Lesser Evils Read online

  *

  Sitting on the edge of his bed, his jaw and rib cage still smarting from Stasiak’s blows, Warren stared out the window but his eyes were unseeing. They had appointed Dunleavy chief of police over him. He was too stunned for anger.

  The day before, he had been sitting in his office, the door closed, trying to absorb what Stasiak had done to him, trying to figure out what to do next. Warren remained sequestered there until four-thirty in the afternoon. He called Jane and asked her if she would pick up Mike from Nazareth Hall and stay with him until he got back. He didn’t know how late he would be. He could not face his son, knowing what had happened. It was humiliating to the point of devastation, the idea of coming home and greeting the boy and knowing that a mere three hours earlier, he had been laid out on the ground outside the police station, one hand gripping the chain-link fence, unable to breathe.

  Somehow, Stasiak knew that Warren would never tell a soul about the assault. If he had come out on top, Warren would have reported Stasiak’s actions. But as it was, the incident would go with Warren to his grave, both because he was ashamed and because it was a question of honor: He was not going to appeal to any outside force to intervene for him. Somehow, Stasiak understood this, which made it safe for him to strike Warren with closed fists.

  He had had disagreements both in his police career and in the military—some of them sharp—but never had anyone so much as suggested violence. Stasiak’s attack over Warren’s interest in the Russell Weeks affair had him wondering just what it was he was dealing with. Stasiak was a bad cop, that was clear now, but it was possible that he was also mentally unstable.

  At four-thirty, his phone rang. It was Donald Nicholas, who informed him that the board of selectmen had made a decision for the chief’s position: Phil Dunleavy. Nicholas was obviously gloating, thoroughly enjoying being the one to make the phone call. “Earl Mott is going to ask you to stay on as lieutenant. I’m going to recommend against it. Just so you know.”

  Jenkins came in as Warren was preparing to go over to the town hall and give his resignation. “I just heard,” he said. “I can’t believe it. Phil? I mean, he’s a smart guy but you’re already doing the job.”

  Warren said nothing. He unloaded his service revolver, dumped the bullets on the desk, and threw his badge and credentials down with them.

  “Boss, you better say something ’cause you’re worrying me. What are you doing?”

  “Going over to town hall.”

  “For what?”

  “To resign.”

  “Oh, come on.”

  Warren got up and headed for the door. Jenkins blocked his way. “Don’t do it.”

  “Move, Jenkins.”

  “You’re cutting your nose off to spite your face.”

  “What do you expect me to do? Just accept it? They want me out. You know who gave me the call? Donny Nicholas. He probably begged Mott to let him be the one to do it. He told me he was going to recommend against me staying on as lieutenant, which I’d never do anyway. This whole goddamn place is corrupt. They want things run the way Marvin ran them. A rigged system. If you’re nobody or you’re on the outside, like those antique dealers, watch out, because they’re going to roll right over you.”

  “I hate to say I told you so, but I warned you you’d pay for that.”

  Warren hurled the duty roster across the room. “And I’d do it again!” he shouted. “That’s not the only thing I’m paying for and you know it! I tried to take care of my son. Did I use my position to do that? Yes, and maybe I was wrong, but that boy has no defenses whatsoever and they wouldn’t leave him alone. You’d probably do the same thing if you had a kid like Mike. He’s my son. I have to protect him.”

  “Which you can’t do very well if you’re unemployed. Maybe you need to take a few days and think about it.”

  “Marvin Holland. That thing with the airport, those rumors about him using his influence to steer the contract to Dave Langella’s concrete business. What about that? People were talking about Marvin getting a cut and Earl Mott getting a cut. And then the thing ran over budget. We had to cut overtime and run fewer cars per shift. Why? So Marvin and Earl could get paid? If I was ever involved in anything like that—if my name had even been mentioned in connection with anything like that—I’d have been finished. I’ve tried to do what’s best in this job. I’ve tried to do what’s right but apparently that’s not what they want. What they want is a political appointee disguised as a police chief. I can’t do that. I don’t know how.”

  Warren took a breath and looked around his office. “Take my weapon, will you? Stow it or put it in property or whatever you want to do. The other stuff, throw it away.”

  “You need to think about this, lieutenant. You’re making a mistake.”

  “You know, the least Dunleavy could have done is tell me he was interested in the job, too. He didn’t have to go sneaking around.”

  “Maybe it’s as big a surprise to him as it is to us.”

  “No. He was spending time at the hospital visiting Marvin in the evenings.”

  “Huh?”

  Warren looked over his desk one last time, then headed to the door. Jenkins still stood there, digesting what Warren had just said. Warren looked at him and for a second felt a surge of emotion. “Would you please get out of the doorway so I can go do what I have to do?”

  32

  After his resignation, Warren had a week’s worth of work helping out at Cameron’s as an assistant to the shop mechanic. He had one more paycheck coming from the town, and that would be it. He would have to withdraw some of his savings to make Mike’s next tuition payment. Perhaps the most difficult thing was that he’d had to let Jane go and he missed her. He was often tempted to call her up and ask her what she thought about this, or what she suggested he do about that, or how would she go about such-and-such. Her absence enhanced his melancholy. A few days after his resignation, he had gone to pick Little Mike up after school, and the nuns asked him how he was getting along. Sister Julia told him that there were some projects they needed to have done, and asked him if he wouldn’t mind looking at them.

  Grayson Newsome and James Holbrooke from Antiquitus called him, offering him their condolences. They asked him to come out to Osterville to look at some things they wanted done around the property because they had heard he was a carpenter. There were a number of stunning acts of kindness in the wake of his leaving the department. By far the most touching was Jane offering to watch Mike three times a week on credit. She would keep track of the time and Warren could pay her when he had the money. No rush. Mike needed her, she said.

  The Standard Times had called him repeatedly for comment on his resignation but he declined. He also got a call from Fred Sibley, who had been convicted of narcotics possession and got five years in state prison at Walpole. The call was made on his behalf by a prison officer who asked if Warren would accept it, which he did not. The Globe ran a surprisingly straightforward article documenting the downfall of one of its most talented reporters. “Squandered Promise: A Reporter’s Tragic Descent Into Drug Addiction,” divulged that Sibley had a history of drug use, in fact was sent away for three months in 1955 until he could get straight. He redeemed himself during the Attanasio trial but then came the debacle on Cape Cod.

  Warren did a lot of thinking about the failed raid on the Elbow Room, the tipped-off wiretaps, and the child murders. He ate little and did not sleep. He stewed in anger over Dunleavy’s subterfuge and Stasiak’s assault on him at the police station. To ease the pain of those events, he dwelt on other things, trying to solve the problems in his head.

  Phil Dunleavy knew about both the raid and the wiretap, and though Warren now knew that the detective couldn’t be trusted, he couldn’t go so far as accusing him of being the leak. Wilson Hayes was convincing when they met him at the diner, but then his stock-in-trade was to be convincing, so
that didn’t count for much. Warren could see him double crossing them on the raid but Hayes had not known about the wiretap.

  On a sultry Sunday afternoon, the two priests sat on the veranda behind the rectory. The morning Masses were done and the church was quiet. It was unusual for Father Keenan to have no place to be on a Sunday, and Father Boyle was grateful for his presence and the peaceful moment with him on the porch, a warm breeze stirring the curtains in the open windows. Mrs. Gonsalves had prepared a pork loin on Friday, which sat heating in the oven. They would have a rare meal together if nothing interrupted.

  “Let me ask you,” Father Keenan said. “You visit the hospital several times a week. You visit the elderly. You work with the retarded. The works you perform are some of the more demanding in ministry. If you’re jaded with religious life, you could make a much easier time of it. Do baptisms, weddings. Just say Masses. Socialize. But you choose not to. I wonder why.”

  “There are only two of us. If I didn’t do it, it would all fall on you. So many sufferers, so little time.” Father Boyle grinned briefly, exposing his missing tooth.

  “My question to you, Terrence, is whether your devotion to the suffering and the rejected does not contradict your statement that you have no faith.”

  “These days, Father, I operate on instinct. This is all I know. I try not to think too much about things. I visit the sick and I sit with the dying because I must. I make no claims to sainthood—you know I don’t, but doing for others is the only thing that keeps me . . . If I didn’t do this, I’m afraid I would break apart in a thousand pieces.”

  “It validates you?”

  “I suppose so,” said Father Boyle. “I happen to be someone who requires validation with a very big stamp, something that makes a loud thump when it hits the paper. Some would say it’s perverse. Perhaps I could be accused of seeking out misery.”

  Father Boyle was looking at the screen door and he thought he saw Mrs. Gonsalves move like a shadow on the other side, wiping her hands with a dishrag, but he knew that she was off today. He began to feel a little light and dreamy and he looked hard through the screen to see what it was that had drifted past. Father Keenan said, “You’ve been staying out late at night and I’ve been wondering where you go.”

  “I’ve been taking walks in the woods.”

  “Really. Where?”

  “Down Cape. Brewster, Truro, Wellfleet.”

  “Way down there? Why?”

  “Wonderful things to draw. And there are places out there . . .” he let the sentence trail off. “Once I would have sworn I heard the seraphim, had I been so inclined.” He let out a little chuckle, which sounded false in his ears.

  “You are inclined, Terrence. That’s what concerns me. And Lucy says she’s noticed things.”

  “Oh, she has, has she?”

  “I’m thinking of events at Belmont, Terrence. There was a place like that in Belmont, if you recall.”

  “Oh, it’s nothing like that.”

  “Terrence, I think it would be a good idea if we got a doctor here to see you.”

  “No doctors, Father. No medication. I don’t like it.”

  33

  That’s a bad fuckin’ stink, man. What is that?”

  “You aren’t used to stink by now?”

  “That isn’t regular stink.”

  “A dead dog, probably.”

  The two men rode in the cab of a backhoe, navigating the bottom of a long mesa of compacted trash at the town dump. The seagulls had concentrated at one spot, forming a gray and white mass, their cries loud and frantic. One of the men took a .22 rifle out of a scabbard that was affixed to the side of the cab. They carried the weapon for sport, to shoot rats they occasionally saw burrowing through the mountains of trash.

  “Roy hears that thing go off, he’ll shit his pants,” said the driver.

  “He can’t hear anything way the hell back here. Look out. I’m gonna clear ’em out.”

  Three cracks rang out in succession. The seagulls lifted off in a storm of flapping wings, stray feathers drifting down over the trash. The driver put the backhoe in gear, and moved forward, lowering the shovel. The place where the birds had congregated was a nearly vertical wall of refuse, formed when a portion of the mound sheared away of its own weight and rolled downhill some twenty-five yards. From among the cardboard and paper and cans and grime and broken glass, a whitish object was visible, unmistakably a hand. Five slender fingers extended from out of a shapeless mass of brown. A short distance from that, located in such a way that it could have been connected to the hand, was a crumpled face, its eyes closed tightly, its features distorted, like that of a mummy discovered in some far-flung peat bog or tundra, like something from National Geographic. The two men got down and stepped over the garbage for a better look.

  “Oh my God.”

  “We better get Roy.”

  Jenkins was in his office compiling a list of suspicious car sightings he was supposed to check out when his phone rang.

  “Barnstable Police, Detective Jenkins.”

  “Hey, Eddie, it’s Roy Campo over at the dump.”

  “Yeah, hey, Roy, how’s it going?”

  “Will you come over here and take a look at something? Some of my fellas over here were up on the backhoe and they found something. I thought maybe it’s a dead animal but now I don’t know. There’s clothes and stuff.”

  “Is it a body?”

  “Hell, I don’t know. I hope to hell not.”

  Jenkins got in his car and drove to the dump. Roy and two of his workers were in the shed at the entrance. They were awed quiet, stunned, it seemed. Roy, normally unpleasant and vulgar, actually appeared thoughtful. “Eddie, my guys here found something I think you ought to look at.”

  “O.K. Where is it?”

  Roy turned to his workers. “You guys take him out there.”

  They walked to the backhoe. The driver got behind the controls. “You can just stand up here,” he said to Jenkins. “Hold on to the cabin frame like that.”

  Jenkins stepped up on the slimy surface of the machine and hung on. His stomach momentarily lurched with the smell of the place. They rolled down a dirt road with mounds of garbage on either side and then turned off of it to roll over a broad, flat ridge of packed-down refuse, then down its side until they were near the edge of some woods. Suddenly, the driver turned the engine off. “It’s right there,” he said, pointing. Jenkins tried to find places to step where he wouldn’t sink or get anything on his shoes or trouser cuffs but it was hopeless. He peered at the wall of garbage but had to get closer to see. The smell was, without a doubt, that of a decomposing corpse. “There’s two,” he called out.

  “Huh?”

  “There’s two bodies. One’s a kid.”

  He turned around and trudged back toward the machine. “All right. Shit. We’re gonna need some way of getting them out of there. Can you get the shovel in just underneath them and lift them out?”

  The man sat with his hands draped over the controls, a doubtful expression on his face.

  “Come on, man. They’re not gonna jump out at you. Stink is the worst thing you have to worry about. Just get them in the shovel and take them down there and put them down on the ground. Then you’re done.”

  He did as directed, dumping a shovel full of garbage on a stretch of flat ground at the edge of the woods. A soaking cloth tarpaulin flopped open with a clank of cans and a slopping, wet sound and a femur appeared, partially wrapped in mud-colored fabric, its tibia still attached and trailing off at an angle. Jenkins had to turn away and heave once. He walked toward the trees and took several deep breaths. Viewing the pile from a distance, he saw another tarpaulin, this one tied at its top with a length of clothesline rope. He called out to the man on the bulldozer. “Take me back up to the shed, will you? I have to use the telephone.”

 
Warren was sitting at his kitchen table, redoing the sums in his checkbook for the third time, when the phone rang.

  “Lieutenant? It’s Jenkins. What are you doing?”

  “I’m waiting on some work to come through.”

  “Listen, I’m at the dump right now. We found two bodies.”

  Warren was silent.

  “An adult and a juvenile. They’re in pieces and they’re tied up in tarps. You there?”

  “Yes, I’m here. You better call Dunleavy.”

  “I will. But I just want to keep it under wraps for a little while.”

  “Why?”

  “Because from what I’ve seen so far, it looks like a woman and a little girl. And you know what I’m thinking? Miriam Weeks and the kid. If that’s true, it’s a long way from Florida, if you know what I mean.”

  “Again, I’d call your superior.”

  “Lieutenant, I don’t know about Phil anymore. I’d like to put Stasiak in a corner on this. I think Phil would try to help him stay out of one.”

  “Are you saying you think Stasiak is involved?”

  “No. But I think his arrogance has come back to bite him in the ass. I think he made the whole Florida thing up. I think he can’t stand having an unsolved case on his resume. He probably figured the Weekses had disappeared into the woodwork and everyone would forget about them. Once he realized you were snooping around he lied to get you to back off. It would have worked except now we have this.”

  “You haven’t ID’d the bodies yet.”

  “That’s right, but now he’s on record as saying the Weekses were found in Florida. So if these bodies are them, he’s going to be in a hell of a fix trying to explain this.”