Mission Flats

23

The first time Caroline kissed me:

John Kelly had taken Charlie for the day on Sunday. Kelly was on a mission that day, as far as I could tell, to do whatever the hell his grandson wanted, an excess of generosity offered up to Charlie as a sort of atonement for the old man’s having moved away to Maine. This left Caroline to entertain me, an arrangement that seemed quite natural by then. I’d spent the last few evenings with the Kellys, and already there had developed a homey routine at Caroline’s apartment. After dinner, I would play video hockey on the PlayStation with Charlie and sip Bushmills with the old man, then return to my hotel alone.

That Sunday afternoon, Caroline and I arranged to meet at the Avenue Victor Hugo bookshop on Newbury Street. It was a brilliant autumn day. The sunlight had a focusing, clarifying quality. You seemed to see the Newbury Street scene in high definition — grungers slinking like cats outside Tower Records; couples promenading; expensive European cars inching along in traffic.

The bookshop was a maze of aisles and rooms stuffed tight with dusty, time-faded books. The books lined the staircase and the walls, they were stacked on the creaky floors, they overflowed the shelves in every room. It was heaven. Waiting for Caroline, I drifted through the small rooms upstairs. I was happily skimming a travel book when I was brought up short by a woman’s voice: ‘Ben?’ I knew the voice without looking up, and I tried to keep my nose in the book until the speaker went away. But the voice was persistent. It inflected my one-syllable name into a sickening little glissando: en? e Be It was Sandra, my grad-school girlfriend, the flower of Boston University Communism. She was thinner than ever, but at least she had traded the heavy black-frame glasses of those days for a more chic model. She folded her arms and grinned. Then, craning her head forward like some predatory bird, she asked, ‘Are you here alone?’

‘No.’

‘Me neither.’ She laid her hand beside her mouth vertically, like a bad actress playing to the back row, and confided, ‘I’m seeing someone.’

I heard myself say ‘Me too’ before I could think it through. It seemed important to match Sandra mate for mate. ‘She’ll be here soon.’

‘I thought you were in Maine?’

‘I am.’

‘And your mother?’

‘She passed away this summer.’

‘Oh, Ben, I’m so sorry’

‘Thank you.’

‘It’s good to see you,’ she lied. ‘What are you doing now? Are you back in school somewhere?’

I shook my head no.

‘What then?’

‘I’m — I’m sort of a policeman.’

‘A policeman! Still? In your little town? What was it called?’

‘Versailles.’

‘Versailles, yes. How precious.’

‘I’m the chief there now.’

‘Oh, my.’

I tried to parse the phrase for complimentary intentions, but they were hard to find. That oh, my meant I had just become fodder for cafeteria gossip. Do you remember Ben Truman? You’ll never guess what he’s doing now…

‘What about your work?’

‘That is my work. For the time being, at least.’

‘Oh.’

Her cheeks flushed a little. She seemed to be floundering for a new topic.

‘So who’s your new boyfriend?’ I said.

‘His name is Paul. He’s downstairs. He’s brilliant! He has a chair at this foundation Across The River.’ She confided, ‘Everyone says he’s up for the MacArthur.’

‘Do they?’

‘And your girlfriend? Is she here?’

I paused, fatally.

‘Ben?’

‘Well, she’s not really — I’m not sure when she’s getting here.’

‘Is this her?’

Caroline appeared beside us. She wore jeans and a black baseball jacket, and at the moment she seemed like a higher life-form than Sandra — strapping and confident, radiant at the prospect of a weekend afternoon all her own, with neither child care nor work to consume her.

‘Is this her what?’ Caroline asked, curious.

‘Ben’s girlfriend?’

Caroline gave me a bemused look.

‘I was just telling Sandra…’ My tongue swelled into a grapefruit.

Sandra’s face registered a moment’s confusion, then I saw her put it all together. Another morsel for the cafeteria crowd: And then — oh, this is rich — he said this woman was his girlfriend but she clearly had no idea…

The next moment I felt Caroline’s hands on my neck and her lips on mine, and warm breath from her nostrils on my cheek, and she pressed a kiss onto my mouth. ‘Sorry I’m late,’ she said. ‘Traffic’

Sandra looked stricken, as if she’d just walked in on her parents in flagrante delicto. She made an excuse and scurried off.

‘Thank you,’ I told Caroline.

‘Don’t mention it, Chief Truman.’

The way Caroline remembered Bob Danziger:

‘Bobby wasn’t one of these avenging-angel types. He didn’t open every file and see the Boston Strangler. He was always like, ‘This kid’s not so bad’ or ‘Look at his record. There’s no violence. It’s all just drug stuff.’ He was always so damn reasonable.’ She squeezed the word like a lemon. ‘I mean, he used to carry spiders outside rather than kill them! Is that the kind of guy you’d think this would happen to?’

We were at a bar called Small Planet, in Copley Square.

As she remembered Danziger, Caroline plowed little furrows in her napkin with a fork. ‘Something changed for Bobby, though. At the end, he seemed to lose that courage, that equanimity. I used to watch him sometimes when his verdicts came in. He’d never look at the defendant. It was like he was ashamed. He’d look at the floor, he’d look off into space, anywhere but at the defendant.’

‘Why would he do that?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe he was worried. There’s always that kernel of doubt, the possibility you got it wrong. You have to be able to live with that. You have to be a little callous to do this job.’

‘And Danziger wasn’t callous?’

‘Not at the end, no. You know, just before he died, Bobby got a conviction on a big gang case. I mean, this was a big hook. So I went in to congratulate him. I thought he’d be elated. But he was really down. He seemed sort of hollow, I don’t know how else to put it. I didn’t know what to tell him, so I said, “Bobby, what are you feeling right now?” You know what he said? He said, “Revulsion.”’

‘Revulsion?’ I echoed. ‘At what?’

‘At the whole system. At the jury for pretending to know the truth, at the judge for pretending to know what to do about it, at the state for locking up an eighteen-year-old in a place like Walpole. Revulsion at the defendant too, not because he committed the crime, but because he’d set the whole thing in motion, this whole irresistible machine. He’d made Bobby do it. Bobby told me, “It feels like I’m guilty of something.” He was feeling all this revulsion at himself, for participating.’

‘Sounds like he was just burned out.’

‘No,’ she said firmly. ‘Not burned out — shaken. Burnout is a gradual thing. What happened to Bobby happened fast. Something really rattled him.’

‘What was it?’

‘I honestly have no idea.’

‘So how about you, Caroline? Do you look away when the verdict comes in?’

‘Me? No, I couldn’t possibly! I look right at the defendant. I have to. I have to see that little flinch when he hears the word guilty. I want to see those eyes blink when he understands he didn’t get away with it, there’s a price to be paid after all. And I want him to know I’m the agent of all that.’

A smile played on her lips, a bad-girl smile that made me think of a lepidopterist pinning a rare specimen to her butterfly board. I wondered what unfortunate defendant she was remembering.

‘Does that make me a bad person?’ she asked.

‘Probably.’

For no good reason, Caroline and I decided to stop at every bar we saw on Newbury Street that Sunday, from the tastefully honky-tonk corner of Mass Ave. all the way to the Ritz with its blue awnings and blue-coated doormen. At the end of this steeplechase, she tried to pull me into the Ritz Bar too, but I nixed it. ‘I don’t think I’d be comfortable at the Ritz,’ I said.

Instead we went into the Public Garden, where even at dusk there were a few tourists staring up at the statue of George Washington on horseback. Washington looked serenely down at them, clutching the remains of a sword. (The blade has been wrenched out of the general’s sword so many times, the city no longer replaces it. But General Washington stubbornly clings to the empty hilt.)

‘Dude, take my picture?’ a guy said to me.

I asked him, Didn’t he think it was too dark for the picture to come out?

‘It’s okay,’ he explained, ‘I’ll be able to see it.’

‘You better have her take it,’ I said, handing the task to Caroline. ‘I’ve been drinking.’

So he stood beneath Washington’s statue and Caroline took the camera.

Pleasantly drunk, I watched her from behind as she lined up the shot and directed the tourists on how to pose. And in my thoughts the actual Caroline was displaced by images of her in court a few days before. Not the whole of her, just glimpses: the soft briefcase slouched against her ankle, the gestalt flame formed by the curves of her calves, the arch of her back as she pulled her jacket tight around her. I tried to displace these imaginings with other, less charged ones, but it wasn’t much use.

We moved to a dessert restaurant called Finale. It was an oval room with small tables and deco fixtures, dimly lit.

‘Caroline, why does Lowery want to keep us away from Julio Vega?’

‘I imagine Andrew doesn’t want anyone mucking around in the Trudell case. He was the DA when the case went south, and it still haunts him. Voters don’t like to see cop killers get off. It leaves a bad impression. And Andrew starts a new campaign soon. Did my dad give him a hard time?’

‘He bit his tongue, for the most part.’

‘That’s unlike him.’

‘What’s Lowery running for, anyway?’

‘The rumor is he wants to be mayor. First black mayor of Boston, and a Republican to boot. But who knows.’

‘Well, it still doesn’t make sense to me. Election or not, Artie Trudell was a cop.’

‘It’s not that simple, Ben. Cases get closed for lots of reasons.’ She looked at me for signs of understanding but got none. ‘Look, some cases stay unsolved because somebody wants them to stay unsolved. Like the DeSalvo case, the Boston Strangler. For thirty-five years around here, the worst-kept secret among cops and DAs has been that Albert DeSalvo was not the Strangler. They stuck him in a lockup with a serial rapist who told DeSalvo all about the murders, and DeSalvo was an unstable guy himself, so he took all these stories and he went out and confessed to things he never did. He got all kinds of details wrong, but nobody cared. It was just easier to let people believe the case was solved. It was what they needed to believe so they could sleep at night. The trouble is, if anybody ever did prove that DeSalvo wasn’t the Strangler, then a lot of people would have to account for their actions. See what I mean? It’s not always about the truth.’

‘So who is it that wants the Trudell case buried?’

‘Lowery, for one. Julio Vega and Franny, too, I’m sure. None of them covered themselves in glory.’

‘Franny says you think he’s crooked. Is it because of this?’

She shook her head. ‘Look, I have no idea what Franny really did in the Trudell thing. I have my suspicions. It’s hard to believe Vega made up all that crap about ‘Raul’ by himself. But my issue with Franny isn’t that he’s crooked. It’s that he’s a drunk, which would be his business except he’s not a very good lawyer anymore.’

‘So why does Lowery protect him?’

‘Because Franny knows more than he’s said, and Lowery wants to keep it that way. So Lowery keeps Franny on the payroll, and Franny keeps his mouth shut.’

The first time I kissed Caroline:

She stepped back, smiled, and said my name. Then, ‘Are you sure you want to do this?’

‘I’m really, really sure, yeah.’

A car drove past and we watched it selfconsciously. We were standing outside my hotel. The doorman was watching us. The night air was chilly.

‘Ben, you don’t have to charm me, you know. It’s not necessary’

‘What if I want to?’

‘Don’t waste it.’

In the hotel room we kissed, awkwardly, and Caroline suggested we get in bed. I said that was fine, and we undressed and lay side by side, facing each other. She leaned forward to kiss me again. Our knees bumped. There was the predictable prod as we slid close, but Caroline did not acknowledge it. She held my face in her hands and studied it. She said, ‘Why do I have this feeling I’ve met you before?’ I said, ‘I don’t know. I think I’d remember you.’

Later, Caroline gathered her things and went into the bathroom to wash and get dressed. I turned on the TV and, when she came out, I was staring at an old movie.

Caroline asked, ‘What’s that?’

‘Rio Bravo. You want to watch?’

‘Is that a John Wayne thing?’

‘Right now it’s an Angie Dickinson thing.’

‘From Police Woman?’

‘Yeah.’

‘I liked Police Woman.’

‘I never knew what was going on with her and Earl Holliman on that show.’

Caroline shrugged her jacket on. ‘He liked Angie Dickinson but he couldn’t say so because of their jobs.’

‘Oh.’

‘Ben, I have to get home to Charlie.’

On the TV, Angie Dickinson was telling John Wayne, That’s what I’d do if I were the kind of girl you think I am.

‘That’s alright. I know how it ends anyway’

She grimaced. ‘How does it end?’

‘Everybody was wrong about everybody else, basically’

‘Doesn’t sound like much of an ending.’

‘Well there’s a gunfight too. But it’s not really the point.’