Mission Flats (44 page)

I said, ‘Franny, Bob Danziger asked for your help, didn’t he? You were one of the only witnesses still out there, you and Julio Vega. Danziger wanted to go after Artie Trudell’s killer.’

Silence.

‘Did he ask you to help, Franny? Or was he going to subpoena you?’

‘He didn’t need a subpoena,’ Franny mumbled. ‘He told me I owed it to Artie. That was enough, after all that time. The thing was, Danziger didn’t know what he was getting into until we started talking. Now he knows.’ His eyes were drifting left and right as if he were watching a badminton match taking place somewhere behind me. ‘Maybe I’ll end up the same way. Got to be better than this.’

I should point out that, according to Caroline, in his day Franny Boyle was the most feared, most eloquent, most charismatic prosecutor in Boston. He was never much on the legal fine points, and by order of the DA he was not permitted to try a serious felony without an appellate attorney in the second chair, ready to hedge him in when he began to push the limits of courtroom oratory. But the true measure of a trial lawyer’s talent is winning, and Francis X. Boyle won over and over again, so much so that it became a perverse point of pride with him when it could later be proven that he’d actually convicted innocent people. The defendant’s innocence, he believed, merely raised the bar a little.

That evening – by this point the sun had set, leaving Franny’s office in a dim half-light until someone finally turned on the fluorescent overheads – we caught a glimpse of Franny’s gift when he pulled himself together sufficiently to tell the tale of Bob Danziger’s murder, a tale that stretched back twenty years. What few legal rules I am aware of, Franny broke in telling the story. He dipped in and out of characters’ heads, he threw in hearsay and rumor, he added facts he could not possibly have known, he may even have misstated a little evidence. He was as he had always been, in Caroline’s words, ‘an appeal waiting to happen.’ But the man could tell a story. He must have been a hell of a lawyer, because drunk and broken down as he was, he could still spin a yarn for you. He made you see it. Franny Boyle put you right there.

Fasulo looks down again. Maybe it won’t be so bad. Not so fuckin’ bad. Lot of guys died making the Tobin Bridge, that’s what everybody says. They fell off, maybe, and that’s all there was to it. Some of them even fell into the wet concrete and they got built right into the bridge, isn’t that what people say about this bridge? Isn’t that right? Or do they say that about every fuckin’ bridge? So how bad can it be just falling? Who is this fuckin’ pig? How did he fuckin’find me? Somebody fuckin’ ratted me out, some fuckin’ cocksucker, and I’ll fuckin’ kill that cocksucker, whoever it was, only I won’t kill that cocksucker cuz I’m never gonna get off this FUCKIN’ BRIDGE
—

‘Kurth, you gettin’ all this?’

Kurth nodded. He was scratching furiously at a legal pad, trying to catch up to Franny I assume he was not trying to copy it all down verbatim. Even so . . .

‘You need me to go back and tell it again, you just say so.’

‘Don’t worry about me, Franny,’ Kurth said. ‘You just keep talking.’

‘I don’t want you to miss anything. Everybody who hears this story, they tend not to be around when that grand-jury day comes.’ He gave us all a little leer to be sure we got the point: The price for watching this danse macabre was that sooner or later any of us could be pulled from the audience and made to join in.

But in this summer of 1987 Frank Fasulo has begun to crawl back into Artie Trudell’s consciousness in a new and surprising way. Trudell stopped using the Tobin Bridge long ago. Now, on those rare occasions when he has to get to the North Shore, he makes the long sweep around Route 128, the ring road around Boston. A few extra minutes of driving time is a small – price to – pay for avoiding the nightmares that crossing the Tobin dredges up. But there is another bridge Trudell has to cross, one he can’t avoid. It is the Sagamore Bridge, one of two bridges that separate Massachusetts from Cape Cod. The Sagamore is a high bridge, much more graceful than the Tobin, a 1930s WPA project that spans the Cape Cod Canal. And isn’t it Artie Trudell’s dumb luck that his in-laws have a place in Dennis? That his wife insists on going to the Cape, for the kids, she says? Trudell is able to wiggle out of most of these trips. He can pile on the details and the double-shifts and jam up his schedule so tight in the summertime that there isn’t time for trips to Cape Cod. Sorry, honey. But there are too many weekends to avoid it altogether, and eventually she starts in with ‘do you mean to tell me you never even get a day off, Artie? Not one day? Are you the only cop in Boston?’ So Artie Trudell – who never liked to fight, giant though he is – has to face the Sagamore Bridge. Twice each trip, once on the way down, once on the way back. These crossings are causing a kind of anxiety that Trudell can’t quite explain. He even looked it up in the DSM, the dictionary of neuroses, the bible for crazies like Artie Trudell feels himself becoming. The proper name for it is
gephyrophobia
, the fear of crossing bridges, and Trudell’s anxiety is nothing compared to some of the case histories in the book. There are people – wack jobs – who get it so bad they can’t even be near a bridge, never mind on one. Trudell’s anxiety is nothing like that. But it is real enough. He becomes irritable, distracted, he sweats, especially when the Cape traffic leaves him up on that bridge for fifteen, twenty minutes at a time. He dreads the ride home and can’t sleep the night before. Now, in the summer of ’87, it has gotten worse, much worse, because each crossing triggers memories of Frank Fasulo. Every trip to the Cape to see his goddamn in-laws, every trip across the goddamn Sagamore Bridge triggers another round of dreams and night-sweats and worries. And visions: Frank Fasulo tipping forward like a chopped-down tree. Fasulo spinning around the bridge support like Gene Kelly on that lamppost in Singin’ in the Rain. Fasulo diving downward at such speeds . . . By July, Trudell is barely sleeping, and the guilt and exhaustion have begun to feed each other. Artie Trudell feels himself draining away.