Momma Lupe, Book 1 in the Ty Connell 'Novella Series. A Mystery/Suspense Thriller. Cooking or killing -- Momma Had Her Funny WAys

by Michael C. Hughes

  She sat on the small living room sofa and Connell and Morgan took chairs opposite.

  "So why are you chasing me about that ol' ting? I did stop. The cop, 'e says I din stop, but I did stop."

  "Miss Dumont, we're not really here about the warrant. We understand that you work at the Crazy Horse."

  "Yeah," she said, a little defensively. “Sometimes,” she said and reached for a cigarette from the pack on the table. She lit it.

  "And you know a woman by the name of Isabelle Lupanier. Momma Lupe," Connell continued.

  "Yeah," she said again, more defensively.

  Connell leaned forward in the tattered old chair.

  "Miss Dumont. We'd like to talk to you about Momma."

  The girl was clearly frightened and reluctant to talk at first. But it didn't take much for it to turn into more of a therapy session than a police interview. It started in fits and starts, but before they knew it, she was filling the ashtray with smokes one after the other and talking so fast they could hardly keep up with their notes.

  She spun out a story about how she was approached by Ma back in the small town of Burlington, near Montpelier in northern Vermont. About a hundred and fifty miles due north of Boston in an almost straight line up the I-93. She said that, after high school was done, she had begun to slip over the Quebec-Vermont border to dance in towns and cities in north Vermont when she was eighteen.

  At that she sneered.

  “At eighteen in Vermont you can become a slave to drunks, you just can’t have a drink to get yourself numb. Men! They make all the laws! Keep us sober so they can get drunk.”

  She also been working as a waitress at a small diner in her home town, Saint-Malo, just across the Vermont border, she said, and still living at home with her folks. The dancing she said she was able to keep from her parents and was going toward building a college fund to go back to school. She had her heart set on a media arts career. She went on to speak about how Ma and her sons were so nice the first few times they came by the club in Burlington. They said that they were tourists, just visiting the area, and it struck her as odd at the time, that an elderly woman would be traveling with two grown sons in their thirties and stopping in strip clubs as they toured. But they struck up a friendship with her and ended up taking her out for an expensive dinner that first night. Even gave her some money to buy some new clothes. She thought they were wonderful.

  They came back through the town a few weeks later and the scenario was repeated: dinner, a few gifts, some more money. Just nice people.

  Then they came back a third time.

  "I 'ad no idea dey were driving all 'round the countryside. All over Vermont and Quebec. Talking to girls like me. Amateurs and newcomers who wanted out, nor more in. Making friends with us. Giving us money. Buying us tings. The tird time they came back we went to dinner again, and dat's when Ma said I owed her two 'undred dollars, plus interest by the week, which made it tree 'undred dollars. Then she said she knew ‘ow I could pay her off fast and make lots more money besides. I could make two tousand dollars a week, she said. Den I realized. I knew what she was talking about, but I needed the money. I thought I could ‘andle it. That's how I ended up in Boston. But I had no idea what they were like. What being a slave was like. Then the sons started on me."

  She said she was repeatedly raped by the sons once they got back to Boston, and then they "sold" her to a biker club in Revere and the bikers took turns raping her. Breaking her down, locking her in, terrorizing her, getting her malleable. They forced her to perform in their strip clubs, and to perform sexually with customers both inside and away from the club. What made it all possible, she said, was the fact that they had got her on the smack. After one fix, she was theirs.

  “I thought it was wonderful. I felt so free. After that, they owned me.” What Geddes had already said.

  She also told them about her "quota" for dealing dope in the clubs —mostly coke— and what happened when she fell short.

  None of this was news either to Connell or to John. That that was the nature of Momma's operation, and every other stripclub/whorehouse operation in the world with minor variations. Trading in the misery of desperate addicted women. But Ma had added a twist they hadn’t heard of before. A quote system.

  Connell regarded her sympathetically. “What happened if you didn’t meet this quota?”

  “She turned me over to the sons, an she’d watch. They’d chain me to the bed so I couldn’t run and go at me. Momma used to sit there drinking her absinthe and making comments, like at a wrestling match. Then she’d ship me off to one of the biker clubs and they kept me in their cub house. Ma said I had to get my head right. That meant sell more coke.”

  Connell and Morgan exchanged glances. They knew there would be more if they just let the girl keep talking. Eventually, she got around to what they were hoping for.

  She claimed that her younger sister had been grabbed the same way after she had. That the sister too had had been brought to Boston and had also been turned over to the bikers to break her in, like you’d break in a young horse. Break their spirit. But the sister, she said, was not like her. She was frightened and passive. The sister, according to her, was a wild cat. Fiercely independent, violently against having hard drugs pushed on her, especially averse to needles and heroin. Impossible for anybody to manage or dominate. She cursed at Ma, had deeply scratched the face of one of the sons, and kicked at the bikers, spat at people.

  “You couldn’t control Martine,” she said and fell silent. “She was such a fighter. I so admired her.”

  “Was she older?” Connell asked.

  Ms. Dumont nodded. “By a fourteen months.”

  “How’d they know about her?”

  “From me. It was so stupid and so trusting. In the early days Momma just asked me if I had a sister, and I said yes, and so they went and got her too,” she said, and looked away. Obviously feeling guilt along with the pain for being the one to have exposed her sister.

  She dabbed at her eyes and Connell gave her a few minutes.

  "Where's your sister now?" he asked, quietly.

  She sat again in silence for a moment.

  "I can't tell you," she finally said. "They'd kill me."

  Connell understood. And he felt for the girl. Trapped into in a hellish world. Every word a trap. The truth more dangerous than lies.

  "Can you tell me if she’s still alive,” he asked.

  She was silent again for another moment. Then shook her head 'no.'

  That was all they needed.

  Connell leaned forward. "Miss Dumont, your name won’t come up. If you tell us what happened to your sister, we can put the piece together ourselves. Make our own case. There are a lot of other girls involved here. You won't have to testify and nobody has to know you spoke to us."

  The girl agonized, looking so thin, pale, and frightened. Connell thought she looked more like a frightened little girl of maybe fourteen, than a worldly young woman of nineteen. But the prospect of justice for her sister was obviously strong. Something that no doubt had been eating at her.

  Finally, she said, "Martine, when she first came, she tried the dance business but it was not for her. She tot she could do it for the money and keep everyone away from her. Just her alone on a stage in her own world. No drugs, no men, just dancing. But it is not the ballet business. It is the sex business. And the slave business. She kept pushing and kicking at men who came too close. Finally, dey came for her —Ma and the sons— to try again to break her. What we didn’t know was dat when Ma brought us to these places, to these people, she sold us to them. Twenty thousand dollars. Doze bar owners, dey owned us! But it wasn’t only that. Ma gave a guarantee. If any one of us din’t do ‘xactly what we were supposed to, they could ship us back to ma and get their money back. Or get a replacement girl.” She looked at them in horror. “Can you imagine! A guarantee! For owning people!”

  She paused again to re-gather herself. She pulled her housecoat around he
r a little tighter.

  “Anyway, what happened was Martine quit. Tol them to go stuff themselves. If dey ever came near her again she was going straight to the police. She got a small place and even found a boyfriend. She went back to work as a waitress and found a small place. Working downtown. In a nice hotel. Their coffee shop. She was out of it. Out of the dance business. Away from the clubs. Out of it all. Making a new life. But one day, those sons, dey came for her. They 'ad a 'uge row on the street and Martine was pushed into the car. One of her friends at the coffee shop tol me she saw dat."

  Then the girl fell silent again.

  "Did you see her after that?" Connell asked.

  Again, she shook her head 'no.'

  "Where is she, Miss Dumont?" Connell asked. “Do you know.”

  The girl hesitated for a moment, and then broke into tears.

  “She’s gone.”

  Connell said nothing for several moments.

  “Gone where?” he asked, quietly.

  "De Reservoir."

  Connell wasn’t sure what she meant. “Which reservoir?”

  “I dunno. Out of town somewhere.”

  “The Wachusett Lake Reservoir?”

  “Might be. I heard that name.”

  It was near Worcester. About forty miles from Boston in hill country. More a huge lake than a reservoir.

  "Doze sons came for me too. They tol me dat Martine was gone. Dat dey put 'er in a dog cage and filled the cage with rocks so she wouldn't come back up. She was still alive when they tipped her in. They had her hands tied and her mouth tied so her screams wouldn’t get out. She screamed all the way to the bottom. Bubbles coming up. Momma ordered it that way. He said Ma was there. She’s de one gave the cage de push and watched as it sank. Alain tol' me dat later to scare me back into line.”

  Connell and John exchanged glances of disgust.

  “Were you trying to get away as well?” Connell asked.

  “Not like Martine. I was going crazy. Bit I needed de stuff. I still do. Dey gave me a few days off and some stuff. But I know dey’ll come back for me. Alain said, if I din be'ave dis time, I'd end up in the bottom of the lake wit Martine. Dat I'd still be alive when I 'it bottom. They scared me so bad I couldn't sleep. But now I just want it to be over."

  The Reservoir Lake was a big lake.

  "Miss Dumont, do you have any idea where at the lake they did this?" Connell asked.

  She sniffled. "I heard dem talking one time. About a spot they go to. An old log trail. Near a cemetery. A dump grounds they called it and laughed about it."

  An aerial search should find it. Maybe even satellite view of the lake.

  The girl broke into tears again, and Connell shut his notebook. Suddenly tracking the death of a mob lowlife like Vinnie Momesso seemed almost inconsequential.

  The next morning Ty, John Henry, and a marine diving unit from the local State Trooper detachment were gathered at a small overgrown boat ramp down a little-used old logging road leading to the Reservoir Lake. It ran beside a small pioneer cemetery, an unused and forgotten heritage site. The State Police boat went out about fifty feet from the east shore mid-way down the Reservoir, and began to scan the area with sonar. There was a sharp drop-off in depth at that spot, and there was something down there, in the deep.

  Divers went down and they ended up winching to the surface a wire-frame dog crate. Then another. And another. And another. Until they had four such crates loaded onto the rear of the police boat. Each was encrusted with muck and ooze from being on the bottom, but two things were clear: inside each crate were remains of a body, slim and female, and inside each were large river stones which would have held them under for eternity.

  There wasn't much doubt that one body would be that of Martine Dumont, or that the others would be girls who had passed through Momma's hands.

  “There’s two more fresh ones down there we can get now,” the dive leader said. “And there’s others as well. Packed deeper in the weeds and growth. Might need a heavier winch to bring them all up.”

  Connell felt sick.

  Back in Mattapan, the phone rang in Momma Lupe's kitchen. The sons, seated at the table, looked up but made no move to answer.

  Ma was at the sink. She wiped her hands and picked it up herself.

  "'allo."

  She listened intently for several moments without speaking. The sons could tell that the call was somehow important, and they watched and waited to see what it was about, staring back and forth.

  Finally, Ma set down the phone. She stared out the big window for several moments not speaking

  "That was Worcester,” she finally said. Worcester is the second largest city in the state. Ma’s operation supplied girls to clubs all around the area. It is five miles from the Wachusett Reservoir. “The police ‘ave been out at the Lake all morning."

  The sons looked back and forth. Ma had biker contacts across the state who monitored police radio bands and tipped her when police activity threatened.

  "How could they know about the lake?" Alain asked.

  "How? Probably because of you two and your big mouths. It's good to scare the girls, you said. Dis is what comes from talking to anybody, about any of our business."

  "Somebody must have talked," Alain said. "One of Paulie's guys."

  Momma wheeled around.

  “You talked,” she said. “Paulie’s men don’t know about the lake. How would dey? Just shut up.”

  They could see that Momma was in that quiet rage that came over her before decisive and brutal action.

  "We'll find out who talked, ma," Theo said, trying to appease her.

  "Oh, shut up. Both of you," she snapped. " ‘Oo do you think is going to talk to idiots like you and tell you what 'appened."

  Momma threw down the dishtowel and stomped from the room.

  "I'll ‘andle this myself."

  When divers brought up the other two crates that had been recently dumped they were in for a whole new kind of shock

  The bodies weren’t of young women.

  They were of men.

  Men dressed in nice suits and over coats, both with large gunshot wounds in the back.

  They called Connell with the news.

  “Any idea who they are?”

  “Not right now,” the State Trooper said. “No ID and no hands. Maybe never know.”

  Weird, Connell thought, when he hung up. Who were these two? How did they fit into Momma’s world?

  The bodies had been sent to the State Police Forensics Lab in the nearby town of Sudbury, only twenty miles from the site. At the morgue, work had already begun to establish identities of the girls.

  When Connell and Morgan relayed details of the discoveries in the Lake to Nolan, Nolan was both shocked and relieved. The prospect not only of solving the contract murder of Vinnie Momesso, but also of rolling up Momma Lupe's operation made it a very good day in a very sad way.

  And Connell had come up with a strategy. They would get the tap back on her kitchen window, and he and John would go to Ma's front door at a time when the sons would likely be home. They would tell Ma that they would like to step in and have a word with her, that they had some routine questions regarding the activities of the late Vinnie Momesso. Connell predicted that Ma would remain cool and calculating and would allow them to step in, rather than make a scene at the door. Then she would buy time. She would lead them to the kitchen, and attempt to deflect their answers with vague answers and non-committal shrugs. When Connell brought up The Reservoir Lake, Ma would continue to sit sullenly, continue to shrug off all questions. Stay calm until they left.

  Then she’d blow.

  "My bet is that ten seconds after we're out the door and down the steps she'll start in, ripping strips off to those two sons. It'll be as good as a confession, and we'll catch it all on tape from the van. Then we go back in with the warrants."

  The plan was approved.

  If they brought in all three to the station together, they felt certain
that they could get one of the sons to turn, to crack and spill. They weren't bright enough to withstand a withering and prolonged Q and A session without getting tripped up by their own lies.

  So, that evening at six, Connell and Morgan donned their Kevlar under their sports jackets and —backed by a heavily-armed SWAT unit— they mounted the steps to Momma Lupe's front door.

  At the door, Connell paused and glanced back, down the street. The police van was in place, the mike aimed at the big window. To the left, just around the corner, one SWAT team was in place and only steps away, hunkered low against the side of the house. To his right, other SWAT guys were grouped behind the hedge at the other side of the house.

  Connell knocked on the door. And they waited.

  But no answer.

  So he knocked louder.

  They waited again.

  Still no answer.

  There were also no sounds of stirring from inside. Just dead quiet.

  John leaned over and peaked in the front window next to the small porch. There were heavy shears drawn across, but he could see vague shapes inside, just furniture and doorways.

  "No lights on," he said, cupping his hands to the glass. "Aw, jeez, I don't think they's home."

  They knocked several more times, still no response.

  "Aw, man. What now?" John said, disappointed. "We sit it out here and wait for them?”

  Connell deliberated briefly.

  “No,” he said. “We’ve got a warrant. Let’s go in and see what we find inside. We can wait in there. "

  He signaled to one of the SWAT guys nearby who moved up the porch stairs.

  “Can you pop this door without breaking in it?” he asked.

  The man checked the door over quickly.

  “No. There’s three slide bolts,” he said, and pointed out the locks. One high, one middle, one low. “We’ll have to bust it down.”

  Connell deliberated for another moment.

  “You know what? You guys go around back,” he said. “Bust in through a window or kick in a door if you have to. Anywhere where Momma can’t see it on their way back.”