Foursome (25 page)

Cosentino slouched in a chair behind the desk, one shoe off as he kneaded the ball of his foot through a black sock. He was early forties, stocky, and homely as a bullfrog, with a wide mouth, black curly hair, and a five-o’clock shadow that would have made Richard Nixon look powdered by comparison. He wore an awning-striped golf shirt and black jeans over a Turntec running shoe that had seen its share of gutters.

I said, “Murphy tell you what this is about?”

King crossed her legs. “Didn’t speak to him directly. Just left me a note, asking me to talk with a John Cuddy.” The knowing smile. “The way the message reads, he trusts you.”

“I’m working on a case for a lawyer who represents a criminal defendant in another state. I didn’t think Boston had anything to do with it until I met a couple of sisters named Quintana this morning.”

King lost her smile, and Cosentino let his foot go to the floor.

I said, “You know them, then.”

King uncrossed her legs and walked to the window.

Cosentino said, “What was their gear?”

“Sorry?”

“What kind of clothes and stuff they wear?”

“Gold warm-up jackets, gold hoop earring on the left side, one knife, lots of guns.”

Cosentino said, “How’d you meet them?”

While I summarized following Blanca in from Calem and getting suckered off Humboldt, Cosentino was attentive, and King looked out the window, crossing her arms this time.

When I finished, King said, ‘John, when you came in, you happen to notice some girls sitting on the bench across the street?”

“Catholic school outfits, knapsacks?”

“Yes. Did you notice how many there were?”

“Three.”

No response from King.

I said, “What’s the matter?”

Cosentino said, “Las Hermanas doesn’t have a hell of a lot going for it yet. Still way more blacks than Hispanics in Rox’, and not many other girl gangs to use as role models.”

“I didn’t realize there were any girl gangs.”

King spoke to the window. “You look at the statistics, you’ll see more than ten boys for every girl moving through the juvie system, and most of the girls are brought in for simple assault or shoplifting.”

Cosentino picked up. “Some of the girls, they’re in gangs just to create kind of a herd, so they can score jewelry off a nongang girl or shoplift wearing their gear, make it harder for the store clerk to ID them. But Las Hermanas, now, they’re different. They look to boys’ gangs like Castlegate or IVP Intervale for what to do, only they feel they gotta do ’em one better, so the boys’ll take them seriously.”

King said, “Their major asset is brainpower. The older sister, Lidia, is one smart lady. She has the other girls loyal to her as kind of a surrogate mother. Most children—male or female—join a gang for protection and status, maybe make real money selling drugs on a corner instead of chump change wearing a paper hat and dipping baskets of fries. But they also join a gang for a sense of belonging, something they don’t often get from their natural families.”

“If they have any,” added Cosentino.

“So,” said King, “Lidia gives them a place to live and money to spend and some basic pride, with the jackets and all, and she’s real careful to use the ones still underage to push the drugs.”

Cosentino said, “Anti-Gang Unit got organized about two years ago. First eleven months, we made over two thousand arrests. But we really got rolling when the legislature gave us section 32K.”

“What’s that?”

King said, “Chapter 94C, section 32K of the General Laws makes it a fifteen-year felony for inducing a minor to distribute drugs. A conviction carries a five-year minimum, though there are some loopholes.”

“Yeah, but even so, you can get Lidia on that one, right?”

“Easier said than done. Las Hermanas is like any other gang. Black, Asian, Hispanic, doesn’t matter. The members don’t use the system against each other. It’s nearly impossible to get one of the younger kids to turn on a leader, because the younger one knows there isn’t a hell of a lot the system is going to do if he or she just stands up and stonewalls it.”

Cosentino said, “The assaults, sometimes they’re a little easier. There’s gonna be witness intimidation, but maybe somebody’s cousin or niece gets caught in the crossfire, the community comes out, especially if we skip district court, where the gang can pack the place, and instead go for an indictment in superior court, where the homeboys and homegirls find things aren’t so comfy.”

I said, “All right. Las Hermanas pushes what, cocaine and crack?”

King said, “Not crack, not anymore. Lidia, she figured out something a long time before she got into the trade. She figured that suburban white folks might pay a bit more for cocaine than ghetto kids would for crack and be a whole lot less trouble as customers.”

Cosentino said, “So Las Hermanas dealt crack only until they got themselves some buy money, then traded up and out.”

I said, “To cocaine and the suburbs.”

“Right. Where they probably figure they’ll find somebody to front for them.”

“As in be their cover?”

“Yeah, but I meant more like to front money, working capital, for them. It’s nice to have a few deals going at once instead of needing the proceeds from one week for buy money the next.”

I thought about that. “They may have found their banker.”

King turned from the window to look at me. “Who?”

“A male teenager named Nicky Vandemeer out in Calem.”

“How obvious was it to you?”

“Pretty clear. The kid must be snorting like a racehorse to look the way he does.”

“Parents?”

“Killed. Two weeks ago in Maine.”

Cosentino said, “The Foursome thing?”

“Yes.”

He cracked his knuckles. “John, you got any contacts on the Calem force?”

“One guy I know. Why?”

King said, “Calem, that’s a strange town. Up till recently, they had this chief, forget his name—”

“Wooten.”

She stared at me. “Wooten. That’s right. He your contact?”

“He’d like to have been my coroner.”

King nodded. “Glad to hear that. Man had his head so far up his ass, he could probably see his molars. Anyway, Wooten ran a very closed shop. You know about Blanca, you know about the special student program they sponsor out there?”

“A little.”

“Well, we knew most of the kids in Calem’s program were straight, but a couple were bent sideways. Calem still took them and didn’t want to hear nothing from nothing about them.”

“Or share anything back.”

Cosentino said, “Exactly. Political thing, libbies in the country wanted to see a model ghetto kid, believe what they see instead of city cops telling them something more about the book than its cover.”

King said, “I’m thinking, you have a contact out in Calem, John, you don’t go visiting there without checking things out with him.”

I pictured Paul O’Boy at the Hojo’s, playing a little of his version of shuck and jive with me over Nicky Vandemeer and his “girlfriend.” To King I said, “My contact has a new chief, probably doesn’t want to stir up the political waters any more than the old one did.”

Cosentino said, “Meaning you went out there and then walked into Lidia’s little mousetrap thinking you’d been told what was what.”

“But getting less than half of it.”

Cosentino cracked his knuckles again. “Sounds like your contact’s worse than no contact at all.”

“I plan to tell him that. Meanwhile, about Blanca Quintana?”

King said, “I first met that girl back when Lidia killed a man who raped her. Murphy tell you about it?”

“I don’t think he made the connection. But I heard Lidia’s side of it.”

“Well, I had a lot of hope for Blanca. She really does have brains, only not like her sister. Real study brains.”

Cosentino said, “Most of these kids, they ever opened a book, it was the
TV Guide
, see what time the reruns of
Miami Vice
were on.”

King looked at him. “Larry, that a new line?”

“Yeah, kind of.”

“I don’t believe it.” She looked to me. “Two years I partner with him, I thought I’d heard them all.”

Cosentino grinned at me. “We got a beautiful relationship, huh?”

I said to King, “But there’s only so much you can do.”

“What?”

“As you watch Blanca follow her older sister.”

“Oh, right. I tell you, John, I’ve never heard of a gang member, regardless of what he or she had done, ever committing suicide. You, Larry?”

“Never. Not once.”

King said, “But Blanca … I don’t know. It’s like she wants to do things that Lidia would do, put herself in situations where she’s going to be in danger. Like intentionally forcing somebody else to kill her, to get her out of the life.”

Cosentino broke in, “This Calem thing, it’s probably like a stock offering for Las Hermanas, Inc. I see Lidia—and Blanca—doing just about anything to see it go right.”

I pushed that around a little. “Ask you something?”

Cosentino said, “Go ahead.”

“The killings up in Maine. With the two parents out of the way, this Nicky kid stands to receive a lot of money a few different ways. What do you think the odds are Las Hermanas could have done it as a massacre to deflect interest away from them?”

Cosentino said, “That was a crossbow, right, not guns?”

“Right.”

King said, “Lidia probably thinks a crossbow is something a Valley Girl wears in her hair.”

Cosentino said, “Yollie’s right. It was guns, now, I could see it. Only there’d have to be about a hundred rounds sprayed all over the fucking house, on account of that’s what bad shots these kids are. They buy the weapons on the street, but they don’t have a fucking clue how to use them beyond lock and load and hold down the trigger.”

Cosentino became animated. “We’re receiving something like fifty, sixty ‘shots fired’ calls a month here. I tell you, John, the kids start shooting, they hit more bystanders than anything, because they almost always miss the one they want first time. Most of the people living in Areas B and C are honest and church-going. But we got only thirty percent of the city’s population and something like eighty percent of the homicides. And lots of times, it’s over nothing. Trivial shit like stepping on somebody’s Air Jordans or dissing—disrespecting—somebody’s sister. You drive around Rox’ today, just go up and down Blue Hill Avenue, you notice something. You notice how many kids are walking with canes or casts or sitting in wheelchairs. Those aren’t torn ligaments from a fucked-up lay-up, pal. Those are gunshot wounds from the gangs that couldn’t shoot straight.”

King said, “Over in East Boston, one of the schools started this program called Music Mobile, trying to keep the kids off the street.” Then, more quietly, “It’s gotten to the point in New York, they have a chorus of children who lost relatives to the killings.”

I said, “They have a what?”

“It’s a chorus, or what do they—oh, right. They call it a chorale. The kids in it are the children or brothers and sisters of people who got killed. Down there, it’s so many they have a singing group of the survivors.”

I shook my head. “So you don’t see Las Hermanas using anything but firearms?”

Cosentino, a little subdued, said, “For a thing like you’ve got, no.”

“Besides,” said King, “these are homegirls, John. Born and ‘brought up,’ in some sense of the phrase, within probably five blocks of where they’re crashing now. Maine would be like another country to them.”

“Another galaxy,” said Cosentino.

“They’re branching out to Calem all right.”

Cosentino said, “You got a point there, but it still don’t feel right. Yollie?”

“Same.”

“You see, John,” said Cosentino, “these’re girls like fourteen, fifteen.”

“Except for Lidia and Blanca.”

“Even so, we’re talking about kids who a year ago were peddling eight-balls—that’s an eighth of an ounce of coke—to fourth-graders in the park. They see a bust coming, they’re hiding the shit under the sod, you can believe it.”

“Under the grass, you mean?”

“Yeah. They pick a spot where they tore up the sod and put it back like Arnold Palmer’s divot, then when things are going down, they stash the shit under it.”

From the window, King said, “Third one’s back.”

I said, “The third schoolgirl?”

“Yes, only they aren’t exactly schoolgirls.”

I thought about how familiar one of them looked. “Las Hermanas.”

Cosentino said, “They got us under surveillance, you can believe it.”

“You can’t do anything?”

He shrugged. “It’s a public bench. No crime to impersonate somebody who goes to parochial school.”

King said, “Lidia believes in communication, John. She plants some of the underage ones out there, keeping track of who comes in and who goes out. They see somebody of interest, one of them goes off to report in.”

I said, “I’m surprised they don’t have a cellular phone in the knapsack.”

Cosentino said, “They tried it. Too much interference.”

From his expression, he wasn’t kidding. “So, they know I came to see you.”

Cosentino cracked his knuckles a third time. “Basically. Lidia, she warn you to stay off her case?”

“She did.”

King said, “Then I’d be very careful, John. We’ll keep a little extra eye on the girls, but we can’t watch all of them all the time, so maybe you keep an eye out, too.”

Cosentino said, “Lidia’s the kind who’d cut the balls off Santa Claus, she didn’t like what he brung her.”

King sighed. “Larry, I’m getting a little tired of that one.”

W
HEN
I
CAME OUT
of the Area B station, all three girls in school uniforms were gone. Walking to the Prelude, I saw a piece of paper ripped from a spiral notebook fluttering under the driver’s-side windshield wiper. In black magic marker, the note read, YOUR DEAD, MR. P EYE.

I opened the door of the car very deliberately, put the note on the passenger’s seat, and drove first to the condo.

An hour later, I parked in the slanting space behind my office building, next to the dumpster with its usual overflow of garbage. Turning off the ignition, I pulled the Smith & Wesson Combat Masterpiece with four-inch barrel from the holster worn cross-draw on my left side. Usually I prefer a two-inch Chief’s Special on the belt above my right buttock, but it’s tough to get into your hand from there while sitting in a car. Since the two-incher is also a less accurate weapon, it was hanging handle-down from a calf holster under my left pant leg. The belly-gun would be all right there as long as I didn’t try jogging.