‘I don’t believe that, Ray,’ Gittens said. ‘Those guys don’t plead. You know that.’
Ratleff just shrugged again. I don’t know, I don’t care.
I coaxed him, ‘Ray, what was going on, do you know?’
‘All I know is Danziger told me if I just stuck with the program, let him work on G-Mac awhile, he could get G-Mac to do what he wanted. I told him McNeese wouldn’t give anybody up or nothing like that, but Danziger kept saying it wasn’t like that. He said he had something G-Mac would want.’
‘And what was that, Ray? What was Danziger doing?’
‘I told you, I don’t know.’
‘Ray,’ Gittens said, ‘what are you gonna do when Braxton comes after you?’
‘Let him come. I didn’t do nothing wrong.’
‘That doesn’t matter, Ray. You know what he’s gonna do.’
‘Let him come. Doesn’t matter what he does to me. I got the bug.’
We looked at him, uncomprehending.
‘I got the bug.’ He injected his arm with an imaginary needle, presumably to signal needle-borne AIDS. ‘I’ve got no time to go to the house or noplace else, and I got no time to waste on Braxton and his foolishness. There’s nothing Braxton can do to me now.’
15
If there is a heaven for cops, it looks like the J. J. Connaughton Cafe. The interior consists of a wood-paneled room, a long, plain bar running the length of it. The bartenders wear white short-sleeve shirts and solid black clip-on neckties. On the wall behind them hang a large American flag and a much larger Irish tricolor. There are no stools, just a rail along the base of the bar to rest one foot on, and when Gittens, Kelly, and I got there — around seven- thirty that evening, after we returned from Lowell — men were lined up along the bar with one foot up like pelicans.
We settled in at a table in the back with three sweating bottles of Rolling Rock.
‘A lot of cops hang out at this place,’ Gittens said. In fact, nearly everyone in the place seemed to be a cop. There were cops in blue uniform pants, plain-clothes cops in nylon windbreakers, cops with potbellies and cops with handlebar mustaches, short cops with Popeye forearms and lanky cops with John Wayne walks.
Before long, cops began to drift up to greet Gittens. They shook his hand and said, howahya Mahtin. Several knew Kelly too, and most of those that didn’t at least had heard his name and seemed happy to see him. They seemed happy to meet me too. They brayed howahya to me and shook my hand vigorously. They sat down with their beers, and soon we were one big group of six or eight or ten or twelve, depending on who was standing and who was off milling around at any given moment. There was an infectious, pleasant sense of testosterone in low idle with these guys. It didn’t take long before I was telling people howahya just like the rest of them.
After we’d been there awhile, one of the younger guys — he had an open, pink face — asked, ‘Any word on the Danziger thing?’
Silence. Danziger’s murder was a close cousin to a cop killing, and it was treated accordingly, with reverence.
‘Nothing,’ declared Gittens, flatly lying. ‘Nobody’s talking.’
‘I’ve never heard anything like it. Nevah.’
‘It’s like Colombia, y’know? Some fuckin’ banana republic? I mean, killing the lawyers? It’s crazy.’
‘-or Sicily. That’s how they do it-’
‘-they’ll kill that kid Braxton too. You watch.’
‘Who?’
‘Up in the Flats, those people’ll kill him.’
There was a low growl — ’he-e-ey’ — emitted by the only black cop at the table.
A pause.
‘Oh, come on, he didn’t mean that,’ one of the white cops said. He held out his beer bottle and grinned. ‘Come on. To Al Sharpton.’
They clinked bottles.
‘To Rodney King,’ the black cop said. He managed a fractional smile.
‘Whoo! Rodney King!’
The crisis seemed to have passed. The monster’s head sank back under the surface of the loch, and the banter resumed as before.
‘Remember Braxton threw that kid Jameel Suggs off the roof?’
‘That was a long time ago.’
‘I remember that. Like ’92 maybe? ’93, something like that?’
I asked, ‘Who’s Jameel Suggs?’
One of the cops clued me in. ‘Suggs raped a little girl in the Grove Park project there. Hey, what was her name? Something Wells?’
‘It was like some African name, I think.’
‘Nikita-’
‘Nikisha.’
‘Nikisha Wells, that’s it. This little girl, she was like seven years old. Suggs raped her then he threw her off the roof so she wouldn’t tell nobody. So a few days later somebody went and threw Suggs off the roof too. They say it was Braxton.’
‘Hey, Maine, that’s called a misdemeanor murder.’
‘That’s the story anyway. Nobody knows if it was really Braxton.’
‘Hey, I say if Braxton really killed Suggs, let’s give him a fuckin’ medal.’
‘-Did he really do that?-’
Gittens broke in. ‘Yes, he did.’
The table got quiet again.
‘Harold threw Jameel Suggs off the roof.’ With his storyteller’s instinct, Gittens took a moment to wipe the condensation off his beer bottle with a napkin. ‘He told me so himself.’
‘“Harold”?-’
‘-get the fuck out!-’
‘-what is this with “Harold”?-’
‘-what, you know him?’
‘Course I know him.’ Gittens shrugged. ‘I’ve known him since he was a kid. I was up in A-3 a long time chasing those kids around.’
‘Get the fuck out. Why don’t you go find him then?’
‘He doesn’t want to be found. No one’s going to find Harold till he’s ready to be found.’
The cops all studied Gittens. Some found the association with Braxton suspicious, others were impressed, others simply didn’t believe it. But all were curious. Martin Gittens had a way of making people curious.
‘Stop calling him Harold,’ said one. ‘You’re weirding me out with that shit.’
‘Hey, Gittens, if you do know him, you better tell Maine here what Braxton’s like so he knows what he’s getting into.’
Gittens smirked at me. ‘Well, he’s smart, I’ll tell you that. Smarter than any of these guys. Harold put together that whole Hot Box Boys thing in high school. You go up to the Flats now, half the guys there will claim they were in Hot Box Boys. But there were really only six or seven of them, and Harold ran the whole show.’
I asked, ‘What does that mean, “Hot Box Boys”?’
‘A hot box is a stolen cah,’ one of the cops informed me.
‘Ah,’ I said, ‘a stolen cah.’
Gittens continued: ‘They were grabbing cars left and right. Fifty in one night off the lot at Hub Nissan in Dorchester. Fifty! They never did any time for anything. They’d get sent to DYS and they’d be out the same night. It was ridiculous.’
