Johnnie was immediately welcomed back into Southie, especially by Frankie’s old gang. He knew a lot of them from his own days at McDonough’s Gym. He started working as a bouncer at some of the gin mills and drug dens on Broadway, owned and run by gangsters and boxers. Johnnie and I hardly crossed paths in Southie. I wanted nothing to do with the town, and he was getting more into it. One night, though, I was starving and came to Southie to borrow ten dollars from Johnnie. I went to find him where he was working at Connolly’s Cafe, Eddie McGlaughlin’s hole-in-the-wall bar on Broadway. It was all boarded-up looking, except for the window with a blinking Budweiser sign between some dirty country-kitchen curtains. Word around town was that Eddie had defrauded Tim Connolly out of ownership of the bar, now known to be a front for guns and drugs. I walked into the smoky narrow room looking for Johnnie. I passed a woman wheeling a baby carriage through the tavern and bumming spare change, and then by two older men “offering each other out,” the way we used to do as little kids in the tunnels of Old Colony. The guy working the front door was leading me through the crowd; he knew me to be a MacDonald. He pulled up a barstool for me, and once again I was surrounded by muscled tough guys recounting Frankie’s championship fights. Johnnie was sent for, and when he showed up, the muscle men brought him into the boxing tales too, with a few funny stories thrown in about Kevin being a hell of a con artist. Johnnie’s face lit up as he listened to stories about his brothers. That’s what he’s doing here, back in Southie, I thought, and I couldn’t blame him after hearing my brothers kept alive like that.
Johnnie had someone give me a twenty from the register behind the bar, and I walked back down Broadway to the train station, passing through the once colorful boulevard that my family had loved, now gone dark and busy with suspicious characters darting in and out of bars, stuffing things into pockets, and looking over their shoulders.
Ma swore she’d never look back. The kids told me they hated Colorado though. They missed their friends. They missed saying they were from Southie, and having it mean something. In their Colorado trailer park they wore the shamrocks, Notre Dame gear, and Southie T-shirts. But it meant nothing. They were in an all-American world out west, where kids their age took buses for miles to hang out on fake street corners at the indoor shopping malls. There was no front stoop excitement. There wasn’t even a front stoop. And Seamus and Stevie commented on how poor everyone in their trailer park looked—as if they’d never met poor people. But when I visited them out there, I saw what they were talking about. These weren’t just poor people; they were poor people living on the edge of a godforsaken highway. There was no pretending you were anywhere else, no pretending you weren’t poor, and no pride about being from the Federal Heights Trailer Park.
I could tell Ma didn’t like Colorado much either, although she talked it up and begged all her old friends from Southie to come out west and move into Federal Heights. “We’ll call it the New Colony,” she said. She must have promised airfare to about ten different friends, who’d stop me on the street to show me her letters. When I was out there, I could see Ma was trying to find ways to make conversation with the Colorado people. She was thrilled to see this one redheaded guy walking by her tiny kitchen window. “Ohhhh, for Chrissake, are you Irish?” she said to him, opening her window. “Mother of God, he looked at me like I had two heads and he just kept on moving,” Ma said in defeat. But she continued to look for any signs of home, pointing out to me the boarded-up highway bar named McIntyre’s, and a town alderman named O’Reilly. But the few Irish names were nothing more than names, passed down through generations. In the end, Ma could only point to the green foothills of the Rockies, and say they were more beautiful than Ireland itself. That’s when she talked Joe into hauling the trailer to a town called Golden, surrounded by the green foothills.
But Golden still wasn’t home. “It’s just the people!” Ma decided. “There’s no hell-raising to them at all.” Ma talked about missing “the craic,” as the Irish called a good time. “With the long pusses on them, you’d think they just came from a funeral.” Ma said Golden was full of Germans. “That explains it!” she said. Joe bought a house dirt cheap in Golden. It looked like a shack compared to the Swiss-style chalets that surrounded it, with floors that Ma complained made her feel she was walking up and down hills. There was a huge yard, though, for Maria to play in, and a picnic table for Kathy to sit at smoking cigarettes and going at her new hobby of scrawling endless words onto piles of lined paper. Ma didn’t want to give up the trailer, so she had Joe plop it into their backyard. The town was up in arms about that one, saying the trailer was an eyesore. They passed an ordinance and made Ma and Joe build a high fence to conceal the trailer.
Ma stopped calling me once her phone was blocked for long distance calls. When I called her, she said Stevie had rung up a big bill calling his friend Tommy Viens in Southie. The two little kids were begging Ma to send them back to Southie that summer to see their friends. Ma swore she’d never look back, but with a place like Southie, it was hard not to. Johnnie was living in the apartment, and she knew I came by each day for a change of clothes, so Ma gave in and sent the kids for a two-week visit. There’s no place like Southie. And at the ages of thirteen and fourteen, Stevie and Seamus knew that better than anyone.
It only took a few days of the little kids’ visit back home before our world fell in on us again. Mary was working in the operating room at the City Hospital when she was told Tommy Viens was downstairs with a gunshot wound to the head. “I was a nervous wreck,” she told me on the phone. “I thought I’d have to dismiss myself from the case.” Mary told me all she knew: that Tommy had gotten hold of one of Johnnie’s guns. That Stevie had found his best friend, face up under a big swivel bamboo chair. Tommy’s eyes were open and blood was streaming from the back of his head. “Stevie’s still shaking,” she said. “Eighteen cops held him for two and a half hours in the apartment right next to where it happened.” The detectives hadn’t allowed Johnnie into the house for the interrogation. In the end, they let Stevie leave the apartment to the crowds that had gathered, and to Johnnie. “Oh, one more thing kid,” Detective O’Leary said to Stevie, throwing his head up in a quick laugh, “your buddy’s Ocean Kai.” Ocean Kai was the local Chinese food restaurant, and Stevie didn’t know what he meant. “Your friend’s dead,” O’Leary clarified.
We spent the night and the next day at Mary’s. Steven was wearing the same clothes from the day before, and couldn’t stop crying. He looked worn out and numb, and kept asking: “When can I go see Mr. and Mrs. Viens?” Seamus was watching cartoons with Mary’s two sons when Steven wandered into the kitchen and saw the headline “Cops Say Teen May Have Pulled Trigger on Himself” and the picture of Tommy being brought out on a stretcher, with neighbors covering their mouths in shock. Steven was staring in a daze at Tommy’s picture. I grabbed the newspaper and got rid of it. Within the hour Detective O’Leary showed up to take Steven to the homicide unit for more questions.
Johnnie went in the cruiser with Steven. When I arrived at homicide with Mary and Seamus, TV cameras filmed us going in. The homicide detectives were now praising themselves for arresting the alleged “child slayer.” Mary’s downstairs neighbor, Detective O’Leary’s girlfriend and secretary, led us into the detective’s office, and there we found Stevie crying in a chair and shaking his head in disbelief at the news O’Leary was telling him, about him being a murderer.
“You want a Pepsi or something kid? Your mouth is gonna get dry.” O’Leary looked like he was tired of his job. When the detective left the room, Stevie asked me why his mouth would get dry. I didn’t know the answer. He wondered if they’d soon be shining a big bright spotlight on him and interrogating him, like he’d seen in old movies. I felt relieved to be reminded of the innocent child Steven still was through everything he’d seen in life. “How come? … How could they think? …” Steven started crying too hard now to finish his sentences. He looked at us, trembling all over. O’L
eary came back in and let out a big sigh, “Your mouth getting dry yet, kid?” He explained that people’s mouths get dry when they’re charged with murder. “He was my best friend,” Steven said to O’Leary, hyperventilating between each word. “Ask his mother, she’ll tell you!”
“Hey, I would advise you to stay mum until a lawyer shows up,” O’Leary said, pointing his finger at my thirteen-year-old baby brother about to be formally charged with murder. I wanted so badly to tell O’Leary to fuck himself. Better yet I wanted to grab the broken pipe hanging from the ceiling and beat him to death for what he was doing to my scrawny helpless brother. I wanted to make the pig bleed through every one of his despicable orifices. I’d never felt that way before, but if I could’ve gotten hold of the gun in O’Leary’s holster I would’ve shot him dead, and gladly gone to prison for it. I helped raise Seamus and Stevie; I changed their diapers and saw their first steps. The hate building up inside me was enough to chase every demon out of hell. But O’Leary had the power of the entire Boston Police Department and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts behind him, and Stevie was just a kid from the projects.
Detective O’Leary was famous in Boston that year. Not for passing out upside-down in stairwells outside his girlfriend’s subsidized project apartment—that we knew about after many nights of having to step over his big belly, although it never made it into the papers. But O’Leary, along with Lieutenant Detective Eddie McNeely, was at the center of one of the most racially explosive murder investigations in the history of Boston. Charles Stuart, a suburban white man driving his wife from birthing classes at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, called police from his car phone to report that he and his wife had just been shot in the mostly black section of Mission Hill. His pregnant wife had been killed, and he was bleeding from a minor gunshot wound. Stuart said he’d been carjacked by a black man who ran into the Mission Hill Housing Project. In following days, Mayor Flynn and Police Commissioner Mickey Roach dispatched police into the project. That Mrs. Stuart was pregnant might have had something to do with the mayor’s promising to leave no stone unturned until the killer was brought to justice. But black ministers, who hadn’t seen this kind of attention paid to the neighborhood’s black murder victims, were wondering if race also played a part.
Then O’Leary and McNeely found their black scapegoat. They targeted a petty criminal and junkie named Willie Bennett, holding him up to the press as public enemy number one. In the end, though, there was no black carjacker. Charles Stuart jumped to his death from the Tobin Bridge, once the truth started to come out: He’d murdered his own wife, and shot himself to make the hoax more convincing. O’Leary and McNeely’s heroic investigation fell apart. Now the newspapers said the witnesses’ testimonies against Bennett had been falsified, coerced, and that drugs had been planted on some witnesses to put them at the cops’ mercy, so they would sign whatever testimony they had to sign, saying that Bennett had bragged about the murder.
As I sat in O’Leary’s dirty office, with piles of disorganized paperwork and posted headlines about this being Boston’s worst year ever for homicides that brought few arrests, it all became clear. Steven was just another easy target. His arrest would bring weeks of splashy Boston Herald headlines and a feather in the cap of the harassed detective. And Stevie was white, so no one could claim racism with this case.
When Johnnie showed up with a Southie lawyer, Steven was formally charged with murder in the first degree. It was Thursday night and Stevie couldn’t be arraigned until morning. He’d have to spend the night locked up. They handcuffed him and took him to Station 6 to await transport to an overnight juvenile lock-up. We walked behind Stevie, and when we all came out of the dilapidated homicide building, the camera crews had the bright lights back on and were about to film Stevie being led to the paddy wagon in cuffs. The police didn’t say anything; they just posed with Stevie. “He’s fucking thirteen years old!” I yelled. I knew it was illegal to identify juvenile defendants. Stevie had become the city’s youngest homicide suspect, fitting into the media’s current trend of portraying a generation of child “superpredators.” “Steve, don’t worry,” Seamus yelled to him as he was escorted into the wagon.
When we got to Station 6, Stevie was excited to see us, as if it had been a month instead of a half hour. His voice was a little calmer now, but his hands were still trembling when he wiped his eyes and said something about having bad luck. “Does Ma know yet?” he asked. “She’s gonna go crazy.” Then he started crying again. He said he hoped the detectives would talk to Mrs. Viens soon, “They’ll straighten it out.” I didn’t have the heart to tell Stevie we’d already seen the Vienses on TV saying they thought he’d killed Tommy, that there was no way their son committed suicide.
Stevie was sitting on top of a table in a small box of a room, wearing his baggy basketball shorts and swinging his skinny legs nervously. We all tried to change the subject a few times, talking about basketball or what lotion Steven might try to get rid of the pimples he was starting to get. But every subject brought Steven right back to stories about Tommy, funny ones about Tommy’s pranks in the neighborhood. Like the morning he’d knocked on the door, asked me in the most innocent voice if Stevie was home, and then whipped three eggs at my head while running down the stairs. Tommy always reminded me of Kevin. You had to love him.
Then Seamus interrupted, asking with worried lines in his forehead, “Steve, what happened before you found Tommy shot?” Everything turned serious again, and that’s when I asked the question I’d been needing to ask: “How did Tommy know about Johnnie’s guns?” Steven and Seamus told me they’d seen Johnnie’s Navy Seal duffel bags with the guns in them, and had bragged about them, and that after that kids would go up to the apartment when Johnnie wasn’t home, on what they called “gun hunts.” Tommy had found the guns, but as far as Seamus and Stevie knew, there was no ammo. Seamus and Stevie still couldn’t figure out where the bullet that killed Tommy had come from.
The two began to go over that day for us. Seamus said Tommy had come to the apartment while Steven was still sleeping. Seamus took a shower, and when he came out Tommy was on the telephone. He slammed the phone down saying, “Hey, some cop on the phone said he’s gonna come up here and arrest me.” Seamus said he didn’t believe Tommy. “Let him come, I’ll grab one of Johnnie’s guns and shoot him,” Tommy said, getting more worked up. When the telephone rang again, Seamus picked it up and was told, “If you kids don’t stop pranking those adult sex lines, I’ll come up there and make you stop.” The voice said he was a police officer, and knew they were at John MacDonald’s apartment at 8 Patterson Way. Seamus said he apologized, telling the guy that he didn’t know Tommy was calling the party lines.
Tommy continued to dance around, talking about how he’d grab one of Johnnie’s guns, hide in the second apartment, and shoot the cop when he came through the door. Eventually Seamus left to go to the noon movie, telling Tommy not to touch Johnnie’s guns, “or we’ll all get our asses kicked.”
By then Stevie had come out to watch TV with Tommy. “ ‘The Price Is Right’ was on,” Steven told us, excited that he could add something to the story. Stevie said that Tommy told him the whole thing about the cop, and then started calling the party lines over and over, each time getting disconnected. Stevie said he didn’t pay much attention, except to laugh when Tommy started swearing at the moderator before she could disconnect him again. Tommy hung up the phone. “You think that cop would come up here?” he asked Steven. But Stevie told us that he was too tired to get into all the excitement about cops and Johnnie’s guns.
Steven said Tommy seemed to get bored with “The Price Is Right” and kept carrying on about the cop on the phone. He asked if he could go to the kitchen for a cup of water. Stevie shrugged his shoulders, wondering why Tommy would ask permission in our house. “He walked toward the kitchen, looked at me out of the corner of his eye, then made a sharp turn, jumped on the washing machine, and reached up to the shelf.” Stevie sai
d Tommy pulled out the .357 Magnum.
“Put it back!” Stevie screamed as Tommy ran into the second apartment of our breakthrough. But Stevie said everything was quiet; Tommy was hiding. “Johnnie’s gonna come home and be pissed!” Stevie yelled into the rooms cluttered with broken-down furniture. But there was no response, not even a movement to give away Tommy’s hiding place. Then Stevie told us he gave up, thinking Tommy would come out of hiding if he just ignored him.
“The Price Is Right” ended and the midday news came on. “Let’s go out,” Stevie said he yelled, shutting off the television. Nothing. Just silence. Then the blast.
“How the fuck did he find the ammo?” Johnnie asked, pounding the wall. Johnnie told us that he’d hidden the ammo separately, in a pouch, under a pile of old shoes in Ma’s closet in the other apartment.
Steven said he walked through the narrow passage into the second apartment, and saw only the .357 on the floor. There was no sign of Tommy. He said he grabbed the gun, and that’s when he heard the noise underneath the chair tipped over in a corner.
“What noise?” I asked. Steven couldn’t talk anymore. He started crying again. “What noise?” I asked again. “He was trying to talk.…” Steven could barely get the words out himself. He was hyperventilating again, taking deep breaths and wailing from a hell that I couldn’t begin to imagine. He finally told us that he turned the chair over and found Tommy, and all he remembered, he said, was the sound of gurgling, and a moan, like Tommy was trying to say something. The bullet hole was in his head, and a puddle of blood was growing around the two of them. “He was my favorite person, we were like brothers.” Then Stevie laughed through his tears as he said, “We were trying to figure out how I could miss the plane back to Colorado. He didn’t want me to go back.”
All Souls Page 25
