Lesser Evils

by Joe Flanagan

  “So he ordered us to dispose of all information related to the study, data, notes, recordings. He said he didn’t ever want it getting out, and he threatened consequences, for me in particular. So to have you come in here threatening to subpoena records—if this winds up in court, everything will be a matter of public record. We just can’t afford to let it get out.”

  Warren said, “Are you familiar with an individual named Charles Vogel?”

  “Yes, but only superficially. I do know that he took part in the study and was one of our pedophiles. He was brought in by Dr. Hawthorne.”

  “What can you tell us about Dr. Hawthorne?”

  “He came from the faculty at Columbia University and had a practice in New York. He was very good. Arrogant—he created problems—but a good psychiatrist. He invigorated the research, I have to say. But I felt—as did others—that he had a certain unhealthy attitude toward the patients. He seemed fascinated by them. I would even go so far as to say infatuated. But more troubling than that was the fact that patients in Dr. Hawthorne’s group tended to become ill. Always in the same way. Pain in the kidney area, extraordinary fatigue, discoloration in the eyes. One of them had to be hospitalized. The rest of us discussed whether it was something Hawthorne was doing. We couldn’t prove anything but we were watching him closely.

  “Then we discovered that he was interacting with one of the study subjects outside the hospital, helping him out, finding him jobs, and so forth. I dismissed him then. By that time, our local representative had intervened and we were in trouble. Dr. Hawthorne threatened to expose the study if we went to the state board of medical licensure with any complaints about him.”

  “Do you know if there were any sanctions against him in New York, any reprimands?”

  “No. And I don’t want to know. I can only imagine what that would add to the scandal if word of the study ever got out.”

  “Did you know he’s got a practice in Provincetown?” Warren asked.

  “I haven’t followed his movements since he left. What led you to him?”

  “Charles Vogel. He’s a suspect. He was living on the Cape but it looks like he left in a hurry. Do you have any idea where we might find him?”

  “No.”

  “Do you still have a list of the people who took part in the study?” asked Jenkins.

  “Yes. But I just hope we’ll all be discreet about this.”

  When Warren got home that afternoon, he found Mike and Jane sitting on the floor at the coffee table in the living room doing rubbings of fallen leaves with crayons. A few strands of Jane’s hair had come out of her headband and fell in her eyes. She swept them back with her hand as she held her work up and assessed it. Warren was aware that he was staring. “I’ll get your money,” he said.

  He went into his bedroom and counted the cash in the white envelope in the drawer of his nightstand. He experienced a moment of panic when he thought he might not have enough. He counted it out and still had a dollar left. Why were his hands trembling? He put the extra dollar in with Jane’s pay, then took a breath and walked out of his bedroom. Jane’s clavicle. Is that what they called it? The way the skin was copper and shiny in the depression around Jane’s clavicle.

  She was gathering up her purse and sweater when he got out to the living room. “Mr. Warren,” she said, “they’re having a house and garden tour on Martha’s Vineyard this weekend and I’ve got two free tickets. It includes the ferry ride over. You can come if you want to. We could bring Mike.”

  She was looking directly at him—a different look from her usual candid regard, and somewhere behind this new subtlety in her face, she seemed to be enjoying his discomfiture. Was she mocking him?

  He sorted through excuses in his head. He stammered and made a mess of it. Jane graciously came to his rescue. “It’s O.K. I’ve got a girlfriend I think will go with me. I just thought it would be good for you to get out. Mike, too.” She tousled the boy’s hair. “See you, kid.”

  When she was gone, Warren slumped into the sofa with the Ferlinghetti book. There it was again. Something about himself that kept people at a distance. He thought of Jenkins and Marvin Holland, who were so easy with others, so spontaneous. More honest. Was that it? It was an upsetting thought. There were ideas he had grown up with—decorum, a careful examination of one’s intentions—and he couldn’t shake them. His formality, what others might call rigidness, was it something that originated in some flawed aspect of himself? He had always thought that it was just who he was, the imprint life had made on him, but he wished he could be different.

  Jane still called him Mr. Warren. Would he have them go to Martha’s Vineyard, looking at the houses and gardens with her calling him Mr. Warren the entire time?

  He sat there watching his son, making some adjustment to the crude washing machine he had fabricated out of a mason jar, a pencil, and the wheel of a Tonka truck.

  “Mike.” He sometimes asked the boy questions that were actually intended for himself. Warren did this to hear the questions, to take their measure, and, he suspected, out of loneliness. “Mike, am I a rigid sort of person?”

  Mike looked up from his makeshift contraption, looked into his father’s face trying to guess what the expected response might be.

  “Yes!”

  Warren laughed softly and Mike went back to his tinkering. “Is that thing working all right?”

  “It has a gremlin in it.”

  “A gremlin?”

  “Yup.”

  “Where’d you pick up that word?”

  “Father Boyle.”

  “Come up here.”

  Mike climbed on to the couch and moved in close beside him. “What are we going to do, Dad?”

  “I sure don’t know.”

  The telephone rang. Warren went into the kitchen and picked it up. There was silence on the other end but he could hear voices in the background. He thought he could hear the caller breathing. “Who is this?” he demanded.

  “It’s me.”

  41

  Stasiak, Heller, and Ferrell sat in a closed office at the state police barracks. On a desk sat Father Boyle’s sketchbook and specimen basket. “When the priest was posted in Belmont, Mass,” said Ferrell, “he took a kid from the hospital in the middle of the night—a kid with cancer—and drove him out to a marsh somewhere. He was working as a chaplain and spent a lot of time on the pediatric ward. So everybody’s looking all over the place for this kid. Total panic. Then the next day, some duck hunters came upon him in the marsh. He had the kid wrapped in a blanket, laid out at the foot of a tree. They didn’t arrest him. The parish confined him to the rectory and the police questioned him there. The Church paid a settlement to the family for not raising a stink about it. There weren’t any charges. They did agree to ship him out of Belmont, though. I’m hearing rumors about a suicide attempt but I haven’t nailed that down yet.”

  Stasiak said, “Did he molest the kid?”

  “No one knows.”

  “What’d the kid say?”

  “The kid couldn’t speak. He had cancer in his esophagus or something. He was in bad shape. He died about a year later.”

  “So no one knows what happened?”

  “No one but Boyle.”

  “What did you get from the Portagee woman? The housekeeper.”

  “She says he goes out for long periods of time,” Ferrell said. “He comes back with debris on his clothes: Thorns, bristles, and whatnot. They found the canvas pack and the sketchpad about a half mile from the pond where the Gilbride kid was found, so he’s been out there. He frequents the area.

  “Otherwise, he stays locked in his room a lot of the time, like he’s hiding something. She tells me he’s got contact with kids at a school for the retarded, a place called Nazareth Hall.”

  Stasiak said, “See if you can get access to his medical file. See if i
t includes his blood type. Stay on him and follow him wherever he goes. This guy is very active right now and I want to stay on him while he’s feeling nice and free. I don’t want to spook him. Put a man on the church and have him watch it round the clock. First chance we get, we’re going in.”

  On a Saturday afternoon, an undercover state police officer watching the rectory at St. Clement picked up the handset on his radio and notified Stasiak that Father Keenan had left the premises and the house was unoccupied. Boyle had left a half hour earlier and was now being followed down the Mid-Cape Highway in the direction of Provincetown. Keenan’s car remained in the drive until half past noon, when he came out dressed in civilian clothes and drove off. As soon as they got the call, Stasiak and his men descended on the church. They walked four abreast toward the house, searching the windows for any signs of life. Stasiak used a bump key to unlock the back door. They entered the kitchen. “Top to bottom, boys,” said Stasiak. “And don’t leave a thing out of place.”

  The search turned up signs that the priest, as the housekeeper claimed, was spending a significant amount of time out in the woods. The detail that followed him down Cape watched him get off the highway and park his car in a secluded area off South Pamet Road in Truro. But Stasiak did not find the damning evidence he had hoped for—forensic material or some trophy from one of the child victims—and was impatient for progress.

  Shortly after they searched the rectory, investigators got a call from a Mrs. Caroline Boggs, who claimed that Father Boyle had taken their retarded son out for the day and kept him out until nearly 10 P.M., and that when he brought the boy back he was soaking wet and filthy, his clothes ruined, the boy traumatized. The priest claimed they had gotten lost, but Mrs. Boggs was furious. She kept the incident to herself until she heard rumors that the police were considering the priest as a suspect—rumors that had to have originated, Stasiak figured, with the Portagee woman.

  He went to Mrs. Boggs’s house to interview her. The kid was beyond hope, a walking abortion. He couldn’t have told Stasiak what time of day it was let alone whether the priest had done anything to him. He told the mother to get the kid examined by a doctor to see whether he’d been molested, but she was hedging. She claimed the boy wouldn’t stand for it but Stasiak believed she didn’t want to know.

  Ava’s face was appalling, ravaged and swollen. One of her eyes wandered, or both, Warren couldn’t tell. She was underweight, bony shoulders poking through a cheap raincoat. There seemed to be some kind of palsy in her face, judging by the heavy, sluggish look to the right of her upper lip. He would never have recognized her if she hadn’t said she would be wearing a light blue scarf on her head. She had aged twenty years.

  Sitting across from her, he was nervous, grieving, and angry all at the same time. His palms sweated and his mouth was dry. The bar wasn’t exactly a dive. The clientele looked like fairly respectable working-class people. It looked to Warren like the kind of place that got rough after a certain hour. It was probably something between what Ava was used to and the kind of place that wouldn’t let her in.

  Her voice was hoarse and chilling, like it was coming from somewhere else in the room, beneath the table or someplace behind his elbow. “I suppose you want to know what I’ve been up to all this time,” she said.

  He simply looked down at his folded hands and shook his head.

  “Did you bring something to write with?”

  Though Warren could not fathom what her slurred request for him to bring a pad and pen had been about, he had complied all the same. “Yes.”

  “You know Dale Stasiak.”

  “Yes.”

  “Write this down.”

  Stunned to be in Ava’s presence, shocked by the extent of her decline, and beset by the storm of his own emotions, he put his pen to the notepad and listened.

  She said, “George McCarthy, Steve Tosca, a man named Grady. Do you know these names?”

  “Yes. How do you know them?”

  “You just need to know that I know them, that’s all. I have heard Dale Stasiak talking on the telephone. I know he’s involved with gambling and some other things. I know he’s crooked. They killed a man named Wilson Hayes. They killed a man named Russell Weeks and something bad might have happened to his family, too.”

  “Slow down. How do you know these things?”

  “I know them. O.K.? I just know them.”

  “You’ve been in close enough proximity to Dale Stasiak that you could hear him talking on a telephone?”

  Ava nodded.

  Warren’s mind was reeling, trying to understand how such a thing could be. He struggled with the possibilities, speechless, and she must have known because her low, scratchy voice continued, telling him things of such a shocking nature—to divert his questions, he suspected—that he had trouble keeping up. So incredulous was he that she had an association with Stasiak that he kept having to ask her to repeat things and finally decided that however it had come about, he did not want to know.

  In a disconnected narrative, Ava divulged everything she knew: Stasiak’s frequent conversations with a man named Grady, their talk of betting slips and bookies, of money owed, who was in trouble and needed to be dealt with. She mentioned the Elbow Room, Brinkman’s, and a private residence on Depot Road in Harwich. “Russell Weeks owed them money,” she said. “I don’t know how much, but Stasiak talked about it a lot. He talked about finding him, how important it was to find him. They have beaten people up. People have disappeared.”

  Ava said there was a lot of talk about Weeks’s wife and child, hushed talk that she never got all of except that Stasiak and the others were very interested in them.

  “Money,” she said. “They’re always talking about money. And betting slips. And checks. They send checks to a place in Boston called Wayson’s. I don’t know what it is but they’re always talking about it. Dale calls them all the time. Frank Semanica is a name I hear a lot. I don’t know who he is but they talk about him. I think he’s a messenger or something.”

  Warren stopped a passing waiter and ordered ginger ale on ice for them both. Ava lifted the glass to her lips, her hands shaking so that the liquid spilled and she had to put it down. She closed her eyes and said, with great effort, it seemed, “Most of the gambling is at the Elbow Room, I think.”

  He got the waiter’s attention and called him back to the table. He handed him Ava’s drink. “Would you put some Scotch in that?”

  When the drink came, she appeared transformed with relief, though miserable and ashamed as well. “Fred Sibley,” she said, finally. “Do you know him?”

  “Yes.”

  “They arrested him for marijuana.”

  “I arrested him for marijuana.”

  “He’s innocent. That stuff wasn’t his. They put it in his room. They had me call and report him.”

  “Who told you to do that?”

  “Dale Stasiak. When I called, I asked for you. I wanted to hear your voice.”

  Warren turned to a new page in his notepad, looked at her, and then looked back down.

  “You have to be careful,” she said. “They’re going to do something to you.”

  “Stasiak said this?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where is the phone that he uses?”

  “I don’t want to say.”

  “Why?”

  “Because. It’s my business.”

  They sat in silence, Ava looking into her drink and Warren staring out the windows to their right, into the bright afternoon outside.

  “So how is he?” Ava asked.

  Her mouth moved, her lips shifting to the left and bunching out for a moment, the only change he had seen in the rigid, masklike quality of her face. It was impossible to tell what it signified though it had the look of a word she was unable to pronounce or something she found extremely difficult to say.

>   “Our son.”

  Warren tapped the edge of his notepad on the table and looked around at the backs of the patrons at the bar. “Listen, I have to know how to contact you,” he said.

  “I’ll contact you.”

  “There are some people I want you to talk to. You’ll have to tell them all the things you just told me. And you’re going to have to tell them how you wound up close to Stasiak. The nature of your relationship with him.”

  “I’ll meet them here. Or wherever they want as long as I can get there. I don’t have a car.”

  “How did you get here?”

  “I hitchhiked.”

  “Can I drive you home?”

  “No,” she said, and he thought he caught her voice breaking. She got out from behind the table unsteadily and got to her feet. Warren did not want to look at her now that more of her was visible. “Where are you staying?” he asked, his eyes on his notepad. When she didn’t respond right away, he looked up to find her gone.

  42

  The swing set in the yard behind Nazareth Hall had gotten a little more complicated than Warren had intended. He had gone for a more ambitious design than most homemade affairs, using a plan he’d seen in Popular Mechanics. And he was having difficulty concentrating, unsettled as he was following his meeting with Ava. He recalled how her voice had sounded, the eerie way it seemed to come from somewhere else, like some trick of ventriloquism.

  In the time after Ava’s disappearance he had sometimes been approached by people sympathetic enough to come up and talk to him. During the war, they said, Ava could sometimes be seen at the Mill Hill Club, at the Panama Lounge, or Oliver’s on the Cove, usually in the company of various men. When everyone was trying to get by under rationing, Ava always had plenty of everything.

  In the early years Warren felt nothing but rage. But in time he discovered that thoughts of Ava often felt very much like a visit from his father. The girl was young. She was lonely. And like all of us, she had weaknesses. Under the light his father cast from the beyond, Warren felt obliged to forgive Ava. As time went by he found that he was uneasy living in judgment of her. It crowded his life and consumed too much of him. She had betrayed him. She had betrayed her own child. But if there was one thing he had learned in twenty years of police work it was that it was possible to understand why people did the things they did.