Mission Flats

50

Battery Point is a bulge of land that extends into Boston Harbor at the southeastern edge of Mission Flats. There is a little park, not much more than a turnaround for cars. A plaque explains that English cannons once were stationed here to guard the southern approach to the city. A knee-high stone wall surrounds the lookout point; beyond it the land quickly melts into a soggy marsh. If you stepped off that wall, you’d find yourself standing in water up to your waist. A few more steps and you’d be under water completely. The land is unbuildable and too far from the city center to tempt developers to fill it in, as they did the Back Bay. So it has been preserved in something like its pristine condition. In fact, if you ignore the modern intrusions — the planes banking away from Logan Airport, a field of oil tanks, trash snarled in the grass — with no great leap of imagination, you can catch a glimpse of this place as it must have appeared when the first Englishmen arrived here. Lush and fecund; rocky and wintry and terrifying too. A new England suited to the rapturous Puritan vision of a community without sin, a fundamentalist Christian theocracy, an anti-America. A New World. They must have sailed right past these marshes. If you’d been standing on this spot four hundred years ago, you would have seen them, proto-Americans searching for a better landfall.

Gittens kept me waiting here for some time. When he finally arrived, we stood on the concrete parapet looking north toward the city skyline. The wind off the harbor fluttered our jackets. I crossed my arms to keep the chill off.

‘Some spot,’ he said.

‘I thought we’d better talk privately’

‘Oh?’

‘I have some information about the Trudell case.’

‘Jesus, are you still on that?’

‘Martin, doesn’t it bother you that everybody involved in the case is dead? First Trudell, then Danziger, now Vega.’

‘Vega? He killed himself.’

‘No. There were two sets of ligature marks, and you can’t hang yourself twice. Vega was murdered. Somebody staged it to look like a suicide. Vega must have struggled, he must have escaped the first time, so the murderer had to do it again.’

‘Who are you, Nancy Drew?’ Gittens was annoyed. ‘You’re making this much harder than it is. Forget Vega, forget Trudell. Braxton shot Danziger because Danziger was a DA. Don’t you get that?’

‘What about Trudell?’

‘What about Trudell?’

‘Who killed him?’

‘Gee, maybe it was the second shooter on the grassy knoll.’

‘I’m serious, Martin.’

‘Alright. Braxton killed him. Is that what you need to hear?’

‘Impossible.’

‘Impossible? Why? Because Braxton’s such a swell guy?’

‘No. Because he wasn’t there. Braxton knew the raid was coming. You warned him.’

For a moment the only sound was the sough of the wind in my ears.

‘That’s a crock of shit, and don’t you ever repeat it to anyone. Somebody’s playing you, Ben. I didn’t warn Braxton. Who told you that?’

‘Danziger. It was in his file, and it gets worse. Danziger had given immunity to Braxton. He was going to have him testify to all this; he was taking it to a grand jury’

‘Untrue.’

‘It is true. Here’s the cooperation letter. At a minimum, it explains why Braxton was in Maine. He wasn’t there to kill Danziger; he was there to meet with him. He was going to be Danziger’s star witness.’

Gittens studied the letter without comment, his face expressionless.

‘Martin, Danziger knew.’

‘Knew what?’

‘He knew Braxton was your snitch. He knew you protected him.’

‘That is just false. Look, have I gotten information from Braxton? You bet I have. Have I given something back to him in exchange? Absolutely. That’s how it works. It’s my job. That doesn’t make Braxton “my snitch.”’

‘Did you tip him off about that raid when Artie died?’

‘Of course not!’

‘Did you ever protect him?’

‘No. Not the way you mean.’

‘Was Braxton “Raul”?’

‘No. And don’t you ever fuckin’ put in a report that you even asked that question.’

I shifted, suddenly unsure of myself.

‘Ben, listen carefully: Braxton. Killed. Trudell. Case closed.’

‘It doesn’t make sense. If Harold was tipped off about the raid, why would he still be in the apartment when Trudell got there?’

‘“Harold”? What is this? Are you getting all this from Braxton?’

‘Why did he leave the gun, Martin? Braxton’s way too smart to drop the murder weapon with his fingerprints all over it. Why would he do that?’

‘Why? Because in real life things get fucked up, that’s why. Why was he in the apartment? How the hell should I know? Maybe he had to go back to get something. Maybe he meant to get out sooner but he got held up. If he was warned — and in the Flats, who knows, maybe he was — maybe the raid team just got there sooner than Braxton figured they would. He fucked up. And once he was trapped inside, he had to shoot his way out because that’s all he knows how to do. What else would he do? Negotiate? He isn’t Henry fuckin’ Kissinger.’

‘And the gun? Why did he drop the gun?’

‘Because he’s human. Because he was under stress and he made a mistake. Yes, he’s smart, but smart people commit crimes imperfectly. It happens all the time. That’s how they get caught. Jesus, Ben, that’s what murder is. It’s not cool calculation; it’s hysteria.’

‘What about Raul?’

‘Would you forget about Raul! It never mattered about Raul. I told you, there was no Raul and there were a thousand Rauls. It doesn’t make any difference.’

He rested one foot on the stone wall and looked out over the harbor toward the airport on the opposite bank. ‘There aren’t neat solutions to every mystery. The world is messier than that. People get involved and they’ — he waved his hand in exasperation — ’they complicate everything. They do things for reasons even they don’t understand. They do things for no damn reason at all. I know this is your first murder and you want to figure everything out. But sometimes you can’t figure everything out because you can’t ever really understand other people. You can’t understand why they do what they do. You just have to accept a little mystery, Ben. People are mysterious, the world is mysterious. You can’t know everything. You’re not supposed to. This isn’t a history book. It’s just the world. It’s a messy place.’

It struck me then that Gittens was the perfect cop for Mission Flats. He was a natural broken-field runner, with just the supple temperament for that chaotic, unbounded place. When the rules did not work, he bent them. When the facts did not fit, he bent them too. And in general that was a necessary — even a good — thing. Without people like Gittens, the system would jam. But all that sophistication made Gittens tougher to decipher than Franny Boyle had been. He was certainly a better poker player than Franny I’d been bluffing when I said all this information had come from Danziger’s files. In fact it had come from Vega, Braxton, and Beck. I’d bluffed, but Gittens had not revealed his cards. Unlike Franny, Martin Gittens did not have a tell. He was indignant at the suggestion he’d done anything wrong — and guilty or not, who wouldn’t be?

He said, ‘What do you intend to do with all these… theories about the Trudell thing?’

‘I’m not sure. I still don’t know who the shooter was. For all I know, maybe it was Braxton after all. All the rest is just — I guess it’s just the way the game is played around here.’

Gittens tore up the cooperation letter and dropped the shreds into the water. They caught in the reeds. Some landed in open water, where after a time they sunk. I was offended at the gesture, but when Gittens spoke again, his voice was so reassuring that I knew he’d torn up the document for my own good. Some secrets should remain just that.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘be careful out there. There are people who don’t want the case reopened. Important people.’

‘So I’ve been told. But what can I do? I can’t just stop.’

‘Knowing when to stop is part of the job, Ben. We’re not supposed to answer every question, we’re not supposed to follow every lead to infinity. There isn’t time. Our job is just to solve the case in front of us then move on to the next one. At some point you have to just stop.’