‘It’s a revolving door-’
‘-see, that’s what happens,’ one of the others scoffed. ‘You’ve got to nip this stuff in the ass. This juvenile shit-’
‘What, are you gonna lock up every kid who steals a car?’
‘Yes! Every one! That’s what you do — you hit ’em hard right away so they learn. They’ve got to know this shit isn’t gonna flush.’
‘Doesn’t matter. These kids have brass balls, they don’t care.’
‘You know what I don’t get?’ said another, in a puzzled tone.
‘We all know what you don’t get.’
Guffaws and high fives all around.
‘No, listen. The thing… the thing I don’t get is, Gittens, you said Braxton told you he threw Jameel Suggs off the roof. So if he admitted it to you, why didn’t you do anything about it? I mean, he confessed. You had him on a murder.’
‘Yeah, Jesus, Gittens, what are you, protecting this piece of shit?’
Gittens allowed the question to hang there a moment. ‘I did report it. The DA said it wasn’t enough to indict. They didn’t have anything else, and they said a confession alone wouldn’t support a conviction. They didn’t want the case.’
Another pause. We waited, uneasily, for the next gust of conversation.
‘I heard a rumor Braxton was a rat,’ said one.
‘No way-’
‘-Who would he give up? Himself?’
‘-How do you turn a guy like that anyway? Braxton’s a murderer. Even if he wanted to flip, you couldn’t give him a deal. No DA would go for it.’
‘Hey, the feds flipped Whitey Bulger. He was a murderer.’
‘That’s different, it was a Mafia thing. Whitey was a mobster.’
‘Yeah, and Whitey fucked them anyway. He didn’t give them jack shit. These feds are complete shitheads.’
‘Tell you what, if anybody ever did flip Braxton, he’d be a great rat. Imagine the shit Harold Braxton could tell you.’
‘Lowery’d never give him a deal. He’d never get elected again.’
‘Hey, you never know. It’s like the man said: Whitey Bulger got his deal.’
‘That’s because he’s white.’ This was the black cop. He delivered the statement in an even tone. It was a fact, take it or leave it.
‘Oh, Jesus, here we go-’
‘-Why are you always starting with that shit?-’
The black cop shrugged. ‘You all know if Whitey Bulger was black, the feds never would have let him flip, Mafia or no Mafia.’
‘What do you mean? Lowery’s black and he’s the DA.’
‘Yeah, what’s he, a black racist?’
This last comment was pushing. The monster’s eyes appeared on the surface of the loch and lingered there a moment before submerging again.
‘Andrew Lowery wants to be the first black mayor,’ the black cop said. ‘He can’t afford to be associated with a thug like Braxton. An African-American DA protecting an African-American gangster? No way. Braxton scares white people, and white people vote.’
Gittens said, ‘Yeah, well, just the same, I’d try and flip Braxton if I could. That’s the job.’
‘It’ll never happen. Braxton’ll never rat out anyone.’
Gittens inclined his head as if to say, Hey, you never know.
Much later, I learned that Gittens kept a photo in his office of Nikisha Wells, the little girl who had been raped and thrown off the roof in the Grove Park project. In the photo, she wore a red dress and white blouse. Her frizzly hair was arranged in two pigtails, which stuck out from her head at ten o’clock and two o’clock like antennae. There was a red ribbon at the end of each pigtail to match her dress. The photo showed Nikisha leaning forward and laughing as if she’d just heard something very funny. What time is it when an elephant sits on your fence? Typical third-grader. I asked Gittens why he kept the photo. He said he’d known Nikisha from his years in the Flats and he kept it ‘to remind me — this is who we work for.’ At the time it seemed like a full enough explanation. In hindsight, though, I wish I’d probed further. I wish I’d asked what he thought of Braxton throwing Nikisha’s murderer off that same roof. It would have been interesting to know Gittens’s answer.
16
The next morning, a little the worse for wear after a night at Connaughton’s Cafe, I showed up at the DA’s Special Investigations Unit. John Kelly did not accompany me, pleading a personal errand of some mysterious and unexplained kind. I did not ask him about it. It was plain that he did not want to discuss what he was doing.
The Special Investigations Unit was in a nondescript seventies-modern office building, separate from the main District Attorney’s office, which was housed in the Sussex County Courthouse. And lest you imagine the SIU office as one of those movie-ish gritty urban police stations — phones ringing, typewriters clacking, ‘perps’ handcuffed to chair legs — let me tell you up front that the SIU looked more like an accountant’s office. In fact, several accountants and even a dentist shared the same third-floor hallway. The office was furnished with cloth- walled dividers and industrial carpeting, all in shades of tan. The only concession to law-enforcement gung ho was a
poster pinned to one of the cubicle walls: A SOCIETY THAT DOES NOT SUPPORT ITS POLICE SUPPORTS ITS CRIMINALS.
With Bob Danziger’s murder, Caroline Kelly had ascended to the head of this unit. Caroline greeted me at the reception area and ushered me around the place, introducing me to several state troopers and to one lawyer, a bowling ball of a man named Franny Boyle.
Boyle came out from around his desk and gave my hand a bone-crushing squeeze. He said, with a Boston accent so thick it sounded like a put-on, ‘So yaw the guy from Maine.’ I admitted I was, then stretched my fingers to peel them apart. Boyle looked like he’d been a football player once, a linebacker maybe, though now, at age forty- five or so, he was going soft. The skin of his face sagged. His belly ballooned over his belt buckle. He was nearly bald, with even the sides of his head shaved virtually to the scalp. Still, he was formidable enough. It was difficult to tell where that hairless head ended and his thick neck began. ‘Anything you need, Mistah Truman, I mean any fuckin’ thing…’ Boyle didn’t finish the sentence, but stood there nodding to signify Just ask. He pointed a meaty finger at me: ‘Remembuh.’ I told him I would.
Caroline asked Boyle if he was feeling alright. The smell of alcohol hung about him — it was ten A.M. — and his face was mottled with a drinker’s flush. A fine mesh of red, threadlike veinules netted the skin of his nose.
‘I’m okay, Lynnie. Just upset, is all. The funeral’s coming up, you know. Autopsy took forever.’
‘Franny, maybe you’d better go home. You don’t look so great. It’s alright, we’re all upset.’
After a moment’s hesitation, Boyle grabbed his coat, gave me another knuckle-cruncher, and shuffled down the hall. With his overcoat on, the man’s neck all but disappeared; his head seemed to be attached directly to his back like a bullfrog’s.
When he was out of earshot I said, ‘“Lynnie”?’
Caroline shook her head with an expression that said, Don’t even think about calling me Lynnie. ‘Franny’s a long story,’ she said, and left it at that.
She brought me to Danziger’s office, where two strips of yellow crimescene tape were strung in an X across the door frame. A glossy peel-and-stick label on the door predicted dire consequences for anyone who entered (… under Massachusetts law it is a felony to enter, tamper with, or otherwise disturb a crime scene unless explicitly authorized…). Caroline paused to run her fingertips over the plastic name-plate with its impressed letters, ROBERT M. DANZIGER, CHIEF, then she pulled off the tape as if she were clearing away cobwebs. Inside, the office was
