Mission Flats (29 page)

‘We picked him up last night. He won’t talk. He says he wants you, and if you won’t come, he wants Max Beck.’

‘But Lowery told me I was off the case.’

‘You are off the case.’ She crossed her arms, tipped her head forward, and eyed me from beneath her brow, the stern-mother look. ‘Are you saying you don’t want to do it?’

‘No, it’s just . . . I’m surprised you’re asking.’

‘Look, Ben, this isn’t exactly the way we’d want to do it. But we don’t have enough to hold him, so we don’t have much choice. If bringing you in to do the interrogation gets Braxton to talk, then that’s what we have to do.’

‘Even though I’m a suspect too.’

‘We’ll be listening. To both of you.’

‘Why should I help you?’

‘If you get anything out of him, it could only be to your benefit.’

‘And if I don’t?’

She did not answer.

I asked John Kelly what he thought.

‘It has to be your decision, Ben. If you decided to stay out of it, no one could blame you.’

‘I guess it’s already too late for that, isn’t it?’

‘Good,’ Caroline said decisively. ‘Kurth is waiting outside to drive us.’ She tossed me a shirt from the little pile she’d made. It was a conservative white button-down oxford. ‘Your shirt was all bloody. I got this for you.’

‘Thank you. What do I owe you?’

‘You get Braxton to talk, we’ll call it even.’

Her tone was mechanical, unfamiliar, cool.

‘Caroline, can we talk for a minute?’

‘We have nothing to talk about.’

John Kelly began to excuse himself, but his daughter told him to stay put.

‘Alright then,’ I said. ‘Okay Thank you for the shirt.’

She pinched out a little half smile that was pained and sardonic in equal measure. ‘Usually,’ she observed, ‘it’s the defense lawyer who puts the murderer in a clean shirt.’

30

In those last few days of its existence, there was a sense of fatigue about the old Boston Police headquarters on Berkeley Street. The building seemed ready to heave a sigh of exhaustion before expiring. (A month or so later, the Boston police moved to a glass box further up Tremont Street, a sleek modern building for a sleek modern department. That was the idea, anyway.)

Kurth and Caroline led John Kelly and me to an interview room down the hall from the Homicide office. It was a gloriously run-down little room with cracked paint and cloudy windows. The only concessions to modernity were a drip coffeepot and a toxic-looking air conditioner that blocked half of one window. Otherwise the flatfoots who’d worked here during Prohibition would have recognized the room straightaway.

We met the remainder of our team, such as it was. District Attorney Lowery was turned out in a maize bow tie and stylish cap-toed shoes. I could see my distorted reflection in the convex lenses of his spectacles. He greeted me with a grim nod. Martin Gittens shook my hand with extra care, a soulful two-hander, and asked about my injuries. His sudden concern for my well-being was a relief after the high drama of the day before. I took it as a sign that his suspicions of me had abated for some reason. Perhaps I’d earned a measure of trust now that I’d been blooded in combat. That was what I wanted to believe, anyway. Probably it was what Gittens wanted me to believe too; he used the momentum of my own panic – my neediness – against me in a kind of emotional judo.

We moved to a cramped room behind a one-way mirror. From this room, Lowery warned, my conversation with Braxton would be watched and recorded. ‘You’ll be on that tape too, Chief Truman,’ he said, ‘not just Braxton.’ I told him, ‘Well, that should help me relax.’ Kelly, looming over the group like a protective daddy, gave me a reproachful look. It said,
Ben, just shut up.

Braxton was brought into the interview room, two uniform cops at his sides. He wore drooping jeans, flannel shirt, and a Brooklyn Dodgers cap embroidered with Jackie Robinson’s number 42. Cuffed at the ankles, he inched his way to the chair in geisha steps. After Braxton sat down, one of the cops cuffed his right foot to the chair leg and left him alone in the room. He stared into the mirror as if he could see through it, as if he were watching us.

And for a minute or so we watched him too. I’d seen Braxton only the day before, but this was my first chance to look at him for any length of time. I searched for some manifestation of his famous lethality. From the overheated descriptions of Braxton, I half expected him to glow like a hot coal. But his physical appearance was disappointing, just as his mug shot had been. He was quite small, maybe five-nine or so, and wiry hard. His manner was all street-corner badass. He manufactured a sneer; he folded his arms (or as nearly folded them as the handcuffs would allow). But there was a sense of disingenuousness about all the posing. It was theater. Braxton was acting out the role of a gangster, but it was someone else’s vision of a gangster, not his. Maybe it was all for our benefit. We demanded a certain style from him – a style that may have owed more to Hollywood than to Mission Flats, but we wanted it just the same – so he gave it to us. His eyes moved around the room, and he seemed to calculate and recalculate his position.

‘Let’s go,’ Braxton said to the mirror.

Kurth escorted me into the hall. ‘Give him his rights, make sure he signs the card,’ he instructed. He handed me an orange Miranda card. His eyes drilled into me: ‘Remember, we’re listening.’

And a moment later I was sitting opposite Harold Braxton.

‘Hi,’ I said.

No response.

Braxton’s nearness came as a surprise. In the observation room, the one-way glass and tinny speakers had exaggerated the distance between us. He had been a figure on a TV screen, glassed in, mediated, broadcast from a studio who-knew-where. But now, separated by just a few feet of photo-wood tabletop, Harold Braxton was undeniably present.

‘I need to inform you of your rights,’ I said, and I recited the Miranda catechism. When it was done, I slid the card toward him. ‘You have to sign it.’

He flexed the card between his thumb and index finger, then slid it back as if unsatisfied with its tensile strength.

‘I can’t talk to you without that signature.’

‘No.’

I slid the card back. ‘Just sign it. Otherwise I’m out of here.’

A smile played around his mouth. He signed the card – almost as a favor to me, I thought, to reassure me.

‘Do you know a guy named Ray Ratleff?’

‘Knew him, yeah.’

‘What do you mean, “knew”?’

‘He’s dead. Didn’t you hear?’

‘Do you know anything about it?’

‘Just what I seen on TV.’

‘Why would anyone want to kill him?’

‘You tell me.’

‘I’m asking you, Harold.’

‘Ray was a junkie. Probably had something to do with it.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Meaning, you hang out with pipeheads and sliders and shit, you usually end up dead. I seen lots of guys like Ratleff. You come to my neighborhood sometime, I’ll show you some.’

‘Have you ever been a slider?’

‘What’s that got to do with Ray Ratleff?’

‘You said yourself, sliders might have done it.’

He smiled. ‘You got my bop. You know what I done.’

‘Your bop?’

‘My record, my Board of Probation record. Those guys have it, I’m sure.’ He nodded toward the mirror. ‘It’s alright, dog, I’ll tell you what’s on it. There’s some juvenile stuff, hot boxing mostly. Then I got two distributions, class B, all powder. Straight probation on both. Some other small shit. Otherwise I’m clean.’

‘Clean? What about Artie Trudell?’

Braxton’s eyebrows crushed downward.

‘The cop who got shot through the door, Harold.’

‘I didn’t have nothing to do with that. That case got dismissed.’

‘Why’d you get charged? Did they just pick your name out of the phone book?’

‘Ask your friend Raul.’

‘Who’s Raul?’ I said.

He smirked.

‘Maybe you’re Raul. That’s the rumor, isn’t it?’

No answer.

This was pointless. ‘Look, are you gonna answer any questions or not? You haven’t told me anything.’

Shrug. ‘Don’t know anything.’

‘Then what are you doing here, Harold?’

‘I got arrested.’

‘You went to the trouble of getting me down here just to tell me you don’t know anything?’

‘Do they really think you capped that DA?’ he asked.

‘I don’t think they know.’

‘Did you?’

‘No.’

‘On your mother’s grave?’

‘On my mother’s grave.’

‘Well I didn’t do it neither.’

‘So that’s it? You’re innocent?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why tell it to me?’

‘This is Boston, dog. B-town. Alabama of the North.’

‘You’re saying it’s a race thing?’

‘It’s always a race thing.’

‘I don’t think so, Harold, not this time. There’s plenty of proof.’

Another caustic smile. He leaned forward, dragging the handcuffs across the table, and rested on his forearms. ‘Let me tell you something,’ he confided. ‘These cops don’t need proof. They can always find proof after they solve the case.’ He stared at me a moment. A dusting of blackheads marred his nose. Otherwise he was handsome, with his brown eyes and monkish ponytail. ‘Go on, finish asking your questions.’

‘Have you ever been to Maine?’

‘Why would I go to some backward-ass—’

‘Is that a no?’

‘Fuck no.’

‘Did you know Robert Danziger?’

‘Course I did.’

‘How did you know him?’

‘He prosecuted me like fifty times.’

‘How did you feel about that?’

‘Oh, I was real thrilled about it.’

‘Answer the question. How did you feel about Danziger prosecuting you over and over?’

‘How would you feel?’

‘It would depend on the circumstances.’

‘That’s right. The man had a job to do. I had no problem with that. There wasn’t nothing between me and him.’

The questions were obtuse and Braxton knew it. There was something approaching friendliness in his tone, in the patronizing way he answered. Criminals often show a false bonhomie toward cops, a desire to connect, an appeal to their goodwill. But this was something worse – he was condescending to me.

‘Where were you Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, when Ray Ratleff was killed?’

‘Party in Grove Park. There were twenty or thirty people there. You want names?’

I got a yellow legal pad from a side table, and Braxton wrote out some names in neat block letters.

‘That all you got?’ he asked.

‘Is there anything else you want to tell me?’

‘I want to talk to you, Chief True-Man.’

‘It’s Ben. Why me?’

‘Because you and me need each other.’

‘Yeah? Why do I need you?’

‘You need to prove you didn’t do it, same as me. They’re going to put it on one of us, right? You can see that, can’t you? So if you figure it out, that helps us both. Now, do you want to go figure it out, for both of us?’

I hesitated.

Braxton looked over my shoulder at the mirror, then his eyes tripped from one corner of the room to another. At the time I thought he was looking for cameras; in fact what he was looking for was a microphone. He leaned forward, rested his chest on the edge of the table and whispered, ‘Come here.’

‘No.’

‘I ain’t gonna hurt you.’

I shook my head.

‘You think I’m gonna beat down some cop
in a police station
? With these on?’ He held up his handcuffed wrists. ‘You think I’m that stupid?’

‘Anything you tell me, Harold, I’m just going to tell them anyway’

‘That’s on you. I figure you’ll do the right thing.’

I leaned forward to listen, warily, like a lion tamer putting his head in the lion’s mouth.

The speed of what happened next shocked me.

Braxton’s hands snapped up over my head. He trapped my neck in the handcuffs and yanked me down against the table. I could not move. The handcuff chain cinched into the back of my neck.

There was shouting behind the mirror, muffled, ‘Hey hey!’

The plastic-wood tabletop was immediately in front of my eye. It was scratched, oily.

I felt Braxton’s mouth inches from my ear. It crossed my mind that he might bite it, gnaw it right off my head.

‘You helped me yesterday in the church. Why?’

‘I don’t know. I didn’t want—’

‘They’re playing you.’ His breath was warm and humid in my ear.

‘What?’

‘They’re playing you, they’re setting you up. And me. Both of us.’

‘Alright, you’re innocent. I get it.’

‘No!’ He thumped me against the tabletop. I felt his frustration. Everybody claims to be innocent; he was telling me something more. ‘I need to tell you—’

A door slammed and feet clattered in the hallway.

Braxton pressed his face close so I could actually feel his lips brush my ear. ‘Find Raul.’

‘What?’

‘Find Raul. It’s got nothing to do with Ratleff.
Follow Raul’

‘Okay’

‘Follow Raul. From Danziger to Trudell, maybe back further. To Fazulo. Watch—’

He never got to finish.

Kelly crossed the room in two long strides and cracked Braxton in the small of the back with the club. The blow made a hollow sound. Braxton arched back. Kelly lifted him bodily away from the table and suspended him against the wall. The chair, still handcuffed to Braxton’s leg, dangled between them.

Once pinned to the wall, Braxton hung there like a doll, offering no resistance. But his face was transformed. He was all sneering badass again. He broadcast disdain – and the pain of the blow to his back – to anyone who cared to register it.