Mission Flats Page 6

  I craned my neck to see the photos, the traditional twin frames showing the suspect face-on and in profile. Braxton looked to be in his twenties, African-American. The sides of his scalp were shaved and the remaining hair was pulled back tightly and gathered in a little tuft at the back of his head. The hairstyle seemed more Tibetan than hip-hop. His skin was as smooth and dark as a seal’s.

  Kurth added: ‘He’s an absolute fuckin’ animal and we’re going to hunt him down.’

  The audience shifted uneasily. Kurth was from away, and the Maine troopers didn’t like being lectured by him, much less informed what they were going to do. His melodramatic tone caused some eye-rolling too, even among the Massachusetts guys.

  ‘Do you have some evidence?’ an older guy finally asked. ‘Or should we just take your word for it?’ He smirked, proud of the sarcasm.

  Kurth tried to smile too, but the smile flickered and died on his lips. ‘Evidence,’ he said.

  He went to his briefcase and fished out a bulging manila folder. He riffled the folder until he found a few photos, then returned to the corkboard. First a color eight-by-ten of Danziger’s mutilated face, the right eye and forehead obscured by a dry cookie of blood. ‘Our victim, Robert Danziger.’ Then he added two rows of similar photos. ‘Vincent Marzano. Kevin Epps.’ With each name, Kurth punched a pin through one of the photos. ‘Theo Harden. Keith Boyce. David Huang.’ The victims were all young, in their early twenties. Marzano was white, Huang Asian, the rest black. All bore the same dark stain on one half of their face. Harden’s features were a blur beneath the blood. ‘All shot in the eye with a high-caliber weapon, like a .44,’ Kurth informed us. ‘That’s his signature.’ Kurth leaned against one of the tables. This was supposed to be a relaxed pose, but he managed to look like a two-by-four leaning against a barn. ‘Harold Braxton runs a crew called the Mission Posse. The Mission Posse moves a lot of rock, makes a lot of money, and they’re willing to do just about anything to defend their business. All these guys here’ – he gestured toward the photos – ’threatened Braxton’s business in some way. Some of them were cooperating with the police. Some tried to open up a corner in Braxton’s neighborhood.’

  ‘Why a bullet in the eye?’

  ‘It’s a message. In Mission Flats everybody understands. It means, Close your eyes, don’t see what we do.’ Kurth locked his gaze on the guy who’d needled him moments before. ‘That’s called evidence.’

  ‘And Braxton’s never been prosecuted for any of this?’

  ‘Nobody talks.’

  ‘But why Danziger?’ one of the troopers asked.

  ‘Bob Danziger had a pending case against a member of Braxton’s crew, a carjacking case. No big deal except the defendant was Braxton’s second-in-command. The trial was scheduled to open a couple weeks ago, in early October, which is about the time Danziger was murdered. So that’s your motive – no DA, no trial for Braxton’s buddy. Braxton protects his own.’

  One of the prosecutors asked, ‘Why kill him in Maine?’

  ‘That’s where Danziger happened to be when they reached him. On vacation, apparently’

  ‘It’s all circumstantial,’ someone argued.

  Kurth shrugged. ‘Of course it’s circumstantial. It’s a homicide; the best witness is dead.’

  Cravish stroked his chin and frowned. ‘I’m not convinced, Lieutenant Kurth. Why would a drug dealer murder an assistant DA? It doesn’t make sense. There will always be another prosecutor to take his place, and another and another. The government is the biggest gang around. Why declare war on it? Besides, I’ve prosecuted guys like this before. They don’t consider the prosecutor an enemy. It’s all professional, they know that.’ The Game-Show Host was proud to announce he’d prosecuted tough guys. A supercilious look crossed his face.

  ‘Mr Cravish,’ Kurth drawled, ‘I don’t think you’ve prosecuted anyone like Braxton.’

  ‘Oh, I’m quite certain I have.’

  ‘Are you, now?’

  From his briefcase, Kurth plucked two more eight-by-tens, which he stuck to the board with the others. The first showed a jolly-looking man with an orange beard. The second image was harder to identify. It was a dark-colored object dangling from a rope over a crumbling driveway. It might have been a laundry bag.

  ‘What the hell is that?’ a trooper asked.

  Kurth, thinking the question referred to the man with the beard – or pretending to – pointed to the first photo and said, ‘This is Artie Trudell. He was a cop. About ten years ago Trudell was on a drug raid in the Flats. Braxton was cornered inside an apartment. He was trapped, so he blew Trudell’s head apart. Fired one shot through the front door, killing Trudell, then took off through a back door.’

  There was a moment of silence. Out of respect for the fallen cop, everyone hesitated to ask about the second photo. Finally someone said, ‘What about that thing? What is it?’

  ‘It’s a dog,’ Kurth said.

  The image came clear – the carcass of an animal suspended by its hind legs. The dog’s head was hidden behind a flap of skin that hung from the back of its neck like Superman’s cape. For some reason this photo seemed more gruesome than the others, whose subjects were merely human.

  ‘Braxton and his crew had a pit bull. They wanted to see how mean he could be. So they tied up this dog and turned the pit bull loose on him. This is what was left.’

  ‘But . . . why?’

  ‘Why?’ Kurth shook his head. ‘Because Braxton’s a fucking animal, that’s why’

  A rustle went through the room. The audience was visibly uneasy, but it took a few moments before anyone screwed up the courage to murmur, under his breath, ‘Come on.’

  Kurth fixed us with one of his reptile stares. ‘Listen to me, you can roll your eyes all you want, but this is what guys like Braxton do. Why? There is no why. It’s like asking, Why do sharks eat swimmers? or, Why do bears eat hikers? That’s what predators do. This guy is a predator.’

  Kurth removed the photos one by one and returned them to his briefcase. Then he paused to share a philosophical thought, or at least as nearly philosophical a thought as he ever voiced: ‘The system isn’t built to handle a guy like this, who kills without even thinking about it. The system presumes that crime is logical, that people do it by choice. So we build prisons to deter them, or we offer programs to rehabilitate them. Carrots and sticks, all so these people will make the right choice. That whole model does not contemplate a Harold Braxton, because Braxton doesn’t weigh the consequences in the first place. He doesn’t choose to kill, he just kills. He doesn’t think. He doesn’t care. So there’s only one thing to do with him: Take him out of circulation. We all know it, everyone in this room.’

  The audience, cops and lawyers alike, squirmed at Kurth’s directness – the police because there was no ironic distance here, none of the cool cynicism that cops swaddle themselves in when confronted with the real danger of their job, the lawyers because Kurth did not share their genteel uneasiness with calling for Braxton’s ‘removal from circulation.’ Kurth was too frank. Still, no one objected. None of us had wanted to be intimidated by Edmund Kurth, the flatlander, but we were.

  After the meeting Kurth approached me and handed me a few mug shots, Braxton’s among them. He asked me to show the photos around in Versailles, to find a witness who could place Braxton in the area. Someone must have seen Braxton or one of his crew. The request was delivered in Kurth’s usual clenched manner. His body leaned forward, the little muscles of his face wriggling perceptibly. Most unnerving, he had a habit of locking his eyes on yours without glancing away or even blinking. My own eyes would sweep around the room just to avoid his, only to find upon returning that Kurth was still staring dead into my pupils.

  So it may come as a surprise, given his overwound manner, that there was a strange attraction about Kurth too. He had a gorgeous purposefulness. In hindsight I see it was nothing more than the clarity of a man who is convinced his cause is righteous – Get Braxton! �
�� but at the time he seemed to have been let in on some very profound secret. For Kurth, all the moral equivocation that underlies police work – that criminality is not the same as evil; that the criminal-justice system may be worse than the crime it is meant to cure; and therefore that policing itself is a morally ambiguous enterprise – all of it was washed away by Harold Braxton’s overwhelming malignance. Braxton was evil, therefore Kurth must be good. Simple as that. It was this great moral reduction that allowed Kurth to speak in absolutes. Braxton was not merely troubled or desperate or suffering from some behavior disorder; he was an animal, a menace to be destroyed. I doubt that Kurth ever understood it was Braxton who gave him this gift of simplicity. In fact, I doubt Kurth ever fretted over the moral complexities in the first place. But without Braxton, Kurth would not have had that sense of crusade. He would have been an Ahab with no Moby Dick, no monster to hunt.

  I did as Kurth asked. I showed the mug shots around Versailles for the next couple of days. I had mixed feelings about finding a neighbor to testify against Braxton, and it came as a relief when nobody in Versailles recognized his photo. I also did a check on the victim, with limited success. A few people remembered speaking with Bob Danziger, a few more recognized his photo. But none of the September renters in the lakeside cabins, now returned to their homes in New York and Massachusetts, remembered anything specific about Danziger. And no one had any idea how long the body had been baking in that locked cabin, although the ME later put it at two or three weeks. In the end, my investigation went nowhere. To all appearances, Robert Danziger had no connection with Versailles. It looked as if he’d come with the sole purpose of dying here.

  But I was hooked just the same. Hooked on Kurth’s narrative as well as the one I was composing in my own head, my own version of Harold Braxton the urban superpredator. I kept Braxton’s mug shot in the case file, and over the next days I found myself studying it, trying to find hints of the lethal predatory stuff Kurth had described. I never did see it. In the photo, Braxton seemed harmless enough. He had not struck a pose for the camera. On the contrary, he looked passive, even sleepy. In a word, his appearance was ordinary, which only added to my fascination: How could Harold Braxton – Kurth’s ‘animal’ to be ‘hunted down’ – look so unexceptional? Maybe that is always the case. Our villains always disappoint us. They never look the part. Remember the old news photos of Eichmann sitting in that Tel Aviv courtroom, blinking out from behind thick eyeglasses like some half-blind watchmaker? What a letdown, the world said. How ‘banal.’ We expect our monsters to make a better show of it.

  6

  During those first anxious days, the cabin on Lake Mattaquisett was guarded round the clock. Dick and I, with a couple of other officers, split the guard duty, rotating shifts so no one pulled two overnight watches in a row. There was not much to do out there, to be honest, especially at night. Once, some kids came driving down the access road, only to turn around the moment they saw the police Bronco parked out front. That was about it. There was no rush to contaminate this crime scene – Cravish would not be OJ’ed this time. I wasn’t much of a watchman anyway. I tended to spend most of my time at the water’s edge, listening to the plash and gurgle at my feet or gazing at the bare spots in the trees on the opposite side.

  There are only a few months when we Versellians really get to see our lake. In summer, we are too busy making twelve months’ worth of income in just twelve weeks. In winter, the lake freezes and is covered with snow. There are only these few precious weeks in between when the lake is there just for us. It is a magical time of year, late October, early November. Leaf season is over. The flashburst of red and yellow foliage has faded, and the leaf-gazers have moved on to southern Vermont, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts chasing the ‘high color.’ The air begins to take on the feel of winter. The water is a flinty blue. The lake is ours alone, briefly.

  During these long quiet watches, my thoughts inevitably turned to my mother. I could envision her swimming here, arms turning in languid windmill strokes, far out into the lake where the white buoy of her bathing cap would vanish in the lambent cloud-shadows that slid across the water and up over the trees.

  She used to swim in this lake nearly every day from May through September. That is no mean feat, mind you. In early spring Lake Mattaquisett is cold enough to shock your lungs into seizures. Joking about the water temperature (and, among men, about its effect on the genitalia) is a rite of spring around here. But Mum was fearless. She plunged in like an otter. She was a slippery swimmer too, the kind you stopped to watch. Her body glided along the surface, frictionless, back and forth, crisscrossing the lake at the pinch-point of its hourglass shape. You could tell she was proud of her swimming, all that naturalness achieved by hours of hard labor in the lap pool as a teenager. She would emerge from the water beaming and, between heavy breaths, challenge all comers: ‘Who wants to race me?’

  It was for her that I came back to Versailles. I have said that I was trapped here, but that’s not true, really. I chose to come back, and even in hindsight, even knowing where the decision led, I would do it again. It was a Hobson’s choice, but all the same it was an easy choice.

  In December 1994 – not quite three years before the Danziger murder – I was a graduate student in history at Boston University. I was only in my second year, but already the academic world seemed everywhere and everything. I’d quickly joined in the death struggle with grad students nationwide over the usual desiderata: fellowships and grants and publications. The ultimate grail, a tenure-track faculty position, was an obsession – a measure of just how far I’d come from Versailles, Maine. Nothing else seemed to matter. I had a basement apartment in Allston, a horrible apartment even by grad-student standards – grungy, cold, damp. It had only one window, at sidewalk level with a view of legs scissoring past. A water stain ran along the bottom half of the wall like wainscoting, left by a flood who-knew-how-long ago. I had a girlfriend too, a fellow PhD candidate named Sandra Lowenstein. She was sallow and thin as a bird in December. Sandra talked a lot about Gramsci and Marx, and wore heavy black-framed eyeglasses to show her commitment to the cause. Maybe she dated me to show her commitment to the cause too: a bodily self-sacrifice to the lumpen-proletariat of backwoods Maine. Which was hunky-dory with me because I’d put my prole past behind me. I was out. The big Venus’s-flytrap had not got me after all. Versailles was a memory, a quaint story I would tell my friends over cocktails in Cambridge or New Haven or wherever I was headed.

  By this time I already suspected my mother had Alzheimer’s. The disease can be difficult to diagnose, especially in early-onset cases like Mum’s. The symptoms precisely mimic the ordinary prosaic effects of aging – forgetfulness, trivial sorts of confusion. Eventually, however, the signs become too obvious to ignore. In the fall of ‘94, Dad was calling every week to complain about her. She left the lights or the oven on overnight, he’d say. Once, she left the car engine running until it was out of gas and he had to go out to the station with a can to refill it. Exasperated, he told me, ‘Your mother’s just not there anymore.’

  All of which I understood, and yet I was able to minimize it somehow. Or at least to compartmentalize it, as the euphemism goes. (We say compartmentalize when we mean ignore or blow off.) Maybe it was just the selfishness of a twenty-something; I could not bear to rouse myself from the hermetic life of a student. More likely, I could not accept that Mum was ‘not there anymore.’ The reports from Dad just did not fit. In my mind’s eye, Annie Truman was always and very much all there.

  But when I came home for Christmas break that year – after an absence of six months – I was brought up short by the reality of it. The slippage.

  At first the changes were not startling. If you’d seen her, you would not have noticed anything obviously wrong. My mother was still an elegant-looking woman, effortlessly slim and ‘put together’ (her phrase, not mine). She had a new pair of designer eyeglasses, for which she’d made the long trip to Portland
twice, to order them and to pick them up. Those vivid blue eyes had not faded. Her face had aged a little. The skin had shrunk over the facial bones and you could just make out the longitudinal curve of the eyeballs. Still she was extraordinarily lovely.

  To me, though, there were subtle but noticeable changes. She spoke less and resisted being drawn into conversation. She seemed to have determined that there was a risk of embarrassment in speaking and decided the safer course was to say as little as possible. There were occasional memory lapses, nothing shocking but unlike her. (Every morning she greeted me with the vague exclamation ‘Ben!’ as if she were surprised to find me home.) What I saw at first was not a sudden, violent transformation in my mother, but a shift in mood. A sense of dullness and withdrawal about her, remarkable only because Anne Truman had never been remotely dull or withdrawn in her life.

  Because the university virtually shuts down over the holidays, I was at home for several weeks that December. Family custom dictated that I work as a temporary at the department, but my real job was to look after Mum. By this point, Claude Truman had had just about enough of his wife. From the start, he was spectacularly unfit for the task of caring for an Alzheimer’s patient. He was still The Chief, nearing the end of his glorious reign, floating along on an argosy of self-satisfaction. Is that too unkind? Maybe. Alzheimer’s imposes a burden on the spouse, and maybe it is unreasonable to demand that every spouse be equal to the challenge. Better to say, Claude had always been able to nourish himself from within, and now he simply could not understand how his wife, who’d once had the same knack, had mysteriously become so ravenous.

  So for a few weeks I put on a uniform and worked a detail as Anne Truman’s bodyguard, a happy enough arrangement. I learned the various strategies Mum and Dad had improvised for protecting her. There were yellow stick-on notes posted throughout the house – CHECK OVEN, they said, or TURN OFF LIGHTS or KEYS ON PHONE TABLE – and I began to add my own notes rather than nag her, which wounded her leonine pride. To prevent her from wandering, I took her on long walks every morning and afternoon to tire her out. For good measure, I was told, I should install a second lock on each of the house doors, keyed from the inside. This I refused to do. It smacked too much of imprisonment. I did hide the car keys, though, just in case.