Mission Flats

16

The next morning, a little the worse for wear after a night at Connaughton’s Cafe, I showed up at the DA’s Special Investigations Unit. John Kelly did not accompany me, pleading a personal errand of some mysterious and unexplained kind. I did not ask him about it. It was plain that he did not want to discuss what he was doing.

The Special Investigations Unit was in a nondescript seventies-modern office building, separate from the main District Attorney’s office, which was housed in the Sussex County Courthouse. And lest you imagine the SIU office as one of those movie-ish gritty urban police stations — phones ringing, typewriters clacking, ‘perps’ handcuffed to chair legs — let me tell you up front that the SIU looked more like an accountant’s office. In fact, several accountants and even a dentist shared the same third-floor hallway. The office was furnished with cloth-walled dividers and industrial carpeting, all in shades of tan. The only concession to law-enforcement gung ho was a

poster pinned to one of the cubicle walls: A SOCIETY THAT DOES NOT SUPPORT ITS POLICE SUPPORTS ITS CRIMINALS.

With Bob Danziger’s murder, Caroline Kelly had ascended to the head of this unit. Caroline greeted me at the reception area and ushered me around the place, introducing me to several state troopers and to one lawyer, a bowling ball of a man named Franny Boyle.

Boyle came out from around his desk and gave my hand a bone-crushing squeeze. He said, with a Boston accent so thick it sounded like a put-on, ‘So yaw the guy from Maine.’ I admitted I was, then stretched my fingers to peel them apart. Boyle looked like he’d been a football player once, a linebacker maybe, though now, at age forty-five or so, he was going soft. The skin of his face sagged. His belly ballooned over his belt buckle. He was nearly bald, with even the sides of his head shaved virtually to the scalp. Still, he was formidable enough. It was difficult to tell where that hairless head ended and his thick neck began. ‘Anything you need, Mistah Truman, I mean any fuckin’ thing…’ Boyle didn’t finish the sentence, but stood there nodding to signify Just ask. He pointed a meaty finger at me: ‘Remembuh.’ I told him I would.

Caroline asked Boyle if he was feeling alright. The smell of alcohol hung about him — it was ten A.M. — and his face was mottled with a drinker’s flush. A fine mesh of red, threadlike veinules netted the skin of his nose.

‘I’m okay, Lynnie. Just upset, is all. The funeral’s coming up, you know. Autopsy took forever.’

‘Franny, maybe you’d better go home. You don’t look so great. It’s alright, we’re all upset.’

After a moment’s hesitation, Boyle grabbed his coat, gave me another knuckle-cruncher, and shuffled down the hall. With his overcoat on, the man’s neck all but disappeared; his head seemed to be attached directly to his back like a bullfrog’s.

When he was out of earshot I said, ‘“Lynnie”?’

Caroline shook her head with an expression that said, Don’t even think about calling me Lynnie. ‘Franny’s a long story,’ she said, and left it at that.

She brought me to Danziger’s office, where two strips of yellow crimescene tape were strung in an X across the door frame. A glossy peel-and-stick label on the door predicted dire consequences for anyone who entered (… under Massachusetts law it is a felony to enter, tamper with, or otherwise disturb a crime scene unless explicitly authorized…). Caroline paused to run her fingertips over the plastic name-plate with its impressed letters, ROBERT M. DANZIGER, CHIEF, then she pulled off the tape as if she were clearing away cobwebs. Inside, the office was neat and organized. A half dozen files stood at attention in a rack on the desk, their edges aligned. The phone, Rolodex, stapler, everything was arranged just so. You half expected Bob Danziger to walk in through a side door and take his seat at the desk.

‘I don’t think you’ll find much in here,’ Caroline cautioned. ‘We took out the files on all Bobby’s open cases.’

I stopped at a small photo on the wall. It showed a group of men posing on the steps in front of a courthouse. ‘That’s the original SIU crew,’ she explained. ‘It was just an anti-narcotics unit then. DAs and cops working together, that was the idea. That must be ’85 or so. Your tour guide, Martin Gittens, is in there somewhere.’ The photo conveyed a feeling of jock comradeship. It reminded me of one of those old photos of a B-52 crew, a bunch of cocky young guys grinning and hanging on one another. Gittens was in the front row. He had a cheesy mustache and thick hair, both gone now. I had to look closer to find Danziger. He was in the back, smiling. A burly redheaded cop with a full beard had his arm over Danziger’s shoulder, and together the two redheads looked like brothers — Danziger the studious firstborn son, this big cop his mischievous younger brother.

‘Who’s this guy?’ I asked.

Caroline stood next to me. (She smelled faintly of soap and powder, and my eyes pulled toward her.) She followed my pointing finger to the big guy with the beard. ‘That’s Artie Trudell. He was killed a long time ago. Harold Braxton was charged but he got off.’ She continued to scrutinize the photo. ‘Look how young Bobby was.’

Robert Danziger must have been in his late twenties, early thirties when the picture was snapped. Not more than a year or two out of law school, with no idea what lay ahead. He probably felt bulletproof with the weight of Artie Trudell’s arm on his own bony shoulder. There was no way to predict the countless branchings that would lead to his own death. Was Danziger already moving inexorably toward that cabin in the Maine woods? Or was there still time to pursue an alternate fate? To leave the DA’s office, say, or stop practicing law altogether. Or simply to leave Boston — to remove himself from Harold Braxton’s murderous path. Every life carries an allotment of what-ifs, but the questions become more fraught when a life ends badly. Of course, no one predicts a bloody death for himself. We all expect to die in bed. But a percentage of us will not; a percentage of us will die violently or too soon. Those people are traveling along their own chain of incident right now, ignorant, free to alter their fate if only they knew it. We are all blithe and unaware, as Danziger had been when he posed for this picture twelve years earlier, and some of us will die just as he did.

‘So what does SIU do now if it’s not an anti-narcotics unit anymore?’

‘Complex investigations. We still do narcotics stuff, but we handle other things too. White collar, public corruption, gang cases, cold cases. We also handle cases where BPD has a conflict of interest.’

‘I thought cops were supposed to have a conflict of interest with bad guys.’

‘I mean where the cops are the bad guys.’

‘Oh.’

Caroline straightened the photo on the wall.

‘What about Danziger?’ I said. ‘What kind of cases did he do?’

‘A little bit of everything. When you’re in a unit this small, that’s how it works; everybody does everything. Bobby coordinated all the anti-gang stuff, but he took other cases too.’

She led me to a conference room next door to Danziger’s office. Manila folders and cardboard boxes were stacked along a wall. The waist-high pile of papers stretched six or eight feet across. ‘These are Bobby’s files, everything he was working on when he died. If Braxton had a reason to kill him, there ought to be something relevant in here… somewhere. It’s kind of a needle in a haystack.’

‘That’s not a haystack,’ I sighed, ‘it’s a farm.’

‘Well then, you should feel right at home.’ She smirked.

‘I’m from Maine, not Kansas.’

‘Whatever.’

I spent the rest of the afternoon in that conference room, sifting through Danziger’s case files. It made lurid reading. There were a dozen or so files involving police corruption of one kind or another — a cop charged with extorting blow jobs from prostitutes in the Combat Zone (the report quoted him, Don’t you say no, don’t you say no to me); a half dozen narcotics detectives who helped themselves to $30,000 from a stashpad in Mattapan; an evidence officer who got hooked on the cocaine that passed under his nose every day on its way to the evidence locker; another group of narcotics detectives who beat up an African-American drug dealer, only to find the dealer was actually an undercover Boston police officer (I’m a cop! I’m a cop! Look at my badge!). Among the crooked-cop files, there was one that stood out, not because it was so serious but because it was so trivial. Commonwealth v. Julio Vega was a perjury case in which the defendant pleaded guilty and accepted a year probation. The case had been closed five years earlier, in 1992, and the file jacket was empty. Why would Danziger still be monitoring a case so petty, years after it had been closed? I set the empty file folder aside.

The bulk of Danziger’s case load was in anti-gang prosecutions. So I began looking for defendants I recognized as members of Braxton’s gang: Gerald McNeese, June Veris, Braxton himself. The cases ranged from ordinary drug pinches to more chilling crimes. June Veris, the guy I’d seen dealing in Echo Park the day before, emerged as a particularly sinister character. In one incident, Veris had used a chunk of concrete to crush the hands of a member of the Mara Trucha, a Salvadoran gang. Both hands were reduced to a mash; all the tiny bones were shattered. The attack was payback for Mara Trucha’s selling rock in Echo Park, clearly Mission Posse territory. Veris was never prosecuted, because there were no witnesses, including, miraculously, the man whose hands were flattened. That pattern — an outrageous crime followed by an acquittal or even an outright dismissal of charges — was repeated over and over again. Whatever mayhem the Posse was responsible for, so long as they confined their activities to Mission Flats, charges were rarely filed. Witnesses who lived there simply refused to testify.

As the hours passed, my sense of outrage over the goings-on in Mission Flats began to wane. It became easier to blame the victims who would not come forward to testify. How could Danziger or anyone else help them if they would not help themselves? To judge by these documents, Braxton’s name rarely appeared in the files. Danziger had no open cases pending against him and none in the offing.

By two o’clock, my eyes were fogged over. Caroline came by to check on me and deliver a can of Coke.

‘You read enough police reports yet, Ben?’

‘Let me ask you something: Where do cops learn to talk this way? I alighted from my vehicle. Who the hell alights from a vehicle? Why can’t they just say they got out of the car?’

‘It’s cop-speak. All police reports sound like that.’

‘Mine don’t. My reports are beautiful.’

‘Chief Truman, you sound like a crotchety old Down-easter.’

‘I’m no Down-easter. Just crotchety’

She smiled, though it appeared to be against her better judgment.

‘Who’s this Julio Vega? There’s a file here with nothing in it.’

‘Julio Vega? Come here, I’ll show you.’

I narrated in cop-speak: ‘The law-enforcement personnel alighted from their chairs and initiated foot traffic to the office of the victim.’

‘Enough,’ Caroline called over her shoulder.

‘Sorry. It’s catchy once you get started.’

In Danziger’s office, she stood before the photo of the Special Investigations Unit circa 1985 and pointed to a handsome Hispanic man sitting in the front row, right next to Gittens. ‘That’s Julio Vega.’

‘He was a cop?’

‘He was in Narcotics in Area A-3, which is basically the Flats.’

‘Why did Danziger have a file on him?’

Her finger moved from Vega to Trudell, the red-bearded giant who had his arm draped over Danziger’s shoulder. ‘Vega and Artie Trudell were partners. Vega was standing right next to Trudell when Trudell got shot.’

‘Shot by Braxton.’

‘Right. Vega saw his partner get killed. It was a terrible case.’

‘What does that have to do with a perjury file on Vega?’

‘It’s a very long story.’

‘I’ve got time.’

‘It’s a big file, I’m warning you.’

‘How big could it be?’

Caroline’s mouth turned up in a smile. She looked like a cat who has just noticed the canary’s cage is open. She went to a cabinet and began unloading boxes, folders, transcripts, notebooks. We lugged the papers to the conference room, where they swamped the surface of the table.

‘I thought you said it was big,’ I cracked.

She left me there with the file on Artie Trudell’s murder, a case that had been closed nearly a decade. Why Danziger had kept all these materials — other than his friendship with the victim — I did not know. But I quickly fell to the task of sifting them and, out of old habit, trying to see the events in real time. To be there. I’d done similar reconstructions before, as a would-be historian, before my life was interrupted — before my mother’s illness mooted all my own plans for the future. This was the essence of historiography, piecing together a moment in time from primary sources. I had done it a hundred times. When I was in school, it had all seemed like a very romantic adventure: I was a time traveler, riding the matrix of time and place. Poring over the ten-year-old file on Artie Trudell’s murder, that adolescent, almost physical sense of transport did not return, but some of the old pleasure did. For the next few hours I was lost in the events of a decade earlier. There was even a little flush of confidence about my abilities as a policeman, for what is a detective but a species of historian?