Mission Flats

10

By a little pond near Sebago, John Kelly’s cottage hid in the selvage of the forest, with unpainted cedar shingles that mimicked the brown setting, tree bark and a bristly carpet of pine needles. The structure might have disappeared altogether into the piney gloom, camouflaged like a green toad on a green leaf, if not for Kelly’s white Toyota and a satellite dish — the state flower of Maine — out front. I drove past the house twice before I found it, and when I did finally track it down, it occurred to me that this hermit’s cave was not a fit home for Kelly, to whom I’d already ascribed any number of heroic characteristics. It seemed to represent a sort of failure on his part — a fatigue of the spirit, a retreat from the world.

I hauled Danziger’s briefcase, still heavy with lake water, to the front door. A window at my right was bearded with pollen and dust. I tried to peek in and still had not got around to knocking when Kelly came around the side of the cottage. He held a newspaper rolled into a tube.

‘Chief Truman,’ he said.

‘Can I show you something, Mr Kelly?’

‘Depends what it is.’

I held up the ruined bag. ‘Danziger’s briefcase.’

‘Hmm.’

‘Want to have a look?’

‘No.’

‘Really?’

‘Why do I have this feeling you’re about to convert me into a witness, Ben Truman? I’d rather not be.’

‘No, I-’

‘Where did you get that bag, anyway?’

‘We found Danziger’s car. It was sunk in the lake. The bag was inside.’

‘And now you’re just carrying it around? Please tell me you didn’t go rummaging around inside it.’

I did not answer.

Kelly kneaded the hollows of his cheeks then his jaw with one long-fingered hand, a gesture of checked frustration. He looked like a father whose son has just cracked up the family car.

‘I know where the case is going. I have a lead.’

‘A lead. May I make a suggestion, Ben Truman? Go back to Ver-sigh — ’

‘Ver-sales.’

‘Go back to Ver-sales, call the AG, tell him you found Danziger’s briefcase and car and he should send somebody over to pick them up.’

‘Don’t you want to know what we found?’

‘No. I’ll read about it in the newspaper, thank you.’

‘I’ve already handled the thing. Whatever damage I might’ve done is already done.’

He shook his head no. ‘I thought this wasn’t your case.’

‘It’s not.’

‘So you’re playing detective.’

‘No, just an interested observer.’

‘And what do you intend to do now, as an interested observer?’

‘I’m going to Boston.’

‘To observe.’

‘To stay informed, yes. I have to. The murder happened in my town. I have a responsibility’

Kelly gave me an indulgent paternal smile. He swung the door open. ‘Perhaps we’d better have a chat, Ben Truman.’

Inside, the rooms were furnished with delicate pieces, all spindle legs and needlework pillows and flowery chintz. I assumed his wife had picked them out many years before. There were no signs of a wife now, though. Kelly appeared to live here alone, still sitting on his wife’s furniture. I tried, as guests invariably do, to gain some glimpse of my host’s inner life from the belongings on display, but Kelly wasn’t giving much away. There were very few pictures and no books at all in the living room where we settled. Kelly did have a collection of old vinyl LPs. His tastes ran toward big bands and mainstream jazz: Bing Crosby, lots of Sinatra, Dean Martin, Perry Como, Louis Prima, Louis Armstrong, with a few Aretha Franklins thrown in. There were two photos on a low chest. An older, faded picture showed a little girl, one of those grade-school portraits with a marbled blue sheet for a backdrop. The girl in the picture was strikingly pale. Her dark hair draped around her face like a cowl. She stared out with a grave expression. The newer photo showed a woman in her early thirties, pretty in a stern, dark-browed way.

‘Is this your daughter?’ I gestured to the photos.

‘Daughters. That’s Caroline on the right. And this’ — he picked up the older photo, dragged the top of the frame across his shirt to dust it, then replaced it — ’this is Theresa Rose. She passed away’

‘Jesus, I’m sorry.’

‘It was a long time ago.’

Kelly poured himself a tumbler of brown whiskey. He offered me one, which I refused. He gave it to me anyway. ‘Take it,’ he said. ‘It sounds like you need it.’ I sipped, and struggled to keep a poker face while the whiskey scalded its way down my throat.

‘Now, what are you talking about, Ben?’

From the briefcase I pulled out the file on Gerald McNeese and laid it on the coffee table. The file was corrugated from soaking in the lake. It looked like a napoleon.

‘Danziger was getting ready to prosecute this guy Gerald McNeese, or G-Mac, whatever his name is. But that was just the start. Really Danziger was going after Braxton. He was starting with one of the low-level guys in Braxton’s gang, then he was going to work his way up the ladder to Braxton. He drew this chart here. Look.’

Kelly made a skeptical grimace, as if I were a kook insisting that the end of the world was nigh. ‘Chief Truman, am I correct in assuming you’ve never handled a case like this before?’

‘Yes. Well — yes.’

‘What is the most serious case you’ve had?’

‘I had a mayhem once.’

‘Mayhem.’

‘It was a fight. Joe Beaulieu bit off Lenny Kennett’s pinky finger. They were drunk. It never got to trial. Lenny refused to testify. Joe was a friend, and there was a rumor he paid Lenny a fair price for the finger-’

Kelly held up his hand. He got the picture.

‘Look, I know I’m a little green. But I do have this job. In my town I’m the chief, for better or worse. I’m the only one they’ve got. I didn’t choose this.’

‘You’re green as grass,’ he said, as much to himself as to me.

‘Okay, well, thank you, I guess.’

‘There are hundreds of cops already working this case. You do know that, don’t you?’

He glanced at the newspaper he’d been carrying, the Boston Herald, then went to the breakfast table for the other morning papers, which he tossed one by one on the coffee table in front of me. The Boston Globe led with the story on page one. A two-column headline read, SEARCH FOR PROSECUTOR’S SLAYER CONTINUES. A color photo showed Danziger smiling behind his red mustache and owlish glasses. The caption identified him as Robert Danziger, led anti-gang unit. The Herald, Boston’s bad-boy tabloid, was more histrionic. It had a one-word banner headline, DRAGNET! over a photo of detectives in BPD windbreakers questioning a group of black teenagers on a street corner. A local paper, the Portland Press Herald, and even The New York Times had picked up the story.

But the notion of following the case to Boston seemed logical, even inevitable. My response to the newspapers was a mute shrug and a manful sip of whiskey.

‘So what do you want from me?’ Kelly asked.

‘I thought maybe you’d like to come along.’

‘To Boston?’

I nodded.

‘I told you, I’m retired.’

‘Yes, but you knew Danziger. Besides, you said yourself, a retired cop is still a cop. You said you never stop being a cop.’

‘Yes, but even cops get old.’

‘You could teach me. You could help me.’

‘Help you what?’

‘Help me follow the case. Stay informed. Maybe get involved somehow if we can.’

Kelly shook his head and paced with his drink. He wandered over to the chest, where the photo of the dark-haired girl stared back at him with a somber expression. ‘Ben, look at me. I’m sixty-six years old. I came up here just to get away from this bullshit.’ He turned for assistance to the little girl in the photo, the late Theresa Rose Kelly. She seemed to shake her head at me too. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said finally.

‘Me too.’

‘You’ll be alright, Ben Truman. You’re a good cop, deep down.’

‘I’m not really a cop at all. It’s just a job.’

‘That’s how it always starts.’

The next morning, Kelly knocked and opened the stationhouse door, tentative and polite, wearing his ever-present flannel jacket and scally cap. ‘Can I have a word with you, Chief Truman?’ He glanced at Dick, who was working a crossword puzzle at the dispatcher’s desk. ‘Alone?’

I slipped on my jacket, and Kelly and I walked down Central Street. He produced a wooden billy club, which he had tucked in his belt. It was coffee brown with a leather wrist strap. Every inch of the wood was nicked and scratched. As we walked, Kelly twirled the thing absent-mindedly. There seemed to be two ways to do this: a propeller sort of motion directly in front of the belt buckle; or at the hip, like a floozy spinning her feather boa. Kelly executed both maneuvers with incredible dexterity. Who knows how many years of practice he’d had, how many beats he’d walked with that truncheon. Our steps fell in with the rhythm of it — spin, slap! spin, slap! — and I understood why they call it ‘walking a beat.’

‘Did they give you that thing at Central Casting?’

‘Standard issue, Ben Truman. Every good policeman carries one.’ He gave me a once-over, ascertained that I was not carrying one, and made a face.

‘Well, you can put it away. I don’t think you’ll need to whack anyone with a billy club in this town.’

‘It’s called a nightstick. And the point is not to whack anyone. It’s part of the show.’ Spin, slap. ‘People have certain expectations. That’s why doctors wear white coats.’

‘So you’ve never whacked anyone with that thing?’

‘I didn’t say that. I said the point of carrying a nightstick is to not use it. If you carry it right, you’ll never have to.’

‘Never?’

‘Never.’

‘Then how did all those dents get there?’

‘Okay, almost never. Still, it’s best not to.’ He inspected the truncheon briefly, as if he’d never noticed all the dents and dings in it. ‘If you are going to be a cop, Ben Truman, you can either be a fighter or a talker. I have always been a talker.’

We strolled along. From the window of the Owl, Phil Lamphier stared out at us. He was holding a coffeepot, swirling the coffee in the glass bulb. Hard to know what Phil made of the sight — a very tall stranger spinning a cop’s nightstick, walking a beat in a town that had never seen a beat cop; and me, hands in pockets, listening intently. I could imagine Phil passing along the intelligence over the lunch counter: ‘Ayuh, saw Ben walking with a tall fella this morning, ’round nine-thirty twas…’ In the hothouse atmosphere of those days, any rumor that concerned the body in the cabin was snapped up and analyzed ad nauseam. I waved to Phil, and he lifted the coffeepot toward me in a sort of salute.

‘What does a cop do,’ Kelly asked, ‘in a place like this?’

‘Wait, mostly.’

‘Wait for what?’

‘For something to happen. Something different, I mean.’

‘So how long have you been waiting?’

‘Three years, give or take.’

‘You’ve only been a cop three years and already you’re the chief?’

‘They weren’t exactly standing in line for the job.’

Kelly stooped to pick up a stray piece of paper, slipped it into his back pocket, then resumed his twirling, spin, slap! ‘You know, when I started out, there was a sergeant in my precinct named Leo Stapleton. Leo was my first watch commander. He introduced me around, kept me out of trouble, showed me how things worked. Do you have anyone like that, a guy like Leo Stapleton?’

‘No.’ It occurred to me that I did have Dick Ginoux and my father. ‘Definitely not.’

‘So this idea about going down to Boston, you came up with that on your own. You haven’t discussed it with anyone.’

‘Right.’

‘Boy-o, do you have any idea what you’re getting into?’

‘I’m not sure what you’re asking.’

He stopped and poked me in the sternum with the nightstick. ‘What I’m asking is, do you know what it means to tangle with a guy like Braxton? Do you know what’s involved? Chief Truman, have you ever put physical pressure on a suspect?’

‘“Physical pressure”?’

‘Yes. Have you used physical pressure to obtain information?’

‘No! Of course not.’

‘Of course not? What if it were the only way to protect innocent life? Let’s say there was a bomb, and the suspect knew where the bomb was planted. Would you use force to make him talk, knowing it would save thousands of innocent people?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe.’

‘Maybe. Well, would you endanger an innocent person in order to get a conviction?’

‘What?’

‘Would you force a witness to testify, knowing his life would be in danger if he did so, but also knowing that a conviction might save many lives?’

‘I don’t know. I never-’

‘Well, you’d better start thinking about it, Chief Truman, if you want to get a guy like Braxton. You’d better think about what you’re willing to do.’ Kelly gave me a long look.

He withdrew the nightstick from my chest. ‘Because there’s no other way. You can’t be a good cop and obey all the rules. That’s the dirty little secret.’

We started walking again.

‘Good cops do bad things for good reasons. Bad cops do bad things for bad reasons. Most cops want to be good, that’s the truth. But it takes experience to know how. Do you see what I’m getting at?’

‘You’re saying I don’t have the experience to work this case. But all I want to do is observe-’

‘I’m saying, if you get mixed up in it, you’ll probably get hurt. Or worse.’

‘When you say worse — ’ Another of Kelly’s looks. ‘Ah.’

We went on walking.

‘Chief Truman, I came here to tell you what Leo Stapleton would have told me: Don’t be in such a hurry to meet the Harold Braxtons of the world. They’ll come to you when the time is right.’

‘In a town like this, I’m more likely to meet a woolly mammoth than a Harold Braxton. I need to do this. I need to. You’ll have to trust me on that.’

Kelly stopped to look up at the sky. It was a clear-blue fall day. He puffed out his cheeks, then released a long sigh. ‘Well,’ he concluded, ‘two dead boys is enough.’

He was referring to Braxton’s police victims, Danziger and the narcotics officer Artie Trudell. At the time, they were the only two we knew about.

There is no official oath for police officers in Versailles, Maine, so I had to make up some malarkey about ‘faithfully protecting and serving the people’ of the town ‘so help you God.’ It fell somewhere between the presidential oath of office and the Boy Scouts oath, but it did the trick. John Kelly, age sixty-six, was now the junior officer in the Versailles Police Department.

We decided to leave first thing Monday morning. That gave me a couple of days to make arrangements and pack my car, an old Saab 900 with a crack in the steering rack and a number of cancerous rust stains. I told everyone where I was going, although I described the journey in the sunniest possible way. I did not mention the Mission Posse or the gunshots to the eye. I was just going down to the city to observe, to keep tabs on the case. No danger ‘t’all. Diane and Phil and the rest all pretended to understand and believe me, and in the shadow conversation of things unsaid — the habitual language of Maine Yankees — I understood that they knew enough about Harold Braxton anyway and were worried for me.

I left Dick Ginoux in charge of the station while I was gone. It was not an ideal choice. Dick was the kind of guy who would prop his eyeglasses on his forehead then spend the better part of an afternoon looking for them. But he was the senior man in the department, and besides, there were no Eliot Nesses among the other candidates.

The morning of my departure, my father got up early to see me off. ‘I know why you’re doing this,’ he told me. ‘I’m not so old I don’t understand what you’re doing. Just you be careful.’ His beard was growing in. It was almost pure white. ‘Well, you’d best get going, Ben. It’s a long ride.’ I hugged him. His body was almost exactly the size of my own now, even a little smaller. It came as a surprise. I still thought he was a giant. He endured the hug as long as could be expected. ‘Look at us,’ he said, pulling away, ‘couple of fruitcakes.’

As for me, I had an inchoate sense that my life was veering, that from now on events — my personal history — would move along a different vector. For the second time in my life, I was getting out. I was leaving Versailles behind.

In a way, I’d already left — the moment I first learned of that dead man by the lake.