Mission Flats

31

Kelly agreed to reinterview Julio Vega with me. I told Kelly the fact that Danziger had reopened the Trudell investigation still nagged at me. So did Vega’s evasiveness when we’d asked him about it earlier. Kelly accepted these explanations, or seemed to.

At Vega’s shabby little house in Dorchester, there was no answer when we knocked at the front door.

‘We’ll wait,’ the old man announced.

‘But we have no idea where he is.’

‘Precisely why we’ll wait, Ben Truman. No sense chasing him all over creation.’

In his thirty-odd years as a policeman, John Kelly had probably spent ten just waiting. It was part of the job. Movie cops never wait around much. They dart from clue to clue like hummingbirds because they only have two hours to solve each crime. In reality, policemen wait for radio calls and they wait for speeders and they wait for breaks. In courthouses, on street corners, in parked cruisers. Walking around in circles, driving around in circles. They are bored. They stamp their feet on cold nights.

‘How long do we wait?’

‘Till he turns up.’

‘What if he doesn’t?’

‘Oh, he’ll turn up soon,’ Kelly said. He glanced up at the sky as if Julio Vega might drop from above. ‘Let’s take a walk.’

‘Good idea. Why don’t we play a round of golf while we’re at it?’

‘There’s time, Ben. We’ll have a little walk.’

We strolled toward Dorchester Avenue, Kelly looking blithe, me anxious. He pulled out his nightstick, which he kept tucked in his belt at the small of his back. Holding it by the leather strap, he twirled the truncheon absently, as he had in Versailles, with that repetitive rhythm of whirring and palm-slapping. Two revolutions clockwise, slap! Two counterclockwise, slap! The rhythm matched our steps. Whir, slap! Whir, slap!

I should say here, again, that I do not pretend to be objective in my description of John Kelly. I tend to form bonds of loyalty quickly or never, and I’d decided long before that Kelly was a man I liked and admired. Maudlin as it sounds, I felt closer to him than the scant few days we’d spent together would seem to justify. So admittedly my view of Kelly that morning was clouded by affection. That said, as we walked along Dorchester Avenue, he seemed to me the distilled essence of a policeman. You could have dressed him in a gray flannel suit or surgical scrubs — hell, you could have dressed him in clown makeup — and still people would say, ‘There goes a cop.’ Until I met him, I’d never thought that was a quality to be admired.

Spin, slap.

‘There’s something I don’t understand, Ben. This morning Braxton asked for you — you specifically — just so he could proclaim his innocence and then attack you? It doesn’t make sense.’

I ambled along in silence.

‘Then you told Lowery you had no idea what Braxton was up to.’

Spin, slap.

‘I may have told a little white lie there.’

‘Ah. Lot of that going around.’

‘When he jumped me, Braxton whispered in my ear. He said, “Find Raul.” He said this all has something to do with Artie Trudell. And he mentioned another name — Fazulo?’

‘Fasulo.’

‘Fasulo. You know who that is?’

Kelly ignored the question. ‘Why did you hold that back?’

‘Because Braxton told me I was being set up.’

‘Did you believe him?’

‘I don’t know. Kind of, yeah. Like you said, he went to a lot of trouble to get the message to me.’

Kelly grunted, hmm.

‘I should have told. I shouldn’t be keeping things from other cops.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous. We don’t work for the Boston police. We’re conducting our own investigation. You tell them just as much as you want to tell them. They have information they’re not giving us. That’s how it works. Welcome to the brotherhood of law enforcement.’

‘I meant, I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.’

‘Well. You’ve told me now.’

We walked a little ways in silence.

‘Do you know who Fasulo is?’

‘Who Fasulo was,’ Kelly corrected. ‘The only Fasulo I ever heard of died a long time ago, in ’77 or ’78. He killed a cop. Frank Fasulo and another guy — what was his name? Sikes, something Sikes. The two of them were juiced out of their minds. They tried to stick up a bar in the Flats called the Kilmarnock Pub. It’s gone now, the Kilmarnock, and not missed. Bucket of blood, that place was. Fasulo and Sikes went in just after closing, they stuck a gun in the bartender’s face, told him to empty the register. Only they took too long and a cop in a patrol car wandered in. They jumped him and-’ Kelly took a few steps before continuing. ‘Well, Fasulo was a hard case. He’d been in and out of Walpole, Bridgewater… Rapes, armed robberies. There are guys like that, just… vicious, animals, psychopaths. Not many, but they’re out there. There’s nothing for it except to kill them.’

The comment surprised me. I didn’t see Kelly as the hang-’em-high type.

‘Sounds bad, huh? Well the truth is, our system is built to punish crimes after the fact. We’re helpless to prevent a crime before it’s committed, even if everyone sees it coming. Everybody who ever ran into Frank Fasulo knew he’d kill someone someday. He was a homicide waiting to happen. But all we could do was wait for it to happen, then go in and clean up the mess. It shouldn’t be that way.’

‘So he killed the cop who interrupted the stickup?’

‘He raped him. Then he killed him. Then he danced around the bar and celebrated.’ Kelly stopped spinning the nightstick. ‘Well, this is all a long time ago, Ben Truman.’

The spinning and walking resumed.

‘So what happened?’

‘We — the police — tracked down Sikes in a hotel a day or two later. We had this military sort of unit then. “Tactical Patrol Force,” they were called, TPF. Helmets, black outfits, the whole shebang. It was big in those days. Every city had one. They stormed the hotel room and shot Sikes dead. Fasulo jumped off the Tobin Bridge a few days later, which was probably the only sane thing he ever did.’

We were coming into a charmless intersection anchored by a scruffy used-car dealership, which consisted of a portable office, a half dozen compact cars, and hundreds of little triangular vinyl pennants. Beside us was the euphonious Pleasant Spa. (In the old Boston dialect, a convenience store was referred to as a spa, and you still see the word in store windows around town.)

Kelly stopped to survey. The nightstick twirled. Spin, slap!

‘How do you do that?’

‘This?’ Spin, slap!

‘Yeah, how do you make it…?’

Kelly regarded the stick as if he hadn’t noticed it was spinning until that very moment. ‘I don’t know. You just…’ Spin, slap.

‘Show me. Do it slow.’

Spin. Slap.

‘You just kind of let it fall away from your wrist a little, then yank it by the strap here.’

‘Let me try.’

‘Do you know how long I’ve had this thing?’

‘Come on, it’s not the crown jewels. It’s a stick. Let me try.’

He passed it to me and I slipped the leather strap over my hand. I tried to imitate him, letting the baton fall forward then snapping it back toward my chest. The free end flashed up in my face. I ducked.

‘Nice and easy, Ben Truman. Don’t knock yourself out.’

‘Do me a favor. If I do knock myself out, just in case — shoot me.’

‘Nice and easy’

The club wobbled through a complete revolution and I grabbed it. The trick seemed to be that it did not turn in an even circle. The weight was unbalanced (the free end was thicker and heavier), and the strap introduced enough play that the axis of rotation shifted constantly. Plus, the thing was barely shorter than your arm, so it threatened to whack you in the head every time it passed.

‘Harder than it looks,’ I said.

‘Here, you better give that thing back before you hurt yourself.’