Mission Flats

53

Franny seemed to be waiting for us. He was horribly transformed in the few hours since I’d seen him. He slumped behind his desk looking exhausted and ill and desperately sad. I thought he might even have been crying — his face was glazed with damp sweat like tears — but tenderness was so far from Franny Boyle’s character that I presumed instead that he was simply drunk, which no doubt he was.

Franny did not stir when we appeared in the door. He gazed at each of us in turn: me, Caroline, John Kelly, and Kurth. ‘Looks like the gang’s all here,’ he said. A beer bottle was pinched between his thighs. He lifted it to take a swig. ‘You guys want one? Just don’t tell the boss — I don’t want to lose my raise.’ Then a shadow passed over his face and the kidding stopped. The bravado was just too much effort to keep up and, at this point, why bother? ‘I been wondering how long it was gonna take you.’

‘Franny,’ I said, ‘you want a lawyer here?’

‘Again with the lawyer. No, Opie, I don’t need a lawyer.’

His eyes drifted to the wall behind me. ‘I ever tell you about my first homicide, Opie? It was when we had real gangsters, the old North End types, not these Asian kids. The real goombahs. My victim, they found him chained to a pile under this pier down near the Red Falcon Terminal, on the waterfront there. They took him down under the pier at low tide and they tied him to the pole and left him there while the tide come up. That’s old school, baby. We never solved it. Nobody would talk. What the hell — I wouldn’t have talked either.’ He slumped further in his chair. ‘I think about that guy all the time: chained there, watching the water come up. Nothing he could do. Just sit there and watch it.’ He wiped an invisible tear from his cheek and looked at me as if I were very far away.

I turned away from his face.

On the desk was the picture that had been hanging in Danziger’s office, the Special Investigations Unit as it was composed in the mid-eighties — Assistant DAs Bob Danziger and Franny Boyle, Detectives Artie Trudell, Julio Vega, Martin Gittens, about a dozen others — hanging on each other, brimful of confidence. The bomber crew assembled on the airstrip for a snapshot before their last, doomed run.

I said, ‘Franny, Bob Danziger asked for your help, didn’t he? You were one of the only witnesses still out there, you and Julio Vega. Danziger wanted to go after Artie Trudell’s killer.’

Silence.

‘Did he ask you to help, Franny? Or was he going to subpoena you?’

‘He didn’t need a subpoena,’ Franny mumbled. ‘He told me I owed it to Artie. That was enough, after all that time. The thing was, Danziger didn’t know what he was getting into until we started talking. Now he knows.’ His eyes were drifting left and right as if he were watching a badminton match taking place somewhere behind me. ‘Maybe I’ll end up the same way. Got to be better than this.’

I should point out that, according to Caroline, in his day Franny Boyle was the most feared, most eloquent, most charismatic prosecutor in Boston. He was never much on the legal fine points, and by order of the DA he was not permitted to try a serious felony without an appellate attorney in the second chair, ready to hedge him in when he began to push the limits of courtroom oratory. But the true measure of a trial lawyer’s talent is winning, and Francis X. Boyle won over and over again, so much so that it became a perverse point of pride with him when it could later be proven that he’d actually convicted innocent people. The defendant’s innocence, he believed, merely raised the bar a little.

That evening — by this point the sun had set, leaving Franny’s office in a dim half-light until someone finally turned on the fluorescent overheads — we caught a glimpse of Franny’s gift when he pulled himself together sufficiently to tell the tale of Bob Danziger’s murder, a tale that stretched back twenty years. What few legal rules I am aware of, Franny broke in telling the story. He dipped in and out of characters’ heads, he threw in hearsay and rumor, he added facts he could not possibly have known, he may even have misstated a little evidence. He was as he had always been, in Caroline’s words, ‘an appeal waiting to happen.’ But the man could tell a story. He must have been a hell of a lawyer, because drunk and broken down as he was, he could still spin a yarn for you. He made you see it. Franny Boyle put you right there.

Frankie Fasulo has to hold on. He has to wrap his left elbow around the I-beam beside him and hug it against his ribs or else the wind blowing across the Tobin Bridge is going to lift him right off the guardrail where he is standing, it will carry him up and over the side and it won’t matter, it won’t make one fuckin’ bit of difference whether he has the balls to jump or not. Fuckin’ wind! There is something behind it, Fasulo thinks, a presence. The wind is alive, like in some Bible story — like God appearing to the Jews as a little sand-tornado or a sandstorm or whatever. I mean, this fuckin’ wind is pushing him in the back, in the ass, the backs of his legs. It is trying to push him over the side. It wants him to go over the side. So Fasulo hugs that I-beam. It hurts to hold the thing on account of he has no gloves and the steel is fuckin’ cold, so cold it stings his hands like electric current, and he can feel the cold right through his jacket, which is just a piece-of-shit olive-green Army jacket with a peace-sign patch on the shoulder. He grabbed it off a bench in the Trailways station on St James Ave when this hippyfreak wasn’t looking. Somewhere there was one shivering-cold hippy cocksucker wondering where’s his piece-of-shit Army jacket with the pussy peace-sign patch, and even up here Frankie Fasulo doesn’t forget that. Ha! No wonder the fuckin’ gooks kicked our ass in Vietnam: These fuckin’ Army jackets don’t do shit in the cold! Fasulo tries to look straight ahead, straight out to — what the fuck is that? — Chelsea, Charlestown, some fuckin’ — place, all lit up, and the whole Boston skyline spread out beyond that. It’s beautiful. He’s aware of that: it’s fuckin’ beautiful, man. He tries to take in the view but he can’t keep his eyes from looking down into the darkness under his feet where the water surface is reflecting little lightpoints from the city all around, and how far down is that? It’s like a mile, maybe, he figures, or — how fuckin’ much is a mile anyway? Can a bridge be a mile up? It’s too far. He can’t do it. He can’t let go of that I-beam and step off and just fall and fall. But then, he can’t step back either.

It is March 20, 1977, 4:06 A.M.

‘I can’t do it!’ Fasulo screams but the crosswind up here is so strong he figures maybe nobody can hear so he shouts again, ‘I can’t fuckin’ do it!’

‘Your choice, Frankie,’ comes the voice behind him, all strutty and cool cuz it’s not his fuckin’ ass standing up here on the guardrail a mile-or-whatever above the Mystic fuckin’ River.

Jesus, Fasulo’s legs are shaking so bad, they’re gonna shake him right the fuck off the little rail he’s standing on. He’ll shake all the way down to that black water. But it’s so goddamn cold he can’t hold his muscles still. Or maybe they’re afraid. Maybe his muscles are scared shitless just like the rest of him.

‘I’m getting down!’

‘Your call, Frankie.’

‘What happens if I get down!’

No answer.

‘I said, what happens if I get down?’

‘Just like I said, Frankie, you get a little of what you gave. Only I tell you what, Frankie, I’ll make you a deal. Just to show I’m not a bad guy. I won’t make you suck my dick, how’s that? I won’t give you back everything you did to that cop, Frankie, see?’

‘I didn’t-’

‘You didn’t what, Frankie? Come on, what didn’t you do?’

‘I didn’t!’

‘Now don’t you fuckin’ lie, Frankie! Don’t you fuckin’ do that!’

‘Alrightalrightalright, I did! I did! He wasn’t supposed to be there! We just wanted the money! He shouldn’t have come in like that! What were we supposed to do?’

‘I can’t listen to this shit anymore, Frankie. You can get off either side of that thing, I don’t give a shit which. Just don’t talk anymore, alright? I’m giving you a choice, Frankie. That’s more than you gave that cop. That cop was my friend, Frankie, did you know that? You don’t even know his name, do you? Did you know he was my friend?’

‘I didn’t know.’

‘Well you should have known before you stuck your dick in his mouth, Frankie.’

‘I didn’t! know!’

Fasulo looks down again. Maybe it won’t be so bad. Not so fuckin’ bad. Lot of guys died making the Tobin Bridge, that’s what everybody says. They fell off, maybe, and that’s all there was to it. Some of them even fell into the wet concrete and they got built right into the bridge, isn’t that what people say about this bridge? Isn’t that right? Or do they say that about every fuckin’ bridge? So how bad can it be just falling? Who is this fuckin’ pig? How did he fuckin’find me? Somebody fuckin’ ratted me out, some fuckin’ cocksucker, and I’ll fuckin’ kill that cocksucker, whoever it was, only I won’t kill that cocksucker cuz I’m never gonna get off this FUCKIN’ BRIDGE -

‘Come on, Frankie, we don’t have all night. What’s it gonna be?’

‘I can’t!’

‘You can. Don’t tell me you can’t.’

‘I can’t!’

‘Then don’t. Climb down off of there.’

‘What? You mean it’s off?’

‘Yeah, come on, Frankie. Just climb down.’

But the cop punctuates his offer by racking his gun and that sound — metallic, precise, machined — carries right into Frank Fasulo’s eardrum like the gun is right next to him.

‘Come on, Frankie. Your choice. You want me to do it, or you want to do it yourself?’

‘It’s not right!’

‘Don’t tell me about right, Frankie. This is right, believe me.’

A deep breath — the smell of cold, the taste of it on the tongue like mercury — and Fasulo leans forward slightly, just enough that he begins to lose his balance, begins to spin forward around the pole in his left elbow — begins to turn around the pole like it’s a streetlamp and he’s just going to spin around it — and a step forward and there is nothing under him and the wind is holding him up, he is floating, hanging for just a moment- flying — and then he is not flying but he is falling- and falling and falling- and it’s not so bad after all, not unpleasant at all — he has time to think, to feel the sensation — the wind is loud and it sticks his ears and his cheeks like needles — and it’s blowing his pant legs up over his shins and he can feel the cold on his calves — and his hair whipping in his eyes — and his body begins to cartwheel — and the wind begins to — pull off his coat and on top of the bridge Martin Gittens — in plain clothes — his face unworried and handsome — carefully clips on the safety and puts his Beretta back in its holster because it’s all over now and it had to end this way — nobody needed to tell him what to do only his partner, the big redhead with the full-moon face — a face like a big ball of dough, Gittens likes to say — a face they could use for the first-base bag at Fenway, he likes to say — only Artie Trudell is staring with that big face at the spot where Frank Fasulo the cop-raper and cop-killer went over the edge — staring as if some miraculous wind were going to catch Frank Fasulo and sweep him back up onto the bridge.

‘Kurth, you gettin’ all this?’

Kurth nodded. He was scratching furiously at a legal pad, trying to catch up to Franny I assume he was not trying to copy it all down verbatim. Even so…

‘You need me to go back and tell it again, you just say so.’

‘Don’t worry about me, Franny,’ Kurth said. ‘You just keep talking.’

‘I don’t want you to miss anything. Everybody who hears this story, they tend not to be around when that grand-jury day comes.’ He gave us all a little leer to be sure we got the point: The price for watching this danse macabre was that sooner or later any of us could be pulled from the audience and made to join in.

Ten years. That’s how long it has taken before Artie Trudell can no longer bear the thought of Frank Fasulo going over the side of the Tobin Bridge. Ten years of returning to that bridge over and over in his thoughts. Ten years of seeing Fasulo up on the parapet, hugging that beam and screaming to make himself heard above the wind, ‘I can’t!’ — then stepping — no, he did not step, not at first — he leaned, Artie Trudell distinctly remembers that — he leaned the way a diver does at the beginning of a dive when he tips his chest forward ever so slightly, listing, tipping, extending the moment of counterbalance, feeling the accelerating pull of gravity as the diver surrenders — Artie Trudell can feel that fatal instant of imbalance, when the body’s weight begins to move not forward but downward — he can feel it, the irreversible loss of balance. Then Fasulo spun — oh, that awful rotation of his body, that half-turn to his left caused by his hand still gripping the I-beam — the twirl, again so like a diver’s, that suggested Fasulo could not let go, that he had not decided to jump but was falling or being pushed — pushed by Gittens — not Artie, Gittens — and then the hand slipping off the beam and Fasulo disappearing over the edge. Artie Trudell had not been able to move, of course. He could not even pull his eyes away from the spot on the guardrail where Fasulo went over. So Trudell did not actually see the man in free-fall, but that has not spared him the visions of it. No, it has only unleashed his imagination to conjure up endless vertiginous falls — tumbling and spinning in the black emptiness of cold and stars — speed and terror of such purity — and impact… Trudell never quite reaches the moment of impact. He wakes up or he simply stops replaying the scene before Frank Fasulo slams into the water.

Ten years of this.

It was not so bad at the beginning. At first, there was a — period of shock when the whole thing seemed unreal. The memory was too sharp, too big, like a movie. Trudell stuffed it down into the same dark hole where he kept the other ghoulies. He ‘repressed’ it, as observers would later say.

And when it began to claw its way out of that hole, Trudell went to Gittens, because who else could he take his murderer’s guilty conscience to? And Gittens would soothe him. Gittens saw the big picture. Gittens reminded him what Fasulo had done. Rape, murder. And not just the cop in the Kilmarnock, bad as that was. Frank Fasulo was evil, Gittens said. Fasulo got what he had coming to him, and who knows how many other lives were saved because of it. Martin Gittens slept like a newborn babe, he claimed, he slept the sleep of the just. Those little counseling sessions would take for a while too. They would calm Trudell and allow him to go about his business of patrolling, first as a beat cop, then as a Narcotics detective in the Flats, the hot zone, where everyone wanted to be. That’s where Artie Trudell is now. Area A-3 Narcotics — Mission Flats. ‘Little Beirut,’ the cops call it, and who’s to say it isn’t worse than the actual Beirut in this hot summer of ’87? And didn’t Martin Gittens stick by him? Didn’t Gittens smooth the way for him? Even Julio Vega — who seems to know more about department politics than the Commissioner himself — Vega, who always keeps a jealous eye on the guy above him in the rankings — even Vega knows Gittens is a man to trust. So if Gittens says it was the right thing, then it must be the right thing. Period.

But in this summer of 1987 Frank Fasulo has begun to crawl back into Artie Trudell’s consciousness in a new and surprising way. Trudell stopped using the Tobin Bridge long ago. Now, on those rare occasions when he has to get to the North Shore, he makes the long sweep around Route 128, the ring road around Boston. A few extra minutes of driving time is a small — price to — pay for avoiding the nightmares that crossing the Tobin dredges up. But there is another bridge Trudell has to cross, one he can’t avoid. It is the Sagamore Bridge, one of two bridges that separate Massachusetts from Cape Cod. The Sagamore is a high bridge, much more graceful than the Tobin, a 1930s WPA project that spans the Cape Cod Canal. And isn’t it Artie Trudell’s dumb luck that his in-laws have a place in Dennis? That his wife insists on going to the Cape, for the kids, she says? Trudell is able to wiggle out of most of these trips. He can pile on the details and the double-shifts and jam up his schedule so tight in the summertime that there isn’t time for trips to Cape Cod. Sorry, honey. But there are too many weekends to avoid it altogether, and eventually she starts in with ‘do you mean to tell me you never even get a day off, Artie? Not one day? Are you the only cop in Boston?’ So Artie Trudell — who never liked to fight, giant though he is — has to face the Sagamore Bridge. Twice each trip, once on the way down, once on the way back. These crossings are causing a kind of anxiety that Trudell can’t quite explain. He even looked it up in the DSM, the dictionary of neuroses, the bible for crazies like Artie Trudell feels himself becoming. The proper name for it is gephyrophobia, the fear of crossing bridges, and Trudell’s anxiety is nothing compared to some of the case histories in the book. There are people — wack jobs — who get it so bad they can’t even be near a bridge, never mind on one. Trudell’s anxiety is nothing like that. But it is real enough. He becomes irritable, distracted, he sweats, especially when the Cape traffic leaves him up on that bridge for fifteen, twenty minutes at a time. He dreads the ride home and can’t sleep the night before. Now, in the summer of ’87, it has gotten worse, much worse, because each crossing triggers memories of Frank Fasulo. Every trip to the Cape to see his goddamn in-laws, every trip across the goddamn Sagamore Bridge triggers another round of dreams and night-sweats and worries. And visions: Frank Fasulo tipping forward like a chopped-down tree. Fasulo spinning around the bridge support like Gene Kelly on that lamppost in Singin’ in the Rain. Fasulo diving downward at such speeds… By July, Trudell is barely sleeping, and the guilt and exhaustion have begun to feed each other. Artie Trudell feels himself draining away.

And at some point he realizes the truth: He has committed a murder. The revelation does not come all at once like a bolt of lightning. No, one day it is simply there and Trudell can’t be quite certain when it arrived. Maybe it has always been there and he chose not to see it. But there it is, the undeniable truth — Artie Trudell is a murderer. Or an accomplice or a coconspirator or a joint venturer or whatever the lawyers will choose to call it. The technical term does not really matter. Whatever name the lawyers assign, Trudell knows the truest description is the simplest: MURDERER. He knows, at any rate, that he can’t live with the secret any longer.

So now it’s Monday, August 3, 1987, two weeks before the raid on the red-door apartment.

‘I’m going to see Franny,’ Trudell announces.

Gittens does not react. He can see Artie Trudell’s big face in front of him and he knows Artie is just about at the end of his rope. He looks like shit. His eyes are rimmed with red, his complexion is chalky. Gittens does not want to spook him.

‘I don’t know what else to do, Martin. We killed that guy.’

‘Shh. Keep your voice down, big man.’

They are in the locker room of the Area A-3 station-house, a cinder-block basement that looks and smells precisely like a school gym locker. The floor is painted concrete. Fluorescent lights hum overhead. It is eleven P.M. and the room is empty. Still, Gittens and Trudell act as if they are in a crowd. Seated on opposite benches, they lean close to each other and whisper. This is the A-3, the Hotel No-tell. We take care of our own problems here — and anyone who looks at Artie Trudell will realize there is a very big problem.

‘Martin, I don’t know what to do.’ Trudell squeezes his head with the heels of his hands as if he could squeeze the thoughts of the MURDERED man back down. ‘I don’t know what to do.’

Gittens takes Trudell by the wrists and pulls his hands off his head. ‘Come on, Artie, stop that.’

‘Jesus, Martin.’

‘Come on, Artie, what?’

‘I was a fuckin’ altar boy!’

‘Well, you probably won’t get that job back.’

‘I’m a murderer. We murdered him.’

‘No. We’ve been all through this. It wasn’t murder, Artie. You know what was going to happen to that guy? He was going to get caught and he was going to Walpole for life. End of story. He was already dead. You can’t kill someone who’s already dead.’

‘I don’t believe that.’

‘Artie, if we didn’t do it, the guy would still be alive today. Would that be right, after what he did? He might even get parole, Artie, think about that. His lawyer would say he was all coked up and they’d knock it down to second-degree and that’s only fifteen years to parole. Would you want to see that, Artie? Would you want to see Fasulo back on the street while that cop he killed is still dead as dirt? That wouldn’t be right, now, would it? That cop is dead and he’s going to stay dead.’

‘I feel like I’m dead too.’

It looks to Gittens like Trudell is about to cry, so he stops explaining and simply soothes. ‘Shh, shh. Come on, cut that shit out. Come on. Artie, you’ve got to pull it together.’

‘I’m going to ask Franny what to do.’

‘That’s a mistake.’

‘I don’t care.’

‘You will care, Artie. What do you think Franny’s going to say? You think you can walk up to a DA and confess to murder and then just walk away? Think of the position you’re putting him in. Don’t do that to Franny. He’ll have to report it. They’ll put away the both of us. They’ll have to.’

‘I don’t care anymore.’

‘No? You want to be a murderer?’

‘We’ll tell them it was, whattayacallit, “heat of passion.”’

‘Artie, Andrew Lowery won’t give two shits about heat of passion. Neither will the jury. They’ll string us up. Anyway, it wasn’t heat of passion; we waited more than a week. Guess what? That’s called first-degree murder, my friend. That’s life without parole. You want to go to Walpole for life? Is that what you want? You got a wife, you got two kids. How you gonna go to Walpole for life?’

Trudell doesn’t answer.

‘You’ve got to pull yourself together, big man, you hear me? Pull your shit together. We didn’t murder anyone.’

‘I didn’t murder anyone,’ Trudell corrects him.

Gittens glares.

‘I was just standing there. You were the one with the gun.’

Gittens glares.

‘I’m just saying, Martin. I didn’t do anything.’

Gittens glares.

Trudell retreats again. ‘I’m just saying.’

‘Look, Artie, don’t talk like that. That’s the wrong way to think. We’ve got to stick together on this.’

No response.

‘Artie, just promise me you won’t do anything until you talk to me, alright? Can you give me your word on that? Can you promise me you won’t say anything to Franny or anyone else until we talk again? That’s all I ask. Can you give me your word on that?’

Trudell shakes his head no then shakes his head yes. ‘Yeah. I guess. But not forever, Martin, you hear me? This can’t go on forever. I can’t do it. I’m coming apart here.’

Gittens studies Trudell’s great elephantine head, then nods in sympathy. ‘Alright, big man. You just hang in there, alright? We’ll figure something out. Just don’t do anything stupid, okay? Give me some time to figure something out.’

‘Did he come to you, Franny?’

‘Yeah, he came to me.’

‘And?’

‘He told me the whole thing, just like I’m telling you. Told me he was a murderer, and what should he do? I-’ Franny’s pudgy fingers worked his cheeks. ‘I wasn’t sure. I needed time to think about it. You don’t just roll out of bed and indict a cop for murder. I told Artie he did the right thing coming to me and all. But deep down I wasn’t sure he did the right thing. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know any of it. See, Artie was right: He was a murderer. We could have prosecuted him, sure. So here was this friend coming to me for help, and what was I gonna do? I didn’t know. I said I’d figure out the best way to handle it and get back to him but he should get himself a lawyer too. In the end, it was going to be up to the DA, Lowery, whether to indict the both of them or just Gittens. It was Lowery’s call. You could cut Artie a deal maybe, but they were both up there on that bridge. I didn’t know what to do.’

His eyes fell back to that picture on the desk.

‘I hesitated.’

Artie Trudell has a sense something is wrong. A mounting uneasiness about this raid. He can’t point to anything specific. There’s nothing obviously out of-place. The investigation, the warrant, the adrenaline rush as the team waits outside the red door — he and Julio Vega have gone through fifty doors like this one, maybe a hundred, maybe more. By now — August 17, 1987, 2:26 AM. — the crack wars have been raging through the Flats for so long, raids like this have become a fact of life. Even the shadowy presence of Harold Braxton and his violent crew is not the source of Trudell’s unease. Trudell has hit the Mission Posse before, after all. In the Flats, everyone hits the Mission Posse. Besides, Braxton is a businessman. He won’t fight to protect this place. He won’t leave any of his prized goons in the apartment to defend it. Braxton will sacrifice it and move on. That’s how it works with these Posse stashpads: The cops cut off an arm, another grows; they cut off a leg, another grows. On and on, forever and ever, amen. No, it is not the usual dangers that have Artie Trudell on edge tonight. It is something inchoate and inarticulable. The sort of nameless foreboding that causes people to refuse to board airplanes or to listen for footsteps. Something in the air.

Maybe it is everything else. Maybe it is the same static that is in Trudell’s head every day now, the background noise that has come to obscure every other thought: Frank Fasulo, gephyrophobia, the Sagamore Bridge. MURDERER. Of course Gittens will find a way out of all that. Gittens is still helping him out, helping him keep up appearances. It was Gittens, after all, who set up this raid by feeding Trudell and Vega the tip from Raul. Hasn’t it always been Gittens who nurtured Trudell’s career ever since he and Vega came to Narcotics? Hasn’t Gittens always been able to find a way out?…

Stop! Trudell has to silence the torrent of thoughts. For the next ten minutes, he has to block all that out. After the raid he can go back to dwelling on Frank Fasulo, but right now there is only room for one thought — get through that door and get home alive. This is the moment of supreme danger for any cop, and Artie Trudell knows it. Static could get him killed. Or is that what Artie wants?

It is probably just the heat that is troubling the big policeman. The air is viscous. It is hard to breathe this stuff. Even the walls are damp. Trudell wasn’t built for this kind of heat. His clothes are soggy with sweat. His face is sweaty. His balls are sweaty. The palms of his hands. Sweat is running down the crack of his ass. Let’s just get this over, he thinks. Let’s just get it over and get back to the station where there’s air conditioning.

He and Vega are standing on opposite sides of the door frame, backs to the wall. Vega nods toward the red door and gives Trudell a look: Bad door, Artie man. Bad juju.

Trudell musters a smile. He used to be the carefree one, Trudell was. The big kid. The big kidder. Now he summons up a little of the old playfulness to smile and flex his biceps at his partner. No problem, JV. They haven’t built a door strong enough.

The cops on the raid team are getting restless. It is dangerous sitting around out here. They need to go or call it off. They can’t just sit here with their dicks in their hands. Trudell can sense their itchiness. Everyone there knows he and Vega have never led a raid before. Everyone is watching to see what sort of leaders these two will be.

Vega gives the nod.

Trudell steps in front of the door, hoists the black battering ram off his forearm and grasps the two handles. The concrete-filled waterpipe is unbelievably heavy, even for Trudell. It looks like a torpedo that he is about to load into the back of a cannon.

Vega counts down: five fingers, four fingers, three fingers, two fingers — on one, he points at Trudell.

Boom!

The battering ram shakes the door. The hallway reverberates.

‘Come on, big man,’ Vega mutters.

Boom!

There is sweat dripping off Trudell’s face but he does not have a free hand to wipe it. It runs into his eyes. It stings a little. He breathes deep. Work on one spot! Keep hitting the same spot till it gives way! He finds a point on the red door, about shoulder level. Trudell focuses on that spot — where a crack has begun to open- one more blow right there- a crack- and on the opposite side of the door, the same crack- inside the apartment, the same little fissure in the wood- and that is precisely where Martin Gittens stands with a rifle — a pump-action Mossberg 500 shotgun — the barrel just inches from the red door.

Gittens is wearing dainty white cotton gloves, jeweler’s gloves, to avoid marring the fingerprints that are already on the gun. These are Braxton’s fingerprints, of course; the gun was seized nine months before. Gittens will have to pump the gun between rounds. That means he will have one shot, maybe two. Then he’ll have to bug out.

He sights along the barrel to that weak point, the fissure in the door. That is where the battering ram is being held — and six inches higher — no, higher still, because Artie Trudell is so goddamn big — eight inches above the point of impact. Boom! The door rocks again, and the whole building shudders. The floor beneath Gittens’s feet quivers with the impact.

Gittens raises the rifle to take dead aim at Artie Trudell’s head — deep breath — slow, cool breath — and squeeze.

‘I suspected it even then,’ Franny told us. ‘I didn’t know for sure, but I had my suspicions. Artie’d told me what Gittens did to Fasulo. Then the way Gittens got to the red door so fast that night and jumped in front of the door without a second thought… I had my doubts. But I kept my mouth shut because it still looked like Braxton was the guy. Now I’m certain. Vega’s dead, and I’m certain. Gittens shot Artie. I just know it.’

‘And Raul? Who was Raul?’

Franny shrugged. ‘Maybe there was a Raul, maybe not. Maybe Gittens did get a tip from some rat and he used it to set up Artie. I figure there was no Raul — Gittens was Raul. But what’s the difference? Gittens was the shooter, that’s all that matters. Who knows, maybe Braxton was Raul. All those years Gittens had this know-it-all snitch in the Flats, and all those years Braxton managed to skate on just about everything. That sure sounds like someone was protecting him. But I don’t know. We’ll never get the truth about Raul.’

‘But you stood up in court, you vouched for it. You said the whole story about Raul was the truth.’

‘Chief Truman, I’m a lawyer. I wasn’t there. I only know what my witnesses tell me.’

‘Bullshit.’ John Kelly, who’d been listening to the entire tale in silence, practically spat the word in Franny’s face. ‘Gittens lied, and you played along. You knew something wasn’t right, but it was easier to prosecute Braxton with lies than to figure out what Gittens was really up to.’

John Kelly glared at Franny with obvious contempt, as if Kelly, not Braxton, had been the victim of Franny’s cowardice and lying.

‘I-’ Franny fell silent. The little burst of composure and vitality that had carried him through the story was extinguished. You could almost see the light go out. For all his brio and talent, Franny Boyle’s life since 1987 had been a relentless ebbing. He must have felt himself receding from that time, carried off by the current.

‘If you need me to testify,’ Franny said to no one in particular, ‘I’ll do it. I said the same thing to Danziger.’

Kurth asked Caroline, ‘You want Gittens picked up?’

She shook her head no. ‘We have three murders and no proof of any of them. There’s no one left who was on that bridge the night Fasulo was killed. With Vega dead, there’s no one who can tell us firsthand about the night Trudell died. And there’s no one who was in that cabin when Danziger was shot. Three murders, zero witnesses. I’d say Detective Gittens covered his tracks perfectly’

‘We do have one witness,’ I said. ‘Harold Braxton.’