William Landay - Mission Flats

Through the windshield, I saw Gittens standing on the hard-packed sand by the water. He looked out over the lake, wearing neatly pressed khakis and a yellow rain slicker with a designer’s name stenciled across the back.

Beside him was my father.

Braxton, in the passenger seat, asked, ‘Sure you want to do this?’

‘I don’t have a choice. That’s my father with Gittens.’

‘Alright then. I got your back.’ When I hesitated, he shrugged. ‘This is what it is.’ His meaning was opaque — this is what it is — but he seemed to feel the aphorism explained this entire situation.

Braxton and I climbed down from the Bronco, and Braxton remained by the truck while I walked down to join Gittens and my father at the water’s edge.

Gittens glanced up the access road at Braxton, then returned his attention to the lake, with its weird phosphorescence. ‘I told you to come alone.’

‘You also told me to think.’

He smirked at me. ‘Like I’m looking in the mirror.’

Dad’s appearance was shocking. He wavered as if he might tip forward in a dead faint. Dark circles sagged under his eyes, and his hair, soaked, fell out in sparse curls. His hands were crossed over his belly.

I said to Gittens, ‘Take the cuffs off him.’

Gittens did so without hesitation, and my father massaged his beefy wrists.

‘Dad, are you drunk?’

His eyes fell, embarrassed.

I said to Gittens, ridiculously, ‘You did this to him.’

‘No, Ben. He did it to himself. I found him this way.’

‘Dad, what did you tell him?’

My father searched the sand for an answer.

‘Claude? Did you say anything to him?’

Gittens said in a soothing tone, ‘Of course he did.’

‘I didn’t ask you!’ I grabbed my father’s arms at the biceps and shook him. ‘Dad?’

Gittens intervened, ‘It’s alright, Ben, calm down. I already knew.’

‘What do you mean, you already knew?’

‘Ben, come on, think! I had an advantage: I knew I didn’t kill Danziger. I was the only one who could have known it for sure.’

I began to feel dizzy. My eyes scanned Gittens. Granules of sand adhered to his loafers and the cuffs of his pants. Rainwater beaded on his coat. As he moved, the beads skittered down his sleeves.

Gittens said, ‘It’s okay, Ben. Stay cool.’ He opened his raincoat and produced a gun, working it out of his belt with a seesaw motion.

As he turned to me, however, we were interrupted by a shout: ‘Hey!’ Braxton paced toward us pointing a gun at Gittens.

Gittens let the pistol dangle from his finger in the trigger guard, and he held it out for me to take. ‘It’s alright, Ben. You and I don’t need guns.’

I took the heavy gun, the same big black. 38 my father carried for years as chief of police.

‘Murder weapon,’ Gittens said simply.

‘That’s crazy.’

‘If you say so, Ben. We’ll let ballistics confirm it.’

It crossed my mind that I could heave the gun out into the lake. I imagined it twirling in the air, against the luminous sky, splashing, disappearing.

Gittens turned and said to Braxton, ‘It’s alright, Harold. We’re just talking.’

Braxton lowered his gun — my Beretta — and took a step back.

Gittens said, ‘The longest time, I could not figure out why you went to such lengths to follow this case, why you took such risks. You seemed too smart to take those kinds of chances. At first I thought you really must have killed Danziger. It was the only explanation. But it didn’t quite fit. You’re no killer. Even if you were, you’d never be so sloppy about it. It took a long time before it occurred to me: You were protecting someone.’

‘Braxton-’

‘No. Harold’s too smart. Besides, he didn’t need to do it. Harold and Danziger already had their deal.’

In my hand, the. 38 was heavy and still warm from Gittens’s belt. I wrapped my fingers idly around the plastic grip for the sensuous pleasure of its shape and its raised crosshatch texturing.

I said, ‘Dad, I think you better go. Martin and I need to talk.’

He said, ‘I’m sorry, Ben.’ He looked at me, then grabbed me in a bear hug. His nose beside my ear, I could hear deep breaths whiffle in and out of his nostrils. He squeezed my arms hard against my sides. I said, ‘Okay, Dad,’ and tapped him to signal the hug was over. But he did not let go. Maybe he could not let go. ‘Okay,’ I said again. Still he held tight.

Over his shoulder I saw Braxton standing by the Bronco, watching us.

That night in September — could it have been only six weeks before? it felt like another lifetime — my father had appeared at the stationhouse with a spray of red blood on his shirt and face. He seemed to be in shock. Rambling, incoherent. He could not explain the blood and, mistaking it for Dad’s own, I searched his body for an injury. It was Danziger’s blood. Dad had killed him with a single shot from the. 38.

Facing me in the stationhouse, he repeated the same question and answer: ‘What have I done? I did it. What have I done?’ And then, ‘Ben, what are we gonna do?’

I hesitated. What were we going to do?

Danziger. In our one brief conversation, hours before he was killed, I’d sensed Bob Danziger’s gentleness. I’d even liked him — his obvious decency — even as he said he would indict me for the assisted suicide of Anne Truman.

Wasn’t there something I could tell him? he wanted to know. Wasn’t there anything he could hang his hat on, anything to mitigate the facts in his file — a cop participating in a mercy killing. A cop! Help me out, Chief Truman, help me understand. I came up here myself hoping you could tell me something, hoping you could change my mind. If you weren’t a cop, then maybe, maybe…

I told him I had nothing to say, he’d wasted a trip. It was a family matter anyway.

You know, Bob Danziger told me, it’s first-degree murder, you understand that? The intent is there, the whole thing was planned. I’ve tried to worry it down to second-degree or manslaughter, but I can’t see a way. The facts just don’t fit. With one hand, he worked the skin around his eyes. There were red freckles on the backs of his fingers. Sometimes, he said, this job is just too much.

A few hours later Danziger was gone.

And here was my father, a thread of Danziger’s blood caught in his hair. He said, ‘I couldn’t let them take you, Ben. Not you and Annie both. I just couldn’t let him do it. When I heard, I just-’

He said, ‘What do we do?’

I hesitated.

What was I going to do? What was a son and policeman supposed to do?

I hesitated — then, in a moment, it was decided. ‘Where’s the gun, Dad?’

‘I dropped it.’

‘Where?’

‘The cabin.’

‘Dad, we have to go get it. Right now, you hear me?’

I do not excuse my actions, and I certainly do not excuse my father’s. I simply did not have the strength — of will, of emotion, of character — to erase my family completely. My mother was dead, now a man named Danziger was dead too. I tried to stop the chain of suffering there.

We went to the cabin, retrieved Dad’s gun, and locked the place up.

And we waited.

An hour became a day became a week.

I went back to the cabin again and again. I pored over the body. I read Danziger’s files and discovered the pattern of kill shots used by the Mission Posse: a gunshot to the eye, just as my father had shot Danziger. It was a fateful convergence. I tweaked the scene, made it look like a gang murder. I burned the file on my mother’s death. To delay the discovery of the body and destroy the papers that now bore my fingerprints, I ran Danziger’s Honda into the lake one night after dark.