Mission Flats

45

Jimmy Doolittle was the archivist of the Boston Police Department, overseeing a musty basement room blocked in with cardboard boxes and steel shelving. In these last few days of the Berkeley Street headquarters, the Records Room was even more chaotic than usual. Files had been boxed up and boxes stacked up, ready for the moving vans. These same boxes would soon be re-interred at the new headquarters or at a state archive facility, but for now there was an appealing sort of clutter here. It was like an old antiques shop — you wanted to open some of these musty boxes just to see what was inside. Someday very soon, of course, boxes like these will disappear altogether as police reports are increasingly maintained on computers, but most Boston cops still scratch out their reports longhand or whack them out with IBM Selectrics, which seems to me a very good thing.

John Kelly tapped on a desktop bell, the type you might see in an old hotel, and a voice deep in the warren of boxes growled, ‘I hear ya, I hear ya.’ When he emerged, Doolittle pointedly removed the bell from the counter.

‘You’re Jimmy Doolittle?’ I asked.

‘I am.’

For some reason — probably the heroic (or anti-heroic) name borrowed from the bomber pilot — I had assumed Jimmy Doolittle would project a little glamour. Instead, he turned out to be a pug, short and slight, with two badly bowed legs. His face was handsome but spoiled by a crushed nose that looked like a dollop of plumber’s putty. He was older than I’d expected, too. Probably sixty or so, far too old, I thought, to be using the diminutive form of his name. Even in the testosterone-rich environment of a police station, where forty-and fifty-year-old Bobbys and Billys and Johnnys are relatively common, it was surprising to meet a sixty-year-old man who still called himself Jimmy.

‘We need to look at a file,’ I told him.

Doolittle slapped a powder-blue Document Request Form down in front of me. I filled out the form with the scant information I had. Case/File number: UNKNOWN. Defendant/suspect: HAROLD BRAXTON. Victim:

ARTHUR TRUDELL. Charge: MURDER (1ST). Date of Offense: AUGUST 17, 1987.

Doolittle scanned the sheet with a critical eye. ‘It’s a black file. Sorry’ He slid the form back across the counter at me.

‘A black file? What does that mean? I need to see it.’

‘A black file means it can’t be released without the Commissioner’s say-so. I need something written.’

‘From who?’

‘I just told you from who, from the Police Commissioner. Soon as you get that, I’ll get you the file.’

‘Caroline Kelly sent me.’

‘What’d I just say? I haven’t seen the paper today. Did somebody die and make Caroline Kelly Police Commissioner? I don’t think so.’

I shook my head, incredulous. I’d been threatened by cops and by gangsters, I’d had a gun put to my head — after all that, it was inconceivable that I could be stopped cold by an intransigent file clerk.

‘Mr Doolittle, I didn’t say she was the Commissioner, did I?’

‘Hey, I’m not going to argue with you. It’s a black file. Nothing I can do.’

‘That’s not good enough. I need to see it.’

‘Can’t help you.’

‘This is a homicide investigation.’

‘I’m sure it is, sir.’

‘But I can’t see the file?’

‘Rules, sir.’

There it was, the elaborate formality of the bureaucrat, armed with his inch-wide, mile-deep expertise and a single pointless regulation.

‘This is bullshit,’ I informed the clerk. ‘Complete and total bullshit.’

Doolittle glared, then turned to retreat into the stacks.

‘Jimmy,’ Kelly interceded, ‘could I borrow your phone a moment?’

Doolittle gave him a suspicious look, as if the phone too was restricted. ‘You can’t dial out. It’s just an intercom.’

‘That’s alright, Jimmy. I’m just calling upstairs.’ Doolittle slid the phone toward him, and Kelly punched in a two-digit number. ‘Commissioner Evans, please,’ he said into the mouthpiece, ‘this is Detective John Kelly. That’s right… Oh, Margaret, I’m fine, dear, how-uh-you?… Haw haw, that’s right, still above ground, ye-e-e-es… Oh, Caroline’s just fine… No. No babies yet. We’re working on it… Yes, I’ll hold.’ Kelly tapped the counter with his fingernail, looking exquisitely bored. He directed a reassuring smile at Doolittle. After a time, he jerked the phone back up to his ear. ‘Paul? Yes… Grand, and you?… Yes, I hate to impose on you, my friend. I’m in a little bit of a jam. I’m downstairs in the Records Room and I need to see a black file, but I’m told I need a clearance from you. You have a very efficient clerk here named Jimmy Doolittle…’ Kelly chatted with the Commissioner awhile, then held the phone out to Doolittle. ‘He wants to talk to you, Jimmy’

Doolittle took the phone reluctantly, as if it might explode in his hand. ‘Hello?’ His face flushed as he recognized the Police Commissioner’s voice. A moment later, he hung up, shell-shocked. ‘He says it’s okay,’ Doolittle mumbled. ‘I have a job to do, is all. I didn’t mean…’

‘Well,’ Kelly comforted, ‘no harm done. Not to worry, Jimmy. Simple misunderstanding.’

Doolittle retrieved the file — all eight boxes of it — and spread them out in a little office off the hallway.

‘Excuse me,’ I said, still pissed off, ‘what exactly is a black file?’

‘It’s just a file that can’t be released, like if it’s sensitive.’

‘How does a file get to be a black file?’

‘The Commissioner makes it one. You know, like if a judge orders that something not get released — what’s that word? — impounded. Sometimes it’s just that people want them for the wrong reasons, like if a case has a celebrity for a defendant, a movie star or an athlete or whatevah, that’d be a black file for sure. You know, a Chappaquiddick kind of thing. Internal Affairs files are all black. So’s child abuse.’

‘And if a file is not a black file?’

‘Then anyone can walk in and get it. Any cop or DA, I mean. Not many of ‘em do, though. These are all closed cases. Nobody gives a rat’s ass.’

‘So if anybody ever tried to look at this file?’

‘Then they’d have to have permission from the Commissioner’s office. Usually a deputy Commissioner signs it.’

‘Would there be a record of that somewhere?’

‘Right here, on the front of the first box. Here.’ Doolittle pointed out a single sheet on one of the cardboard boxes. It was a perfunctory one-sentence letter from the Commissioner on Boston PD letterhead:

Per the request of the District Attorney, ADA Robert M. Danziger and/or his designee(s) may review, photocopy, and/or photograph any document(s), evidence, or other materials in the above-referenced file at any time within one year of this date.

‘So nobody else has opened this box besides Danziger?’

‘Not since they closed the case. Could have been hundreds of people pawing through it before it got sent down here. I can’t control that, you know.’

‘Is there any way to tell who requested this file be black?’

‘A ’course.’ He lifted the form to reveal another. ‘Lowery. The DA.’ Doolittle turned to leave, then paused to ask, ‘Hey, you guys want coffee or something?’

Amazing what a call from the Commissioner can do.

‘No, thank you, Jimmy.’ Kelly smiled. He waited until the clerk left the room, then asked, ‘Alright, now, what are we looking for?’

‘The Homicide detectives’ notebooks. Anything that didn’t make it into the reports, anything that connects Trudell to Frank Fasulo.’

‘And we’re doing this because Braxton says so?’

‘You got any better ideas?’

We scavenged through the boxes, which contained mostly papers. The physical evidence — bloody clothing, slugs extracted from the walls, drug paraphernalia — had all been buried in some other archive, presumably. A few items remained, including a thick file of gory photographs. As for the papers, most of them I had already seen photocopied in Danziger’s own file on the case. He had apparently created a duplicate file of his own containing copies of every scrap in these boxes. Only one thing had been missing from Danziger’s file: the detectives’ original notebooks. The absence of these notebooks sent up a red flag. Obviously if Danziger’s theory was that the detectives had missed something the first time around, their contemporaneous notes would be a crucial bit of evidence. ‘Danziger copied the notebooks,’ I told Kelly. ‘Somebody took them out of his office. I’m sure of it. Danziger wouldn’t have left them out.’

The notebooks themselves were not fancy. Most were the spiral-bound type that students use. A few were breast-pocket-sized. Only one of the detectives had assembled his notes into a three-ring binder. Kelly and I read through the notebooks for the better part of the morning. Each was a diary of mundane tasks, the meticulous combing-out of good leads from bad (interviews with neighbors, friends, suspects, snitches), and daily interactions with others in law enforcement (telephone calls with prosecutors, forensics labs, other cops). It was grunt work and it yielded nothing. In the late summer of 1987, Mission Flats had been struck by a plague of amnesia and lockjaw. What evidence the investigators had obtained, including the murder weapon, had been recovered within minutes of the shooting.

The needle in the haystack was this note, scribbled by a Detective John Rivers the day after the Trudell shooting:

Per JV [Julio Vega?] V [victim, i.e. Trudell] upset, ‘not right,’ consulted FB [Franny Boyle]. JV unsure re. Nature of problem?

Time to talk to Franny Boyle again.

As Kelly and I drove to Government Center, where the SIU office — Boyle’s office — was located, it occurred to me that I had nearly forgotten the morning’s other revelation. ‘I didn’t know you were friends with the Commissioner,’ I said.

He gave me a skeptical glance.

‘No, really. I’m impressed.’

‘Ben Truman, don’t be daft. I wouldn’t know the Commissioner if he stood up in my soup. That was Zach Boyages from Admin.’

I cleared my throat. ‘Oh.’