He never got to finish.
Kelly crossed the room in two long strides and cracked Braxton in the small of the back with the club. The blow made a hollow sound. Braxton arched back. Kelly lifted him bodily away from the table and suspended him against the wall. The chair, still handcuffed to Braxton’s leg, dangled between them.
Once pinned to the wall, Braxton hung there like a doll, offering no resistance. But his face was transformed. He was all sneering badass again. He broadcast disdain — and the pain of the blow to his back — to anyone who cared to register it.
Kelly pulled him away from the wall and slammed him back against it. He pressed the nightstick against Braxton’s throat.
‘That’s enough!’ Max Beck shouted. I had not even seen the lawyer enter. His face was red and already, at ten in the morning, his tie was pulled down to his sternum. ‘Put that man down!’
‘Yes,’ Lowery said, coolly. ‘Put him down, Lieutenant Kelly.’
Kelly complied. He straightened his sport coat and asked me if I was okay.
‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘I’m fine, it wasn’t like that.’
‘It’s an A.B.P.O.,’ Kurth said. ‘Good. Now we can hold him.’
It would surely have gone that way, of course — a swift arrest, an arraignment that morning at the B.M.C., a prohibitive bail. It would have gone that way but for one thing: The District Attorney was there and he had a broader agenda.
‘What do you say, Chief Truman?’ Lowery asked. ‘You’re the victim here.’
Before I could answer, Gittens blurted, ‘Harold, if you ever lay a hand on a cop again-’
‘Detective Gittens,’ Lowery soothed. He gestured with his hands, palms down: Calm down. ‘Chief Truman, what do you want to do about this?’
Braxton was staring at me.
Kelly watched too, with an attentive frown.
Lowery said, ‘Chief Truman?’
‘Let him go.’
31
Kelly agreed to reinterview Julio Vega with me. I told Kelly the fact that Danziger had reopened the Trudell investigation still nagged at me. So did Vega’s evasiveness when we’d asked him about it earlier. Kelly accepted these explanations, or seemed to.
At Vega’s shabby little house in Dorchester, there was no answer when we knocked at the front door.
‘We’ll wait,’ the old man announced.
‘But we have no idea where he is.’
‘Precisely why we’ll wait, Ben Truman. No sense chasing him all over creation.’
In his thirty-odd years as a policeman, John Kelly had probably spent ten just waiting. It was part of the job. Movie cops never wait around much. They dart from clue to clue like hummingbirds because they only have two hours to solve each crime. In reality, policemen wait for radio calls and they wait for speeders and they wait for breaks. In courthouses, on street corners, in parked cruisers. Walking around in circles, driving around in circles. They are bored. They stamp their feet on cold nights.
‘How long do we wait?’
‘Till he turns up.’
‘What if he doesn’t?’
‘Oh, he’ll turn up soon,’ Kelly said. He glanced up at the sky as if Julio Vega might drop from above. ‘Let’s take a walk.’
‘Good idea. Why don’t we play a round of golf while we’re at it?’
‘There’s time, Ben. We’ll have a little walk.’
We strolled toward Dorchester Avenue, Kelly looking blithe, me anxious. He pulled out his nightstick, which he kept tucked in his belt at the small of his back. Holding it by the leather strap, he twirled the truncheon absently, as he had in Versailles, with that repetitive rhythm of whirring and palm-slapping. Two revolutions clockwise, slap! Two counterclockwise, slap! The rhythm matched our steps. Whir, slap! Whir, slap!
I should say here, again, that I do not pretend to be objective in my description of John Kelly. I tend to form bonds of loyalty quickly or never, and I’d decided long before that Kelly was a man I liked and admired. Maudlin as it sounds, I felt closer to him than the scant few days we’d spent together would seem to justify. So admittedly my view of Kelly that morning was clouded by affection. That said, as we walked along Dorchester Avenue, he seemed to me the distilled essence of a policeman. You could have dressed him in a gray flannel suit or surgical scrubs — hell, you could have dressed him in clown makeup — and still people would say, ‘There goes a cop.’ Until I met him, I’d never thought that was a quality to be admired.
Spin, slap.
‘There’s something I don’t understand, Ben. This morning Braxton asked for you — you specifically — just so he could proclaim his innocence and then attack you? It doesn’t make sense.’
I ambled along in silence.
‘Then you told Lowery you had no idea what Braxton was up to.’
Spin, slap.
‘I may have told a little white lie there.’
‘Ah. Lot of that going around.’
‘When he jumped me, Braxton whispered in my ear. He said, “Find Raul.” He said this all has something to do with Artie Trudell. And he mentioned another name — Fazulo?’
‘Fasulo.’
‘Fasulo. You know who that is?’
Kelly ignored the question. ‘Why did you hold that back?’
‘Because Braxton told me I was being set up.’
‘Did you believe him?’
‘I don’t know. Kind of, yeah. Like you said, he went to a lot of trouble to get the message to me.’
Kelly grunted, hmm.
‘I should have told. I shouldn’t be keeping things from other cops.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous. We don’t work for the Boston police. We’re conducting our own investigation. You tell them just as much as you want to tell them. They have information they’re not giving us. That’s how it works. Welcome to the brotherhood of law enforcement.’
‘I meant, I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.’
‘Well. You’ve told me now.’
We walked a little ways in silence.
‘Do you know who Fasulo is?’
‘Who Fasulo was,’ Kelly corrected. ‘The only Fasulo I ever heard of died a long time ago, in ’77 or ’78. He killed a cop. Frank Fasulo and another guy — what was his name? Sikes, something Sikes. The two of them were juiced out of their minds. They tried to stick up a bar in the Flats called the Kilmarnock Pub. It’s gone now, the Kilmarnock, and not missed. Bucket of blood, that place was. Fasulo and Sikes went in just after closing, they stuck a gun in the bartender’s face, told him to empty the register. Only they took too long and a cop in a patrol car wandered in. They jumped him and-’ Kelly took a few steps before continuing. ‘Well, Fasulo was a hard case. He’d been in and out of Walpole, Bridgewater… Rapes, armed robberies. There are guys like that, just… vicious, animals, psychopaths. Not many, but they’re out there. There’s nothing for it except to kill them.’
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.’
