Mission Flats

by William Landay

  In hindsight, I see that Caroline’s contradictions were precisely why I could not let go of the subject. The more she puzzled me, the more I thought about her; the more I thought about her, the more puzzled I became. Was she beautiful or just vivid? Was she warm, as she’d been with Charlie (and me), or irascible, as she sometimes delighted in being? I wanted to understand her in my academic way, I wanted to flatten all that wonderful complexity and elusiveness into a few bald adjectives. No, I had not fallen in love. After a certain age you do not fall in love. Falling, with its implications of delirium and loss of control, is no longer the right metaphor. What you do is study your lover. You consider her. You turn her over in your hand like a coin from a foreign country. But then, that is a kind of love too.

  All of this I was considering – Caroline, the taste-memory of her mouth, the feel of her strong back – the complicating factor of Charlie – the possibility of love – all these considerations swarmed in my mind, and I was in the process of sorting them out – categorizing them – because you have to be prudent with these things – emotion, I mean – you have to consider it, not rush in like Annie Wilmot did with Claude Truman – when Bobo showed up.

  Bobo looked different than he had a week before, when Gittens rousted him from the Dumpster-cum-shooting gallery at the garbage collection plant. Gone were the Lakers sweatshirt and the stained work pants. Gone too was the druggy stupor. Now Bobo was flashing a definite sense of style. He wore his Greek fisherman’s cap down over one eye. And he walked with a rhythmic strut, limping slightly on his left leg so that he moved down the street like a bird with a broken wing.

  Bobo was still half a block away when he recognized me, or at least recognized trouble. A white guy in this neighborhood – a white guy with a bad haircut standing around drinking coffee, a white guy looking at him in a familiar way – all things considered, to Bobo it meant trouble. Trouble of the law-enforcement variety. He immediately crossed the street, looking both ways, to put a little distance between us as he passed.

  Even law-abiding people often become anxious when cops are around. But Bobo did not seem unnerved in the least. Bobo was cool. As he reached the parked cars on the opposite side of the street, he looked across at me and that was all. No sign of recognition, let alone fear. Then Bobo disappeared around the corner.

  I hesitated, then, with a last forlorn look at 442 Hewson Street – the building I was supposed to be watching – I decided instead to follow Bobo. It was an impetuous decision. I did not know whether I would try to talk to him or whether I was just curious to see what he was up to. Mostly, I think I was fed up with staring at June Veris’s girlfriend’s apartment building – staring, sipping coffee, pissing at the convenience store on the corner, staring some more. Four straight days of that was enough. So I followed Bobo.

  There was not much of a crowd on Hosmer Street, a fairly busy road that runs east-west through Mission Flats, so I kept a good block or two behind him. He strutted his way down Hosmer a few blocks, then hooked a left onto a side street with the winsome name Blue Moon Lane. By the time I reached the corner, Bobo was already slipping through the doorless entry to a brownstone.

  The brownstone was one of eight or ten that lined the street. All but one were well-kept, Bobo’s being the exception. I have seen pictures of Berlin after World War II, and the best way I can think to describe this building is to say that it looked like something out of Berlin in 1945. There was no front door and no glass in any of the windows. Every delicate piece of the structure – glass, window frames, gutters – had been blown away. What remained was the beautiful stone facade, a chain-link fence sliced open with wire cutters, and an ominously worded NO TRESPASSING sign.

  I guessed (incorrectly, it turned out) that Bobo had gone inside to score drugs. What other reason was there to hang out in such a building? So I decided to wait until he came out again. Five, ten minutes – how long could it take?

  But Bobo did not emerge after fifteen minutes, or thirty, or sixty.

  So I decided to go in for the simple, all-explaining reason That’s What Gittens Would Do. After watching and admiring Gittens’s mastery of Mission Flats police-work for the last few days, I had begun to ape him consciously. I drew my gun for the same reason, though in three years as a cop I had never done so before. That’s What Gittens Would Do, or so I hoped.

  Inside, there was a central staircase. The apartment doors were missing, and sunlight poured in from the empty windows to light the empty rooms. The floors were silted over with dirt and rot. But the seaminess was offset by poignant vestiges: scraps of wallpaper adhering to the walls; a fireplace where a family had once warmed themselves; old newspapers; a stained mattress. I worked my way up the staircase to the second floor, where there were more empty rooms, then to the third, where at last I found Bobo.

  He was on the floor, alone, in a room at the front of the building. A piece of cardboard was propped in the window, leaving this room gloomier than the rest. Maybe Bobo had blocked the window himself, looking for privacy or a place to sleep. He lay against the wall, apparently sleeping. There was a needle by his side with a little yellowish fluid remaining in the syringe. It was unlikely that Bobo had shot up only half a syringe. He had probably passed out while preparing a second one.

  ‘Bobo!’ I knelt beside him and felt his neck for a pulse. I shook him. ‘Bobo!’

  He groaned. His eyes opened, fixed on me with milky pupils, closed again.

  ‘Bobo! Wake up. Are you alright?’

  ‘Mmmm.’

  ‘Jesus, Bobo, I’m going to get you an ambulance.’ I took out my radio, which I’d been given in case I spotted Braxton over on Hewson Street.

  ‘No am-uh-lance, no am-uh-lance.’ Bobo pushed himself up to a sitting position. Drowsily, he covered his face with his hands, rubbed, then opened his hands like a child playing peekaboo. ‘I seen you before?’

  ‘I’m a friend of Martin Gittens. We saw you at that garbage place the other day.’

  ‘Yeah yeah yeah,’ he murmured. ‘You hit me in the balls.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Those were my balls, man. You think I forgot?’

  ‘They were your balls but it wasn’t me that hit them.’

  He closed his eyes again. ‘’At’s alright, ’at’s alright. I’m not mad at you. Just balls, right?’

  ‘That’s right, Bobo.’

  I wondered what he’d been shooting. Heroin, presumably.

  ‘Give me my works, man.’

  ‘I can’t do that. I’m a cop.’

  ‘You gonna arrest me?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then give me my works.’ He stretched out his hand toward the needle but seemed incapable of moving further to get it.

  ‘Can’t help you, Bobo. Sorry’

  He closed his eyes and drifted off. After a while he said, ‘What you come here for?’

  ‘I’m looking for Braxton.’

  ‘Thought you were looking for Ray. You heard about Ray?’

  ‘Yeah, I heard. That’s why we’re looking for Braxton.’

  ‘You guys fucked Ray good.’

  ‘We did not fuck Ray, Bobo. Braxton did that.’

  ‘Whatever you say, boss.’ His head lolled. ‘You come in here looking for Braxton? Ain’t going to find him here.’

  ‘I came in here to talk to you.’

  ‘Yeah? What we going to talk about?’

  ‘Braxton. You know where he is?’

  ‘Maybe I do.’ The sound of this answer pleased him, and he repeated it with a crooked smirk. ‘Maybe I do.’

  ‘Bobo, I could still take you in if I had to.’

  ‘You already said you weren’t going to.’ He opened one eye. ‘Besides, Gittens won’t let you. He helps me out.’

  ‘Is that how it works?’

  ‘That’s how it works. Come on, boss, you help me out too.’ He pointed with his chin toward the syringe on the floor.

  ‘Bobo, I can’t do that.’

  ‘What’
s your name, anyway?’

  ‘It’s Ben Truman.’

  ‘Well, Officer Truman, let me tell you how it is. You want to get, see, you got to give. That’s what it’s all about. Capitalism.’

  ‘Bobo, do you know where Braxton is?’

  ‘See, that’s it. You want to get, but you don’t want to give.’

  I took out a twenty and tossed it on his lap. This was no small thing. Twenty dollars was a lot to me. I didn’t have Gittens’s Robin Hood instinct for robbing the dealers to pay the snitches.

  He glanced down at it but did not move. Struggling to lift his eyes from his lap, he mused, ‘Just give me my works, will you.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Go find Braxton yourself then.’

  ‘Bobo, I could give you another whack in the balls. That seems to help you open up.’

  ‘You could but you won’t.’

  ‘Yeah? Why not?’

  ‘Because you don’t want to.’

  ‘You don’t know me.’

  ‘Yes, I do,’ Bobo assured me. ‘Yes, I do.’

  He made a lethargic grab at the syringe, but I snatched it away. Bobo fell on his side and lay there, laughing. I took the syringe to the window to look at it in the light. It was a cheap plastic thing but surprisingly clean. It weighed almost nothing. I shook the little bit of fluid in the cartridge.

  ‘Just give that here.’

  ‘Bobo, I told you, I can’t do it. You don’t need it now, anyway’

  ‘Suppose you let me decide that.’

  ‘Suppose you tell me where Braxton is.’

  ‘Suppose I do? Then you help me out?’

  I shook my head no.

  ‘Then we’ll see who he kills next.’

  I walked over and handed the needle down to him.

  ‘I need that too.’ He nodded toward a belt on his own lap.

  ‘Just take it,’ I said.

  ‘I can’t, man, I’m fucked up. You help.’

  I handed him the belt.

  Bobo prepared the syringe with a few flicks of his finger, then he wrapped the belt around his upper arm, pulled it tight into a tourniquet, and clasped the free end in his teeth. He held the needle out to me.

  I walked away, refusing it.

  Bobo laid the needle down and took the belt out of his mouth. ‘You want me to tell you about Braxton or not?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well I can’t talk with this in my mouth. I only got two hands.’

  I knelt beside him.

  ‘Hold this.’

  I held the belt tight.

  Bobo searched a long time for a vein. The needle pierced his arm four times. When he’d found one, he sighed and asked, ‘You want to do it?’

  ‘Bobo, just tell me where Braxton is. I gave you the dope.’

  ‘You want to do it?’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘You do it.’

  ‘No.’

  He took the thumb of my free hand and placed it on the plunger, then put his own thumb over mine. ‘We’ll do it together. You want to be a cop, you should know how this works.’

  I did not resist.

  ‘Let’s do it together.’ A lunatic smile.

  ‘Bobo, where’s Braxton?’

  ‘There’s a church on Mission Ave, Calvary Pentecostal. This priest there, Reverend Walker, he puts Braxton up sometimes when he’s in trouble. The Reverend’s known Braxton since Harold was in diapers. He helps him out. Maybe you’ll find Harold there.’

  With that, Bobo’s thumb pressed down on my thumbnail, and the plunger, after a brief, virginal resistance, slid down the syringe. I allowed the belt to go slack. Bobo’s eyes squeezed shut as the heroin orgasm washed over him in a warm rush.

  I told myself, He would have done it anyway, whether I’d helped or not. I didn’t really do anything. Nothing Gittens wouldn’t have done.

  I did not find Braxton at the Calvary Pentecostal Church that day. But I made it part of my routine to stop by the church when I wasn’t staring at the apartment building on Hewson Street. Soon enough, I conceived a hero fantasy in which I would capture Braxton single-handed at this church, effectively ending the case.

  What I did not realize was that the Boston PD had already identified a new suspect – me.

  25

  ‘Your name was in Danziger’s files.’

  It was a startling moment, though the statement itself was not surprising. I was not shocked to hear that my name was in Danziger’s files: Danziger and I had spoken the day he arrived in Versailles. No, the startling thing was how suddenly and irrefutably this fact made me a pariah. How easy it was for Lowery and Gittens, based on this single datum, to imagine me rifle-blasting Bob Danziger’s head. You could hear it in their voices. I was out. It was the day before Halloween. Gittens, Andrew Lowery, and I had gathered in a windowless interrogation room inside the Area A-3 station.

  Lowery, in a soigné double-breasted suit with peaked lapels, seemed comically out of place here. He stood at the furthest corner from me, looking small and doll-like.

  Gittens’s fingers worked the skin on that elongated forehead, a gesture of benign puzzlement. ‘Mr Truman,’ he said, ‘do you want to explain what’s going on?’

  ‘‘‘Mr Truman”? Explain what exactly?’

  ‘Why you lied to us.’

  ‘I didn’t lie to you. I just did not think it was relevant.’

  Lowery burst out, ‘Oh come on! You didn’t think it was relevant?’

  ‘What does it have to do with Danziger’s getting killed?’

  ‘Motive!’ Lowery said.

  ‘Ben,’ Gittens soothed, ‘do you want a lawyer in here with you?’

  ‘No! Jesus, Martin! Where’s Kelly? Why didn’t you call him in here too?’

  ‘We don’t think he belongs here right now. We don’t think either of the Kellys should be present for this, frankly. Do you need me to read you your rights?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Then you understand your rights and you waive them?’

  ‘Martin, what are you talking about?’

  ‘Do you understand your rights and waive them?’

  ‘No! Yes! What the hell are you talking about?’

  Lowery quick-stepped in from the corner on little dancer’s feet. ‘What are we talking about? Why didn’t you tell us your mother killed herself? Why didn’t you tell us Danziger was investigating you?’

  ‘I didn’t tell you my mother killed herself because it’s none of your damn business. And I didn’t tell you Danziger was investigating me because there’s nothing to investigate.’

  ‘Nothing to investigate?’ Lowery snapped open a file. ‘August 16, 1997, Anne Wilmot Truman found dead in Room 412 of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Boston. Cause of death: suicide by barbiturate overdose.’

  ‘My mother committed suicide. So what?’

  ‘Ben,’ Gittens explained, ‘assisted suicide is illegal in Massachusetts. It’s murder.’

  ‘I didn’t say it was assisted. I said my mother committed suicide.’

  ‘Danziger apparently thought differently.’

  I leaned back in my chair and stared at the ceiling tiles with an incredulous grin. I said, ‘Danziger came up to speak to me, to check it out. In his shoes, I’d probably do the same. We talked, he asked what happened, I explained the whole thing to him. He was satisfied. That was the last we ever heard of Robert Danziger until the body turned up.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘Me.’

  ‘What did you explain to him?’

  ‘You must already know.’

  ‘Tell me again.’

  ‘I told him my mother had an incurable disease. I told him she knew the Alzheimer’s was eating her up and she did not want to ride it out to the bitter end. I told him she made a horribly painful decision and I supported her. But she made the decision. She did what she had to do and that was all. There was no case, certainly not a murder.’

  ‘Then why did you lie about it?’ Lowery insisted
.

  ‘I told you, I did not lie about it.’

  ‘You just didn’t volunteer that you had a motive to kill Danziger.’

  ‘I did not have a motive to – Jesus! Are you listening to me?’

  Lowery cross-examined me for the benefit of an imaginary jury. ‘Chief Truman, your mother’s illness trapped you in Maine. It disrupted your life, all your grand plans for the future. Wasn’t it enormously convenient for you when she died?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Her death set you free, didn’t it?’

  ‘That’s not how it was.’

  ‘Why did she do it in Boston? Why not at home?’

  ‘This was home. She wanted to die here. She was never really at home in Versailles.’

  ‘And when Danziger showed up?’

  ‘I told you. We spoke very briefly. I told him it was a suicide. He said he was sorry for my mother’s death. I thanked him for his condolences. End of story. My bad luck that Braxton found him while he was still in Maine.’

  ‘Your fingerprints are all over the murder scene.’

  ‘Of course my fingerprints are all over the murder scene: I discovered it. That’s why I submitted my prints – so they could be excluded as evidence, same as any cop’s would be. Braxton’s prints were all over the murder scene too.’

  Lowery paced, arms folded. His cuff pulled back to reveal an elegant gold watch the size and thickness of a quarter. ‘Is this why you insisted on coming here? Because it never quite made sense to me until now. I mean, why come so far to stay informed about a case when you could just as easily keep tabs with a few phone calls? But now I see. Your interest wasn’t professional at all, was it? You had a personal reason for coming. What did you hope to accomplish here? Were you going to steer us toward someone else? Braxton maybe? Or was it that you just couldn’t stand to be kept in the dark, knowing the trail would inevitably lead back to you?’