Mission Flats

by William Landay

  McNeese fell silent.

  ‘Ben,’ Kelly said, ‘take Mr Beck and his client out of here.’

  Kurth hissed, ‘Hey, shithead, tell Braxton this was a big mistake. Tell him this isn’t over.’

  ‘You can’t touch him.’ McNeese smirked.

  ‘Ben!’ Kelly said. ‘I said get them out of here.’

  The elevator door opened again and the silver-haired lady peered out. ‘Excuse me,’ she said tentatively, ‘where would I find the Probate Court Clerk’s office?’

  Caroline held up four fingers.

  ‘Four,’ I informed her.

  ‘Thank you, Officer.’

  On the windswept plaza in front of the courthouse, I pulled Max Beck aside. ‘I need you to give a message to Braxton.’ Leaves and candy wrappers eddied around us. ‘Tell him I want to see him. I need more information.’

  ‘Are you joking? I’m not going to tell Harold any such thing. Have you even heard of the Constitution?’

  ‘Counselor, just give him the message.’ I squeezed his arm at the biceps.

  McNeese objected on his lawyer’s behalf: ‘Hey.’

  ‘Shut up,’ I said, as Kelly had just a few minutes earlier. And again McNeese did shut up, which surprised me as much as anyone.

  I told Beck, ‘I need Harold’s help.’

  ‘You want to tell me what this is all about?’

  ‘I can’t. Sorry. If I told you, you’d have to use it.’

  The lawyer regarded me a moment. ‘Are you alright, Officer Truman?’

  ‘No, I’m not. Just tell Harold.’

  ‘Alright. I’ll give him the message. Then I’m going to tell him to ignore it.’

  37

  While Kelly chatted with one of the old-timers in the courthouse, I called Versailles from a pay phone to check in.

  Dick Ginoux answered. I could imagine him at the station, feet up on an open drawer, eyeglasses propped on his bald forehead, USA Today spread out on the desk. ‘Hello?’

  ‘Dick? Is that how you answer the phone?’

  ‘Hey, Chief Truman. Yeah.’

  ‘What happened to ‘Versailles Police Department’?’

  ‘Well, Ben, I expect people know who they just called.’

  ‘That’s not the point. The point is to sound professional.’

  ‘For whom?’

  I had to give Dick credit for that whom, which he threw in for my benefit as the brainy college boy. But he was as stubborn as he was grammatical.

  ‘Dick, just answer the phone the right way, will you?’

  ‘Righty-o, Chief.’

  Dick skipped the Versailles gossip this time. He was burning to tell me something more important. ‘Jimmy Lownes – you know Jimmy – called just t’other day and he says, “I heard you been asking around about a white Lexus.” I hadn’t got ahold of Jimmy before that. He was off to the lakes or somewhere for the weekend. So when he got back, somebody told him I’d been asking about it. Anyway Jimmy says he seen the kid out on Three Mile Road. Said they both come to those stop signs there, where it crosses over 2A, and they slowed down and kind of looked at each other. He says he saw the kid. He couldn’t remember the face too well, but he says the kid had this weirdo haircut, kind of shaved along the sides with a little Japanesey-type ponytail. You know, like a samurai? So I had him come in and showed him the mug shot of that Braxton character. And Jimmy says he thinks that’s the kid. He was almost positive. It was your man Braxton, just like those guys said.’

  I was stunned. Both at the ID and at the fact it was Dick who discovered it. ‘Dick, you did all that?’

  ‘Yessir.’

  ‘That’s great.’

  ‘I figured you’d be happy to hear it.’

  We were talking about different things, but it was okay.

  ‘Hold on, Ben, there’s someone here wants to say hello.’

  There was a series of clicks and muffled voices. Dick had his palm over the phone, but I heard him say, ‘Go on, just say hello.’

  ‘Hi, Ben.’ A big basso boomed out of the tiny speaker in the earpiece.

  ‘Hey, Dad.’

  ‘How’s everything going down there?’

  ‘Just alright, Dad.’

  He fell silent.

  Another conversation was audible on the line. Women’s voices, faint, the words indistinct but the tone cheerful. Two women unaware of Claude and Benjamin Truman and all our history. There must have been millions – billions – of voices out there murmuring in the network.

  ‘What does that mean, “just alright”? Is something wrong, Ben?’

  ‘Yeah, you could say that.’

  ‘What is it?’

  What could I tell him? That his son was a murder suspect? What would he have done about it? And what would the news have done to him?

  ‘It’s nothing, Dad. Don’t worry about it.’

  ‘You say it’s nothing like maybe it’s something.’

  ‘No. It’s really nothing. I’ll tell you all about it when I get home. Just don’t worry. And don’t drink anything.’

  ‘Don’t – I’m not—’ I could hear his breath huffing in and out in big greedy nostrilfuls as he composed himself. He cleared his throat. ‘I’m not drinking.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘You want me to come down there, Ben?’

  ‘No, Dad. Don’t do that.’

  ‘I feel like I should be there with you. I feel like I’m letting you—’

  ‘No. You stay put. There’s nothing to worry about. It’s nothing.’

  ‘Everything’s nothing with you.’

  ‘Dad, you got to do what I tell you, just this one time. Don’t come down here. You understand?’

  ‘I can come down just to see you, make sure you’re alright.’

  ‘No. You can’t. I’m alright, I promise.’

  I could see him in the little stationhouse, holding the base of the phone in one hand and the handset in the other, as was his habit.

  ‘It’s not something you can help with, Dad. I’ve got to do it myself. It’s gonna be alright.’

  I wanted to tell him more. I wanted to tell him everything. And I wanted to hear him say nobody was getting to me without going through Claude Truman – and nobody was getting through Claude Truman. But this was one problem he could not fix. He could not twist its arm or bully it into submission. He couldn’t make it come out right. I was on my own.

  Now, looking back, I’m glad I did not tell him more. Just a few hours later the case would be broken and I would be cleared of all suspicion. There was no need to worry the old man.

  Around two that afternoon, Gittens called me personally to say it was over. ‘You can breathe again,’ he told me. I was no longer Danziger’s killer.

  Turned out, Gerald McNeese was wrong – the cops could touch Braxton after all.

  38

  Bullshit was John Kelly’s favorite word, shorthand for anything he did not respect. The Kennedys, the designated-hitter rule, the U.S. Attorney’s Office, National Public Radio – all these were bullshit. There was quite a lot of bullshit in the world, Kelly believed. It wasn’t always clear what this Wrong Stuff was, but Kelly could spot it readily enough to divide the world into the bullshit and the not bullshit. It was all pretty simple to him, just ones and zeroes. I did not yet have the knack of distinguishing the bullshit from the non-, especially in the nonbinary world that cops inhabit. So it came as a surprise to me when Kelly pronounced Gittens’s behavior that afternoon bullshit.

  True, when we met him at the Homicide office around two o’clock, there was an exuberant, cocky swagger to the detective. ‘Ben Truman!’ Gittens beamed at me. ‘Looks like I just saved your sorry ass!’ He hugged me, welcoming me back to the fold. No hard feelings. All a big misunderstanding.

  And it wasn’t just Gittens. In the Homicide office, cops sat on desks and smiled and laughed over their paper coffee cups. The corked-up anxiety of a stalled investigation had finally been released.

  Gittens announced to the
room, ‘I’m getting tired of carrying you all on my back!’

  ‘Bullshit,’ Kelly whispered to me.

  I was not so sure. Didn’t Gittens have a right to be exuberant? He had plunged into Mission Flats like a pearl diver with a knife clenched in his teeth and emerged with the solution. It was a tour de force. And the fact that – by finding Danziger’s killer and maybe Trudell’s too – Gittens had cleared my own name only magnified his accomplishment. So I wrote off Kelly’s comment to old-fartism and, inside at least, joined in the general celebration.

  The cause for all the self-congratulations sat in an interview room, a doughy, caramel-skinned kid squirming with a case of phantom hemorrhoids. Andre James struck me as one of those boys who radiate vulnerability, sensitive boys at the edge of the playground whose victimhood is so inevitable it evokes both pity and its opposite, a desire to distance oneself, to avoid the oncoming crash. How on earth did such a kid get tangled up with a roughhouse crew like Braxton’s? The boy’s father sat beside him, earnest, slight, a churchgoer in tortoiseshell glasses.

  Gittens swept past us and, in the high spirit that pervaded the office, invited us to ‘come check out this kid’s story. It’s fuckin’ dynamite.’

  I shook the kid’s damp hand, then his father’s. Gittens introduced Kelly and me as ‘the officers leading the investigation’ and instructed Andre to tell us the story ‘just the way you told me.’

  Andre squirmed until his father chastised him, ‘Do what the officer told you.’ The father assured us, ‘He wants to help.’

  Clearly the kid wanted anything but. He spoke only after another bout of fidgeting and a sharp look from his father. ‘It’s like I told ‘Tective Gittens. I seen Harold like a couple weeks ago. His mother lives in this apartment next to us in Grove Park. That’s like the project. Harold doesn’t live there no more, but his mother still does. I don’t really know him. I know his mother. She’s a nice lady. I used to know Harold a little, back in the day, like before he blew up. He still comes around sometimes, he helps out people in the neighborhood, like he gives money to people sometimes if they can’t get groceries and stuff, like old people, you know?’

  Gittens rolled his finger in a circular motion. Get on with it.

  ‘Anyway I’m coming out of the elevator and I see Harold coming out the stairs. So I say like, “Yo, Brax, wuzzup?” Like, “Why you taking the stairs?,” cuz we live on the eighth floor, right? So he doesn’t really say anything. Or maybe he just says like, “Hey, Dre” or something like that. And he goes in his mother’s apartment and I just figured, like, whatever, and I go into my apartment.’

  ‘Did you notice anything about his appearance?’ I asked.

  He glanced nervously at Gittens.

  ‘It’s alright, Andre,’ I reassured him. ‘I’m just asking. Did you see any marks on him?’

  ‘What kind of marks?’

  ‘Scratches, stains, rips in his clothes, anything.’

  ‘No. I don’t remember anything like that.’ He gave Gittens another glance, then continued. ‘Anyway, I heard Harold like banging stuff around in there, like pots and pans, you know. Because the walls are really, really thin. We hear everything. Sometimes we hear the TV shows playing next door and we can just sit and listen, you know?’

  Gittens rolled his eyes and rolled his finger.

  ‘So I’m thinking Harold isn’t acting right, and then I hear him go back out into the hall. It made me kind of curious, like maybe something was wrong. So I open the door and I see Harold out there in the hall with this bucket and a bottle of Clorox. It was weird. I knew Harold didn’t go running up all them stairs just to do his laundry out in the hallway.’

  Andre smiled at his own joke and looked around for one of us to reciprocate. His desire to please was as plain as a dog’s wagging tail. ‘So Harold, he had water in the bucket and he pours in this bleach and he sticks his hands in there and he starts washing his hands in it. I figured it must burn but he washes it around, like on his hands and arms. So I stick my head out and I ask him, “Brax, what are you doing? That stuff isn’t for your skin,” and I make some joke like “The black won’t come out” and “Who are you, Michael Jackson?” Only Harold doesn’t answer, he just tells me, “Shut the door and never mind.”’

  I interrupted again: ‘Did you see anything on his hands? What was he washing off?’

  ‘I didn’t see nothing. Whatever it was, I guess he didn’t want it to get on the floor in his mother’s apartment so he took it out in the hall. Anyway, when he was done with that, he went back inside.’

  I looked at Gittens and shrugged. So?

  ‘Keep going,’ Gittens instructed.

  ‘Like I said, this was all kind of buggin’, so I kept on listening. And the walls are real thin, right? So I could hear everything. And I hear Harold get on the phone and he tells somebody, ‘We don’t have to worry about that DA no more.’ And then he keeps talking and he says like, “I put a cap in him and then I jelled up.”’

  ‘Jelled up?’ I asked.

  ‘Yeah, that’s what he said, “I jelled up.”’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘I don’t know. I guess he, like, froze.’

  ‘Did he say anything else?’

  ‘No. He just said, “I capped that DA and then I jelled up and I took off and I drove his car into the lake so nobody would find him for a while.”’

  ‘Just like that?’

  ‘Just like that.’ The kid looked at Gittens to confirm he had not left anything out.

  ‘What else did he say?’ I pressed.

  ‘I don’t know. I guess I didn’t hear the rest.’

  ‘I thought you could hear everything.’

  ‘I could. I mean, I guess I just don’t remember every word he said.’

  ‘But you remember that part?’

  ‘Yeah. I definitely remember that part.’

  Kelly was listening from a corner of the room. ‘Did you ever tell this story to anyone before today?’ he asked.

  ‘Nah. I didn’t want to tell anybody cuz this was MP and everybody knows you don’t want to get mixed up with them. But then Officer Gittens came by this morning and he asked, so I just decided to tell the truth.’

  ‘You waited all this time and then all of a sudden you decided to tell the truth?’

  ‘Nobody ever asked before.’

  I studied the kid’s full-moon face.

  Gittens broke in to explain. ‘Andre has been doing some work for me. He got caught up in a little drug thing. He got talked into doing something stupid. These sliders recruit the good kids to act as mules because they know the cops won’t bother them. Andre got caught with a little coke. I’ve been letting him work it off.’

  The kid looked at Gittens with an eager expression.

  ‘He’s been doing some undercover stuff for us, some buys outside the Flats where no one knows him. Sometimes if he hears something, he passes it to us. He’s doing just fine. In six months if he holds up his end, we’ll drop the charge. Andre has a clean record. He’s got a three-five at English Academy. He belongs in college, not jail.’

  The father put his hand on Andre’s hand to reassure him, to protect him.

  The kid looked down at his father’s hand. He seemed to realize there was not much the old man could do for him now.

  ‘Andre,’ I said, ‘are you sure about everything you just told us?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘And you’d be willing to tell it to the grand jury? And at a trial?’

  ‘If I got to.’

  In the hallway outside, I asked Gittens, ‘Will that kid really show up to testify?’

  ‘Let me tell you something about Andre. I have to hold him back. He’s always after me to do more, more, more. We can’t even use him in the Flats anymore because everyone knows he’s cooperating. They call him Five-O. No one will even talk to him, never mind sell to him. So now he’s all hot to do more buys in other neighborhoods, Roxbury, Dorchester. He can’t get enough. B
elieve me, Andre will show up.’

  ‘I feel bad for him,’ I said. ‘Braxton’ll kill him.’

  ‘Well,’ Gittens replied philosophically, ‘he made his own bed. We’re just offering him a way out.’

  ‘A first-offense simple possession? Wouldn’t they just dismiss it anyway?’

  ‘Maybe.’ Gittens shrugged. ‘But look, we got to do what we got to do. It’s no fun for me either, jamming up a kid like that. Andre’s a good kid. But the alternative is to let Braxton walk and then maybe he kills someone else. Besides, I didn’t make Andre a witness. He happens to live there. Somebody has to live there.’

  Kelly folded his arms, apparently satisfied with this explanation. It was a rough game Andre had chosen to play. It would get a lot rougher when Braxton heard about his testimony.

  ‘You mind if I talk with him, alone?’ I asked Gittens.

  ‘Be my guest. Caroline Kelly’s on her way down, though. She won’t like it if we take too many statements. It creates inconsistencies.’

  In the interview room, Andre and his father both had their hands on the table with fingers laced, as if they were praying.

  ‘Sir,’ I said to the father, ‘do you mind if I talk to Andre alone?’

  ‘No, of course not.’ He stood up slowly, reluctant to leave his son. Mr James stood there with his spectacles and narrow shoulders, hovering over the boy, impotent, and I projected onto him all the Everyman virtues of the nine-to-fiver: humility, dignity, decency, discipline, generosity. I saw him getting up before dawn to catch a bus. I saw him reading quietly at night. I saw him bragging on his son who was going to go to college. I wanted to tell him, Take your kid and get out of here. Run. Disappear. Don’t be so damn virtuous. For once, don’t tell the truth. Stay out of this.

  Instead I told him, ‘It’s okay. I just want to ask him a few more questions.’

  When the man had left, I said, ‘Andre, the thing that bothers me is, how come you waited so long to tell anybody this?’

  ‘I was scared.’

  ‘But you’re not scared now.’

  ‘I talked to Detective Gittens. He told me it was the right thing.’