Lesser Evils

by Joe Flanagan

  The discovery of Larry Crane’s body elevated the investigation to a new level entirely. The off-Cape media, sniffing out the irresistible story line—unspeakable acts in a remote seaside idyll—had the phones at the district attorney’s office, the Yarmouth barracks, and the local police stations ringing constantly. Reporters started showing up, including some from radio and television, which was a rarity on the Cape.

  Stasiak got a call from Lt. Colonel John Fitzgerald, his commanding officer in Boston, who wanted a rundown on the killings and told him that Governor Furcolo would get him whatever resources he needed. He was irritated at Fitzgerald’s quizzing. It strayed into areas unrelated to the murders. Nonetheless, he was now fully in charge of the investigation and Elliott Yost was keeping the locals out of the way. But Stasiak needed a seasoned local he could trust for inside knowledge on certain neighborhoods, on individuals, rumors—any number of things.

  There is an extensive area of scalp hemorrhage along the right tempoparietal region extending from the orbital ridge all the way to the occipital area. At the superior extension of the hemorrhage is a linear skull fracture which extends from the right occipital forward to the right frontal area across the parietal portion of the skull.

  Nine-year-old Larry Crane had been spotted floating in a creek in Eastham by two boys who were crabbing. He had been hunting frogs with some friends in a wooded marsh about a mile away and had wandered away from his companions. Stasiak considered the case, what was known and what was assumed: The person they were looking for was either a longtime Cape resident or someone who had spent a great deal of time familiarizing himself with its waterways. He knew of the ponds in Truro and he knew about the section of reeds at Kalmus Beach. He was familiar with the creek in Eastham and the woods along its course. That covered an extensive area of the Cape. He was either unemployed, worked at night, or had a job with unconventional hours, possibly one that demanded days at a time away followed by successive days off, such as merchant seaman or commercial fisherman. This allowed him to prowl around in his car and find children at times when most people would be at work. All three of the boys had been abducted during weekdays.

  It was believed that the Lefgren boy had been surprised in the reeds and that Larry Crane was attacked somewhere close to the creek where his body was dumped. Kevin Gilbride was likely transported to the pond where he was found, since it was too far away from the rented cabin for the boy to travel on his own. The killer arrived at these places—two of them quite isolated—by car, yet somehow managed to remain inconspicuous. In the cases of Lefgren and Crane, he would have to have left the vehicle parked somewhere and gone out wandering around on foot.

  Stasiak’s detectives were concentrating on finding a common factor among the three locations, working their way through a number of theoretical combinations that might tie them together. The strange car angle was a Pandora’s box but they had no choice but to open it. Predictably, they were flooded with calls. Everything looked suspicious to a community in fear. Forensic evidence thus far was practically nonexistent except for four individual hairs and some shards of very thin glass found on the Lefgren boy. Stasiak thought again about finding a local cop he could rely on. The task force had some of the best detectives he knew. They were driven and focused. But it was the periphery of things that concerned him. He needed an awareness of what was going on around him that only a local could provide.

  Jack Dowd worked his way down the boy’s body, noting a number of small scrapes and contusions, taking their measurements and describing their locations. As he concluded the exterior examination and prepared for the dissection, he spoke in the general direction of the police officers. “Cause of death is asphyxia by strangulation associated with craniocerebral trauma. He was not sodomized but there was an attempt.”

  “That’s the bruising on the buttocks?” Ferrell asked.

  “Yes. But there is no semen and no trauma to the anus.”

  “What about the head injury?”

  “Something blunt. It’s the kind of injury you see when someone falls from a height or runs into something.”

  Jack Dowd measured the purple furrow on the boy’s neck and commented that it was about the width of common clothesline rope. Stasiak gathered up his hat and jacket and prepared to leave. “Give us a call when you have the report typed up,” he said. “We’ll send someone over to pick it up.”

  Jack Dowd did not respond, but continued laying out a set of retractors on his tray. Stasiak supposed he was still angry over them rousting him out of bed to do the autopsy on the Lefgren kid.

  Out in his car, Stasiak radioed Heller. “10-81 at Uncle Sam’s,” he said, and pulled out. He drove a few miles in stop-and-go traffic. The road was crowded with cheap motels, souvenir shops, ice cream places, and seafood stands. Two young boys were sitting at a picnic table outside a place called Dog ’n Suds. Stopped in traffic, Stasiak watched them. They were unaware at first, talking, sipping from straws stuck through the tops of their paper cups. They were small enough that their feet didn’t touch the ground beneath the benches on which they sat. One of them swung his legs back and forth, alternating left, right, left, right. They were oblivious to the man in the gray sedan inching slowly towards them as the traffic crawled forward. Stasiak continued staring long after it became clear that they had noticed him and were uncomfortable. Their movements became self-conscious, their free, animated demeanor vanished as they hunched over the table looking cowed and vulnerable. By the time they became so disconcerted that they got up to leave, the road was clear in front of Stasiak and the cars behind him were honking their horns.

  Uncle Sam’s Motel was a three-story white stucco structure with a fiberglass likeness of Uncle Sam out front. Cars tended to slow and look at it not only because of its size—it was about fourteen feet high—but because it bent at the waist and doffed its top hat, then straightened again and replaced it. The statue did this every thirty seconds or so, depending on the vagaries of its mechanics. Occasionally it got stuck mid-bow, or halfway through replacing its hat. Once it stayed jackknifed at a right angle for most of an entire winter.

  Heller was sitting in the lot, facing the road in an unmarked Chevrolet, when Stasiak arrived. He pulled up alongside the sergeant, facing in the opposite direction. “What is the situation, Heller?”

  “The situation is good, sir.”

  Stasiak looked in his rearview mirror and checked the passing cars.

  Heller asked, “What do they say about the kid?”

  “Strangled and hit in the head.”

  “Raped?”

  “No, but somebody tried.”

  “You want to take Gene Henry in and have a go at him?”

  “Yes. James Frawley, too. See if he’s got access to a car. What do you hear from up above?”

  “Nothing.”

  Stasiak looked in his rearview mirror again. “You know I got a call from Fitzgerald the other day?”

  “What for?”

  “Asking about the homicides. But he was asking about some other things, too.”

  “Like what?”

  “Just about things in general. What’s going on down here.”

  Heller watched the traffic going by on Route 28. Stasiak did the same in his rearview mirror. “We need a friend, Heller.”

  “What kind of friend?”

  “Someone local. Someone in law enforcement.”

  Heller considered this. “You want me to come up with some possibilities?”

  “I’ll work on that. I’ll be giving you a name or two. I’ll want you to do a full check. Background, personnel records, everything.”

  19

  With his sketchbook and specimen basket on the seat beside him, Father Boyle drove along the headlands, among scrub oak, juniper, and squat pines. The wooded areas were sparse and poor, though when his car crested a rise, the vista was breathtaking, stark and
exotic at once. The ocean lay flat on the horizon and blended with the sky at the far reaches of vision in pale lenses of pewter and cornflower blue, the hues calling to mind the sentimental iconography of devotional cards, some type of Marian idyll, someone’s forever and ever, things that pulled at his heart and in which he was inexpressibly disappointed.

  He found it hard to believe that at one time he thought he had been called. To the degree that that later seemed folly, he dove into researching Catholic mania and the early Christian cults. His room was filled with books and articles that would have made people wonder: J. A. Wylie’s The Papacy, works by Bertrand Russell, Alfred Jules Ayer, and Sigmund Freud. He read heretical texts and crackpot treatises, broadsides from the Masons, the collection of obscure atheist writings from seventeenth-century Europe known as the Clandestina.

  His arrival on Cape Cod, though occasioned by regrettable events, in many ways seemed like deliverance. It was a beguiling place to him, both its geography and its less tangible aspects. There were tall grass meadows with clumps of wild blackberry, rich and terrestrial as any in the Midwest, rolling hillocks covered with scrub, repeating their forms toward the horizon. Sere dunes and skies like sapphire, and on a certain kind of day, nothing but shades of gray and silver, as the entire place submerged itself in a moist somnolent funk. Rain and fog heralded extended periods of Lenten gloom, like a days-long state funeral. Stand at the edge of that marsh in South Yarmouth—he couldn’t think of the name—stand there on a November day and look out over the creek the color of road grime. Look out at the palette of grays and maroons and browns. Sit in the confessional on a dark February afternoon and listen to the people sneak into the church. Hear them settle into the penitent’s booth. Listen to the things they say.

  On remote stretches of shore, among barnacled boulders, and in still coves, Father Boyle sometimes undressed to his boxer shorts and plunged into the water. Once last summer, he stood up in the middle of some cold and glassy shallows, stricken. He’d seen a little too much of himself in a moment, had observed the sad act of clandestine swimming, and then the sun went under and turned the surface of the water into the moody hues of the insides of empty houses and unslept-in bedrooms. He didn’t come out of the rectory for two days.

  Sitting at his desk looking through the previous night’s call log, Warren saw that at 0211 hours there was a report of breaking glass at an antique shop on West Bay Road in Osterville. The caller was a woman who lived across the street. The log did not indicate any response.

  Warren went into the hallway and saw the midnight-to-eight shift sergeant down by the front desk filling out paperwork.

  “Sergeant.”

  “Sir.”

  “There was a call last night about a break-in on West Bay Road in Osterville.”

  The sergeant frowned. “I don’t recall, sir.”

  Warren looked at the call log. “0211 hours. The caller reported breaking glass. Said she saw people on the lawn across the street and they ran off when her husband came out on the porch.”

  “Oh. That was the antique dealers’ place.” He glanced sideways at Warren. “The queers.”

  “No one went over there?”

  The sergeant stopped writing for a second and looked at Warren. “No, sir. We were, uh . . . We were tied up I think, sir. If I recall.”

  Warren went into his office and put the call log down. The shop in Osterville was called Antiquitus. It was owned by a pair of homosexuals who had arrived on the Cape sometime during the war. Posing as brothers, they moved into the big Federal-style house. It was a remarkable property, over twenty acres with a century-old orchard, a large barn, and a herring run passing through. It was unusual to see them out anywhere. They lived in the house from May to September and supposedly spent winters in New York City. They dealt in high-end antiques. Jackie Kennedy was said to be a frequent visitor.

  It had been unofficial policy under Chief Holland to ignore calls to the place. They had been burglarized a number of times and vandalized as well, and as far as Warren knew, no action was taken. The men themselves didn’t even call anymore. If there was an incident, the department usually found out about it through word of mouth. Occasionally a neighbor would call it in.

  Warren filed the call log and looked out the window. Eight-to-four was on the road and the station was quiet. Mike had been accepted at Nazareth Hall and had been going there for two weeks now. Jane had asked, “Will you still need me now that he’s in school?” He hadn’t thought about what it would mean for his arrangement with Jane. “Yes, I need you,” he said. He blurted it out, unconcerned with how it might sound until he actually heard it. He needed Jane in his life, and he was just realizing, there, in that moment, all the ways in which this was true. Somehow she raised them up—him, Mike, the sad little house—when they might otherwise plunge into hopelessness. But he didn’t know how he could pay the tuition at Nazareth Hall and keep her, too. Her hours would be reduced and she would find work elsewhere.

  He sat there for a while longer, thinking about how, if he were formally appointed chief of police, he would be able to pay Jane to be at the house during the day and handle Mike’s tuition as well. He considered stopping in to see Marvin Holland, though he didn’t particularly want to. It was the promotion, or the possibility of the promotion, that was why he wanted to visit. Warren felt shameful and underhanded. But it had to be done. He would sort it out later, whether it was wrong or not.

  Warren found the chief sitting up in bed, going through a pile of mail. The television was on. He spoke to him from the doorway. “You’re looking good, chief.”

  Holland looked up, waved him in, and continued with his mail. Warren entered the room and stood by the bed. “How are you feeling?” he asked.

  The chief tossed his head in the direction of the television set. “Turn that damn thing off.”

  Warren reached up and turned the switch.

  Holland stuffed a letter back into an envelope he had torn open. His motions were rough and clumsy. “What’s going on?” he asked.

  “Not much,” said Warren. “I just wanted to stop in and see how you were getting along.”

  “Oh, I’m all right. They’re letting me out next week. I’m supposed to sit down with the doctor so he can tell me what I can and can’t do. I probably won’t be coming back to work.”

  There followed a silence which Warren tried to end as quickly as possible so it didn’t seem so much like the obvious was hanging between them, but before he could defuse the moment, Holland said, “Listen, Bill, are you having some kind of beef with Dave Langella?”

  Caught out, Warren groped for a quick response.

  “Did you ask for a records check on him down at the courthouse?”

  “Yes, sir. I did.”

  “Why?”

  “I wanted to find out a few things about him.”

  “What for? Has he done something?”

  Warren sat down and placed his hat on his knee.

  “He’s mad as hell, Bill. He went to the selectmen about it.”

  “With all due respect, sir, who the hell is Dave Langella? I can’t run a records check on him?”

  “Why were you running a check? That’s the point.”

  “He’s no good.”

  “Is that a fact?”

  Warren did not respond.

  “Has this got something to do with your son?”

  “His kid abuses my boy.”

  “That’s personal. Personal, Bill. You can’t go around using your authority to settle personal issues. We had this discussion the last time you did this. Now, I understand about your son. But you don’t use your position to get even, for Chrissakes.”

  Warren burned inside, furious at the chief’s hypocrisy—the chief, who got friends and influential people off the hook, who looked the other way if it was more convenient, who had allegedly used his own p
osition to enrich himself when they improved the municipal airport.

  “He approached me when I was out walking with my son. He got aggressive and it came close to assault.”

  “If he assaults you, lock him up. Break his head for all I care. But this other crap, cut it out.”

  “Has he got some kind of pull?”

  “I don’t know if he’s got some kind of pull. No more personal stuff. That’s it.”

  Warren’s heart was pounding, his breath coming heavily. He tried to disguise it, picking his hat up off his knee and adjusting the dents in its crown. The chief scattered the envelopes around on his bedspread, then collected them all together again. “What else?” he said.

  “Not much. Things are pretty quiet. If you don’t count the murders.”

  “A terrible thing. How are the cars running?”

  “They’re all right,” said Warren. “The usual problems.”

  “You know they’re going to be adding a cloverleaf off the highway at the Howard Johnson’s?”

  “I got a call about it.”

  Warren waited, going along with the small talk, until he finally said, “I should get back.” He walked down the corridors of the hospital miserable with anger. If Holland couldn’t see that what Warren had done with Dave Langella was no different from his own dealings with any number of people, then he was blind. And Warren did not believe that the chief was preoccupied and didn’t have any interest in the killings. There was a reason he was not discussing it. Didn’t Holland trust him?

  Warren got in his car and drove down Main Street, through town, into Centerville, quieter, greener, cool and shadowy for long stretches down the road. Osterville’s grand old houses appeared, meticulously maintained behind billowing drifts of honeysuckle, meadow rose, and rhododendron, behind sculpted boxwoods and small fields of daylilies, the vegetation like defensive works, the houses like dignified old relics, with crooked windows and canted porches, but glistening with new paint.

  The antique dealers’ property extended far back from the road. Ava had showed it to him before the war, during the winter. It was unoccupied then. There had been snow on the ground that day. They walked past a big barn in the back with six windows on each side and a large orchard whose trees were gnarled, spidery shapes against the gently rolling white ground. They followed the herring run into the woods, frozen along its edges but rushing and burbling in the center, beautiful, quiet. The air had been harsh in his nostrils but pure and clear and bracing. Ava wore sealskin boots and trudged confidently among the snow-covered rocks at the water’s edge, watching the stream with an intent, piercing expression. Warren hadn’t been back since.