‘I don’t know. I never-’
‘Well, you’d better start thinking about it, Chief Truman, if you want to get a guy like Braxton. You’d better think about what you’re willing to do.’ Kelly gave me a long look.
He withdrew the nightstick from my chest. ‘Because there’s no other way. You can’t be a good cop and obey all the rules. That’s the dirty little secret.’
We started walking again.
‘Good cops do bad things for good reasons. Bad cops do bad things for bad reasons. Most cops want to be good, that’s the truth. But it takes experience to know how. Do you see what I’m getting at?’
‘You’re saying I don’t have the experience to work this case. But all I want to do is observe-’
‘I’m saying, if you get mixed up in it, you’ll probably get hurt. Or worse.’
‘When you say worse — ’ Another of Kelly’s looks. ‘Ah.’
We went on walking.
‘Chief Truman, I came here to tell you what Leo Stapleton would have told me: Don’t be in such a hurry to meet the Harold Braxtons of the world. They’ll come to you when the time is right.’
‘In a town like this, I’m more likely to meet a woolly mammoth than a Harold Braxton. I need to do this. I need to. You’ll have to trust me on that.’
Kelly stopped to look up at the sky. It was a clear-blue fall day. He puffed out his cheeks, then released a long sigh. ‘Well,’ he concluded, ‘two dead boys is enough.’
He was referring to Braxton’s police victims, Danziger and the narcotics officer Artie Trudell. At the time, they were the only two we knew about.
There is no official oath for police officers in Versailles, Maine, so I had to make up some malarkey about ‘faithfully protecting and serving the people’ of the town ‘so help you God.’ It fell somewhere between the presidential oath of office and the Boy Scouts oath, but it did the trick. John Kelly, age sixty-six, was now the junior officer in the Versailles Police Department.
We decided to leave first thing Monday morning. That gave me a couple of days to make arrangements and pack my car, an old Saab 900 with a crack in the steering rack and a number of cancerous rust stains. I told everyone where I was going, although I described the journey in the sunniest possible way. I did not mention the Mission Posse or the gunshots to the eye. I was just going down to the city to observe, to keep tabs on the case. No danger ‘t’all. Diane and Phil and the rest all pretended to understand and believe me, and in the shadow conversation of things unsaid — the habitual language of Maine Yankees — I understood that they knew enough about Harold Braxton anyway and were worried for me.
I left Dick Ginoux in charge of the station while I was gone. It was not an ideal choice. Dick was the kind of guy who would prop his eyeglasses on his forehead then spend the better part of an afternoon looking for them. But he was the senior man in the department, and besides, there were no Eliot Nesses among the other candidates.
The morning of my departure, my father got up early to see me off. ‘I know why you’re doing this,’ he told me. ‘I’m not so old I don’t understand what you’re doing. Just you be careful.’ His beard was growing in. It was almost pure white. ‘Well, you’d best get going, Ben. It’s a long ride.’ I hugged him. His body was almost exactly the size of my own now, even a little smaller. It came as a surprise. I still thought he was a giant. He endured the hug as long as could be expected. ‘Look at us,’ he said, pulling away, ‘couple of fruitcakes.’
As for me, I had an inchoate sense that my life was veering, that from now on events — my personal history — would move along a different vector. For the second time in my life, I was getting out. I was leaving Versailles behind.
In a way, I’d already left — the moment I first learned of that dead man by the lake.
PART TWO
‘What have we better than a blind guess to show that the criminal law in its present form does more good than harm?… Do we deal with criminals on proper principles?’
11
In the year and a half I lived in Boston as a graduate student, I never went to Mission Flats, not once. The neighborhood was mentioned often enough around BU. The savvier students, native Bostonians especially, referred to it in a smirky, knowing way, but always with fearful reverence. The name Mission Flats was shorthand for them. It meant all the things dreaded by city dwellers: a place where one would not want to get lost on a dark night, a place where stolen cars turned up abandoned, where stray bullets passed through kitchen windows, a place to score drugs (if you were so inclined). But for all the talk, few of them had actually seen it. I suppose every city has its isolated, run-down districts. Still, it was surprising how few Bostonians — white Bostonians especially — had ever been to Mission Flats. To them, it was as remote as the Gobi Desert. To be fair, there is no real reason to visit the Flats unless you live or work there. The neighborhood is small. There are no shops or sights. The only institution of any distinction is the New England Presbyterian Hospital, which found itself marooned in the Flats when the tide of wealth receded in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s. Even the picturesque features for which Mission Flats is named have been erased; there is no longer a mission or a flat there. The mission, where John Eliot preached Christianity to the Indians in the seventeenth century, vanished long ago. And the flats — a marshy, pestilential fen surrounding the Little Muddy River — had already been drained and filled by 1900. The district is adjacent to nowhere and on the way to nowhere, dangling beneath Franklin Park like a rotten pear. It exists in near-perfect isolation from the rest of the city, a sort of blighted Brigadoon. But it had taken up a spot in the ether of the imagination, especially among white suburbanites who knew nothing about Mission Flats except that they did not ever want to be there.
Kelly and I reached the eastern edge of the Flats shortly before noon. ‘You want to look around a little?’ he offered, and as I drove, he directed me down a broad avenue called Franklin Street. Here the sidewalk was lined with the same red-brick row houses that fill the Back Bay and the South End. Proceeding north, though, the street wall began to falter. Burned-out and abandoned buildings cropped up between the occupied ones. Here and there a tenement would simply have vanished, leaving a gap between the rough interior walls of the adjacent buildings. These vacant lots were strewn with stones and bricks. Eventually the row houses gave way to larger apartment buildings, then the desolate Grove Park housing project, then a commercial strip: auto-body shops, check-cashing services, convenience stores, tow lots.
‘The tour buses don’t get out here much,’ Kelly remarked dryly.
We turned off Franklin Street into a maze of side streets with tranquil names, Orchard Street, Amherst Street, Willow Street. The apartment buildings fell away and one-, two-, and three-family homes lined the sidewalks. Cracked driveways, sagging porches, peeled paint, even a few broken windows. The well-kept houses served only to highlight the decay of the surrounding ones. Yet for all that decay, on a sunny autumn day the neighborhood did not look especially threatening. Everywhere I looked, there seemed to be cheery details: a milk crate nailed to a phone pole as a makeshift basketball hoop, flower boxes, little girls skipping rope. This was no underworld, just poor. I had seen poverty before. There is no shortage of dirt-poor swamp Yankees and Quebecois in Acadia County. I imagined people here felt the same sense of diffident yearning. Poor is poor.
We emerged from the winding side streets and Kelly announced, ‘This is Mission Ave.’
(Bostonians reflexively shorten the word avenue to ave. A New Yorker sees the abbreviation 5th Ave. and says ‘Fifth Avenue’; a Bostonian sees Massachusetts Avenue and says ‘Mass Ave.’ I don’t know why. In any event, in Boston the road is generally referred to as Mission Ave.)
The main artery through the Flats was a wasteland. Looking north, Mission Avenue was a corridor of empty
