Mission Flats (25 page)

The first time I kissed Caroline:

She stepped back, smiled, and said my name. Then, ‘Are you sure you want to do this?’

‘I’m really, really sure, yeah.’

A car drove past and we watched it selfconsciously. We were standing outside my hotel. The doorman was watching us. The night air was chilly.

‘Ben, you don’t have to charm me, you know. It’s not necessary’

‘What if I want to?’

‘Don’t waste it.’

In the hotel room we kissed, awkwardly, and Caroline suggested we get in bed. I said that was fine, and we undressed and lay side by side, facing each other. She leaned forward to kiss me again. Our knees bumped. There was the predictable prod as we slid close, but Caroline did not acknowledge it. She held my face in her hands and studied it. She said, ‘Why do I have this feeling I’ve met you before?’ I said, ‘I don’t know. I think I’d remember you.’

Later, Caroline gathered her things and went into the bathroom to wash and get dressed. I turned on the TV and, when she came out, I was staring at an old movie.

Caroline asked, ‘What’s that?’

‘Rio Bravo.
You want to watch?’

‘Is that a John Wayne thing?’

‘Right now it’s an Angie Dickinson thing.’

‘From
Police Woman
?’

‘Yeah.’

‘I liked
Police Woman
.’

‘I never knew what was going on with her and Earl Holliman on that show.’

Caroline shrugged her jacket on. ‘He liked Angie Dickinson but he couldn’t say so because of their jobs.’

‘Oh.’

‘Ben, I have to get home to Charlie.’

On the TV, Angie Dickinson was telling John Wayne,
That’s what I’d do if I were the kind of girl you think I am.

‘That’s alright. I know how it ends anyway’

She grimaced. ‘How does it end?’

‘Everybody was wrong about everybody else, basically’

‘Doesn’t sound like much of an ending.’

‘Well there’s a gunfight too. But it’s not really the point.’

24

After four days of searching for Harold Braxton – since Caroline had given the go-ahead to pick him up after Ray Rat’s murder – the Boston police had nothing to show. Braxton had vanished.

Gittens and I trolled the Flats daily, questioning anyone who had ever passed him a tip. It was fascinating to watch Gittens, a supple man who was able to connect with all sorts of people. This he accomplished with an arsenal of small talents. He spoke passable Spanish. He had a politician’s knack for remembering names, not just the names of informants but their relatives and associates too. And most important, Gittens used good judgment. He had no desire to pile up the arrests, and he was perfectly willing to turn a blind eye to petty offenses where other cops might not. It is too much to say that all this skill was appreciated by a grateful populace. Gittens was still a cop and people were leery of him. But he handled his role gracefully, he was respectful, he spotted nuances and complexities that others missed. He was a great cop – and he knew it.

In this case it wasn’t enough. Braxton had vanished, and by this point the police were no longer searching for him so much as they were waiting for Braxton to reveal himself. Officers were posted in likely locations and left to wait there like hunters behind duck blinds. Convinced he knew Braxton better than anyone, Gittens positioned a few officers from Area A-3 at various locations in the Flats. Kelly and I drew assignments from Gittens too. I was stationed, alone, outside the apartment building where June Veris’s girlfriend lived – an unpromising site, I thought, although Gittens assured otherwise.

I arrived at my post early Monday morning, around seven. Under a dreary gray sky, I leaned in a doorway and sipped from a paper cup of coffee. My assignment was to eyeball the building opposite, on the off chance that Braxton might have stayed there the night before. In movies they call this a ‘stakeout,’ though I’ve never heard a cop use that term. Call it what you will, it is a phenomenally boring task. And to a worrier like me, it is an invitation to trouble. An idle mind and all that.

My thoughts turned to Caroline and our encounter the night before. What had it meant to her? And to me? It is all very well and good to take someone to bed with blithe intentions, but there is always the danger that things will seem more complicated in the morning – particularly when it is unclear who took whom to bed. It was not that I had fallen in love with Caroline. Nothing so dramatic or unambiguous had happened. I am too cautious a person to be struck by those thunderbolts anyway. But something had happened. I could not stop thinking about her – or, more accurately, about my idea of her, for it must be said that Caroline Kelly was a difficult person to know. She could be warm and mettlesome one moment, chilly and remote the next. You got the sense she simply did not want to be known, not until she was good and ready. Not until she’d decided. When she’d said the night before ‘You don’t have to charm me, Ben,’ her voice seemed to carry a warning:
Don’t think you can charm me.
Was that streak of circumspection the result of her divorce? Impossible to know.

In hindsight, I see that Caroline’s contradictions were precisely why I could not let go of the subject. The more she puzzled me, the more I thought about her; the more I thought about her, the more puzzled I became. Was she beautiful or just vivid? Was she warm, as she’d been with Charlie (and me), or irascible, as she sometimes delighted in being? I wanted to understand her in my academic way, I wanted to flatten all that wonderful complexity and elusiveness into a few bald adjectives. No, I had not
fallen in love.
After a certain age you do not
fall
in love. Falling, with its implications of delirium and loss of control, is no longer the right metaphor. What you do is study your lover. You consider her. You turn her over in your hand like a coin from a foreign country. But then, that is a kind of love too.

All of this I was considering – Caroline, the taste-memory of her mouth, the feel of her strong back – the complicating factor of Charlie – the possibility of love – all these considerations swarmed in my mind, and I was in the process of sorting them out – categorizing them – because you have to be prudent with these things – emotion, I mean – you have to consider it, not rush in like Annie Wilmot did with Claude Truman – when Bobo showed up.

Bobo looked different than he had a week before, when Gittens rousted him from the Dumpster-cum-shooting gallery at the garbage collection plant. Gone were the Lakers sweatshirt and the stained work pants. Gone too was the druggy stupor. Now Bobo was flashing a definite sense of style. He wore his Greek fisherman’s cap down over one eye. And he walked with a rhythmic strut, limping slightly on his left leg so that he moved down the street like a bird with a broken wing.

Bobo was still half a block away when he recognized me, or at least recognized trouble. A white guy in this neighborhood – a white guy with a bad haircut standing around drinking coffee, a white guy looking at him in a familiar way – all things considered, to Bobo it meant trouble. Trouble of the law-enforcement variety. He immediately crossed the street, looking both ways, to put a little distance between us as he passed.

Even law-abiding people often become anxious when cops are around. But Bobo did not seem unnerved in the least. Bobo was cool. As he reached the parked cars on the opposite side of the street, he looked across at me and that was all. No sign of recognition, let alone fear. Then Bobo disappeared around the corner.

I hesitated, then, with a last forlorn look at 442 Hewson Street – the building I was supposed to be watching – I decided instead to follow Bobo. It was an impetuous decision. I did not know whether I would try to talk to him or whether I was just curious to see what he was up to. Mostly, I think I was fed up with staring at June Veris’s girlfriend’s apartment building – staring, sipping coffee, pissing at the convenience store on the corner, staring some more. Four straight days of that was enough. So I followed Bobo.

There was not much of a crowd on Hosmer Street, a fairly busy road that runs east-west through Mission Flats, so I kept a good block or two behind him. He strutted his way down Hosmer a few blocks, then hooked a left onto a side street with the winsome name Blue Moon Lane. By the time I reached the corner, Bobo was already slipping through the doorless entry to a brownstone.

The brownstone was one of eight or ten that lined the street. All but one were well-kept, Bobo’s being the exception. I have seen pictures of Berlin after World War II, and the best way I can think to describe this building is to say that it looked like something out of Berlin in 1945. There was no front door and no glass in any of the windows. Every delicate piece of the structure – glass, window frames, gutters – had been blown away. What remained was the beautiful stone facade, a chain-link fence sliced open with wire cutters, and an ominously worded
NO TRESPASSING
sign.

I guessed (incorrectly, it turned out) that Bobo had gone inside to score drugs. What other reason was there to hang out in such a building? So I decided to wait until he came out again. Five, ten minutes – how long could it take?

But Bobo did not emerge after fifteen minutes, or thirty, or sixty.

So I decided to go in for the simple, all-explaining reason
That’s What Gittens Would Do.
After watching and admiring Gittens’s mastery of Mission Flats police-work for the last few days, I had begun to ape him consciously. I drew my gun for the same reason, though in three years as a cop I had never done so before.
That’s What Gittens Would Do,
or so I hoped.

Inside, there was a central staircase. The apartment doors were missing, and sunlight poured in from the empty windows to light the empty rooms. The floors were silted over with dirt and rot. But the seaminess was offset by poignant vestiges: scraps of wallpaper adhering to the walls; a fireplace where a family had once warmed themselves; old newspapers; a stained mattress. I worked my way up the staircase to the second floor, where there were more empty rooms, then to the third, where at last I found Bobo.

He was on the floor, alone, in a room at the front of the building. A piece of cardboard was propped in the window, leaving this room gloomier than the rest. Maybe Bobo had blocked the window himself, looking for privacy or a place to sleep. He lay against the wall, apparently sleeping. There was a needle by his side with a little yellowish fluid remaining in the syringe. It was unlikely that Bobo had shot up only half a syringe. He had probably passed out while preparing a second one.

‘Bobo!’ I knelt beside him and felt his neck for a pulse. I shook him. ‘Bobo!’

He groaned. His eyes opened, fixed on me with milky pupils, closed again.

‘Bobo! Wake up. Are you alright?’

‘Mmmm.’

‘Jesus, Bobo, I’m going to get you an ambulance.’ I took out my radio, which I’d been given in case I spotted Braxton over on Hewson Street.

‘No am-uh-lance, no am-uh-lance.’ Bobo pushed himself up to a sitting position. Drowsily, he covered his face with his hands, rubbed, then opened his hands like a child playing peekaboo. ‘I seen you before?’

‘I’m a friend of Martin Gittens. We saw you at that garbage place the other day.’

‘Yeah yeah yeah,’ he murmured. ‘You hit me in the balls.’

‘No.’

‘Those were my balls, man. You think I forgot?’

‘They were your balls but it wasn’t me that hit them.’

He closed his eyes again. ‘’At’s alright, ’at’s alright. I’m not mad at you. Just balls, right?’

‘That’s right, Bobo.’

I wondered what he’d been shooting. Heroin, presumably.

‘Give me my works, man.’

‘I can’t do that. I’m a cop.’

‘You gonna arrest me?’

‘No.’

‘Then give me my works.’ He stretched out his hand toward the needle but seemed incapable of moving further to get it.

‘Can’t help you, Bobo. Sorry’

He closed his eyes and drifted off. After a while he said, ‘What you come here for?’

‘I’m looking for Braxton.’

‘Thought you were looking for Ray. You heard about Ray?’

‘Yeah, I heard. That’s why we’re looking for Braxton.’

‘You guys fucked Ray good.’

‘We did not fuck Ray, Bobo. Braxton did that.’

‘Whatever you say, boss.’ His head lolled. ‘You come in here looking for Braxton? Ain’t going to find him here.’

‘I came in here to talk to you.’

‘Yeah? What we going to talk about?’

‘Braxton. You know where he is?’

‘Maybe I do.’ The sound of this answer pleased him, and he repeated it with a crooked smirk. ‘Maybe I do.’

‘Bobo, I could still take you in if I had to.’

‘You already said you weren’t going to.’ He opened one eye. ‘Besides, Gittens won’t let you. He helps me out.’

‘Is that how it works?’

‘That’s how it works. Come on, boss, you help me out too.’ He pointed with his chin toward the syringe on the floor.

‘Bobo, I can’t do that.’

‘What’s your name, anyway?’

‘It’s Ben Truman.’

‘Well, Officer Truman, let me tell you how it is. You want to
get,
see, you got to
give.
That’s what it’s all about. Capitalism.’

‘Bobo, do you know where Braxton is?’

‘See, that’s it. You want to get, but you don’t want to give.’

I took out a twenty and tossed it on his lap. This was no small thing. Twenty dollars was a lot to me. I didn’t have Gittens’s Robin Hood instinct for robbing the dealers to pay the snitches.

He glanced down at it but did not move. Struggling to lift his eyes from his lap, he mused, ‘Just give me my works, will you.’

‘No.’

‘Go find Braxton yourself then.’

‘Bobo, I could give you another whack in the balls. That seems to help you open up.’