Lesser Evils

by Joe Flanagan

  He drove until the pavement ended in a grove of ghostly cedars and got out of the car. As he bent to get his sketchbook and specimen basket out of the back, he experienced shooting pains in his chest and stood erect until they passed. Sweating and jumpy, he made his way into the brush. The terrain headed upward, the tall conifers continuing up the slope like grave sentinels in the gloaming. In time, he found himself in an old-growth forest where the light was sanctuarial. Father Boyle registered the brief rush of excitement. He had passed through just such a place on that late afternoon in May, not long before falling asleep in a hollow on the moor and waking to that extraordinary experience.

  Among some stones near a downed, rotted tree trunk was a discarded bottle. Predictably, he found himself thinking about his time at St. Sebastian’s in Erie, Pennsylvania. Though he had begun drinking a few years earlier, it intensified at St. Sebastian’s. He was mortified at the turn events had taken, astonished, in an anaesthetized kind of way, at the rapid fall of something that had been so central to his life and his conception of who he was. Even now, years afterward, it was frightening to recall how rapidly he descended.

  He had had a grand mal seizure on the kitchen floor of the rectory and was sent to Talbot House in the country outside Baltimore, a place where the Church sent its troubled priests to either dry out or undergo psychoanalysis. There, he sweated and trembled his way through the hours. They started him on Phenobarbital to ease his tremors and Librium to quell his sense of impending panic and he spent his days adrift on a wide sea of dreams in a pharmacological twilight.

  When he was finally well again, he was sent to Our Lady of Good Counsel in Belmont, Massachusetts. Some seemed intrigued by the troubled new arrival who spoke cryptically and kept to himself. It was something that was in the air at the time. There was some rearrangement in the culture, or in Catholic culture anyway, that attributed romance to experiences such as his. At Our Lady of Good Counsel, they put him on medications, which calmed his mind, though they produced a certain torpor he found disagreeable. He felt glib and flat, like someone he himself would avoid. Father Boyle stopped taking the medication and began to feel better. But by then, he had earned the pastor’s trust and was rewarded with the honor of saying Easter Mass.

  It was personal experience that prompted him to say during his sermon, “If you let the garbage get high enough, you’re going to have rats.” The words did not sound particularly priestly and it was a conservative congregation. He couldn’t remember what prompted him to speak so familiarly but he did remember the final week of Lent that year he had felt peculiar, light of body, uncharacteristically voluble. He thought he might have caught a touch of the flu.

  He heard himself saying, “You, John Jones, and your infidelities. You, Mary Brown, and your peccadilloes, whatever they may be.” Before the Mass, Father Boyle had had the idea to talk about how people often search for God where he is not. He had been trying to say that one should find God—or at least go looking for him—in agape, in acts of selflessness, that we are too often taken with form and ritual—“tokens, talismans, and trinkets,” he called them, with an ill-advised gesture to the sanctuary around him. He had been trying to say that a life of virtue demands discomfort.

  But he had mumbled something, too, about his own sinfulness, his unworthiness to say the things he had just said, and stopped just short of an apology to the congregation. He was lost. His thoughts flooded in on a tide of uncertain inspiration and eddied in a pool, mingling with one another so that he was unable to assemble anything coherent with them. Then, when he became aware that there was no rescuing himself and he had gone on too long, he made one last thrust at resolution. “Why do you come here?” he asked them. “When you look up here, what do you see? A man with soft hands and a cowardly heart. You bring your hope, your fears—your ambition, some of you—and you expect . . . What?” Father Boyle stopped himself, turned to his co-celebrants, the monsignor and the bishop (who had come out for the special occasion), who were gaping at him, and finished with a pathetic pair of sentences that were the equivalent of slamming a lid down on an erupting blender.

  In the wake of what was to become known as the Easter Sermon, Father Boyle was ostracized and under watch. But he was strangely unperturbed. Certain hours of the day seemed heralded by angels and his ears sang. He began to think that his past troubles had been intended for his purification, that they were, as St. John of the Cross had written, “the light that wounds and yet illumines.” He was changing, changing in ways that were intriguing in some ways and disturbing in others. There were more sermons. He did not recall them very well. He was called before the bishop. There had been complaints, even requests to have Father Boyle moved to another parish. He left Our Lady of Good Counsel in the early summer of 1954. Things had ended so badly there, he didn’t like to think about it.

  Finally, he was packed off to Cape Cod, which he found peaceful and accommodating, where his thoughts settled down and he was able to function without the medication. He immersed himself in working with the sick and the suffering, which he did with a Spartan intensity, a grim resolution that had something of spite in it, and perhaps a kind of self-hatred.

  Father Boyle walked until he could perceive light between the trees, as though a large open space might lie beyond. He passed out of the old-growth forest and entered a wide region of dune and meadow that was a considerable height above the ocean. He tottered on his feet as a knot of pain worked through his chest, then passed. He surveyed the tattered-looking hummocks around him, now unsure whether this was the place. He thought it was peculiar that he had been unable to find it, which lent to the overall unreality surrounding the incident.

  He recalled that night. How all the insects fell silent and the outdoors took on the feeling of a close, stifling room. Father Boyle had had the sensation of surreptitious fingers on his skin, of a weight settling down over the rolling grassland, and felt that if he spoke, the sound would echo like a word uttered in an empty church, so strange had the outdoors become.

  What was he doing out here? If he admitted he was looking for something, then didn’t he also have to admit that he believed in it?

  He thought he heard someone laugh far off in the brush. Though it was only 2 P.M., the sky was getting dark, with purple and gray clouds converging overhead. He thought of the big man standing in the ferns and experienced a crawling sensation on his scalp. How strange it was, the man with his air of authority and menace, planted there in what looked like dress pants and a T-shirt.

  Father Boyle retraced his steps, moving more quickly than he meant to, his chest aching. He kept thinking he heard movement behind him, as if someone were tracking him through the woods, but every time he stopped to listen it was quiet. For a while he was convinced that he was lost and he headed blindly west until he could hear a car rolling down a distant road in the quiet. There was a whispering in his left ear and he began to trot toward the road. He burst out of the woods a half mile from his car and ran the entire way, losing his sketchbook and his specimen basket. He yanked the car door open and fumbled with the key in the ignition. He locked the doors and stepped on the gas. In the rearview mirror, the road was empty.

  25

  George McCarthy entered the Elbow Room through a locked side door. He went into the back area, grabbed the big wooden handle on the walk-in door, and yanked it open. Four men were seated at the plywood counter around its perimeter. A teletype was churning out lengths of paper—sports lines from Las Vegas. Four televisions were on, their volume down, one showing the news, another Death Valley Days, the other two tuned to a horse race at Suffolk Downs. Two of the men were on the phone, the other two checking columns of figures in a ledger. One of the men on the phone held the receiver away to his right and spoke. “What’s going on, George?”

  “You guys get off the phone for a minute.”

  Everyone stopped what they were doing and turned in their chairs.


  “The cops might be sniffing around. I think they been over here sneaking around the parking lot. I don’t know what it’s about yet but everyone’s got to be careful. Pay attention to who’s around you. Don’t be stupid with the phones.”

  “Anybody know who they are?” one of the men asked.

  “Barnstable cops. It’s usually a little guy. Some detective, I don’t know his name. Thinks he’s a tough guy, what I heard. Lieutenant Warren is the one in charge. I want to know if you spot any of these guys.”

  Someone said, “Are our phones O.K.?”

  “As far as I know. But we’re gonna need a phone guy down here. I gotta go call Grady. Stevie, come with me.”

  Steve Tosca, who had been hovering at the edge of the room, followed him out.

  “I want you to make sure they’re careful in there,” McCarthy said.

  “I will. This is going to get fixed, though, right?”

  “I hope so.”

  “Is Frank Semanica coming down today? We got a lot of checks to go up.”

  “Yeah, he’s coming. But this will be the last time, if I have anything to say about it. I got a feeling he fucked up that Leapley thing.”

  “Leapley was a mule, though, George. He had it coming.”

  “Yeah, but you notice how we bring Frankie in to do a tune-up and all of a sudden we got trouble? We’ve tuned up a few guys since we been down here, right? Not once did we have trouble. Now we do.”

  “Leapley going along with the program?”

  “We paid him a visit at the hospital. He knows enough to keep his mouth shut. That Warren’s been dogging him, though. Frankie overdid it. Cutting him in the face. We don’t need that.”

  “He’s lucky he ain’t floating in a creek somewhere. That’s how it works.”

  “I know how it works, Stevie. I’m gonna tell Grady I don’t want Frank down here no more.”

  “We got to balance our books on the Wednesday night fight. Asher versus Jefferson. Everybody thinks Asher’s a dog. We gotta do a layoff.”

  “How far are we out?”

  “Three hundred. Something like that. Is the Cock n’ Bull still up and running?”

  “In Brighton? I’m not sure. I’ll ask Grady.”

  McCarthy checked his watch and then called a number in South Boston. Grady Pope came on the line, terse and unreadable. “We might have some trouble down here,” McCarthy said. “The cops are nosing around. One of our guys says they tailed him last night.”

  “You talk to our good friend?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Tell him I want it fixed,” said Pope.

  “I told him that.”

  “Tell him again. These are local cops?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Who?”

  “Barnstable.”

  “You got any names?”

  “Someone named Warren. William Warren. You know him?”

  “No. And this is all from the Leapley thing?”

  “That’s right. And I don’t think we should be using Frank Semanica anymore.”

  “Why?”

  “I think he fucked up. He overdid it. He didn’t use his head.”

  Pope was quiet for a moment. “Did this guy talk to the cops?”

  “Leapley? No. They’re working on him, though.”

  “You make sure he stays zipped tight, George. Make sure he understands what this is. As for Frankie, I’ll talk to him. Everyone else is being watched. Frankie they don’t know. He just got out of prison and he wasn’t around when everything went to hell. We had him running that poker game in Braintree and they never got their nose into that, so they don’t even know who he is. That’s why he’s useful. Are the phones O.K.?”

  “I don’t know,” McCarthy said. “We need to get a phone guy down here to check it out. Oh, yeah. Is the Cock n’ Bull still up?”

  “Yes and no. They’re operating out of a basement in Arlington.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Yeah. It’s that bad.”

  “We’re gonna take it on the nose in the Asher-Jefferson fight. The action’s out of whack.”

  “I’ll make a phone call and get back to you. How much you need to lay off?”

  “About three hundred.”

  “O.K. Make sure everyone’s being careful. I’ll get someone down to check the phones. Talk to our good friend. Do it right now. Tell him I don’t like what’s going on and he needs to get on it. What’s this Barnstable cop’s name?”

  “Warren. William Warren.”

  On Monday morning, as Warren was driving through town in his unmarked, the dispatcher’s voice came up on the radio. “KCA374 to Easy seven.”

  “Easy seven.”

  “Request to stop by Wentzel and Livingston auction house and make contact with one Irving Wentzel.”

  Warren acknowledged and turned in the direction of the Mid-Cape Highway. A few days earlier, he had taken photographs of the items that had been stolen from the antique shop in Osterville to Wentzel and Livingston auction house. It had happened in the past that thieves who found themselves in possession of an object they believed to be valuable took it to Irving Wentzel to be appraised or auctioned off. Wentzel was a stickler for provenance and knew when something was suspicious, which discouraged people from trying to use him as a fence, but from time to time Warren got a call from him about someone who had brought something by his auction house and had left him with an uneasy feeling.

  Warren found Wentzel seated at his desk. “Good morning, Mr. Wentzel,” he said.

  “Lieutenant. How are you, sir?”

  Wentzel stood and they shook hands.

  “You wanted to see me?”

  “Yes.” Wentzel moved a few papers around on his desk and came up with the photographs Warren had given him. “A boy came in here this morning with this lantern. He wanted to know what I’d give him for it. I told him that’s not how we acquire our inventory, by people just walking in off the street. This is not a flea market. At any rate, the boy I know. Stephen Nicholas.”

  “The selectman’s son?”

  “Yes. He’s . . . I don’t know. He thinks he’s a gangster or something.”

  “You’re sure it was him?”

  “He went to high school with my daughter. She’ll tell you. She was here when he came in.”

  “And you’re sure that’s what he showed you?” Warren pointed at the photograph.

  “I’m sure. There aren’t many of these around anymore. At least in this part of the country. It’s not valuable but it is rare.”

  Warren pinched the bridge of his nose.

  “It’s never simple, is it?” said Wentzel.

  “Not lately.”

  Warren drove out to Selectman Nicholas’s home. Mrs. Nicholas answered the door, prim and immaculate in a light cotton print dress and a rose chiffon scarf with matching shoes and earrings. She had the look of someone who was accustomed to being in charge and who expected treachery and incompetence. When he stated his business, she told him that her son was not at home, that she was insulted by Warren’s accusation, and that Selectman Nicholas would see him in his office within the hour.

  When Warren came through the front doors of the station, Sgt. Garrity looked up at him like a spooked domestic whose boss had just gone on a tirade. “Selectman Nicholas is here,” he said quietly. Warren found the selectman in his office, looking at one of the duty rosters that was taped to the wall. He turned immediately to Warren when he entered. “Did you speak disrespectfully to Mrs. Nicholas?”

  Warren shut the door behind him. “I did not,” he said. “I explained to her . . .”

  “That’s not what she told me. Why are you asking about Stephen and a burglary? Why didn’t you come to my offices and speak with me?”

  “It’s your son I need to speak with. No one else
.”

  “Well, let me tell you something, Warren. You’re not speaking with my son. You’ll speak to me.”

  “That won’t do.”

  “It will have to do.”

  “It was your son who was identified as the person who tried to sell stolen property to Irving Wentzel at his auction house.”

  “Irving Wentzel.”

  “Maybe your son got it from someone else, but I need to know who.”

  “What burglary are you talking about? Where?”

  “Antiquitus. On West Bay Road in Osterville.”

  Nicholas shouted, “Are you kidding me? That place is always getting broken into.”

  “Well, that’s going to stop.”

  “Do you have any idea what you’re doing here? These are two perverts who run a junk shop. Who don’t hide the fact that they’re perverts and do nothing but bring more of their kind up here from New York. And I don’t know if you’ve noticed but a number of children have been murdered, lieutenant, and their killer is still out there walking around.”

  “The state police are working on that.”

  “But you’re not.”

  “Everything else doesn’t stop, Mr. Nicholas. What if it was your place that got broken into?”

  “Drop it right now. This doesn’t even rise to the level of vandalism. I’m telling you to drop it right now.”

  “You don’t have that authority.”

  “This is my family you’re talking about here. This is my name. Irving Wentzel is a sneaky little Jew who doesn’t know a goddamn thing if he can’t find it in his account book. He’s wrong.”

  “He identified your son without any trouble. His daughter was there when your son came in. She went to school with him.”

  “Who the hell do you think you are?”

  “I’m the acting chief of police, Mr. Nicholas.”

  “That’s right. Acting. And not for long, if I have anything to say about it, which I do.”

  “This is a burglary, Mr. Nicholas, and I’m going to treat it like a burglary. I don’t care who did it.”