The Fire This Time

by S. Frederic Liss

  Maddie clicked off the television and dumped the cold tea in the sink, running the water so it wouldn’t leave a stain.

  Outside, there was no relief from the heat.

  -3-

  The television pundits were still analyzing Charlie’s performance at his news conference when a group calling itself Bumper’s Brigade claimed responsibility for the wave of anti-Semitism plaguing the Greater Boston area since Bumper’s murder. “We disrupted yesterday’s bar mitzvah at Temple Beth Sholom in Jewtown Sharon,” they proclaimed in letters to Boston’s newspapers and television stations. The letters were printed or broadcast uncensored. “We broke the windows in kike stores in Hymieville Brookline. We spray painted the interior of the kosher deli on Beacon Street. We cut the sidelocks off Jews walking to Saturday morning services in Rich Jew Newton. We are not the lunatic fringe. We are the mainstream and we have only just begun.”

  The prisoners in Levy’s cellblock tallied the incidents as if they were scoring a prize fight: Christ Lovers eight, Christ Killers zero. Outside the Charles Street Jail, a mob paraded with signs demanding Justice! Southie’s teenagers marched along the route of the St. Patrick’s Day parade carrying a gallows with Levy’s effigy hanging from it. An occasional priest begged for tolerance, but Boston’s Catholics interpreted the cardinal’s silence as an endorsement of the Brigade. Ugolino bitched about the strain on the limited resources of the police department, but refused to cancel vacations or personal leave or request the governor to call out the National Guard or the president to deploy the army. Mayor Charlie issued a statement urging “the good people of Boston to reject lynch mob mentality and repudiate violence.” In Boston’s subways and on its busses, in the elevators of its office buildings, in its bars and beer joints, its shopping malls and supermarkets, its movie theaters, on its sidewalks, on Boston Common, in the Public Garden, at Fenway Park, at Boston Garden, people eyed each other, wondering who belonged to Bumper’s Brigade, how to join. The Brigade claimed responsibility for so many anti-Semitic acts the Boston Globe likened it to the rats that had spread the plague throughout medieval Europe.

  With each new desecration, Boston’s Jewish community distanced itself further from Levy, disowning him the way status-seeking parents disown wayward children. The majority of Jews avoided social and business contacts with Gentiles so they would not have to apologize for Levy. The more militant agitated for the formation of a counter-terrorist group, a Haganah, to enforce the biblical dictum of an eye for an eye. One or two, such as Rabbi ben Reuben and Jacob Moskovitzky, begged the Jewish community to support Levy, but their pleas were ignored. Sacrifice the one to save the many was the consensus.

  -4-

  That evening, Trish Sullivan set Charlie’s traditional Sunday night dinner before him, pan-fried shoulder lamb chops, a baked potato, and baby carrots. Charlie rotated his dinner menu day by day the way a diner rotated its blue plate specials. He never ate green or leafy or chicken or fish except when forced to at political fund-raisers.

  “None for you?” He sliced open the mottled brown potato, squeezed out a crown of white, and centered two squares of butter on it. Yellow rivulets trickled between the hot crevices and Charlie mixed his carrots in the butter pooling beside the potato. “You should eat.”

  “The horrible things they’re doing in Charles’s name. Make them stop.”

  “I released a statement. What more can I do?”

  “They’re stealing Charles from us. He deserves a better legacy than hatred. It’s what people will think of when they hear his name. Is that what you want for him?”

  “It’ll die out.” Charlie sliced the fat off his chop and dipped it in the butter.

  “I wish you never found that little hat. I wish you’d thrown it down the sewer. I wish they never arrested the Jew. Charles would be able to rest in peace.”

  “You’ll feel better when the heat breaks.”

  “Make it stop. If you don’t, I’ll tell people you’re behind this Bumper’s Brigade. I’ll tell them it’s a dirty trick to win an election.”

  Charlie stopped chewing. “Christ, Trish. It’s beyond my control.”

  “You let this go on, you’re no better than the Orangemen of Belfast.”

  Charlie shoved aside his dinner. He no longer had any appetite. If he ever had one. Maybe it was just a reflex. Eating. Trish’s preparing it certainly was. A reflex. A distraction. A failure. How to calm her down. No. Wrong question. How to help her deal with her pain. Bumper’s Brigade was beyond his control. It was true, but he shouldn’t have said that. He shouldn’t have. He reached for the phone.

  “George,” Charlie said before Harriman could say hello. Charlie’s voice was hoarse, as if his throat were raw and red from a day of crying. “Trish and I . . . we . . . need to know how Bumper spent his last hours. Could you talk to whoever was at Capablanca that night, anyone who might have seen or talked to Bumper?”

  “I’m sure Ugolino’s on it.”

  “I want you on it.”

  “I doubt I’ll learn anything of value beyond what the chief’s turned up.”

  “For me and Trish.”

  “Chief don’t like it when people go behind his back. He’ll have me pounding a beat in Roxbury.”

  “I’ll need a head of security in Washington.”

  Harriman decided to take the Joe Friday approach from Dragnet, his favorite television cop show. He’d start with Charlie’s boys, members of Capablanca who were either part of Charlie’s inner circle or owed him for favors past. They’d be sympathetic, prone to exaggeration. He’d record and transcribe the interviews, neither comment nor editorialize. Just the facts, ma’am. Let Charlie make of them what he would.

  Harriman would interview Patrick Reilly first. Reilly had been appointed clerk-magistrate of the Boston Municipal Court because the governor owed Mayor Charlie a favor. Egged on by his dad, Bumper always called Reilly “Spud” because his gut hung over his belt like a bag of potatoes falling off a counter.

  Next, he’d interview Robert O’Malley, chief enforcement officer of Boston’s Department of Inspectional Services who had played hockey with Charlie on the Holy Family High School Super 8 championship team and against him in college, O’Malley’s Boston University squad losing to Charlie’s Boston College team in the NCAA championship game.

  Brendan Nolan, Bobby Doyle, Sheila Diggle, others.

  And, Pete Kelly, an at-large member of the Boston City Council and Capablanca Club champion. Kelly had first played chess with Bumper three years ago, taught him strategy Charlie the First could never have conceived, coached him between tournament games, and never shushed him when he shouted after a good move. Bumper sucked up the respect of these men, though he could live without the Reillys, the O’Malleys, the Nolans, but not Kelly. He fed on Kelly’s respect the way Charlie fed on the love of the voters.

  After completing his interviews of Reilly, O’Malley, Nolan, Kelly, and others at Capablanca on the night of Bumper’s murder, George Harriman prepared two documents, one a sanitized set of transcripts for Trish in whose eyes Charles was as uncorrupted as the baby Jesus, the other an uncensored set for Charlie. He figured Charlie knew about Bumper’s attitude toward blacks, probably approved of it since it mirrored Charlie’s as well as that of Charlie’s dad, Charlie the First. The interview tapes and his notes he’d stick in the bottom of a desk drawer in the unlikely event they would be needed someday.

  If Trish read the censored version of the transcripts, she would learn that Bumper and Mabi had played chess the night of Bumper’s murder; that Bumper recorded the moves in his notebook; that Reilly, Kelly, Nolan, O’Malley, and several other members witnessed the match; that at closing time, Bumper and Mabi agreed to finish the match on another day; that when the Club closed Mabi and the other members left while Bumper, Virgil, the African-American janitor, and Brian Cairns, the Club manager, remained. Mabi corroborated this narrative, at least the parts concerning him. Virgil stated he left after cleaning up the
game room, stopping by the African Meeting House on Beacon Hill, the first black church in Boston where he also was the custodian, to vacuum the sanctuary. Cairns confirmed the time of Virgil’s departure and further stated Bumper was in the library when he locked up and left at approximately 9:30.

  If Charlie read the unexpurgated version of the transcripts, he would learn about the interaction between Bumper and Mabi across the chessboard. Bumper had teased Mabi, saying he had seen Mabi before but wasn’t sure where, maybe in one of the dioramas in the Museum of Science, a cave man with a club, or as one of the natives in the original King Kong, or as Kong himself. Bumper hadn’t stopped there. He boasted to Mabi he didn’t understand why his dad gave so many blacks city jobs or was nice to them at election time; but he figured what was right for his dad and his granddad was right for him. Hatred, like chess, made Bumper feel powerful, superior, and he knew at the age of nine he would always hate, that it was as natural for him as praying the Rosary.

  Bumper didn’t limit his racism to Mabi, but extended it to Virgil, the Club janitor. Every member knew he demanded Virgil be fired the first time he stayed past closing. Virgil had found him in the library surrounded by books, plumbing the secrets of past international grandmasters, and told him the Club was closed and he best be getting along. I’ll get you fired faster than you can suck down a watermelon, Bumper threatened. Harriman explained the emptiness of Bumper’s threat in his report. Funded through Boston’s recreation department, Capablanca was a municipal facility like the skating rinks and swimming pools, parks and tennis courts, the Franklin Park zoo. The Club’s employees, as decreed by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, were protected by civil service laws that clearly defined the reasons people could be fired or disciplined and which granted the employee right of an appeal, first in a hearing before the civil service commission, then a hearing in court. And in the case of war veterans like Virgil, a member of the 92nd Infantry Division in World War II, dubbed the Buffalo Division because it was descended from the Buffalo Soldiers of the 10th Cavalry Regiment, the added protection of the Veteran’s Preference Act which gave veterans a preference for being hired for certain municipal positions.

  Charlie was advised at the time by the city’s law department that the best he could do was to order Brian Cairns to reprimand Virgil for insubordination–in a dignified manner so as not to provoke a Federal civil rights suit–and place a disciplinary warning in his personnel file. With a paper trail of warnings, the city solicitor concluded, in a year or so Virgil can be put out on the curb with the week’s trash.

  Bumper’s harassment of Virgil did not stop there according to the interview transcripts which included an account of Bumper’s behavior when demanding Virgil fetch sodas for him and all the spectators.

  Two things intrigued Harriman when he reviewed the transcripts. First was the way Mabi ignored the insults to himself and Virgil, concentrated on his chess moves, and agreed to resume play at a later date. He puzzled at Mabi’s self-control, his restraint, in the face of Bumper’s conduct. It was as if Mabi was following a script, implementing a well-conceived plan, a game of chess off the board. Second was that none of the people he interviewed stated that Levy was present that night. No one placed him at the scene of the crime, a loophole in the case on which Maddie Devlin could construct a defense. One juror was all she needed.

  Harriman debated with himself whether to tell Maddie. Guilt or innocence, truth or justice, in the context of this case he cared little. His concern, his only concern, was Maddie. What were the consequence to her if she won, if she lost? He owed it to Brian to do best by his daughter, to protect her, if necessary from herself. Maddie was relentless, as relentless as her da had been on Guadalcanal. When she set her mind to something, she was unyielding. Obstinacy polluted her perseverance. She lived and breathed the old Irish proverb that the road to heaven was well sign-posted, but badly lit at night. Telling her would illuminated the signposts. Brian would want him to.

  “Angelo got their first,” Ugolino said when Harriman pointed this out to him. “He says it’s an old Jew trick–create a distraction to send us on a wild goose chase by making someone else look guilty. Evidence of the brilliance of the Jew’s plan. We got our man. We’ve had him since the night of the murder. Res ipsa loquitor or whatever the fuck attorneys say when the case is open and shut.”

  Not all attorneys, Harriman wanted to reply, but didn’t so he wouldn’t have to endure one of Ugolino’s infamous rants.

  CHAPTER 4

  MONDAY, APRIL 13, 1981

  -1-

  The Monday morning sun that cast Maddie Devlin’s shadow across City Hall Plaza as she walked toward the New Court-house which housed the Social Law Library harbored no April showers. Glare reflected off the bricks, burning into her eyes, burrowing into her brain. Her head ached. Bumper’s Brigade frightened her. How soon before it turned its wrath on her? She had suffered such opprobrium before, the Black Panthers picketing outside the legal aid office building, outside her apartment building, outside the court-house; but picketing was shouting, signs waving, fists clenched in the air, so peaceful compared to the violence of Bumper’s Brigade.

  The Vancini case. Tony Vancini, an anti-busing militant, had been accused of sabotaging the brakes on a school bus carrying black children from Roxbury to the North End. It crashed into a Jersey barrier. One fatality. Several serious injuries. Refusing to be intimidated, Maddie had persevered, persuading the jury, eight Caucasians, one African-American, two Asians, a Hispanic, that the evidence was insufficient to find Vancini guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. She had used an alibi defense. Vancini was at the home of Louise Day Hicks who had leveraged her opposition to forced busing into a seat on the Boston School Committee plotting legal strategy with other militants. Six witnesses including Hicks corroborated his testimony. A defensible verdict, well within the legal definition of “beyond a reasonable doubt”; but Boston’s black community which thought the alibi a lie and the testimony perjury didn’t see it that way. The jury had passed judgment and it was not for Maddie to second guess them publicly. Privately, she had her doubts. Technically, she fell within the black letter legal definition of co-conspirator, she and the Suffolk County DA who had assigned the trial to an attorney so freshly minted the ink on the certificate manifesting his admission to the bar had yet to dry. Once again, Birmingham north. Now, many trials later, she didn’t want to think about how Bumper’s Brigade would react to Levy’s acquittal. She didn’t want to be its co-conspirator.

  Maddie paused to sit on the wall of the waterless fountain beside the Kennedy Federal Building, the JFK Building in local slang, dangling her feet where water once bubbled. The water spigots, black like dead branches in the aftermath of a forest fire, reached skyward, praying for rain. A dead pigeon, heat swollen, lay beside one of the drains. She saw herself as that pigeon, left to rot in the ungodly heat. She could rationalize risking all on a winnable case, but an unwinnable case? Martyrdom had a perverse appeal to her, but not the type of martyrdom Levy would confer.

  She had had unwinnable cases in the past. Too many to count. Those she plea-bargained, negotiating a disposition more lenient than the sentence that would be imposed after a guilty verdict. Trials were like sand in the gears of the criminal justice system; plea-bargains the lubricant that flushed the sand from the gears. The more burdensome a trial was on the prosecution or court calendars, the greater the motivation to dispose of a case as quickly as possible, a motivation which often resulted in more lenient dispositions. The reverse was also true, a guilty verdict after a lengthy trial often resulted in a sentence much harsher than what could have been plea-bargained. The majority of judges understood this and played the game, especially since a judge’s performance was evaluated based on the number of cases closed, not the quality of justice dispensed.

  Most plea-bargains Maddie entered in the win column. Most of her clients were better off than if they had gone to trial. But not all. She also plea-bargained t
he hopeless cases, the guaranteed convictions, the cases where the prosecution’s evidence was air tight. Those she entered in the loss column because they did little or nothing for her client other than avoiding the spectacle of a trial. Plea-bargaining Levy would be such a loss, maybe not in the eyes of the other lawyers in the office, but in her eyes. Unless Levy did it. That would place her on the doorstep of the moral outhouse occupied by mob and gang lawyers, one foot over the threshold. Bumper’s Brigade would win whether Levy did it or not. She felt she was standing in front of a firing squad like her grand da, her innocence or guilt irrelevant to her execution. She gathered her strength and continued to the Social Law Library.

  What did Ugolino know that she didn’t? Why is Angelo the Sweeper leading the investigation? Everything about Bumper’s death, its timing, its crime scene, its method, reeked of intricate design, everything except the skull-cap embroidered with Levy’s name. The neatness of the Capablanca library–every book in its proper place, the chess men resting in their ranks while awaiting their next players, the chairs nesting against their tables unmoved since the last checkmate–created a sense of order within the library which made the skull-cap, like Bumper’s body, too adventitious a circumstance. Without it, there would be no defendant, no indictment, no trial. It was the strongest element and weakest link in the prosecution’s case. Attack it directly, create doubt in the minds of the jury, in the mind of one juror, regarding its presence on the library floor, transform it from the confession of a murderer to the symbol of an innocent man being framed and an acquittal or at least a hung jury was possible. More than possible if she could pull a Perry Mason and finger the real killer. If there were a real killer other than Levy.