A Drink Before the War (17 page)

If Jenna had hidden something in that car, it would make a perverse bit of sense. Sure, a car sitting untended in Boston for more than four or five minutes usually loses its stereo and speakers, and more often than not, the rest of it as well. But the chopping block market for fifteen-year-old Chevies ain't what it used to be, and no self-respecting car thief is going to waste precious time screwing around with the boot. So, unless she hid it in her stereo, there was a good chance it was still there. If she'd hidden anything there in the first place. Big if.

We sat and watched the car, waiting for darkness to fall. The sun had set but the sky still held its warmth, a canvas of beige streaked with wisps of orange. Somewhere behind or in front of us—in a tree, on a roof, in a bush, at one with the natural urban world—Bubba lurked in wait, his eyes as constant and emotionless as T. J. Eckleburg's.

We had no music going, because the Vobeast has no radio, and it was damn near killing me. God only knows how people kept their sanity before rock and roll. I considered what Angie had said about my motives, about my father, about taking my anger out on Mulkern and his cronies, anger at a world that had settled the score with my father before I had a chance to. If she was wrong, we'd find out when we finally got our hands on the evidence and I turned it over for another signed check, including the bonus. If she was right, we'd find out about that too. Either way, I didn't like thinking about it.

There was, come to think about it, way too much happening lately that required pauses for introspection. I've never made any bones about it—I love investigating things, as long as I'm not one of them. But suddenly, there were all these hot-blooded confrontations with people in my life—Richie, Mulkern, Angie. All of a sudden I was being asked to reevaluate myself in terms of racism, politics, and the Hero. My three least favorite subjects. Much more in
trospection and I'd end up growing a long white beard, maybe wearing a white smock, sipping a glass of hemlock while I read
The Crito
. Maybe I'd move to Tibet, climb a mountain with the Dalai Lama or head to Paris and wear nothing but black, grow myself a keen goatee and talk about jazz all the time.

Or maybe I'd do what I always do—hang out and see what develops. Fatalist to the core.

Angie said, “What do you think?”

The sky was turning to ink, and there wasn't a working streetlight for miles. I said, “Time for a little B and E.”

There was no one on the stoops as we came down the hill, but that wouldn't last much longer on a humid Sunday night. This wasn't the type of neighborhood where people took off to the Cape for the Fourth of July. We had to get in, find whatever it was we were looking for, and get out. People who don't have much usually protect what they've got in lethal ways. Whether the trigger's pulled by a Bobby Royce or a little old lady, the damage can often be damn similar.

Angie pulled the slim jim from her jacket as we approached the car, and before you could say “grand theft auto,” she'd slid it down beside the window and popped the lock. I had no idea what sort of house Jenna had kept—the only time I'd seen it someone had gone through it like a storm front—but she kept a pristine car. Angie took the backseat, reaching down under the seat and behind it, pulling up the mats, looking for telltale tears in the carpet.

I did pretty much the same in the front seat. I pulled open the ashtray, found it brimming with Marlboro butts, closed it. I took what looked like warranties and repair records and an owner's manual from the glove compartment, but I stuffed it all in the plastic bag I'd brought anyway. Easier to check through it all when we got out of here. I reached under the dashboard, ran my hand around, didn't find anything taped there. I checked the door panels for rips or cuts in the seams. Nada. I took a screwdriver to the
running panel on the passenger side; maybe Jenna'd seen
The French Connection
. I opened it: Maybe she hadn't.

Angie was doing the same to the panel on the driver's side. When she removed it, she didn't shout “Eureka,” so I figured she hadn't found any more than I had. We were steadily getting nowhere when someone said, “Ain't they pretty?”

I sat up in the seat, my hand on my gun, and saw the girl who'd been sitting on the steps the last time I'd been here. Jerome was standing beside her and they were holding hands. Jerome said, “You meet Roland yet?”

I sat up in the seat. “Haven't had the pleasure.”

Jerome looked at Angie, kept looking, not wide-eyed, just interested. He said, “The fuck you doing in his mother's car, man?”

“Working.”

His girlfriend lit a cigarette. She took a drag, blew the smoke in my direction. A thick ring of red lipstick looped around the white filter. She said, “He's the man was there when Jenna got herself killed by Curtis.”

Jerome said, “I know that, Sheila. Damn.” He looked at me. “You're a detective, right?”

I looked at Sheila's cigarette again. Something about it annoyed me, but I couldn't figure out what yet. I said, “Yeah, Jerome. Got a badge and everything.”

Jerome said, “Beats working for a living.”

Sheila took another hit off her cigarette, placed another red ring slightly above the first.

Angie sat up in the seat and lit one too. Carcinogen city.

I looked at Sheila, then at Angie. I said, “Ange.”

“Yeah?”

“Did Jenna wear lipstick?”

Jerome was watching us with a cocked eyebrow, his arms folded across his chest. Angie thought about it. She took a few more drags off her cigarette, blew the smoke out in slow streams. She said, “Yeah. Come to think of it. It was subtle, a light pink, but yeah.”

I flipped open the car ashtray. “What kind of cigarettes she smoke, you remember?”

“Lights, I think. Or Vantage, maybe. Definitely something with a white filter.”

“But she'd just started again,” I said, remembering Jenna's claim that she hadn't smoked in ten years until the events of the past few weeks caused her to start back up.

The cigarettes in the ashtray had cork filters and no lipstick rings on them. I yanked the ashtray out, swung my legs out of the car. “Step back for a sec' please, Jerome.”

“Yassuh, bawse, whatever you say.”

“I said ‘please,' Jerome.”

Jerome and Sheila took two steps back. I dumped the ashtray on the sidewalk. Jerome said, “Hey, man, some of us got to live here.”

Metal gleamed up through the pile of ash. I reached down, scattered the ash, and picked up a key. I said, “We got what we came for.”

Angie said, “Neato,” and got out of the car.

Jerome said, “Congratulations. Now, pick that shit back up, man.”

I held the ashtray by the curb and brushed everything back into it. I put it on the seat and got out of the car. I said, “You're all right, Jerome.”

Jerome said, “Thanks. Just knowing I please white folks like yourself makes me a complete man.”

I smiled and we walked back up the hill.

 

It was a locker key, number 506. Could have belonged to a locker at Logan Airport or the Greyhound Station in Park Square or the Amtrak Terminal at South Station. Or any number of bus depots in Springfield or Lowell or New Hampshire or Connecticut or Maine or God knew where else.

Angie said, “So, what do you want to do? Check them all?”

“Don't have much choice.”

“That's a lot of places.”

“Look on the bright side.”

“Which is?”

“Think of all the overtime we can pay ourselves.”

She hit me, but not as hard as I thought she would.

We decided we'd
start in the morning. There were a lot of lockers in the state and we'd need all the energy we had; right now, we were running on fumes. Angie went home and Bubba followed. I slept in the office because it was harder to approach than my apartment; footsteps in the empty church would echo like cannon shots.

While I slept, a knot the size of a seashell worked its way into my neck, and my legs cramped up where they bent on the cot against the wall.

And sometime while I slept, war broke out.

 

Curtis Moore was the first to fall in the line of duty. Shortly after midnight a fire broke out at the nurse's desk in the prison hospital ward. The two cops on duty by Curtis's bed got up to take a look. It wasn't much of a fire—a rag doused in rubbing alcohol tossed in a trash can, a match thrown in for combustion. The two cops and the nurse found a fire extinguisher, doused it, and then it didn't take the cops too long to figure out a possible motive behind it. By the time they burst back in the room, Curtis had a hole the size of a hand in his throat and the initials J. A. carved into his forehead.

Three members of the Raven Saints met their blaze of glory next. Coming back from a late game at Fenway Park and a little subway wilding for a nightcap, they stepped out of Ruggles Station and had a one-sided conversation with an AK-47 pointed from a car. One of them, a sixteen-year-
old named Gerard Mullins, took a burst to his upper thighs and abdomen, but didn't die. He played possum in the shadows until the car drove away, and then he started crawling toward Columbus Avenue. He was halfway between the subway station and the corner when they came back and stitched a line from just below his ear to just above his ankle.

Socia was stepping out of a bar on South Huntington, two soldiers a few feet behind him, when James Tyrone, a fifteen-year-old member of the Angel Avengers, stepped from behind a van with a .45 aimed at Socia's nose. He pulled the trigger and the gun jammed, and by the time Socia's bodyguards stopped firing, he was in the middle of South Huntington turning the yellow divider line a dark red.

Three Avengers went down in Franklin Park next. Then, two more Saints caught it while sitting on a stoop in Intervale. Another cycle of retaliation followed that one, and by the time the sun came up, the worst night in Boston gang history leveled out at twenty-six wounded, twelve dead.

 

My phone started ringing at eight. I grabbed it somewhere around the fourth ring. I said, “What?”

Devin said, “You heard?”

I said, “No,” and tried to go back to bed.

“Boston's favorite father-and-son team just went to war.”

My head dropped off the side of the cot. “Oh, no.”

“Oh, yes.” He gave me the rundown.

“Twelve dead?” I said. “Jesus.” Maybe par for the course in New York, but here it was astronomical.

“Twelve at the moment,” he said. “Probably five or six on the critical list who won't make Independence Day. It's a wonderful life, isn't it?”

“Why're you calling me at eight in the morning with this, Dev?”

“Because I want you down here in an hour.”

“Me? Why?”

“Because you were the last person to talk to Jenna Angeline, and someone just happened to drill her initials onto Curtis Moore's head. Because you met with Socia yesterday and didn't tell me. Because word around town is you got something both Socia and Roland are willing to kill for, and I'm tired of waiting for you to tell me what that is out of the goodness of your heart. You, Kenzie, because lying is second nature to you, but it's harder to do in an interrogation room. So, get your ass down here and bring your partner with you.”

“I think I'll bring Cheswick Hartman with me too.”

“Go right ahead, Patrick. And that'll please me so much, I'll press obstruction charges against you and toss you in jail for a night. By the time Cheswick gets you out, all the fuckers we arrested last night from the Saints and Avengers ought to know your ass real intimately.”

“I'll be there in an hour,” I said.

“Fifty minutes,” he said. “The clock started ticking when you picked up the phone.” He hung up.

I called Angie, told her I'd be ready in twenty minutes.

I didn't call Cheswick.

I called Richie at home but he was already at work. I tried him there.

“How much you know?” he asked.

“Nothing more than you guys.”

“Bullshit. Your name keeps coming up in this one, Patrick. And weird shit's going down at the State House.”

I was working my way into a shirt, but I stopped, my right arm sticking out, frozen, like it was in a cast. I said, “What weird shit?”

“The street terrorism bill.”

“What about it?”

“It was supposed to go to floor today. Early. So everyone could beat the traffic up to the Cape for the Fourth.”

“And?”

“And no one is there. The State House is empty. Twelve kids died last night in gang violence and the next morning,
when a bill that's allegedly going to start curbing all that shit is supposed to go to floor, suddenly no one's interested anymore.”

“I got to go,” I said.

I could have airmailed the phone to Rhode Island and still heard his voice. “What the fuck do you know?”

“Nada. Got to run.”

“No more favors, Patrick. No more.”

“Love it when you scold me.” I hung up.

 

I was waiting in front of the church when Angie pulled up in that brown thing she calls a car. On weekends and holidays, Phil has no need for it; he stocks up on Budweiser and settles into the Barcalounger and watches whatever's on TV. Who needs a car when Gilligan still hasn't gotten off the island? Angie drives it whenever she can so she can listen to
her
tapes; she also claims I'm a lousy driver behind the wheel of the Vobeast because I don't care what happens to it. This isn't entirely true; I would care if something happened to it and I'd like some money from the insurance company if it ever did.

The ride from Angie's to Berkeley Street took less than ten minutes. The city was empty. Those who had gone to the Cape had left Thursday or Friday. Those who were going to the Esplanade for tomorrow's concert and fireworks hadn't started camping out yet. Everyone had taken the day off. During the ride, we saw something few Bostonians ever see—empty parking spaces. I kept asking her to stop at each one and back in and out again, just to see what it felt like.

Upper Berkeley, by Police Headquarters, was different. The block was cordoned off with sawhorses. A beefy patrolman waved us around the block. We could see vans with satellite dishes on top, cables running like overweight pythons across the street, white TV trucks parked on the sidewalk, and the black Crown Victorias of the upper police brass parked three-deep by the curb.

We swung over to St. James and parked easily enough, then walked back to the rear door of the building. A young black cop stood in front of the door, hands crossed behind his back, legs spread in military stance. He glanced at us. “Press goes through the front door.”

“We're not press.” We identified ourselves. “We have an appointment with Detective Amronklin.”

The cop nodded. “Go up these stairs. Fifth floor, take a right. You'll see him.”

We did. He was sitting on a table at the end of a long corridor with his partner, Oscar Lee. Oscar is big and black and just as mean as Devin. He talks a little less but drinks just as much. They've been partners so long they even got their respective divorces on the same day. Each has taken a bullet for the other, and penetrating just the surface of their relationship would be as easy as digging through cinder block with a plastic spoon. They noticed us at the same time, looked up, and held their tired eyes on us as we walked down the corridor toward them. They both looked like shit, tired and cranky, ready to stomp on anyone who didn't give them what they wanted. They both had splotches of blood on their shirts and coffee cups in their hands.

We entered the office and I said, “Hey.”

They nodded. If they became more similar they'd be joined at the hip.

Oscar said, “Have a seat, folks.”

There was a scarred card table in the middle of the room with a telephone and a tape recorder on it. We took seats on the side closest to the wall, and Devin sat down on my right, beside the phone, while Oscar sat to Angie's left, beside the tape recorder. Devin lit a cigarette and Oscar turned on the tape recorder. A voice said: “Recording copied August the sixth, nineteen ninety-three. Listed under bar code number 5756798. Evidence room, Boston police headquarters, precinct nine, 154 Berkeley Street.”

Devin said, “Turn it up a bit.”

Oscar did, and there were fifteen or twenty seconds of dead air, then the sound of a low rumble and lots of metal on metal sounds, as if a dinner party of ten were all rubbing their knives and forks together. Water dripped somewhere in there too. A voice said, “Cut him again.”

Devin looked at me.

The voice sounded like Socia's.

Another voice: “Where?”

Socia: “Fuck do I care? Be inventive. That knee looks sensitive.”

There was a moment when the only sound was the dripping water, then someone screamed, long and loud and shrill.

Socia laughed. “I'm doing one of your eyes next, so why don't you tell me, get it over with.”

The other voice: “Get it over with. He ain't fucking with you, Anton.”

“I ain't fucking with you, Anton. You know that.”

A low, wheezing sound. Weeping.

Socia: “Too many tears coming out of that eye. Take it out.”

I sat up in my chair.

The other voice said, “What?”

Socia: “I stutter? Take it out.”

There was a soft, unpleasant sound, the sound a shoe makes when it steps into slush.

And then the scream. Impossibly high-pitched, a mixture of excruciating pain and horrified disbelief.

Socia: “It's on the floor in front of you, Anton. Give me the name, fuck. Who turned you?”

The screaming hadn't subsided yet. It rang clear and hard and steady.

“Who turned you? Stop screaming.” A harsh flesh-on-flesh sound. The screaming blew up to a louder pitch.

“Who fucking turned you?”

The screaming was defiant now, an angry howl.

“Who fu—Fuck it. Rip out the other one. No, not with that. Get a fucking spoon, man.”

There was a sound of soft footsteps, squeaking a bit as they walked away from wherever the microphone was.

The screaming turned into a whimper.

Socia, in a soft whisper: “Who turned you, Anton? It'll be over quick, soon as you tell me.”

The whimper screeched something unintelligible.

Socia said, “I promise. It'll all be over, soon as you tell me. You'll die quick and painless.”

A torn sob, ragged breathing, gasping for air, a steady weeping that lasted for over a minute.

“Come on now. Tell me.”

From the sob came: “Na. Na I—”

“Hand me that fucking spoon.”

“Devin. The cop! Devin!” It sounded like the words had been pushed out of the body through a torn hole.

Devin reached over and shut off the tape recorder. I realized I was sitting rigid in my chair, half out of it, my spine bowed. I looked at Angie. Her skin was white, her fists tight against the arms of the chair.

Oscar looked bored, staring up at the ceiling. He said, “Anton Meriweather. Sixteen years old. Devin and me turned him in December and he informed on Socia. He was a soldier with the Saints. Oh yeah, he's dead.”

I said, “You have this tape. Why's Socia still walking around?”

Devin said, “You ever see a jury try to make a decision on a voice ID? You ever seen how many people a defense attorney will find who sound just like the guy on that tape? Did you hear anyone call Socia by name on that tape?”

I shook my head.

“I just want you to know who you're dealing with here, kids. After Anton gave my name up, they worked on him for another ninety minutes. Ninety minutes. Long time to be alive with your eye ripped out. When we found him, three days later, I didn't recognize him. Neither did his
mother. We had to do a dental just to be sure it was Anton.”

Angie cleared her throat. “How'd you get that recording?”

Oscar said, “Anton was wearing it. Between his legs. He knew he had the whole thing on tape, all he had to do was say Socia's name, and his brain froze up and he forgot. Pain'll do that.” He looked at Devin, then back at me. “Mr. Kenzie, I ain't going to try and turn this into good cop/bad cop, but Devin's a friend of yours, and I'm not. I liked Anton a whole hell of a lot though. So I want to know what you know about the shit going on and I want to know now. You figure a way to do that without compromising your clients, that's OK with me. But if you can't figure a way, you're going to tell me anyway. 'Cause we're tired of picking bodies up off the street.”

I believed him. “Ask the questions.”

Devin said, “What'd you and Socia talk about yesterday?”

“He thinks I have incriminating evidence on him, things Jenna Angeline gave me. He wants to trade me my life for the evidence. I told him if I died, so did he.”

“Compliments of Bubba Rogowski,” Oscar said.

I raised my eyebrows slightly, then nodded.

Devin said, “What kind of evidence do you have against Socia?”

“Nothing—”

“Bullshit,” Oscar said.

“True shit. I don't have anything that could get Socia convicted of so much as jaywalking.”

Angie said, “Jenna Angeline promised us there were things that
she
had access to, but she died before she could tell us what or where they were.”

“Word on the street is Jenna gave you something right before Curtis Moore popped her,” Oscar said.