Mission Flats

Prologue

On screen, a woman lounges on a rubber float, her face toward the sun, fingertips trailing in the water. The float is shaped like a doughnut. It turns in lazy circles. The beach is in frame, on the left. The woman is pregnant; the madras shirt over her bathing suit does not disguise her distended belly. She lifts her head and faces the camera, and her mouth forms the words ‘Stop it! Turn that thing off! Look at me!’ The camera shakes, apparently with laughter. The woman rolls her eyes and shakes her fist, the silent-movie gesture for frustration. Soundlessly she says to the camera, ‘Hi, Ben,’ then she joins in the laughter before laying her head down again to drift some more.

The woman is my mother, and the baby in her belly is me. It is early summer, 1971. I will be born a month later.

This little eight-millimeter film (it ran two or three minutes, tops) was among my mother’s prized possessions. She kept it in a yellow Kodak box tucked under the brassieres and stockings in the top drawer of her bureau where, she thought, thieves were not likely to look. There were not many thieves in our town, and the few we had were not interested in grainy old movies of pregnant women. But Mum was convinced of its value, and every now and then she could not resist burying her hand in that drawer to feel for the box, just to be sure. When it rained, she would lug out a twenty-pound Bell amp; Howell movie projector and show the movie on the living-room wall. She’d stand by the wall, point to her belly, and announce, with vestiges of a Boston accent, ‘There you ah, Ben! There you ah!’ Sometimes she got wistful and teary. Over the years, I guess we watched that clip a hundred times. It still runs in my head, familiar, my own Zapruder film. I don’t know exactly why my mother loved it so much. I suppose that to her it documented a transition, the moment of equipoise between girlhood and motherhood.

I’ve never liked the film, though. There is something unsettling about it. It shows the world before me, the world without me, and it is a world complete. There is as yet nothing necessary or inevitable about my creation. Nobody has met me, nobody knows me. I don’t exist. A woman — not my mother, but the woman who will become my mother — waves and calls me by name, but what is it she is calling to? She is expecting me, in every sense of the word. But it is a fragile expectation. Events branch and divide and multiply, and she and I may never meet. And what of her? Who is this extinct woman to me? Not my mother certainly, nothing as real as that. She is just an idea, a pictogram on the living-room wall. She is my conception.

It has been thirteen months since my mother died, and I have not bothered to check on that little reel in its yellow reliquary. Maybe someday I’ll find it and the movie projector, too, and I’ll watch the film again. And there she will be. Young and laughing, alive and whole.

I suppose that is as good a place as any to begin this story — with that pregnant, pretty young woman at the lake on a hot summer day. There is no absolute beginning to any story, after all. There is only the moment you begin watching.

Another moment, five and a half years later. 1:29 A.M., March 11, 1977.

A Boston police cruiser inches along Washington Avenue in a neighborhood called Mission Flats. Grit crunches under the tires: sand, ice. An elevated railway straddles the road. Phosphorous light. The cruiser stops in front of a bar called the Kilmarnock Pub, a shadow-hunching structure with neon signs in the windows.

Inside the cruiser, a policeman — his name is not important — uses the butt of his fist to clear condensation from the driver’s side window, then he studies the neon signs. GUINNESS, BASS, a generic one with the promise GOOD TIMES. Last call at the Kilmarnock was twenty-nine minutes ago. Those signs are usually turned off by this time.

Now, consider this policeman. If he does not chance upon the bar or if he does not notice those neon signs, none of what follows would ever take place. At this moment, any number of different courses — an alternate history, a hundred alternate histories — remain open to him. He can simply ignore the signs and continue his prowl along Washington Avenue. After all, is there really anything suspicious here? Is it all that unusual for a bartender to forget to switch off a few lights at closing time? Alternatively, the officer can call in a request for backup. A bar at closing time is a tempting target for stickup men. It is a cash business, all that money still in the register, the doors still unlocked. No guards, just bartenders and drunks. Yes, maybe he should do that, maybe he should wait for backup. This is Mission Flats, remember; around here it pays to be cautious. But then again, a cop working the midnight-to-eight shift could check on fifty businesses before he clocks out. He can’t very well call for backup every time. No, in this case there is no reason for our policeman to do any of those things. He will make the right decision and yet — how to explain what follows? Bad luck. Coincidence. Innumerable random branchings and sequences have brought him to this place at this time. It is the end of one story, or several, and the beginning of another story, or several.

Consider this, too. As the officer idles outside the Kilmarnock Pub — fidgeting with his radio, deciding what to do, deciding whether to bother — I am five years old, asleep in bed in western Maine, some three hundred miles away.

Back to our policeman. He decides he’ll go in, tell the bartender to close up, maybe even make some noise about writing him up to the ABC, the Alcoholic Beverages Commission. No big deal. He calls in his position to the turret: ‘Bravo-four-seven-three, take me off at the Kilmarnock on Mission Ave. Bravo-four-seven-three, charlie-robert.’ No concern in his voice. Routine.

Then the policeman walks into an armed robbery.

Inside the Kilmarnock, a wiry man, an addict named Darryl Sikes, puts a nine-millimeter Beretta to the policeman’s head. Sikes is coked up, and he has stoked the high with amphetamines, mellowed it with Jack Daniel’s.

The policeman raises his hands in submission.

The gesture sends Sikes reeling with laughter. Hahahahahahahaha. His mind is literally buzzing; there is a purr in his ears that, to Sikes, sounds like the electric hum of a guitar amplifier. Turn it up! Turn that motherfucker up! Hahahahaha!

Sikes’s partner is a man named Frank Fasulo. Fasulo is not as high as Sikes. Not nearly. Frank Fasulo is in control. He carries a sawed-off pump-action shotgun. He points the shotgun at the cop and orders him to strip. Fasulo cuffs the officer’s hands behind his back and orders him to his knees.

Naked, the cop shivers.

The two celebrate, Frank Fasulo and Darryl Sikes. Sikes plucks the police uniform shirt from the floor and puts it on over his sweatshirt. Hahahahaha! They do a little victory dance around the bar. They kick at the policeman’s clothes, sending them flying — tube socks, urine-dappled briefs, black shoes. Fasulo fires the shotgun into the ceiling, racks and fires, racks and fires.

The policeman is forced to perform fellatio on Fasulo. At the moment of orgasm, Fasulo fires the gun into the policeman’s head.

Now it is nine days after the Kilmarnock murder, four A.M., a bitterly cold winter night. The wind is whipping across the lower deck of the Tobin Bridge, where the temperature is five degrees with the windchill.

Frank Fasulo steps off the side of the bridge and turns slow cartwheels in the air, arms and legs extended. It will take three long seconds before he reaches the surface of the Mystic River about one hundred fifty feet below. He will hit the water at around seventy miles an hour. At that speed, there isn’t much difference between hitting water and hitting concrete.

What passes through Fasulo’s mind as he tumbles through the air? Does he glimpse the black wall of water rushing up at him? Does he think about his partner, Darryl Sikes, or the murdered cop? Does he think his suicide will end the story of the Kilmarnock case?

Frank Fasulo doesn’t know it, but in the last nine days he has learned the original meaning of the word outlaw. Today the word has come to refer to any criminal. In the ancient English law, it had a more specific definition. If a court declared you an outlaw, you were literally outside the law — that is, the law no longer protected you. An outlaw could be robbed or even killed without penalty. There was no sanctuary for him in all England. So it is for Frank Fasulo. The Boston Police Department has no interest in arresting and trying him. They want him dead. No sanctuary.

They caught up to Darryl Sikes just two days after the murder. Found him holed up in the old Madison Hotel, near the Boston Garden. Four BPD cops burst into the room and fired forty-one rounds into his body. To a man, the entire entry team swore Sikes was reaching for a gun; none was ever found.

Now it’s Fasulo’s turn. The police want him even worse than Sikes. It was Fasulo who had… well, most of them can’t even say it.

And where can Fasulo run? Every law-enforcement agency in the world will return him to the Boston police on a murder warrant.

So it has to end this way. That is all Frank Fasulo knows for sure. As he plummets, in those three seconds as he feels his body accelerate and the wind tugs his jacket off his shoulders like a helpful host, it is his only thought: There was no other ending — some cop was going to find him sooner or later.

Ten years later. August 17, 1987, 2:25 A.M.

Again we are in Mission Flats, in the sort of three-family wood-frame structure Bostonians call a triple decker. On the third-floor landing, eight policemen crouch. They stare at a door, listening intently as if the door might speak.

The door is lacquered in China red. There are two small holes in the door frame, just above eye level, where a mezuzah was once attached with little gold brads. Fifty years ago, this neighborhood was predominantly Jewish. The mezuzah is long gone now. Today the apartment is a stashpad for a crew called the Mission Posse.

No doubt the door has been reinforced somehow. Most likely, it is wedged shut with a makeshift police lock, a board jammed at a forty-five-degree angle between the door and the floor, anchored in place by wood blocks bolted to the floorboards. To get into the apartment, the police will have to reduce the door to splinters. That could take fifteen seconds or it could take several minutes — an eternity, long enough to flush cocaine, burn cuff lists, toss scales and baggies through holes in the walls. Too long. Now, a sheet-metal door you could judge, you could predict how it would hold up. The thin ones bend, become distorted, and quickly twist out of their frames. The thick ones just dent, and your only choice is to try to rupture the hinges, the lock, or the entire door frame. But these old wood doors? Hard to say. This one looks solid.

Julio Vega certainly doesn’t like the look of it. Vega glances at his partner, an Area A-3 Narcotics detective named Artie Trudell, and shakes his head. Vega’s message: They don’t make doors like this anymore.

Trudell, an enormous man with an orange-red beard, smiles back at Vega and flexes his biceps.

Vega and Trudell are excited, nervous. This is a first, a raid that is all theirs. The target is a major player: The Mission Posse moves more rock in this neighborhood than anyone else by far. The no-knock warrant is all theirs too, based on their own investigation — two weeks of surveillance, and a stream of information from a CI endorsed by Martin Gittens himself. The warrant is bulletproof.

Detective Julio Vega could be bulletproof, too, with a few more scores like this one. Vega has a plan. He’ll take the sergeant’s exam in the fall, work drug cases a couple more years, then try for an assignment in Special Investigations or even Homicide. Of course, Vega keeps his careerism to himself because his partner, the big redhead Artie Trudell, doesn’t get it.

Trudell does not dream of going to Homicide or anyplace else. He is happy just to work narcotics cases. Some guys are like that. They prefer cases that are victimless, with suspects as professional as their police adversaries. It’s neater that way. Vega has tried to instill a little ambition in Trudell. Told him he won’t climb the ladder without working victim crimes. He even hinted once that Trudell should take the sergeant’s exam, but Artie just laughed it off. ‘What?’ Artie said. ‘And give up all this?’ At the time, they were sitting in a battered Crown Vic looking at the moonscape of Mission Avenue in the Flats — block after block of ashy, broken tenements. How do you deal with a guy like that?

The hell with him, Vega figures. Let Artie chase crackheads around the Flats forever. Let him rot here. But not Julio Vega. Vega is a player. He’s moving up. Up and out. If, if… See, Detective Vega can dream about Homicide or SIU all day, but first he needs to make a little noise. He needs a few skins to show the Commissioner’s office. He needs this score.

Vega and Trudell stand beside the apartment door like sentinels.

The other men avoid the area directly in front of the door as best they can, but the landing is small, and they wind up arrayed along the stairs leading up to the next floor. There are four uniforms among them. The rest — the Narcotics guys — wear jeans, sneakers, and Kevlar vests. Casual. None of the commando-style gear other units use. This is the Flats; these guys have gone through doors before.

For several seconds the men listen for noise in the apartment and, hearing none, they turn to Vega for the signal.

Vega kneels against the wall, then nods toward Trudell.

The burly detective steps in front of the door. The temperature in the hallway is pushing ninety degrees. Trudell is sweating in his vest. His T-shirt is stained. His beard is damp; curly orange tendrils glisten under his chin. The big policeman smiles, maybe out of nervousness. He hoists a five-foot steel pipe into the crook of his right elbow. Later, the newspapers will describe the pipe as a battering ram, but in truth it is just a segment of water pipe filled with concrete and fitted with two L-shaped handles.

Vega holds up five fingers, then four, three, two — on one he points at Trudell.

Trudell smashes the door with the pipe. The stairwell echoes with a sound like a bass drum.

The door does not budge.

Trudell steps back, drives the pipe into the door again.

The door shakes but it holds.

The other cops watch, increasingly uneasy. ‘Come on, big man,’ Vega encourages.

A third strike. The bass-drum sound.

A fourth — this time with a different sound, a boom-crack.

One of the upper door panels bursts out from the inside blasted out — a shot fired from inside the apartment a spray of blood sneezes out of Trudell’s forehead red mist a scrap of scalp and Trudell is on his back, the crown of his head butterflied open.

The pipe falls to the floor with a thump.

Cops jump back, throw themselves flat against the stairs, against one another. ‘Artie!’ one yells. Another: ‘GunGunGunGunGun!’

Vega stares at Trudell’s body. Blood is everywhere. Red droplets spattered on the wall, a pool of it spreading thick under Trudell’s head. The pipe lies right in front of the door. Vega wants to pick it up but his legs won’t move.