliott wanting to put on a good show for the DuPonts because they were rich and powerful and could lift his standing and his career. “I don’t like this a bit, Elliott. I think it’s wrong.”

  “Point taken.”

  On his way back to Hyannis, Warren drove beneath an overpass whose abutments were subsumed by honeysuckle and ailanthus and he experienced the futility that sometimes came over him and which made him feel defeated and panicked at the same time. He once responded to a suicide at a cut-rate beach cottage where a young woman had hanged herself and he often saw her in his mind, her head twisted off to the side at a grotesque angle and a surprised look on her blue face, as if this wasn’t what she had expected at all. At moments like this, in the shadows beneath the overpass, he found himself gripping the steering wheel and shaking his head and wondering what could drive a person to do such a thing. But what troubled him just as much was the young woman’s appearances in his vision—the types of things that prompted it. There was a correlation there, he suspected, if he took the time to trace it out.

  When he got back to Hyannis, he closed himself in his office and paced. He spotted the list of names he’d taken down the day Jane Myrna brought Mike by. The father of one of the boys who’d abused his son was David Langella, a concrete contractor who had some kind of connection to the head selectman through marriage or something, so Warren had heard. He happened to know that Chief Holland had fixed a drunk driving arrest for Langella a few years ago. Langella had a reputation as a drinker and a brawler who was never held responsible for his behavior, whose antics were almost appreciated, Warren believed, as an expression of local color.

  He looked at the phone, his anger rising. Warren picked up the receiver and called the clerk over at the Barnstable courthouse. He gave her Langella’s name and asked for a records check. He noted with satisfaction that she was quiet for a moment and then asked him to repeat himself. Warren knew that there was a better than even chance that she would talk about his request and that word would get around. The clerk told him that it would take her some time—she was alone and handling the switchboard at the moment. He requested that she call back and leave the information with Sgt. Garrity at the desk, who he knew was even more likely to spread the gossip.

  5

  The girl lay on her back in a faded purple and lavender checked shirt and denim overalls. She was tomboyish, with short coarse hair, dirt beneath her nails, and long, slender limbs she hadn’t yet grown into. With her soiled clothes and her smeared skin, the androgynous child looked like she’d climbed into the bathtub and fallen asleep after a long day of playing outside.

  The porcelain was streaked with the blood of her mother, who had been dismembered in the tub before her. The air in the bathroom was moist and smelled of freshly opened shellfish. And there was, too, an indeterminate musky scent that could almost be taken as part of this world, but its evanescent quality kept it halfway in the realm of the imagined. Leaning against the wall at the foot of the tub was a man of about twenty-three, dressed in a butcher’s smock and smoking a cigarette. He was looking down at the girl with a troubled expression. On the floor by his feet was a pair of bloody aqua-colored rubber gloves. An older man sat on the toilet across from him, also in a smock. Their bare arms were flecked with gore and bits of skin and tissue.

  The older man took a long drag off his cigarette and, squinting through the smoke, watched his companion. He leaned over the tub with his cigarette held between thumb and forefinger and planted the lit end in the center of the girl’s forehead.

  “Jesus Christ, Steve.”

  Tendrils of smoke rose up and, for a few seconds, came dense and fast before dying out altogether. The skin blackened and shrank away, leaving a glistening crater around the cigarette end. Steve took his hand away and the cigarette stood straight up on its own. He sat back on the toilet. “Look at that,” he said.

  “Fuck.”

  “We’re going to need more oilcloth.”

  The young man stood as if in a stupor, smeared from knees to elbows in varying shades of red, purple, and brown. “Is this about that guy who wouldn’t pay?”

  Steve swept his foot across a pile of tools, which spread with a clatter across the tiled floor. There were assorted knives, saws, and cleavers, a pair of metal snips and a set of bolt cutters. “It’s connected, Bobby. There’s a connection there, O.K.?” Steve picked out a pair of surgical scissors and handed them to the young man. “I’m going out to get the oilcloth. Cut the clothes off.”

  They took six bundles out of the apartment and down an outside stairway to a step van. Each was double lined with old bedsheets taken from the laundry room that occupied the first floor of the Starlight Cottages, an old resort from the 1920s that had closed down long ago.

  They drove the step van to the dump on the outskirts of town. Branches scraped the sides of the vehicle as it entered the woods. The road ended in a clearing, where the smell of raw earth and garbage was overpowering. They each took a bundle and disappeared into the brush, heading in the direction of the dump. They made three trips and when they emerged sweating at the tree line with their final load, they saw that they were being observed by a row of seagulls, perched silently atop the mountain of trash and silhouetted against the misty sky.

  A stout nun in a habit appeared on the other side of the screen door and looked out at Warren and Little Mike. “Come in,” she said. They stepped into the front hallway. Boxes lined the walls on either side, full of toys and books. “You must be Mr. Warren.”

  “I am. This is my son, Mike.”

  “Come with me.”

  They walked down a corridor with classrooms on either side. They could hear children’s voices, laughter, an adult trying to speak over the din. The nun led them to an offic
e at the end and rapped twice on the doorjamb. “Mr. Warren is here,” she said. She motioned for them to go inside. Seated behind a desk was a large, masculine-looking woman in heavy framed spectacles. She, too, wore a full habit, and though her overall appearance was formidable, her face was open and pleasant. “Hello,” she called out. “Come in.”

  Warren took a chair, Mike clinging to him, attached to his knee.

  “And this is Michael?” the nun asked.

  “It’s Mike. We call him Little Mike. It’s because he was so small when he was born and there was another Mike in the neighborhood . . . Anyway.”

  The nun introduced herself as Sister John Frances and made small talk with Little Mike. “And how do you like school?” she asked, finally.

  Warren said, “He’s had . . .”

  “Mike can answer, Mr. Warren.” She cut him off without looking away from the boy. Little Mike evaded the question, fidgeting and murmuring. She turned back to Warren. “As you probably know, we work with handicapped children from kindergarten through eighth grade. We’re operated by the Catholic Church but you don’t have to be Catholic to bring your child here. We don’t follow the same schedule as regular schools. We’re in session year-round because the kids need the attention and the structure. We don’t have grades, per se. Instead, we master certain skills and we have the children work their way up—if they can—to fourth-grade-level math, fifth grade, sixth, as far as we can get them. So instead of grades we have skill levels, and no time requirement to get there. We focus on the basics—reading, writing, arithmetic. But we also work on practical things: hygiene, getting dressed, buying things at the store. Everyday problem-solving. We get them as far along as we can so that by the time they’re high school age, they can more or less function like other young people. Ultimately, we’d like them to have more options besides complete dependence on a caretaker or institutionalization.”

  The offhanded reference to such a possibility awoke in Warren both a sudden fear and a resolve. He would do everything in his power to ensure that Mike was never taken away from him or put in a home somewhere, but as he summoned this determination, he felt an inexorable tide rising around him: things for which he could never prepare, the possibility of Mike getting worse, of financial trouble, medical problems, his own death. He was no longer listening to Sister John Frances but imagining the dire days ahead somewhere, and when he refocused he heard her saying, “We have an arrangement with Children’s Hospital in Boston where they send specialists down here to work with the kids, evaluate them and so on. They’re engaged in long-term research and we’ve agreed to be part of it. The hospital offers medical care in return and has done a few surgeries—a couple of our kids who are crippled from polio and a hydrocephalic boy. They come down every other week. Sister Julia Weyland can tell you more about that. She’s a licensed psychologist and did work with retarded children as part of her doctoral study at Boston College. Do you have Mike’s medical records?”

  “I do.”

  “We would need to see those and we would need to spend a little time with him, just us, without you present. Just to observe and to get to know him a little better.”

  Warren nodded.

  “And Mrs. Warren?”

  He paused just long enough to betray the difficulty of the subject. “She’s no longer with us.”

  “She is deceased?”

  “Yes.” He recoiled at the lie, urged himself to take it back and explain, but the seconds were passing. He would make it right later, tell the truth and apologize.

  When they were finished, Sister John Frances led them out a set of patio doors that gave on to the backyard. There, a group of older children were gathered around a large puddle that had formed in a shallow ravine at the edge of the woods. Kneeling among them was an elderly priest whose skin was uncommonly bronzed, as if he spent a lot of time outdoors. He appeared oblivious to the wet ground in which the knees of his formal black pants were embedded. One of the children said something that made him laugh and Warren noticed that one of his incisors was missing. He got the impression that the priest was acutely aware of his presence, that he was making an effort not to look in Warren’s direction. Sister John Frances led Warren and Mike toward the group. “This is Father Boyle,” she said. “He helps out with the children.”

  The priest glanced up at Warren for no longer than it took to make fleeting eye contact. He looked at Little Mike. “Who is this, then?”

  “This is my son, Mike.”

  “And to what do we owe the pleasure of this young man’s presence?”

  “Mr. Warren is considering having him attend,” said Sister John Frances.

  “Ah,” said Father Boyle and began speaking with Little Mike. He lacked the cloying earnestness people affected when they talked to the boy. He was direct and inquisitive, considering the boy’s comments with an attentiveness that appeared neither false nor overbearing. Warren looked down at the mud stains on the priest’s pants and the water on the tops of his shoes. Father Boyle said, “We’ve been watching these tadpoles for the last two weeks, Mike. Would you like to come see them?”

  Mike accompanied him to the edge of the pool and joined the other children there. Father Boyle spoke to them, pointing at the surface of the water. A boy whose nails had been bitten to bloody nubs put his hand up to his mouth and the priest, without looking away from the water, gently caught the boy’s hand, placed it by his side, and patted it. As Father Boyle talked about the life cycle of tadpoles, he produced a Life Saver from somewhere on his person and handed it to the boy.

  Watching Father Boyle with the children, Sister John Frances seemed to have forgotten that Warren was there. Their conversation awkwardly suspended, he watched her face and could not determine what he saw there: Fondness, perhaps, he wasn’t sure. She was an imposing woman, not given, Warren imagined, to easy sentiment.

  Father Boyle accompanied the children across the lawn back toward the house. Mike followed, his eyes on the priest. It occurred to Warren that his son seldom encountered men who were kind to him. He watched the children swarm around the priest, who honored them with directness and took the time to be clever with them and seemed genuinely pleased to be in their presence. Even Warren, with the hardened aspect he had acquired over years of police work, was affected by it.

  He held the door open for the children as they filed back into the house. “Let’s go, kids,” he said. “Reading with Sister James.”

  He paused a moment after the last one and squinted into the woods as if he might have seen something there. Both Warren and Sister John Frances looked in that direction, the nun shading her eyes against the morning sun in the treetops. When they turned to look back at the priest, he had gone into the house.

  6

  Warren sat in the quiet of his office with the notices and bulletins that he’d taped to the wall gently lifting off the plaster surface in the soft draft that passed through the open windows.

  On his desk was a stack of town vehicle maintenance forms that the department mechanic had brought him. The rear wheel bearings on Easy twelve were making noise. The voltage regulator on nine was bad. Thirteen was leaking coolant. Six had a bad tie-rod end. Warren had told the men these things weren’t hot rods. The rest of the paperwork was orders for parts and supplies.

  Outside he could hear Garrity moving around at his desk in the hallway. Warren was aware that there was an element within the police department that did not like him. He didn’t know exactly who they were but he had some ideas and he believed that Garrity was among them. Warren did not believe in fraternizing with the men. He had learned in the Army—the old Army—that it was the most effective way to run a military organization, which is what he considered the police department. There were some new ideas floating around post-Korea, a laxness and what he thought was an abdication of moral responsibility. Warren had tried to let his officers know that a certain kind of b
ehavior was expected of them, not only on duty but in their private lives as well. He was aware that it had not been well received. He had been trying to find a way to let them know that if they did not hold together morally, as a group of men, then the profound responsibility they had accepted as police became something dangerous in their hands.

  And Warren knew that this was just the sort of thing that isolated him from people. He believed it was the price of his position but sometimes he wondered if it had to be this way. People found him formal and distant. Ava teased him for it. It pained him to know he was viewed this way, but people depended on him to do what was right. He did not judge. He did not even judge Ava. Once again he found himself mired in the internal dilemma, sure that his attitude was correct while regretting the effect it had.

  His parents’ Catholicism had bordered on the fanatical. As a child, it had awed and comforted him. As a teenager, it made him feel uneasy. He had turned away from the Mass in the wake of Little Mike and Ava, but he was still deeply affected by the idea that there was a way to live in the world, and it was tied up with his father and after-death images of his father and the world his parents had occupied. In some part of himself, he was waiting for his father to come back and get him. He could see the old gentleman extending his hand out over the years and the disappointments that littered them like so much debris. Warren still believed in a world where things were right and whole and that he and Mike might live in it one day and his father would somehow be present. And when he thought of how his father would have embraced Little Mike and how he would have loved him not in spite of what he was but because of what he was, Warren was filled with a new grief and such a feeling of loss that he was paralyzed until he could work his way out of it again.