On the third floor, a short hallway stretched out before us, lined with four dented metal doors. One of the doors was cluttered with Halloween decorations.
Gittens pointed to the door at the rear left corner, number 3C. ‘That’s the one,’ he told me. ‘Braxton’s in there. Come on, buddy. Bright lights, big city’ Was it possible he was enjoying this? ‘You want to knock and announce, Ben?’
‘Me?’
‘Braxton seems to trust you. He sure as hell doesn’t trust us.’
‘He doesn’t trust me that much.’
‘Hey, you don’t have to.’
For some reason, I did want to do it. I wanted to stand where Artie Trudell had, I wanted to feel it. It’s a stupid reason, of course, but there it is. Young men do stupid things, there’s no more to it than that.
Kurth objected, but Gittens overrode him. ‘He wants to do it,’ Gittens said, ‘let him.’
Kelly said, ‘Absolutely not. What’s wrong with you, Gittens?’
‘Ben wants to do it.’
‘It’s alright,’ I told them, ‘I’ll do it.’
I pressed up against the wall to the right of the door. Because 3C was a corner unit, it was impossible to stay away from the front of the door on this side. The others spread out along the walls. A few fanned out in the hallway so they could see the door.
Only Kelly came with me to the exposed right side of the doorway. He laid his arm across my chest as if he were going to hold me back, prevent me from stepping in front of the door. ‘Don’t do anything stupid,’ he said.
The wall was cool against the back of my head.
A sweet smell from one of these apartments. What? Peanuts. No, peanut sauce.
Gittens reached across the door to hand me the warrant, six sheets stapled and folded in thirds. He pointed at his watch: Time.
Deep breath. I stepped in front of the door.
There was a surreal, suspended moment, a fermata during which I heard a line of sitcom patter on a TV somewhere — Don’t worry, sir, we’ll have you doing the Lambeth Walk in no time — followed by that funhouse laughter, ha ha ha ha ha ha.
The fermata ended and things began to move very fast.
I pounded on the door. ‘Police. Open up. We have a warrant.’
The rasp of my own breathing.
Don’t worry, sir, we’ll have you doing the Lambeth Walk in no time.
Kelly pulled me back against the wall.
‘Harold, it’s Ben Truman! Please open the door please.’
There was shuffling inside the apartment but no acknowledgment.
A beat. Two beats.
Inside, a man’s voice said, ‘Okay, hold on a second, one second.’
Gittens made a face. Crouching beside the door, he snapped, ‘Go!’
Two guys came forward with a battering ram. It had a square steel plate welded on the front.
‘Wait. Gittens, he just said-’
‘No time, Ben, it’s taking too long. Can’t take the chance. Let’s go, let’s go!’
And I thought, They mean to kill him.
The door flew open, cracked at the doorknob.
Gittens rolled around the edge of the doorway into the apartment, staying low, leading with his rifle.
I stepped forward but was shoved aside by the surge of rushing cops.
‘Police! Police! Police!’
I floated in after them with the rifle at my shoulder.
Inside was chaos. Motion. Screaming. Cops rushing around — ’Police! Police! Police! Don’t move! Get down! Get down on the ground!’ — running from one room to another.
A blur of a little girl scurried across the room, shrieking. One of the ninjas scooped her up with one black- gloved hand and carried her out. Her shrieking echoed in the stairway, softer and softer.
‘Do not move! Do NOT move!’
The cops were flooding the apartment room by room.
‘Show me your hands! I said show me your hands!’
The shouting was in a back bedroom. I began to move that way when a gunshot banged through the apartment.
Don’t worry, sir, we’ll have you doing the Lambeth Walk in no time.
Kurth and two ninjas rushed out of one room and disappeared into another. I followed them.
The single bed was neatly made, with a nubbly chenille bedspread. A cross and an image of Jesus Christ on the wall. Cops squeezed shoulder to shoulder at the foot of the bed. Kurth pushed them apart, then fell to his knees over a body. I pushed in behind him.
The man on the floor was African-American, around seventy years old. He wore a crimson shirt with a priest’s collar. His face was gray.
Kurth yelled, ‘Get an ambulance!’
The priest rolled onto his side. He was struggling to breathe. Kurth fumbled with the collar until he found the clip in back and opened it. It made no difference. The priest continued to writhe and suffocate.
‘Get back! Damn it, get back!’
We stepped back.
In the hallway behind me, one of the commandos moaned, ‘I didn’t shoot him, I didn’t shoot him.’
I looked for blood on the priest. There was none.
‘I didn’t kill him! Why didn’t the fuckin’ guy just show me his hands? I told him to show me his hands!’
The priest was no longer struggling.
Kurth felt his neck for a pulse. He rolled the man onto his back, pulled up the shirt and an undershirt, and put his ear to the old man’s chest. ‘Damn it,’ Kurth said. He began mouth-to-mouth.
Gittens rubbed his eyes as if he were very tired. ‘Jesus.’
A woman came to the bedroom door and screamed. No one reacted to her. She threw herself across the priest’s body, which forced Kurth to turn away from the priest’s open mouth long enough to spit out the command ‘Get her out.’ Two of the ninjas took her by the arms and pulled her away.
Kurth continued the CPR for several minutes. Long minutes, an hour in each minute. He meant to keep it up until the EMTs came, I suppose. He kept on puffing air into the man’s windpipe while, one by one, we realized it was too late. No one said anything, though, and for a while the only sounds in the room were Kurth’s huffing and the woman’s sobbing prayers. It was Kelly who finally stepped forward to tell Kurth the man was dead.
The priest, I later learned, was the Reverend Avril Walker, retired pastor of the Calvary Pentecostal Church of God in Christ, on Mission Ave. Braxton’s one-time protector, dead without a scratch on him. Cause of death: heart attack.
42
For a time after the priest’s death, the dozen or so cops in that room stared at their feet, abashed, like kids who have smashed a vase and know it can’t be put back together and there’ll be hell to pay. Gittens radioed the news to the A-3 stationhouse. After that, the word spread faster than I’d have thought possible. By the time we got downstairs, there was a small crowd gathering on the sidewalk. Twenty minutes later, it had swelled to a hundred people. As the streetlights buzzed overhead, the ritual crime-scene tape was strung between the light posts. The crowd grew, which required more police, which in turn drew news vans with klieg lights, which in turn drew more crowds. The raid team milled around for a time in the lobby, away from the stares and the cameras.
Then the questions began. Eventually they would all distill down to one: Did the Boston police kill Reverend Walker? But in those first hours after his death, there were a hundred different questions, from DAs and detectives
