Lesser Evils

by Joe Flanagan

  At that moment, Dunleavy turned a corner in the hallway and came toward them. “Hey,” he said. “I swung by the coroner’s office on my way in. I had Jack Dowd call the forensic pathologist up at the state police lab in Sudbury. Turns out Jack knows him from the old days.”

  Jenkins and Warren regarded him with surprise, waiting for him to continue.

  “Bernie Suggs is O-positive, for the record. And our guys picked up a few small glass fragments from Stanley Lefgren’s hair. They don’t know what they are yet but it’s very thin glass, like from a lightbulb. There were a few hairs, too, and they say they don’t belong to the kid.”

  “Do they have anything similar off the Gilbride body?” Warren asked.

  “Nothing but material from the pond. Anyway, the kid was a mess. They had to keep him in the bag for the autopsy ’cause he was falling apart. Like a stewed chicken.”

  Warren said, “I wonder if Jack can keep us connected with this guy.”

  “At least until they shut him down.”

  “You’ve got someone on James Frawley?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What’s he been up to?”

  “Sticking close by the Salvation Army shelter on Winter Street.”

  “What about the place Cleve said he was looking at, the rental?”

  “I went over and checked it out. It’s like he said. A studio above a garage, currently for rent.”

  Back in his office, Warren went through the reports taken the previous day. The state police in Maine called about a truck driver who was picked up in Rockport the summer before for soliciting underage girls and did six months in the house of correction up there. He had a north-south route delivering cleaning supplies between Rockport and Boston and might have found his way to the Cape. A drifter named Clyde Pommering was run out of Lee, Massachusetts, for loitering around a carnival that was passing through town, making the parents nervous. According to police there, Pommering claimed to be on his way to Cape Cod. And doctors at a psychiatric hospital in Pittsburgh called about a patient they once had in their care—a man who heard voices that told him to hurt children. He had been discharged months ago but the doctors recalled that he said he might go to live with his parents in New England. Warren was surprised that anyone in Pittsburgh had heard about the murders.

  He left the reports with Jenkins and drove toward Kalmus Beach. Sitting in traffic on Main Street, he watched the tourists. A young woman exited a jewelry shop and began walking up the street with her back to him. He was sure it was Jane Myrna. He watched her gain distance, his fingers drumming on the steering wheel, impatient with the traffic. Was that a man walking at her side or was it a coincidence? Had he been waiting for her outside the jewelry shop?

  He experienced an unaccountable sinking feeling as she mixed in with the crowd and became indistinct, then turned off down a side street and was gone. When the traffic finally moved, he rolled grimly onward, pronouncing a new discipline to himself. He would have to stop all this business about Jane. There had been dreams lately. She was attractive, handsome even. She wore her dark, straight hair pulled back and clasped at the nape of her neck with a barrette. She was lean, with the wide shoulders of an athlete, and a strong jawline which was particularly striking in profile. She had a frank way of looking at people and her expression often flickered in a fascinating way between a gravity beyond her years and the mischievous look of a teenager.

  Jane was a lot like Ava had been, he thought; her hair, her physique. But then he thought that she was nothing at all like Ava, and the fact that he was comparing the two only emphasized how out of line his thoughts were on the subject. Warren had been taken with Jane from the start but he had believed that his favorable impression of her was simply appreciation of a pretty, intelligent young woman who showed compassion for his son. Now there were dreams, and there were some thoughts, too.

  When he pulled up to the Lefgren house, there were a state police cruiser and an unmarked car parked on the roadside in front. As Warren was coming up the walkway, the front door opened and Mr. Lefgren came out. He began to speak but emitted only a short, choked sob, a sound that he strangled and aborted so he could try again to form words.

  “You put them up to this, didn’t you?”

  He had left the front door open, and inside, Warren saw Stasiak standing there, in profile, with his hands on his hips. He was speaking to a pair of troopers in uniform and a man in plain clothes. He turned his head to look at Warren. Beyond him, in the living room, Warren could see Mrs. Lefgren sitting on the couch. A man in civilian clothes sat on an ottoman across from her, holding a small white envelope and a pair of scissors.

  “How could you do this to us?” said Mr. Lefgren. “When you were here that day . . . You came to our house . . . We trusted you.”

  “Mr. Lefgren . . .”

  “You sent these people here.” He shoved past Warren and walked to the front gate. Stasiak called out after him, “Mr. Lefgren.” Warren could hear children crying inside. Stasiak turned to the troopers. “Go get him.”

  The officers came out the door and clambered past Warren. Mr. Lefgren was walking up the road in the direction of Kalmus Beach and they headed after him.

  Warren addressed Stasiak. “What’s going on?”

  Stasiak turned away and continued speaking to the plainclothesman.

  “I’m talking to you.”

  Stasiak looked at him. He turned back to his companion and said, “Hold on a minute, Heller.” He walked down the steps and stood in front of Warren.

  “You and I are going to have problems, aren’t we?” he said.

  “We already have problems, you and I.”

  The two kept their eyes on each other’s faces, their bodies tensed.

  “What are you doing here?” Warren asked.

  “We’re conducting an investigation. The murder of the Gilbride boy, and I don’t need your permission to do it.”

  “You could have notified me. I spoke with the family two days ago.”

  “Well, we move awful fast, Warren.”

  “Why are they so upset?”

  “I would imagine because someone choked their kid to death.”

  “I’m trying to work this case to the best of my ability with whatever I’ve got at my disposal. That’s straight from the district attorney. Until another agency takes it over, we’re the lead investigators on this case. That entitles us to certain courtesies from you, one of them being notification of . . . stunts like this.”

  “Stunts?”

  “Like the autopsy. And the evidence you made off with.”

  Stasiak looked around the yard as though containing himself was taking a monumental effort.

  Warren said, “I pull up here and find you guys . . . What are you doing, grilling these people?”

  “We’re asking questions, Warren, and some of them are hard, yeah.”

  “Why do you have a technician in there?”

  “For hair samples.”

  “Didn’t it occur to you that something like this might concern us?”

  “Like I said, we move fast. I can’t stop and call up the goddam board of selectmen or the ladies’ auxiliary every time I’m going to do something.”

  “What you’re doing has a direct bearing on our case.”

  “Then why aren’t you out here taking hair samples, huh? Oh, that’s right, you are here. A day late and a dollar short. If I have to turn your water on for you, Warren, I’d say that you probably ought to go back to directing traffic.”

  “Now listen here . . .”

  “Where did the hair on the Lefgren kid come from? We need to know that, should the same hairs turn up in some place associated with the Gilbride killing. Should more bodies turn up.”

  The troopers returned up the road, flanking Mr. Lefgren, holding him by his elbows. He was sobbing openly now
, like a child, and a few neighbors were out on their lawns, looking, pretending to perform tasks. An old woman was visible in a house across the street as a ghostly, indistinct figure in a glassed-in porch. Warren watched Stasiak look the man over as he passed. He heard a rumor that the Gilbrides had complained about an interrogation the state police had conducted and that a lawyer from Tennessee had intervened. Warren suspected the same thing was going on here. He thought about the futility of complaining to Elliott about any of it. He was practically in a blind rage and, with difficulty, decided that before he said something to make matters worse, before he actually put his hands on Stasiak, he had better leave.

  Stasiak said, “You have that list of sex offenders from our R&I division.”

  Warren started walking to his car and said nothing.

  “I hope you’re not chasing down every pansy from here to Pittsfield.”

  Warren reached the gate in the picket fence and opened it.

  “At the risk of hurting your feelings,” Stasiak said, “you check parole officers, former parole officers, local tax and real estate records, employment offices, utility companies, court records in the jurisdiction of last known address. In addition to the usual.”

  Warren turned and glared back at him. Stasiak was watching him with a trace of amusement on his face. “I heard you used to be one of us,” he said.

  Warren opened the door to his cruiser.

  Stasiak said, “That was a different time.”

  “It sure as hell was.”

  12

  Ed Jenkins and Phil Dunleavy were sitting in an unmarked car in a dirt lot on the east end of Hyannis. They were a block from the ferry terminal that handled freight for Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard, and they could hear the clatter and banging of cargo being moved and the revving of engines as the last ferry of the day was being loaded. It was a quarter past eleven, the night warm and muggy.

  They were watching a big seedy-looking duplex across the street. The subject of their interest was thirty-six-year-old Gene Henry, who had served time for taking liberties with the 14-year-old daughter of a woman he was living with in 1949.

  Henry had been convicted of engaging in sexual activity with the girl, but there were accusations against him that were not included in the charging documents and were not admissible at trial. The girl had a six-year-old brother, and both she and the mother claimed Henry had molested him, a charge that could not be substantiated. Their statements were documented in the case file, however, and Henry’s name was duly flagged.

  They had recently discovered that Henry had a connection to the lower Cape—and Truro specifically, where the Gilbride boy’s body was found. Rumor had it he often went fishing there and had a girlfriend in the area as well. Since his release from prison, Henry had remained uninvolved with the criminal justice system and was employed as a cook at Mildred’s Chowder House where he worked the dinner shift. He was reclusive and slept during the daytime, which is what he had claimed to be doing at the time of the killings, though they hadn’t been able to confirm this.

  A silhouette appeared in front of a small window. There was a gauzy material hanging from the curtain rod, making the figure look as if it had been drawn with charcoal and then smudged. It stood still for a moment and then moved out of sight. Jenkins said, “That’s a terrible thing, that kid out there in the reeds like that.”

  “Yeah.” Dunleavy had his eyes fixed on the window. “I think this is a stretch though, this Gene Henry.”

  “The lieutenant thinks he’s worth a look.”

  “The lieutenant’s never worked a murder, has he?”

  “As a lead? I don’t know. Maybe with the state police.”

  “I don’t think he had any rank back then,” Dunleavy said. “You think they’re going to make him chief?”

  “Who knows. I hope so.”

  “I think you’re in a minority,” said Dunleavy.

  “Oh, are you one of those guys who’ve got a hard-on for him?”

  “No. He’s all right by me, but I know a lot of guys who don’t like him.”

  “That’s ‘cause he doesn’t pal up with them. He makes them do their jobs. Some of these guys are bums. You know that.”

  “Well, even the ones who aren’t bums aren’t crazy about the lieutenant. They liked Marvin.”

  “Hell, Marvin was more of a politician than a cop,” said Jenkins. “A fixer. That’s Marvin. Might’ve been a little dirty, too, as everyone knows. Remember that story about how he might have gotten kickbacks during the airport construction? Marvin and that concrete guy, Langella, or whatever his name was? What they don’t like about Warren is he’s got integrity. That’s why they don’t like him.”

  “You remember that time someone taped a picture of him to the inside of the urinal?”

  “Jesus.”

  “Can you imagine if he’d seen that?”

  They were both laughing now.

  “But that’s the thing,” Dunleavy said. “They do that stuff because of the way he is.”

  “So he’s wound a little tight. Come on. He’s a good man.”

  “You met his wife, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah, once.”

  “What did she look like? I heard she was good-looking.”

  “She was. Very good-looking.”

  “But she was an alkie.”

  “Yeah. She was that, too.”

  “Lots of stories about her.”

  Jenkins didn’t say anything. He looked up and down the street.

  “I heard stories about her walking down to the package store wearing nothing but a raincoat,” Dunleavy said.

  “I was here when all that was going on. A lot of those stories are bullshit.”

  “Some of them must be true, though.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You know some good shit, Ed, I know you do. You are not allowed to know good shit without sharing it with me, now come on.”

  “I’m not getting into the lieutenant’s private business, O.K.?”

  “We’ve been into his private business for the past five minutes.”

  The radio fizzed with static and the shift sergeant’s voice came on, droning faintly out of the dash chrome. He was positioning cars around a block of woods off Old Colony Boulevard. Jenkins said, “They’re setting up a perimeter.”

  “Want to go see what it is?”

  “We should probably stay here and keep an eye on this guy.”

  “The only thing this guy is going to do is go to bed. Let’s go. We need to get something to eat anyway.”

  By the time they got to Old Colony Boulevard, patrol officers had a man in custody in an alleyway that ran behind a row of one-story commercial buildings. He was bloodied, his hands cuffed in front of him and his head bowed, dark, stringy hair hanging down over his face. He was bleeding from a head wound and his lips were swollen and split. A group of officers stood around him, including Welke, with whom Jenkins had had words the night Warren choked out the big drunk and disorderly in Barnstable. The shift sergeant turned to the detectives as they approached. “We got a witness says this guy fell out the passenger side of a car going about 40 on Old Colony Boulevard,” the shift sergeant said. “We found him hiding in the woods.”

  A drop of blood formed on the end of the man’s nose, another at the tip of his chin, both hanging there simultaneously. “Any ID?” Dunleavy asked.

  “Joseph Leapley. He lives in Sagamore. We’re calling the name in right now.”

  Dunleavy spoke to the man. “What happened to you?”

  The man was silent, his head bowed.

  The sergeant said, “Get a look at his face. He didn’t get those cuts from falling out of a car.”

  Dunleavy, loud and accusing: “Who was driving that car you fell out of?”

  The sergeant said, “Who put those
cuffs on you?”

  Dunleavy turned to the cop. “You didn’t cuff him?”

  “No. We found him like this.”

  Jenkins said, “With cuffs on?”

  “Yeah. Who put the cuffs on you? You’re getting yourself in a shitload of trouble right now.”

  The man did not speak.

  Patrolman Welke said, “What are you, a fucking mute?”

  Jenkins turned and eyed Welke. Welke eyed him back. Jenkins said to the sergeant, “Did he have a wallet?”

  “Yeah. It’s in my car, on the dash.”

  Jenkins went over and got the wallet. There was no money inside. He found an insurance card, a driver’s license, a membership to the Bass River Rod and Gun Club, a picture of a little girl in pigtails, and a slip of paper with a phone number on it. He walked over to the man and said, “Someone handcuffed you. They cut your face and by the looks of it they beat the hell out of you. Instead of going for medical help you go and hide in the woods. What kind of trouble are you in, Mr. Leapley?”

  A flashing red light lit the quiet side street as the ambulance turned the corner. The sergeant called out, “Welke. Go with him to the hospital. Get whatever information you can on him. If he gets any visitors, I want to know.”

  When the ambulance was gone, the alleyway returned to darkness. The only illumination came from the aging street lamps set at infrequent intervals on splintery poles out on the side street. The sergeant took off his cap and scratched his head. “Weird.”

  Frank Semanica knew he shouldn’t have done it. But the guy just sat there and said nothing. When they handcuffed him and started beating him, he didn’t beg and he didn’t promise. He just got real quiet, like he was going to be brave about it, like he was going to prove something.

  They had brought the guy over to Brinkman’s Brake & Lube in Dennis. There was no such person as Brinkman, at least not anymore. Grady had a third party lease it and they kept the name that had been on the building for years. He brought down a couple of mechanics he knew from South Boston, guys who could be trusted to keep their mouths shut. They serviced a light volume of cars, enough to make the place look legitimate. Grady ran a booking operation and loaned money out of the rooms upstairs. There was a card game, too, which is how this guy, Joe Leapley, got himself in trouble.