‘No, it’s just… I’m surprised you’re asking.’
‘Look, Ben, this isn’t exactly the way we’d want to do it. But we don’t have enough to hold him, so we don’t have much choice. If bringing you in to do the interrogation gets Braxton to talk, then that’s what we have to do.’
‘Even though I’m a suspect too.’
‘We’ll be listening. To both of you.’
‘Why should I help you?’
‘If you get anything out of him, it could only be to your benefit.’
‘And if I don’t?’
She did not answer.
I asked John Kelly what he thought.
‘It has to be your decision, Ben. If you decided to stay out of it, no one could blame you.’
‘I guess it’s already too late for that, isn’t it?’
‘Good,’ Caroline said decisively. ‘Kurth is waiting outside to drive us.’ She tossed me a shirt from the little pile she’d made. It was a conservative white button-down oxford. ‘Your shirt was all bloody. I got this for you.’
‘Thank you. What do I owe you?’
‘You get Braxton to talk, we’ll call it even.’
Her tone was mechanical, unfamiliar, cool.
‘Caroline, can we talk for a minute?’
‘We have nothing to talk about.’
John Kelly began to excuse himself, but his daughter told him to stay put.
‘Alright then,’ I said. ‘Okay Thank you for the shirt.’
She pinched out a little half smile that was pained and sardonic in equal measure. ‘Usually,’ she observed, ‘it’s the defense lawyer who puts the murderer in a clean shirt.’
30
In those last few days of its existence, there was a sense of fatigue about the old Boston Police headquarters on Berkeley Street. The building seemed ready to heave a sigh of exhaustion before expiring. (A month or so later, the Boston police moved to a glass box further up Tremont Street, a sleek modern building for a sleek modern department. That was the idea, anyway.)
Kurth and Caroline led John Kelly and me to an interview room down the hall from the Homicide office. It was a gloriously run-down little room with cracked paint and cloudy windows. The only concessions to modernity were a drip coffeepot and a toxic-looking air conditioner that blocked half of one window. Otherwise the flatfoots who’d worked here during Prohibition would have recognized the room straightaway.
We met the remainder of our team, such as it was. District Attorney Lowery was turned out in a maize bow tie and stylish cap-toed shoes. I could see my distorted reflection in the convex lenses of his spectacles. He greeted me with a grim nod. Martin Gittens shook my hand with extra care, a soulful two-hander, and asked about my injuries. His sudden concern for my well-being was a relief after the high drama of the day before. I took it as a sign that his suspicions of me had abated for some reason. Perhaps I’d earned a measure of trust now that I’d been blooded in combat. That was what I wanted to believe, anyway. Probably it was what Gittens wanted me to believe too; he used the momentum of my own panic — my neediness — against me in a kind of emotional judo.
We moved to a cramped room behind a one-way mirror. From this room, Lowery warned, my conversation with Braxton would be watched and recorded. ‘You’ll be on that tape too, Chief Truman,’ he said, ‘not just Braxton.’ I told him, ‘Well, that should help me relax.’ Kelly, looming over the group like a protective daddy, gave me a reproachful look. It said, Ben, just shut up.
Braxton was brought into the interview room, two uniform cops at his sides. He wore drooping jeans, flannel shirt, and a Brooklyn Dodgers cap embroidered with Jackie Robinson’s number 42. Cuffed at the ankles, he inched his way to the chair in geisha steps. After Braxton sat down, one of the cops cuffed his right foot to the chair leg and left him alone in the room. He stared into the mirror as if he could see through it, as if he were watching us.
And for a minute or so we watched him too. I’d seen Braxton only the day before, but this was my first chance to look at him for any length of time. I searched for some manifestation of his famous lethality. From the overheated descriptions of Braxton, I half expected him to glow like a hot coal. But his physical appearance was disappointing, just as his mug shot had been. He was quite small, maybe five-nine or so, and wiry hard. His manner was all street-corner badass. He manufactured a sneer; he folded his arms (or as nearly folded them as the handcuffs would allow). But there was a sense of disingenuousness about all the posing. It was theater. Braxton was acting out the role of a gangster, but it was someone else’s vision of a gangster, not his. Maybe it was all for our benefit. We demanded a certain style from him — a style that may have owed more to Hollywood than to Mission Flats, but we wanted it just the same — so he gave it to us. His eyes moved around the room, and he seemed to calculate and recalculate his position.
‘Let’s go,’ Braxton said to the mirror.
Kurth escorted me into the hall. ‘Give him his rights, make sure he signs the card,’ he instructed. He handed me an orange Miranda card. His eyes drilled into me: ‘Remember, we’re listening.’
And a moment later I was sitting opposite Harold Braxton.
‘Hi,’ I said.
No response.
Braxton’s nearness came as a surprise. In the observation room, the one-way glass and tinny speakers had exaggerated the distance between us. He had been a figure on a TV screen, glassed in, mediated, broadcast from a studio who-knew-where. But now, separated by just a few feet of photo-wood tabletop, Harold Braxton was undeniably present.
‘I need to inform you of your rights,’ I said, and I recited the Miranda catechism. When it was done, I slid the card toward him. ‘You have to sign it.’
He flexed the card between his thumb and index finger, then slid it back as if unsatisfied with its tensile strength.
‘I can’t talk to you without that signature.’
‘No.’
I slid the card back. ‘Just sign it. Otherwise I’m out of here.’
A smile played around his mouth. He signed the card — almost as a favor to me, I thought, to reassure me.
‘Do you know a guy named Ray Ratleff?’
‘Knew him, yeah.’
‘What do you mean, “knew”?’
‘He’s dead. Didn’t you hear?’
‘Do you know anything about it?’
‘Just what I seen on TV.’
‘Why would anyone want to kill him?’
‘You tell me.’
‘I’m asking you, Harold.’
‘Ray was a junkie. Probably had something to do with it.’
‘Meaning?’
‘Meaning, you hang out with pipeheads and sliders and shit, you usually end up dead. I seen lots of guys like Ratleff. You come to my neighborhood sometime, I’ll show you some.’
‘Have you ever been a slider?’
‘What’s that got to do with Ray Ratleff?’
‘You said yourself, sliders might have done it.’
He smiled. ‘You got my bop. You know what I done.’
