Lesser Evils

by Joe Flanagan

  “I understand.”

  “I’m going to write this up as satisfactory, but you need to call me at the beginning of every month. We’re having this conversation two weeks late.”

  “I’m sorry, monsignor. I’ll call you on the first of August for his next report.”

  Stasiak sped down the Mid-Cape Highway, the only car on the road. It was an oppressive, misty evening, the smell of skunk strong in the air. His cruiser dipped into hollows, where the air was cooler by five degrees, and when it rose back out, it was noticeably warmer and he could feel the clammy night on his skin.

  He’d been sitting in his office a few minutes earlier going over leads when one of the sergeants came in with a report of a suspicious car that had been seen parked in an alleyway behind a convenience store in Brewster, a place frequented by kids. The license plate came back registered to a medical lab called Bondurant. A call to the lab revealed that the car was normally driven by one of their couriers, one Edgar Cleve, but that he was not on duty at the time the car was reported. The name was vaguely familiar to Stasiak, who went over the case file and dug out the reports compiled by the Barnstable police during their involvement in the Lefgren investigation. On the day of the murder, they had pulled in the vagrant Frawley, who turned out to be a waste of time, an old poof looking for some action at a public beach, and Cleve. Employees at the medical lab were able to tell Stasiak that Cleve had part-time work on a fishing boat out of Provincetown known as the Darius.

  Stasiak turned off on a remote road that ran through an open landscape dotted with low dunes and isolated stands of cedar. He found Heller’s Chevrolet parked at a turnoff and pulled up alongside. “What do you hear?” said Stasiak.

  “Nothing.”

  “You talk to anybody up above?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Nothing from Fitzgerald?”

  “No, sir.”

  “How’s it going with Jenkins?”

  “I’m keeping him busy.”

  “Make sure he stays that way. What’ve you got him doing?”

  “Chasing dead ends. But he doesn’t like it. He isn’t stupid.”

  “That’s why we need to keep him out of the picture.” Stasiak put his cruiser in gear. “We need to make a trip out to Provincetown.”

  “Do we have something?”

  “I’ll tell you when we get there.”

  A half hour later they were at the waterfront in Provincetown, walking between the boats, two men in expensive suits amid the rusting steel and cables and shellfish rakes. The Darius was tied up alongside a dragger about halfway down the length of the wharf. Stasiak and Heller walked the length of the vessel, looking it over. A man came out of the pilothouse and glanced at them, then leaned on the gunnel with his elbows. They saw motion toward the stern, a rope flung out onto the deck from behind twin cable drums. They walked to the rear of the boat and saw a thin man of about thirty squatting with a length of rope, his hands moving quickly, fashioning it into an elaborate knot. Suddenly aware of their presence he looked up at them with wide eyes. “How you doing?” Stasiak said.

  Cleve gave a slight nod. Stasiak looked at the rope in Cleve’s hands, two identical loops, formed and cinched off with a fluidity and precision that recalled cursive script. “You’re pretty good at that,” said Stasiak.

  The captain called down from his place at the gunnel. “All my guys are pretty good at that.”

  Stasiak looked up at him and then back at Cleve. “Are you Edgar Cleve?” The man nodded.

  “The guy’s just trying to make a living,” the captain said. “Why don’t you leave him alone?”

  Stasiak removed his sunglasses and faced the man. “Why don’t you go back to shucking clams, admiral?” He turned back to Cleve. “Come down here, Mr. Cleve. You’ve come to our attention one time too many.”

  They escorted him to the entrance of a nearby warehouse. “Any idea why we came out here to see you?” Stasiak said.

  Cleve shook his head.

  “What were you doing at the Kwik Mart in Brewster yesterday?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Driving around doing nothing.”

  Cleve shrugged.

  “Sitting in the alleyway behind the Kwik Mart doing nothing. I know one thing you were doing.”

  Cleve looked at Stasiak expectantly.

  “You were violating section 622 of the Massachusetts General Code. Unauthorized use of a motor vehicle. Care to say anything about that? No? O.K. You used to work at Bondurant Medical Labs. Did you catch the past tense, Cleve? Used to because as of this morning, you’re fired. You were using one of their lab cars to . . . well, we don’t know what, do we? But you were using one of their lab cars without permission. You weren’t on the clock, Mr. Cleve.”

  “I don’t have a car.”

  “Most people find a way to get one legally.”

  Cleve looked past the two policemen, down the long line of buildings that backed up to the harbor. Among the people strolling along the waterfront, Cleve spotted someone who bore a striking resemblance to Dr. Hawthorne.

  “Are there any priors on you?” Stasiak asked.

  “No. I’ve never been in trouble of any kind.”

  “I understand you lived in New York before you came here but the registry of motor vehicles down there has no record of you. Didn’t you have a driver’s license in New York?”

  “No. I didn’t need one. I lived in the city.”

  Cleve looked back toward the piers and saw that the man he’d noticed was indeed Dr. Hawthorne. He was walking in that languid way he had, looking over the little establishments like a tourist, but his eyes kept going out to the water, checking the boats. Hawthorne was headed in their direction but he hadn’t seen them yet. He was frowning now, his hands in his pockets, looking at the Darius.

  “You ever serve in the military?” Stasiak asked.

  “No.”

  “Did you go to college?”

  “No.”

  So you’re a bit of a mystery, huh, Mr. Cleve. This is not a good time to be a bit of a mystery. And you still haven’t answered the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. What where you doing in Brewster?”

  “I was just . . . getting out. Sometimes I have to. It’s my living situation . . .”

  “I’m not interested in your living situation.”

  “You would be if . . .” Cleve had sneaked a look past Stasiak at Hawthorne, who was now gazing straight back at him, his look intense and severe. Cleve wiped away the film of sweat that had suddenly formed on his upper lip.

  “If what?” said Stasiak.

  “Nothing.”

  Stasiak looked to Heller, and with a movement of the head that was nearly imperceptible, launched the sergeant into motion. Heller took Cleve by the front of his shirt and pulled him into the empty warehouse. Stasiak remained outside, watching the docks. Just inside the doorway, Heller slammed Cleve against the raw wooden wall. “What about your living situation?”

  Cleve muttered and looked away.

  Heller jabbed two fingers into his collarbone. “What about your living situation?”

  “It’s nothing, really. Just, personal. It’s nothing you . . .”

  Heller slammed the heel of his hand into Cleve’s chest, driving him back against the wall. “We didn’t come out here to play games with you, understand? We’re running all over the goddamn state working a murder investigation. There ain’t enough hours in the day for us to do what we have to do. So I don’t appreciate making the trip all the way out here to Queertown so some shitbird like yourself can play cute. Now what is it about your living situation you think we should know?”

  Cleve shook his head. Heller grabbed his wrist with one hand and bent his fingers back with the other.

  “Pot!” Cleve gasped. “Marijuana. The guys I live with.”

/>   “Where?”

  Supplied with an address and two fictitious names, Stasiak and Heller left a sweating Edgar Cleve standing just inside the doorway of the darkened warehouse. He waited for some time and was preparing to peer around the frame of the door when he heard shoes on the pavement, nice shoes, the kind that would make a clicking sound walking down the street but here produced a thin crunching grind on the bits of broken shell and grit covering the ground.

  “Edgar.” Hawthorne’s voice. “Edgar, come out here.”

  Cleve rushed into the oily-smelling depths of the structure, feeling his way around heaps of discarded rope, empty crates, and pieces of heavy equipment in various stages of disassembly. A row of tall, clouded windows gave on to an alleyway, one of which was open a few inches. He forced the sash up enough to squeeze his body through, dropped into the alleyway, and disappeared into the crowds on Commercial Street.

  That evening around dusk, Cleve sat with the captain of the Darius in the vessel’s galley. Each had a thick ceramic mug in front of him containing a small amount of bourbon. “I got turned around in some neighborhood over in Brewster,” Cleve was saying. “Someone wrote the license number down and reported it. That’s why they showed up here, to ask me about it.”

  “They’re out here at least once a week, seems like. I hear they’re always prowling around Barnstable Harbor, too, crawling all over the guys down there. That one with the dark glasses, the big one. I don’t like him.” The boat creaked in the gentle swell made by a pleasure boat leaving the harbor. “You know that doctor you’re renting from came around not long after they left.”

  Cleve pursed his lips and looked out the porthole. There was only the vague shape of the pilings to which they were tied, looming like phantoms in the deepening night. “He comes by the boat a lot,” the captain said.

  “I know he does.”

  “Well, what’s he doing? Checking on you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Has this guy got something on you?”

  “No. But you could say that I’ve got something on him.”

  “Yeah, like what? I won’t tell anyone.”

  Edgar looked up and quickly took in the tiny enclosure in which they sat. His eyes glittered. “I’m holding on to that for the time being.”

  The captain watched him, turning his cup around in circles on the battered surface of the table. “Whatever you say. But I tell you what. If I see him here again, I’m going to set him straight. Me and a couple of the guys get hold of him, he won’t be back.”

  “No. Don’t do that.”

  “Then move out, Edgar. Jesus Christ. Find a new place to live.”

  Edgar wrapped his hands around his cup, looked down into its contents, and nodded.

  “In the meantime you can bunk here. I’m staying with that waitress from the Lobster Pot. Use my rack. Or put a mattress down in the hold, I don’t care.”

  The captain got up and put his cup in a strainer on the counter. “I’m going. If you’re staying here, make sure all the equipment is off up top.” He started out of the passageway then stopped. “You’ve got to watch out for yourself, Edgar.”

  31

  Ed Jenkins crossed the packed dirt lot at Barnstable Harbor, skirting the water-filled potholes, on his way to the harbormaster’s office. Working with the state police on the child murders was challenging, but not in the way he’d anticipated. They kept him busy. Check this address. Pull this file. Go talk to a Mrs. So-and-so, who saw something suspicious the other night. Go to the registry of motor vehicles for this reason and that reason. They had him chase down some apparently phony information Edgar Cleve had given them about a couple of guys in possession of marijuana at a house in East Dennis. It took an entire day of footwork to discover the guys didn’t exist. The only upside to that little excursion was that Heller was furious.

  Now, the state police had him compiling a record of commercial fishermen who leased slips at the various town docks. What they were going to do with this information, Captain Stasiak wouldn’t say.

  At his first weekly briefing at the barracks in Yarmouth, with all the detectives on the task force present, he and Stasiak had clashed. He challenged some of Stasiak’s ideas, such as compiling a list of fishermen who rented docks in the town of Barnstable but not in Chatham or Orleans or anyplace else. He raised the point that this approach didn’t even take into consideration the fact that each boat had a crew of six, on average, which could change weekly. Some guys loaned the slips out to other fishermen to whom they owed favors, and Jenkins happened to know that some falsified their paperwork because they were dodging creditors or tax officials. Stasiak stopped everything and said a few things to Jenkins, he no longer remembered what, except there was some reference to keeping his ass in his chair and his mouth shut and something about the extent of information that he, Jenkins, didn’t know.

  But Jenkins didn’t particularly feel like keeping quiet. The captain slammed his palm down on the conference table so that they all flinched. “Heller,” was all he said. The next thing Jenkins knew, this big son of a bitch was standing behind him, telling him to get out of his chair. “I don’t need this shit,” Jenkins said, and followed Heller out into the hallway. There were uniformed troopers and some volunteers manning the phone lines there, so Heller led him into an adjacent office and closed the door. The state policeman put the tip of his nose practically against Jenkins’s, though he had to lean down considerably to do it. “You are insubordinate, Jenkins,” Heller said.

  “What the hell kind of operation are you guys running here, Heller? A guy can’t ask questions?”

  “You don’t rate asking questions. Sit down, shut up, and do as you’re told. We’re not amateurs here.”

  “Neither am I.”

  “You’re nobody and you’re lucky to be here. If you want to go back to that Podunk department, go right ahead.”

  “Maybe I will. I don’t even know what the hell I’m doing here in the first place.”

  “Captain Stasiak obviously felt you could contribute to the investigation. You should be honored.”

  “Well, Captain Stasiak doesn’t do a whole lot for me, sergeant, you know what I mean? I think Captain Stasiak is riding a lot of hype from the Attanasio case. I haven’t seen anything from Captain Stasiak that impresses me all that much. Aside from his clothes. You impress me even less. Big fuckin’ farm boy without two brain cells to rub together.”

  The next thing Jenkins knew, his feet were suddenly no longer touching the ground and he was listening to a long, slow tear working its way through an armpit seam in his jacket. Heller had two fistfuls of material, his eyes just inches away from Jenkins’s. “Get in your car,” he said quietly. “And get the fuck out of here. You’re finished.”

  As it turned out, they gave him his assignments through Dunleavy. He joked with the clerks at the registry of motor vehicles that he ought to have his own desk with as much time as he was spending there. Jenkins didn’t believe the investigation had any focus. He’d heard that Edgar Cleve had been spotted in Brewster, hanging around a corner grocery, attracting the attention of the neighbors. Stasiak had grilled him about it and hadn’t really come up with anything. And as far as Jenkins knew, nobody was talking about Gene Henry anymore. He wasn’t sure, because no one—not even Dunleavy—would tell him anything.

  Warren had gone to check with his officers at the scene of an accident just before noon, and when he returned to the station, he found Stasiak standing in the front hallway at Garrity’s desk. Stasiak turned as Warren came through the front doors. “Well, look who it is,” he said. “The district attorney tells me you were on the phone with him.” He paused and watched Warren. “About Russell Weeks.”

  “I spoke with him, yes.”

  “Why did you do that?”

  “I wanted to know if he was aware you’d found the Weeksees in Florida. It
turns out he’d just found out, which is strange, since you told me you located them some time ago.”

  Stasiak stared at him. Warren couldn’t stop himself. “I get the idea there’s something you’re not playing straight about this.”

  “Is that the idea you get?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, I’ve got an idea for you, and you’d damn well better get it through your head.”

  “I’m done talking to you, Stasiak.”

  The state policeman looked at Warren, appraised him from his forehead all the way to his patent leather uniform shoes. “You know what I think the problem is?” he said. “We just need to get to know each other better.” He put an arm around Warren’s shoulders. “Let’s go outside for a minute, Warren,” he said, steering the lieutenant toward the door.

  “I’m not going anywhere with you.”

  “Come on.” Stasiak’s arm clamped Warren in, an amazing force. Just one arm and Warren felt he would have to struggle in order to break free of it. “What are you doing?”

  “Come on outside for a sec, talk in private.”

  Stasiak shoved the door open and propelled Warren out. Warren turned on him. “What in hell do you think you’re doing? Don’t you ever put your hands on me.”

  Stasiak looked around the street in all directions and then turned to Warren. “Stay the fuck out of state police business,” he said. “Are you accusing me of lying? Huh? You think for some reason I’d make up a story about locating the Weekses? For what? I got a bunch of murders on my hands, you shitstain. And you call the fucking district attorney to tell him you think there’s something suspicious about the Russell Weeks thing?” Stasiak looked around the street once again, then drove his fist into Warren’s solar plexus. The wind left his lungs and he rocked back against the chainlink fence. Warren was about to fall to the ground when he felt another hard blow, this one high on his jawbone just below his left ear. A white streak shot past his eyes and he went down. Stasiak took him by one of his arms and, with shocking ease, hoisted him upright and propped him against the fence. Stasiak hit him in the side, just below his rib cage, then again in his solar plexus, a lightning-fast combination that brought Warren to his knees, his forehead on the ground. “Now you know me a little better, Warren. But, believe me, you don’t want to know me any better than this.”