Denial (8 page)

I take a sheaf of paper from the box. At one point, I lick my finger, trying to gain some kind of traction, determined to get through this quickly, eager to get to the heart of the matter. Suddenly I realize what I have done. A childish thought comes into my mind. Could molecules from my rapist's skin be clinging to these papers? Have I ingested a piece of my rapist? I am nauseated. But quickly, I brush the thought away. I sweep my mind clear. I become efficient and smart when I'm in this no-feeling state. The intellectual part of my mind—the accountant—does well, although I tire quickly.

I note that Paul and Chet are reading slowly. They want to talk about what they see like those annoying people who insist on reading parts of the
Sunday Times
aloud to you while you are engrossed in your own article. Somehow, despite the interruptions, I zero in on something surprising. It is a request by a woman to be informed regarding the release of the rapist. She had not filed a complaint against him, but she must have known him, and known that he was dangerous. Paul expresses amazement that I manage to find this interesting document so fast. You would make a great detective, he tells me. I will not be falsely modest: I know this to be true.

Our perpetrator was a madman, it seems. Much of the time he was passive, quiet, even polite, according to the reports; sometimes extremely odd. He was observed standing, stark naked, on his toilet. He was observed eating paper. He committed many petty crimes.

He was not popular with his fellow inmates. They torched his
cell. Child rapists are despised—not just by their victims, but also by other criminals. He was put in protective custody.

I find a progress report on the inmate. My inmate. My rapist. On January 28, 1974, he was in protective custody at Walpole.

“He has spent very little time in the prison population due to the nature of his offense. The team and the resident concur that counseling is of the highest priority, in that the resident might better come to grips with the length of his sentence. At the same time, it was agreed that the resident would most profit from a comprehensive program that would enrich his skills as a plumber.”

His skills as a plumber. He did indeed plumb me. The resident, it appears, was obsessed with plumbing.

The resident? A nauseating image comes to my mind, the rapist as a medical resident, performing Mengele-like experiments on the plumbing systems of little girls.

I have always found it dizzying when people refer to our innards as “plumbing.” Such a vulgar expression. But we are beyond vulgar here. We are in the muck of terror.

I see now that this man didn't just reside in my mind's eye; he resided on this earth. He was apparently a fellow human.

I find, in these documents, that the perpetrator was from a small town, Milbridge, Massachusetts.

At this point, Lt. Macone is sharing this information with me because he wants to help me. Now that we know the rapist is dead, Lt. Macone no longer feels the need to find him. Brian Beat cannot commit any more rapes. Now, if I cannot resist learning more about my rapist, I will be on my own.

 

Lt. Macone gives me the name of one of the detectives who knew Beat in Milbridge after he was released from prison. Detective George Remas.

After hesitating for a couple of months, I call Detective Remas. He does not return my call. I call again. He doesn't respond. I ask my research assistant to leave messages every day. I guess they are busy out there. Eventually I write to the chief of police, thinking that perhaps Detective Remas is afraid to talk to me without his chief's permission. That does the trick. Finally, we have a date.

Chet and I drive out to Milbridge. It's only an hour from Boston, but you feel like you're in a different state. Iowa, maybe. Milbridge was a mill town. Later it was known for its tanneries and shoe manufacturing. The mills and tanneries are now gone, and the town feels dead. It is utterly flat. Local lore has it that Lindbergh once landed a plane here, and that they turned the airstrip into a town. I have no idea whether this story is true, but the idea that this flat town was once a landing strip captures the mood well.

The police station is right on Main Street. It looks like a small suburban tract home. Perhaps they don't have much crime here, I think to myself.

Now that we're here, it turns out that Detective Remas is friendly. He seems almost relieved to have time off from duty. He did not know Brian Beat before he went to prison, he tells us. But he saw him frequently after Beat was released.

“I was always arresting Brian because he was throwing trash at cars, or he was drunk, or because he committed a crime,” Remas tells us.

Beat lived in a kind of alcove right next to the railroad tracks, he tells us. He built fires there. He collected things: bags of cigarette butts, the bar codes at the bottom of Marlboro cigarette
packs, news stories about accidents. The police would know where he had been because they would find his collections.

“Sometimes he would give his clippings to me. News stories about police-cruiser accidents. He would hand me a clipping and say, ‘Kojak. I got this for you.' He knew my name, but he always called me Kojak,” Remas says.

He wore tattered clothing. Pants on top of sweatpants and shorts over that. Gloves with holes in them. Or he'd use an old pair of socks as mittens.

“One year I gave him a coat, an old coat of mine,” Remas says.

He pauses, his lips slightly pursed, as if he is not sure whether to continue. But he can't stop himself. It must be painful to have a convicted rapist of children return to your small town.

“I told him I had something for him, that I wanted him to have my coat. At first he refused it. Finally he accepted it. I saw that he was welling up. That was the only time I saw him show any kind of emotion.”

He seems to feel the need to defend this act of generosity.

“You get sick and tired of chasing the same person day in and day out,” he says.

Suddenly he seems to recall the reason that I'm here.

“I knew from his record that he was a sex offender, but I never heard of him committing that kind of crime here.”

He is speaking haltingly now.

“Do sex offenders change?” he asks.

Am I supposed to voice an opinion?

After a slight pause, he answers his own question.

“I don't believe so,” he says.

I am deeply relieved that he found a way to answer himself.

But Brian Beat, he tells us, was never put on the list of registered sex offenders. I wonder why, but am afraid to ask.

The subject of sex offenders reminds Detective Remas of another topic.

“There was a certain group of kids that would pick on him. They would antagonize the poor guy. But there was another group that got on well with him. They had an arrangement: they would give him money to buy a case of beer. Then they would offer him a few beers as payment. He'd walk out of the package store and you'd see kids farther down the road.”

Were any of those kids girls? I wonder. I don't ask, afraid that if I do, he may stop talking. It is probably not a good thing for a police department to reveal that officers had witnessed a convicted sex offender buying beer for local children.

“Brian never admitted to anything.” What crime does Detective Remas wish he admitted to, I wonder?

“I never heard Brian say he was sorry. I never saw him sober,” he adds. But then he adds, “He was a haunt. A pest to the community.”

He would walk up and down Main Street, Detective Remas says. Sometimes Remas would see him walking up and down the railroad tracks at night. He often built himself a fire under the bridge, where it was dry. He would jump in the river to wash his clothes, and dry his clothes by the fire. Sometimes he would set his clothes on fire, Detective Remas explains. But he never bathed himself. He reeked, Remas says.

“When it was cold, he would sleep in the bathroom in the gas station. Stevie's Global. Right down the street. Stevie let him sleep in there. He would use the sink to wash up. Did him no good though. The crud on his ankles,” Remas tells us.

His arm passes across his mouth in disgust at the thought of that crud.

“Brian and Stevie were friends,” he says, apparently not surprised that a convicted rapist of children would have friends in town.

“If it got to be too cold or he wanted something from us, he would stand at the corner of Main Street and Harwich, throw shoes or clothing or trash at passing motorists. Always at that corner. When he came in here, the sergeant would make us take his shoes off outside because of the odor. But his feet stank, too. He would urinate and defecate and ejaculate all over the walls. If we didn't have Plexiglas over his cell, I'm sure he would have been throwing excrement at us.”

And with a sigh, he summarizes his assessment. “Brian was a pig,” he concludes.

“He could be very calm and talk to you about history, next minute he would start screaming at you. ‘I'm going to call Johnny Cochran,' he would say. I tell him, Brian, here is the phone, go right ahead and call him. Then he would go right back to asking what time supper is being served. ‘I want a bologna sandwich with onion.' He always wanted a bologna sandwich with onion.”

Once again, Detective Remas seems to recall why I'm here.

“Somebody with a background like that. You don't rape children or molest someone just like that. Something must have happened to him. If I get a confession in a sex-crimes case, I always ask, has anything like this happened to you in the past? The answer is always yes. We don't just wake up one day and molest children. Something happened to this guy. It is a learned behavior. The idea to rape children didn't just pop up in his mind.”

Then he adds, “We had a priest at Saint Roch's…,” but he doesn't finish the thought.

He starts again. “We had other men in town that had been molested. They were in the south end of town.”

Was Detective Remas telling me that he thought Brian had been molested by a priest? If so, I don't think he intended to.

“When we arrest someone, we have to list properties that they
come in with. Brian always had a lot of stuff in his pockets. He'd collect cigarette butts. In his pockets. Empty matchboxes. He kept plastic ware, pennies. It would take you a while to empty his pockets. Always at the bottom, small stones. Wrapped them in tissue paper. Dime-size pebbles wrapped up in the tissue paper. A dozen of them. Tissue paper with little pebbles. I'd throw them in the clear plastic inventory bag. I would ask him, What are you doing with the rocks? He would just say, ‘Those are my property.' Always in tissue paper. It wasn't significant.”

Detective Remas is content to talk, stream of consciousness. But now Chet has a question.

“Were the pebbles ever in his back pocket?” he asks.

“No, never in the back pockets. In the back he would have plastic bags. A filthy comb. Maybe an extra pair of socks or the gloves without the fingers. The pebbles were always in his front pocket.”

“Can you tell me more about the priest?” I ask. “The one from Saint Roch's?”

“Father Sissen,” he says. “Last I heard he is blind and living down on the Cape.”

“Was there ever a formal complaint against him?” I ask.

He doesn't know. The church had relocated him. And then there was another priest after Father Sissen. “Father Smith,” he says. “Same nature.”

How could the church send two pedophile priests in a row to this tiny town?

“They were very quiet about it, but I went to school with one of the guys who was a victim. I know two of his victims. Two guys. They still live in town. One of them is very vocal. Then Pat Hanley, the new priest, same problem. Three priests at one church. All pedophiles.”

Is this really possible?

“But the kids loved Father Sissen. He would hold dances. He
had a summer home on the Cape, and the kids would go with him. He treated the kids good. He would mingle with the kids. He went to every basketball game.”

“Did he use rosary beads?” Chet asks. Detective Remas doesn't seem to notice the question. His thoughts have returned to Brian Beat.

“Even when Brian was drinking, he would recite poetry. Riding back in the cruiser, he would go on and on. I would turn up the radio. Brian, enough's enough. There was one poem about the Garden of Eden…Brian always carried paperback books with him. Always had books. When he came in here he wanted the papers. He wanted the
Globe
and the
Herald
. He would sit and read all weekend long. When he was done, he would throw the papers in the toilet. He would cover the vent or the light in the cell.”