by Joe Flanagan
“You’re frightening my son. Step back.”
Langella looked at the boy and then back at Warren. “You’re going to tell me why you’re looking at my record.”
“What I’m going to tell you is to keep your boy away from my son. You tell him not to touch him, not to speak to him, not to even so much as look at him. Your son has been bullying my boy. You’re not stupid. You know what the situation is here.”
“So that’s what this is about.”
“My son has enough difficulties as it is.”
“Well, you raised him.”
“And you’re raising a coward.”
“What?” Langella thrust his chest out and balled his hands into fists. His nose was practically touching Warren’s.
“Your son’s a coward, Langella. He picks on handicapped children. He’s a big boy and he knows how to be mean but he’s got no character. I wonder where he got that from.”
Langella’s body shifted slightly. He moved his right foot back a bit and set it like he was getting ready to do something.
Warren said, “You get any closer to me and I’m going to be putting your face in the pavement.”
“Dave,” one of the friends called.
“I’m filing a complaint against you,” Langella said. “I’m going to the board of selectmen.”
Warren looked down at Little Mike. The boy was clutching his comic book, watching the two men. “Let’s go, Mike.”
As they walked home, Mike was quiet but agitated. He rolled his comic book up, which was unlike him—he would normally be very careful with a new one—and kept looking behind them. Warren could hear him whispering to himself.
“Mike, it’s O.K.,” Warren said. “That was Matt Langella’s father. You know Matt, right?”
“Yeah.”
“I told him I wanted Matt to stop bothering you.”
“Is he a bad guy, Dad?”
Warren had to think. He knew what Mike’s conception of a bad guy was, and Langella didn’t really fit. Not yet, anyway. Warren wondered if he would eventually qualify, if he would get liquored up and start something one day, or if he would encourage his son to go after Mike again.
17
That night, as Warren sat at the kitchen table reading the paper, the phone rang.
“Lieutenant Warren, it’s Alvin Leach. Am I interrupting anything?”
“No, Mr. Leach. What is it?”
“I’m all but certain that number you asked about goes to a place on Route 28 called the Elbow Room. I had a man trace it out that far but I wanted to contact you before going any further. Finding out for sure is going to mean sending him up the pole out on the street or checking the service box on the side of the building. It will be conspicuous. The number itself is what we call a phantom number. There’s nothing in billing, there’s no record of a request for service. We have no information on it whatsoever.”
Warren knew of the Elbow Room only vaguely. He recognized it from its occasional appearance in the call log—fights, mostly—though he couldn’t place its location.
“Unless there’s any further step you’d like to take,” said Leach, “I need to disconnect the line and issue a citation for unauthorized use.”
“I’d appreciate it if you’d hold off. I’ll be in touch with you, Mr. Leach.”
Warren paced the kitchen. The whiskey sat on the kitchen counter in its brown paper bag but he resolved not to touch it. He was wound up from his confrontation with Langella and he preferred to sit through it on his own, without any ameliorative.
Toward midnight, when the neighborhood quieted and the only sound was the insects peeping in the weeds, he removed the little book from its place between the refrigerator and the breadbox and thumbed its pages. It sprung open at a familiar place:
It was a face which darkness could kill
in an instant
a face as easily hurt
by laughter or light
“We think differently at night”
she told me once
lying back languidly
And she would quote Cocteau
“I feel there is an angel in me” she’d say
“whom I am constantly shocking”
Then she would smile and look away
light a cigarette for me, sigh and rise
And stretch her sweet anatomy
let fall a stocking
The author was someone named Lawrence Ferlinghetti. He’d read that particular poem half a dozen times now. It made him think of Ava in a way nothing else did, not even the rare physical remnants of her presence in the house.
He sat there and shook his head. This house could be alive with Ava if he allowed it but he would not allow it. His responsibility was to make a safe, happy place for the boy. He found himself looking warily around the darkened living room, warding Ava off though she’d been gone now for six years.
Warren met Ava in the spring of 1940 when he was a young state trooper. He was shy and self-conscious around women. Being relaxed in their presence seemed like an unattainable quality to him, and he wasn’t convinced that simply being himself was something that would interest them in any case.
Ava was a beauty. Her eyes were an uncommonly pale blue. Against her raven hair and the dark red lipstick she often wore, they made her look exotic, unsettlingly beautiful. She was lively and outgoing and her sense of humor was almost what Warren would have called risqué, though he suspected he probably didn’t get out enough. There was an instant physical attraction between them. During dinner she had slipped a hand over his briefly, which thrilled him beyond what he imagined to be normal, which distressed him, and wasn’t it awfully forward of her to do that on a first date? She played the awed girl in his presence, asking about his work, but could sometimes change into someone more worldly: irreverent, laughing at everything. Then she could be tender and pensive. It all seemed like play, like she was trying on different versions of herself to see which one would work best on him. Warren watched the display, dazzled.
He couldn’t tell if she was someone he should avoid or if he should give in to the incredible pull that was taking him toward her. She was a local girl. She had grown up on the Cape and knew how to fish, sail, shoot, knit, and cook. She seemed to soften as they spent more time together. Suddenly, it wasn’t necessary to go out for drinks or dinner. She borrowed a friend’s sailboat and showed him how to sail. They hunted pheasant in the marshes in the days before hotels and housing tracts took so much of it away. Ava fixed him dinner and he sat quietly in the kitchen with her and her mother. There was a candle in a mason jar on the table and a summer storm outside. Ava called her mother “Ma” and touched her shoulder when she spoke. Mrs. Kitteridge’s eyes glowed in the candlelight as she watched them and told stories about her childhood on the Cape.
They found ways to be together whenever they could. They got married in July 1941 and moved into a tiny cottage one block off Main Street in Hyannis that had mostly been used for summer rentals. It seemed like he had dropped out of his previous life into some paradise for which he’d been randomly chosen. That time seemed enchanted to him now, difficult to recall but for the odd detail that came without his bidding. They floated into his vision, triggered by things that he couldn’t anticipate and which often surprised him. He never knew when the happy time with Ava was going to come back, bright and winsome and killing him with regret.
He got called in early 1942. He and Ava left their little cottage, stored all their things at her parents’ house, and drove down to Camp Stewart, Georgia. When training was over, his unit boarded a train bound for San Francisco. He said goodbye to Ava. It was like one of them had died. That night, in a cramped berth that smelled of body odor and freshly issued gear, he nearly wept. Ava went back to Hyannis and waited. They wouldn’t see each other again for three and a half years.
When Warren came back from the Pacific things were different. He was edgy and disoriented and he got the feeling that she had gotten used to life without him, perhaps had even come to like it. The truth was he had gotten used to living alone himself. He was anxious to go back to work because he didn’t know what to do with their time together. But going back to his old job with the state police would have meant living in barracks for six nights out of the week and he couldn’t see how that would help matters. So though he had loved the job and was very proud to be a state trooper, he made the painful decision not to go back. He got hired on as a carpenter at Cameron’s boatyard, where he worked for a year until the job with the Barnstable police came through.
Domestic life was uneasy, their small talk excruciating. He realized that they could not simply pick up where they had left off. There was something about the whole experience of being away—the entire experience of the war—that he could not stuff down into himself. It all should have had some momentous effect, what, he couldn’t say, but after the unforgettable events in those places it seemed his existence should somehow be changed. The bloated dead on Biak, the emaciated prisoners in slimy rags, the long, steamy concrete cellblocks at the military prison in Leyte, it all seemed too significant to simply merge with the rest of the past and disappear in the wake of his passage into his thirties. Now he sat in a frigid squad car on patrol and then went home to Ava and dinner, where she chewed her nails and looked around the room as if trying to find a way out.
The entire time he was overseas, he had his pay sent home. He hoped that when he returned they would have enough for a down payment on a house of their own. When he got back he was stunned to find there was little of it left. The explanation, such as it was, came fitfully over weepy accountings and indignant claims of innocence. He didn’t know what it took to run a house, she said. Her mother died while Warren was away and her father immediately took up with someone else and gave her no assistance. The money didn’t go very far. They fought bitterly over it. He wondered if she’d been having an affair, or if she’d hidden the money somewhere with the intent of leaving him and collecting it later.
Warren noticed she was drinking more than he recalled. She’d usually had one or two by the time he got home. If he was working a late shift, he’d find her dead asleep and the room had the rich cloying smell of exhaled alcohol. If he mentioned it, she’d get defensive.
They moved into the rental at General Patton Drive and managed to make a life together. It wasn’t what it had been before the war, but Ava relaxed and took to the new place. She turned the homely, functional back hall into a pantry and planted a vegetable garden in the backyard. She was clever and resourceful, converting the place into a comfortable, cheery home. She found economical ways to furnish and decorate it, making her own curtains, refinishing a pair of end tables, cutting fresh flowers from the roadside.
During a spell of cold autumn evenings when it got dark early, he thought he perceived a downward turn in her mood. For the first time, he saw a little sarcasm in her humor that carried a sting and it was directed at him. He was alarmed when he called her at one in the afternoon to find her slurring her words. Warren spoke to her about it and she denied drinking.
Their unhappiness was compounded by isolation. Ava always wanted to go out, but Warren, because of his work, didn’t feel comfortable being seen at leisure in public. He felt it compromised him somehow. Warren had to maintain authority and respect with the public, and to him that meant he could not be out among them doing the things they did.
Ava’s drinking worsened. They fought. She said she would have a drink if she wanted one and it was the first time she ever said “goddamn” to him. “Someone ought to pry you off your cross,” she said, with the sheer bitter joy of releasing something that she had always been longing to let go. It whetted her appetite for conflict. Warren didn’t know what he was going to find when he came home. He was dazed by how rapidly things were deteriorating and then Ava became pregnant with Mike. Warren ordered her to stop drinking for the sake of the baby but she only made a little more effort at hiding it.
When Mike was born, it was immediately clear that something was wrong. He was premature and underweight and didn’t nurse or make a single peep. He looked around him with a strange adult seriousness as if to inquire what he was doing here. He didn’t cry when he needed changing and he didn’t cry when he was hungry. He was an eerily quiet and somber baby who stared at things as though he were inexpressibly tired of looking at them. They took him up to Boston frequently to see specialists. Warren didn’t like subjecting him to all the tests, even though he lay still through each of them with a profound sadness that even affected the nurses.
Warren and Ava ground out another year together. He made lieutenant while the gulf between him and the rest of the force felt like it turned into something permanent and unbridgeable. Mike was about to turn one and he showed not the slightest sign of making a sound or crawling. The house became cluttered and dismal.
Ava disappeared and was gone for four days. One night at about seven thirty, he answered a knock on his door and found Ed Jenkins standing on his front step holding a reeling Ava by the elbow. She looked horrible. Her clothes hung off her, limp, stained, and slept in. Warren brought Ava inside and put her on the couch. He went back out to Jenkins and said, “Where was she?”
“The Westover Motel.”
Warren didn’t even know the place.
“A cab dropped her off there four days ago. I was over there asking around about some bad checks and the help flagged me down. They were worried about her.”
Warren didn’t know what to say. He didn’t know how he could go on working on the force—in a position of authority—with this kind of scandal in his personal life. He didn’t know Jenkins very well, either. His impression of him at the time was that of someone with a very rough edge and a vulgar mouth, a small man with a chip on his shoulder. Warren didn’t know whether Jenkins was doing him a favor or just pretending to so he could get a good close look at Warren’s domestic catastrophe and report back to everyone else. He thanked Jenkins and they stood awkwardly on the step for a moment. The lilac by the front door was in full bloom and powerfully fragrant and Warren was embarrassed about it for a reason he couldn’t fathom. It made everything seem even more humiliating, more painful. Jenkins said, “I’ll be going then, sir,” and walked off to his car.
Normally, when there was an incident with Ava, Warren knew when it had been spread around the police station. Garrity would peep at him over the previous night’s call log as he passed the front desk on his way in. Marvin Holland would give him a weary, appraising look, as if to gauge how he was holding up. Conversations stopped when he passed.
But it seemed like no one knew about what had happened at the Westover Motel. Warren could not bring himself to believe that Jenkins, presented with such a ripe story, could have refrained from telling it.
Shortly afterward, Ava disappeared and did not come back. That was on a Friday, and he spent the weekend looking for her, one hand on Mike to keep him sitting upright in the front seat. He carried the child from motel to motel, with a picture of Ava that he showed to the front desk clerks. When she hadn’t turned up by Sunday night, he called Harold Myrna, who was a retired Barnstable District Court magistrate. His daughter Jane had been engaged to a young serviceman who was killed in Korea in ’53. She was currently living with her parents and had a job teaching school. Warren heard she sometimes babysat. He told Harold he was in the midst of a domestic crisis and needed someone to watch over Little Mike. Warren had misgivings when he first saw the tentative, dark-eyed girl who was clearly hollowed out from grief, but it was all he could think of.
Mike grew and developed and Warren was overjoyed as he watched him walk and then talk—much later than other children, but it was an incredible gift all the same, like watching a miracle.
He never discovered what became of
Ava. If they pulled a body out of a pond, he thought of Ava and remembered her face so he could compare it to the deceased. It was the same with car wrecks involving single females, and the occasional suicide. He felt sure she was going to turn up in some mess, some accident, in a hospital or a morgue, but she was gone.
If Warren was isolated before, it was far worse now. It was painful to be seen in public. He felt exposed at work and besieged behind the walls of the tiny house, which barely seemed enough to shield him and Little Mike from the merciless eyes of the world outside.
18
This is Dr. John F. Dowd, coroner, town of Barnstable. It is 1037 hours, Wednesday, July 21, 1957. Present are Captain Dale Stasiak and Detective James Ferrell, Massachusetts State Police.
The decedent is a well-developed Caucasian male child. The body measures fifty-two inches and weighs an estimated sixty pounds. The decedent is nude except for a pair of underwear, white, with an elastic waistband. These are located approximately five inches above the knees. There is no staining or any visible evidence of biological material on the fabric. The underwear is removed, sealed in an envelope, and given to Detective Ferrell of the Massachusetts State Police.
Stasiak and Ferrell watched the pathologist examine the boy’s body. His Dictaphone was set up on a white ceramic tray with his instruments. The child was rigored into a position that suggested a fetal animal, taken out of its jar for dissection. His knees were drawn up, presenting his little feet like a pair of ghastly paws.
The body has been submerged in seawater for an estimated twenty-four hours. There is a circumferential ligature mark with associated ligature furrow on the neck. Also, abrasions and petechial hemorrhages on the neck. There are petechial hemorrhages in the conjunctival surfaces of the eyes and in the skin of the face.