Mission Flats

by William Landay

  Ratleff crossed his arms. He looked like a cigar-store Indian. ‘I’m alright.’

  Gittens stood beside him, staring out at the swaybacked buildings on Shaughnessy Garden. ‘This is some shit-storm, Ray’

  ‘You going to tell them where I am?’

  ‘I guess I’ll have to,’ Gittens said. ‘How’s your head?’

  ‘I’m alright.’ Ratleff patted the bandage on his eye as if he’d forgotten it was there. There must have been panic and confusion behind that bandage, but he managed to mask it all. ‘I didn’t do nothing wrong.’

  ‘I know, Ray’

  ‘I didn’t do nothing wrong,’ Ray repeated.

  Gittens nodded his understanding.

  Ratleff continued to stare, and you could practically hear him repeating the phrase like a mantra: I didn’t do nothing wrong, I didn’t do nothing wrong.

  ‘Ray,’ Gittens said gently, ‘these guys want to ask you some questions. They’re working the Danziger case, the DA that got shot.’

  ‘Mr Ratleff,’ Kelly said, ‘did Gerald McNeese or anyone from Braxton’s crew ever talk to you about the carjacking case? About dropping it?’

  ‘They didn’t have to talk to me. I knew what they wanted. They wanted me to drop the case.’

  ‘How did you know that?’

  ‘It’s MP. That’s just how it is.’

  ‘But you decided to go ahead and testify anyway?’

  ‘DA told me just go and tell the truth.’

  ‘But you knew about Braxton, about what he might do?’

  ‘Everybody knew. The DA knew too.’

  ‘You mean Danziger?’

  Ratleff nodded.

  ‘Danziger knew you were in danger?’

  ‘Course he did.’

  ‘So what did Danziger say to you? How did he convince you to go forward?’

  ‘He had a case on me. I sold a bag to a cop.’

  Gittens snorted. ‘One bag? Ray, that’s just distribution! It’s a few months of house time. You could do that standing on your head. You did all this just to avoid a six-month ride in the house?’

  ‘It wasn’t like that.’

  I put my foot up on the bottom step, which left me looking straight up at Ratleff. ‘What was it like, Ray? What was going on?’

  He looked down on me.

  ‘What was going on?’ I repeated.

  ‘I couldn’t go to the house. I didn’t have the time. Besides, the DA, Danziger, said it wasn’t going to happen anyway.’

  ‘What wasn’t going to happen?’

  ‘There wasn’t going to be no trial. The DA had some kind of deal. He said all I had to do was say I was going forward, let it keep going till we got to the trial, then the whole thing was gonna go away.’

  Again Gittens was surprised. ‘G-Mac was going to plead?’

  Ratleff shrugged. ‘That’s what the DA said.’

  ‘I don’t believe that, Ray,’ Gittens said. ‘Those guys don’t plead. You know that.’

  Ratleff just shrugged again. I don’t know, I don’t care.

  I coaxed him, ‘Ray, what was going on, do you know?’

  ‘All I know is Danziger told me if I just stuck with the program, let him work on G-Mac awhile, he could get G-Mac to do what he wanted. I told him McNeese wouldn’t give anybody up or nothing like that, but Danziger kept saying it wasn’t like that. He said he had something G-Mac would want.’

  ‘And what was that, Ray? What was Danziger doing?’

  ‘I told you, I don’t know.’

  ‘Ray,’ Gittens said, ‘what are you gonna do when Braxton comes after you?’

  ‘Let him come. I didn’t do nothing wrong.’

  ‘That doesn’t matter, Ray. You know what he’s gonna do.’

  ‘Let him come. Doesn’t matter what he does to me. I got the bug.’

  We looked at him, uncomprehending.

  ‘I got the bug.’ He injected his arm with an imaginary needle, presumably to signal needle-borne AIDS. ‘I’ve got no time to go to the house or noplace else, and I got no time to waste on Braxton and his foolishness. There’s nothing Braxton can do to me now.’

  15

  If there is a heaven for cops, it looks like the J. J. Connaughton Cafe. The interior consists of a wood-paneled room, a long, plain bar running the length of it. The bartenders wear white short-sleeve shirts and solid black clip-on neckties. On the wall behind them hang a large American flag and a much larger Irish tricolor. There are no stools, just a rail along the base of the bar to rest one foot on, and when Gittens, Kelly, and I got there – around seven-thirty that evening, after we returned from Lowell – men were lined up along the bar with one foot up like pelicans.

  We settled in at a table in the back with three sweating bottles of Rolling Rock.

  ‘A lot of cops hang out at this place,’ Gittens said. In fact, nearly everyone in the place seemed to be a cop. There were cops in blue uniform pants, plain-clothes cops in nylon windbreakers, cops with potbellies and cops with handlebar mustaches, short cops with Popeye forearms and lanky cops with John Wayne walks.

  Before long, cops began to drift up to greet Gittens. They shook his hand and said, howahya Mahtin. Several knew Kelly too, and most of those that didn’t at least had heard his name and seemed happy to see him. They seemed happy to meet me too. They brayed howahya to me and shook my hand vigorously. They sat down with their beers, and soon we were one big group of six or eight or ten or twelve, depending on who was standing and who was off milling around at any given moment. There was an infectious, pleasant sense of testosterone in low idle with these guys. It didn’t take long before I was telling people howahya just like the rest of them.

  After we’d been there awhile, one of the younger guys – he had an open, pink face – asked, ‘Any word on the Danziger thing?’

  Silence. Danziger’s murder was a close cousin to a cop killing, and it was treated accordingly, with reverence.

  ‘Nothing,’ declared Gittens, flatly lying. ‘Nobody’s talking.’

  ‘I’ve never heard anything like it. Nevah.’

  ‘It’s like Colombia, y’know? Some fuckin’ banana republic? I mean, killing the lawyers? It’s crazy.’

  ‘—or Sicily. That’s how they do it—’

  ‘—they’ll kill that kid Braxton too. You watch.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Up in the Flats, those people’ll kill him.’

  There was a low growl – ’he-e-ey’ – emitted by the only black cop at the table.

  A pause.

  ‘Oh, come on, he didn’t mean that,’ one of the white cops said. He held out his beer bottle and grinned. ‘Come on. To Al Sharpton.’

  They clinked bottles.

  ‘To Rodney King,’ the black cop said. He managed a fractional smile.

  ‘Whoo! Rodney King!’

  The crisis seemed to have passed. The monster’s head sank back under the surface of the loch, and the banter resumed as before.

  ‘Remember Braxton threw that kid Jameel Suggs off the roof?’

  ‘That was a long time ago.’

  ‘I remember that. Like ’92 maybe? ’93, something like that?’

  I asked, ‘Who’s Jameel Suggs?’

  One of the cops clued me in. ‘Suggs raped a little girl in the Grove Park project there. Hey, what was her name? Something Wells?’

  ‘It was like some African name, I think.’

  ‘Nikita—’

  ‘Nikisha.’

  ‘Nikisha Wells, that’s it. This little girl, she was like seven years old. Suggs raped her then he threw her off the roof so she wouldn’t tell nobody. So a few days later somebody went and threw Suggs off the roof too. They say it was Braxton.’

  ‘Hey, Maine, that’s called a misdemeanor murder.’

  ‘That’s the story anyway. Nobody knows if it was really Braxton.’

  ‘Hey, I say if Braxton really killed Suggs, let’s give him a fuckin’ medal.’

  ‘—Did he really do that?—’ />
  Gittens broke in. ‘Yes, he did.’

  The table got quiet again.

  ‘Harold threw Jameel Suggs off the roof.’ With his storyteller’s instinct, Gittens took a moment to wipe the condensation off his beer bottle with a napkin. ‘He told me so himself.’

  ‘“Harold”?—’

  ‘—get the fuck out!—’

  ‘—what is this with “Harold”?—’

  ‘—what, you know him?’

  ‘Course I know him.’ Gittens shrugged. ‘I’ve known him since he was a kid. I was up in A-3 a long time chasing those kids around.’

  ‘Get the fuck out. Why don’t you go find him then?’

  ‘He doesn’t want to be found. No one’s going to find Harold till he’s ready to be found.’

  The cops all studied Gittens. Some found the association with Braxton suspicious, others were impressed, others simply didn’t believe it. But all were curious. Martin Gittens had a way of making people curious.

  ‘Stop calling him Harold,’ said one. ‘You’re weirding me out with that shit.’

  ‘Hey, Gittens, if you do know him, you better tell Maine here what Braxton’s like so he knows what he’s getting into.’

  Gittens smirked at me. ‘Well, he’s smart, I’ll tell you that. Smarter than any of these guys. Harold put together that whole Hot Box Boys thing in high school. You go up to the Flats now, half the guys there will claim they were in Hot Box Boys. But there were really only six or seven of them, and Harold ran the whole show.’

  I asked, ‘What does that mean, “Hot Box Boys”?’

  ‘A hot box is a stolen cah,’ one of the cops informed me.

  ‘Ah,’ I said, ‘a stolen cah.’

  Gittens continued: ‘They were grabbing cars left and right. Fifty in one night off the lot at Hub Nissan in Dorchester. Fifty! They never did any time for anything. They’d get sent to DYS and they’d be out the same night. It was ridiculous.’

  ‘It’s a revolving door—’

  ‘—see, that’s what happens,’ one of the others scoffed. ‘You’ve got to nip this stuff in the ass. This juvenile shit—’

  ‘What, are you gonna lock up every kid who steals a car?’

  ‘Yes! Every one! That’s what you do – you hit ’em hard right away so they learn. They’ve got to know this shit isn’t gonna flush.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter. These kids have brass balls, they don’t care.’

  ‘You know what I don’t get?’ said another, in a puzzled tone.

  ‘We all know what you don’t get.’

  Guffaws and high fives all around.

  ‘No, listen. The thing . . . the thing I don’t get is, Gittens, you said Braxton told you he threw Jameel Suggs off the roof. So if he admitted it to you, why didn’t you do anything about it? I mean, he confessed. You had him on a murder.’

  ‘Yeah, Jesus, Gittens, what are you, protecting this piece of shit?’

  Gittens allowed the question to hang there a moment. ‘I did report it. The DA said it wasn’t enough to indict. They didn’t have anything else, and they said a confession alone wouldn’t support a conviction. They didn’t want the case.’

  Another pause. We waited, uneasily, for the next gust of conversation.

  ‘I heard a rumor Braxton was a rat,’ said one.

  ‘No way—’

  ‘—Who would he give up? Himself?’

  ‘—How do you turn a guy like that anyway? Braxton’s a murderer. Even if he wanted to flip, you couldn’t give him a deal. No DA would go for it.’

  ‘Hey, the feds flipped Whitey Bulger. He was a murderer.’

  ‘That’s different, it was a Mafia thing. Whitey was a mobster.’

  ‘Yeah, and Whitey fucked them anyway. He didn’t give them jack shit. These feds are complete shitheads.’

  ‘Tell you what, if anybody ever did flip Braxton, he’d be a great rat. Imagine the shit Harold Braxton could tell you.’

  ‘Lowery’d never give him a deal. He’d never get elected again.’

  ‘Hey, you never know. It’s like the man said: Whitey Bulger got his deal.’

  ‘That’s because he’s white.’ This was the black cop. He delivered the statement in an even tone. It was a fact, take it or leave it.

  ‘Oh, Jesus, here we go—’

  ‘—Why are you always starting with that shit?—’

  The black cop shrugged. ‘You all know if Whitey Bulger was black, the feds never would have let him flip, Mafia or no Mafia.’

  ‘What do you mean? Lowery’s black and he’s the DA.’

  ‘Yeah, what’s he, a black racist?’

  This last comment was pushing. The monster’s eyes appeared on the surface of the loch and lingered there a moment before submerging again.

  ‘Andrew Lowery wants to be the first black mayor,’ the black cop said. ‘He can’t afford to be associated with a thug like Braxton. An African-American DA protecting an African-American gangster? No way. Braxton scares white people, and white people vote.’

  Gittens said, ‘Yeah, well, just the same, I’d try and flip Braxton if I could. That’s the job.’

  ‘It’ll never happen. Braxton’ll never rat out anyone.’

  Gittens inclined his head as if to say, Hey, you never know.

  Much later, I learned that Gittens kept a photo in his office of Nikisha Wells, the little girl who had been raped and thrown off the roof in the Grove Park project. In the photo, she wore a red dress and white blouse. Her frizzly hair was arranged in two pigtails, which stuck out from her head at ten o’clock and two o’clock like antennae. There was a red ribbon at the end of each pigtail to match her dress. The photo showed Nikisha leaning forward and laughing as if she’d just heard something very funny. What time is it when an elephant sits on your fence? Typical third-grader. I asked Gittens why he kept the photo. He said he’d known Nikisha from his years in the Flats and he kept it ‘to remind me – this is who we work for.’ At the time it seemed like a full enough explanation. In hindsight, though, I wish I’d probed further. I wish I’d asked what he thought of Braxton throwing Nikisha’s murderer off that same roof. It would have been interesting to know Gittens’s answer.

  16

  The next morning, a little the worse for wear after a night at Connaughton’s Cafe, I showed up at the DA’s Special Investigations Unit. John Kelly did not accompany me, pleading a personal errand of some mysterious and unexplained kind. I did not ask him about it. It was plain that he did not want to discuss what he was doing.

  The Special Investigations Unit was in a nondescript seventies-modern office building, separate from the main District Attorney’s office, which was housed in the Sussex County Courthouse. And lest you imagine the SIU office as one of those movie-ish gritty urban police stations – phones ringing, typewriters clacking, ‘perps’ handcuffed to chair legs – let me tell you up front that the SIU looked more like an accountant’s office. In fact, several accountants and even a dentist shared the same third-floor hallway. The office was furnished with cloth-walled dividers and industrial carpeting, all in shades of tan. The only concession to law-enforcement gung ho was a poster pinned to one of the cubicle walls: A SOCIETY THAT DOES NOT SUPPORT ITS POLICE SUPPORTS ITS CRIMINALS.

  With Bob Danziger’s murder, Caroline Kelly had ascended to the head of this unit. Caroline greeted me at the reception area and ushered me around the place, introducing me to several state troopers and to one lawyer, a bowling ball of a man named Franny Boyle.

  Boyle came out from around his desk and gave my hand a bone-crushing squeeze. He said, with a Boston accent so thick it sounded like a put-on, ‘So yaw the guy from Maine.’ I admitted I was, then stretched my fingers to peel them apart. Boyle looked like he’d been a football player once, a linebacker maybe, though now, at age forty-five or so, he was going soft. The skin of his face sagged. His belly ballooned over his belt buckle. He was nearly bald, with even the sides of his head shaved virtually to the scalp. Still, he was formidable enough. It
was difficult to tell where that hairless head ended and his thick neck began. ‘Anything you need, Mistah Truman, I mean any fuckin’ thing . . .’ Boyle didn’t finish the sentence, but stood there nodding to signify Just ask. He pointed a meaty finger at me: ‘Remembuh.’ I told him I would.

  Caroline asked Boyle if he was feeling alright. The smell of alcohol hung about him – it was ten A.M. – and his face was mottled with a drinker’s flush. A fine mesh of red, threadlike veinules netted the skin of his nose.

  ‘I’m okay, Lynnie. Just upset, is all. The funeral’s coming up, you know. Autopsy took forever.’

  ‘Franny, maybe you’d better go home. You don’t look so great. It’s alright, we’re all upset.’

  After a moment’s hesitation, Boyle grabbed his coat, gave me another knuckle-cruncher, and shuffled down the hall. With his overcoat on, the man’s neck all but disappeared; his head seemed to be attached directly to his back like a bullfrog’s.

  When he was out of earshot I said, ‘“Lynnie”?’

  Caroline shook her head with an expression that said, Don’t even think about calling me Lynnie. ‘Franny’s a long story,’ she said, and left it at that.

  She brought me to Danziger’s office, where two strips of yellow crimescene tape were strung in an X across the door frame. A glossy peel-and-stick label on the door predicted dire consequences for anyone who entered (. . . under Massachusetts law it is a felony to enter, tamper with, or otherwise disturb a crime scene unless explicitly authorized . . .). Caroline paused to run her fingertips over the plastic name-plate with its impressed letters, ROBERT M. DANZIGER, CHIEF, then she pulled off the tape as if she were clearing away cobwebs. Inside, the office was neat and organized. A half dozen files stood at attention in a rack on the desk, their edges aligned. The phone, Rolodex, stapler, everything was arranged just so. You half expected Bob Danziger to walk in through a side door and take his seat at the desk.

  ‘I don’t think you’ll find much in here,’ Caroline cautioned. ‘We took out the files on all Bobby’s open cases.’

  I stopped at a small photo on the wall. It showed a group of men posing on the steps in front of a courthouse. ‘That’s the original SIU crew,’ she explained. ‘It was just an anti-narcotics unit then. DAs and cops working together, that was the idea. That must be ’85 or so. Your tour guide, Martin Gittens, is in there somewhere.’ The photo conveyed a feeling of jock comradeship. It reminded me of one of those old photos of a B-52 crew, a bunch of cocky young guys grinning and hanging on one another. Gittens was in the front row. He had a cheesy mustache and thick hair, both gone now. I had to look closer to find Danziger. He was in the back, smiling. A burly redheaded cop with a full beard had his arm over Danziger’s shoulder, and together the two redheads looked like brothers – Danziger the studious firstborn son, this big cop his mischievous younger brother.