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  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously.

  Copyright © 2016 by Joe Flanagan

  First publication 2016 by Europa Editions

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  Cover Art by Emanuele Ragnisco

  www.mekkanografici.com

  Cover photo © kickimages/iStock

  ISBN 9781609453213

  Joe Flanagan

  LESSER EVILS

  JULY, 1957

  1

  In green shallows, the ocean’s lesser creatures showed themselves. Bland minnows appeared at the edge of clearings in the sea grass, their fish eyes wide with astonishment at having survived another tide. Hermit crabs like long-suffering old refugees hauled their burdens across the bottom, and ragged jellyfish drifted like souls passing through limbo.

  On the beach there was a scattering of people in motionless torpor, fully under the spell of the July sun. Reclining mothers in Ray Bans watched the sluggish movements of their children. Elderly couples peered out from beneath the brims of their hats as though deep in the heart of an old, old dream where even longing and regret had been dulled by the sweltering haze.

  The little colony made a spray of color on the beach with their swimsuits, umbrellas, and coolers. Sometimes a faint breeze came in off the water and touched their cheeks, ruffling the pages of their paperbacks and magazines. It carried a rumor of the wild breathless Atlantic—fish and death and oblivion—and caused people to glance for a moment out to the horizon.

  Between long stretches of wooded desolation were crude clam shacks and lonely houses collapsing in weedy yards, turned into summer souvenir shops without much enthusiasm. Liquor stores appeared, new motor courts, and seafood restaurants. They crowded the road—now a small highway—in a welter of neon and plastic. The theme was maritime kitsch: talking fish, cartoon sea captains, grinning crustaceans, draped fishnets decorated with buoys and painted shells.

  Within a mile, the commercial activity faded. Reeds appeared, a glimpse of ocean, the smell of decay, and then another strip in another town: Eastham, Brewster, Orleans, Chatham.

  In Hyannis, the road formed a wide boulevard of low storefronts. Down a side street there was a block of weathered buildings, dead and empty remnants of the maritime trade, their windows smeared, their gutters sprouting grass. Beside this, a bus station and a small cemetery surrounded by a picket fence.

  From his open window in the police station, Lieutenant Warren watched the stillness. The ticket clerk at the bus station was visible as a phantom behind the glass, a frozen specter that moved only occasionally to turn the page of his book.

  There was a knock on the door and he turned to see Sergeant Garrity push his head in. Garrity looked at the floor and paused before speaking, which meant that the sergeant was delighted to be the bearer of bad news and was savoring it for a moment before passing it along. “Someone to see you, lieutenant.”

  Warren got up and went into the hallway. On the bench across from the sergeant’s desk was Jane Myrna, his son’s summer school teacher, and his son, who went by the name of Little Mike. The young woman looked up. “Mr. Warren,” she said, “We had an accident.”

  Little Mike suddenly became absorbed in a book he had in his lap. It was a primary reader for toddlers with textures you could touch. He was small for his age. His legs stuck out straight from the bench seat, and Warren saw that he had a towel wrapped around his gray flannels. Garrity was a looming presence to the left, rustling papers and closing drawers. Warren motioned for them to follow him into his office. Little Mike trailed his teacher, gathering up the book and the loose ends of the towel, trying to keep it wrapped around his waist.

  In Warren’s office there were no mementos, photographs, or anything to suggest a personal history. He had posted only bulletins, shift rosters, and a calendar from Cameron’s boatyard where he sometimes got extra work as a carpenter. This month showed a poorly composed snapshot of a red-hulled workboat up on jacks and, beyond it, a rough wilderness of pine trees.

  Jane Myrna took a seat in a chair against the wall, while Little Mike sat on the floor behind his father’s desk and opened Pat the Bunny. Warren stood in front of Jane with his hands on his hips and his feet spread apart, then realized it was not the attitude to take and tried for something more relaxed. The demands of his work made social conventions difficult. He was fond of Jane Myrna because she had been so good to Mike and because he believed her to be genuine and virtuous. That was the truth, he assured himself. But the knowledge that it was not the entire truth made him blink and shift his feet. He tried not to gather in the details of her there in his office as she crossed her ankles beneath the chair and looked up at him with an open face. “The boys were teasing him,” she said. “He brought his book to school with him and they saw it. We really try to keep an eye on him but this time they got him off to himself.”

  “Did they hurt him?”

  “I think they just pushed him around a little bit, but you know how he is.”

  “Yes.”

  “He wet his pants.”

  Little Mike was out of sight. Only his soft murmuring could be heard from behind the desk. Jane said, “I would have brought him home to change but I have to get back to my classroom. I figured it would be best to bring him here.”

  Rage and sorrow, by now familiar afflictions, filled the cavity of Warren’s chest like a sudden illness. It came with each incident involving Little Mike, but it never lost its power. He was at a loss now at how to stand before Jane Myrna, once again the aggrieved father, and appear appropriately angry, judicious, compassionate, in command. He didn’t know which it should be. Once they had made the boy eat dog shit. They had talked him into snipping his eyebrows off with scissors in art class. They practiced the wrestling moves they saw on Saturday morning TV and nearly dislocated his shoulder. Mike’s inability to cry was unsettling. It was as if he had received a divine message, one to which his father was not privy—that this was the way it was supposed to be.

  “I think that will be enough for today,” Warren said.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Warren.”

  “It’s not your fault.”

  “I try to keep an eye on him.”

  “I know, Jane. I’m grateful.”

  Jane Myrna went over to Little Mike and said goodbye. On her way to the door, Warren said, “Who were the boys involved?” Her face registered dismay. She had the door part-way open, then closed it. “It was . . . Danny Freitag, Shaggy Hilliard. You know. Those kids.”

  He wrote the names down. “Anyone else?”

  Her distress seemed to deepen. “Ken Reich. Fred Finn. Matt Langella.”

  When she had gone, Warren dropped the sheet of paper on his desk. It wasn’t the first time he’d made such a list. After the episode with the dog shit, he had visited each family. He showed up in uniform, and while it was strictly a personal matter, he did nothing to dispel the impression that he was there on official business. Unspoken insinuations, the ambient atmosphere of threat, and the influence of his position seemed to have had the desired effect. But it had left him with a queasy, shameful feeling and there were rumblings around town later that he had overstepped his bounds.

  Warren sat down behind his desk and looked at the boy. He had the mental capacity of a three-year-old. He had no idea how to camouflage the things about himself that made him stand out and invite abuse. He seemed i
mpervious to the humiliations he suffered regularly, more concerned, it seemed, with the effect they had on his father. Now he held his father’s hand to his chest. “Dad,” he said. “Don’t be sad.” It was his sheer, innocent witlessness that Warren found devastating. That and the uncanny perception of a boy so impaired. It was as if after each episode, he had to audition for his father’s acceptance, just to make sure he still had it, to make sure the latest abuse hadn’t caused a seismic shift in the only sure thing he knew. He seemed to feel that after each humiliation he could face the ultimate rejection: that his father, his only friend, wouldn’t want him anymore; and these heartrending gestures were his appeal for mercy to the source from which he needed it most.

  “Dad,” he said. “Is there any bad guys here?”

  The sadness that was bearing down on Warren’s center expanded into his throat and stung his eyes. “We might have a couple.”

  “Can I see them?”

  “What do you want to see the bad guys for, Mike?”

  “Dad! Bad guys!”

  “Come on. Let’s go home.”

  Out in the hallway, it was silent, a slow weekday in the middle of summer and no one about. The police station smelled of Pine-Sol and new leather. Warren went out into the bright afternoon with Mike, and when the heavy varnished doors closed behind them, the police station was filled with quiet again. The desk sergeant, who had the florid complexion of a heavy drinker, looked down at the blotter, a sad and sinister little narrative of a brief span of time in a small seacoast community. The hidden life, the appetites, delusions, and mishaps that seemed pettier, dirtier, and more tragic somehow because of the postcard seaside setting. The corners of his mouth turned upward as he ran his fingers over the previous night’s entries: a drunk and violent husband on Willow St. An elderly woman with dementia struck by a car and killed on Route 149 in Mashpee. A six-year-old boy gone missing in Truro.

  At American Legion Post 1124, the bubbles rose in amber beer, the liquid suffused with light from the big picture windows behind the bar overlooking Route 132 and the municipal airfield. The lounge was cool with refrigerated air, and at the three o’clock hour, a lazy frat house conviviality prevailed.

  Denny Nelson was behind the bar polishing glasses. A former Navy cook, Nelson’s routine was comprised of raunchy commentary and tales of his military incompetence. He had become an institution at Post 1124, his oversexed patter and general harmlessness essential to the experience. His brisk motions slowed to a stop as he watched a new Ford two-door pull into the lot. Nelson considered himself a sketch, and while his comments were normally intended for the whole room, he now lowered his voice so that only the men seated at the bar could hear him.

  “General quarters, general quarters. Heavy ordnance coming in the door.”

  A chorus of murmurs traveled down the bar.

  “Oh yeah.”

  “Look at that.”

  “Look who’s here.”

  The man striding across the parking lot was built like a stevedore, massive through the chest and shoulders, legs like tree trunks. His hair was short, spiky in a tight crew cut. He wore a lightweight powder gray suit, a white shirt, and a bright blue tie. In his blazer pocket was a matching blue handkerchief. When he walked into the lounge, Nelson put his heels together and executed an elaborate salute. The newcomer walked through the lounge with his eyes straight ahead in the kind of indulgence sometimes practiced by people who know they are watched. A few men chose not to look at him at all, like the roofers, with their windburned and feral appearance, their bare forearms blackened with tar, who lowered their heads as he passed.

  At the bar, someone said, “He looks just like Aldo Ray, don’t he?” The visitor went to a booth in the dim recesses of the lounge. Once he was seated, Denny Nelson arrived with a dry martini. “Captain Stasiak, sir,” he said. “How are you?”

  “What do you say, Nellie.”

  Dale Stasiak had the uniform tan of a film star, even down to his scalp, which shone through the fine bristles of his crew cut. While there was little transition between his shoulders and his head and he was a bit thick in the lips, he did not have the face of an extraordinarily stocky man. His features were those you would see on a man of finer proportions, yet the whole assembly composed a look that was hard and authoritative. His eyes were a soft hazel color, which produced a troubling effect, so prominently located, as they were, in the face of the essential man.

  Denny Nelson made a hasty retreat to his place behind the bar. Stasiak slowly unwrapped a panatela and waited for the district attorney. When he arrived, he stood at the entrance and looked around the lounge with a defensive, mistrustful expression. Elliott Yost was a small, slight man who couldn’t seem to find a suit that fit him. The unhealthy-looking strands of hair he’d plastered across his bald dome with pomade in the morning were rebellious by afternoon. Stasiak chuckled as he watched Elliott cross the room with his satchel. “Dale,” he said, as he pulled up a chair across from Stasiak.

  “Hello, Elliott.”

  Elliott had been the district attorney for the Cape and islands since 1951. His caseload over the years had been made up mainly of unremarkable thefts and crimes of impulse. There was generally only one killing a year and they all got neatly resolved without much effort on his part. Elliott lived with his wife and two teenage sons in Sandwich, a serene little village that had somehow retained all the charms of the last decade while taking on few traits of the current one. It was the ideal place for someone like Elliott, who was distressed by disorder and lived with an uneasy sense that a great turmoil was under way in the world and that somewhere west of the canal its distant surging could be felt in the air. Dale Stasiak’s arrival on Cape Cod seemed a validation of his feelings, though Elliott didn’t know whether it was cause for celebration or worry. The decorated state trooper had made a name for himself in a campaign against the mob in Boston—the now famous Attanasio case. It was understood that Stasiak was given command of Troop D, headquartered at the Yarmouth barracks, as a reward. But Elliott was not the only one who thought the posting a little surprising. It was possible that the assignment was not about prestige. Elliott wondered if Stasiak’s arrival was a portent of things to come or a hedge against things that might. He was not well connected with the attorney general’s office in Boston and he felt he’d been kept in the dark.

  He had worked a few minor cases with Stasiak since his arrival. He seldom showed up at Elliott’s offices, preferring to send a couple of the new men he’d brought down from Boston with him, who were taciturn and not very helpful. And Elliott didn’t like conducting business in a bar, but he supposed it was part of the rough and freewheeling cop culture in Boston and what Stasiak was used to.

  The first few times he met Stasiak, Elliott tried to make small talk, which wasn’t his style, but he didn’t want to come off as aloof and it was important that Stasiak like him. As it turned out, the policeman had no use for small talk, and Elliott found him inscrutable in any case, so now when they met, Elliott just got straight down to business. He was beginning to think that Stasiak did not care for him, and figured the no-nonsense approach was something he might look favorably upon.

  This particular meeting had the district attorney more uneasy than usual. A young boy had gone missing in Truro and four days had passed with no sign of him. That morning, Elliott had discovered that the family had retained an attorney and there were complaints about Stasiak’s handling of the investigation.

  Denny Nelson materialized in his peripheral vision and startled him. “What can I get for you, sir?”

  Elliott fussed with his satchel and cast his eyes around the room, across the Marine Corps plaque mounted on the pine paneling, across the red and gold regimental banner. It was only 3:15.

  “I’ll have a Schaefer,” Elliott said.

  When Denny Nelson was out of earshot, Stasiak said, “So, what’s going on, Elliott
?”

  “Well, primarily the missing boy out in Truro. What’s the status with that?”

  “We start dragging the ponds tomorrow,” Stasiak said. “There’s a bunch of them out there.”

  “I understand you interviewed the parents.”

  “That’s right.”

  “At the barracks?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Dale, I’m not going to question your expertise in any way. I wouldn’t do that. But you need to know there was a complaint about it. They went to the board of selectmen to protest the way they were treated. And they’ve hired a lawyer. He called me this morning.”

  “The parents are distraught.”

  “They say they were treated like suspects.”

  Stasiak looked at the district attorney in such a way that Elliott was glad when Denny Nelson arrived in that moment with a brimming pilsner glass on a round tray. He made a show of receiving the beer, loosening his tie, and taking what he hoped looked like an eager first drink. When he looked up, Stasiak’s eyes were on him, dead in their sockets like a pair of marbles. “I understand you’ve got your methods, Dale. But a complaint to the selectmen . . . We don’t want to get off on the wrong foot with this.”

  Unsettled by Stasiak’s silence, Elliott quickly moved on to the upcoming trial of a car theft ring and evidence against a foreman in the department of public works who was under investigation for selling supplies out of the state barn. Elliott made repeated assaults on his beer, his will diminishing with each one.

  “I think I might have evidence,” Elliott said, choking back the bitter, malty taste that was rising up his throat, “that there is an illegal moneylending operation going on.”

  “Here? I doubt it a lot.”

  “What would you say if I told you I know of a man who borrowed a hundred and fifty dollars at ten percent interest a week—compounded—and got beat up when he couldn’t make the payments?”