Mission Flats

39

We don’t think about our garbage much. We may have a cloudy notion of it streaming into dumps or landfills or furnaces somewhere, but for all practical purposes it just vanishes. Maybe that is why, come garbage day, we take all our most intimate secrets, mix them in with a few chicken bones and tuna-fish cans, and leave them out on the street corner for anyone to see. Block after block of plump plastic bags in white and olive drab. A policeman — or anyone else, for that matter — who rummages through your trash can obtain your phone records, your creditcard statements, account numbers of all kinds, letters, notes. He can tell what magazines you read, what you eat, what you earn. And, if you are sloppy enough, he can determine whether you are dealing drugs by looking for the telltale by-products: sandwich bags with the corners snipped off, scales, razors, cutting agents, wrapping materials (foil and plastic to wrap a brick, or kilo, of cocaine; Saran wrap or heat-sealed envelopes for smaller amounts, often found with traces of the drugs still on them). And here’s the best part: A cop does not need a warrant for any of this because it is no longer yours. By setting your trash out on the street corner, you renounce ownership of it. This is why cops love garbage day — especially cops who have worked narcotics, as Gittens had.

His plan was to determine where Braxton was by sifting through the garbage at the likeliest places. Anything that suggested his location — mail addressed to him, especially — would be enough to direct us. Simple enough. And it went fairly smoothly as we gathered up bags from the curb in front of a couple of chipped-paint houses where Braxton had stayed at various times. At a few places the garbage had already been picked up, but we were able to accumulate a half dozen bags or so, which we labeled with masking tape and Magic Marker.

Unfortunately, according to our eager snitch Andre, Braxton had also been seen at the Grove Park project where his mother lived. And there is no garbage day at a multiunit apartment building. There is just a garbage chute that empties into a Dumpster — and somewhere among all those bags was the one or two Braxton might have tossed in.

Gittens led us to the Dumpster in the basement of the C Building in the project. On the side was a label from the Zip-A-Way Waste Disposal Company on Mission Ave, where Bobo made his home in a Dumpster, albeit a much nicer Dumpster than this one.

‘Up you go,’ Gittens told me cheerfully.

‘What is that, “up you go”?’

‘Well, somebody’s got to get in there.’

‘Well, it’s not going to be me.’

‘It’s your case,’ he said. ‘Happened in Ver-sigh.’

‘But this was your idea.’

‘That’s why you have to get in there. I can’t do everything.’

I struggled for a counter-excuse. The only thing that came to mind was But I’m the guest.

Gittens offered a pair of rubber gloves from his coat pocket. ‘Come on, Ben, we don’t have time. Upsy-daisy.’

My eyes bounced around the Dumpster. All around it, sticky fluid was candied to the floor. I checked my shoe bottoms.

‘Isn’t this what you wanted?’ Gittens said. ‘Bright lights, big city?’

I snapped on the gloves and hoisted myself into the open mouth of the Dumpster. The garbage chute filled it from the back, so the front was relatively empty. I slid down the angled front wall of the Dumpster until my feet hit the steel bottom. The garbage bags pressed around my shins in a comforting way, maternal, bosomy.

‘Look out for the rats,’ Gittens advised.

My eyes bulged.

‘Kidding,’ he said.

The banter was such pleasure. It had the feel of an oblique, manful offer of friendship. A restoration, a re-acceptance.

I rustled through the loose items, newspapers, grease-stained paper bags, scraps. A method quickly developed: grab, glance, toss it out of the Dumpster, grab, glance, toss.

‘So,’ Gittens said, ‘do you feel a little different about your friend Braxton now?’

‘He was never exactly a friend. But yes. I guess you knew the truth about him all along. The last ten years anyway.’

‘I’ve known the truth about Harold Braxton longer than ten years.’

‘Since the Trudell thing, I meant.’

‘What makes you say that?’

I poked my head out of the Dumpster. ‘I spoke to Julio Vega.’

‘Did you?’

‘I did.’

‘When was that?’

‘Few days ago.’

The information can’t have come as news to Gittens; it had reached all the way to District Attorney Lowery long before. But Gittens made a surprised face — eyebrows raised, mask-of-tragedy frown — as if he’d never heard about it.

I explained, ‘I was looking through Danziger’s files. Turns out he was looking at the Trudell thing. I figured I’d better find out what he was so interested in.’

‘So what did Julio have to say?’

‘He said Raul was your snitch.’

Gittens smiled a cryptic smile.

‘Is it true?’

‘Off the record? Yeah, of course it’s true.’

‘How come you and Julio never told anybody?’

‘Who were we going to tell?’

‘The judge, the DA.’

‘We told everyone who needed to know.’

‘Including the DA?’

‘Put it this way, Ben: Julio and I did what we thought was best for the case and for Artie. We made a judgment call. We did our job, we protected the case.’

‘Does that mean you told the DA or not?’

‘It means we did what we thought was right.’

I pulled out a crumpled copy of Newsweek and made a show of reading the address label, holding it over the lip of the Dumpster to see it in the light. A moment to think. At length, I tossed the magazine on the floor with all the other trash.

‘Why didn’t you just give up Raul?’ I asked.

‘What is this? What are you trying to say, Ben?’

‘Nothing. I’m just saying. If you’d given up the snitch, maybe the case wouldn’t have gone south.’

Gittens eyed me. ‘I tried to give him up. I turned this neighborhood over and shook it. I couldn’t find him. Julio told the judge that.’

‘What about his name?’

‘I didn’t have his name. Jesus, Ben, it’s not like getting a tip from your stockbroker. These are vagrants. They appear, they disappear. They change their names like you change your socks. Raul didn’t have a name, he didn’t have an address, he didn’t have a phone number. How could we produce him? What were we supposed to do? What would you do?’

I did not have an answer.

‘We did what was right,’ Gittens insisted. ‘The judge fucked up. He didn’t understand the situation.’

‘Maybe. Then again, you didn’t tell the truth.’

‘Oh, Ben, come on, this isn’t kindergarten.’

‘I’m just trying to figure it out, is all.’

‘Alright, well let me help you figure it out. A cop was dead, a good cop who happened to be a friend of mine. Harold Braxton blew Artie Trudell’s head right off his shoulders. What was I supposed to do? Go to the judge and say, “Your Honor, Julio Vega might have left out a detail on the search warrant. Raul was really my snitch, not Vega’s. So go ahead and dismiss the case, Your Honor, let Braxton walk.” Would that have been the right thing to do, Ben? Would it?’

At Gittens’s feet, the concrete floor was crumbling. He picked up a chunk of concrete the size of an apple and flung it against the wall, where it burst.

He shook his head. ‘Who are you to lecture about the truth? You of all people. Did you tell the truth when you came down here? Did you tell us everything about your mother’s case? About why Danziger went to Maine in the first place? No, you did what you thought was right. You tried to make things come out the right way.’

‘You’re right. I’m sorry’

‘You should appreciate what I’ve done for you, Ben. It was one of my snitches that gave up the truth in this case. Otherwise you might be looking at life in Walpole.’

‘You’re right. I’m sorry, I spoke out of turn.’

Gittens stood with hands on hips, unsure whether to stay or go. With his sport coat pulled back, I could see the nylon holster on his belt. It crossed my mind that if he shot me here in this Dumpster and closed the lid, I would probably never be found. I would be trucked to a landfill and buried among the plastic bags. I shook away the image. It was crazy.

‘Hey, Gittens, it’s ancient history. I’m just trying to get it all straight.’

‘You want to know what happened? I’ll tell you what happened. Julio wanted credit for the pinch because he wanted to make sergeant and maybe get out of Narcotics someday, maybe get out of the Flats altogether. Simple as that. Same as everybody else wanted. All I did was pass him a tip from this rat I had. Happens all the time — you hear something, you pass it along. Cops help each other. That’s how we survive.’

‘I’m sorry I brought it up. I wasn’t accusing you of anything, Martin.’

Gittens shrugged to signal all was forgiven. No offense taken. But then he picked up another chunk of concrete and fired it at the wall. ‘I need to get some air. Just finish this, Ben.’

We left the Grove Park complex — empty-handed, alas — and returned to Area A-3 to sort through the garbage bags we’d collected. At the station-house we tore open the plastic bags one by one, spilled the contents out on a conference table covered with newspaper, and searched for bits of paper that could be linked to Braxton. We stood on opposite sides of the table, barely speaking.

‘Is police work always this glamorous?’ I ventured finally. An invitation to conversation.

Gittens acknowledged the comment with a smirk but said nothing.

He and I had never been friends exactly, and for a while — when he’d suspected me in the Danziger case — we’d even been adversaries in a professional way. But this little frisson of tension between us felt like something new. This felt more personal. I had broken trust by questioning his role in the Trudell case, and now a cool cordiality descended between us. My own mood suffered too, and when we finally did uncover a trove of Braxton’s trash — including a credit-card slip bearing his signature — there was a sense of anticlimax.

‘Looks like you did it again,’ I congratulated him.

‘Ten years too late, right?’

We were on different terms now.