Gone, Baby, Gone (20 page)

Pasquale was one of the CAC detectives assigned to watch Concord Prison for any visitors who’d come to see Cheese. “This is Pasquale.”

“Anything?”

“Nothing. No visitors since you guys yesterday.”

“Phone calls?”

“Negative. Olamon lost phone privileges when he got in a beef on the yard last month.”

“Okay. Broussard out.” He dropped the walkie-talkie on the seat. He raised his head suddenly and watched a car come up the street toward us. “What have we here?”

A smoke-gray Lexus RX 300 with a vanity plate that read
PHARO
pulled past us and drove another twenty or thirty yards before banging a U-turn and pulling into a space along the curb and blocking an alley. It was a fifty-thousand-dollar sport utility vehicle built for off-road travel and those occasional jungle safaris that come through these parts, and every inch of it gleamed as if it had been polished with silk pillows. It fit right in with all the Escorts, Golfs, and Geos parked along the street, the early eighties Buick with green trash bags taped over the shattered rear window.

“The RX 300,” Broussard said, in the deep bass of a commercial announcer. “Pristine comfort for the drug dealer who can’t be hindered by snowstorms and bad roads.” He leaned forward and rested his arms on the seat back between us, his eyes on the rearview mirror. “Ladies and gentlemen, meet Pharaoh Gutierrez, Lord High of the city of Lowell.”

A slim Hispanic man stepped out of the Lexus. He wore black linen trousers and a lime-green shirt, clasped at the neck with a black stud, underneath a black silk dinner jacket with tails that fell to the bend in his knees.

“Quite the fashion plate,” Angie said.

“Ain’t he just?” Broussard said. “And he’s dressing conservative today. You should see the man when he goes out clubbing.”

Pharaoh Gutierrez straightened his tails and smoothed the thighs of his trousers.

“What the fuck is he doing here?” Broussard said softly.

“Who is he?”

“He handles Cheese’s action in Lowell and Lawrence, all the real sexy old mill towns. Rumor has it he’s the only one can deal with all the psycho fishermen up in New Bedford to boot.”

“So then it makes sense,” Angie said.

Broussard’s eyes remained fixed on the mirror. “What’s that?”

“Him meeting with Chris Mullen.”

Broussard shook his head. “No, no, no. Mullen and the Pharaoh despise each other. Something to do with a woman, I heard; goes back a decade. That’s why Gutierrez was banished to the 495 Beltway dumps, and Mullen gets to stay cosmopolitan. This makes
no
sense.”

Gutierrez looked up and down the street, using both hands to grasp the lapels of his dinner jacket like a judge, his chin tilted up slightly. His long thin nose sniffed the air. There was something recalcitrant and illogical in his stiff bearing; it didn’t go with his slim build. He cut the figure of a man who brooked no offense, yet always seemed to be expecting one. So insecure he’d kill to prove he wasn’t.

He reminded me of a few guys I’ve known—shorter guys, usually, or slight of build, but so ferociously determined to prove they could be just as dangerous as the big guys that they never stopped fighting, never paused for breath, ate too quickly. The men I’d known like this either became cops or criminals. There didn’t seem to be much room in between. And they often died quickly and young, an angry question frozen in their faces.

“He looks like a pain in the ass,” I said.

Broussard placed his hands on the seat back, rested his chin on them. “Yeah, that about sums the Pharaoh up. Too much to prove, not enough time to prove it. I always figured him for snapping, maybe walking up to Chris Mullen and busting a cap in his forehead some day, Cheese Olamon be damned.”

“Maybe this is that day,” Angie said.

“Maybe,” Broussard said.

Gutierrez walked around the Lexus and leaned back against the front quarter panel. He looked down the alley he blocked, then at his watch.

“Mullen’s coming your way.” Poole’s voice was a whisper over the walkie-talkie.

“Unfriendly third party out front,” Broussard said. “Hang back, man.”

“Copy.”

Angie reached up and tilted the rearview mirror a bit to the right so we had a clear view of Gutierrez, the Lexus, and the edge of the alley.

Mullen appeared at the end of the alley. He ran a palm down his tie, looked at Gutierrez and the Lexus blocking his path for a still moment.

Broussard leaned back from the front seat, removed his Glock from his waistband, and racked the slide.

“This goes bad, don’t move from this car, just call 911.”

Mullen held up a slim black valise and smiled.

Gutierrez nodded.

Broussard ducked down on the seat and hooked his fingers over the passenger door handle.

Mullen reached out his free hand, and after a moment Gutierrez took it. Then the two men hugged, clapped each other’s backs with their fists.

Broussard let go of the door handle. “Oh, this is interesting.”

When they broke their clinch, Gutierrez held the valise. He turned to the Lexus and opened the door with a flourish and small bow, and Mullen climbed into the passenger seat. Then Gutierrez walked around to the driver’s door, climbed in, and started the engine.

“Poole,” Broussard said into his walkie-talkie, “we got Pharaoh Gutierrez and Chris Mullen out here acting like long-lost brothers.”

“Hush your mouth.”

“Swear to God, man.”

Pharaoh Gutierrez’s Lexus pulled away from the curb and rolled past us.

As it continued up the street, Broussard raised the walkie-talkie to his lips. “Clear, Poole. We’re tailing a dark-gray Lexus SUV driven by Gutierrez with Mullen riding shotgun. They’re heading out of the project.”

As we passed the second alley, Poole came jogging out. He wore a vagrant’s disguise similar to my own except he’d added the dash of a dark-blue bandanna. He removed it as he crossed behind our car and trotted to the Taurus, and we followed the Lexus back onto Boston Street. Gutierrez took a right, and we followed into Andrew Square and then over to the annex road that ran parallel to the expressway.

“If Mullen and Gutierrez are friends now,” Angie said, “what does that mean?”

“Shitload of bad news for Cheese Olamon.”

“Cheese is in prison, his two lieutenants—supposedly mortal enemies—join up against him?”

Broussard nodded. “Take over the empire.”

“Where’s that leave Amanda?” I said.

Broussard shrugged. “In the middle somewhere.”

“The middle of what?” I said. “Crosshairs?”

16

One of the things that happens when you follow scumbags around for a while is that you grow a little envious of their lifestyles.

Oh, it’s not the big things—the sixty-thousand-dollar cars, the million-dollar condos, the fifty-yard-line seats at Patriots’ games—that really get to you, though they can be annoying. It’s the small, everyday carte blanche a good drug dealer enjoys that seems truly alien to the rest of us working folk.

For example, in all the time we watched them, I rarely saw Chris Mullen or Pharaoh Gutierrez obey traffic signals. Red lights, apparently, were for the wee people, stop signs for suckers. The fifty-five-mile-per-hour speed limit on the expressway? Please. Why go fifty-five when ninety gets you there all that much faster? Why use the passing lane when the breakdown lane is free and clear?

And then there was the parking situation. A parking space in Boston is about as common as a ski slope in the Sahara. Little old ladies in mink stoles have fought gun battles over a contested spot. In the mid-eighties some moron actually paid a quarter million dollars for a deeded parking slip in a Beacon Hill garage, and that didn’t include monthly maintenance fees.

Boston: We’re small, we’re cold, but we’ll kill for a good parking space. Come on up. Bring the family.

Gutierrez and Mullen and several of their minions we followed over the next few days didn’t have that problem. They simply double-parked: wherever and whenever the mood struck them, for as long as they desired.

Once, on Columbus Avenue in the South End, Chris Mullen finished his lunch and walked out of Hammersleys to find a very pissed-off artiste complete with signature goatee and three studs in one ear waiting for him. Chris had blocked in the artiste’s dumpy Civic with his sleek black Benz. The artiste’s girlfriend was with him, so he had to make a stink. From where we sat, idling a half block up on the other side of the street, we couldn’t hear what was said, but we got the gist. The artiste and his girlfriend shouted and pointed. As Chris approached he tucked his cashmere scarf under his dark Armani raincoat, smoothed his tie, and kicked the artiste in the kneecap so deftly the guy was on the ground before his girlfriend ran out of things to say. Chris stood so close to the woman they could have been mistaken for lovers. He placed his index finger against her forehead and cocked his thumb, held it there for what probably seemed like hours to her. Then he dropped the hammer. He took his finger back from the woman’s head and blew on it. He smiled at her. He leaned in and gave her a quick peck on her cheek.

Then Chris walked around to his car, got in, and drove off, left the girl staring after him, stunned, still unaware, I think, that her boyfriend was howling in pain, writhing on the sidewalk like a cat with a broken back.

Besides ourselves and Broussard and Poole, several cops from the CAC unit worked the surveillance, and in addition to Gutierrez and Mullen we observed a rogues’ gallery of Cheese Olamon’s men. There was Carlos “the Shiv” Orlando, who oversaw the day-to-day operations in the housing projects and kept a stack of comic books with him wherever he went. There was JJ MacNally, who’d worked his way up to head pimp of all non-Vietnamese hookers in North Dorchester but dated and doted upon a Vietnamese girl who looked to be all of fifteen. Joel Green and Hicky Vister oversaw loansharking and bookmaking from a booth in Elsinore’s, a bar Cheese owned in Lower Mills, and Buddy Perry and Brian Box—two guys so dumb they’d need maps to find their own bathrooms—ran the muscle.

It was not, from even a cursory glance, a think tank. Cheese had risen through the ranks by paying his dues, showing respect, paying homage to anyone who could hurt him, and stepping up whenever there was a power vacuum. The biggest of these happened a few years back when Jack Rouse, godfather of the Irish mob in Dorchester and Southie, vanished along with his chief henchman, Kevin Hurlihy, a guy who had a hornet’s nest in his brain and industrial corrosive for blood. When they disappeared, Cheese put in a bid for upper Dorchester and got the action. Cheese was smart, Chris Mullen was halfway there, and Pharaoh Gutierrez seemed to have a bit on the ball. The rest of Cheese’s guys, though, conformed to his policy of never hiring anyone who, besides being greedy (which Cheese regarded as a given in this business), was smart enough to do anything about it.

So he hired chuckleheads and adrenaline freaks and guys who liked to wad their money in rubber bands and talk like James Caan and swagger, but who had very little ambition beyond that.

Every time Mullen or Gutierrez went anywhere indoors—an apartment, a warehouse, an office building—the place was immediately tagged for CAC surveillance and over the next three days was watched around the clock and infiltrated if possible.

The bugs we’d placed in Mullen’s place revealed that he called his mother every night at seven and had the same conversation about why he wasn’t married, why he was too selfish to give his mother grandkids, why he didn’t date nice girls, and how come he always looked so pale when he had such a good job working for the Forest Service. At seven-thirty every night, he watched
Jeopardy!
, and answered the questions aloud, batting about .300. He had a real gift for geography questions but flat-out sucked when it came to seventeenth-century French artists.

We heard him talk to several girlfriends, bullshit with Gutierrez about cars and movies and the Bruins, but like a lot of criminals, he seemed to have a healthy distrust of talking business over the phone.

The search for Amanda McCready had failed on all other fronts, and police manpower was gradually being shifted away from CAC and into other areas.

On the fourth day of surveillance, Broussard and Poole got a call from Lieutenant Doyle telling them to be down at the precinct in half an hour and to make sure they had us with them.

“This could be ugly,” Poole said, as we drove downtown.

“Why us?” Angie said.

“That’s what we meant about ugly,” Poole said, and smiled as Angie stuck her tongue out at him.

Doyle didn’t seem to be having a great day. His skin was gray and the flesh under his eyes was dark and his entire body smelled of cold coffee.

“Close the door,” he said to Poole, as we entered.

We took seats across the desk from him as Poole shut the door behind us.

Doyle said, “When I set up CAC and was looking for good detectives, I looked everywhere but Vice and Narcotics. Now why would I do that, Detective Broussard?”

Broussard played with his tie. “Because everyone’s afraid to work with Vice and Narco, sir.”

“And why is that, Sergeant Raftopoulos?”

Poole smiled. “Because we’re so pretty, sir.”

Doyle made a keep-it-coming gesture with his hand and nodded several times to himself.

“Because,” he said eventually, “Narco and Vice detectives are cowboys. Crazy cops. They like the juice, like the jack, like the rush. Like to do things their own way.”

Poole nodded. “Often an unfortunate side effect of the assignments, yes, sir.”

“But I was assured by your lieutenant at the Oh-Six that you two were stand-up guys, very effective, very by-the-book. Yes?”

“That’s the rumor, sir,” Broussard said.

Doyle gave him a tight smile. “You made Detective First last year. Correct, Broussard?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Care to be busted back to Second or Third? Patrolman, possibly?”

“Uh, no, sir. That I would not enjoy much, sir.”

“Then stop breaking my balls with the wise-ass shit, Detective.”