The Year We Disappeared (8 page)

The female doctor in the clinic set me up, sprayed something into my eyes, and shined a light from the side onto my eye’s surface. She then began trying to pull glass slivers from my eyes
with some fine tweezers. I don’t know if you’ve ever had somebody poke something at your eye and tell you to sit still, but I couldn’t do it. As soon as she would touch my eye, I’d blink and flinch no matter how hard I tried not to.

Another doctor walked in during the procedure and gave the woman a dressing down. “You never do that!” he yelled at her. “Now let’s see what we’ve got here . . .” and he leaned in and moved the light around to get a look at the glass too. After his examination, I was set up with a full operating theater procedure. This is a surgery done in an operating room surrounded with glass windows, and behind the windows are chairs set up for the audience—other doctors. I guess the eye doctor decided that if this woman didn’t know how to extract glass from someone’s eyeball, maybe the other docs didn’t either, and he was going to demonstrate. On me.

I was conscious for the procedure, but they numbed my eyes with a special anesthetic. I could see but not feel anything, even the urge to blink. They managed to get all the glass out. When they were done, my right eye needed a patch over it, and the next morning, I woke up with two black eyes. The oral surgeon crew came in to see me, including Dr. Keith. “I want that eye patch off,” he told the other doctor. “It makes us look bad, like we missed the glass.” They were taking me into another surgical theater that day, but not for a procedure, just show and tell. They wanted to show the other doctors at the hospital, especially those in the oral surgery department, what they had done on me so far. I guess they didn’t want the Eye and Ear guys to get all the credit.

Before taking me out of my room for anything, my security guys always checked out where I was going, what path we would take, and how best to get me there safely. John Ayoub, a Falmouth policeman who also grew up in Dedham, was the senior officer running my security detail the day of the show and tell, so he had to approve moving me anywhere the security wasn’t as good as my room. John checked out the space. It was a big amphitheater in Mass General called the “Ether Dome”—the location of the first successful demonstration of ether as an anesthesia back in the mid-1800s. Historical significance aside, the place was big and open and all the doctors at the hospital were invited to come and check out my face, so security was an issue. John called in for more guards, and they added a couple of guys at each entrance to check hospital IDs on anyone coming and going.

Once the security was set up, a couple of guards and orderlies wheeled me down to the Ether Dome. It’s actually a beautiful space, with stadium seating along one side and a center stage lit by a stained-glass dome overhead. It feels almost more like a church than a hospital. The seats quickly filled with doctors. My doctors brought my X-rays and displayed them on a big lighted board. They talked about what they’d done so far and how they planned to rebuild my face. When they got to the part about future surgeries, one doctor said that it would take years to do the type of reconstruction they wanted to attempt. I felt my chest tighten up at the mention of years—who knew how I was going to eat, talk, or even breathe between now and then.

I noticed one older-looking doctor in the audience nodding off, and by midlecture, he was heavily asleep. Made me nervous to think that this guy might be taking care of other patients in the hospital, and I hoped that he wouldn’t be in charge of anything involving my care.

When they were done with me, it was back to my bed, tubes, breathing machine, eye patch, and pain meds. The room was starting to look a little bit like a shrine—my Catholic mother was a true believer and thought that if she attached enough saints’ medals and prayers to my hospital bed that I would survive. She had even added a signed photo of the Pope on my bedside table.

On my fifth day in the hospital, I was holding my own when two good friends and former fellow officers, Arthur Pina and Mickey Mangum, came in to see me for a serious talk. The Falmouth Police Department was probably similar to a lot of other small-town police departments in that a great deal of the regular officers were doing part-time work as something else—some of them were school bus drivers/operators and a few worked in construction. Working as a cop didn’t pay great, so it was nice to have something else on the side.

Some of the guys were what we called RACs: rent-a-cops, or “summer specials,” since the population of the town—and the crime rate—swelled in the summertime. Most of our RACs were guys who had full-time gigs in law enforcement, local government, or just about anything else from carpentry to bus driving and took on the part-time police work during the summers.

About the time I came on the force in 1970, the town had grown enough that it needed to start hiring so-called “outsiders” to be on the force. Even though I’d grown up just outside Boston, I would be considered an outsider because I wasn’t a Falmouth boy. So we started getting full-time cops on the force who, like myself, came from outside Falmouth and wanted to do police work—not part-time police work. Some lines were drawn in the department, unspoken but still there. For the most part, I got along with everyone on the force—I didn’t care where you were from as long as you were doing your job.

But even with new blood, the majority of the cops on the Falmouth force were still locals, especially the senior guys and the brass—all the way to the top—and they definitely believed in selective law enforcement. We could ticket, arrest, and hassle the tourists and Southie bums all we wanted, but there were some locals who were untouchable. No matter what they were guilty of, we were supposed to look the other way. That’s just how it was done.

Mickey Mangum had been a North Carolina state trooper who started as a summer RAC and then became a full-time regular shortly after I started on the force. But Mickey didn’t quite get the unspoken rules when he joined the force and was so gung-ho arresting and ticketing locals that they took him off the street and put him on permanent desk duty. He was allowed to use a cruiser only to go home to supper with his wife and kids. That is, until a rookie whom he had trained arrested a
“connected” local for DUI. The next day, her ticket was cleared by the chief and removed from the log book. Mickey complained to the chief, but nothing came of it. Except for the fact that after that, Mickey had to bring his supper or have it delivered—he was now officially a troublemaker, and they didn’t want him out in a patrol car if they could help it. Two years before I was shot he resigned from the force, but not before writing a nice long letter to the town officials, letting them know all about the issues and cronyism in the police department. Didn’t make a difference. At the time of my shooting, he was working for the community college, teaching law enforcement.

Arthur Pina was a local guy from West Falmouth, worked full time for the Department of Motor Vehicles and part time as a cop in the summers. Nicknamed “the Bear,” Arthur was six foot five and around three hundred pounds. His size came in handy on party raids—when the first cop on the scene completely fills the doorway, things have a tendency to quiet down quickly. But for his size, Arthur didn’t have a mean bone in his body—a good guy with a good heart. Before long, Polly and I were spending time with Arthur and his wife, Cynthia, and our kids were playing with their two daughters.

I worked with Arthur and Mickey for years, both of them good guys on the right side of the law, so when the two of them came to see me, I knew they weren’t there to talk about the weather. Mickey got right to it and told me that he’d heard the following story: the morning after my shooting, Raymond
Meyer shows up at the back of the police station to empty the Dumpster. Meyer is a local character running Falmouth’s garbage disposal under contract, but he’s got a bunch of guys who work for him. There’s no reason for him to personally pick up the trash outside the station, unless he wants to be there.

“And guess who climbs right up into the truck with him?” Mickey asked me. I wrote the name “Monty” on my notebook and showed it to him, referring to a cop on the force who we all knew was dirty. But Mickey shook his head. “Nope, Larry Mitchell. And they’re having a good chat. After that, Ray leaves and no one has seen him since.” Mitchell is a cop and also a friend of Meyer’s, so this came as no surprise to me. But the thought of a fellow officer casually chatting with the chief suspect in my shooting wasn’t just troubling, it was infuriating. I felt my heart beating faster, the machine monitoring my heart rate by the bed keeping time with the blips.

I wrote, “Has he been questioned?” Arthur explained that the district attorney, Philip Rollins, was away on vacation until Tuesday and was just now getting back into his office. He’s the one who had to order the investigation.

I was confused. No one had asked Meyer anything yet? It had been about five days since I was shot. I’d told everyone—or rather, I’d written notes to every cop who had been in to visit me—that I knew who wanted me dead. Maybe Meyer didn’t shoot me himself, but if he didn’t, then he hired whoever did. This was simple cut-and-dried police work. I was shot. I told my
fellow officers that there was only one person I suspected. And no one had even talked to this dirtbag yet?

I wanted to ask our chief of police, John Ferreira, what the hell was going on, but he still hadn’t found the time to visit the hospital. Then it dawned on me that he wasn’t going to. He didn’t want to see me, to have to face me. He didn’t want to answer my questions. There was a big difference between looking the other way when a town selectman is caught driving drunk and looking the other way when an attempt is made on a police officer’s life.

While I was figuring this out, Mickey was still talking, all heated up about the force, about who was connected to whom, and how pissed he was. But I was only half listening. In my head, I was already making plans. I didn’t have the time to wait for the police detectives to botch the investigation like I knew they would. Even if they did their jobs and linked my shooting to Meyer, I had a sinking feeling that he would never pay a high enough price for it.

Since the shooting, I’d been focused on survival. My survival, my family’s survival. But now I was mad—beyond that, I was consumed with hatred for this guy. It was clear to me that as soon as I was well enough to leave the hospital, I needed to get a gun, one that couldn’t be traced, and go after Meyer myself.

Mickey asked me if I knew who I could trust on the force. He asked who was watching my family, who did they have on detail guarding my room. He was trying to ease me into some
harsh facts: someone on the force knew my work schedule; someone told Meyer where I lived and exactly when I would be driving to work. Mickey was a smart guy. He was thinking like I was thinking. Meyer wasn’t the only one involved. This wasn’t over. It was just beginning.

ON Tuesday morning, Lauren and Cassie went back to school. My brothers and I went swimming and watched TV and hung out. Aunt Kate had taken time off from work to be at home with us, and when she wasn’t there, Uncle Joe was.

In the afternoon, we got out our cousins’ art supplies and made a few more cards for Dad. We had been making cards every day for Mom to take to him in the hospital. I used crayons to draw a picture of our house on Cape Cod, the little red house with a big yellow sun over it, and I added some colorful flowers in our front yard that weren’t really there but I thought they looked nice.

Eric drew a mini comic book of an imaginary superhero he had invented years ago called “Super Hippo.” Super Hippo was wearing a red cape with the letters “SH” on it and doing feats with his super strength. The drawings were pretty good.

Shawn was the real artist, though. Like Mom, he could draw
anything. So he did a picture of Spider-Man, using a comic book to get it just right. It looked like a store-bought card when he was done with it. We left the cards for Mom so she could take them to Dad the next day.

Around the time that Lauren and Cassie came home from school, my grammie showed up at the house along with our uncle Brian, my mom’s other brother. They had been to the hospital to visit my dad. Uncle Brian sat down on the couch and put his head in his hands like he had a bad headache. It seemed like Grammie couldn’t stop crying. Uncle Joe helped her to sit down, and she asked me to sit next to her so she could put her arm around me. I’d never seen her cry, so it was a little scary. I didn’t know what to do to make her feel better, so I just sat there. “You’re so young,” she kept saying, hugging me tighter. She took off her glasses and wiped the tears off them. “You’re just a little girl, nine years old. You’re the same age your mother was when my Floyd died.”

I knew that she was talking about my grandfather, Floyd, my mom’s father, who had died a long time ago in a canoe accident in Maine. After diving in to help rescue a drowning friend, he struck his head on a rock and never came back up—they didn’t find his body until days later, miles downriver. Grammie always said that he was the love of her life, and I guess it was true because she never even went on so much as a date with another man after he died. “Your poor mother, to have to go through what I went through . . . ,” Grammie said, sobbing.

Uncle Brian didn’t say anything, but sometimes he would look over at me and shake his head like I had done something bad. Eventually Uncle Joe told us kids to go down to the playroom and stay down there until Grammie felt better.

When we got downstairs, Cassie and Lauren got out their Barbie playhouse and gave me a Barbie doll to use. I never played with Barbies; I didn’t have any at home. Having two older brothers around meant that I mostly did what they did: riding bikes, skateboarding, playing Atari and
Star Wars
make-believe. It was nice to have two girls to play with, and to play dress up with their dolls.

“You know why Grammie is crying?” Lauren asked me. “Because your dad is going to die,” she said, putting a form-fitting sparkly gold dress on her Barbie. She held up her doll and started brushing its hair. “But you’re lucky,” she pointed out, “because at least you don’t have to go to school.”