Lesser Evils Page 15

  “I’d like you to be more specific.”

  “I don’t know. I got up. Looked at the classifieds. Went and filled out a couple of applications, I think . . .”

  Hawthorne listened as Vogel’s accounting of himself lost steam and ground to a halt. He gave him fifteen long seconds to pick it up again but Vogel merely sat there and foundered in his Woolworth’s Junior Style getup. The psychiatrist tilted back in his chair and said, “Why do you ask about Friday, Dr. Hawthorne? What differentiates Friday from Tuesday? Or Sunday? Why Friday, Dr. Hawthorne? But you do not ask, Charles. You do not ask.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Hm?”

  “I don’t have any idea what you’re trying to ask me, Dr. Hawthorne. I don’t . . . I wasn’t supposed to be here on Friday, was I? My appointment is always on Wednesday.”

  Vogel’s face was searching, disconcerted. “I mean, I guess you’ve got some reason for asking me about Friday but I don’t know what it is. I feel like I’m supposed to know. Like you’ll be upset with me if I don’t come up with the right answer.”

  Hawthorne scrutinized him for a while and said, finally, “That is the right answer, Charles.”

  A half hour later, he watched from the window as Vogel made his way down the street. His gait was stiff and self-conscious but as he gained distance, it became noticeably looser, as if he were transforming mid-stride. In time, his arms swung, his head lolled this way and that, and there was a barely perceptible bounce to his step, as if the person who had walked into Dr. Hawthorne’s office thirty minutes earlier had become someone else altogether.

  Dunleavy pulled into the lot at the state police barracks and jogged up the walkway to the front doors. Captain Stasiak had asked him to show up for the briefing the state police investigators held every Monday, which had taken him completely by surprise.

  Dunleavy showed his badge to the sergeant at the front and was waved down the corridor. At the far end, outside the room where the briefing was held, there were four desks that had been moved out into the hallway, an impromptu workspace for people manning the phones and taking down tips. Standing by the desks was a state police matron, and a uniformed trooper. She was removing brand-new children’s clothing from its packaging and laying it out on one of the desks as the trooper watched.

  Inside the room, there was a large table where eight men were seated. Captain Stasiak was speaking. “Ferrell, what’s—Nice of you to join us, Dimwitty.”

  Everyone chuckled.

  “Where do we stand with the Crane neighborhood, Ferrell?”

  The state police detective ran down the latest on his canvassing of the area. “There was a handyman outfit in the neighborhood a couple days before the killing, doing some shingling,” he said. “It’s a fly-by-night operation. I need to track them down. A single male at 5 Linden Street whose whereabouts aren’t real solid. Straight. Got a girlfriend. Works sometimes at Kreigel Produce. Says he spent the previous night with her and stayed part of the day but the time frame is fuzzy. Let’s see . . . seven suspicious car sightings. No tags. Makes on some of ’em.”

  An officer gave an update on the Gilbride murder. The crime scene was remote and detectives hadn’t been able to find a single person who had been in the area during the week of the killing. They questioned the members of a small bird-watching society that frequented the location where the Gilbride boy’s body was found, and visited bait and tackle shops to ask about who was fishing the ponds in Truro. They were currently working their way through interviews with the agencies that managed inholdings in the vast stretch of land between Orleans and Provincetown—the state department of natural resources and its numerous local counterparts—looking for hikers or campers or anyone else who visited on a regular basis, anyone who stood out for any reason.

  “As you all know,” said one of the new men who had been sent down from headquarters, “It’s ninety-nine percent certain the hairs found on Stanley Lefgren’s body are from his mother. They were probably on the clothes the kid was wearing. The lab hasn’t come up with anything on the glass found in his hair. They’re looking at electrical fuses, different kinds of lightbulbs . . .”

  “Have them send it down to the FBI in Washington,” said Stasiak. “Where are we with James Frawley?”

  The men who had been watching Frawley reported that he wandered extensively: to the woods at the edge of the municipal airfield; to the railroad tracks near the defunct Hyannis station; to the wilderness surrounding a vast salvage yard just outside of town. Recently, Frawley had spotted them, and now wandered no farther than the shade of the locust trees in the front yard of the Salvation Army shelter. Interviews with the staff and residents weren’t particularly helpful. Frawley kept to himself. Opinions ranged from the impossibility of him harming children to his being just the type to do such a thing. The policemen had not seen him anywhere near a car.

  Stasiak took the cord to the Venetian blinds in his hand and jerked them open. “The list,” he said.

  An officer consulted the statewide list of sex offenders which he had on the table in front of him. “There are two names that haven’t been ruled out.”

  “Who’s got those?”

  Dunleavy raised his hand. “I do.”

  “And?”

  “The first guy went to the Vineyard shortly after the Lefgren killing. Supposedly he’s still over there but I’m looking into it. He could have come back for Crane. I doubt it, but . . .”

  “I don’t want to know whether you doubt it, Dunleavy. It’s not important to me, your hunches.”

  Dunleavy looked around the table at the officers, who were suppressing grins, watching him closely.

  “Please continue, detective.”

  “Gene Henry says he’s not sure where he was for the Gilbride killing but he says he wasn’t in Truro. He was drinking at the Windjammer Lounge for Lefgren or he was home asleep. Very iffy. Home for Crane, so he says, but no corroboration. When we—when Barnstable was on the Lefgren investigation, they got information that he had a girlfriend out in Truro and that he liked to go surf casting out there at Longnook Beach. But he says none of that is true and I haven’t been able to confirm it. He’s really touchy and doesn’t want to talk.”

  “That’s a priority,” Stasiak said. “Stay with it until he’s in or out.”

  Stasiak’s men were looking for ways to connect the three murder scenes, all miles away from one another. Truck drivers, salesmen, commercial fishermen, retirees, and the unemployed, anyone who had an unstructured schedule and freedom of movement was being considered. None of the victims’ missing clothing had been found. Stasiak had officers consult with the families and reconstruct what each child was wearing at the time of death, then purchased the items and was having them photographed for distribution.

  In the basement of the barracks was a collection of miscellaneous objects they had retrieved from each of the crime scenes: cans, bottles, cigarette packages, a lighter, a small cardboard box for a transistor radio, two fishing lures, six sodden pages of a magazine called Leg Show, one PF Flyer shoe, a spent .410 gauge shotgun shell. Anything that had been found in the general vicinity of the crime scenes Stasiak had collected and dusted for latent fingerprints. They had three readable prints, which they had sent off to the state police crime lab to see if they matched anything on file. The items were laid out on the basement floor, in areas chalked off with the victims’ names, each numbered, photographed, and indexed.

  Stasiak looked out the window and watched a dark blue sedan pull in off the road and park. Sgt. Heller got out, wearing a beige London Fog, his shirt collar open. He looked ill-tempered and weary. Stasiak adjourned the meeting and everyone got up to leave. He called after them, “This guy has a car, gentlemen. He’s driving around. He likes the outdoors. He’s a local. He’s free during the day. Use your heads. Dunleavy, see me in my office.”

 
; Stasiak went around to the side entrance and met Heller as he came in. “Where’ve you been?”

  “New Bedford.”

  “And?”

  “Dunleavy’s got secrets.”

  They walked abreast down the hallway. Dunleavy was sitting outside Stasiak’s office, waiting. They passed him without a word and went in. Heller closed the door. “He worked for the New Bedford PD before he came here. 1949 to ’54. What he likes to tell people is that he came up here because he wanted a nicer environment for his wife and kids. The real story is that when he was working robbery down in New Bedford, he got on to a bunch of guys who were fencing stolen property out of an old textile factory near the wharf. Dunleavy and another cop took payoffs and gave them protection in return. Then he got ambitious and tried to put the squeeze on some guy who was selling pills to the fishermen down there. This guy knew about Dunleavy and the fencing operation. And he’d worked as an informant for the New Bedford narcotics guys in the past, so he had some friends in the department. He saw to it that internal affairs got wind of what Dunleavy was up to. And that was it. He was out of the New Bedford PD. Dunleavy was pretty tight with his CO and I guess he went and talked to him. The CO fixed it so all that stuff disappeared. At least enough so Dunleavy could get the job here. But you can still find it if you go looking hard enough.”

  Stasiak sat down at his desk. “Does Warren know about this?”

  “No.”

  “Anything else?”

  “He’s married, got a son and a daughter. I suppose he’d like to send them to an Ivy League college, which he won’t be doing on $7,000 a year.”

  “I want you to spend some time with him.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Evaluate, Heller. Evaluate.”

  When Heller was gone, Stasiak sat in his office with the door closed, looking around at the photos and news clippings he had had framed and mounted on the walls. There was the famous shot of himself and the US attorney from the photo essay that appeared in LIFE in the summer of 1955, when the Attanasio trial was going on. Stasiak was shown in a tight close-up, consulting with the head prosecutor, their foreheads almost touching. The image had something about it of a baroque Old Testament scene. “Last Days of the Dons: A Boston Passion Play” was an intimate portrait of the Attanasios, the prosecutors, and the investigators shot entirely in the shadowy corridors of the Suffolk County Courthouse and the Spartan back offices of the federal building.

  His eyes moved over the wall, taking in the headlines and the grainy images of men in trench coats, himself among them—getting out of cars, climbing the steps to the US attorney’s office, caught unaware by photographers on the street outside Post Office Square. Freezing nights on surveillance in the North End, showing the inexperienced FBI guys the ropes. The long hours listening to the bugs they’d planted at the Venus Lounge and a warehouse in East Boston. Heller. Fitzgerald. The goddamn Irish. He tapped his cigarette lighter against the top of the desk and called out, “Dunleavy. Come in here.”

  The detective entered and took a seat. “Get to the bottom of this Gene Henry thing,” Stasiak said. “I want some answers from this guy. I want eyewitness corroboration that he was where he said he was. You’re supposed to know this shit, Dunleavy. You’re local, he’s local. That’s why I put you on it. Stop in Heller’s office and get him. Both of you guys on Henry.”

  22

  Warren walked down the hall to Jenkins’s office and found the detective on the telephone. “I’m on the line with the Department of Corrections,” he said. “Central records. You know that Cadillac I tailed from the Elbow Room yesterday? It belongs to a guy with a past. Hang on a minute.” Jenkins spoke into the receiver. “Yes.” He took notes on a yellow legal pad as he listened. “That’s everything? O.K. Thanks a lot.” He put the phone back in its cradle and faced Warren. “George McCarthy. He was convicted of usury in ’50. Bookmaking in ’46. Me and Dunleavy have been watching the Elbow Room pretty regular and there are three other vehicles we see out there all the time. I ran their plates, too. Corrections didn’t have anything on the owners, but when you consider their addresses—South Boston and Somerville—things get a little interesting. The rackets have always been strong in those neighborhoods.”

  “So we have a guy who’s got a history as a loan shark and an illegal phone line going to a bar where he spends most of his time.”

  “A bootleg phone line,” said Jenkins, “That’s usually gambling. And Leapley—handcuffed, beaten, and thrown out of a moving car—that sounds like a bad debt to me.”

  “Do you suppose there’s any connection to the Russell Weeks disappearance?”

  Jenkins raised his eyebrows. “That might be a stretch, lieutenant.”

  “But think about it. Mrs. Weeks was specific about numbers and the amount of interest that accumulated on the loan. And now a guy shows up who’s got a history as a loan shark and who’s possibly involved in a beating.”

  “Dunleavy thought Miriam Weeks was full of crap,” said Jenkins. “So did the DuPonts’ lawyer. And back when Dunleavy and I were looking into this, we never found anybody who’d actually seen Russell Weeks beaten up.”

  “Well, I’d like to see what else we can find out about McCarthy and the Elbow Room. Let’s fill Dunleavy in on what we’ve got so far. Where is he, by the way?”

  “State police called him first thing this morning. Said they needed him over at the barracks.”

  “This is getting to be a regular thing. What do they have him doing?”

  “Making friends in the fishing community.”

  Warren gave Jenkins a puzzled look.

  “They’re figuring the killer is someone who keeps unconventional hours, someone who has their days free. So they’ve got him looking at fishermen.”

  “I guess it makes sense.”

  “Could be someone who’s unemployed, though.”

  “Who else keeps unconventional hours?”

  “Cops. Wouldn’t that be something.”

  Warren went back to his office, unlocked a desk drawer, and took out the file on Russell Weeks. He picked up the phone and called Alvin Leach at New England Telephone. “Mr. Leach, I’d like to get a look at some phone records. A Russell Weeks of Marstons Mills.”

  “How far back do you want to go?”

  “The last three months.”

  “Very well, lieutenant. If you want to drive over I should have the records by the time you get here.”

  A few minutes later, Sergeant Garrity stepped into the doorway. “A call for you, lieutenant. It’s a woman. She says it’s urgent.”

  “Send it through.”

  Warren picked it up and listened for a while. The voice was vague and scratchy, like it was coming from a long distance away over a tenuous connection. He repositioned the receiver against his ear. “And what is your name, please?” he asked, but the woman had hung up.

  He went back down the hallway to Jenkins’s office. “I just got a call. A female, she wouldn’t give her name. She said there’s a guy with marijuana in one of the rooms at the East End Lodge.”

  The East End Lodge was a Victorian-era building that had housed offices for the railroad in its heyday and for an assortment of freight companies and seafood wholesalers. It had been turned into a hotel after the Second World War, the new owners opting to leave its Victorian décor in place, either out of fondness for the period or apathy. The place never did very well as a hotel, becoming a sort of flophouse, and though the management did not allow long-term rentals, it was favored by college kids on break and people of little means, so that it had the air of a derelict refuge where the owners held its guests in contempt.

  Jenkins telephoned Warren from the lobby. “Boss, this guy’s got a few pounds of Mary Jane on him.”

  “Pounds?”

  “Yes, sir. In his travel bag. But here’s the thing. H
e’s a reporter for the Globe. He’s down here to cover the child killings. His name is Fred Sibley.”

  “And where is he now?”

  “Out somewhere. The manager let us into his room.”

  “I’ll be right over.”

  Joined by a pair of patrolmen, Warren and Jenkins went up to the reporter’s room on the second floor. Jenkins went over to an open suitcase, pulled out a large plastic bag filled with marijuana, and tossed it on the bed.

  Warren said. “Anything on the woman who called?”

  “No, sir. But if she asked to speak to you, she’s got to be local.”

  Jenkins handed Warren a laminated card attached to a long chain. The word PRESS was printed on it in large block letters. Below that, it read, “Fred Sibley, Boston Globe.”

  “I remember this guy from the press conference,” Warren said. “After the Crane kid was murdered.”

  At that moment, they heard raised voices in the hall. “What’s going on?” A man, indignant, alarmed. They heard one of the cops say, “You need to come this way, sir.”

  “What is it? What’s going on?”

  Fred Sibley appeared in the doorway, his mouth slightly open, looking at Warren and Jenkins. He was pudgy, had fuzzy receding hair and a pasty complexion. In his woolen blazer and heavy corduroys, oxfords, and a sweater vest, he looked like a seedy English professor.

  “Are you Fred Sibley?” Warren asked.

  “Yes. What is this?”

  “You have marijuana in your possession, Mr. Sibley. Quite a lot of it.”

  “Marijuana? What are you talking about?”

  Jenkins produced the plastic bag and held it up. The reporter looked at it, his face frozen in an expression of distress. “It’s not mine,” he said.

  “But it’s in your room,” said Warren.

  “It’s not mine. I don’t know where it came from.”

  “Well, the fact that it’s in your room is a problem, Mr. Sibley.”