by Jay Atkinson
Father Dever blessed him and absolved him and gave him Hail Marys to recite as penance. “I want to tell you something, Joe,” said the priest. “I've had a bit of psychiatric training, and most people don't know what policemen go through. It's a very, very difficult job that you do.”
“I've been through a lot, Father. Taking bodies out of rivers with a grappling hook, all the shootings, the autopsies,” Joe said.
Father Dever continued to look into his parishioner's eyes. “You know, Joe, some people are put on this earth because they have a mission and they don't know it.”
“I'm not overly religious, Father, in that I come into church and sit in the front row,” said Joe. “I stand in the back; I put my money in the poor box. Whatever the church needs, I give. It's like I'm hedging my bets in case there is a heaven. I'll be the guy, when they tell me I'm dying, who'll be screaming, ‘Where's my priest?'”
Father Dever chuckled. “Always remember, Joe, that you were put on this earth to accomplish certain things, and maybe if this guy gets by you, and the police are coming, he would've shot somebody else, maybe someone's mother. Maybe that's why you were put there on that particular day— to stop him from doing something like that. And because sometimes God's will is hard, you had to pay a price for that.”
Joe McCain sat breathing in the scent of candle wax and incense, and then he reached across and gripped the priest's hand. “I can live with that, Father,” he said.
Joe was getting tired. In a gesture that was more than symbolic, he instructed Mark Donahue to work the names on the Kartell case by himself, with an eye toward contradicting Brian McGovern's version of the story. The young nurse's aide's tale may have been adopted as gospel by the newspapers, but to McCain it still didn't add up. He knew from his own experience that everyone wants to be a hero, although few have the mettle for it. That role is not chosen but thrust upon you.
As a kid, Mark Donahue had spent the lion's share of his free time at the McCains', and Joe had been grooming him for such a job since he'd started as a detective. But working a murder case was a lot different from tailing some deadbeat who was cheating on workmen's comp.
After numerous interviews that went nowhere, Donahue was getting to the end of his list when, late one afternoon in December, he drove to Haverhill, Mass. and knocked on the door to Thomas Montecalvo's apartment. Montecalvo was one of several unarmed security guards working at Holy Family Hospital the day Vajda was killed. No longer employed at the hospital, Montecalvo had kept a low profile, eschewing media interviews and responding to anyone who asked him about Dr. Kartell that Holy Family management wanted all inquiries routed back to them. Thomas Montecalvo was just a name on a piece of paper.
He came to the door that afternoon in a Massachusetts Police Academy sweatshirt, his hair buzzed short. Cutting Donahue off in midsentence, Montecalvo said that he didn't want to talk. He hadn't really seen anything that day and was busy doing other things.
“You a cop?” asked Donahue.
Montecalvo said, with a measure of pride, that he had graduated from the academy a couple of months earlier and was on the job in Lawrence. Donahue noted that he was a cop, too, and just wanted to ask a few basic questions.
“Okay, I'll give you a minute,” said Montecalvo, opening the storm door.
The two men went into Montecalvo's kitchen. Producing a little notebook, Donahue asked the former security guard where he was assigned and what he'd been doing when Dr. Kartell shot Vajda. He almost dropped his pencil when Montecalvo replied that he'd been the first security officer to respond and the only other person on the scene except for Suzan Kamm. As he approached the room, Dr. Kartell was coming out. He handed Montecalvo his weapon and allowed himself to be escorted to a small room off the nurses' station, where they both waited for police.
“Actually, I fucked up,” said Montecalvo. “I had a radio. I should've just called for help and sat back and let the guy come out. I had no idea what his state of mind was.”
Donahue asked if anyone else was there in the room or hallway with him; specifically, had Brian McGovern already disarmed Kartell and had conversations with anybody?
“No,” said Montecalvo. “I was the only one there.”
Thomas Montecalvo's account established two things: Brian McGovern was not telling the truth, and Dr. Kartell was no longer aggressive or pursuing the fight when help arrived. In fact, Montecalvo described Kartell as a “wet rat”; he was completely beaten up.
“And this kid had credibility, because he was a cop,” said Donahue.
Donahue took notes and hustled out to his car. He made the thirty-minute drive back to the office in a state of rising excitement and told McCain the entire story. “Joe got right on the phone with Carney's office,” said Donahue. “They were ecstatic.”
With Montecalvo testifying in his police uniform, Jay Carney was able to debunk McGovern's account of Kartell's belligerence. Although facing charges of first-degree murder, Kartell was convicted of voluntary manslaughter and received only a five- to eight-year prison term, which he is currently serving at the Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center in Shirley, Mass.
“What I learned is, even if you think a witness has nothing to say, you have to be persistent,” said Donahue. “A lot of people said they were told by the hospital not to talk to anyone, to go through their legal office. Joe used to say, ‘This is America. You can talk to anyone you want, about anything you want.'”
THIRTY
The Erin Society
Life is made up of ever so many partings.
— CHARLES DICKENS
THE PLOT IS LOCATED ON A PROMINENT CORNER in Holy Cross Cemetery in Malden, surrounded by a low concrete berm approximately ten feet square and marked by a granite stone engraved with Celtic crosses and an intaglio of the Virgin Mary holding her grown, dead son. Late in April, the sky is heavy and gray, tinged with the last cold front of a pretty bad winter. At Joe McCain's grave, the toughest guy in Somerville shifts from one side of the berm to the other, knotting and unknotting his thick, rough hands and finally looking away, his gaze skimming over the monuments and minarets that occupy the lot to the horizon.
“It's hard to come here,” says Brian O'Donovan, exhaling a long, slow breath.
Like Mark Donahue and countless other two-fisted kids who haunted Foss Park and the MDC rink, O'Donovan, now thirty-nine and a lieutenant on the Somerville Fire Department, came under Joe McCain's influence at a young age. He grew up on Rogers Avenue off Ball Square, in a large, rambling house overseen by his father, James, a lawyer, and his mother, Pauline, who owned an answering service and “took shit from no one.” The middle son among five boys, Brian learned to get his shots in at a tender age as he and his brothers Jim, Kevin, Mike, and Sean followed a pretty set schedule from the time he began to walk until he graduated from Somerville High.
“There was a battle royal every day after school, and then it would be street hockey time,” says O'Donovan, laughing at the recollection.
The fights in the O'Donovan household were not the ordinary tussles associated with having five healthy boys under one roof: they were prolonged and sometimes bloody free-for-alls, like the old turf battles of the Irish chieftains. “We did some serious damage to that house,” says Brian.
Standing by Joe's grave, Brian O'Donovan is wearing a long-sleeved Black Dog T-shirt, blue track pants, and sneakers. He has the heavy, muscled hands and shoulders of a stonemason and an Irish pug's face: wide, flat nose, stubby ears and close-cropped black hair under a sun-faded baseball cap. When he smiles, little crescents of scar tissue rise on his cheekbones and above his eyes, the remembrances of a habit that began at home and was raised to the level of a talent in the back alleys and ball fields around Rogers Avenue.
With his father at work, sometimes Brian and his siblings became so furious with one another that his mother would catch a punch on the jaw while trying to break them up. “A couple of times she went down,” he says. And there was a period afte
r high school when Brian drifted away from his warring brothers and began to find trouble on his own. “We thought as teenagers we'd never be close when we got older, because we fought so hard,” he says.
Then Joe McCain came into the picture. O'Donovan had known the big man since he was twelve, when he and Joey and Mark Donahue played peewee hockey together. In those early days, Mr. McCain was just another dad at the rink, albeit a friendly one, with hands the size of baseball gloves and an easy way with his son's young friends.
“He'd tell you stories like you were one of the guys,” says O'Donovan.
Joe McCain the cop and Jim O'Donovan the lawyer became good buddies in those chilly old rinks, and over time it just seemed natural when big Joe became another member of the family. Brian and Joe McCain, Sr., became friends and shared a passion for ice hockey and then golf. When Brian was eighteen, Joe gave him a little MDC police sticker that said “Erin Society” and instructed him to affix it to his car. And if he ever got into any trouble, he was to say that Joe McCain was his uncle.
Late one night, a few pints under his belt, Brian was weaving down Revere Beach Parkway more occupied with the bagful of roast beef sandwiches from Kelly's than he was with his driving, and a huge, bald-headed Met cop threw on his lights and siren and pulled O'Donovan over.
“Who do you know?” the cop asked, gesturing toward the Erin Society sticker.
O'Donovan replied that he was Joe McCain's nephew and was amazed at the cop's reaction. “Go home,” the cop said. “And please tell your uncle that I was asking for him.”
Brian O'Donovan was twenty-four years old when Joe got shot in 1988, and after the big fellow recovered from his injuries, the two friends often played golf together at the Charles River Country Club in Newton Centre. After years of duffing, big Joe was able to put a pretty solid game together, especially for a guy who had topped out at over three hundred pounds and spent more of his youth swinging a hammer than a nine-iron. O'Donovan, by contrast, was a six handicap and had once considered joining the pro tour. To throw the younger man off his game, Joe would stand by the tee and open up his shirt. “Gee, look at this,” he would say, indicating the surgical staples that crisscrossed his massive torso. “I'm bleeding all over the place.”
“Go to hell, Joe,” O'Donovan would respond, and the two would laugh.
One day in the fall of 2001, Brian O'D's cell phone rang when he was driving his two boys to tae kwon do. It was Helen McCain, and she was worried about Joe; his diabetes was kicking up and he refused to go to the hospital.
Brian asked Helen to put her husband on the phone. “How you doin', Joe?” he asked.
McCain's voice was weak and hollow. “Not good, Brian,” he said. “Not good.”
Alarmed by this, O'Donovan left his two boys at karate, called his wife, Denise, to pick them up and sped over to the McCains'. When he jumped the stairs and burst into the foyer, there was Joe, sitting on the window bench, hands grasping his knees, as yellow as lemon peel with jaundice and struggling for breath.
Joe refused to go in an ambulance, so Brian slung his arm across the big man's shoulders and helped him down the stairs into the front seat of his car while the neighbors looked on. They drove straight to Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, where Joe was admitted, and over the next few days O'Donovan spent every free minute by Joe's bedside. One evening he brought his five-year-old, Seamus Patrick, who drew a picture of Joe and sat in his lap watching the Eagles beat the Giants on Monday Night Football.
Joe was quiet and thoughtful that evening, but the force of his personality had returned, and when O'Donovan and his young son left the Mount Auburn at halftime, they joked and said good-bye like it was any one of a thousand other nights they had taken leave of each other.
Joe has been dead for a year and a half now. Hands at his sides, Brian O'D stands gazing at the headstone amidst the crowded expanse of Holy Cross Cemetery.
McCain
“Our love is forever”
Joseph E. 1929–2001 Helen L. 1936–
Little strips of muscle appear along O'Donovan's cheekbone as he works to keep his jaw together. “He was so concerned about his grandkids— what they were going to do without him,” he says.
He starts to say something else but clips his teeth together, for a moment gazing at the clouds overhead. At five-thirty in the morning after Brian and Seamus Patrick's visit to the Mount Auburn, Joe Jr. called the O'Donovans, waking them from a sound sleep.
“He said his father was gone,” says O'Donovan. And then the toughest guy in Somerville begins to weep.
* * *
ON THE MORNING OF JOE MCCAIN'S FUNERAL, retired Met superintendent Al Seghezzi and his wife, Mary, left their modest home on Sealund Road in Quincy and drove to the foot of the Neponset Bridge to pick up Joe's old partner Leo Papile. Al, Leo, and Joe McCain went all the way back to the Old Colony district in the late fifties, when the three patrolmen worked out of the same building. Even then, McCain was impressive, a big, rangy fellow, very outgoing, already making a name for himself among the wiseguys on Revere Beach. Leo Papile was a colorful figure in his own right, with his slicked back hair, profane wit, and the kind of swagger that moved him out of patrol into the detective bureau in short order. Al was the quiet, steady one, staying up late to cram for the sergeant's exam, polishing his brass, looking after McCain and Papile like they were his wild younger brothers.
So it was that Al Seghezzi was dispatched to Leo's house before the funeral. Hearty, fit, and white-haired at seventy-seven, with his rough cement worker's hands and straight white teeth, Seghezzi looked like a grandfather in a magazine advertisement, the square, handsome face, pink-cheeked and freshly shaven, trousers pressed, shoes shined. But he had a wife to look after him and had always kept the cop job in perspective; Leo Papile was a widower, lived alone, and according to Joe McCain, Jr., had been struggling with the news of big Joe's death.
Al honked the horn in the driveway, and Leo came out dressed in a neat blue suit and climbed into the rear seat. Sitting beside Al, Mary Seghezzi wore a simple black dress and had her hair swept up in a new perm. There were a few pleasantries, but within minutes, the two old Mets were bickering like a couple of fishwives as Al drove up the Expressway toward Doherty Funeral Home in Somerville.
“Al, you're in the wrong lane,” said Leo, hanging over the front seat.
“What do you mean, Leo?” asked Al. It was a cold Tuesday morning in October, with clouds scudding overhead, and commuter traffic was light heading toward the tunnel; they were making good time in the far-left lane.
“Al, you've got to get in the right lane,” Leo said.
Al glanced over at his wife and then turned his head and looked Leo in the eye for a moment. “I like to ride in the left lane,” he said.
“Great, but if something happens up there you'll never be able to get off.”
“Leo, who's driving this thing?” Al asked.
Joe's old partner thrust himself back against the seat. “I always drive in the right lane,” said Leo.
After their little debate, the Seghezzis and Leo rode north in silence. As they turned off, skirted Medford, and drove into Powder House Square, they were not prepared for the scene they encountered.
Doherty Funeral Home has been a fixture in Somerville since 1906, and the large white Colonial with the green awnings and immaculate lawn has buried such local notables as the mayors Dr. G. Edward Bradley and William Brennan, a firefighter killed in the Hotel Vendome fire in 1972, and a young Marine killed in Beirut in the 1982 bombing. On the day of Joe McCain's funeral, cars lined every street radiating from the traffic circle, and the sidewalks were roiling with cops, dignitaries from the state house, a host of Joe's old cronies and retired Mets, wiseguys from Winter Hill, and dozens of women, young and old, wearing black and sobbing into their handkerchiefs. By Doherty's front door, state trooper Mark Lemieux, a wiry, intense man who had worked undercover for Joe, paced up and down in his dress blue uniform and shiny b
oots, getting up the nerve to go inside.
“No tears in here,” Leo said to Al. “Joe wouldn't go for any of that.”
Clutching each other, Al and Mary Seghezzi mounted the front steps and followed Leo Papile into the funeral home. A dense crowd filled the hallway amidst the stench of too many flowers, and red-eyed men in ill-fitting sport jackets, staring down at their feet or gazing at the thin silver brocade of the wallpaper, occupied several rows of chairs.
Halfway along the main room, two large easels contained photographs of Joe's grandchildren, Joseph, Liam, and Lucas, posing on their beloved dirt bikes or grinning from beneath Somerville Little League caps. At the entrance to the odd-shaped chapel where Joe lay in state, wearing his double-breasted Met uniform and flanked by two state troopers, additional photographs of Joe McCain, Sr., at work occupied two more pinboards: Joe accepting yet another award from the police commissioner; Joe and Leo smiling at newspaper photographers as they led a manacled prisoner up the courthouse steps; Joe back in '45, tall and lean and straight in his Navy whites.
For three days Leo Papile had been telling anyone who would listen that there would be “no bullshit” at Joe's funeral; from his days growing up as “Little Hash” on Marshall Street in Winter Hill to the last, agonizing stay at Mount Auburn Hospital, big Joe had prized his own inner strength and stoicism as much as anything else. He wouldn't have wanted any crying or gnashing of teeth, Leo insisted, demanding of those closest to him what he demanded of himself. Certainly Helen was hanging tough, standing beside the coffin in a tailored black pantsuit, her blonde hair just so, greeting visitors with a dry eye and a steady hand.
Joe McCain's round, visored Met cap was on a little table beside the coffin, and as Leo approached the bier, he picked up the cap and put it on his own head. Kneeling beside the coffin with Al and Mary Seghezzi right behind him, Leo began mumbling to Joe like his old partner was listening to him. Then he reached over and smoothed Joe's lapel, patting his chest and weeping.