Lesser Evils Page 7

  “What did I just tell you?”

  Warren shot out of his chair. Dunleavy stood up to intervene. “Gentlemen,” he said. “Let’s cool down.”

  “I told you,” Stasiak said in slow, deliberate tones, “that once we have a grip on what we’ve got, we’ll be in touch with you. You’re out of line, Warren.”

  Dunleavy glanced at his lieutenant. His face was red and his eyes were wide, a bad sign. He had seldom seen Warren this angry but the occasions when he did were memorable. It was unsettling, the way this man, who was so straight and buttoned-up all the time, could suddenly become uncontrollable. He knew Warren wouldn’t listen to anyone if he got to a certain point. He recalled a few incidents where Warren felt he had been undermined by fellow officers, by court officials, by the town. Dunleavy remembered him pacing up and down the corridor of the police station, shouting. The look he’d had on his face was the same one he had right now, glaring at Stasiak.

  Dunleavy tossed the Gilbride photographs on the desk. “We’ll get copies from Jack Dowd. Let’s go, lieutenant.” Warren turned away and walked to the door. Stasiak stood on his side of the desk, staring after them.

  Outside, Dunleavy said, “He’s not our friend. In case you hadn’t noticed. He’s not going to give us anything and having Elliott mediate isn’t going to make it any different because he can always lie his way around concealing information. When the big case breaks and all the glory comes raining down on them, no one will remember they were pricks and they didn’t share.”

  When they got back to the police station, Jenkins was pacing the parking lot, waiting for them. Before they were out of the car, he was heading toward them, tossing his cigarette off to his left. “Wait till you hear this,” he said.

  “Why aren’t you at the autopsy for the Lefgren kid?” said Warren.

  “Because I missed it, that’s why. It was done at four o’clock this morning. The state police got Jack Dowd out of bed and made him come over to the hospital. They said it was an emergency. They didn’t tell anyone, they didn’t say shit. They just went in there and did it.”

  “They did the autopsy?” Warren murmured.

  “Yeah. Four o’clock in the morning. Didn’t tell a soul. Jack Dowd is madder than hell.”

  Elliott Yost was contrite, defensive, and confounded all at once. He sat in the conference room next to his office at the courthouse, rapping his knuckles lightly on the table while he listened to Warren tell him what happened. Stasiak’s actions shocked him. He didn’t think the investigation lost anything because the Barnstable officers weren’t involved in the autopsy. He was planning to ease them out gradually anyway, hoping that more state assistance would become available as time went on. The two killings were getting a lot of play up above, and he was in the spotlight. The feelings of Bill Warren and his local constabulary notwithstanding, this was simply too important. The state police were going to run the investigation. But still, Stasiak’s surprise autopsy was just an unnecessary provocation.

  In the end, he got Warren out of his office with the promise that he would speak not only to Stasiak, but to his superiors in the state police. In fact, Elliott had no intention of doing either. He needed to maintain good relations with Stasiak, not only because he was Elliott’s best chance at nailing this case, but because Stasiak was connected. The state trooper had more standing in the state attorney general’s office than Elliott did. If a child murderer had to descend on Elliott’s jurisdiction, the timing couldn’t have been better. Using Stasiak and his seasoned detectives, he was going to make a noise that they would hear across New England.

  9

  Father Boyle, in his first waking moments, was making a rare return to the years of gentle light. With his face half buried in the pillow and one eye partly open, he recalled that ancient feeling, which was ever more difficult to reconstruct, of time and language having ceased to exist. He recalled the power in the shadows, the mystery around the tabernacle, grave and benevolent at once, the vertiginous sense of God’s nearness. What could have accounted for such a condition in a young man of twenty? When did the decline begin? Was there any point in knowing?

  Father Boyle got dressed and went downstairs. He wanted to check the notepad they kept by the telephone in the kitchen to see if he had any calls but he could hear Mrs. Gonsalves banging around in there. They were uncomfortable around each other and he did his best to avoid her. There could be any number of fundraising or maintenance and repair items written down on the pad, but Father Keenan always handled those things.

  He could be reasonably certain that he would not be asked to preside over any momentous occasions. They wanted Father Keenan’s infectious joy at weddings and at funerals they wanted his comforting presence. Father Keenan did not, like many jaded clergymen, view marriage as a flawed and fragile arrangement, nor was he devoted to death for its unerring finality and its impeccable reputation. Marriages pleased him, and he often stood before the congregation rubbing his hands together or clapping them ever so slightly. And to see Father Keenan preside over a funeral was an amazing thing. For the short amount of time the mourners were assembled in the church, he created the feeling that together, they were bigger than death, that if death believed itself victorious, it was sorely mistaken. Father Keenan would say that he knew death, respected it, loved it even, as an adjunct of God. But he also implied that death didn’t deserve the credit people gave it. That the secret death didn’t want us to know was that somewhere in a world beyond our perception, it had to spit us out. And it had to free the living, too, accidentally bestowing peace and wisdom and compassion on them, unaware that the suffering it inflicted made souls fertile and capable of astounding change.

  Father Keenan exuded love and grace and people were drawn to him. He had discovered something, been fed by something that had made on him an indelible taint of the divine. Father Boyle wondered if it had happened slowly over the years. And what was it like as it grew in Father Keenan, as it rose, burning over some horizon in his soul? Did it take place in increments, Father Keenan unaware as he heaved his legs over the side of the bed and hoisted his girth off the mattress to start another day? Or perhaps it had been sudden, the type of epiphany that Father Boyle tended to imagine: a stranger in a hat coming silently up the veranda steps as Father Keenan sat there reading one evening in late June, a man he’d never seen, who looked at him or touched him and then without a word walked back down the steps and disappeared behind the shrubbery.

  Father Boyle stood at his window and looked out at the shafts of early morning sunlight on the lawn. He wondered if he would be able to get out to the lower Cape today and do some walking. The incident earlier in the summer—the one he found himself simultaneously reconstructing and trying to forget—was never far from his thoughts.

  He had hiked into the woods near the remains of the old Marconi wireless station in Wellfleet, passing the old antenna masts with their concrete moorings scattered across the dunes, abandoned since 1917. He walked farther than usual, into an area he had never been before. Two hours later, he passed through an old-growth forest and emerged in a moor-like landscape high above the sea. He sat down in a sandy meadow to rest before turning back, but he had been sleeping poorly at the rectory and had pushed himself on the hike, and no sooner had he closed his eyes than he fell into a deep slumber.

  It was dark when he woke. He could not see a tree in any direction, just boundless night, deep blue and thick. It seemed that a wave of warm air passed over the hollow momentarily. High above, there were flashes in the sky, unaccompanied by any sound, like heat lightning. The underside of the clouds glowed briefly.

  At the crest of the hollow in which he knelt, something appeared. He could not have said it was a light. It was more a region of darkness that was a different hue from the rest of the night, and within it, some kind of turbulence, a pale boiling color, changing shape, never taking the form of anything recognizable except for
a moment when there was clearly something anthropomorphic there, the vague shape of a head and the uncertain gesture of an arm. The air in the meadow hummed and the temperature changed. Father Boyle was overcome by a sensation he could only know as having some distant antecedent in his early childhood. There was a softening somewhere in him, an inner supplication, a fleeting thought of something or someone he had loved. The interior of his family’s bungalow in Sandusky, Ohio, a figure in motion there, his mother, perhaps, a vision that came and evaporated in a single breath as he watched in awe and disbelief the thing that stood out against the night in that forlorn and primitive place. He recalled the way it heated the air, how it changed the way sound behaved. He thought he heard children calling from far-off places in the meadow, and a fizzing in his ears, as of something being ignited.

  The night in the meadow was the secret he would share with no one, not even Father Keenan.

  10

  The shadows cast by the superstructure of the Sagamore Bridge passed through the Oldsmobile’s interior in repeating patterns of dark and light and made Frank Semanica think of his time in Walpole state prison, where he pulled a twelve-year hitch for armed robbery in 1947. On the positive side, he didn’t get sent to Korea, though he did get stabbed and suffered a botched surgery by a jailhouse doctor who tried to repair a severed intestine. But he was being rewarded now for having kept his mouth shut. He had a great job that wasn’t really even a job, and it paid well. He drew in a deep breath and looked down on the Cape Cod Canal and the tiny white sails of pleasure boats going through and the wakes of powerboats, frozen at this distance, one hundred and fifty feet above the water, like furrows on a blue canvas.

  He had wanted to drive down in the Thunderbird convertible he’d recently bought, but Grady had told him not to. This four-door Olds was a square John kind of a car, but it drove well and it had a big 303. He got it up to ninety, floating from the right lane to the left and back again. It was a nice machine for an old man’s car. He slowed back down to sixty and kept it there. He was carrying a gun and getting stopped was the last thing he needed.

  He got off the Mid-Cape Highway at Hyannis and found his way to a side street where abandoned buildings backed up to the defunct railroad, their loading docks sprouting weeds. He pulled into a small lot on the right, where there was a squat, flat-roofed building with Christmas lights in the windows. The Elbow Room was a sinister-looking little tavern whose false stone siding and filthy slit-like casement windows installed well above eye level made it resemble a pillbox. Its disregard for appearances went well beyond simple neglect. There was a willfulness about it, heightened by the irony of the Christmas lights, which were the Elbow Room’s joke on itself.

  Frank stood in the doorway and waited for his eyes to adjust to the dark. The Everly Brothers were playing faintly and the smell of stale beer and cigarette smoke stirred up a familiar excitement in him. It was 11 A.M. and there was no one in the place. A door behind the bar burst open and a stocky older man appeared carrying a case of beer. His hair was white but greased back in the style a younger man would wear, and where his build might have made him seem formidable at one time, he had mostly gone to paunch and softness and he now looked like a rakish grandfather. “There he is!” the man said.

  “What do you say, George?”

  “This your first stop?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Look at you. You look like a tourist.”

  Frank fingered one of the buttons on his shirtfront. “Grady, you know? He wanted . . . you know.”

  “I know. Everything on the QT. Everything.”

  “Got me driving this fucking car, too. Embarrassing.”

  George laughed. “So what’s going on up there?”

  “Nothing much.”

  “Any trouble?”

  “I don’t hear about any. I mean, they’re watching, you know?”

  “So you drive down here, looking like John Q. from Newton or Lexington or some damn place, that’s good.”

  “Yeah. I don’t like it.”

  “Look at you,” George laughed again. “You look like a goddamn insurance guy from Malden.”

  “Shit.”

  “Like a regular civilian.”

  Frank said, “Our good friend been around?”

  George made a face. “Our good friend isn’t gonna show up here.” He seemed surprised Frank had asked the question. “He sends friends of his.”

  George produced a pair of ledgers and a large vinyl bag with a zipper, the kind banks use, and put them on the bar. “Come on around back,” he said.

  Frank lifted a hinged section of the bar top, gathered up the ledgers and bag, and followed George into the back area, which was crowded with cases of beer and liquor stacked to the ceiling. George opened the door to an unrefrigerated walk-in. Sections of plywood supported by cinder blocks served as a work surface around its perimeter. There were adding machines, telephones, and four brand-new Philco 20-inch television sets. George knelt and turned the dial on a safe in the corner. Frank sat in one of the chairs and picked up a laminated chart that was a combination table and slide rule manufactured by a concern called American Turf Monthly. Above an artist’s rendition of a herd of galloping horses were the words “Rate-O-Matic Speed Rule Handicapper.”

  “So where’s the good beaches around here?” Frank asked.

  “Depends what you want.”

  “Girls in bikinis.”

  “Go to Craigville. Lots of girls over there.”

  “I want to get laid down here.”

  “You can’t get laid up there?”

  “Sure. But I want to get laid down here. I’m thinking of something like, I don’t know, on a beach chair, involving suntan lotion.”

  George reached into the safe and pulled out two grocery bags packed with cash. “It’s eight hundred for the week. Total’s in the ledger.” He was trying to get Frank off the subject of sex. Frank sometimes beat up his sex partners and he had cut a couple, too. One, a girl who ran the roulette table at an after-hours club in Revere, was going to press charges until it was pointed out to her that Frank was connected with Grady Pope. Grady gave the girl a settlement and had a session with Frank and that should have been the end of it, but you never knew what the kid was getting up to in his off-hours. He was locked up when he was eighteen and now here it was, twelve years later, and he just didn’t know how to be out here in the world. As far as George was concerned, Frank Semanica was a pervert and couldn’t be trusted. George didn’t think it was a good idea working with Italians. That Stevie Tosca was another one. A master disappearance artist, sure, probably the best. But a sick bastard, from what George heard. It didn’t matter to Grady. He wasn’t around when the Irish and the Italians were at each other’s throats over control of the smuggling rackets during the Depression. Grady was doing a long stretch in Leavenworth when George was a soldier for the Gustins out of South Boston in 1935. They were going after each other in the streets back then with no restraint. By the end of it all, some people were dead and some people were in jail, territories changed and regimes were overturned. The Italians had the North End. The Irish operated unchallenged in South Boston, Charlestown, and Somerville. When Grady reemerged from federal custody in 1945, cooperation was the new business strategy. The fighting had taught everyone a lesson, but for people like George, who’d been through all that, the Italians would always be the other side.

  Outside, Frank Semanica opened the trunk of the Oldsmobile and transferred the money into an overnight valise. He tucked the ledgers and the vinyl bag on top and closed the trunk. From one of the windows of the Elbow Room, George watched him drive off. He regretted mentioning Craigville Beach to him. There were inexpensive vacation cottages and motels there, crowded with kids from up above. He could imagine Frank Semanica cruising up and down the beach road, sticking out like a sore thumb in spite of the car and the John Q. getup,
because all you had to do was take a look at Frank Semanica and you knew he was bad news. The problem was George could imagine him doing something stupid and getting caught with a suitcase full of cash and a gun in his possession. He regretted giving him the little paper envelope with the amphetamines in it, which he did as a gesture of goodwill, because that was the kind of thing George liked to do. For the ride back, he’d said. So you’re not falling asleep behind the wheel. Now he didn’t think it was such a good idea, Frank Semanica hopped up on speed.

  11

  Warren and his officers began sorting through the statewide list of sex offenders they had gotten from the state police, trying to account for their whereabouts at the time of the killing and establish any connections to the Cape. Warren took two men off patrol and had them working the phones all day, along with a pair of retired men who agreed to volunteer their time at Chief Holland’s request. The registry of motor vehicles donated two employees from their records section to work exclusively with the police. Sequestered in a back room of the registry’s offices across town, they fielded requests from the officers, cross-checking information against the state list as needed.

  Jenkins and Dunleavy’s office had been turned into the command center, such as it was. Inside, it was cramped, warm, and noisy. Several people were speaking on telephones and a technician from the phone company was in there trying to secure the lines out of the way of chair legs and foot traffic. Jenkins and Warren stood outside in the hallway.

  “We should save the peepers for last,” Jenkins said. “And for the indecent exposures, if we can figure out which ones involved kids, that would be our best bet.”

  Warren said, “We’re going to have to track down where those cases were heard so we can get the records. That’s a lot of phone time. Why don’t you supervise them until noon, then I’ll have Dunleavy take over.”