Mission Flats (15 page)

‘It is, but I’m coordinating the investigation here. Frankly, I don’t understand why you can’t just monitor the case from Maine, Chief Truman. But if you feel it’s important to be part of it . . .’ She shrugged. ‘Well, it’s none of my business. I suppose you have your reasons. Anyway, DA Lowery says I should extend our full support, as a courtesy’

‘Imagine,’ Kelly grumbled, ‘my own daughter needing to be told—’

‘Dad, spare me. You’re supposed to be retired.’

‘I’m too young to retire.’

‘You’re sixty-seven years old.’

‘Sixty-six.’

‘It’s old enough.’

‘For what?’

‘Don’t ask.’ She scribbled something on a scrap of paper and handed it to her father.

‘Martin Gittens,’ he read. ‘Who’s this?’

‘A cop. He’s been detailed to help you out, courtesy of Mr Lowery’

‘Very courteous, our Mr Lowery. What do you know about this Gittens?’

‘He’s a detective. He’s supposed to be wired up in Mission Flats. And he’s been calling me begging for a piece of this case. Other than that, not much.’

‘Do you trust him?’

‘Dad, it’s like you always say: Trust everyone—’

‘Trust everyone but cut the cards. Good girl.’

‘Thank you,’ I interjected, ‘for helping.’

Caroline leveled an index finger at me. ‘Chief Truman, so help me, if anything happens to my father . . .’ She didn’t feel constrained to fill me in as to the precise consequences.

‘Um, what if anything happens to
me
?’

She ignored me. ‘One more thing. You two have to promise to share whatever you find with me. If you hold anything back, and I mean even the smallest detail, the arrangement is off. You’ll be on your own. That’s straight from Lowery.’

‘Of course,’ Kelly
père
assured.

‘Alright then.’ She kissed her father again and wiped his cheek again with the pad of her thumb. ‘You two make some team.’

‘Like Batman and Robin,’ John Kelly suggested.

She sniffed and made that sardonic Elvis-smile. ‘Yah, right.’

13

The Grove Park housing project was a collection of six ugly, yellow-brick apartment buildings. They were arranged asymmetrically, like blocks dropped here and there by a careless giant.

We caught up to Martin Gittens on a rooftop. He was bending forward with his hands on his knees like a running back before the ball is snapped. At Gittens’s feet, an African-American man in his mid-twenties sat splay-legged, his back slumped against the concrete parapet. He had a forlorn look on his face. ‘You can stop this any time, Michael,’ Gittens was telling him. ‘Just say the word. I’m not gonna make you do anything you don’t want to do.’ The man just sat there, in a daze. Gittens hunched over him, waiting for a response, then straightened and said, ‘Your call.’

Nearby, a couple of plainclothes cops monitored the conversation. They seemed anxious to just get on with it already.

But Gittens was in no hurry. He came over and shook our hands. Martin Gittens was not an imposing guy. His face was unlined and pleasant, even bland. The forgettable face in the crowd. A receding hairline and prominent forehead – which together formed a headland, a tall forehead shaped like a sperm whale’s brow – were Gittens’s only irregular features. He wore khaki pants and sneakers. If not for the small nylon holster and badge on his belt, you might have taken him for an accountant or a high-school teacher, if you remarked him at all.

‘This kid is getting ready to make a buy for us,’ Gittens said. ‘He’s almost there.’

‘Should we come back?’

‘Nah. This isn’t a bad kid. He’s just having a little crisis. He’ll figure it out. Then we can talk.’ He gave us a knowing look, letting us in on the game.
You know how it works; you know the score.

A few feet away, the kid let out a sigh. It seemed to take all his strength to look up at Gittens and say, ‘I can’t do it.’

Gittens went back to him. ‘Alright, Michael, no problem. If that’s what you want.’

‘So what happens now?’

‘Well, I’ll file my report with the DA, see how they want to handle it. When they get around to it, they’ll indict you. Couple of weeks maybe. They’re busy. It’s just a drug thing.’

‘I can’t believe this shit.’

Gittens nodded sympathetically.

‘What would you do, Detective?’

‘It doesn’t matter what I would do. It’s your life, Michael. I can’t tell you what to do. I’m not your lawyer.’

‘Well guess what: My lawyer isn’t here at this particular moment. Just tell me, what am I supposed to do?’

Gittens knelt beside him. ‘Look, I gave you this opportunity because I thought you deserved it. I don’t see you in state prison, Michael, I really don’t. But what am I gonna do? I’ve got a job to do, right? I can’t just shit-can the thing without a reason. I need you to give me something in return. Tit for tat.’

‘Where will I do the time? Walpole?’

‘No, Concord probably’

‘What’s Concord like?’

‘What do you think, Michael? It’s state time, it’s bad.’

The kid sagged against the wall, disconsolate. ‘I don’t know how I got here. I really don’t.’

‘You don’t know how you got here?’

‘No, I mean I
know.
But it was a fucking dime bag. What the fuck! Three years for a dime bag? Mother
fucker
!’

‘It wasn’t a dime bag, Michael. It was sixteen grams.’

‘I didn’t weigh the shit! I told you, it wasn’t mine.’

‘Michael, you put yourself here. You should learn to take responsibility.’

‘I told you, I was just holding it.’

‘Holding it, selling it, putting it on a hot dog, whatever – if you have sixteen grams, that’s trafficking, end of story. You have to own that.’

The guy made a face. He wasn’t up for the lecture.

‘Look, Michael, you want to try and beat it? Go for it, take a chance. I’ll be rooting for you. Hey, you never know, right? Maybe you’ll walk.’

‘And if I don’t?’

‘It’s a three-year minimum, and that’s day-for-day – no parole, no good time, no work release, no nothing. You sit there. There’s a war on drugs, maybe you haven’t heard.’

‘I got two kids, Gittens, you know that. I can’t go away for three years. I can’t go away for three
days.
You got kids, Gittens?’

‘Yeah, I’ve got kids.’

‘Then you know how it is.’

‘I’m offering you a way out, Michael.’

‘A way out with a fuckin’ cap in my head.’

‘I told you, they’ll never know who you are.’

‘They’ll know.’

‘No. You won’t be named in any of the reports; no one will ever name you in court. You have my word on that. What’s between you and me stays between you and me. Have I ever broken my word to you?’

‘They’ll know.’

‘Not if everybody does their job.’

The man breathed deep, considering his options. ‘This is the last one. I can’t take no more of this shit.’

‘Last one, Michael.’

‘After this, I’m out.’

‘After this, you’re out.’

‘What about the DA? What’s he gonna do with my case?’

‘There won’t be any case. The DA doesn’t have a case until I bring it to him. Until then, it’s my case. This is between you and me, Michael. I’ll take care of you. You know you can count on me.’

‘Truth?’

‘Truth. The DA will never hear your name.’

‘Last time,’ Michael warned, relenting.

Gittens nodded. ‘Last time. Alright, you know the drill. Stand up, empty your pockets. Detective,’ he called to one of the plainclothes guys, ‘will you come witness this?’

The kid emptied his pockets and turned them inside out for good measure. He left his things in a tidy pile on the rubbery surface of the roof, then raised his hands and allowed Gittens to frisk him. Boredom registered on both their faces. The procedure had become routine for them. Gittens carefully copied down the serial numbers from two twenty-dollar bills and handed them to the kid with the advice, ‘Knockout, Michael, nothing else. Tell him it’s got to be Knockout. And make sure the money goes to Veris himself. Big guy in the red FUBU shirt.’

‘I know who the motherfucker is.’

‘Alright, Michael. We’ll be watching.’

‘That makes me feel much better,’ the kid sniffed, and he disappeared down the stairs.

Gittens invited us to watch. ‘Step right up, men. Showtime at the Apollo.’

We moved to the edge of the roof, which overlooked Echo Park five stories below. Like so many things in Mission Flats, Echo Park was not what its name suggested, a rolling green meadow where sounds echoed off trees and hills. Instead, it was a crooked pie piece wedged into the joint where North Tremont Street branched off from Franklin Street. Gittens said the locals called it Hypo Park for the hypodermic needles found there. Inside were a few stringy trees and some park benches – the unfancy kind, green slats in concrete bases. A Y-shaped walkway connected the three corners of the park. Graffiti on the walkway read,
Fuck the PoPo, DeeZee,
the ubiquitous
MP,
and some markings I could not interpret.

Gittens looked down at this scene, rapt. He held a pair of binoculars, which he passed to me occasionally.

I mimicked his posture, craning slightly, forehead creased with concentration.

I tried to detect something more than a few kids hanging out in a ratty park. There wasn’t much going on, though. A half dozen young guys – kids, all of them black, wearing baggy hip-hop styles – were draped over the benches. A few people came and went, loitering, talking, moving on. From all appearances, the Echo Park drug trade had shut down for the day.

‘What’s Knockout?’ I asked Gittens.

‘Heroin with some other garbage in it. It’s been turning up the last few weeks. We had a kid die from it.’

One of the cops with us muttered, ‘Come on, shithead.’

‘Give him a minute to get down the stairs,’ Gittens soothed. ‘Be patient.’

Echo Park struck me as an indiscreet place for a drug market. There was nothing to hide behind, no privacy from the heavy traffic on Franklin Street. ‘Isn’t this place a little . . . exposed? You can see everything.’

Gittens shrugged. ‘It’s not enough to see. We have to get the stuff, we have to catch them with the dope in their pockets, otherwise there’s no case. And we can’t get close enough for that. There are lookouts all up and down the block. You go down there, you’ll hear them whistling signals to each other. It sounds like a birdcage.’

A woman was entering the park now, at the corner closest to us, the narrow tip of the pie wedge. She was black, rail thin, with a knock-kneed walk and a rainbow-colored knit hat. A kid greeted her just inside the park. He seemed glad to see her, greeting her as an old friend, laughing, clasping her hand, pulling her close for a hug.

‘That kid’s a sweeper. His job is to steer the buyers to the right place. He’ll hang out near the entrance to the park, ask you what you’re looking for, figure out if you’re a player or a cop or just someone walking through the park. If you’re a buyer, he’ll tell you to go sit on one of those benches and he’ll give one of those whistle signals.’ Gittens whistled a little bird call, soft, under his breath, low-high-high-high.

The woman moved on. She sat on one of the benches next to a guy in a red
FUBU
baseball shirt.

‘
FUBU
,’ Gittens said, ‘For Us, By Us. Those FUBU clothes went big-time and they started telling white kids it meant For U, By U.’ He shrugged. ‘That’s June Veris in the red shirt. He’s original MP. Used to run with Braxton when they were kids. Now Braxton just uses him as muscle.’

June Veris had muscle to spare. Big guy with massive shoulders that tapered down to a narrow waist. Veris sat a level higher than the buyer, his butt on the backrest, feet on the seat of the green bench. He chatted with the woman for some time before she reached into her pocket and slapped her hand down into his. The gesture was a sort of exuberant handshake. From our position, you could not see any cash being passed. Then Veris disappeared and a kid walked toward the woman.

‘That’s the slider,’ Gittens narrated.

The slider sauntered right past the woman. There was a little seesaw in his walk, a flourish. It was a walk the kid probably practiced, checking himself out as he passed store windows. He dropped something in a garbage can and kept walking. When the woman retrieved it, the three guys who’d been so friendly with her a moment before were nowhere to be seen. They’d melted away to the edges of the park. She hurried out of the park with anxious, bird-like glances.

‘The slider has the most dangerous job,’ Gittens said. ‘Nobody touches the dope but him. That way the risk to everyone else is minimized. Even if we catch the others, there’s no case because there’s no dope on them. Without an informant or an undercover buy, there’s no way to tie the sweepers or anyone else to the drugs. But the slider has to carry the drugs on him, so if he’s caught . . .’

There was a lull in the sliders’ business.

‘There’s a stashpad around here somewhere,’ Gittens lectured to fill the downtime, ‘to replenish the sliders. The kitchen will be somewhere else. It moves around. We close one down, another one opens somewhere else. It’s like Whack-a-Mole, you know that game? It’ll never end.’

‘What about Braxton? What does he do?’

‘Braxton designed all this. He runs this whole thing. If things were different, he’d have gone to Harvard Business School. As it is, he runs a damn good business. He doesn’t need Harvard Business School. Harold’s a player. He’s a damn smart guy’

‘And a murderer.’

‘Yeah, but it’s not like that,’ Gittens said.

Our man Michael finally emerged. He moved casually between the buildings, entering at the near corner of the park.

This time I did not need Gittens’s narration to follow the process. Michael was met by the same sweeper, who approached him tentatively. There were no smiles, no hugs. Presumably the sweeper did not know him, maybe even suspected he was a snitch. Whatever the reason, their chat took a little longer than the previous one. But the informant bluffed his way by the sweeper and made his way to a bench. Veris sat down next to him, easy to pick out in his cherry-red shirt, and it was Veris who actually took the cash. Gittens’s two twenties, the serial numbers recorded, disappeared into his pocket. After the money was passed, less gracefully this time, Veris moved off. A slider walked past to drop a plastic envelope in a trash can for Michael to retrieve.