Lesser Evils

by Joe Flanagan

  With a surplus of idle time on his hands, Dale Stasiak became an unhealthy preoccupation.

  Watching him now through the scope, Warren was amazed at his good luck. He had lost Stasiak in this vicinity a number of times and finally, guessing that the beach was where he had been headed, decided to stake out the parking lot.

  There was a boarded-up bathhouse and a small playground beside it, the seesaws and rocking horses empty, the swings moving slightly in a breeze. He watched Stasiak get out of his car and circle the bathhouse, disappear from sight briefly, and reemerge on the other side. He stood by a phone booth and looked at the empty playground.

  After some time, Stasiak entered the phone booth and pulled the door shut behind him. Through the glass, which was streaked with bird droppings, Warren could see him talking. He saw Stasiak’s head rotate slowly around, checking his surroundings, as if he sensed the presence of someone else. Stasiak looked down at the floor of the phone booth for a moment, then raised his gaze in Warren’s direction. In the round aperture of the spotter’s scope, it seemed as if Stasiak were staring directly at him.

  Seated perfectly still in the confessional, Father Boyle listened to the sounds outside in the church. It was nearing five o’clock on a Saturday afternoon. He had heard a half dozen confessions, similar litanies of minor sins, some from voices he recognized, all no different from those he’d heard the previous week. Outside, he could hear the occasional creaking pew, the odd cough, and once in a while a snatch of whispering.

  At five till five, the adjacent booth opened. He heard someone kneel on the small padded ledge below the screened window. Instead of beginning with the ritual words of confession, the penitent simply knelt there quietly. “Go ahead,” Father Boyle whispered. When there was no sound from the other side, he said, “Are you there?”

  “Yes.”

  It was a man’s voice. The scent of tobacco and sweat drifted through the wicker, acrid and primal, suggestive of some extremity of circumstances the priest could only guess at.

  “Go on. How long has it been since your last confession?”

  “I have never been to confession.”

  “You are Catholic?”

  “No. But I need to tell something.”

  “I empathize with you, friend. I’m humbled you came to me. But the sacrament of penance . . .”

  “I know something terrible.”

  “I see.”

  Father Boyle strained to see through the wicker. In the tiny interstices of black, there was nothing. He could hear the man rustling in the dark on the other side. There was a long pause during which it appeared he would not speak at all.

  “Perhaps this is not the time for you to speak,” Father Boyle said.

  “It’s past time.”

  Another silence passed.

  “I myself am guilty of things that would surprise you,” Father Boyle said. “Does that put you more at ease?”

  “My name is . . .”

  “I don’t want to know your name.”

  “I want you to know it. In case something happens to me.”

  “This is all very dramatic, but in the scheme of things, how serious can this be?”

  “Very serious.”

  “I’ve been a priest for more than forty years. I’ve heard just about every wrong a human being can commit.”

  “I doubt it.”

  Father Boyle waited. He could hear people shuffling in for the five o’clock Mass. Whispered conversation in the entrance foyer. The man said, “There’s something happening and I need to stop it.”

  “Are you talking about a crime?”

  Light flooded the adjacent compartment as the man opened the door and let himself out. Father Boyle sat there, fighting the temptation to follow. He counted to twenty—time enough for the penitent to get out of the church. When he emerged from his booth, the heavy front doors of the church were open, the afternoon ablaze outside. Just before they swung shut, he saw the black form of a tall, thin, long-limbed man hurrying out.

  Late afternoon settled thick and damp over General Patton Drive. Crows sat in the dead branches of the pines in the backyard and looked silently down on Warren as he smoked on the back step. He had no work and had been roaming the house looking for something to do, as if this were the only thing that stood between him and some terrible fall. He ran for the telephone when he heard it ringing on the kitchen wall. It was Jenkins.

  “Hey,” he said. “Did you see today’s Globe?”

  “No.”

  “They killed Wilson Hayes.”

  Jenkins showed up ten minutes later. It had been a long time since two grown people had sat at the kitchen table. It seemed incredibly cramped.

  Wilson Hayes was discovered sitting behind the wheel of his car at the parking lot of the Gillette Company’s headquarters. Employees arriving for work noticed the shattered driver’s side window. Hayes had been shot once in the side of the head by someone, police surmised, who knew his schedule and was waiting for him.

  “I know Wilson was asking questions up in Boston about George McCarthy and the other names we gave him,” Jenkins said. “He was asking around about Grady Pope, too. I never believed that he screwed us on the Elbow Room.”

  “Then who?” Warren asked. “The phone guy Alvin Leach used to trace the lines? Dunleavy?”

  “Shit. The more I see, the less I’d put it past him. How’d you know Phil was visiting the chief at the hospital?”

  “I found out from the nurses. He usually showed up at eight o’clock at night.”

  “I never thought he would’ve done something like that. I didn’t even know he and Marvin were close.”

  “I didn’t either. Dunleavy is ambitious. I guess there’s nothing wrong with that, but he went behind my back and he robbed me of an appointment I should have gotten. God only knows what he said to Holland.”

  A car with no muffler rattled slowly up the street.

  “I just can’t believe they killed Wilson.”

  They walked back out to Jenkins’s unmarked. “Listen,” the detective said, “I’ve got something for you.” He reached into his car and felt around under the front seat. He came up with a small box. Warren opened it and found a .45 automatic inside.

  “Where’d you get this?”

  “I figured it would be a good idea if you kept it in your car.”

  “Tell me you didn’t take this from the property room.”

  “I didn’t take it from the property room. O.K.?”

  Warren looked around the street, removed the weapon from the box, and examined it. “Is this the gun they used in the holdup at the Sunoco on Phinney’s Lane last Halloween?”

  “No. Come on.”

  “Yes, it is. Ed, this is illegal.”

  “At this stage of the game, lieutenant, I think we need to stop playing by the rules.”

  On the highway heading down Cape, Stasiak watched the other vehicles on the road. He doubled back twice, then continued, checking to see if any of the cars that had been behind him before were still there. On the northern edge of Truro, there was a series of dirt roads that led into the woods. There was an old house on the right, completely overgrown, its single dormer melting into the structure itself, its weight too much for the water-damaged roof. The front porch sagged dramatically, the ground around it covered by a black, algae-filled lake from which frogs chirped and grunted. On the left there was an illegal trash dump just inside the woods, and shortly after that, a sandy road that led to a group of dilapidated cottages. Stasiak pulled his car around to the back of one of them and parked it by a pair of propane tanks. Fugitive smells rose in the air and spoke in the secret language he shared with them: The dregs of discarded bottles, sodden clothing, coniferous decay. He went in the back door and walked through a small, bare kitchen, its linoleum floor blistering, the sink full of unwashe
d dishes. She was sitting up on the edge of the bed, her hair unkempt, her head bobbing slightly. Stasiak took off his sunglasses. The scents from outside had found their way into the cottage through the screens in the windows. He could smell them here, in her room, and he felt the excitement stirring. No one knew about her, about this place or what went on here. Sometimes it stayed in his mind for days afterward.

  He looked around the bedroom for signs of any visitors. “You haven’t had any guests, have you?” he said.

  The woman shook her head.

  Stasiak checked the bathroom and the tiny front room, looking in ashtrays, picking up stray items of clothing to see whether there was anything that did not belong to her. He returned to the bedroom and stood over her. “You got any liquor in the house?” he asked.

  She did not respond.

  “Not likely, huh?”

  He took a small package out of his wallet and tossed it on her bed, then went out to the telephone in the front room to make some phone calls.

  Stasiak called her Mitzy. He didn’t know what her real name was. In fact, the woman carried no type of identification whatsoever. He had met her one day while driving through the area during the Gilbride investigation. Stasiak discovered her walking down the road in a tan raincoat and a kerchief, a bottle in a brown bag in her arms. He initially stopped to question her but when he saw that she was inebriated, he drove her to her place and they had sex. He left her some money and spent some time scouting the area. The cottages were extremely isolated.

  Stasiak kept an eye on the place, driving by at odd hours to see what she was up to. There was never so much as a car on the road and at night the cottages were dark masses in the woods, the only light a dim outline around one of her drawn shades.

  He finished his phone calls and went back into the bedroom. She was lying on the bed with her eyes closed, the needle and tourniquet beside her. He knew by now that there wasn’t any risk of her running off and telling anyone about his visits. She was drunk all the time. And now she had acquired a taste for heroin and Stasiak was the only way she could get it.

  Whenever he left, he went out to the box on the side of the house where the telephone line came in and pulled out the jack. She wouldn’t be able to figure out how to get the phone working again. When Stasiak came to the cottage, he opened the box, reconnected the jack so he could use the telephone, then disconnected it again before he left.

  He stood in the front room and peered out through the curtains over a sea of ferns toward the road. He looked in on her one more time, found her unconscious, and drove off.

  When the sound of Stasiak’s car faded into the late morning quiet, the woman got up on one elbow and retrieved the heroin from a small dish where she had poured it and which she had concealed behind the lamp on the floor. She lit a candle and prepared the drug, drawing it up into the syringe once it started to liquefy and bubble. He always talked on the phone afterward, sometimes for as long as an hour. She never injected the drug until he left. She pretended to, and lay on the bed feigning unconsciousness while she listened to what he was saying.

  When she was in school, she had a good head for figures and could memorize well. In spite of all she’d done to herself—or allowed others to do—she could still remember things if she really tried. She had a feeling she was heading toward death and there was some relief in it, though she sometimes thought she should try to do something about it all; what, she couldn’t begin to say. She cast around in her mind for the thing she would do, however small, the one good thing in all this impossible mess of wrong and ugliness, but then, as the point of the needle sank into her skin and she pushed her thumb down on the plunger, she decided it didn’t matter anymore, whether she ever committed a good act again. She felt the sun rising inside, and once again she was trying to think of some small good thing, but then she lay back on the bed and was gone.

  36

  Jenkins made it a habit to stop by the state police barracks early in the morning so he wouldn’t run into Stasiak, Heller, or any of the cadre of goons they kept around them. He also got there early because he got to the tip sheets before anyone else. As Jenkins expected, he did not get assigned to the Weeks case. Dunleavy put him off repeatedly and now was acting as if he were wary of approaching Stasiak about it again.

  The tip sheets were the bottom of the barrel for anyone working on the task force, and they usually comprised an eternity of partial plate numbers, vague hunches, dead ends. However, they were sorted through daily and if there happened to be anything promising, one of the state police detectives took it. If Jenkins waited till midmorning to check the tip sheets, he found that anything remotely intriguing would be gone. So he arrived at the barracks well before seven and rifled through the pile for the best ones. Most of the time there was nothing, but since he’d been doing this, he had amassed quite a lot of information and he just had to hope that he would discover one particular vehicle that had been spotted in all the wrong places.

  Jenkins walked down the empty main corridor of the barracks, eyed Stasiak’s office door, and went to the rear of the building where a state police matron was seated by the silent phones. “Good morning, Margaret,” he said.

  “Good morning, Jenkins.”

  “Anything good come in last night?”

  She huffed out a laugh. Jenkins began going through the sheets. “Come on,” she said. “I don’t want you fishing through all that stuff. Just take some off the top and get out. Jenkins, I’m serious.”

  “I know. But I get all the shit work on this case and I want something halfway decent to look at. Is that too much to ask?”

  “You’re going to get us in trouble. We’re missing some tip sheets, you know.”

  “You’re not missing any tip sheets.”

  “Yes we are.”

  “You’re just overtired, Margaret. What’s this? ‘Man walking on golf course at the Sea Pines,’ O.K., I’ll take that.”

  Jenkins drove around to the rear of the barracks on his way out, passing a chain-link enclosure where there were a few state police cruisers parked. At the edge of the lot, near the fringe of the woods, he spotted a light gray unmarked. Stasiak was standing by the open trunk. In his hands was what Jenkins first believed to be a tarpaulin but turned out to be a much thinner material, like that of a bedsheet. Stasiak had his back to the road. Jenkins watched him, anticipating the point when Stasiak would notice his approach. When the policeman’s head began to turn in his direction, Jenkins looked away and drove past, but in those final seconds, he got a look at the sheet Stasiak was holding and saw that it was stained a reddish brown.

  He got on Route 28 and headed back to Hyannis, his eyes on the rearview mirror. It said something, he supposed, that he fully expected Stasiak’s car to materialize in the road behind him.

  Over the weekend, Fred Sibley called Warren for the third time and he finally agreed to speak with the reporter. “There are some things I need to talk to you about,” he said. “There are some things you need to know.”

  Warren called Jane Myrna. She answered the phone, her voice clear and fine. “Oh, hello, Mr. Warren.” She sounded genuinely thrilled to hear from him.

  “Listen, I was wondering if you could possibly come over this morning to watch Mike. I have to run up to Walpole on business. Don’t worry if you can’t. I know it’s short notice.”

  “No,” she said. “I’d be glad to. Do you know how long you’ll be? We were going to go out to Sandy Neck about three if the weather clears up.”

  “Oh, I should be back long before that.”

  She arrived soon afterward. White lamb’s wool sweater, tight in the arms. Lavender skirt. Sandals. He tried to pull himself together. “Thanks for coming over on such short notice,” he said, and made a hasty departure.

  He arrived in Walpole early and drove into town to kill a half hour. He found a small bookstore in an old townhouse, a ta
ll, narrow structure, all its rooms filled with books. There was no one there but a young man who sat behind a desk near the fireplace reading the newspaper. Warren climbed the creaky staircase three stories to the top. On the landing was a poster of a Negro saxophone player who went by the name John Coltrane. On a display rack he spotted a small yellow volume. He picked it up and looked at the cover. Pictures of the Gone World, by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Warren felt an excitement that he could not account for. He supposed it was just the coincidence of the thing.

  He paged through the book and found that peculiar poem that had so transfixed him. It was called, simply, “Number 8.” His eye ran down the lines. We think differently at night, she told me once . . . He was intrigued and embarrassed, flummoxed somehow, standing there in the cramped top floor of the old townhouse. He went downstairs and put the book on the counter. The young man at the register looked at it and then glanced at Warren, took in his charcoal suit, white shirt, and dark blue tie, and made a kind of weary smirk.

  When Warren arrived at the state prison, he found Fred Sibley waiting for him in a booth with a reinforced glass partition. “You know what I heard about you, Warren?” he said.

  “Nothing would surprise me at this point, Mr. Sibley.”