“Your reputation precedes you,” she said. “It is coloring my judgment.”
Cardinal Road was once Irish. White Catholic people my age had been born there. The houses were nearly all clapboard three-deckers with flat roofs and bay windows and a piazza across the back at each level. The doors were generally to the left side. There was a small porch, three steps to a walk made of cement, and a tiny yard. Along Cardinal Road the yards were neat and mostly enclosed with a low-clipped barberry hedge. On the minuscule lawns, greening in the spring rain, there were tricycles and big wheels. The houses were painted. In the windows there were curtains. It looked like most of the other blue-collar neighborhoods in Boston. But in this one, every face was black.
“I need more help,” I said.
Erin’s eyes moved carefully over the cityscape as we drove.
“Tell me what you need,” she said.
“A young girl, not quite fifteen, was murdered,” I said. “Around Double Deuce. She had her three-month-old baby with her. The baby was killed too.”
“Boy or girl?” Erin said.
“Girl. Crystal. You’re right. She shouldn’t be anonymous.”
“Yes,” Erin said. “Helps to focus.”
“Girl’s name was Devona Jefferson,” I said.
“I don’t know her.”
“Nobody seems to, but somebody did. I want to find somebody who knew her.”
“Why?”
“Because I want to know who killed her.”
“And when you know?” Erin said.
“Depends. If there’s evidence we’ll give it to the cops.”
“If there isn’t?”
“We’ll see,” I said.
“Would you take some sort of action yourself?”
“I might.”
“And your friend?”
“He might.”
We turned onto Alewife Way. It had the same three-deckers, the same tiny yards. But the yards had no grass, and the rain had made the bare earth muddy. The houses seemed to have sagged more on Alewife, and the front porches had sagged. There was a sway in the piazzas. The houses badly needed painting. Many of the windows were patched with cardboard, and the yards were littered. There were empty bottles of Wild Irish Rose, and the plastic rings that six-packs came in, small brown paper sacks, and fast-food wrappers, some empty wine cooler cartons, and empty cigarette hard-packs with the tops open. People were out in the rain, but they seemed to hate it and walked in sullen slouches, hunching close to walls and standing in the doorway of the variety store with the thick wire mesh over the windows.
At the corner of Colonial Drive was a playground: some blacktop inside a chain-link fence with two metal backboards. One rim had no net, the other had one made of wire mesh.
“Bury one from the corner,” I said, “and it won’t swish, it’ll clang.”
“Mesh nets are supposed to last longer. But they don’t. The kids use them for weapons.”
I nodded. “Gather one end and tape it,” I said. “Kids make do, don’t they.”
“Yes,” she said. “They are often quite ingenious. They function barely at all in school, and the standard aptitude tests seem beyond them, and yet they are very intelligent about surviving in fearful conditions. They are often resourceful, they fashion what they need out of what they have. They endure in conditions that would simply suffocate most of the Harvard senior class.”
“Probably more than one kind of intelligence,” I said.
“Probably,” Erin said. “Let’s talk to these kids.”
There were six of them leaning against the chain-link fence in the rain. One of them had a basketball. All of them wore Adidas hightops and stone-washed jeans, and purple Lakers jackets. Three of them had white Lakers hats, two wore them backwards. They seemed at ease standing in the rain. The one with the basketball was dribbling it around himself behind his back through his legs in a figure-eight pattern. The others were smoking. Their faces froze into the uniform look of tough indifference when I pulled up. They thought we were cops. When Erin got out they relaxed, though the look flickered on again when they saw me.
“Quintin,” she said. “How are you?”
She put her hand out and the boy with the ball tucked it under his left arm and slapped her right palm once, gently.
“Lady Beige,” he said. “Looking good.” He didn’t look at me.
“He’s not a cop,” Erin said. “He’s with me.”
Quintin shrugged. The tough look flickered again. They would never be easy with a big white guy in their yard, and the look, if it wasn’t quite tough hostile, wasn’t welcoming.
“Girl named Devona Jefferson was killed a little while ago over in front of Double Deuce. She had a baby. Baby’s name was Crystal. They killed her too.”
