THE HOSTS were dosed!” Ray had screamed, begging the mob not to shred his brother.
Nobody got it until His Eminence Richard Cardinal Cushing started acting funny. He had taken and eaten first, as was liturgical practice, the only person to sample the chalices. It was never confirmed that His Eminence took an acid trip, although when Monsignor Pasqua rushed him to a limousine, Cushing was studying his cufflinks with mounting awe.
The Cardinal was his old self soon enough. The next morning, he summoned the mayor and demanded Biff Dunn’s head.
Ray and Vinnie Sullivan and Manny told everyone with ears to test the wafers for LSD—just test them—but nobody listened until Lem Childs came forward. He had survived a harrowing acid trip at Joe Mears’s hands, and he had seen in his hallucinations the whole folly of his life. Childs was finally ready to talk about the Special Wing, the Navy’s LSD experiments, and the deaths which followed: Poole, Zimquist, Garrett Hays, Father Sedgewick. He was ready to admit selling fentanyl and acid to Joe Mears to save his own skin.
Ray sent Lem Childs to Martin Pasqua at the chancery. Pasqua didn’t want to believe Childs’s story, since it implicated Father Sedgewick in the cruel experiments, but there remained the undeniable record of Sedgewick’s scapular and self-scourging from the January autopsy. Something had happened in Portsmouth.
Pasqua was willing to test the wafers salvaged from the sidewalk. He saw a problem, however: only a priest could touch Eucharist, but only a chemist could test them. Pasqua dug up an old Marquette Jesuit who taught organic chem. The Jesuit took the hosts into a lab and found that they were covered with d-lysergic acid diethylamide. Ray pounced on these results, insisting that the test cleared Biff of everything—proving both that Biff was drugged when he shot Shecky and that, by hijacking the chalices, Biff had saved thousands of people from a nightmare he himself had already endured.
Strangely, it was Martin Pasqua, Cushing’s hatchet man, who pressed Johnny Cahill to do a package deal. Biff would retire from the Boston Police Department on one-quarter disability, sixty bucks a month; in return, Cahill would drop all charges forever. Pasqua got the Cardinal to weigh in on Biff’s side, but Johnny Cahill hung tough until he got the prize he really wanted: Ray Dunn’s signature on a letter of resignation in which he confessed to burglary, bribery, and abuse of prosecution. The letter went to Johnny Cahill’s safe, silencing Ray and clearing the path for Eddie Cahill’s run for DA that fall. As a threat of any kind to the emerging Cahill dynasty, Ray Dunn was finished—tainted, fairly or not, as a bag man’s son and a madman’s brother—and though Ray’s letter of resignation never left Johnny’s safe, word of its contents leaked out. Johnny and Eddie saw to that.
Eddie Cahill proved as weak a candidate as he was a man, and several challengers came forward, including an assistant DA who was very much like Ray Dunn, right down to his name, Ron Dolan. Both were respected lawyers from cop families. Both had three sons. Ray Dunn was thirty-four, Ron Dolan thirty-six. The two were so alike in looks and style and even in certain small mannerisms that it was a little spooky. It was as if the clean and promising half of Ray Dunn had been cut away and made into the perfect civil servant.
Ron Dolan beat Eddie Cahill two to one in the Democratic primary, then rolled to victory in the November general. He served quietly and well as Suffolk County DA until 1972, when he foolishly ran for governor. He was one of four candidates crushed by a little-known state senator from Brookline named Michael Dukakis.
Of course, a question remained: if Ron Dolan was everything clean and promising in Ray Dunn, what was left for Ray himself?
RAY DUNN became one of those ex-prosecutors who haunt the criminal courts, starving for work but ashamed to be seen in the courthouse canteen with the mugger or wife-beater he happened to represent that day. Ray had scorned such men until he joined their ranks.
Now he vowed that he would be different. He vowed he would be as devoted to defending as he had once been to prosecuting, and even made little rules to salve his conscience: no violent criminals, no sex offenders, no drug dealers. But this left almost nobody to defend, and by early 1967, Ray was facing eviction from his storefront office, foreclosure on his house, and personal bankruptcy, until deliverance came from an unlikely quarter.
Caesar Raines was paroled after serving a year for his part in the Gibraltar operation. Soon after his release, Narco busted him yet again. Caesar asked Ray to handle the defense and put a stack of fifties on Ray’s desk.
“What is it this time?” Ray asked.
“Just good old dope,” Caesar said. “I’m through messin’ with the funky stuff.”
“Haven’t you learned your lesson?”
Caesar got all wry and grandfatherly. “Old dogs, old tricks. How ’bout it?”
“This drug money?” Ray asked, holding the cash retainer like one of Caesar’s Chinese hand fans.
“No.” Caesar smiled. “It’s American money.”
MANNY MANNING finished his tour in Narco and accepted a job teaching tactics at the Academy, where he was an awesome, battle-scarred figure to the cadets. He spent his free time on his motorboat, fighting the bluefish off Hull. Nat Butterman took over the team, becoming Sergeant Butterman, with Paddy Hicks as his Shecky Bliss.
Ray went to Manny’s house for dinner and they argued bitterly about the Vietnam War.
“It’s just another Operation Pressure Point,” Ray said. “A half million troops, ten million bucks a day, for what? Bodycounts. Headlines. Clear the Vietcong out of the South End and move them into the Back Bay. Sound familiar, Manny?”
Manny’s wife still complained about Sunday mass in English, the language of grocery shopping and police radio.
“It isn’t right,” she protested. “Mass should be in Latin. That’s how it was for a thousand years. Why does everything have to change, Manny?”
MARY-PAT wasn’t at that dinner. She and Ray had separated a few months before and were seeing a marriage counselor twice a week. Ray, being old school, hated paying a stranger by the hour to invade his privacy, but Mary-Pat said if he didn’t like the marriage counselor, he could see a divorce lawyer. Ray moved in with Biff.
The first counselor they saw told them to scream.
Mary-Pat screamed right there in the man’s office, long and loud, her tonsils vibrating. Then it was Ray’s turn.
“Go ahead,” the counselor coaxed. “Let it out.”
Ray told Mary-Pat, “I’m sorry for whatever I did or didn’t do. I’ll be better in the future. Can we leave now, please?”
“Scream,” she screamed at him, and opened her mouth to show him how.
But Ray couldn’t scream, not in the marriage counselor’s office, not in the elevator to the street with Mary-Pat, not even alone by the highway late that night when he pulled over at a rest stop and tried his hardest.
The next counselor hypnotized them. Mary-Pat, in a trance, admitted that she loved Win Babcock. She wept. She told a long story about how she had thrown herself at Win for a year until she realized that he didn’t love her back.
When Ray was hypnotized, the counselor asked him about his father and mother, and Ray, who didn’t feel hypnotized, told the guy the plain truth: his father was a good man who fucked up a couple things and his mother was better than most. The man listened and took notes, then snapped his fingers sharply.
He asked Ray, “Do you remember what you just told me?”
Ray was desperate to please his wife, which meant pleasing this fucking clown, so he acted like a child just awakened. “No,” he said. “Did I have a breakthrough?”
He didn’t have a breakthrough—he didn’t know what a breakthrough was. Instead, he had his sons every weekend at Biff’s apartment, and he did all the dad things with them that he had been too busy to do when he was first assistant DA. He took them to ballgames, to playgrounds, and to the petting zoo—and when it rained he took them to museums, until they ran out of museums.
Ray Jr. was stoic, a Dunn. Timmy was more like Mary-Pat—dreamy and moody, easily excited and often disappointed. Stephen, who was just starting to talk, couldn’t remember his parents together. He seemed the happiest of them all.
BIFF spent his days pasting newspaper clippings into used photo albums he bought at the Salvation Army. One album was labeled Precious Memories, another Our Daughter’s Wedding. Biff called the photo albums “books,” a Narco term for surveillance files kept on long-term targets. There had once been books for Caesar Raines, for Bo Norman, and for the Cuban Angel. Ray figured Biff was carefully building a case against reality.
Biff had one book for clippings on the Kennedy assassination, another for applesauce recipes, a third for crossword puzzles he had “solved” by filling in the squares with careful, block-print gibberish. A three-letter word for “Santa pal”? Biff wrote NUD. Seven letters, “Madagascar port”? Biff tried AXYLMOP. He sat in his flat off Dorchester Bay listening to three radios. He spent hours tuning the knobs down and up, trolling for a lost clue to everything that had happened.
In March 1967, Biff, at long last, detected the Clue. He snapped two of his radios off and sat riveted to a song on the third radio:
One pill makes you larger
And one pill makes you small,
But the ones that mother gives you
Don’t do anything at all.
Go ask Alice
When she’s ten feet tall.
Biff took a trolley to Harvard Square and wound up in the Discomat across Mass Ave from the Yard. He chatted up kids in the record store. They told him about something totally new, The Sound of San Francisco.
“What does The Sound of San Francisco sound like?” Biff asked. He was twenty-nine, but looked forty-five. Everyone is hitching out there for the Summer of Love, the kids said. It was free space, beins, groovy music, great drugs.
“Acid?” Biff asked.
The most, the best, the purest, he was told.
Biff purchased the single “White Rabbit,” by the Jefferson Airplane, and listened to it in his ratty flat 102 times. During the 103rd listening, Biff made up what was left of his mind.
He cashed out his savings account and went up to Navy Avenue in the Heights. He saw a guy he once knew and paid him one hundred dollars for a Marine-issue Colt .45 and two clips stolen from a ship bound for Indochina.
That night, Ray came back from a desultory car ride with his sons and put them all to bed in his own room in the flat. Ray made up the couch and was ready to go to sleep on it when Biff dropped his bomb.
“I’m taking the bus to San Francisco,” he said.
“What the hell for?” Ray asked.
“Make a new start,” Biff bluffed. “Clean slate.”
Ray slapped his pillow and threw it on the couch. “Forget about it,” he said.
Biff dropped the pretense. “I got to go,” he said. “Mears is out there. I heard him.”
Biff played “White Rabbit” for his brother, volume low so as not to disturb Ray’s sons in the back bedroom.
“That’s a dumb song,” Ray remarked when it was over.
The two brothers argued in hushed and bitter tones all night, finally settling down to beans and franks at midnight. They chewed in silence around the old kitchen table.
The next morning, Ray piled his sons in the car and drove Biff to Greyhound. Ray and Biff hugged goodbye alongside the bus. Ray felt the gun on Biff’s hip.
Ray recoiled. “What the hell’s that?”
Biff looked Ray in the eyes. “I’m gonna find Joe Mears in the Summer of Love. I’m gonna put this fat Colt in his face.”
“Then?”
Biff said, “Et cetera.”
The boys were whining for breakfast as Ray watched the Greyhound make the pike. Ray herded them back into the car and let them whine. He drove, without knowing why, to the Paulist Fathers’ church on the Common. Ray dragged his sons inside and tucked five bucks—all he had—in the poor box for Biff. Ray had not been inside a church since his brother threw the hosts in the gutter.
Ray meant to go, but stayed. For the first time in his life, he heard mass in this language.