Mission Flats (37 page)

He shook his head, disappointed in me. ‘Ben, I bet you could tell me what color Martha Washington’s eyes were, but if there was a real live woman in front of you, you wouldn’t know which end was the front and which was the back.’

‘Martha Washington’s eyes were green.’

‘You’re joking.’

‘No. It’s in the correspondence.’

He grunted and shook his head some more.

We returned to surveilling number 111 St Albans Road. And waiting.

And waiting.

An hour later, the ninjas arrived.

41

They emerged from the back of a modified panel truck, ten guys in commando-chic outfits, black from their
Wehrmacht-style
helmets to their combat boots. They even wore gloves so their pink hands would not draw attention. The ninjas jogged along the sidewalk then crouched behind a low wall, out of sight of the house.

Their appearance caused a ripple of excitement on the street. Kids gaped at the men before running off with high-pitched screams and laughter. Maybe the cops seemed funny to them – grown-ups in soldier outfits playing war games – or maybe it was just nervous laughter. The adults did not laugh or run off. There were mostly women on the street, a dozen or so gathered in twos and threes. They were old and young, mothers and girls. Most of them stood and stared, mesmerized by the sight or just rubbernecking. But at the time I had the sense there was something more distinctive and sinister going on. The awareness of race hung in the air like fog. Not racism or racial tension, nothing as grand as that. Just racial awareness, or maybe it is better to say racial wariness – the quickening attentiveness to race that lives under the thin membrane of civility.

Kelly and I jumped out of the car and ran across the street to join the ninjas. We waved our badges above our heads all the way across, just in case.

The commando leader grimaced at me. Under all that equipment, it took me a moment to place the El Greco face of Ed Kurth. ‘He show up?’ Kurth asked.

‘No,’ I told him in a distracted way. Then: ‘Is all this really necessary?’

‘Tactical Operations Unit. They’re trained for dangerous situations. Hostages, riots.’

‘But we don’t have any hostages or riots.’

‘We do have a dangerous situation, Chief Truman.’

I looked the cops over. Metallic rattles emitted from their equipment. ‘All this for one kid?’

‘The kid’s killed a cop and a DA. You think we’re going to fool around with him?’

‘No, but – These guys look like they’re ready to invade Poland.’

Kurth blinked twice and reassured me, ‘We’re not going to invade Poland.’

Our conversation might have stalled there, but Gittens and his own crew pulled up in three unmarked sedans, four men to a car. No lights, no sirens, no uniforms. No particular urgency. They wore jeans, sneakers, and vests, and carried rifles. Most had paunchy bellies and receding hairlines. But they had a scruffy, jock confidence, and I guessed they’d done this hundreds of times.

One of them, a burly fifty-something with a drinker’s flush and a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, greeted the commandos with an archetypal high-school taunt: ‘Afternoon, ladies.’

With all the old swagger returned, Gittens said to Kurth, ‘Are you guys here to back us up?’ Then to me, ‘How about you, Ben? You in?’ If he was still upset about my comments earlier in the day, he wasn’t showing it.

I said I would come along, imagining a complete rehabilitation from suspect to arresting officer in the space of one day.

Gittens directed that somebody issue equipment to Kelly and me. The red-faced guy with the cigarette escorted us to one of the cruisers and produced rifles and vests from the trunk. Up close, the man’s face was fascinating, distorted as it was by a bulb-tipped nose and a web of burst capillaries. I doubted this guy could chase Harold Braxton across a room, never mind across the neighborhood.

‘You know how to use one of these?’ he asked as he handed a rifle to me.

‘Yeah, you pull this thingy here, right?’

The guy smirked, pleased to have found a fellow smartass.

But Kelly saw through my bravado. ‘Pay attention,’ he said.

Suitably fitted out, we rejoined Gittens and Kurth at the head of what was now a sizable contingent.

‘We’ll go first,’ Gittens said.

‘No,’ Kurth told him. ‘It’s my scene. I’m the senior Homicide officer here. We’ll go first.’

‘Bullshit,’
Gittens retorted. ‘These guys know the neighborhood, they know Braxton. We’ll go.’

Kurth removed his helmet. ‘Gittens—’

‘I guarantee we get in without a problem.’

Kurth shook his head no.

‘Ed, how do you think he’s going to react when you burst in with the fucking Eighty-second Airborne? Don’t be stupid.’

Though Kurth was the ranking officer, the fact is the police are not the military – politics matters as much as chain of command. Kurth was not going to ram anything down the throat of the precinct detectives, with whom he had to work every time there was a homicide in the Flats. He put his helmet back on, resigned. ‘Fine. We’ll both go.’

It was a bad decision. There was bound to be confusion. Looking back on it, though, it probably didn’t matter which team went in, Gittens’s Rough Riders or Kurth’s ninjas. Emotions were running too high. We were looking for trouble.

The lobby of 111 St Albans Road was fairly noisy considering there was no one in it. Sounds drifted down the stairs: babies crying, TVs blaring. Somewhere a couple was arguing. (A man’s voice:
Right now. What’d I just say? Right now!)
The canned laughter of TV laugh tracks mixed with my adrenaline to create a druggy, funhouse atmosphere.
Ha ha ha ha . . .

Up the staircase, Gittens and Kurth in the lead.

On the third floor, a short hallway stretched out before us, lined with four dented metal doors. One of the doors was cluttered with Halloween decorations.

Gittens pointed to the door at the rear left corner, number 3C. ‘That’s the one,’ he told me. ‘Braxton’s in there. Come on, buddy. Bright lights, big city’ Was it possible he was enjoying this? ‘You want to knock and announce, Ben?’

‘Me?’

‘Braxton seems to trust you. He sure as hell doesn’t trust us.’

‘He doesn’t trust me that much.’

‘Hey, you don’t have to.’

For some reason, I did want to do it. I wanted to stand where Artie Trudell had, I wanted to feel it. It’s a stupid reason, of course, but there it is. Young men do stupid things, there’s no more to it than that.

Kurth objected, but Gittens overrode him. ‘He wants to do it,’ Gittens said, ‘let him.’

Kelly said, ‘Absolutely not. What’s wrong with you, Gittens?’

‘Ben wants to do it.’

‘It’s alright,’ I told them, ‘I’ll do it.’

I pressed up against the wall to the right of the door. Because 3C was a corner unit, it was impossible to stay away from the front of the door on this side. The others spread out along the walls. A few fanned out in the hallway so they could see the door.

Only Kelly came with me to the exposed right side of the doorway. He laid his arm across my chest as if he were going to hold me back, prevent me from stepping in front of the door. ‘Don’t do anything stupid,’ he said.

The wall was cool against the back of my head.

A sweet smell from one of these apartments. What? Peanuts. No, peanut sauce.

Gittens reached across the door to hand me the warrant, six sheets stapled and folded in thirds. He pointed at his watch:
Time.

Deep breath. I stepped in front of the door.

There was a surreal, suspended moment, a fermata during which I heard a line of sitcom patter on a TV somewhere –
Don’t worry, sir, we’ll have you doing the Lambeth Walk in no time
– followed by that funhouse laughter,
ha ha ha ha ha ha.

The fermata ended and things began to move very fast.

I pounded on the door. ‘Police. Open up. We have a warrant.’

The rasp of my own breathing.

Kelly pulled me back against the wall.

‘Harold, it’s Ben Truman! Please open the door please.’

There was shuffling inside the apartment but no acknowledgment.

A beat. Two beats.

Inside, a man’s voice said, ‘Okay, hold on a second, one second.’

Gittens made a face. Crouching beside the door, he snapped, ‘Go!’

Two guys came forward with a battering ram. It had a square steel plate welded on the front.

‘Wait. Gittens, he just said—’

‘No time, Ben, it’s taking too long. Can’t take the chance. Let’s go, let’s go!’

And I thought,
They mean to kill him.

The door flew open, cracked at the doorknob.

Gittens rolled around the edge of the doorway into the apartment, staying low, leading with his rifle.

I stepped forward but was shoved aside by the surge of rushing cops.

‘Police!Police!Police!’

I floated in after them with the rifle at my shoulder.

Inside was chaos. Motion. Screaming. Cops rushing around – ’Police! Police! Police! Don’t move! Get down! Get down on the ground!’ – running from one room to another.

A blur of a little girl scurried across the room, shrieking. One of the ninjas scooped her up with one black-gloved hand and carried her out. Her shrieking echoed in the stairway, softer and softer.

‘Do
not
move! Do
NOT
move!’

The cops were flooding the apartment room by room.

‘Show me your hands! I said show me your hands!’

The shouting was in a back bedroom. I began to move that way when a gunshot banged through the apartment.

Kurth and two ninjas rushed out of one room and disappeared into another. I followed them.

The single bed was neatly made, with a nubbly chenille bedspread. A cross and an image of Jesus Christ on the wall. Cops squeezed shoulder to shoulder at the foot of the bed. Kurth pushed them apart, then fell to his knees over a body. I pushed in behind him.

The man on the floor was African-American, around seventy years old. He wore a crimson shirt with a priest’s collar. His face was gray.

Kurth yelled, ‘Get an ambulance!’

The priest rolled onto his side. He was struggling to breathe. Kurth fumbled with the collar until he found the clip in back and opened it. It made no difference. The priest continued to writhe and suffocate.

‘Get back! Damn it, get back!’

We stepped back.

In the hallway behind me, one of the commandos moaned, ‘I didn’t shoot him, I didn’t shoot him.’

I looked for blood on the priest. There was none.

‘I didn’t kill him! Why didn’t the fuckin’ guy just show me his hands? I told him to show me his hands!’

The priest was no longer struggling.

Kurth felt his neck for a pulse. He rolled the man onto his back, pulled up the shirt and an undershirt, and put his ear to the old man’s chest. ‘Damn it,’ Kurth said. He began mouth-to-mouth.

Gittens rubbed his eyes as if he were very tired. ‘Jesus.’

A woman came to the bedroom door and screamed. No one reacted to her. She threw herself across the priest’s body, which forced Kurth to turn away from the priest’s open mouth long enough to spit out the command ‘Get her out.’ Two of the ninjas took her by the arms and pulled her away.

Kurth continued the CPR for several minutes. Long minutes, an hour in each minute. He meant to keep it up until the EMTs came, I suppose. He kept on puffing air into the man’s windpipe while, one by one, we realized it was too late. No one said anything, though, and for a while the only sounds in the room were Kurth’s huffing and the woman’s sobbing prayers. It was Kelly who finally stepped forward to tell Kurth the man was dead.

The priest, I later learned, was the Reverend Avril Walker, retired pastor of the Calvary Pentecostal Church of God in Christ, on Mission Ave. Braxton’s one-time protector, dead without a scratch on him. Cause of death: heart attack.

42

For a time after the priest’s death, the dozen or so cops in that room stared at their feet, abashed, like kids who have smashed a vase and know it can’t be put back together and there’ll be hell to pay. Gittens radioed the news to the A-3 stationhouse. After that, the word spread faster than I’d have thought possible. By the time we got downstairs, there was a small crowd gathering on the sidewalk. Twenty minutes later, it had swelled to a hundred people. As the streetlights buzzed overhead, the ritual crime-scene tape was strung between the light posts. The crowd grew, which required more police, which in turn drew news vans with klieg lights, which in turn drew more crowds. The raid team milled around for a time in the lobby, away from the stares and the cameras.

Then the questions began. Eventually they would all distill down to one: Did the Boston police kill Reverend Walker? But in those first hours after his death, there were a hundred different questions, from DAs and detectives and CPAC troopers.
Had we confirmed that Braxton was staying here? Had we felt pressured to make an arrest in this case? Would the warrant hold up? Was it a no-knock warrant? Had we knocked and announced, or just barged right in? Who fired the shot?
I answered as patiently as possible, even when the questions became more accusatory.
What were you doing there in the first place? Did you feel pressure from any Boston cops to do anything you felt was inappropriate? Or were you trying to prove something?

I measured my words carefully, I told as much of the truth as seemed necessary. ‘No, we did not feel pressured to make an arrest.’ ‘Yes, we knocked and announced’ (but then the damn cowboys from the A-3 decided to smash the door anyway). ‘Yes, I think proper procedures were followed.’ I repeated these near-truths because they were as true as anything else I might have said, and as I recycled my answers they became the truth, or at least one version of it. Eventually my voice took on a whingy, impatient tone. ‘I think I’ve answered that,’ I told them, and ‘My statement already covered that.’ Someone from BPD reassured me I would not be hung out to dry on this, which made me feel all the more vulnerable – it had not occurred to me that anyone would be hung out to dry. And if it came down to it, no doubt, they would sacrifice the hick from Versailles, Maine, rather than one of their own.