There was a soft intake of breath in the room. Hawk and Tillis locked eyes for a moment. Then Tillis turned away.
“I’m on the record,” he said, and went and sat on a chair in the front row.
“Now,” Hawk said, “anybody got an idea who killed this little girl and her baby?”
“Cops know?” I said.
A woman said, “You know, everybody know.” She had long graceful legs and a thick body, and her skin was the color of coffee ice cream.
“It’s the Hobarts, or the Silks, or some other bunch of gangbangers that keep changing the name of the gangs so fast I can’t keep track. And how we supposed to stand up to them? We a bunch of women and old men and little kids. How we supposed to make some kind of life here when the gangbangers fuck with us whenever they feel like?”
“They don’t fuck with me,” the old man said.
“Course they do,” the woman said. “You old and fat and you can’t do nothing about it. That’s why you here. They ain’t no men here, ‘cept a few old fat ones that couldn’t run off.”
The old man looked at the ground and didn’t say anything, but he shook his head stubbornly.
“They got guns,” another woman said. She was smallish and wore tight red pants that came to the middle of her calves and she had two small children in her lap. Both children wore only diapers. They sat quietly, squirming a little, but mostly just sitting staring with surprising dullness at nothing very much. “They got machine guns and rifles and I don’t know what kinds of guns they all are.”
“And they run the project,” Hawk said.
“They run everything,” the big woman said. “They own the corridors, the stairwells. They’d own the elevators, if the elevators worked, which a course they don’t.”
“They got parents?” I said.
Nobody looked at me. The woman with the thick body answered the question, but she answered it to Hawk.
“Ain’t no difference they got parents,” she repeated my word with scorn. “Some do. Some don’t. Parents can’t do nothing about it, if they do got ‘em. How come you brought him here? Reverend didn’t tell us we’d have to talk to no white people. White people don’t know nothing.”
“He knows enough,” Hawk said. “Name some names.”
The group was silent. One of the babies coughed and his mother patted him on the back. The bigbodied woman with the graceful legs shifted in her seat a little bit. The old guy glowered at the floor. Everyone else sat staring hard at nothing.
“That get a little dangerous, naming names?” Hawk said. He looked at the Reverend Tillis. Tillis was standing with his hands behind his back, gazing solemnly at the group. He shook his head sadly, as if he would have liked to speak up but grave responsibilities prevented him. “Sure,” Hawk said. “Anybody got an idea why the kid and her baby got shot?”
Nobody said anything.
Hawk looked at me. I shrugged.
“Me and Satan gonna be around here most of the time the next few weeks,” Hawk said. “Till we get things straightened out. You have any thoughts be sure to tell us. Either one of us. You talk to Spenser, be like talking to me.”
Nobody said anything. Everyone stared at us blankly, except Tillis, who looked at me and didn’t like what he saw.
CHAPTER 4
We came out of the meeting at about 9:30. It was a fine spring night in the ghetto. And around Hawk’s car ten young men in black LA Raiders caps were enjoying it. A big young guy, an obvious body builder, with a scar along his jawline and his hat on backwards; was sitting on the trunk of the car.
As we approached he said, “This you ride, man?”
Hawk took his car keys out of his pocket with his left hand. Without breaking stride he punched the kid full in the face with his right hand. The kid tipped over backwards and fell off the trunk. Hawk put the key in the lock, popped the trunk, and took out a matte finish Smith and Wesson pump-action 12-gauge shotgun. With the car keys still dangling from the little finger of his left hand, he jacked a round up into the chamber.
The kid he had punched was on his hands and knees. He shook his head slowly back and forth, trying to get the chimes to stop. The rest of the gang was frozen in place under the muzzle of the shotgun.
“You Hobarts?” Hawk said.
Nobody spoke. I stood half facing Hawk so I could see behind us. I didn’t have my gun out, but my jacket was open. Hawk took a step forward and jammed the muzzle of the shotgun up under the soft tissue area of the chin of a tall kid with close-cropped hair and very black skin.
“You a Hobart?” Hawk said.
The kid tried to nod but the pressure of the gun prevented it. So he said, “Yeah.”
“Fine,” Hawk said and removed the gun barrel. He held the shotgun easily in front of him with one hand while he put his car keys in his pocket. Then without moving his eyes from the gang he reached over with his left hand and gently closed the trunk lid.
“Name’s Hawk,” he said. He jerked his head at me. “His name’s Spenser.”
The kid who’d taken the punch had gotten to his feet and edged to the fringe of the group where he stood, shaky and unfocused, shielded by his friends.
“There some rules you probably didn’t know about, ‘cause nobody told you. So we come to tell you.”
Hawk paused and let his eyes pass along the assembled gang. He looked at each one carefully, making eye contact.
“Satan,” he said, “you care to, ah, promulgate the first rule?”
“As I understand it,” I said. I was still watching behind us. “The first rule is, don’t sit on Hawk’s car.”
Hawk smiled widely. “Just so,” he said. Again the slow scan of tight black faces. “Any questions?”
“Yeah.”
The speaker was the size of a tall welterweight. Which gave Hawk and me maybe sixty pounds on him. He had thick hair and light skin. He wore his Raiders cap bill forward, the old-fashioned way. He had on Adidas high cuts, and stone-washed jeans, and a satin Chicago Bulls warm-up jacket. He had very sharp features and a long face and he looked to be maybe twenty.
Hawk said, “What’s your name?”
“Major.”
“What’s your question, Major?” Hawk showed no sign that the shotgun might be heavy to hold with one hand.
“You a white man’s nigger?” Major said.
If the question annoyed Hawk he didn’t show it. Which meant nothing. He never showed anything, anyway.
“I suppose you could say I’m nobody’s nigger,” Hawk said. “How about you?”
“How come you brought him with you?” Major said.
“Company,” Hawk said. “You run this outfit?” I knew he did. So did Hawk. There was something in the way he held himself. And he wasn’t scared. Not being scared of Hawk is a rare commodity and is generally a bad mistake. But the kid was real. He wasn’t scared.
“We all together here, man. You got some problem with that?”
Hawk shook his head. He smiled. Uncle Hawk. In a minute he’d be telling them Br’er Rabbit stories.
“Not yet,” he said.
Major grinned back at Hawk.
“Not sure John Porter believe that entirely,” he said and jerked his head at the guy that had been sitting on Hawk’s trunk.
“He’s not dead,” Hawk said. Major nodded.
“Okay, he be bruising your ride, now he ain’t. What you want here?”
“We the new Department of Public Safety,” Hawk said.
“Which means what?”
“Which means that starting right now, you obey the 11th commandment or we bust your ass.”
“You Iron?” Major said.
“We the Iron here,” Hawk said.
“What’s the 11th commandment?”
“Leave everybody else the fuck alone,” Hawk said.
“You and Irish?” Major said.
“Un huh.”
“Two guys?”
“Un huh.”
Major laughed and turned to t
he kid next to him and put out his hand for a low five, which he got, and returned vigorously.
“Good luck to you, motherfuckers,” he said, and laughed again and jerked his head at the other kids. They dispersed into the project, and the sound of their laughter trailed back out of the darkness.
“Scared hell out of him, didn’t we?” I said.
“Call it a draw,” Hawk said.
CHAPTER 5
“She was hit seven times,” Belson said. He was sitting at his desk in the homicide squad room, looking at the detectives’ report from the Devona Jefferson homicide. “They fired more than that. We found ten shell casings, and the crime-scene techs found a slug in the Double Deuce courtyard. Casings were Remington-nine-millimeter Luger, center-fires, 115-grain metal case.” “Browning?” I said. Belson shrugged.
“Most nines fire the same load,” he said. “Whoever shot her probably emptied the piece. Most nines carry thirteen to eighteen in the magazine, and some of the casings probably ejected into the vehicle. Some of the slugs went where we couldn’t find them. Happens all the time.”
Belson was clean-shaven, but at midday there was already a five o’clock shadow darkening his thin face. He was chewing on a small ugly cold cigar.
“Baby took three, through the mother’s body. They were both dead before they hit the ground.”
“Suspects?” I said.
I was drinking coffee from a Styrofoam cup. Belson had some in the same kind of cup, because I’d brought some for both of us from the Dunkin Donut shop on Boylston Street near the Public Library. I had cream and sugar. Belson drank his black.
“Probably she was shot from a van that drove by slowly with the back door open.”
“Gang?”
“Probably.”
“Hobarts?”
“Probably.”
“Got any evidence?”
“None.”
“Any theories?”
“Gang people figure it’s a punishment shooting,” Belson said. “Maybe she had a boyfriend that did something wrong. Probably drug related. Almost always is.”
“They got any suspects?”
“Specific ones? No.”
“But they think it’s the Hobarts.”
“Yeah,” Belson said. “Double Deuce is their turf. Anything goes down there it’s usually them.”
“Investigation ongoing?” I said.
“Sure,” Belson said. “City unleashes everything on a shine killing in the ghetto. Treat it just like a couple of white kids got killed in the Back Bay. Pull out all the stops.”
“Homicide got anybody on it?” I said.
“Full time?” Belson smiled without meaning it, and shook his head. “District boys are keeping the file open, though.”
“Good to know,” I said.
“Yeah,” Belson said. “Now that you’re on it, I imagine they’ll relax.”
“I hope so,” I said. “I wouldn’t want one of them to start an actual investigation and confuse everything.”
Belson grinned.
“You come across anything, Quirk and I would be pleased to hear about it,” he said.
“You’re on the A list,” I said.
CHAPTER 6
I was in a cubicle at the Department of Youth Services, talking to a DYS caseworker named Arlene Rodriguez. She was a thin woman with a large chest and straight black hair pulled back tight into a braid in back. Her cheekbones were high and her eyes were black. She wore bright red lipstick. Her blouse was black. Her slacks were gray and tight and tucked into black boots. She wore no jewelry except a wide gold wedding band. “Major is his real name,” she said. She had a big manila folder open on her desk. “It sounds like a street handle but it’s not. His given name is Major Johnson. In his first eighteen years he was arrested thirty-eight times. In the twenty-seven months preceding his eighteenth birthday he was arrested twenty times.”
“When he turned eighteen he went off the list?” I said.
“He’s no longer a juvenile,” she said. “After that you’ll have to see his probation officer or the youth gang unit at BPD.”
“What were the offenses?” I said.
“All thirty-eight of them?”
“Just give me a sense of it,” I said.
“Drugs, intent to sell… assault… assault… possession of burglary tools… possession of a machine gun… assault… suspicion of rape… suspicion armed robbery… ” She shrugged. “You get the idea.”
“How much time inside?” I said.
She glanced down at the folder on her desk. “Six months,” she said. “Juvenile Facility in Lakeville.”
“Period?”
“Period,” she said. “Probably the crimes were committed within the, ah, black community.”
“Ah what a shame,” I said. “Your work has made you cynical.”
“Of course it has. Hasn’t yours?”
“Certainly,” I said. “You got any background on him family, education, favorite food?”
“His mother’s name was Celia Johnson. She bore him in August of 1971 when she was fifteen years and two months old. She was also addicted to PCP.”
“Which meant he was, at birth,” I said.
“Un huh. She dumped him with her mother, his grandmother, who was herself, at the time, thirty-two years old. Celia had three more babies before she was nineteen, all of them PCP addicted, all of them handed over to Grandma. One of them died by drowning. There was evidence of child abuse, including sodomy. Grandma was sent away for six months on a child-endangerment conviction.”
“Six months?” I said.
“And three years’ probation,” Arlene Rodriguez said.
“Teach her,” I said.
“His mother hanged herself about two months later, doesn’t say why, though I seem to remember it had something to do with a boyfriend.”
“So Major is on his own,” I said. Arlene Rodriguez looked down at her folder again.
“At eleven years and three months of age,” she said.
“Anything else?”
“While we had him at Lakeville,” she said, “we did some testing. He doesn’t read very well, or he didn’t then, but one of the testers devised ways to get around that, and around the cultural bias of the standard tests, and when she did, Major proved to be very smart. If IQ scores meant anything, which they don’t, Major would have a very high IQ.”
We were quiet. Around us there were other cubicles like this one, and other people like Arlene Rodriguez, whose business it was to deal with lives like Major Johnson’s. The cubicle partitions were painted a garish assortment of bright reds and yellows and greens, in some bizarre bureaucratic conceit of cheeriness. The windows were thick with grime, and the spring sunshine barely filtered through it to make pallid splashes on the gray metal desk tops.
“Any thoughts on how to deal with this kid?” I said.
Arlene Rodriguez shook her head. “Any way to turn him around?” I said.
“No.”
“Any way to save him?”
“No.”
I sat for a moment, then I got up and shook her hand.
“Have a nice day,” I said.
CHAPTER 7
Susan and I were walking Pearl along the Charles River on one of those retractable leashes which gave her the same illusion of freedom we all have, until she surged after a duck and came abruptly to the end of her tether. The evening had begun to gather, the commuter traffic on both sides of the river had reached the peak of its fever, and the low slant of setting sun made the river rosy. I had the dog on my right arm, and Susan held my left hand.
“I’ve been thinking,” she said.
“One should do that now and then,” I said.
“I think it’s time we moved in together.” I nodded at Pearl.
“For the sake of the child?” I said.
“Well, I know you’re joking, but she’s part of what has made me think about it. She’s with me, she spends time with you. She’s really our dog but
she doesn’t live with us.”
“Sure she does,” I said. “She lives with us serially.”
“And we live with each other serially. Sometimes at my house, sometimes at yours, sometimes apart.”
“The `apart‘ is important too,” I said.
“Because it makes the `together‘ more intense?”
“Maybe,” I said. This had the makings of a minefield. I was being very careful.
“Sort of a `death is the mother of beauty‘ concept?”
“Might be,” I said. We turned onto the Larz Anderson Bridge.
“That’s an intellectual conceit and you know it,” Susan said. “No one ever espoused that when death was at hand.”
“Probably not,” I said.
We were near the middle of the bridge. Pearl paused and stood on her hind legs and rested her forepaws on the low wall of the bridge and contemplated the river. I stopped to wait while she did this.
“Do we love each other?” Susan said.
“Yes.”
“Are we monogamous?”
“Yes.”
“Then why,” Susan said, “aren’t we domestic?”
“As in live together, share a bedroom, that kind of domestic?”
“Yes,” Susan said. “Exactly that kind.”
“I recall proposing such a possibility on Cape Cod fifteen years ago,” I said.
“You proposed marriage,” Susan said.
“Which involved living together,” I said. “You declined.”
“That was then,” Susan said. “This is now.”
Pearl dropped down from her contemplation of the river and moved on, snuffing after the possibility of a gum wrapper in the crevice between the sidewalk and the wall.
“Inarguable,” I said.
“Besides, I’m not proposing marriage.”
“This matters to you,” I said.
“I have been alone since my divorce, almost twenty years. I would like to try what so many other people do routinely.”
“We aren’t the same people we were when I proposed marriage and you turned me down,” I said.
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