I said, “What’s my first name?”
“Lincoln.”
“Lincoln Clockedile.”
“Got a ring to it.” He held out his hand. “Luc Tremblay. Pleased to meet you.” He told me to get some sleep. We’d make Anchorage around noon; we’d dump the car, find a place to stay, get a fabulous meal, watch the video, and get a disturbing night’s sleep.
24
We didn’t wait until after our fabulous meal to play the video file from the purloined black sports watch. I suspected this would be horrific. Worse than you can imagine, Bay said. Better, then, on an empty stomach. We sat in Bay’s room at the Hilton looking out in the dim light at the low clouds over Cook Inlet. Bay told me he’d sent the video file to DA Millard, to the federal marshals, to the FBI, and to the local newspapers and TV stations. He’d keep the watch for now. He was wearing it. He’d answer their e-mails when we got back to Florida. When I asked why the marshals, he said I’d see why shortly. He opened the file.
We heard a man’s voice tell Krysia that there’s been a change of plans; everyone is leaving tonight. She says, Pino didn’t say anything about a change of plans. The time on the video read 6:37 P.M. I figured she must be referring to our Pino, Pino Basilio of the crushing handshake. Krysia says she’ll wait for the marshals. The man says there’s been a leak, and your lives are in danger. Krysia excuses herself, says she has cookies in the oven, and Shanks asks her what kind and follows her into the kitchen. We see the black and white floor, the opened oven door, and hear Krysia say they need a few more minutes. Another male voice addresses the children, whom we now can see from shoulders to shins standing in the kitchen doorway. The voice says, Why don’t you kids go play in your room. And Brantley, it sounds like, says, Why don’t you make us? And another adult male voice says, Smart-ass. Krysia tells the children to go put on their pajamas and watch TV in the den, please and thank you. A uniformed officer’s face appears briefly and Bay hit pause. I told Bay that was Sully. Bay hit play. Krysia blows her nose off camera. The man who spoke to the children earlier now tells the others in an exaggerated whisper that we’re wasting time here. This is not a fucking tea party, he says. Sullivan wants to know the time, and we see Shanks’s face again. And then Shanks must rest his face in his hand, and the camera shoots the empty kitchen door space. When Krysia walks by we see her, and it goes quiet for a moment. Sully says, Put that away. And then Shanks lays his hands on what we see is the dining room table, and we get a clear but sideways look at Officer Kind and another guy who is not in uniform. This guy, in a blue polo shirt, is rolling his eyes and tapping his foot like a madman. Kind has his hand on the guy’s arm, calming him. You can hear the TV blasting in the background, and then someone must close a door, and the racket is muffled.
Bay paused the video. He pointed to the skinny little agitated man on-screen. “That’s Chris Bolzano, Internal Affairs, EPD. He’s got something on everyone in the department, but he’s a crack addict, as is his wife, and so his ethical bar has been lowered.”
“How do you know that?”
“Our paths have crossed. He was placed in IA by Meatyard as an informant. No more secrets, no more surprises. And, of course, you recognize our friend from the Wayside.”
Bay resumed the video. Krysia stands by the table. Sully says, Not too many people get a second go at the Witness Protection Program. Krysia says, Shouldn’t you boys be home with your families on this of all nights? Shanks says, Crime doesn’t take a holiday, I’m afraid. Sully asks where they’re relocating the family this time, and she answers that even if she knew, she couldn’t tell him. You get to start all over, Sully says, get to be whoever you want to be. What an opportunity. Shanks says he’d like a do-over himself, and Kind asks him who he’d like to be the next time. We’re looking at Krysia’s face a moment, and then the camera sweeps across the room, and Shanks says he’d really like to own a nightclub, a classy one, says he’d call it Dino Martini’s. He says, All that free booze and whatnot, all those desperate, sexy women. Kind asks Krysia what she’d like to be, and she says, Alone with my children, and she tells them all it’s time to leave, but nobody leaves, and we see the ceiling and a bit of the ceiling fan. Sully tells Krysia they just need to talk with Chafin a minute and they’ll be off, and he asks her to call her husband, please. She says she’s been instructed not to call him under any circumstances. Sully says the circumstances are extenuating. I’ve explained that your lives are in danger, have I not? Bolzano slams his fist on the table and says, Call the fucking number! Sully says, That’s enough. The screen goes dark. Shanks may have his hand under the table. And then the oven’s alarm goes off, and Krysia hurries to the kitchen. And then her cell phone rings, and she says, What the hell is going on and where the hell are you? And then there are some seconds of erratic camera movement and the scraping of chairs and the shuffling of feet, and then we’re in the kitchen looking at the measuring spoons on the wall. And then Shanks, who must have grabbed the phone from Krysia, tells Halliday he has ten minutes to get his ass home or else. And then there’s the noise of the TV, and Kind says, I’ll take care of it. Or else you’ll regret it, Shanks says. And then we see Krysia being restrained by Sully. And then all hell breaks loose.
Bay and I reconstructed what must have happened that gruesome Christmas Eve based on the evidence presented in the frenzy of unfocused and dizzying visuals and on what we heard in the muddied garble of shrill and blustering voices and in the turmoil of clamorous noises. We used our imaginations to fill in, or to fire across, the narrative gaps.
•The man whom Pino Basilio sometimes called Charlie became Chafin Halliday when he testified against the Ianotti crime family in Rhode Island.
•Halliday was set to testify before a federal grand jury about the racketeering and collusion between local law enforcement officials, the Mafia, the Russians, a handful of elected municipal office holders, and the late Mickey Pfeiffer’s merry band of jurisprudent thieves.
•Pino was the U.S. marshal assigned to Halliday’s case.
•Pino had arranged for another relocation and for new identities for the Hallidays.
•As was customary, WITSEC officials notified local authorities, in this case our sheriff and the chief of the EPD, as to the whereabouts of Chafin Halliday upon relocation so that local law enforcement might keep an eye out for any suspicious behavior and also to ensure that the betrayed terriers were not coming after the rat.
•One week earlier, Officer Kind had investigated a possible burglary at La Mélange and confiscated Chafin Halliday’s Colt Woodsman “as evidence.”
• Officer Kind had given the confiscated Colt handgun to Officer Bolzano.
• Officer Bolzano had loaded a magazine into the Colt before he holstered it earlier that Christmas Eve.
•The police officers in question arrived at the Halliday house in an unmarked vehicle.
• Bolzano took a black leather driving glove out of his pocket, slipped it over his right hand, and tucked the glove up the webs of his fingers. Halliday, we know, was not at home, but where was he? Was he with Pino? Did Pino realize that word of Halliday’s testimony had leaked to the very people under scrutiny? We thought that the answers were: At a secret location. No. Yes.
• The contents of the Halliday home, modest and austere as they were, had been packed and carried off to a government warehouse in Hialeah.
The Slaughter of the Innocents. Apparently when Shanks presented Halliday with the ultimatum—come home or else—Halliday refused. Shanks walked out of the kitchen and lowered his voice on the phone. He asked Halliday if he was willing to accept the responsibility for what would happen to his wife and children. Sully released Krysia, who screamed at him. I couldn’t make out what she said, but Bay heard her call him a mackerel-snapping nancy boy. Sully took the phone from Shanks and tried to reason with him. He said, Yes, it does seem to come down to that: your life or the lives of your family. Bolzano told Krysia to shut her pie hole. Krysia bent down ov
er the opened oven door and appeared on-screen when she did. She mumbled something to Bolzano, some back-sass or other. Bay thought she told him to kiss her Polish ass. That was followed by a surprisingly dull, almost perfunctory blast, and Krysia fell onto the opened oven door dead. That was followed by a confusion of visual images, as Shanks was unable to still himself. He called Bolzano a motherfucking moron. Sully said, Aw, fuck-it-all! Bolzano said the bitch had it coming. Kind picked up a pile of linen napkins and left the room. Sully asked Halliday if he had just heard the gunshot. That was your wife. Your wife. You heard me. In ten minutes, we’ll shoot one of your children. And then in ten minutes more, another. Just tell us where you are, and we’ll send the welcome wagon. Shanks said, We really don’t have much choice now, do we?
Shanks stood in the den. The gifts were unopened. The children were elsewhere and being quiet, or being quieted, evidently unaware of the gunshot. We saw the pistol in Bolzano’s gloved hand, his index finger on the barrel. He said he remembered one Christmas when he was seven or eight, and he woke up and there was nothing. No gifts, no tree, no breakfast, no heat in the apartment, no lights, no parents. Not a fucking thing. And these little shits live like royalty. Shanks said, You just killed their mother. Oh, yeah, Bolzano said, end of fairy tale. And then the younger boy, blindfolded, was led into the den by Kind, who told the boy to sit. Briely had been told he would be allowed to open one gift, and one gift only. He asked where his mother was and was told she’d run to the mall for some last-minute shopping. Someone turned up the volume on the TV. That kid who wants a Red Ryder BB gun was screaming, Oh, fudge! Kind asked the boy if he was ready. Briely smiled and held out his arms and Bolzano shot him. Sully told Chafin, You just killed your son. And then Sully told the others that Chafin hung up. And Kind said, What kind of a father …? The other two blindfolded children were brought out to the den. Their mouths and wrists had been duct-taped. Bolzano shot them.
Shanks said, What’s our story, Sully? Kind said, Drug bust. Sully asked Bolzano for the weapon. Then he said, Murder-suicide. Shanks said, Where’s our suicide? Sully put the pistol on Bolzano’s chin and fired. Sully told Shanks to make it look right and told Kind to type up a suicide note on the typewriter in the office and then dispose of the typewriter. Kind wanted to know what to say. Sully told him to use his imagination. What would you write if you had killed your own family?
Good riddance.
And if you were going to kill yourself?
Shouldn’t I know their names, at least?
Sully spelled the names for him, told him their ages, then called Meatyard while Shanks opened the gifts, looking for something else he liked, maybe. And then Sully called in the crime. We’re at the scene, he said. Send backup. Quietly.
Bay and I had come back to the hotel after an aimless and silent walk in the late-afternoon dusk and plopped down in a booth in the stifling Bruin sports bar. I felt like I had the flu. My throat was dry and swollen. I was achy and congested. My limbs were leaden. I wanted to put my head on the table and fall into a dreamless sleep, but my nerves were crackling and my bruised and swollen cheekbone throbbed. A dozen muted TVs were tuned to cable news or Jerry Springer. We ordered smoked caribou nachos and beer. Every business you enter in Alaska is arid and hot. I wanted to strip down to my T-shirt. If only I could have lifted my arms. I closed my eyes. In his magician’s voice, Bay said, You are getting sleepy …
On our walk, we had watched a dark sedan fail to negotiate a left-hand turn and slowly drive across two lanes of sparse traffic, over a snow pile, onto the sidewalk, and into an empty bus shelter, all without making a sound. The driver opened the door and fell to the ground. Then he got up and walked away.
On the Springer TVs a man wielding a chair over his head was being reasoned with by several burly men in black T-shirts while the audience stood and cheered. And then he was being tackled. On the news TVs military troops were firing on people assembled in a plaza in some Middle Eastern country.
Bay said, “There was never a mystery to solve.”
I said, “If I lived here, I would kill myself.”
“But there’s still the mystery of Halliday’s whereabouts.”
I thought about going home and painting all the rooms white, putting in a skylight, building a patio and a greenhouse.
Bay said, “Now that Halliday’s no longer dead, perhaps he’ll testify.”
“I’d love to see Malacoda and company implicated in all of this.”
“Someone must have tipped off the cops.”
“Pino?”
“Likely.”
“I hope he’s looking over his shoulder.”
Our beers arrived. We thanked Godfrey, who told us our nachos would just be a minute. I thought about the three bodies in Quartz Lake and how they must have been discovered by now and how the hunt for the perpetrator, the cop killer, must be already under way. We’d seen nothing on the news about it. I said, “They’re looking for whoever drove that Ski-Doo over the hole in the ice.”
“They’ll be looking for Paul A. Kunkel, whose rental SUV and Ski-Doo they are.” He reminded me I hadn’t killed anyone, and I was happy to believe that. Godfrey arrived with the nachos and we devoured them. More beer. More nachos.
“Can you believe Carlos?” I thought about Myles, whom I would never see again, but I was certain I would always feel his presence. And not in a prison cell, I hoped. I’d rather be in Alaska than in prison.
Christopher Michael Bolzano entered the Peace Corps after graduating with honors from Bridgewater (Mass.) State College as a sociology major. He was stationed in Uzbekistan, where he helped construct irrigation systems in remote villages and cultivated root vegetables for sale at markets. It was here he met his future wife, Lily Preston from Maryland, at the English language puppet show in Bukhara. After a grand wedding at the Sheraton Inner Harbor in Baltimore, the newlyweds vacationed on the Eastern Shore and then settled here in Everglades County. Lily worked as an ER nurse at Memorial Hospital and Chris as a social worker with the Florida Department of Children and Families. Eventually, Chris realized that he was not changing the world as he had hoped, was not even making a significant difference in any of his clients’ lives, was not making any child’s burden more tolerable, was not the bearer of hope that he had supposed, and he quit the underpaid, ineffectual, and powerless life of a social worker and became a cop, where he could do more good.
So he began his new life, and that life began to include a host of pharmaceutical drugs that he had confiscated from dealers in the hood. Chris and Lily moved from Xanax and Vicodin to Adderall and Oxycodone to crack and meth in relatively short order. After Chris was suspended from the department for the third time, he was punished with an assignment to Internal Affairs. Lily lost her job at the hospital when she was caught pilfering patients’ meds and replacing them with Wal-Zyr and vitamins. Several times over the holidays, Lily had thought to report her husband missing, but that would have meant people and questions, and she was not up for the emotional turmoil sure to ensue. The son of a bitch was probably spending the holidays, or the rest of his life, with one of his skanky girlfriends.
Francis Xavier “Sully” Sullivan departed Saint Joseph’s Seminary in Yonkers after two years of prayer and study to become a police officer, leaving his mother in tears, her express lane to heaven now blocked; his father elated; and his uncle Tim Cooney, a New York City cop, proud. When he was a boy, Francis told anyone who asked that he wanted to be a cowboy priest when he grew up, riding the range in his Roman collar on his palomino, Archangel, bringing the sacraments to cowpokes and buckaroos around the campfires and bunkhouses. He joined the Eden Police Department in 1986 and had maintained a sterling reputation as a no-nonsense, straight-shooting, stand-up guy. He never married, but he did have a longtime steady girlfriend, Mary Ellen Twombly. They drank together every free night he had at the bar at Moynihan’s on Main. Francis liked his Canadian Mist (Misty and water), while Mary Ellen preferred rum and Diet Coke.
Mary Ellen’s forbearing husband, Davy, sat at the other end of the bar drinking Bud Light, watching the TV, smoking, shooting the breeze with the bartender Scotty Bain. When Davy’s colon cancer finally took him out a year ago, Francis and Mary Ellen’s relationship began to lose its steam and purpose. What had once been a reliable and uncloudy future had now become a shadowy maze. Francis began to do most of his drinking at Leo’s. Mary Ellen adopted a feral cat and bought herself a flat-screen TV. On the evening that Channel 10 aired portions of the video of the murders, she called Francis to have him tell her it wasn’t true, that it was as fake as that man-on-the-moon video. While the phone rang, Francis knelt by his bed beneath a picture of the Sacred Heart, with a rosary wrapped in his hand, and shot himself through the temple.
Ernest Abel Kind joined the Eden Police Department because, as he confided, without a hint of irony, to a reporter for the Beachcomber, Gals, he said, love a man in uniform. Any uniform, he said, projects a sense of security, panache, competence, and a certain “journey say quad,” to quote from the article. He grew up as an Army brat, the only legitimate child of Corporal Gerald Kind, his philandering old man. His mother, Maureen, lost herself in Harlequin romances, reading four a day most days, smoking cigarettes, and growing morbidly obese. When Ernest reached sixteen, and the family was stationed in Schweinfurt, Germany, he and his dad went hunting for women together, “trolling for Brunhildes,” they called it. Ernest had a GED, earned an associate’s degree from Everglades College and a BS in criminal justice from Florida Tech online. He drove a metallic gray Hummer, owned a Sea-Doo jet ski, a Kawasaki motorcycle, and a Scrambler ATV. Weekends he enjoyed boar hunting in the Big Cypress. He took an annual holiday to Thailand to sample the local Asian cuisine, as he put it. Easy to get lost in Thailand. No one would ever find you.
No Regrets, Coyote Page 26