Mission Flats

51

Gittens was right, of course. Mysteries always remain. In any murder, a hundred tiny enigmas — what was the victim doing there? why did he cry out (or not cry out)? why did the killer drop the weapon? why did he linger at the scene? You can swat at these gnats all day, to no real purpose. Homicides, with their randomizing violence and missing eyewitness, simply breed mysteries. Most are insignificant, and investigators learn to live with them. A case is ‘solved’ when the essential fact — the killer’s identity — is established. There are no drawing-room scenes in which the suspects are gathered and the sleuth delivers an immaculate, all-explaining solution. Gittens was right: The world is a messier place than that.

So I was prepared, after my conversation with Gittens, to accept a little uncertainty. If Artie Trudell was worried about something in the weeks before he died, we’d probably never know what it was, and there was no reason to think it mattered. Frank Fasulo and the Kilmarnock case; and ‘Raul’ and the red door and the Trudell murder; the killer who’d moved Danziger’s dead body looking for something — in all likelihood no one would ever know the truth about any of them, and maybe none of it mattered. The Danziger murder was solved. The hard evidence pointed to Harold Braxton, all of it. The rest was just background noise — rumor and gossip and tips. I had to accept that.

There was one mystery, though, one of those gnats I could not resist swatting. Alone among the witnesses, Franny Boyle still had not come clean. I left Gittens and went straight downtown to find him.

I parked on Union Street and began to make my way on foot, past Faneuil Hall and the statue of Samuel Adams, past City Hall with its looming concrete geometries, and out into the open space of City Hall Plaza.

This is a plaza in name only. It is too big and featureless, too empty to be a plaza. Rather, City Hall Plaza is a void. A barren, windy clearing the size of four or five football fields completely tiled over with red bricks. It is not a place where you linger. It is a place where you quicken your step to get across to the other side.

And that is precisely what I was doing, quick-stepping my way across the red bricks toward Cambridge Street. My thoughts were on Gittens — had I judged him unfairly? — and on the history of this real estate — on the loopy urban planner who decided fifty years ago to bulldoze Boston’s honky-tonk old Scollay Square and replace it with this monochromatic pinball table — specifically I was thinking that Bomber Harris was not half as thorough in leveling Dresden, and congratulating myself on the cleverness of that remark, thinking perhaps I would find a way to repeat it to Caroline, to impress her — all of which is to say, the usual slurry of thoughts was burbling through my mind, I was thinking of many things and of nothing — when a little burst of brick exploded at my feet like a land mine.

My first thought was that someone had thrown a stone or that a rock had fallen from a building. But there was no one nearby, and the nearest building was fifty yards away.

I heard a hiss, then a ghost slammed my left arm in the triceps with a hammer. The arm jumped across my chest. My jacket sleeve was torn and the arm was bleeding. There was a dull, swollen pain in the muscle — my muscle! — a pain that blossomed only after a delay, after that first unbelieving moment.

It was not until the third bullet raised another plume of brick dust that I accepted the obvious: Someone was shooting at me.

My brain whited out. There was no thought at all, only the primal urge — run.

I ran. At first toward Cambridge Street, away from the shots. But the only shelter on this fucking tabletop was the subway entrance, a bricked-over bunker behind me. So I doubled back and ran for that, even though this path took me back toward the shooter.

People bustled around the subway entrance. Lawyers and secretaries, office workers finishing a long day. They turned to see me running. They had not noticed the gunshots. There had been no bang! to alert them. The small crowd regarded me — a man sprinting toward them, his arm bleeding — an odd sight but as yet no cause for alarm. A yuppie in a suit smiled tentatively as if there might be some kind of joke, a punch line.

In a dead run, I pulled my pistol and racked it. This was a bit of action-movie flapdoodle I ought to have skipped. I had no idea where the shots were coming from and, in any event, how could I shoot back with so many people around?

Now, ironically, it was my gun that triggered a panic.

There was a scream. The commuters pushed back into the mouth of the subway entrance, then, when the lobby filled and they could not get past the turnstiles, they burst back out of the doors and scattered, screaming.

I did not bother to show my badge or announce I was a cop. I ran.

I reached the subway entrance and crouched against the wall. My arm was throbbing now, my shirtsleeve heavy with wet blood.

In the token booth, the clerk pressed himself against the back wall. His eyes were locked on the gun in my hand, his mouth hung open in a perfect O.

‘It’s okay,’ I told him. ‘I’m a cop.’

‘You want me to call the cops?’

‘No!’ I snarled. ‘No cops.’

I pressed my arm to stanch the bleeding and riffled through the possibilities. Who would take a shot at me? Braxton? Another gangbanger? Gittens? After all, I’d offended him just minutes earlier with questions about the Trudell case. But none of them made sense. Braxton had made me his confidant. And as far as I knew, Gittens was still in the Flats. With no ready explanation, paranoia set in.

I stepped up to the token window and tried to engineer an ordinary transaction, as if the events of the previous sixty seconds had never occurred. ‘One please.’ I fished in my pocket for a dollar to buy a token but I came up empty. ‘Jesus, I don’t have any cash. Sorry.’

The clerk gaped. He had not budged from the back wall. ‘It’s okay, buddy,’ he assured me, ‘you can go around.’