Lesser Evils

by Joe Flanagan

  “I swear, I don’t know how it got here.”

  “Did you have anyone up here with you today?” Jenkins asked. “A girlfriend, maybe?”

  “No. I don’t know how this got here, I swear. I got up early this morning and I went out to do interviews. I’m just coming back now. I haven’t been in this room since 7 A.M.”

  Warren said, “You can’t expect us to believe that this stuff found its way into your possession by itself.”

  “I did not bring that in here. It’s not mine.”

  “Put your hands behind your back.”

  “It’s not mine! I don’t know how it got here!”

  “Behind your back, Mr. Sibley. Don’t make trouble.”

  Jenkins handcuffed him and sat him down on the edge of the bed. Sibley looked dazed, staring at the floor. “I’ve been set up.”

  “Oh, boy,” Jenkins muttered.

  “I’m down here on assignment for the Globe,” Sibley said. “I don’t use narcotics.”

  “All I can tell you is get a good lawyer,” Jenkins said.

  The lounge at the VFW was crowded early on a Friday evening. The plate glass windows behind the bar were darkened, the blue lights along the runway of the municipal airfield visible as long dotted lines running off into the distance. Denny Nelson was in his element, his hair standing up, his spindly arms poking out of the sleeves of his madras shirt. He walked up and down, ribbing people, filling their glasses, rapping his knuckles on the bar in a tattoo. “Oh yeah?” he called out to someone at the far end. “What do you want, a medal or a chest to pin it on?” A ripple of laughter drifted up the bar.

  A man wearing a postal service uniform said, “I don’t see how it could get any stranger. Five pounds of marijuana. I’ll never read the Globe again.”

  “I never read it anyway,” said his neighbor on the adjacent stool.

  “Murder and narcotics,” said the postman. “That’s what we’ve got down here now. I hear there’s a guy who works at Mildred’s Chowder House that they’ve been questioning about the murders.”

  “Really?” the man adjacent said. “I didn’t hear that. Do you know who?”

  “No. My neighbors, though, their kid buses tables there and he says they’ve been over there a few times to talk to the guy.”

  Someone two stools down said, “Mildred’s Chowder House? Who?”

  “I don’t know,” the postman said.

  “They’re talking to everybody,” a redheaded man said. “State police were down at the trucking company where I work asking about the drivers.”

  A voice from one of the tables behind them said, “How can this person kidnap three kids and kill ’em without anybody seeing anything? Answer me that.”

  “He’s smart,” said a man sitting at the end of the bar.

  “He ain’t smart. He’s just lucky,” said the redhead.

  “I hope they string him up by his balls,” the postman said.

  “Oh, they will.”

  The conversation had drawn in a half-dozen people now, an ever-growing group of commentators.

  “What a sick son of a bitch,” said the man at the end.

  “Stasiak will find him,” said the redhead.

  “He’d better.”

  “He did a hell of a job on the Mafia,” said the postman. “Did you read about that?”

  “Yeah,” said the man at the end of the bar. “The Attanasios.”

  The redhead got up and went to the cigarette machine. “I’m surprised they haven’t tried to rub him out.”

  “Stasiak?” the postman said.

  Denny Nelson sauntered up. “They better bring out the big guns if they’re going to try that. Big Dale’s a war hero.”

  “What’d he get?” someone asked. “The Silver Star?”

  “It was the Navy Cross, I think,” said the postman. “Iwo Jima.”

  Someone further down the bar called, “I heard he took out a tank.”

  “Killed a bunch of Japs, anyway,” someone else said. “But you know what? If he’s such a hotshot, why’d they send him down here? Why didn’t they keep him up in Boston where there’s real crime?”

  “Haven’t you been paying attention?” said the postman. “Three dead kids. We got crime right here.”

  “Yeah, but they sent Stasiak down here before all that started.”

  “It’s a promotion,” said the redhead.

  “Really?”

  “You don’t get to say where you go,” the postman said.

  Nelson folded a damp rag and tossed it over his shoulder. “You know what I heard?” he said. “I heard that Bill Warren was madder than hell that the state police took over the investigation. They say he begged the DA to let him take the case.”

  “That guy’s an idiot,” said the man at the end of the bar.

  “Warren?” asked the postman.

  “Yeah.”

  “There’s some people that like him. They say he’s decent. A fair guy.”

  “Some of his own guys don’t like him,” said a man standing at the bar with a pair of empty glasses. “He’d turn his own mother in, for Christ’s sake. He’s probably one of those guys who does all the shit he doesn’t want anyone else to do.”

  “Do you know Al Petraglia?” asked the redhead. “He’s a Barnstable cop. He told me that him and Warren got into a fight with this great big fella out on Eel River Road. Must’ve weighed three hundred pounds. Him and one of the summer specials got there first and the guy was crazy drunk. They beat the hell out of him with nightsticks and it didn’t even faze him. Then Warren shows up and frigging head-butts the guy. Then he gets into a wrestling match with him and chokes him out. Petraglia said it was crazy as hell, the whole place destroyed. He said Warren and this big bastard went right through a wall.”

  “Oh, he’s tough,” said the postman.

  “But I heard he’s crazy,” said someone else.

  “Crazy how?”

  “He can’t handle power,” said a rough-looking older man sitting by himself at a table. “He goes too far with it. Throws his weight around just because he can.”

  Someone at the bar said, “He got into a beef with Dave Langella over his kid, that retarded kid of his. So he started doing some kind of investigation on him, looking for dirt. That’s the kind of thing he does. That’s not right.”

  “Langella isn’t someone you want to piss off,” said the man at the end of the bar. “His brother-in-law is Earl Mott, the head selectman. Langella filed a complaint.”

  The conversation drifted off in another direction.

  Sitting by himself in a booth against the wall, Alvin Leach drained his Scotch, stubbed out his cigarette, and surveyed the men at the bar. He decided that he would stay away from the VFW lounge after 7 P.M. The place took on a quality he did not like. The communal discussion had broken apart and now there was a din of many small conversations all around him. A hulking man to his right said, “Not for forty-five I can’t. Fifty-five, yeah. At least. I got to eat.”

  “Nellie!” someone shouted. “Whadja say? Nellie!”

  In the booth behind him, a low voice said, “. . . what happened to my cousin Artie.”

  Another voice: “I didn’t hear.”

  “He won all that money at the Elbow Room and he kept going back.”

  “And he lost it all.”

  “And then some.”

  Alvin Leach tensed at the words “Elbow Room.” He strained to hear but momentarily lost the conversation behind him. The conversation at the bar had swelled, the volume loud and fueled with alcoholic mirth. The congenial quiet of early evening had passed and the night, sharp-edged and ungoverned, was upon them.

  “Douchebag?” someone farther down the bar yelled. “Douchebag? Where’d you get that?”

  “Someone ought to wash your mouth ou
t with soap, Nellie.”

  Denny Nelson was standing directly under one of the spotlights mounted in the ceiling behind the bar. He was grinning widely, apparently satisfied with himself, but his smile was strangely devoid of light. “I wash it out daily with Johnnie Walker,” he said. “It doesn’t do any good.”

  The voice came from behind Leach again. “I wouldn’t do it, man. My cousin’s in a lot of trouble. You see what they did to him?”

  “Who’s running that place?”

  “Some people from up around Boston. What I heard.”

  Leach paid his bill and got up to leave. He turned to his left and tried to get a look at the men on whom he’d been eavesdropping but the place was getting crowded and there were people walking past, blocking his view. The bar had taken up conversation as one again, everyone shouting to make themselves heard.

  “How come he lives in that shitty neighborhood, huh? Don’t you think on a lieutenant’s pay he could afford something better?”

  “The missus drank it all,” someone shouted.

  “How about the missus?”

  A raucous sound went up, hooting, whoops, and whistles. Nelson said, “She used to come around the back of the lounge and I’d give it to her doggie style over the trash cans.”

  “Yeah, that kid’s probably yours, Nellie.”

  Uproarious laughter drowned out every other sound in the place. Leach tried once more to see the men at the table whose conversation he’d heard, but he could only see one of them, a workman of some kind with rolled-up sleeves and a tanned face, who looked straight back at him, almost as a warning.

  23

  On Saturday Warren had work at the boatyard—a catboat they were building for a surgeon in Brookline. He worked until sunset, keeping Mike occupied with little chores. On the way home, he stopped at the liquor store, then picked up a bucket of fried chicken and went home. He and Mike sat on the back step and ate, even though the oil tank was just a few feet away and they could smell its industrial stink. He thought he should find a picnic table somewhere and some benches so they could eat in the backyard on warm evenings, maybe string up some lightbulbs on a wire between two trees. Some of the neighborhood children showed up, dirty, barefooted, potbellied kids with fruit-drink-stained T-shirts and runny noses and a musky, uriney smell about them. They gawked unselfconsciously at the chicken and watched Mike with predatory eyes. Warren handed each of them a piece and went back inside. He set Mike up at the kitchen table with the remainder of the chicken and found a couple of frankfurters in the refrigerator, which smelled a little rich. He boiled them and dipped them in a jar of mustard and had them with a bottle of Knickerbocker.

  On the kitchen table were scraps of paper from something Jane and Mike had been doing. Amid Mike’s crayon pictures and his awkward scrawling, he saw her neat, rounded handwriting. Warren swept the paper aside and tossed an old newspaper on top so it was out of sight. When he got home from work on Friday afternoon, he’d found the two of them in the backyard. To his surprise, Jane was in the lower branches of a pine at the edge of the woods. She had both legs wrapped around a branch and was knotting a rope, her hair hanging in her face. She had on calf-length dungarees. He saw the high arches of her bare feet, the dirty soles, her painted toenails. She looked down at him and grinned tightly, concentrating on the rope. He said, “Jane. Don’t fall.”

  “You’ll catch me, I hope.”

  He nodded and stammered. “What are you doing?”

  Mike said, “She’s making a Tarzan rope for me, Dad.”

  He looked down at the boy, who was dressed in an old section of faux leopard skin, something that had belonged to Ava. Jane had fashioned it into a costume, pinning it over one of Mike’s shoulders like a prehistoric shift. Warren didn’t even know that it had been in the house.

  Jane sat up and put her hands on her hips, her thighs gripping the branch, her ankles crossed beneath it. The low angle of the late afternoon sun revealed lines at the corners of her mouth. “We watched Tarzan on TV today,” she said, climbing back down. Warren stepped forward to help, but then froze where he was. Jane dropped the last four feet to the ground, landing squarely on her feet, knees bent, arms straight out, like a gymnast. She gave a tug on the rope and looked at Mike. “That ought to hold you and six monkeys.”

  “Are we going to find some monkeys?”

  “That’s a job for tomorrow. Maybe your dad can help us with that. I’ll bet he knows where he can find a few.” She gave Warren a quick look as she said this, playful, sly, he couldn’t tell. He felt hopelessly old in her presence. He watched as she slipped into her flip-flops. “Where did you learn to tie knots?” Warren asked.

  “Ted showed me. My fiancé. We used to sail.”

  Inside the house, she gestured toward a framed photograph standing on the dining room table and said, “I hope you don’t mind. We found that this afternoon while we were looking for a Tarzan suit.”

  Ava was staring into the camera. She was wearing a woolen coat, her hands in a muffler. It was the winter of 1948, some outing they’d taken, Warren no longer remembered where. Ava already looked worn-out by then, like she knew what was coming.

  Now he was angry. Jane had unthinkingly pushed the past at him, this unwanted artifact of a time he wanted to forget. And what did Mike think of this? Was Warren now going to have to answer questions about his mother, answers the boy couldn’t even begin to understand? Was all that bad history now going to have another run at them—this time with the boy in its sights—thanks to Jane’s interference? And where on earth had she found the picture in the first place?

  She said, “I notice you don’t have any pictures of Mrs. Warren around.”

  “We’ve put it behind us.”

  Jane seemed to read his discomfort. “I shouldn’t have,” she said. “But it was just such a beautiful day and there was sun coming in the windows and there was this picture buried in a box in the utility room and it seemed so sad. We put it in the sun there on the table.”

  Warren’s anger evaporated as suddenly as it had risen. He saw her again with her legs wrapped around the tree branch like a tomboy. Now here she was saying these things. She had no idea, the effect she had.

  After dinner, he put Mike in the tub and sat out on the front step with the little book, smoking and watching the evening deepen.

  What happened to Robinson

  Who used to stagger down Eighth Street

  Dizzy with solitary gin?

  Where is Masters, who crouched in

  His law office for ruinous decades?

  A car came out of the neighborhood, moving slowly down General Patton Drive. It nearly came to a stop when it was abreast of Warren. The driver turned to look at him, his face opaque, featureless except for dark curls on the forehead and an upper lip that seemed enlarged somehow. The brake lights flashed for a second and Warren thought the driver was going to speak, but he only looked out his window, his head perfectly still, staring. Warren was about to ask him what he wanted when he drove on, turning right on Bearse’s Way.

  Years ago, Warren had fastened a holster to the underside of his bed, driving screws through the leather into the wooden slats of the box spring. It was positioned so that, from a prone position in bed, he could drop his hand down and reach the handle of the .38 revolver he kept there. Once Mike was able to go exploring around the house, Warren removed the pistol but the holster was still there. He went into his bedroom closet and reached to the rear of the shelf and felt for the revolver, wrapped in an old T-shirt dampened with Hoppe’s oil. There was a box of fifty rounds next to the gun. He opened the cylinder and spun it. He snapped it shut, checked the action, and opened the cylinder again, inserting the rounds into their places.

  Warren slipped the loaded revolver into the holster under the bed and went to check on Little Mike in the bathtub. “Are your feet starting to shrivel up yet?”
/>   “Not yet.”

  “You clean?”

  “I guess so.”

  “The water’s brown. You must be clean.”

  “Can you read me a comic book? Green Lantern?”

  “Did I get you a Green Lantern?”

  “Yeah. Remember?”

  “O.K. Out. Let’s dry off, now.”

  The telephone rang. Warren tossed Mike a towel and went into the kitchen to get it. Alvin Leach was on the other end.

  “I’m sorry to call at this hour, lieutenant. But I wanted to let you know that I pulled those records you asked about. Russell and Miriam Weeks. And I thought you might want to know that the number you asked about—the number we traced to the Elbow Room—is there.”

  “In their records?”

  “Yes. Someone called that number several times.” Before Warren could respond, Alvin Leach continued. “And last night I was at the VFW and I heard some fellows talking.”

  Warren, pacing the tiny kitchen as he listened to what Leach had overheard, could feel the excitement of a quickening chase. “There’s a good chance I’m going to want to tap that line,” he said to Leach.

  “Very good. I’ll wait for your call.”

  Outside, a car went by, its headlights making shapes on the wall behind the television set, revealing the spidery dead branches in the high pines as it made its hushed passage down General Patton Drive. Warren watched it turn right and disappear among the little cottages. He couldn’t say if it was the car he’d seen earlier.

  24

  Father Boyle turned off the road somewhere in the vicinity of Truro and wound his way down a narrow blacktop lane through the woods. On his left appeared a cluster of dilapidated cottages set back off the road, vacant, by the looks of them, their shingles so stained with verdigris it looked like they had become part of the woods. He slowed to look at them but suddenly saw a heavy, crew-cut man standing knee-high in a sea of ferns in front of the cottage nearest the road. The sight of him, standing there as if he knew someone was going to drive by, was disturbing.