Lesser Evils Read online

  You owe two bills! George McCarthy screaming in his face. I’ll get it, the guy says. Like he’s telling his wife he forgot to pick up the milk. Like this wasn’t anything serious and he was going to show them, and that’s what really sent Frank Semanica over the deep end. When they were done with him, Frank was supposed to drop him off in Hyannis, but on the way there, he got the idea that this guy was not going to pay, that he was either going to skip town or go to the police, and that’s why he was just sitting through the beating and the cutting, waiting it out.

  He reached over and opened the door and shoved him out, taking both his hands off the wheel to do it. Frank was so wound up he didn’t notice the car behind him and he knew the driver reported it because soon afterward, while he was sitting at an empty intersection, the cop pulled up behind him. The red light went on and he floored it. Then Frank was in that wild desperate place that he hadn’t known since prison, where his vision was reduced to a small circle and he had a peppery sensation in the back of his throat, his palms tingling.

  The cop pushed that stupid humped-up-looking heap of shit for all it was worth and Frank couldn’t get any distance on him. He finally managed to lose him on a long curve by shutting his lights off and running off the road. He hit some rocks and a few small trees and he didn’t think it was serious, but now, back out on the Mid-Cape Highway, he noticed that the oil pressure was dropping. He figured he’d damaged the oil pan. He didn’t want to risk trying to make it to Boston. They were looking for him and the car was going to break down. Frank took the exit for Sagamore.

  He came out on Old King’s Highway, within view of the bridge over the canal. There were big drooping trees by the road. He pulled over in front of a mom-and-pop restaurant with picnic tables out front and a phone booth off to the side of the lot. Frank drove the car to the back of the building. The oil gauge dropped to zero and stayed there. There was a narrow passageway between the rear of the building and a wooden stockade fence and he nosed the car in until the front end bumped a row of trash cans. He got out and retrieved his pistol from under the seat and put it in the waist of his jeans. He went out to the phone booth and smashed out the little light in the ceiling so no one could spot him from the road. He waited for his eyes to adjust to the darkness and then he made a phone call.

  “Hello?”

  “Christy?”

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s Frank.”

  “What?”

  “It’s Frank Semanica.”

  “Oh, Frank.”

  “Hey, is Ernie there?”

  “You woke me up.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Frank?”

  “Yeah, it’s Frank.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Is Ernie there?”

  “No.”

  Christy Fontaine knew damn well that her husband was a thief, a forger, and a former loan shark who had a regular job milking the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority for a good sum of money for work not performed. So Frank found it galling, to say the least, that Christy thought he was a bad influence from whom her husband needed to be protected.

  “Okay. You’re not going to tell me where he is.”

  “I don’t know where he is, Frank. It’s twelve thirty.”

  “Well, I need to talk to him. Right now.”

  “God, Frank. It’s the middle of the night.”

  “Like right fucking now, Christy. Now.”

  “Don’t swear at me.”

  “I hate to bring this up but your husband owes me. I’m in a fix right now and I need a ride. I need him to come out and get me. He needs to come here now.”

  “Jesus. Well . . . Where are you?”

  “I need to talk to him. If he’s there you better put him on the line.”

  “He’s at Arthur’s. I’ll call him.”

  “Give him this number.” He read the numbers on the white circle at the center of the dial.

  “Tell him to let it ring until I answer it. If you have to get dressed and walk over to Arthur’s, do it.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Doesn’t sound like nothing to me. This better not get Ernie in trouble.”

  “Ernie’s gonna be in trouble if he doesn’t come out here. Now get in touch with him and tell him to call that number.”

  Frank hung up the phone, let out a long breath, and began going through his options if Ernie didn’t call. Maybe he was where he told Christy he was, and maybe not. Last Frank remembered, he was screwing some hairstylist who lived on the top floor of a triple-decker in Milton.

  He walked back over to the Buick. There was a trail of oil on the pavement, tracing the arc he’d made when he pulled in. He looked inside and noticed the blood on the seat on the passenger side. His fingerprints were all over the car. He took off his T-shirt and started wiping down the Buick as he went over names in his head. He needed to think of who else he could call in case Ernie didn’t show. He was going to try to keep this from Grady and his people, so they were out. Frank planned to tell them that the Buick was stolen from outside his apartment during the night. They had stolen the car themselves about a year earlier. It was one of a group they kept in a repair shop in Dorchester for general use. They were coming and going constantly, Grady’s cars, so Frank was confident this one wouldn’t be missed.

  Far off toward the road, he heard the telephone ring. Frank ran to the phone booth. He told Ernie where he was and gave him the exit off the Mid-Cape and a description of the restaurant. He didn’t say what circumstances brought him there. Ernie told him he was leaving right away.

  Frank paced behind the restaurant, out of sight, savoring the relief, then he got back to wiping with a new enthusiasm. When he had cleaned every surface of the car that he might have touched, he went over it again, keeping an ear cocked for Ernie’s arrival. Frank had gotten him out of one hell of a lot of hot water when Ernie was putting money on the street in Quincy and Grady got wind of it. He asked Frank if he knew anything about it. Frank said he didn’t. Grady decided to send some men over to inform this person that his free ride was over. Someone would be coming by every week to collect thirty percent.

  Frank made a quick run to Quincy. He and Ernie had gone to high school together and were part of the same loose street gang when they were teenagers. In his loan-sharking business, Ernie sometimes used Frank for tune-ups, something Grady didn’t know about. Frank told Ernie that he was going to get a visit from some of Grady Pope’s people—which often meant a trip to the hospital—and that he should shut down immediately. Ernie agreed, and Frank went back to South Boston and told them that the Quincy loan shark was no longer in business, that he’d run into trouble with local law enforcement.

  Frank sat back among the trees and watched the road. After nearly two hours, he heard a car approaching and saw headlight beams through the woods. He stayed where he was until he recognized Ernie’s Mercury. He came out of the trees and got into the passenger side.

  “What’s going on?” said Ernie.

  “Don’t ask questions.”

  Ernie started to drive off, but Frank said, “Wait.” He got out and ran back to the Buick. He opened the hood and reached under the air cleaner until he found the fuel line. He twisted it until it broke free from the carburetor and he felt the cool gasoline running between his fingers. He put his T-shirt under the broken line, and let it soak. Then he stuffed it in the gas tank and lit it. The T-shirt ignited with a whoof. He ran back out to the Mercury and said to Ernie, “Go.”

  They got onto Old King’s Highway and passed the great silent abutment of the Sagamore Bridge, going underneath the giant structure, the canal surging past, turbulent and oily-looking in the night. They wound around and soon were up on the bridge. Frank Semanica looked down. Where he had been was all blackness, a particularly deserted section of the can
al. Far off, he saw a small orange ball glowing. He watched it get brighter and then blossom into something three times its original size and slowly rise, lighting the treetops around it and churning upward, a roiling, growing mushroom of fire.

  13

  Chief Holland looked old, propped up in a hospital bed reading a newspaper folded in quarters. His bare feet stuck out from under the blanket, white, with gnarled, yellow toenails. They disappeared beneath the bedclothes when Warren walked into the room. The chief’s jowls were somehow accentuated, even while the substance of his face seemed diminished. His white hair, which Warren was used to seeing combed to the side, was standing up in wispy formations around his head.

  The relationship between the two was an awkward, stillborn thing, characterized by paternal approval and filial loyalty, but mostly by the uneasiness between two men who were so fundamentally different that each found the other difficult in ways that they could not fully describe. Warren’s seriousness and the chief’s avuncular, profane ease in a world of men made for an odd tension between them and while there was mutual respect and even a certain affection between the two, they had always found conversation outside the job difficult and one was frequently indecipherable to the other.

  Warren perceived that Holland took a liking to him when he joined the force in 1950, a go-getter among a bunch of laggards. Holland appeared grateful to have Warren on hand, praised his enthusiasm, and rewarded his initiative. He was promoted quickly. But when he made lieutenant, and they began working more closely together, it soon became apparent that they weren’t entirely compatible.

  He knew there were certain things the chief overlooked. Holland played small-town politics and did what was expedient. He had admonished Warren on occasion about his approach to the job. Holland had advised him once to “be realistic,” and on another occasion said, “Don’t take yourself so damn seriously.” These incidents burned anew in his memory as he took a seat beside the chief’s bed. “How are you feeling?” Warren said.

  “My third goddamn trip to the hospital in three months. I should just move in.”

  “What’s the latest?”

  “Damned if I know. Damned if they know. I keep getting these heart rhythms or whatever they call them.”

  “How’s Alice?”

  The chief waved the question off, then said, “She’s beside herself.” Holland straightened some of the things on the wheeled tray beside his bed, then made an attempt to smooth the hair against his head. The two started to speak at once. “Go ahead,” said the chief.

  “No,” said Warren. “You go.”

  “How are things at the station?”

  “I guess I’ve been remiss by not coming in here to give you regular reports.”

  “You don’t have to do that. You’re in charge. I believe I’m out of it anyway. Every time I get back on my feet I have more damn problems.”

  “Maybe it’s just going to take some time.”

  “Oh, hell. What’s happening with that murder down at the beach?”

  Warren told him about the surprise autopsy, the confrontation with Stasiak, and their meeting with Elliott Yost. The chief seemed to be half-listening, smoothing the newspaper out against his thighs, and it occurred to Warren that he already knew all of it. Suspicion and a sense of persecution began to stir. Perhaps the chief had been calling around for news, but if that were so, why didn’t he call Warren, who was in the best position to know things?

  The chief showed no concern over the actions of the state police, in fact displayed little interest in the murders. It came as such a surprise to Warren that he wondered for a moment if it were fear of death. He mentioned the disappearance of the Weeks family and Holland looked at him as if he’d suddenly started speaking another language. Warren was going to tell him about the discovery of Joseph Leapley, handcuffed, beaten, and possibly thrown out of a moving car, but didn’t bother.

  If the chief weren’t preoccupied with the possibility of his demise, then he was being tight-lipped for another reason. And the subject of his replacement hadn’t come up. Warren had to admit that was the reason for his visit. But he encountered this pudgy old man with whom he was not familiar, reduced and frightened, or cagey and evasive, he wasn’t sure which, but he walked out of the hospital wondering if he was being excluded from something, and as he drove away, he felt something solidifying in his stomach: anxiety and gathering anger and a repeating run of scenes in Chief Holland’s hospital room that he knew had no basis in fact but which he couldn’t help imagining anyway.

  In the early evening, Doctor Hawthorne sat on the upper porch of his house in Provincetown drinking gin and tonic, all but invisible in the wisteria and shadow. He was a large, bald man with a classical nose and a broad mouth, his face appealingly masculine, though somewhat compromised now by the effects of age. With him was a colleague, Karl Althaus. They sat in low wicker chairs in the gathering dark, watching a man pace in the yard below.

  “Look at him,” said Hawthorne. “He is all wilderness.”

  “Edgar, is it?”

  “That is what he prefers at the moment.”

  “He looks like someone who requires a short leash.”

  “Twenty milligrams of benzodiazepine in a tumbler of lemonade.”

  “Oh, Reese, you are awful. Did he ever make any progress on the seropromazine?”

  “No.”

  “You aren’t giving him anything at all?”

  “Just the occasional ‘Mickey,’ to borrow a vulgar term. When the situation warrants it.”

  They watched Edgar Cleve stomp around the yard, examining the weeds, his gaze occasionally drifting over the back of the house, his outsized hands going in and out of his pockets

  Hawthorne said, “So what are they working on now, Karl?”

  “First trials on an antiseizure prototype. Fenchloravin.”

  “I assume they’re not going to bother with animal testing.”

  “They’re falsifying phase one results as we speak,” said Althaus. “Mice, rabbits, even monkeys are only useful to a point. As you well know. Any interest?”

  “I’m busy here. And my personal circumstances call for a certain amount of discretion. What are you looking for?”

  “Specifically, about a dozen children under the age of twelve with a history of seizures.”

  Hawthorne put his elbows on the porch rail and peered down through the wisteria as if to get a better angle on Cleve in the yard below.

  “It’s not really my forte. Children or seizures.”

  “Do think about it,” said Althaus.

  A bat careened through the dark and Cleve was suddenly alert, his arms rigid by his sides, his face turned upward toward the creature as it passed. He resumed his pacing with an intensified agitation.

  “Wilderness and appetite,” Hawthorne said, looking down through the screen.

  Althaus’s cigarette glowed in the dark. “What are you using him for?”

  “I’m trying out some ideas.”

  “Do you think it’s wise, keeping him around?”

  “He’s no risk. In fact he’s quite vulnerable.”

  “He doesn’t strike me as someone who is particularly vulnerable. In fact, he looks quite formidable.”

  “Oh, he’s an accomplished manipulator. But that’s the worst you could say about him. He craves approval. He wants my approval, especially. I’d like him to shed this eventually, for his own sake, but for the moment his desire for approval gives me leverage.”

  Althaus gulped from his drink, his eyes glassy. “I don’t see you dispensing approval very freely.”

  “That is correct. The trick is convincing him he might get it.”

  Althaus laughed into his glass. “You awful man.”

  14

  Father Boyle stood in the old sunroom at Nazareth Hall and watched the children playing in the yar
d. In his car he had a change of clothes, his specimen basket, and his sketchbook. Though he had told Mrs. Gonsalves he would be spending the afternoon helping a parish in Fall River organize a spiritual retreat, he was in fact going to hike into the woods of the outer Cape.

  He looked out at the sky. Uncommonly clear and dry. He felt a momentary thrill at the thought of early evening light in the highlands, its burnished tones on the bayberry and dunes, on the broad sea far below. But then he remembered the resolution he’d made to not be out in the woods again at night. Though he told himself he did not want a repeat of the incident in the meadow earlier in the summer, he understood that in fact he wanted it very much. Father Boyle sometimes drove around in the area where he believed it had occurred. He pretended to take meandering hikes when he was actually hoping to recognize some feature in the landscape, to find himself in the very spot where he had had that exceedingly strange experience.

  Sitting at a picnic table off to himself was the new child, Michael Warren, who was spending three days at Nazareth Hall on a trial basis. The boy took something out of his pocket just far enough to look at it and quickly put it back. Father Boyle watched him do this several times and glance around at the others. He had examined the file on Michael Warren. The boy was a fairly routine example of mental retardation with some indications of fetal alcohol syndrome. But there was something particularly poignant about him. He was shy and delicate and agreeable; attentive but given to flights of inner retreat during which he was all but oblivious to the world around him.

  Father Boyle stepped out of the sunroom and crossed the yard. Mike folded his arms on the picnic table in an attempt at nonchalance. Father Boyle said, “How are you, young man?”

  “Fine.”

  “Why are you sitting here by yourself?”