Lesser Evils

by Joe Flanagan

  Jenkins called his old partner. “Pete, it’s Jenkins.”

  “Hi, Ed.”

  “We going fishing?”

  “You’re not doing any fishing. Not for the foreseeable future. Hell of a thing you got going up there.”

  “That’s a fact.”

  “That’s why I called, as it turns out. I don’t know if this is anything at all, but I think you need to know about it.”

  Gabbert told him that back in the summer of 1954, Providence cops were contacted by a woman named Sally Vogel. Her brother Charlie had gotten out of prison two months earlier after serving time for driving drunk and causing a serious crash. She was putting him up until he could get back on his feet, but Charlie had certain predilections she felt the police should know about—namely an attraction to young boys. Sally Vogel reluctantly agreed to take him in temporarily but her brother soon reminded her of why no one had had any contact with him over the years. Charlie was borrowing her car and hanging around places where there were children: Playgrounds, schoolyards, bus stops. There were things he brought into the house that made her feel uncomfortable.

  “Our vice guys started watching him,” Gabbert said. “And one day they tailed him to this athletic field where some elementary school kids were out having gym class. Now, I’m just reading from the report here in front of me, but this Vogel was dressed like a goddamn kid, apparently. Let’s see . . . kid’s one-piece jumper—I don’t even know what the hell that is—aah . . . Here we go. White short-sleeve shirt, Buster Browns. He even had a kid’s haircut for Christ’s sake. Well, you get the idea. Pretty goddamn weird. Anyhow, our guys told him to screw and that if they ever saw him around any kids again, they’d lock him up for good. Right after that, he left town. But then the sister finds this pornography he’d been hiding and it sounds like it was pretty serious stuff. Again, just what I’m seeing in the report from ’54. It showed children . . . Kids tied up . . . Pretty bad, it sounds like. We would have charged him but his sister got rid of it all and we didn’t have anything to pin on him.”

  “Did you go hunting this down on your own?”

  “No, we just got a call from his sister this morning. Like everyone else, she’s been following the murders up there. Charlie Vogel is on the Cape. He’s been there since April.”

  Jenkins paced around his office, wondering whether to call Dunleavy, but decided against it. He allowed himself a little fantasy as he gathered his radio and keys, an extra pack of cigarettes out of his desk drawer: The state police in shock that he’d broken the case, Elliott Yost chagrined, speechless. He hustled down the hallway on his way out to his unmarked. Charlie Vogel might be just another of a half dozen losers they’d looked at already: Henry, Frawley, Cleve, all the rest of them. On the other hand, it had some promise. He’d been on the Cape since April. Kids. Pornography. Jenkins slapped his keys against his thigh as he strode toward the double doors. “Hot shit.”

  From behind him, he heard a voice, echoing in the corridor: “What is it?” He turned to see the big orb of Garrity’s head peering around the enclosure of the sergeant’s desk. “Something up?’

  Jenkins half-turned, slowing his pace. “No. It’s nothing.”

  Jenkins found Charlie Vogel on the second floor of a dark, two-story duplex in Cotuit. Vogel answered the door, a man of average height and build who, though clearly approaching forty, had an unwholesome youthfulness about him. His skin was milky and nearly translucent, his hair soft and limp. Vogel’s appearance seemed to present some kind of visual trick and Jenkins eyed him there in the doorway, trying to figure out what it was. “I’m Detective Ed Jenkins,” he said. “Barnstable police. Mind if I come in?”

  Vogel stepped back and allowed Jenkins to enter. He looked around the place. It was mostly bare, with partially unpacked bags on the floor, a mattress with rumpled sheets, and containers of takeout food scattered around. On a round table a newspaper was open to the classifieds section. “What’s the problem?” Vogel asked.

  “Are you Charlie Vogel?”

  “Yes. What’s this about?”

  “I’m investigating the child killings.”

  “Well, what do you want with me? I don’t know anything about that.”

  “How long have you been living here?”

  “About a week and a half.”

  “And where were you before this?”

  “In Illinois.”

  Jenkins paced the apartment, looking around, Vogel watching him. Jenkins said, “See, already we have a problem, Charlie.”

  “What?”

  “You weren’t in Illinois. You were down in Providence.”

  “This is harassment. I want to know why you’re here talking to me.”

  “You have a thing for little kids, Charlie. Right?”

  “No. Where’d you hear that?” Vogel’s face was suddenly crimson.

  “You got picked up in Providence for prowling around playgrounds, dressed up like a little kid, right?”

  “No.”

  “You would have got picked up for child pornography, too, if you hadn’t left Providence and come up here to lay low. Or whatever it is you’re doing.”

  “That’s not true. None of that is true.”

  Among the clutter on the kitchen counter, Jenkins saw an appointment card from the office of a Dr. Reese Hawthorne of Provincetown. “Yeah, it is. That’s why I’m here. I heard you got a thing for kids and I want to know where you were on the seventeenth of July. That was a Thursday.”

  “This is bullshit!”

  “In fact, I’ve got a list of dates here. I’d like you to tell me where you were and what you were doing on each of them.”

  Jenkins questioned him for a half hour. While the hostile but compliant Charlie Vogel tried—largely without success—to reconstruct the days in question, Jenkins’s eyes roamed the flat, searching its clutter and disarray for anything incriminating, glancing at Vogel’s fingers, hands, and arms to see if he could spot any signs of violence.

  “I want to know who told you I was queer for kids,” Vogel said indignantly.

  “Never mind who told me. You’re not to leave the Cape, understand? We’re watching you, Charlie. I’m coming back, and you need to do better than this on your whereabouts.”

  Before leaving, Jenkins slipped the business card on the kitchen counter into his pocket.

  Watching the stunted woods of Truro flow past, Warren rolled his window down a crack and threw his cigarette butt out. The soil on the verge of the highway was beginning to show sandy patches as they neared Provincetown, the trees interrupted more frequently by barren places and marshy swales where the grass was starting to go brown with autumn. Over the tops of the tired-looking pines, now a silvery shade of grayish green, he saw the white monolith of the Truro Drive-In, its plastic sign out front blank except for some letters that spelled out, simply, “Closed. Thanks.”

  Warren had no work today, the third day in a row. So when Jenkins called and asked him to come along to check out the doctor whose card he had found in Charlie Vogel’s apartment, he said yes without a thought. He would be back in plenty of time to get Mike at school, which put him in mind of money: How little of it there was, how he was again at a financial crisis. They were letting Mike stay at Nazareth Hall under the pretense that Warren was actually doing something useful for them in return. He’d finished the majority of the work there weeks ago. He’d gotten in touch with Grayson and James at Antiquitus but they were reconsidering the improvements they had originally planned and the project had been put on hold. Warren hoped it would work out, but he knew he couldn’t go on like this. He felt encroaching despair, sitting silently beside Jenkins, who seemed unusually bitter and withdrawn. He glanced over at the detective. The murders and his situation in the police department were wearing on him. He was always cleanly shaven, but now he had two days’ growth.

  T
he glittering surface of Provincetown Harbor appeared on the left. They went down a causeway where there was barely anything on either side of the blacktop but a thin margin of sand, water on both sides, and signs warning of blowing sand during high winds. The town itself appeared, nestled in the curve of the shore, rooftops, steeples, and masts intermingled in a sudden visual cacophony, surprising after long miles of desolation and dreary country. Jenkins steered the car down Howland Street and put it in a public lot.

  They found Dr. Hawthorne’s address on Daggett Lane, two blocks off Commercial Street. It was a two-story structure with weathered white clapboard and gingerbread millwork around the porch. The door opened and they faced a large man in his late fifties, bald, tanned, with the fringe of gray-blond hair that remained on the sides of his head cut short. He looked well-relaxed, louche, even, with a hint of amusement in his face, as if he found something humorous about the sight of the two men on his step. He wore tight, magenta-colored European swim trunks which were visible as the sash on his robe worked loose and exposed his shiny golden belly and the region below it. To Warren’s mortification, Hawthorne caught him looking and tried to make eye contact with him.

  “You have identification, I assume?” the doctor said.

  Jenkins showed his badge. “Mind if we come in?”

  The doctor did not say anything, but walked back into the house and left the door open. Warren and Jenkins stepped inside. It was not what they expected for the residence of a doctor. The house looked much lived-in and indifferently cared for, cluttered, heedlessly bohemian. Hawthorne said, “What is your business, please?”

  “We’re here to ask you some questions about an individual named Charles Vogel,” said Warren.

  “Charles Vogel.” The doctor repeated the name as if trying out the sound of it.

  “We understand he’s a patient of yours.”

  The doctor hesitated. He drew the robe back over his girth and cinched the cord lightly. “Yes. What’s the nature of your interest?”

  “We’d just like to ask you a few questions about him.”

  “I can’t answer any questions about Mr. Vogel. Doctor-patient confidentiality.”

  Warren said, “We’re looking into the murders, Dr. Hawthorne, the murders of the children on the Cape this summer.”

  Hawthorne grimaced. “The murders. Yes.”

  “What can you tell us about Vogel?”

  “Very little, I’m afraid, that wouldn’t breach his confidence.”

  Jenkins stepped forward, startling Warren. “That’s not how it works,” he snarled. “We’re talking about the murder of three children. Strangled. Raped. You don’t get to say, ‘No thanks, I’ll pass.’ Who the fuck do you think you are?”

  The doctor was completely unperturbed. “What is your name again?”

  “Jenkins.”

  “Ah.” Hawthorne nodded once, then addressed himself to Warren. “Charles Vogel is of no interest to you. He’s a standard depressive with a drinking problem. Nothing sinister. Very routine, in fact.”

  Warren looked over at the bookshelves and saw a volume entitled Crime and the Sexual Psychopath, by Dr. J. P. De River. He scanned the spines. It was a mix of art books and medical material, with a good dose of fiction thrown in. There was Moby-Dick, the Bhagavad Gita, and a book of Man Ray’s photographs. On a wall was a framed portrait of what looked like a nineteenth-century military personage. Napoleon, perhaps, or Nelson. It was hard to tell because the figure’s head was obscured by scribbles, hard, frenzied strokes with orange, black, and red crayon, the painting defaced in such a way that it was almost stylized. Its eyes had been crudely gouged out, leaving ragged holes through which the surface of the wall could be seen. An aggressive scrawl in heavy black paint in the corner read, “Clyde.” Warren’s eyes went over the bookshelf again. He saw what looked like a professional journal: Endocrinology and Sexual Deviance, edited by Dr. Reese Hawthorne, and nearby, a heavy three-ring binder: Clinical Trials Protocol, Bridgewater State Hospital.

  Jenkins and the doctor were engaged in some petty sparring. Hawthorne was smart and unflustered, giving Warren the impression that he had probably conducted much more difficult interviews, had played far cleverer games, than either of them. He maintained a neutral demeanor while delivering stinging sarcasm and insinuation that was so drily expressed it seemed harmless and outrageous at the same time. Jenkins was up to his neck and sinking fast.

  “What is your specialty, Dr. Hawthorne?” Warren asked.

  Hawthorne turned to him, his face blank. “I am a psychiatrist.”

  “I know, but do you specialize in any particular form of psychiatry?”

  “No.”

  “We’ve developed information that Charles Vogel has an interest in children, and . . .”

  “Developed information. What does that mean?”

  “It’s information we have. It’s something we’ve been told.”

  “So it’s gossip?”

  Warren saw Jenkins gather himself, as though ready to launch into a tirade. He held his hand out to steady him. “Maybe it is. It might be just gossip. That’s why we’re here. He was on the Cape for most of the murders and we’re just trying to find out if he’s capable of something like this. Surely, you can help us out with that.”

  “An interest in children, you say.”

  “That’s right.”

  “If someone told you he had an interest in children, that could mean anything, no?”

  “Why are you unwilling to cooperate with us?”

  “I am not, in fact, being uncooperative. You came in here with certain expectations. Namely, that I would be uncooperative. I would venture to say that recent events find you out of your depth and prone to hostility and suspicion. Unfortunately, any answer I give you, you will interpret as uncooperative. No matter what I say, you and the hominid here will interpret it as evasive, slick ‘smart-assery,’ as a colleague of mine used to say.”

  “All that aside,” Warren said, “we heard Charlie Vogel has a sexual interest in kids.”

  “If so, he’s never shared that with me. That much I can tell you. I won’t go into my discussions with Mr. Vogel. I can’t. But they wouldn’t interest you. He suffers from the human condition. Nothing that would raise eyebrows. In fact, he misses most of his appointments. I haven’t seen him in two weeks.”

  “You got a private practice here in P-town, do you?” Jenkins asked.

  “I see patients here, yes.”

  “How many people live in this house?”

  “Am I the subject of this investigation?”

  “Is it just you living here?”

  Hawthorne stared back at Jenkins. He looked as if he might be starting to get angry. “Yes.”

  “No one else?”

  “No.”

  Walking back up Daggett Lane, Jenkins unleashed a storm of profanity. Warren let him go, thinking about the books he’d seen on Hawthorne’s shelves. He knew who Dr. Joseph De River was. He worked as a consultant with the Los Angeles police department and was hired on to take charge of their sex offense bureau, the only psychiatrist in the United States to serve in such a capacity. De River was considered the top specialist in sexual deviance and made a name for himself during the Black Dahlia investigation.

  “Did you happen to notice the books he had on his shelf?” he asked as they got into the car.

  “No. I was too busy trying to keep from grabbing that fat bastard by his throat and choking the shit out of him.”

  “Books on sexual deviance. Medical books. Professional books. He had something in there from Bridgewater Hospital for the Insane.”

  Jenkins’s expression changed, lost its wild look and became sharp and suspicious. “Is that so?” he said as he turned the key in the ignition and squinted out through the windshield.

  “Things keep getting curiouser and curiou
ser,” Warren said.

  “What?”

  “It’s from a book I read to Little Mike once. Let’s go back and see if we can find Vogel.”

  39

  Mrs. Boggs brought Perry out on to the porch by his arm. He took odd, high steps, his brow furrowed, his expression distressed and uncomprehending. “Here we are, Father,” she said. They all walked down the steps together and across the lawn to Father Boyle’s car.

  The Boggses had found a place for their son at a residential program for retarded children off-Cape. He could come home on weekends, but his parents did not know what they would do with him if the new arrangement didn’t work out. They did not want to send him to a state institution but they were dying beneath the weight of his presence. Father Boyle had offered to take Perry to the outer Cape, perhaps up to the high grassy areas where he could see the ocean. He thought Mr. and Mrs. Boggs would enjoy the few hours’ relief.

  Mrs. Boggs was extraordinarily careworn and pale. Even her hair, which was once blonde, had gone colorless.

  “How is he getting along at the new place?” Father Boyle asked.

  “We’re not sure it’s going to work, Father. He’s hurting himself there, too. It’s worse, I think. Maybe we shouldn’t have sent him away.” Tears appeared in her eyes and rolled down her cheeks. She removed her glasses and reached into the sleeve of her dress for a tissue. “Are his shoes all right?” she asked.

  Father Boyle looked down at the boy’s feet. He had on a new pair of sneakers, brilliant white. “They’ll be fine, Mrs. Boggs. We’re just going to walk on easy paths. Maybe I can convince him to take them off and put his bare feet in the ocean. What do you think about that, Perry?”

  “Well, have fun.” Mrs. Boggs wiped her cheeks.

  “We might be a bit late. After dinner sometime.”