The comment surprised me. I didn’t see Kelly as the hang-’em-high type.
‘Sounds bad, huh? Well the truth is, our system is built to punish crimes after the fact. We’re helpless to prevent a crime before it’s committed, even if everyone sees it coming. Everybody who ever ran into Frank Fasulo knew he’d kill someone someday. He was a homicide waiting to happen. But all we could do was wait for it to happen, then go in and clean up the mess. It shouldn’t be that way.’
‘So he killed the cop who interrupted the stickup?’
‘He raped him. Then he killed him. Then he danced around the bar and celebrated.’ Kelly stopped spinning the nightstick. ‘Well, this is all a long time ago, Ben Truman.’
The spinning and walking resumed.
‘So what happened?’
‘We – the police – tracked down Sikes in a hotel a day or two later. We had this military sort of unit then. “Tactical Patrol Force,” they were called, TPF. Helmets, black outfits, the whole shebang. It was big in those days. Every city had one. They stormed the hotel room and shot Sikes dead. Fasulo jumped off the Tobin Bridge a few days later, which was probably the only sane thing he ever did.’
We were coming into a charmless intersection anchored by a scruffy used-car dealership, which consisted of a portable office, a half dozen compact cars, and hundreds of little triangular vinyl pennants. Beside us was the euphonious Pleasant Spa. (In the old Boston dialect, a convenience store was referred to as a spa, and you still see the word in store windows around town.)
Kelly stopped to survey. The nightstick twirled. Spin, slap!
‘How do you do that?’
‘This?’ Spin, slap!
‘Yeah, how do you make it . . . ?’
Kelly regarded the stick as if he hadn’t noticed it was spinning until that very moment. ‘I don’t know. You just . . .’ Spin, slap.
‘Show me. Do it slow.’
Spin. Slap.
‘You just kind of let it fall away from your wrist a little, then yank it by the strap here.’
‘Let me try.’
‘Do you know how long I’ve had this thing?’
‘Come on, it’s not the crown jewels. It’s a stick. Let me try.’
He passed it to me and I slipped the leather strap over my hand. I tried to imitate him, letting the baton fall forward then snapping it back toward my chest. The free end flashed up in my face. I ducked.
‘Nice and easy, Ben Truman. Don’t knock yourself out.’
‘Do me a favor. If I do knock myself out, just in case – shoot me.’
‘Nice and easy’
The club wobbled through a complete revolution and I grabbed it. The trick seemed to be that it did not turn in an even circle. The weight was unbalanced (the free end was thicker and heavier), and the strap introduced enough play that the axis of rotation shifted constantly. Plus, the thing was barely shorter than your arm, so it threatened to whack you in the head every time it passed.
‘Harder than it looks,’ I said.
‘Here, you better give that thing back before you hurt yourself.’
32
‘You again.’
Julio Vega leaned his shoulder against the door frame. The ex-cop tried to fix his filmy eyes on me but they were sluggish; he let them wander to a spot on my chest somewhere.
‘What is it now, Maine? Gittens send you back for more?’
‘No, sir. Gittens doesn’t even know I’m here.’
‘Of course he does.’ Vega snorted, then padded off barefoot.
Kelly and I followed him to the same room where we’d spoken ten days before. Vega fell into one of the sweat-slicked wing chairs and returned to his television show, ESPN SportsCenter.
There was something disquieting about Vega’s appearance. It wasn’t simply that he was drunk or exhausted – though he was obviously both drunk and exhausted. Something was missing, something had gone out of him. Whatever it is that hangs behind the curtain, behind the gristle and bone of the face, whatever it is that animates the eyes and nose and mouth, it had simply left. I could imagine Vega removing that pouchy, unhandsome face and laying it down like one of Dali’s liquid clock faces.
‘Have you been drinking, Julio?’ I asked.
‘Course I been drinking.’ He blew a scornful little sniff. Stupid question.
‘I need to talk to you about Raul.’
No response.
‘I said we need to talk.’ My voice was too loud, as if I could reach him by shouting.
‘Hey, Maine, I’m drunk, not deaf.’
Kelly and I exchanged glances. What was wrong with this guy?
‘Julio, what did Frank Fasulo have to do with the raid on the red-door crackhouse?’
‘Frank Fasulo? What the fuck you talking about?’
‘That night you raided the apartment with the red door, the tip from Raul had something to do with Frank Fasulo, didn’t it?’
‘Man, I don’t even know who Frank Fasulo is.’ He watched basketball highlights on the screen.
‘Tell me about the night you and Artie Trudell did that raid.’
‘I told you already, I got nothing to say about that.’
‘Julio, that isn’t gonna fly anymore. We’re going to talk about it.’
He shook his head. ‘Nothing to say, homes.’ The words were defiant, but Vega’s tone was not. He was reciting lines he’d rehearsed over and over, an actor walking through a part he’d played for too many performances.
‘Julio, I need to know who Raul was.’
Vega ignored me.
Kelly said, ‘Alright, that’s enough of this bullshit.’ He switched off the TV with a slap. ‘You’re going to cut this shit out and answer the man’s questions.’
‘Who the fuck you think you are?’
‘Shut up.’ Kelly turned to me. ‘Ask him again.’
Vega started to rise from his chair, presumably to turn the TV on again.
With the tip of the nightstick, Kelly nudged him back into the chair. ‘Sit down.’
‘Who the fuck are you? Turn the TV back on, man.’
‘You want me to turn it off for good?’ He raised the nightstick as if to smash the screen.
‘HeyHEYHEY!’ Vega appealed to me: ‘What is this? Like good cop, bad cop?’
‘I said shut up. Ben, ask.’
‘Hey, didn’t your boy here tell you?’ Vega’s voice was soft, aggrieved. ‘I’m a cop.’
‘A cop? Is that what you think you are? A cop?’ Kelly wagged the nightstick at him. ‘You’re not a cop, you’re a disgrace. Don’t you ever call yourself a cop.’
‘What are you talkin’ about?’
‘You broke the code, Julio.’
‘What code?’
‘You sold out your partner.’
‘I didn’t sell out no one. Artie got shot.’
‘Yes, he got shot, and then you sold him out. You let his killer walk. You sinned.’
‘What are you talking about, “sinned”? I loved Artie.’
‘Then why did you let Harold Braxton get off?’
‘Me and Artie, we were like brothers, man—’
‘Who put Artie in front of that door?’
‘I don’t know. It was . . .’
‘It was what, Julio?’
‘We had a tip.’
Exasperated, Kelly stepped in front of the chair and leaned over Vega. The old man looked like some Grim Reaper come to collect Vega’s mortal soul. ‘That’s right, you keep it to yourself. Protect Raul, whatever you do. I don’t know if you’re a coward or if you’re crooked or just stupid, but I never thought I’d see a cop protect a cop killer.’
‘I’m not!’
‘What is it, Julio? Raul was your snitch, is that it? Your snitch killed your partner, is that what you’re afraid everybody is going to find out?’
‘No, I, I—’
Kelly loomed over him. ‘Don’t ever call yourself a cop. I’m a cop. This man is a cop.’ He pointed at me. ‘Artie Trudell was a
cop. You’re nothing. Understand? You’re nothing.’
‘I loved Artie.’ Vega’s voice was disappearing.
‘I can’t listen to this bullshit anymore,’ Kelly sighed. He went to the window.
For a time nobody spoke. We heard the sounds of kids nearby, teens maybe, needling each other, laughing.
Vega’s soft voice: ‘I never knew who Raul was.’
More young shouts from outside, a radio, a distant siren.
‘I never met him.’
I shot Kelly a glance. He was staring out the window, shaking his head.
Vega again: ‘It was just a tip.’
‘I don’t understand,’ I sputtered. ‘This whole thing – Braxton skated because you wouldn’t give up Raul. The whole point was to protect Raul from getting killed. Wasn’t it?’
Vega stared at the blank television screen.
‘You couldn’t find him, you said. You testified – You said you drove around looking for Raul but you couldn’t find him.’
‘Maybe there never was a Raul.’
‘What?’
‘I never met him.’
I knelt down in front of Vega so I could look into his eyes.
‘Julio, it’s real important you tell the truth. No more lies. Everything that’s happened up to this point – none of it matters now. You can’t go back and do anything any different. You see what I’m saying? But you can do the right thing now.’
Nothing.
‘Julio, if Braxton killed Artie Trudell, we’ll get him. But we need to know what really went on that night. If the tip about the red-door coke did not come from Raul, where did it come from?’
Nothing. I had the sense the real Julio Vega was retreating like a boat on the horizon.
I prodded, ‘Listen to me, Julio, it’s not too late. You can still make this come out right. You can go back and make it right for Artie.’
Then, unexpectedly, Vega’s reserve simply collapsed. Maybe he gagged, finally, on the acid he’d been forced to swallow. Remorse and guilt and longing over Artie Trudell’s death. The thumbs-down of policemen, the loathing of the city, the finger-pointing – the community wheeling on one of its members, the many encircling the one. Of course all of this is my own supposition. Vega gave no outward signal, no movement in his face, no tears, no melodrama. The only motion he made was an involuntary tremor in his hand. But all at once, the truth poured out and out.
‘Everybody knew about it,’ he said evenly. ‘It was like, that summer everybody in the Flats was scoring coke from that place. Everybody had this red-door coke. And everybody knew it was MP dealing out of there. We all knew it. We had to close the place. The whole neighborhood was terrified, with all the sliders and the drugs and the gangs. But nobody would say anything. We tried to do a few buys but nobody would help us. They didn’t want to get mixed up with it. So we couldn’t get a snitch in there, and without a snitch we couldn’t get a warrant.’
‘So you just made up Raul?’
He shook his head no.
‘Where did the tip come from?’
‘Gittens.’
My jaw literally dropped.
‘Gittens always had snitches, man. When he was in Narcotics, it was like he knew more than anyone else. He was like the king of Mission Flats. Me and Artie, when we come along and we got to Narcotics, sometimes he’d help us out, like he’d give us some tip one of his snitches gave him. He was just helping us out so we could get a few pinches, right? You got to understand, nobody talks in the Flats. No-body It’s like the Code of Silence, like the Mafia or whatever. So we went to Gittens and asked if he could help us out. We told him, we got to close down this red-door place but we can’t get a CI – a confidential informant, you know? You need a snitch for the warrant. So Gittens tells us he’ll ask around. A few days later he comes back and he says this guy Raul told him all this stuff about the red door and Braxton. Gave up the whole thing. So we used it. We just wrote it all down and we used it. It was a good tip. The warrant was good.’
‘How do you know he was a good snitch? Maybe Gittens made him up.’
‘Gittens didn’t have to. He had guys would just talk. Everybody talks to Gittens. He’s just got a way. Besides, I’d heard about Raul before. Gittens used him in other cases. I don’t think that was his real name, Raul, but I know Gittens used him in other cases, called him Raul.’ Vega’s voice was flat, his tone did not waver.
‘You waited ten years to say this? Why?’ Kelly was incensed. ‘Why didn’t you just tell the truth and then let Gittens find Raul? Jesus, you let a cop killer walk!’
Vega shook his head. His pupils moved with his head like the buttoneyes in a stuffed animal. He was not seeing anything. ‘We had to,’ he said. ‘We had to stick with what we said in the search-warrant application. If it came out that we lied in the warrant, they’d have thrown out the whole case. My partner got killed, man. This was my brother. How could I let them throw out the case? We had to stick to the story. We needed that warrant to stand up.’
He pleaded, ‘What did it matter where the tip came from? What difference did it make? The tip was true. Every word of it was true! What was I supposed to do? Admit we cleaned up the warrant a little? Braxton would have walked right then and there!’
But Kelly wasn’t mollified. ‘Why didn’t you just ask Gittens to give you Raul? All you had to say was, We need to give up the snitch because this is a cop killing and all promises are off. Gittens would have understood that.’
‘I told him that. He said he did not know Raul’s real name, he only knew his street name.’
‘OG,’ I prodded, remembering the file in Danziger’s office.
‘That’s right. Old Gangster, some bullshit like that. Gittens and me, we looked for that guy, Raul, OG, whatever. He took off. He didn’t want to get caught between the cops and the Posse. I’d have done the same thing. Raul was dead no matter which side found him. Even if the cops had found him, he knew we couldn’t protect him, especially after the trial. So he took off. We were locked in,’ Vega said.
‘We?’
‘Me and Gittens. Well just me, really. Gittens didn’t have nothing to do with it.’
Kelly sighed wearily.
‘I don’t suppose there’s no way we could just keep this between us?’ Vega asked.
‘No chance,’ I said.
‘No. Didn’t think so.’ One of Vega’s hands sought out his forehead and began to knead the slack skin there. He said, ‘It wasn’t like you said, you know. It was all for Artie. I was trying to save the case. I’d do anything . . .’
I nodded. There was nothing to tell him, no comfort to offer.
‘I’d do anything.’
‘Julio,’ I said finally, ‘maybe there is something. You can take us back to that night.’
33
The triple-decker at 52 Vienna Road in the Flats had been vehemently rehabilitated. What had once been a fortress with a crack dealership on the top floor was now a trig little three-family home with October-colored mums out front.
On the third-floor landing – where crackheads had stood and passed rolled-up bills through a slit in the red door – there was a bristly mat so visitors could wipe their shoes. The red door was not even red. It was beige. The beautiful battered-down, rifle-blasted, wood-pane red door of my imagination had been replaced by a hollow-core steel job. The landing was tiny, about four by four – much smaller than I’d pictured it – and the two of us cha-cha’d around each other as different details caught our attention. When we were through, Kelly and I climbed up the next few steps, vaguely relieved to be out of the killing zone in front of the door.
Vega, who had been obliged to wait below on the staircase, stepped up onto the little stage. ‘Man, they really cleaned this place up,’ he said apprehensively, as if we would not believe him. ‘It didn’t look like this.’
‘It’s alright, Julio,’ I reassured. ‘Just tell us what happened, start to finish.’
Vega recounted the raid in detail. He na
med the cops on the entry team, where they were positioned, he described the dripping heat of that summer night, even the apparent strength of the door itself. Yet he did it all in the same hollow manner I’d noticed when he’d met me at the door an hour earlier. It was like listening to a dead man.
‘When Artie got shot, at first I didn’t see nothing. Just the sound. Like boom. People always say guns sound like firecrackers, like pop pop. This was no firecracker, this was BOOM! I was looking at the door, and the top of it just kind of blew out, like from the inside. I remember I’m thinking, That’s weird, the way the top of that door exploded like that. The things you think about, you know? I was kneeling beside the door, down here like this. I looked up and Artie had kind of turned around, like his back was to me. And then he just dropped, man. There was a lot of blood. I mean a lot of blood.’ Vega rubbed his eyes, which were dull and world-tired. ‘I figure the guy must have been standing right behind the door, right up close so he could aim at Artie’s head. He must have waited to figure out where Artie was hitting the door so he could line him up. Then he just shot through the door where he figured Artie’s head was at. Only it doesn’t make sense, because if he wanted to kill him and be sure of it, he’d have aimed at Artie’s chest, where the target was biggest. It’s like he knew Artie was wearing a vest . . . Sometimes I think, Artie was just such a big dude. I’m talking maybe six-two, six-three, two-sixty, two-seventy-five – big. And the shooter, he aimed so high, like maybe he did not want to hit him, just scare him. Only he did not know Artie was gonna be so damn big . . .’