30
In those last few days of its existence, there was a sense of fatigue about the old Boston Police headquarters on Berkeley Street. The building seemed ready to heave a sigh of exhaustion before expiring. (A month or so later, the Boston police moved to a glass box further up Tremont Street, a sleek modern building for a sleek modern department. That was the idea, anyway.)
Kurth and Caroline led John Kelly and me to an interview room down the hall from the Homicide office. It was a gloriously run-down little room with cracked paint and cloudy windows. The only concessions to modernity were a drip coffeepot and a toxic-looking air conditioner that blocked half of one window. Otherwise the flatfoots who’d worked here during Prohibition would have recognized the room straightaway.
We met the remainder of our team, such as it was. District Attorney Lowery was turned out in a maize bow tie and stylish cap-toed shoes. I could see my distorted reflection in the convex lenses of his spectacles. He greeted me with a grim nod. Martin Gittens shook my hand with extra care, a soulful two-hander, and asked about my injuries. His sudden concern for my well-being was a relief after the high drama of the day before. I took it as a sign that his suspicions of me had abated for some reason. Perhaps I’d earned a measure of trust now that I’d been blooded in combat. That was what I wanted to believe, anyway. Probably it was what Gittens wanted me to believe too; he used the momentum of my own panic – my neediness – against me in a kind of emotional judo.
We moved to a cramped room behind a one-way mirror. From this room, Lowery warned, my conversation with Braxton would be watched and recorded. ‘You’ll be on that tape too, Chief Truman,’ he said, ‘not just Braxton.’ I told him, ‘Well, that should help me relax.’ Kelly, looming over the group like a protective daddy, gave me a reproachful look. It said, Ben, just shut up.
Braxton was brought into the interview room, two uniform cops at his sides. He wore drooping jeans, flannel shirt, and a Brooklyn Dodgers cap embroidered with Jackie Robinson’s number 42. Cuffed at the ankles, he inched his way to the chair in geisha steps. After Braxton sat down, one of the cops cuffed his right foot to the chair leg and left him alone in the room. He stared into the mirror as if he could see through it, as if he were watching us.
And for a minute or so we watched him too. I’d seen Braxton only the day before, but this was my first chance to look at him for any length of time. I searched for some manifestation of his famous lethality. From the overheated descriptions of Braxton, I half expected him to glow like a hot coal. But his physical appearance was disappointing, just as his mug shot had been. He was quite small, maybe five-nine or so, and wiry hard. His manner was all street-corner badass. He manufactured a sneer; he folded his arms (or as nearly folded them as the handcuffs would allow). But there was a sense of disingenuousness about all the posing. It was theater. Braxton was acting out the role of a gangster, but it was someone else’s vision of a gangster, not his. Maybe it was all for our benefit. We demanded a certain style from him – a style that may have owed more to Hollywood than to Mission Flats, but we wanted it just the same – so he gave it to us. His eyes moved around the room, and he seemed to calculate and recalculate his position.
‘Let’s go,’ Braxton said to the mirror.
Kurth escorted me into the hall. ‘Give him his rights, make sure he signs the card,’ he instructed. He handed me an orange Miranda card. His eyes drilled into me: ‘Remember, we’re listening.’
And a moment later I was sitting opposite Harold Braxton.
‘Hi,’ I said.
No response.
Braxton’s nearness came as a surprise. In the observation room, the one-way glass and tinny speakers had exaggerated the distance between us. He had been a figure on a TV screen, glassed in, mediated, broadcast from a studio who-knew-where. But now, separated by just a few feet of photo-wood tabletop, Harold Braxton was undeniably present.
‘I need to inform you of your rights,’ I said, and I recited the Miranda catechism. When it was done, I slid the card toward him. ‘You have to sign it.’
He flexed the card between his thumb and index finger, then slid it back as if unsatisfied with its tensile strength.
‘I can’t talk to you without that signature.’
‘No.’
I slid the card back. ‘Just sign it. Otherwise I’m out of here.’
A smile played around his mouth. He signed the card – almost as a favor to me, I thought, to reassure me.
‘Do you know a guy named Ray Ratleff?’
‘Knew him, yeah.’
‘What do you mean, “knew”?’
‘He’s dead. Didn’t you hear?’
‘Do you know anything about it?’
‘Just what I seen on TV.’
‘Why would anyone want to kill him?’
‘You tell me.’
‘I’m asking you, Harold.’
‘Ray was a junkie. Probably had something to do with it.’
‘Meaning?’
‘Meaning, you hang out with pipeheads and sliders and shit, you usually end up dead. I seen lots of guys like Ratleff. You come to my neighborhood sometime, I’ll show you some.’
‘Have you ever been a slider?’
‘What’s that got to do with Ray Ratleff?’
‘You said yourself, sliders might have done it.’
He smiled. ‘You got my bop. You know what I done.’
‘Your bop?’
‘My record, my Board of Probation record. Those guys have it, I’m sure.’ He nodded toward the mirror. ‘It’s alright, dog, I’ll tell you what’s on it. There’s some juvenile stuff, hot boxing mostly. Then I got two distributions, class B, all powder. Straight probation on both. Some other small shit. Otherwise I’m clean.’
‘Clean? What about Artie Trudell?’
Braxton’s eyebrows crushed downward.
‘The cop who got shot through the door, Harold.’
‘I didn’t have nothing to do with that. That case got dismissed.’
‘Why’d you get charged? Did they just pick your name out of the phone book?’
‘Ask your friend Raul.’
‘Who’s Raul?’ I said.
He smirked.
‘Maybe you’re Raul. That’s the rumor, isn’t it?’
No answer.
This was pointless. ‘Look, are you gonna answer any questions or not? You haven’t told me anything.’
Shrug. ‘Don’t know anything.’
‘Then what are you doing here, Harold?’
‘I got arrested.’
‘You went to the trouble of getting me down here just to tell me you don’t know anything?’
‘Do they really think you capped that DA?’ he asked.
‘I don’t think they know.’
‘Did you?’
‘No.’
‘On your mother’s grave?’
‘On my mother’s grave.’
‘Well I didn’t do it neither.’
‘So that’s it? You’re innocent?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why tell it to me?’
‘This is Boston, dog. B-town. Alabama of the North.’
‘You’re saying it’s a race thing?’
‘It’s always a race thing.’
‘I don’t think so, Harold, not this time. There’s plenty of proof.’
Another caustic smile. He leaned forward, dragging the handcuffs across the table, and rested on his forearms. ‘Let me tell you something,’ he confided. ‘These cops don’t need proof. They can always find proof after they solve the case.’ He stared at me a moment. A dusting of blackheads marred his nose. Otherwise he was handsome, with his brown eyes and monkish ponytail. ‘Go on, finish asking your questions.’
‘Have you ever been to Maine?’
‘Why would I go to some backward-ass—’
‘Is that a no?’
‘Fuck no.’
‘Did you know Robert Danziger?’
‘Course I did.’
<
br /> ‘How did you know him?’
‘He prosecuted me like fifty times.’
‘How did you feel about that?’
‘Oh, I was real thrilled about it.’
‘Answer the question. How did you feel about Danziger prosecuting you over and over?’
‘How would you feel?’
‘It would depend on the circumstances.’
‘That’s right. The man had a job to do. I had no problem with that. There wasn’t nothing between me and him.’
The questions were obtuse and Braxton knew it. There was something approaching friendliness in his tone, in the patronizing way he answered. Criminals often show a false bonhomie toward cops, a desire to connect, an appeal to their goodwill. But this was something worse – he was condescending to me.
‘Where were you Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, when Ray Ratleff was killed?’
‘Party in Grove Park. There were twenty or thirty people there. You want names?’
I got a yellow legal pad from a side table, and Braxton wrote out some names in neat block letters.
‘That all you got?’ he asked.
‘Is there anything else you want to tell me?’
‘I want to talk to you, Chief True-Man.’
‘It’s Ben. Why me?’
‘Because you and me need each other.’
‘Yeah? Why do I need you?’
‘You need to prove you didn’t do it, same as me. They’re going to put it on one of us, right? You can see that, can’t you? So if you figure it out, that helps us both. Now, do you want to go figure it out, for both of us?’
I hesitated.
Braxton looked over my shoulder at the mirror, then his eyes tripped from one corner of the room to another. At the time I thought he was looking for cameras; in fact what he was looking for was a microphone. He leaned forward, rested his chest on the edge of the table and whispered, ‘Come here.’
‘No.’
‘I ain’t gonna hurt you.’
I shook my head.
‘You think I’m gonna beat down some cop in a police station? With these on?’ He held up his handcuffed wrists. ‘You think I’m that stupid?’
‘Anything you tell me, Harold, I’m just going to tell them anyway’
‘That’s on you. I figure you’ll do the right thing.’
I leaned forward to listen, warily, like a lion tamer putting his head in the lion’s mouth.
The speed of what happened next shocked me.
Braxton’s hands snapped up over my head. He trapped my neck in the handcuffs and yanked me down against the table. I could not move. The handcuff chain cinched into the back of my neck.
There was shouting behind the mirror, muffled, ‘Hey hey!’
The plastic-wood tabletop was immediately in front of my eye. It was scratched, oily.
I felt Braxton’s mouth inches from my ear. It crossed my mind that he might bite it, gnaw it right off my head.
‘You helped me yesterday in the church. Why?’
‘I don’t know. I didn’t want—’
‘They’re playing you.’ His breath was warm and humid in my ear.
‘What?’
‘They’re playing you, they’re setting you up. And me. Both of us.’
‘Alright, you’re innocent. I get it.’
‘No!’ He thumped me against the tabletop. I felt his frustration. Everybody claims to be innocent; he was telling me something more. ‘I need to tell you—’
A door slammed and feet clattered in the hallway.
Braxton pressed his face close so I could actually feel his lips brush my ear. ‘Find Raul.’
‘What?’
‘Find Raul. It’s got nothing to do with Ratleff. Follow Raul’
‘Okay’
‘Follow Raul. From Danziger to Trudell, maybe back further. To Fazulo. Watch—’
He never got to finish.
Kelly crossed the room in two long strides and cracked Braxton in the small of the back with the club. The blow made a hollow sound. Braxton arched back. Kelly lifted him bodily away from the table and suspended him against the wall. The chair, still handcuffed to Braxton’s leg, dangled between them.
Once pinned to the wall, Braxton hung there like a doll, offering no resistance. But his face was transformed. He was all sneering badass again. He broadcast disdain – and the pain of the blow to his back – to anyone who cared to register it.
Kelly pulled him away from the wall and slammed him back against it. He pressed the nightstick against Braxton’s throat.
‘That’s enough!’ Max Beck shouted. I had not even seen the lawyer enter. His face was red and already, at ten in the morning, his tie was pulled down to his sternum. ‘Put that man down!’
‘Yes,’ Lowery said, coolly. ‘Put him down, Lieutenant Kelly.’
Kelly complied. He straightened his sport coat and asked me if I was okay.
‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘I’m fine, it wasn’t like that.’
‘It’s an A.B.P.O.,’ Kurth said. ‘Good. Now we can hold him.’
It would surely have gone that way, of course – a swift arrest, an arraignment that morning at the B.M.C., a prohibitive bail. It would have gone that way but for one thing: The District Attorney was there and he had a broader agenda.
‘What do you say, Chief Truman?’ Lowery asked. ‘You’re the victim here.’
Before I could answer, Gittens blurted, ‘Harold, if you ever lay a hand on a cop again—’
‘Detective Gittens,’ Lowery soothed. He gestured with his hands, palms down: Calm down. ‘Chief Truman, what do you want to do about this?’
Braxton was staring at me.
Kelly watched too, with an attentive frown.
Lowery said, ‘Chief Truman?’
‘Let him go.’
31
Kelly agreed to reinterview Julio Vega with me. I told Kelly the fact that Danziger had reopened the Trudell investigation still nagged at me. So did Vega’s evasiveness when we’d asked him about it earlier. Kelly accepted these explanations, or seemed to.
At Vega’s shabby little house in Dorchester, there was no answer when we knocked at the front door.
‘We’ll wait,’ the old man announced.
‘But we have no idea where he is.’
‘Precisely why we’ll wait, Ben Truman. No sense chasing him all over creation.’
In his thirty-odd years as a policeman, John Kelly had probably spent ten just waiting. It was part of the job. Movie cops never wait around much. They dart from clue to clue like hummingbirds because they only have two hours to solve each crime. In reality, policemen wait for radio calls and they wait for speeders and they wait for breaks. In courthouses, on street corners, in parked cruisers. Walking around in circles, driving around in circles. They are bored. They stamp their feet on cold nights.
‘How long do we wait?’
‘Till he turns up.’
‘What if he doesn’t?’
‘Oh, he’ll turn up soon,’ Kelly said. He glanced up at the sky as if Julio Vega might drop from above. ‘Let’s take a walk.’
‘Good idea. Why don’t we play a round of golf while we’re at it?’
‘There’s time, Ben. We’ll have a little walk.’
We strolled toward Dorchester Avenue, Kelly looking blithe, me anxious. He pulled out his nightstick, which he kept tucked in his belt at the small of his back. Holding it by the leather strap, he twirled the truncheon absently, as he had in Versailles, with that repetitive rhythm of whirring and palm-slapping. Two revolutions clockwise, slap! Two counterclockwise, slap! The rhythm matched our steps. Whir, slap! Whir, slap!
I should say here, again, that I do not pretend to be objective in my description of John Kelly. I tend to form bonds of loyalty quickly or never, and I’d decided long before that Kelly was a man I liked and admired. Maudlin as it sounds, I felt closer to him than the scant few days we’d spent together would seem to justify. So admittedly my view of Kelly that morni
ng was clouded by affection. That said, as we walked along Dorchester Avenue, he seemed to me the distilled essence of a policeman. You could have dressed him in a gray flannel suit or surgical scrubs – hell, you could have dressed him in clown makeup – and still people would say, ‘There goes a cop.’ Until I met him, I’d never thought that was a quality to be admired.
Spin, slap.
‘There’s something I don’t understand, Ben. This morning Braxton asked for you – you specifically – just so he could proclaim his innocence and then attack you? It doesn’t make sense.’
I ambled along in silence.
‘Then you told Lowery you had no idea what Braxton was up to.’
Spin, slap.
‘I may have told a little white lie there.’
‘Ah. Lot of that going around.’
‘When he jumped me, Braxton whispered in my ear. He said, “Find Raul.” He said this all has something to do with Artie Trudell. And he mentioned another name – Fazulo?’
‘Fasulo.’
‘Fasulo. You know who that is?’
Kelly ignored the question. ‘Why did you hold that back?’
‘Because Braxton told me I was being set up.’
‘Did you believe him?’
‘I don’t know. Kind of, yeah. Like you said, he went to a lot of trouble to get the message to me.’
Kelly grunted, hmm.
‘I should have told. I shouldn’t be keeping things from other cops.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous. We don’t work for the Boston police. We’re conducting our own investigation. You tell them just as much as you want to tell them. They have information they’re not giving us. That’s how it works. Welcome to the brotherhood of law enforcement.’
‘I meant, I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.’
‘Well. You’ve told me now.’
We walked a little ways in silence.
‘Do you know who Fasulo is?’
‘Who Fasulo was,’ Kelly corrected. ‘The only Fasulo I ever heard of died a long time ago, in ’77 or ’78. He killed a cop. Frank Fasulo and another guy – what was his name? Sikes, something Sikes. The two of them were juiced out of their minds. They tried to stick up a bar in the Flats called the Kilmarnock Pub. It’s gone now, the Kilmarnock, and not missed. Bucket of blood, that place was. Fasulo and Sikes went in just after closing, they stuck a gun in the bartender’s face, told him to empty the register. Only they took too long and a cop in a patrol car wandered in. They jumped him and—’ Kelly took a few steps before continuing. ‘Well, Fasulo was a hard case. He’d been in and out of Walpole, Bridgewater . . . Rapes, armed robberies. There are guys like that, just . . . vicious, animals, psychopaths. Not many, but they’re out there. There’s nothing for it except to kill them.’
Mission Flats Page 23