All Souls

by Michael Patrick MacDonald

  I asked straight out if Tommy had ever talked about killing himself. Steven snapped at me, “You didn’t know Tommy like I knew him. No one did. He’d never kill himself.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “I don’t know.”

  On the morning of the arraignment, nothing felt real. I’d stayed up all night at Mary’s apartment drinking a bottle of whiskey to get back that numb feeling I’d had after Kevin died, and flicking the cable TV channels every time another gun appeared on the screen. But there were guns on every channel, so I turned the TV off and paced the floors drinking, while Seamus, Mary, Jimmy, and their two kids slept. Seamus kept getting up, pretending to go to the bathroom, checking up on me, and asking questions about Stevie. I hid the bottle and sent him back to bed, telling him to stop being such a worrywart. I was worried too though, even though the cops said Stevie would be kept on a suicide watch, “given the circumstances.”

  It seemed like the sun would never come up as I paced, watching through the window for the faintest hint of dawn. I got dressed for the arraignment. When we all finally went to the Southie courthouse, we were dying to see Stevie again. He was kept in a holding cell downstairs that morning, a dingy cold room with a toilet overflowing with what looked like generations of shit from nervous defendants.

  After getting five minutes with Steven, I ran out to the corner store to get a pack of cigarettes and started smoking away as soon as I got them. News reporter types, with a pad and a pen, started hovering around me, staring and wondering who I was in relation to Tommy’s death. As I lit up my smoke, the radio on the counter started broadcasting about Boston’s youngest murder suspect, my own little brother, “in a case that has shocked city officials.” I ran out of the store. It was hot out and a taxi driving by the courthouse was blasting the rest of the story, about how the defendant came from “a troubled family.” I felt as if I was outside my own body—nothing seemed real. On my way into the courthouse, a group of older men sat around reading the Herald and talking about the tragedy, and saying how it would make Southie look bad.

  Eventually, Stevie was brought up to the courtroom and stood in the defendant’s box. The judge arraigned him for murder in the first degree. He pleaded not guilty, and was put on $250,000 bail. That was that.

  “Where the fuck are we gonna get $250,000 bail?” I asked out loud. Johnnie shhhed me, explaining that it was $250,000 surety, meaning if you owned a house or anything worth that much, you could put that up. But that it meant $25,000 if we used cash. “Oh,” I said. I was relieved for a second. Then I said even louder, “Where the fuck are we gonna get $25,000?”

  When we went to the cell after the arraignment, Steven was crying again. “He thinks I did it!” he said, talking about Mr. Viens; he’d seen Tommy’s father sitting far away from us in the courtroom. I couldn’t answer him. Steven had a bruise on his neck, and explained that he had gotten a beating the night before in the transport van. He said it as if it was nothing, just another part of his bad luck. He said that some older black teenagers had beat him once they found out he was from Southie. “What did the cops do?” Mary asked. Stevie shrugged his shoulders. “They laughed.” Stevie himself attempted a laugh now too, but his face was vacant, as if he didn’t know how to feel about anything anymore.

  The next day’s Boston Herald said that Stevie was “stoic” in the courtroom, that he’d shown no emotions, or as they put it, “no remorse.”

  Eddie McGlaughlin had arrived at the courthouse wanting to help out. We all followed him into the office of his new attorney, Al Fallon. Fallon was a fast talker, and my head was already spinning. He told us there was nothing to worry about, that the police had already done so many illegal things in this case that all they’d want now would be to cover their asses before letting Stevie go. “The two-and-a-half-hour interrogation without a lawyer or legal guardian present was illegal,” he said, throwing on his coat and rushing us out of his office just when I was getting comfortable enough to ask a question. “But … ,” I said. He halted all questions, saying we just had to wait for the results of the gunpowder tests done on Steven’s hands the day Tommy died.

  Mary, Joe, Johnnie, and I scraped up the $25,000 to bail Steven out, emptying our life savings. We were all relieved to see Stevie walk out of the Department of Youth Services, into whatever freedom he might hold on to, while we hoped for this big mistake to be cleared up.

  I made Mary come back into the apartment with me, one last time, to gather up my belongings. The neighbors cleared a path and stared silently as we walked up the front steps. Being in that apartment again was like being in a house on fire. I gathered up what I could, as if I was in the middle of an emergency—and I was. I could feel it all moving in on me. I ran out of my bedroom with two full trash bags to rush Mary out the door. I felt out of breath. “What are you doing?” I asked her, watching her bend over to clean something. “There’s brain on the floor,” she said calmly, as if she was at work in the OR. That’s when my knees went. I fell onto the couch and for some time couldn’t move a limb. I could barely get up the strength now to make it out that door. But I did, and it was the last time I ever saw our old home. I swore I’d never come back to Southie again.

  I spent the rest of the summer with Seamus and Stevie, hiding out in a cottage on Cape Cod we’d rented from one of Johnnie’s new Southie friends. We came back to Boston once in a while for pretrial hearings and visits to Fallon’s office; or else to visit Mary, who’d also abandoned Southie once and for all, moving to Quincy. Other than those journeys, we sat in the cottage and talked about the fatal day over and over again, trying to figure out what had happened to Tommy, what was going on in his head when he hid out, and how the gun might have accidentally gone off. Steven wasn’t allowed to leave the state, so Ma came to Cape Cod for a few weeks. She talked and talked about her own theories. I felt I was suffocating in the stories. Steven was free, but he wasn’t really. None of us were. We were drowning in it. Steven couldn’t wait for the gunpowder tests to come back from the FBI in Washington, proving that he hadn’t shot the gun.

  Finally, in September, the test results came back in Steven’s favor. The FBI report was complicated, explaining the properties of “barium” and “antimony,” the two chemicals that would show up on Steven’s hands in large quantities from the blast of a .357 Magnum. The report said that the blast would’ve covered his hands in the chemicals, and that, given his age and lack of criminal experience, it was unlikely Steven had fired the gun. Fallon explained that the chemicals were difficult to get off one’s hands. He said that even “some of the best criminals” he’d defended didn’t get the stuff off.

  But the Herald report only said the tests were “inconclusive.” In the article, the police and the DA’s office said that barium and antimony tests were unreliable, and that the department couldn’t depend on them. This, even though they’d made such a big deal of the test on the day Tommy died. Even worse, the DA’s office said that they had new evidence that would prove “the juvenile’s” guilt.

  After reading the article, we went into Fallon’s office, to find out what this new police evidence was. He closed the door, looked at Stevie, and said, “You know you can tell me anything. No matter what, I have to challenge the state’s evidence.” He added, “Even if you shot Tommy!” Fallon pulled out an official typewritten police transcript of Steven’s call to 911 on the day Tommy died. I scanned the piece of paper and found two lines where it had Steven saying he’d shot Tommy in the head.

  In spite of Stevie’s reaction—he was crying, saying, “I feel like I’m going crazy, like I’m just losing my mind”—for the first time I thought maybe he had shot Tommy, accidentally. Maybe he blocked it out, I thought. On the long journey back to our hideaway on the Cape, I asked him once again to go over everything that happened the day Tommy died. Stevie just looked at me as if to say, “Not you too!” He said he didn’t want to go over it again, that whatever might happen to him, as long as he knew�
�and Tommy knew—the truth, that was all that mattered.

  I should’ve known better than to trust anything handed down officially, having grown up in Southie. It took two weeks to get the original cassette of Stevie’s call to 911 we’d demanded. I went to Fallon’s alone, anxious for the truth. It was nightmarish to hear Steven pleading with the dispatcher, seconds after finding Tommy. It brought me back to my own calls for help after Davey had jumped. Stevie was begging them to hurry up. He gave his address a few times to the dispatcher, who asked him to calm down and to speak slower. I listened and listened, waiting for the line, “I shot my friend in the head.” But it never came. Nor was there anything that could’ve been mistaken for those words typed on the transcript that homicide had given us.

  Fallon called the DA and asked him if he’d listened to the tape. He said he didn’t need to, that he had the transcript. “What, are the cops lying?” he laughed. But he agreed to listen to his copy while Fallon waited on the line. I heard the Assistant DA’s voice come through the phone. “Holy shit,” he said.

  I fled Fallon’s office. I wanted to get back to Steven to tell him what I’d heard, and to apologize for questioning him, even for one moment. I sped on the highway back to the Cape. It started to rain. The rain beat down on the car, and my heart felt as if it would explode with hate. I wanted to murder again. I was sure of it. I thought of ten people I would kill. But the amount of suffering I would inflict on them could never match the pain I was feeling for a helpless child railroaded by a cast of demons. Agents of the state, district attorneys, cops and detectives, the police commissioner who ran a department so corrupt it would send children and neighborhoods to hell before admitting a mistake, even the mayor. I pulled over to fantasize about killing every last one of them, and about how to make it worthwhile I’d have to keep from getting caught until I’d gotten them all.

  But in the next minute I only wanted to die myself. The world’s nothing but pain. It’ll never get better. It’s completely useless. Stevie’s going to be found guilty of something he didn’t do, and how much more suffering and death will that lead to? How soon will Stevie be found hanging in a cell? I felt the pain of all these thoughts converging on me, and I wanted out. I thought about Tommy, and about the brothers I hadn’t had time to cry for, and about my mother, whose suffering was never-ending. The rain poured down so that the windshield wipers couldn’t keep up. I was stuck there on the side of the road, and I realized that I could just put the car into drive, and press the gas peddle, and kill myself right then. I couldn’t see anything through tears and rain.

  I couldn’t do it, though. I decided then, that if I ever made it out of this storm, I’d have to spend my life fighting—not only for Stevie, but for everything else that had happened over the years, for the dignity of my family, and for other families like mine. I didn’t even have words for what I was promising myself, but something told me that I was making a lifelong commitment. It was justice I wanted, that’s all. I wasn’t even sure I knew what justice was anymore. But I knew it had to be sweeter than blood.

  Steven’s case went to trial twice: the “de novo” system in Massachusetts allows defendants to go before a judge for the first trial, and then, if found guilty, to take it to a jury.

  For the first trial, Steven had been charged with first-degree murder. The DA worked on a theory that Steven and Tommy had been playing Russian roulette, based on a rumor that two weeks prior to Tommy’s death, Stevie had put a bullet in Johnnie’s gun, spun the chamber, pointed it at their friend Greg, and pulled the trigger. Greg and Tommy’s brother Brian, one of Seamus’s best friends, were to take the stand as witnesses. But when questioned under oath, they contradicted the written testimonies that Detective O’Leary had submitted to the court. Similarly, the eight-page memo submitted to the court by the first officer on the scene was undermined by the initial incident report, which said nothing about Russian roulette or a confession from Steven.

  When O’Leary took the stand, he denied that holding Steven incommunicado, under questioning without a lawyer or legal guardian, was an interrogation. This, even though Steven testified that when he’d asked to see Johnnie, O’Leary had said to him, “You’re going nowhere, kid,” obviously meaning he wasn’t free to leave. O’Leary said that the questioning wasn’t illegal because Steven wasn’t a suspect at the time. When questioned about the thirteen-year-old’s demeanor on that day, O’Leary said, “He was very calm. He had no remorse.” I’d noticed that all of the detectives and officers testifying that day had been huddled in a corner outside the courtroom, going over what they were going to say on the stand. A black detective with a foreign accent stood apart. He clearly wasn’t part of the club. When questioned on the stand about Steven’s demeanor, this Detective Hensaw said Steven had been hysterical, slumped over in a crouched position, holding his stomach with both arms and crying his eyes out.

  The state’s experts took turns testifying that the FBI’s report on the gunpowder tests wasn’t credible, and that the tests weren’t an exact science. The police ballistician, Mr. Bogden, showed white cotton sheets that were shot with the same gun at various distances, creating circular patterns of powder burns, or “stippling.” He was followed by the state medical examiner, Dr. Feigen, who stared straight ahead as he reported that the stippling pattern created by the gun at a distance of twenty-four inches resembled the stippling pattern on Tommy’s face. Then he added that he’d measured Tommy’s arm—from armpit to the end of his middle finger—in the autopsy and that it was only eighteen inches long, and that Tommy couldn’t have shot himself. When asked if Tommy’s hands were ever tested for gunpowder, Feigen said no, and that barium and antimony tests weren’t reliable anyway. Even though they thought the tests were crucial when they tested Steven’s hands, I muttered quietly, struggling to stay in order before the judge.

  During a recess, Mary approached Fallon, telling him that it would be impossible for someone Tommy’s age, who was five feet eight inches, to have an arm only a foot and a half long, unless the person had some kind of bone disease. “And,” she said, “I get all those gunshot victims at the City Hospital, and when they’re pronounced dead, their hands are always bagged for the barium and antimony test swabs.” She said they must have tested Tommy’s hands, but that the results might not have been the results they wanted. Fallon patted her on the back a few times and asked Mary’s husband if “the little lady” could cook at all. “You should have married a Greek woman,” he laughed, “now they can cook!” Then he patted Mary on the back some more and escorted us all back to our benches.

  The evidence, such as it was, was in. Fallon came out of his private meeting with the judge and the DA, and explained that the charges were being reduced to involuntary manslaughter. He said that meant Steven was playing with the gun, “acting in wanton and reckless disregard for another’s life.” “Like when someone runs a red light and, in the course of breaking the law, runs someone over, even though they never meant to kill anyone,” he explained, as if it wasn’t so bad after all. Fallon took Steven into a corner alone, trying to encourage him to plead guilty to the new charge, and the next thing I knew Stevie was weeping, “But I didn’t do it.” Fallon said that Steven would get very little time, and maybe none at all if the judge thought he was finally admitting he did it. But Steven hadn’t shot Tommy and he said he wanted to stick to the truth. So we kept fighting.

  Grandpa showed up at the courthouse in Southie. He was starting to look a lot older. He came into the courthouse lobby shuffling his feet, with wide blue eyes, bright as ever, and a black leather aviator’s hat that was all puffed up on top of his head. He said his heart was very bad, but that he came to the courthouse to warn us. He said he had seen Fallon on the news the night before, and that he couldn’t hear a word he was saying about Steven’s case, but that he had “an awful criminal face on him.” “Where’d you find that blackguard? I suppose some no-good-bum-of-a-gangster led you to him.” We all laughed, but he was right
, and in walked Eddie McGlaughlin to talk to Fallon about his own case, as he was facing federal drug charges from the Whitey Bulger roundup.

  While we awaited the second trial on the new charge, we were able to keep Steven out on bail. He attended school in Worcester, living with Ma’s sister Mary. Ma had to go back to Colorado to take care of Maria and Kathy while Joe went off to work every day. Seamus missed Steven terribly, going back to Colorado without him. Steven was discovering that suburban life wasn’t that bad after all—it was better than being in the Department of Youth Services and getting beatings from black kids when they found out he was from Southie.

  The spring of 1991, Grandpa was dying. Ma had flown back again from Colorado, after hearing that her father kept asking, “Where’s Helen,” from his deathbed. We all got to see Grandpa one last time in the ICU, and he held Steven’s hand the longest, assuring him, “It’ll be OK.”

  Then Ma, knowing that Grandpa had been drifting in and out of consciousness, asked if he’d seen the kids: Patrick, Davey, Frankie, Kevin. Grandpa was hooked up to machines keeping him in his old body. He looked tired and thirsty, but the nurses said he couldn’t have water, so Ma kept wetting cloths and pressing them on his trembling lips. Grandpa spoke: “Sure, hasn’t Davey been sitting here with me? And your mother, your mother’s here.” Ma took what Grandpa was saying casually. She’d become used to saying that for her, the line between this world and the next had been blurred. She even joked with Grandpa. “Well, my mother would be bullshit, knowing that you’re seeing another woman,” Ma said, referring to the female companion Grandpa had befriended in the nursing home. Grandpa laughed.