Flynn's World

by Gregory Mcdonald

  TWO

  “Now, Da. Listen.” On the front seat of the car, close beside Flynn, Winny settled his schoolbooks on his lap.

  “When have I ever not listened?” Flynn asked. “More’s the pity.”

  “You see those six birds on that tree branch?”

  Flynn lowered his head to look up through the windshield. “I do.”

  “If I shot one of them off, how many would be left on the branch?”

  “None.”

  “None!”

  “The others would fly away.”

  “Oh, Da. Someday I’ll make up my own riddle and you won’t get it.”

  “At the age of nine, my son, you already are your own riddle.”

  A back door of the ancient Country Squire station wagon opened. The “Flynn-twin,” as they were commonly known, Randy and Todd, climbed into the car, throwing their sports bags behind their seat.

  “Ah, Winny gets the front seat this morning!” With his left hand, Todd messed up Winny’s hair.

  “Cut that out!” Winny had worked hard on making the part in his long brown hair perfect to his own eyes. “You guys! Da, why don’t you beat one of them to death with the other one!”

  “I’ll consider it,” Flynn said.

  At fifteen, Todd was slightly more blond than his identical twin, his nose a centimeter shorter. He spoke a little faster, was a little less precise in his violin playing. On the soccer field and basketball court he was also slightly more aggressive than his brother, who would hesitate that fraction of a second and usually make the more dazzling play.

  Randy rolled down the car window and shouted at the house. “Jenny! Get your face out of the mirror! There’s nothing you can do about your looks! We’ll be late for school!”

  “Jenny was late getting home last night.” Winny was trying to perfect the part in his hair in the rearview mirror.

  Behind the steering wheel, Flynn turned his broad shoulders to look at the twins in the backseat.

  “Did either of you know Jenny has been meeting with a boy in the cemetery?”

  “No,” Todd said. “What boy?”

  “I did,” Randy answered. “Billy.”

  “Who’s Billy?” Todd asked.

  “Capriano.”

  “The wrestler at the high school?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Capriano,” Flynn said. “I’ve seen that name somewhere. Recently.”

  “He’s a neat kid,” Randy said.

  “What do you know about him?” Flynn asked.

  “Not much. Seen him around. Parties. Used to be in Scouts with us. He beat Bobby Wentworth.”

  “Nobody ever beat Bobby Wentworth,” Todd said in defense of the Cartwright School wrestling champion.

  “Bill Capriano did.”

  “I’ve run into him in the library,” Todd said. “He’s an altar boy.”

  “Runs with a tough bunch, does he?” asked Flynn.

  “Billy? No.”

  “A street fighter?”

  “No way. He’s smart.”

  Flynn addressed Randy. “You object to his meeting Jenny in the graveyard?”

  Randy shrugged. “Her business.”

  “Did you know they were meeting last night?”

  “Not particularly.”

  “Yes or no?”

  “No. But she didn’t come to our basketball game. So I guessed.”

  “How did you know they meet?”

  “I saw Jenny climbing over the cemetery wall one afternoon. Billy was inside the cemetery, between the trees.”

  “What did you do about that?”

  “I waved at him. Billy’s a nice kid, Da. I trust him with my little sister, okay?”

  “Is there something you want us to do about this?” Todd asked.

  Jenny was coming down the back steps of the house. A hair drier, cord dangling, was on top of the books cradled in her arms.

  “Yes,” Flynn said. “The next time I ask you about Billy Capriano, which I expect will be soon, I’d like you to know more about him.”

  Jenny got into the front seat beside Winny. “Who put my hair drier in the laundry basket?”

  Flynn started the car.

  He readjusted the rearview mirror.

  The routine: Todd said, “Randy did”; Randy said, “Winny did”; Winny said, “Jeff did.”

  “Sure. At ten months old, Jeff put my hair drier in the laundry basket.”

  “Boy oh boy,” Winny said. “I’m glad that kid was born. It was tough bein’ the youngest in the family all these years.”

  Flynn turned left out of his driveway toward Cartwright School.

  Todd muttered, “If you hadn’t spent all night talkin’ to the other witches in the cemetery with Billy Capriano”—he said the name loudly—“you would have been up in time to find your hair drier.”

  “Da! Did you tell them?”

  “Not everything.”

  “Everything what?” asked Winny. “Did something grave happen in the cemetery?”

  Flynn looked down at his nine-year-old son.

  “It’s not funny.” Jenny made a double-defensive turn in the conversation. “I have to use the hair drier after swimming practice. You think it’s nice coming out in this weather with a wet head?”

  Autumn weather: all three of Flynn’s sons continued to wear their school-uniform shorts.

  “I don’t use your damned hair drier,” Todd muttered.

  “I use a towel, myself,” Randy said. “Saves electricity.”

  Winny said nothing.

  “Maybe if you didn’t use an electric hair drier,” Randy continued, “your hair wouldn’t be so damned bumpy.”

  “It’s called ‘curly,’” Jenny said. “Da likes it that way.”

  “What about Billy Capriano?” Randy said. “How does he like your hair?”

  “In his mouth,” Todd said.

  Flynn looked at Todd through the rearview mirror.

  Todd jumped forward. He folded his arms across the back of the front seat. “If you get fired today, Da, can we go back to Loch Nafooie?”

  “How did you know I’m going to get fired today?”

  “Grover left that message with me yesterday. He made a special point of telling me. He said, ‘Be sure and tell your father Captain Walsh is going to fire him tomorrow afternoon.’ I don’t think Grover likes me much.”

  Randy laughed. “Not since that time we beat the lights out of him on a Cambridge sidewalk.”

  Winny sang, “Da’s gonna get fired / Da’s gonna get fired.”

  “Sergeant Richard T. Whelan takes his job very seriously.” Flynn turned the car into the Cartwright School’s driveway. “Which does him no good at all at all.”

  “If we have to go back to the farm on Loch Nafooie,” Randy said, “we could ride our horses to school every day.”

  “Yeah,” Jenny added. “You could sleep late in the mornings, Da.”

  “Sit by the fire and smoke my pipe. Read again the great Irish writers everyone thinks are English.” The children were piling out of the car. “Shoulders back. Ears and eyes open,” Flynn advised them. “Mouths closed.”

  He noticed most of the boys milling about in front of the main school building still wore their uniform shorts. If they were ever ordered to do so in forty-five degree weather, doubtlessly they would complain.

  Flynn proceeded toward Boston and Courtroom 9.

  He and his family had enjoyed the year he had spent at the farm in Ireland, while waiting for the international intelligence community to accept his death while on assignment in Burundi.

  After a year, however, John Roy Priddy, No Name Zero, decided he wanted Francis Xavier Flynn, N. N. 13, more available for the odd intelligence assignment “between the borders,” which was where No Name operated.

  Thus he had been moved to Boston, Massachusetts, the United States of America, with the cover job of the Boston Police Department’s only inspector.

  Elsbeth, his wife, a sabra, born and raised in Israel
, found both places cold and damp. Somehow she had managed to warm their homes in Ireland and the United States just by the width and depth of her personality, wit, and love.

  Flynn nestled the huge, boxy station wagon next to the fire hydrant in front of the courthouse.

  “Now to testify against a poor soul who swears his gun fired and accidentally killed his mother-in-law a day after his wife ran off with the postman.” Flynn locked his car. “His aim was that bad.”

  “The judge will see you now,” the court officer whispered in Flynn’s ear. “In chambers.”

  Flynn had sat patiently in the courtroom, as most employees of police departments learn to do, thinking of ships and shoes and sealing wax, while the wheels of justice ground exceedingly slow, wide men in thin suits milling around the judge’s raised desk, muttering madly, slapping this paper after that on the judge’s desk ever so much like players of poker.

  Until Michael Carruth, shackled, in prison uniform, was brought in for sentencing.

  Flynn had then given the court officer a note and asked him to deliver it to the judge immediately.

  The note read:

  Dear Judge Goldston:

  Before uttering sentence upon the miscreant before you, Michael Carruth, it is imperative you speak to me.

  Inspector Francis Flynn

  At the door to the judge’s chambers, Flynn looked around at the miscreant. He was a small, light-boned, black person.

  His eyes were blazing at Flynn.

  First his lips mouthed at Flynn, “No, no.”

  Then he stood up and shouted, “No, Flynn, you bastard! Don’t do it! Stop!”

  In chambers, Judge Goldston said, “I was wondering what you’re doing in my courtroom this morning, Frank. I don’t have anything coming up in which you’re involved.”

  “You don’t?”

  “No, sir.”

  “You’re not hearing The Commonwealth v. Oral McMahon?”

  The judge consulted some papers on his desk. “Jack has that. In Courtroom 6. Someone gave you a bum steer.”

  “Someone did.” GROVER!

  “Sit down.” The judge did so. “Want some coffee?”

  “I never take stimulants.” Flynn sat. “I find life quite exciting enough.”

  The judge chuckled. “How about sedatives?”

  “I fall asleep every time I think of trying one.”

  “How’s Elsbeth?”

  “Dandy.”

  “I want you to know that musicale you and Elsbeth and the kids put on at our shul last spring was the high point of our year.”

  “Elsbeth talked us into that. She said what good is it to play ensemble only for our own pleasure.” Flynn smiled. “Did you mind the Spanish piece in praise of St. James at all?”

  “I liked it.”

  “St. James praised in shul. I expect he enjoyed that.”

  “So?” Judge Goldston laughed. “Last year the temple gave me a testimonial. And I’m no saint!”

  “Who among us is?”

  “That Jenny. Was there ever a more beautiful child?”

  “No.”

  “What’s this about Carruth?”

  “You’re about to sentence him, I overheard, for three counts of rape.”

  “Yes.”

  “Did the women identify him?”

  “Nope. Every incident took place in the dark of an alley. He wore a ski mask.”

  “Was his semen matched to that found in the women?”

  Judge Goldston was scanning his papers. “It doesn’t exactly say so here.”

  “But the raped women were semen stained?”

  “Yes. The man confessed, Frank. Lieutenant Detective John Kurt—you know him?”

  “No.”

  “Astonishing conviction record. Truly astonishing. Kurt did the interrogation. Carruth was sent for ten days’ psychiatric evaluation. The docs are convinced Carruth is our man. He told all, in graphic detail, fit all the psychological patterns of a serial rapist, expressed no remorse. A plea of guilty was accepted seven weeks ago. What’s the problem?”

  “I wouldn’t say he’s exactly innocent,” Flynn said. “But he didn’t do it.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Met him professionally about a year ago. Five times he was beaten up on the streets of our fair city for soliciting males. Finally I convinced him he had very little future in carryin’ on as he was.”

  “Still, a rapist of females—”

  “Carruth is incapable of producing semen. Further, due to botched surgery, even if he could produce semen he is incapable of transmitting it, you might say, to another human being. The docs didn’t notice?”

  “Yee, gods.”

  “I think Carruth wants the world to think him better, in a certain way, than he is.”

  “He wants to go to prison?”

  “He wants to go to a male prison.”

  “You’re sure of this?”

  “You’ll have to check, of course. Until then, I strongly suggest you delay sentencing.”

  “You’re saving the taxpayers some money, again, ‘Reluctant’ Flynn.”

  At the door to chambers, Flynn said, “More to the point, there’s a cad out there who is a rapist, free to rape again. You might suggest to Lieutenant Detective John Kurt that next time you’ll be more impressed by his thoroughness than his ‘astounding’ arrest record.”

  Leaving the judge’s chambers, Flynn focused on the man at the prosecutor’s table who obviously was Lt. Kurt.

  The unsmiling man looked at Flynn with steady blue eyes.

  From the defense table, the defendant, due to be freed, shouted, “Flynn, you prick! I hate you, hate you!”

  “Och, man,” Flynn said back to the man. “Aren’t you in enough of a prison as it is?”

  THREE

  “Cocky left a message for me to call you,” Flynn said to his wife over his desk phone.

  After dropping in at Courtroom 6 and being told The Commonwealth v. McMahon had been continued for the ninth time, Flynn treated himself to a leisurely lunch at Jacob Wirth’s before proceeding to his office on the third floor of the Old Records Building on Craigie Lane. The German cuisine reminded Flynn of the best of his youth in Germany.

  “You forgot I have to bring Jeff in for his checkup this afternoon?” Elsbeth asked.

  “Change his oil and grease him, or a full tune-up?”

  “You forgot to give me the money for the doctor’s appointment?”

  “How much is it?”

  “A week’s wages, Frannie. Plus to remind you that’s where I’ll be all afternoon. Despite our having a fixed appointment, the doctor will make me wait at least three hours to prove to me how valuable his time is while Jeff and I pick up every infection, staph and otherwise, in his crowded waiting room.”

  “Elsbeth, are you sure these monthly appointments are really necessary? The lad is as strong as goat cheese.”

  “What if something went wrong with the baby, Frannie? We’d have only ourselves to blame.”

  “Would we? The doctors prescribe guilt, is that it?”

  “Did you leave some money in the house?”

  Although they collected receipts and kept good records, the Flynns paid cash for nearly everything.

  “In my boot,” Flynn said. “My left hiking boot.”

  Dragging his left leg behind him, carrying the small tray in only his right hand, Cocky entered Flynn’s office.

  “Ah,” Flynn informed his wife. “Here’s Cocky now with a nice cuppa.”

  “Give him my best.”

  Taking his mug of herb tea from the tray Cocky had placed on his desk, Flynn said to her, “While I have you on the horn, old dear . . . does the name Capriano mean anything to you?”

  “They’re our butchers, Frannie.”

  “Are they indeed?”

  “You don’t know the name of our butchers?”

  “How many of them are there?”

  “Two brothers. Tony and William. You’ve been in th
e shop a hundred times.”

  “Tony and William! Yes. Their last name is Capriano?”

  “They have a big sign over their door. It says CAPRIANOS’ MEATS.”

  “Do they indeed? Anything else odd about them?”

  “William has a finger missing.”

  “Many a butcher does. Occupational hazard. He didn’t sell it to us, did he, along with the week’s sausage order?”

  “He lost it while serving in the Marines, Frannie. Someone slammed a jeep’s door on it, or something.”

  “I’m looking for dirt, old thing. Rumors of drink, drugs, gambling, violence, wife abuse . . . ?”

  “They’re wonderful people. I know their wives, their children, most of them, at least by sight, very polite, helpful.”

  “You know Billy? Is he William’s son?”

  “Yes.”

  “What do you know about Billy?”

  “Jenny is stuck on him. Billy is stuck on Jenny. They’re just four big eyes, two blue, two brown, eating each other up. Frannie, I think they’re having first love with each other. How nice.”

  “Jenny is too young for that.”

  “Frannie, you still think I’m too young for that.”

  “You are. Who are you stuck on now?”

  “Still my first love.”

  “Still? What, against progress, are you? You’ll never see yourself on daytime television that way.”

  “I keep looking for someone else, but what to do? Every other man I meet is a bore.”

  “Me, too. So how do you know about Jenny and Billy? I was about to tell you their secret.”

  “You were about to tell me the secret that they meet alone in the cemetery?”

  “I thought I was half up on things.”

  “You do very well, for a busy father of five.”

  “Thank you. How did you first find out about Billy?”

  “Joan of Arc.”

  “I see. Joan of Arc told you. You women do stick together.”

  “All of a sudden, Jenny knew everything about Joan of Arc. Then Henry the Eighth. And each of his wives. Helping me peel potatoes one Sunday she told me the whole history of the Peloponnesian War, as if I’d asked. Sparta won, by the way.”

  “Yeah, but it took them nearly thirty years.”

  “Twenty-seven. When Jenny got Todd into a half nelson he couldn’t break free of I knew there had to be a Billy somewhere.”