The Babysitter

by Liza Rodman

  The overdose didn’t stop or even slow their profligate drug use. With Bobby in tow, he and Barbara made almost daily rounds to the various hippie hangouts and communes in and around Golden State Park. Through it all, Tony wrote letters to Avis about how carefree and wondrous Haight-Ashbury was, much like one describes a childhood of pony rides and playing street hockey with their friends until Mom called them home at sunset.

  A few days after his and Barbara’s overdoses, Tony received word that the Provincetown police had a warrant out for his arrest for nonsupport of Avis and the three children. He also learned that Avis had filed for divorce. The papers had been delivered to his mother’s apartment on Conant Street in Provincetown.

  The news shook Tony. While he and Avis had agreed to a separation, no one had talked about a divorce. Sure, they’d had countless arguments, separations, reconciliations, and betrayals, but he never imagined a life without her. She was his true north. Stronger than he and decidedly a better parent to the children, Avis had been his one constant in life, the one person he always knew he could count on when his chips got low. But now she’d done the unthinkable; she’d abandoned him, just like Cecelia had abandoned him in marrying Joseph Bonaviri and having another son. Confident that he could talk Avis out of the divorce, he decided to head back to the Cape to “clear things up” with her and the police.

  Tony called his mother and told her to tell Vinnie to wire him money for a plane ticket home. Even though he used a friend’s American Airlines student ID for a reduced fare, the ticket still cost $75 ($554 in today’s money) and it was $75 he didn’t have.3 Vinnie wired the money, and at the end of February, Tony flew home. Later, when asked why he left his car in San Francisco, he told authorities he gave it to Barbara. However, months later it was found on McAllister Street where he left it, covered in parking tickets. Barbara had apparently never touched it.

  22 LIZA

  I think it was right after I turned nine that I first started asking God for a new family. Unfortunately, I got what I asked for. Dad again reappeared, this time with a very pregnant wife and her three-year-old daughter. Mom couldn’t wait to send us off to Dad’s dreary apartment in Middleborough for the weekend; she positively giggled as she watched us walk out to his car, our feet and overnight bags dragging down the front walk.

  Louisa and I spent the weekend sitting on the couch watching television and eating tuna fish sandwiches and Cheetos, not knowing where to wipe our orange fingers and trying to keep Holly Berry, Louisa’s puppy that she’d gotten for Christmas, from peeing on the carpet. When we got back to West Bridgewater Sunday night, I knelt by my bed and told God he’d made a mistake; I’d asked for a new family, not a new mother. I had enough trouble with the one I had.

  As the summer of 1968 approached, I was finishing up third grade and Mom was getting restless. She didn’t want to cocktail waitress at the Wequassett again. One summer working nights in a bar with its sloppy drinkers and their meat hook hands all over her were enough. She pulled out the want ads and sat at the kitchen table poring through them, looking for a job in a motel or restaurant in Provincetown, or at least nearer to it than “Deadsville” Harwich.

  Then, John Atwood, who owned the Royal Coachman with Uncle Hank, called to tell her that the motel across the street was for sale and might be within her means. But Mom had no means. Dad never did send any money, and she earned just enough at her home ec job to keep food on our table. So she went to Grampa Georgie and begged him to finance the $50,000 purchase. (Among all the things single women were prevented from doing in the 1960s was obtaining a mortgage.) While Grampa Georgie was never what you might call generous, he knew a good investment when he saw one, so he agreed to cosign the loan and gave her the down payment. She was thrilled. Not only would it get her back to Provincetown; it would enable her to quit her job at Stoughton High School and never again have to face Tom or the other teachers’ ugly whispers that followed her when she walked through the halls.

  As usual, we started packing.

  23 TONY

  The day after he flew back from California, Tony was arraigned for nonsupport and placed on probation with the condition that he pay Avis $40 a week—$10 for each child and herself. But nothing had changed; Tony’s construction jobs were few and far between, and when he did find work he failed to keep it. Again, Avis and the children received almost nothing from him. His only steady source of income was dealing drugs, and that of course was unknown to the welfare department.

  Tony’s life became even more quarrelsome when Avis started hanging around with another of Provincetown’s drug dealers, John Joseph “Jay” Von Utter, a summer kid from Greenwich, Connecticut, who could always be counted on to supply the locals with LSD, speed, and marijuana. While Tony was angered by what he saw as Avis’s betrayal with Von Utter, the Provincetown police chief saw an opportunity.

  Respected and feared throughout the Outer Cape, Chief Francis “Cheney” Marshall was a bearish man with a powerful, raspy voice, steel-blue eyes, and a military-style crew cut that fit like a tight cap on his skull. Ambitious and savvy, he had run Provincetown for thirty-four years like his own private fiefdom. In 1960, when homosexuals were considered “subversives” and were a target of law enforcement nationwide, Marshall, with the encouragement of Father Duarte at St. Peter the Apostle Catholic Church, required background checks on restaurant employees in an attempt to weed out any with a prior arrest for sodomy. As the 1960s wore on and the town’s good-time atmosphere inspired an influx of vagrant hippie youth and their drugs, “Marshall law,” as his detractors and supporters alike called it, helped hold Provincetown in one piece.

  Part of that Marshall law was a pilot task force the attorney general of Massachusetts had formed in January 1968 to help combat the nation’s ever-increasing drug scene. The AG had put Marshall in charge of the Outer Cape area. And while it had lessened the availability of some drugs, Jay Von Utter, the “Connecticut punk” who was hanging around Avis, had been able to keep LSD, marijuana, and an assortment of uppers and downers flowing into town. Marshall needed an impressive arrest to prove that he and the drug task force were doing their jobs, and the Von Utter kid was a perfect patsy: he wasn’t from the area; he was a spoiled rich kid who drove around town in a two-door sedan with JJVU vanity plates; and, except for his drug customers, he had few friends among the locals. What the chief needed to nail Von Utter was someone who knew enough about the drug scene in Provincetown to know when Von Utter was next coming to town with a load to sell. Provincetown police sergeant James “Jimmy” Meads told Marshall he knew just the guy, a man born to be a snitch—Tony Costa. Marshall, however, was reluctant to use him.

  “That guy is a pig on drugs. He’ll take anything,” he told Meads.

  Nonetheless, Marshall needed his bust and finally agreed to use Tony in the sting. For his part, Tony was all too willing to see Avis’s suitor get taken away in cuffs.

  The warrant was issued, and on Monday, March 19, 1968, when Von Utter drove up Route 6, Jimmy Meads and two other police officers were sitting in their cruiser at the Provincetown line waiting for him. When the officers saw Von Utter’s car pass, they quietly tailed him to the Mayflower Café on Commercial Street, where he stopped for lunch. When Von Utter opened the car door, the officers surrounded him, served the warrant, and opened up the wheel covers. There they found LSD and marijuana, just where Tony said it would be.

  With Von Utter’s arrest, Marshall got his big break and eighteen months later was promoted to chief of narcotics at the state police barracks in West Yarmouth, a job he held until his retirement in 1975.

  For Tony, the arrest was a turning point in the wrong direction. His already troubled reputation around Provincetown now had an even darker stain: snitch. While the locals may not have liked Jay Von Utter all that much, they certainly didn’t want to see him get arrested, particularly given that he had supplied them with drugs. Then, when word got out that Tony had been the police’s rat, many of his old frie
nds never trusted him again, and several of his employers realized that in order for him to squeal on Von Utter, he too must have been involved with drugs coming into and out of Provincetown.

  Tony had always struggled with paranoia, a phobia only made worse by his drug use. But when Provincetown started to buzz with talk of his being a stool pigeon, his periodic anxiety became permanent, and everywhere he went he thought he heard murmured voices talking about him.

  Soon after the drug bust, Tony started frequenting the Pilgrim Club, which had moved from Commercial Street to Shank Painter Road, conveniently close to the cottage he and Avis had rented the fall before. She refused to let him move back in, but he hung out at the club in order to keep an eye on her, any new boyfriends, and the endless stream of kids who seemed to constantly come and go from her apartment.

  One day, over a game of pool at the club, he saw Sydney Monzon waiting on tables. He’d seen her before on the Benches in front of town hall, but this time he went over and introduced himself. Sydney was a tiny young woman, barely five feet tall and exceptionally pretty, with almond-shaped eyes, full lips, long dark hair, and a mysterious, sultry air. She looked like a Cherokee princess, almost regal in her bearing. Her boss at the restaurant where she had worked during high school said she moved “like a little cricket” from table to table, charming her customers and employer.

  Always planning her future far from the constraints of Cape Cod, Sydney had been something of a shy loner in school and usually had at least one part-time job, sometimes two. Once she graduated, and away from home and on her own, she was known to be somewhat “kooky, wild, and up for anything.”1 Like Tony, she complained that the Cape was provincial and boring. She dreamed of becoming an airline stewardess or joining the Peace Corps—she wanted to see the world, and in the turbulent days of the Vietnam War and its protests, she told people she hoped to work for peace. She had graduated from Nauset Regional High in June 1967 and bought a car with money she had saved from her various jobs. Soon after graduation, she packed up the car and with a friend drove to San Francisco, proudly announcing she was going to become a flower child and “work for peace, one way or the other.” After three months loafing around Haight-Ashbury, she decided she’d had enough and drove to Canada, then south to visit one of her brothers, and then flew to the Bahamas for a short time before finally returning to Cape Cod in January 1968.

  By the time she got home, she was hooked on speed and thin to the point of being gaunt; some friends even suspected she was sick. While some thought she had picked up her drug habits in the hash dens of San Francisco, her sister later told investigators, “Sydney didn’t learn anything about drugs in Haight-Ashbury. She already knew.” She revealed to friends that her drug use was an effort to suppress some “sorrow in her past,”2 a “shattering memory of a childhood sexual experience which left an [entrenched] psychic scar.”3 Whatever that “shattering memory” was, she suffered horrific nightmares and panic attacks and was on medication for chronic heart palpitations. Perhaps the drugs were her best escape.

  Once back on the Cape, she rented a room in the apartment of a friend, Roland Salvador. While many suspected that he was bisexual, if not gay, Sydney told a friend that she hoped by living with Roland, and caring for him and his home, she could turn him away from any latent homosexuality.

  Her sister, Linda, who was a short-order cook at the Pilgrim Club, got Sydney the job waitressing there most afternoons and evenings. Sydney settled back into life on the Cape and, like everybody else, waited for the tourist season and its bigger tippers to return. Then, on a slow afternoon at the club, she met a man playing pool—Tony Costa.

  Linda, as well as Roland and his brother, David, warned Sydney to steer clear of Tony. A friend, Bob Anthony, described Tony as being “always a click off.” Indeed. According to one member of the circle, Tony snacked on Milk-Bone dog biscuits and ate his cooked peas one by one with a pair of tweezers. But more than being known as an oddball, he was now infamous as the snitch in the Von Utter drug bust.

  “I was between the devil and the deep blue sea on that one,” Tony later boasted of his role in the arrest.4

  Linda, for one, didn’t want her sister caught in the middle. She and a few of their friends may also have tried to warn Sydney off Tony because he was carrying on with three other women at the time. But, at nearly twenty-four, Tony must have seemed like a man of the world to Sydney, filling her head with tall tales (most of them lies) about all the exotic places he’d been and those he was planning to visit. Despite her friends’ best efforts at thwarting a relationship, Sydney and Tony soon were often seen riding their bikes together or holding hands walking up and down the streets of Provincetown.

  In April, after two and a half years of giving Tony handfuls of drugs, Dr. Callis finally wearied of his demanding, strung-out patient. (He had also begun to worry that the rumors around town of Tony’s excessive drug use as well as his drug dealing were true.) Callis gave him a final supply of Solacen and told Tony he would no longer see him as a patient, which of course meant no more easy supply of drugs. After a few weeks of being cut off, Tony’s cache was running low. Almost a month to the day after the doctor’s rebuff, Tony took matters into his own hands and robbed Callis’s office in Wellfleet.

  He chose a miserable night for his burglary; the rain was coming down in sheets, and visibility on the roads was reduced to yards. Without a car of his own, he asked Sydney if she could borrow Roland’s, to which she had access when Roland was at work. Tony promised her a share of the loot, and she agreed. On the night of May 17, she picked him up at the Crown & Anchor Inn, where he was staying for free in exchange for working to get the inn open for the season. They drove through the rain to Callis’s office in Wellfleet, where it took Tony only twenty seconds to pick the lock.

  “It’s easy,” he boasted. “Once you know how the tumblers work in Yale locks, you’re home.”5

  After he broke into the office, it took him only another five minutes to load an oversize Kalmar Village motel pillowcase full of drugs.

  Dr. Callis and Tony later made separate lists of the stolen drugs, and they were wildly divergent; Callis was most likely protecting himself by underreporting the scope and amount of drugs he had stored in his office, and Tony was most likely inflating his résumé. Callis’s list totaled drugs worth a few hundred dollars; Tony said his take was more than $5,000 in drugs (nearly $36,500 in today’s money).

  Regardless of its actual size, Tony was elated with his haul and quickly buried it in two stashes—the one in the Truro woods and another behind the Provincetown dump. Callis immediately fingered Tony for the heist, but when police failed to find any of the drugs in his Crown & Anchor room, they couldn’t arrest him. The ease of the robbery only fed his urge for more. With Callis refusing to see him, Tony returned to his family doctor, Dr. Hiebert, eager to keep his cache as fat as possible. On one visit to the office, he noticed the doctor’s medical bag just sitting on the back seat of his car parked on Commercial Street. Tony casually opened the car door, took the bag, and kept walking. When he was a safe distance, he ducked into a narrow alley, undid the buckles, and looked inside the bag. He saw an assortment of drugs and surgical tools, among them syringes, needles, scissors, and a scalpel. He carefully lifted the scalpel out of the bag, examining the sharp blade in the light.

  * * *

  Sydney was excited about her new day job at the A&P in Provincetown because, along with working nights at the Pilgrim Club, she would be able to save money more quickly for her next adventure. This time, she told her mother, when she had enough saved, she was going to Europe.

  Friday, May 24, Sydney cashed her paycheck from the A&P, put ten dollars of it in her pocket and deposited the rest in the bank. Later that afternoon, her sister, Linda, was walking home from work when she saw Sydney standing in the street at the top of Watson Court, visibly distraught. She saw that Sydney was having a heated conversation with someone in a parked car. Sydney called to Linda th
at she needed to talk to her, but Linda waved her off, saying she didn’t have time right then; she would catch her later. She saw Sydney get into the car and watched it drive away. Linda came back in an hour to talk to her sister, but Sydney was gone.

  The next day, Sydney’s bicycle was spotted leaning up against the A&P’s employee entrance, but she had failed to show up for work. A week went by, and Sydney was still nowhere to be seen. Linda later told investigators that because she suspected her disappearance might have had to do with her drug use, she waited three weeks before accepting that something was terribly wrong. She finally called her mother in Eastham and said that Sydney was missing. On June 14, a missing person’s report was filed with the Provincetown police. When they interviewed Linda, police asked her who was driving the car that she had seen Sydney get into. As if considering it for the first time, she told them, “Well, I think it was Tony Costa.”

  Tony would later claim that Sydney went to Europe early. “I never gave it a second thought,” Tony said. “Hippies are like that; here today, somewhere else tomorrow.”6

  24 LIZA

  As soon as school let out for the summer, Mom quit her home ec job. She loaded the car with just about everything we owned, and we headed to Provincetown, this time for good. She told Grampa Georgie to put our house on the market; she was done with West Bridgewater, finally!

  I was ecstatic. For years, I had dreamed of moving to Provincetown permanently and becoming a local. I had always wanted to belong somewhere, anywhere, and after our first summer in Provincetown, I wanted it to be there. To be part of that close-knit community, part of Cecelia and Tony’s people, who seemed to like me and would probably welcome me into their family. To live downtown in a small, shingled house overlooking the wharves. I wanted to be one of the cool kids, the townies, many of whom worked at the Royal Coachman as maids and groundskeepers. To stroll Commercial Street, my arms linked with other girls, wearing tank tops and cutoff blue-jean shorts, flirting with the boys who rode by on their bicycles. To sit on the Benches and laugh at the drag queens, stoned hippies, and tacky tourists. To eat hot dogs and french fries and hot fudge before going to the beach and working on our tans. I wanted it all, and now that we would be living full-time in Provincetown, I hoped I had a chance of getting it.