Lesser Evils Read online

  Someone in the audience whooped.

  “I will step on toes. I will hurt some feelings. I will break some dishware. Hell, I’ll turn the whole kitchen upside down if I have to. I have been very direct with the families in this investigation. I asked some questions that hurt. I had to. Because tomorrow we might pull another little boy out of a creek somewhere. And I don’t have the time to think about etiquette. I don’t have the luxury, Mr. Sibley, to sit back and complain about the way the engine runs when it has to get us from A to B and it’s a matter of life and death.”

  A good portion of the room erupted in cheers. Pens scribbled furiously and recorders were thrust further toward the stage, over the heads of the packed crowd, like offerings at a religious revival. Fred Sibley broke into a grin. Stasiak said the press conference was over.

  The state policemen conferred in a back hallway of the armory, Elliott standing at the edge of the gathering until the officers began to go their separate ways. Then he approached Stasiak and said, “Dale, can I have a word with you?” The other state policemen left the two of them alone.

  “That wasn’t helpful,” said Elliott. “Having that reporter come out with that in front of a room full of people.”

  “Forget it. Guy’s trying to win a journalism prize. He’s playing to the wrong crowd anyway.”

  “What I’m getting at is the Gilbride interrogation . . . We can’t have—even the perception of—we don’t need to move backwards, is what I’m saying. And if that had been handled differently . . .”

  “Why don’t you go ahead and tell me what’s on your mind, Elliott, because I don’t think I’m getting the full picture.”

  “We can’t afford any controversy. We can’t alienate the families.”

  “You weren’t there at the barracks when we questioned them, were you?”

  “Well, there was a complaint. And now here it is coming back to bite us in the middle of a damn press conference with TV and radio and I’m up there lying about it.”

  “The Gilbrides were hysterical. Which I understand. But some of this stuff is just going to be ugly. This is for grown-ups, Elliott. It’s a game for grown-ups.”

  “Do you really think the Gilbrides were involved in their son’s death?”

  Stasiak seemed to enlarge himself there in the narrow hallway. “Let me tell you something. I did a case out in Worcester in 1954, Felicia Derry. Rich family lived on the West Side. They told me their daughter—three years old—wandered off down the street and got into a van with a man they didn’t recognize. They said they saw it from the front yard and ran after her but couldn’t get to her in time. We looked all over the state for her. We found her in a cistern in the cellar of her own home. And her skin was black. And it was slipping off her body when we were trying to pull her out of the fucking tank. And her parents did it. Obviously I don’t suspect the Gilbrides now because two more bodies have turned up. But back in ’54, the Derrys played it all the way to the end like a kidnapping or a disappearance. It doesn’t happen all the time but it happens more than you think.”

  “Look, Dale, I have confidence in you. I respect your methods. But we have to be careful who we alienate. How we’re being perceived.” He gestured toward the assembly hall they had just left. “The entire world is watching now.”

  Stasiak’s face took on a brief, disgusted expression. “You want to play politics with this thing, give it over to Warren and his boys. I’m sure he’ll handle it just as nice and polite as you want him to.” He walked away, leaving Elliott standing there alone.

  Stasiak walked out to the front of the armory to see how many people were still hanging around. He saw Sibley standing by himself in the lot where the military vehicles were parked, going through his notes. He walked over.

  “The Globe send you down here to bust my balls, did they? I thought they were my friends at the Globe.” To Stasiak’s surprise, the reporter didn’t even look up from his notebook.

  “Oh, they’re your friends, captain. They love you.”

  “Sibley, huh?”

  “That’s right.”

  “You look familiar to me. And your name rings a bell.”

  “I covered the Attanasio trial. You and I actually spoke a few times.”

  Sergeant Heller walked up and stood beside Stasiak. He began staring at Sibley and did not take his eyes off him. Sibley squinted at him, nodded, and flicked some ashes from his cigarette. “I covered the Grady Pope investigation too,” he said.

  “Is that right.”

  “Yes. I’m still on it, in fact. Even though there isn’t much to report.”

  “You staying down here to follow this thing?”

  “No. I just came down for the press conference. Good performance, by the way.”

  “I could say the same thing to you.”

  Sibley chuckled. “They did make those claims, by the way, the Lefgrens and the Gilbrides.”

  “Well, with all due respect to the Lefgrens and the Gilbrides, that’s a bunch of shit.”

  “I had to ask.”

  “You had to showboat.”

  “I guess you’re not going to give me an exclusive, then.”

  Stasiak laughed, looked at Heller, and said, “You believe this guy?” Heller kept staring at the reporter.

  “I think I’ll give an exclusive to the New York Times,” Stasiak said.

  “I didn’t see the Times here.”

  “They won’t screw around with a bullshit press conference. They’ll come up later. Do all their research first. Send a crack reporter up here who will come straight to my office and talk to me directly.”

  The two men were looking at each other, both, it seemed, trying not to smile.

  “I guess you are impugning my skills as a journalist.”

  Stasiak laughed and shook his head. “If you’re not going right back up, come over to the VFW this afternoon about three. I’ll get you drunk.”

  Sibley looked uncertain for the first time in their exchange. He searched Stasiak’s face for a moment with his mouth frozen in a half-smile. He dropped his cigarette on the pavement and ground it out with his heel. “I’ll be seeing you around, maybe,” he said without looking up, and walked off down the street.

  Heller handed Stasiak a slip of paper. “Make, model, and tag number,” he said. “He lives in Jamaica Plain. The address is on the back.”

  16

  Warren made a quick exit from the press conference, returned to the police station, and closed himself in his office, where he smoldered over the district attorney cutting him out of the investigation. On the heels of having the Weeks case taken away, it was particularly aggravating. Elliott, infatuated with Stasiak and his illustrious resume. Bucking like hell to get his office on the map, his name in the papers. Warren thought of his partially completed application to the FBI, wondering whether he should finish it and send it off.

  He telephoned the department of public works, which had requested a detail for some roadwork they had scheduled. There was a note to call the owner of one of the new hotels on Ocean Street, who had complained about cars from the ferry to Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard parking in his lot. A teletype from police in Stonington, Connecticut, described a 1948 Hudson they wanted for a hit and run.

  He went through some of the papers on his desk. Easy nine had trouble with its drive shaft. Easy four needed a brake job. There was a circular from Titan Distributors—Specializing in Police Equipment Since 1931. Here was the telephone number that had been in Joseph Leapley’s wallet the night they found him handcuffed and beaten on Old Colony Boulevard. Warren picked up the telephone and dialed it. “Hello.” A flat, nasal inflection, almost a challenge. Some kind of commotion in the background, but Warren couldn’t say what.

  He hung up the phone, picked up his keys and his radio, and walked out of the office. As he passed the front desk, Garrity sai
d, “You have two calls from the Providence Journal. About the murders.”

  “Refer them to the state police.”

  Warren drove over to the headquarters of New England Telephone to see the manager, Alvin Leach. Leach was always cooperative. He seemed to consider it a solemn privilege to provide modern communication technology to the people, but there was an air of reproach about him too, as if he believed that the legions of telephone subscribers needed to be watched, that their sins and their schemes and their baser instincts found new ways to express themselves via the telephone, and it was a burden he carried, the dark side of his calling. On the odd occasion when Lieutenant Warren showed up, he closed his office door and sat down at his desk without any preliminary conversation, as if to say, “Let’s get at it.”

  Warren produced a slip of paper and handed it to Leach. “This is a phone number we found in the wallet of an individual we’re investigating.”

  “For the murders?”

  “No. It’s another matter. We have a reverse directory at the station but I can’t find the number there.”

  Alvin Leach looked at the number. “It’s a Hyannis exchange. Let me have a look at the numerical index.” He left the room and returned a few minutes later, shaking his head. “I can’t find it in our numerical directory. If someone wrote it down wrong, if they transposed a number, that would explain it.” He handed the slip of paper back to Warren.

  “The problem is,” Warren said. “I’ve called this number, and someone answered it.”

  Alvin Leach sat down, rubbing the fingers of one hand with those of the other, as if he was trying to get something off them. “There are mistakes in the numerical directory. It’s not perfect. I take it you did not ask who was at the other end of the line, whether it was a business or a residence.”

  “I don’t want to do that just yet.”

  “Do you mind if I ask what this is about?”

  “It’s a case we’re looking into, Mr. Leach,” Warren said. “I really can’t say much about it just yet.”

  “Of course. But this concerns me, because if it’s an unassigned number then it could be a bootleg line and then I have to take a look at my technicians.”

  “Can we find out who’s using it?”

  “Of course. It will take some time. We’ll have to trace it out from the switching center.”

  “How soon can we get that started?”

  “Within the next couple of days. I’ll call you when I know something.”

  Warren gathered the oak two-by-tens on a bench in the saw shed at Cameron’s. The shapes drawn on each one represented the ribs of a boat they were building. He opened the back of the band saw and removed the blade, whose teeth were too coarse for oak, and selected a finer-toothed replacement from a nail on the wall. Little Mike didn’t like the band saw, either its noise or its appearance, and stayed outside.

  He looked at the way the day glared in the door opening and thought of how completely alone he was. His parents had gone to weekly Mass and he had as well until he reached his twenties. He was engrossed in his career, discovering the world, and liberating himself from his parents’ cloistered, primitive existence, from their unquestioning belief. His parents’ Catholicism had struck him as both ludicrous and arresting. While he dismissed it largely as traditional superstition, he now respected his parents’ discipline, their stations of the cross, their rosary, their penance. He still felt a lump in his throat on the odd occasion he found himself alone in a church. He didn’t know what to make of it. Maybe it was grief for the past.

  His mother had been like a strange continent to him. She suffered bouts of debilitating depression and sudden storms of fervor during which she spoke rapidly, flew around their small flat, and prepared for something imminent and miraculous in which she had been chosen to play a crucial role. But most of the time she was quiet, reserved, and plodding. Warren felt that she never revealed anything of herself to him except what came out during her sick periods.

  His father was a stoic, dignified man of the last century. He had left home at sixteen, sailing out of St. John, New Brunswick, on a clipper ship to Shanghai. He’d traveled around the world until he developed heart trouble and settled in Boston, taking a job with a bank as a custodian. He had never learned to do anything but sail. Warren believed that his father had lived with a great unexpressed disappointment. His new life in the city—a regular job, a wife, a family, monthly rent—was suffocating and rife with unforeseen trouble. This was how Warren imagined it was. Even as a child, Warren perceived a sadness in his father, and while he wished and prayed that it would be lifted, he absorbed some of it into himself.

  His father’s sense of decorum would not allow him to speak with loose emotion, but his love for his son was fierce. When Warren was small, his father held him in his lap and read to him. They rode the trolley car together to places his father wanted to show him. They went to Haymarket Square, where walking among the produce and the goods and the things hung from ropes overhead was like being at a carnival. The train roared over their heads on the elevated railway, drowning everything else out, and when it passed, the hawkers’ voices filled the air again. It smelled like sawdust and fish and cigar smoke and fresh fruit. On the way home on the trolley, his father would sometimes reach over and squeeze his knee and look at him and chuckle, a rare and private thing, as if they had pulled something off, as if it were one of life’s greatest joys.

  Before his father died he came as close as he ever would to confiding some kind of loss to his son, some disillusionment, some sentiment that was secret and precious. He came to the edge a few times, it seemed, then stepped back. It was 1935, Warren was twenty-one, when he went into his father’s room to find him dead. The feeling, seeing him lying there in his pale blue pajamas, changed by death somehow, like a rough likeness of himself, devastated Warren even now in the quiet of the saw shed.

  When he got home from the boatyard that evening, he and Mike ate in the little area that served as the dining room. Warren tried to avoid having all their meals in the kitchen, which was their tendency. It helped make the house seem bigger, less desperate, if they used all of its space. Mike was eating, watching him. There was something funny about the way the boy was chewing and looking up at him. The high jaw muscle moved in the side of his head where his hair was shaved close. Warren had to laugh. “Why are you looking at me?” he said.

  “Because.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How would you like it if I placed you under arrest?”

  “You can’t.”

  “Oh no?”

  “Nope.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m your son.” Little Mike beamed then. It was like a proclamation of victory, that whatever else was true about him, he had this man who sat across the table from him, a man who would always be present. He said, “I am your son,” as if it were the source of their happiness, and Warren, his elbows on the table, his hands clasped in front of his face, looked down at the boy, who was completely unaware of the sorrow and regret Warren often felt—the anger—and the fact that his father was deeply unhappy. And Warren loved the boy. He wondered how his own father would have sorted it out. He would have embraced the love and repudiated the rest as so much distraction, unworthy sentiments that had no business trespassing in his heart. Sometimes we are tested, he would have said, and he thought of his father sitting in the hard wooden pew, gazing at the altar, possessed of some kind of equanimity that had never been available to Warren.

  After dinner, he decided to walk Mike down to the drugstore and get him a comic book. Though there was no one out, the neighborhood was unquiet somehow. Warren looked up at the wind in the trees. There was a slight freshening in the air that signaled night and perhaps some faraway intention the ocean might have, say, a squall or an inundation of heavy fog. A pickup truck passed and he thought he
heard someone yell something out the window. There were three men in it and they turned to look out the back window at him as they went down the road. When Warren and Mike arrived at the drugstore minutes later, the pickup truck was parked outside. The three men were outside it, talking. Warren recognized one of them as David Langella, whose son had bullied Mike and about whom he had called the courthouse for a records check. When Warren glanced at them, Langella made eye contact. Warren held his gaze as he and Mike went inside. Warren watched the back door as Mike looked through the comics. When they came out, Langella began heading toward him, his shoulders held back, arms out a little, the kind of posturing with which Warren was so familiar. Unless Langella were drunk, Warren didn’t think he would try anything stupid, but he was prepared all the same, alert to any quick movements. If anything started, he didn’t think the two friends would participate. He shot a quick glance their way and they looked worried.

  “Have you got some kind of a problem with me?” Langella demanded, his face close to Warren’s.

  “You’d better back up a little, Mr. Langella, or there will be a problem.”

  “I want to know why you’re calling the courthouse checking on me.”

  “That’s police business.”

  “I got a right to know why you’re checking on me.”

  “In fact, you don’t. If I’m charging you with something you have a right to know. If I detain you for something you have a right to know why. But if I’m looking at records that is official business.”

  “Then I want to know why you’re making me your official business. I know you’re checking on me. I haven’t done anything. You’re harassing me, Officer Warren, and I’m not going to take it. You overstep your bounds and everyone knows it. You think you got a right to get in everybody’s business, well, you don’t. What did I do that you’re checking on me? Answer me that.”