Gone, Baby, Gone (40 page)

“What if I can’t?” I repeated.

Devin sighed. “Then you might not be able to walk anywhere soon.”

30

In the blind hope that it might make a difference, we decided to drive over to see Poole.

The New England Medical Center sprawls across two city blocks, its various buildings and skywalks occupying a linchpin spot between Chinatown, the theater district, and what remains, gasping and gulping, of the old Combat Zone.

On an early Sunday morning, it’s tough to find an open parking meter around New England Med: on a Thursday night, it’s impossible. The Schubert was playing its upteenth revival of
Miss Saigon
and the Wang was showing the latest bombastic Andrew Lloyd Webber or someone similar’s piece of sold-out, overwrought, overdone, singing dung extravaganza, and lower Tremont Street was teeming with taxis, limos, black ties, and blond fur, angry cops blowing whistles and waving traffic in a wide arc around the triple-parked throng.

We didn’t even bother circling the block, just turned into New England Med’s parking garage, took our ticket, and drove up six levels before we found a spot. After I’d exited the car, I held Angie’s door for her as she struggled onto her crutches, shut the door behind her as she worked her way out between the cars.

“Which way to the elevator?” she called back to me.

A young man with the tall, ropy build of a basketball player said, “That way,” and pointed to his left. He leaned against the hatch of a black Chevy Suburban and smoked a slim cigar with the red Cohiba label still wrapped around it near the base.

“Thanks,” Angie said, and we proffered stock-friendly smiles as we passed him.

He smiled back, gave a small wave with the cigar.

“He’s dead.”

We stopped, and I turned back and looked at the guy. He wore a navy-blue fleece jacket with a brown leather collar over a black V-neck and black jeans. His black cowboy boots were as weathered as a rodeo rider’s. He tapped some ash from the cigar, put it back in his mouth, and looked at me.

“This is the part where you say, ‘Who’s dead?’” He looked down at his boots.

“Who’s dead?” I said.

“Nick Raftopoulos,” he said.

Angie turned fully around on her crutches. “Excuse me?”

“That’s who you came to see, right?” He held out his hands, shrugged. “Well, you can’t, because he died an hour ago. Cardiac arrest due to massive trauma as a result of gunshot injuries incurred on Leon Trett’s front porch. Perfectly natural, given the circumstances.”

Angie swung her crutches and I took a few steps until we were both standing in front of the man.

He smiled. “Your next line is, ‘How do you know who we’re here to see?’” he said. “Take it, either one of you.”

“Who are you?” I said.

He slung his hand low in my direction. “Neal Ryerson. Call me Neal. Wish I had a cool nickname, but some of us aren’t so blessed. You’re Patrick Kenzie, and you’re Angela Gennaro. And I must say, ma’am, even with the cast and all, your picture doesn’t do you justice. You’re what my daddy’d call a looker.”

“Poole’s dead?” Angie said.

“Yes, ma’am. ’Fraid so. Say, Patrick, could you shake my hand? It’s a little tiring holding it out like this.”

I gave it a light squeeze, and he offered it to Angie. She leaned back on her crutches and ignored it, looked up into Neal Ryerson’s face. She shook her head.

He glanced at me. “Fear of cooties?”

He withdrew the hand and dug it into his inside coat pocket.

I reached behind my back.

“No fear, Mr. Kenzie. No fear.” He withdrew a slim wallet and flipped it open, showed us a silver badge and ID. “Special Agent Neal Ryerson,” he said, in a deep baritone. “Justice Department.
Ta-da!
” He closed the wallet, slipped it back in his jacket. “Organized Crime Division, if you need to know. Christ, you’re a chatty couple.”

“Why are you bothering us?” I said.

“Because, Mr. Kenzie, judging by what I saw at that football game this afternoon, you’re kinda short of friends. And I’m in the friend business.”

“I’m not looking for one.”

“You might not have a choice. I may have to be your friend whether you like it or not. I’m pretty good at it, too. I’ll listen to your war stories, watch baseball with you, generally pal around with you at all the hip watering holes.”

I looked at Angie, and we turned and started walking toward our car. I went to her side first, unlocked the door, and started to open it.

“Broussard will kill you,” Ryerson said.

We looked back at him. He took a puff of his Cohiba and came off the back of the Suburban, sauntered toward us with loose, long strides, as if he were walking off court at the end of a period.

“He’s real good at that, killing people. Usually doesn’t do it himself, but he plans it well. He’s a first-rate planner.”

I took Angie’s crutches from her and brushed Ryerson back with the rear door as I opened it to slide them in the backseat. “We’ll be fine, Special Agent Ryerson.”

“I’m sure that’s what Chris Mullen and Pharaoh Gutierrez thought.”

Angie leaned against her open door. “Was Pharaoh Gutierrez DEA?” She reached into her pocket, removed her cigarettes.

Ryerson shook his head. “Nope. Informant for the OCD.” He stepped past me and lit Angie’s cigarette with a black Zippo. “My informant. I turned him. I’d worked him for six and a half years. He was going to help me bring down Cheese, and Cheese’s organization was going to be next. After that, I was going after Cheese’s supplier, guy named Ngyun Tang.” He pointed at the east wall of the garage. “Chinatown bigwig.”

“But?”

“But”—he shrugged—“Pharaoh got hisself iced.”

“And you think Broussard did it?”

“I think Broussard planned it. He didn’t kill them himself because he was too busy pretending to get shot at up in the quarry.”

“So who killed Mullen and Gutierrez?”

Ryerson looked up at the garage ceiling. “Who took the money out of the hills? Who was the first person found in the vicinity of the victims?”

“Wait a sec,” Angie said. “Poole? You think Poole was the shooter?”

Ryerson leaned against the Audi parked beside our car, took a long puff off his cigar, and blew smoke rings up into the fluorescent lights.

“Nicholas Raftopoulos. Born in Swampscott, Massachusetts, 1948. Joined Boston Police Department in 1968, shortly after returning from Vietnam, where he was awarded the Silver Star and was, surprise, an expert-class marksman. His lieutenant in the field said Corporal Raftopoulos could, and I quote, ‘shoot the asshole ring out of a tse-tse fly from fifty yards.’” He shook his head. “Those military guys—they’re so
vivid
.”

“And you think—”

“I think, Mr. Kenzie, that the three of us need to talk.”

I took a step back from him. He was easily six-three, and his perfectly coiffed sandy hair, his easy bearing, and the cut of his clothes spoke of a man who’d come from money. I recognized him now: He’d been the spectator sitting alone at the far end of the stands in Harvard Stadium this afternoon, long legs hooked over the guardrail as he slouched low in his seat, baseball hat down over his eyes. I could see him at Yale trying to decide between law school and a job with the government. Either career held the promise of political office once the gray had blended in just right around his temples, but if he went with the government, he’d get to carry a gun. Outstanding. Yes, sir.

“Nice meeting you, Neal.” I walked around to the driver’s door.

“I wasn’t kidding when I said he’ll kill you.”

Angie chuckled. “And you’ll save us, I suppose.”

“I’m Justice Department.” He placed a palm to his chest. “Bulletproof.”

I looked over the roof of the Crown Victoria at him. “That’s because you’re always behind the people you’re supposed to be protecting, Neal.”

“Oooh.” His hand fluttered over his chest. “Good one, Pat.”

Angie climbed in the car, and I followed. As I started the engine, Neal Ryerson rapped his knuckles on Angie’s window. She frowned and looked at me. I shrugged. She rolled the pane down slowly, and Neal Ryerson dropped to his haunches, rested one arm on her windowsill.

“I got to tell you,” he said. “I think you’re making a big mistake by not hearing me out.”

“Made ’em before,” Angie said.

He leaned back from her door and took a puff of his cigar, blew the smoke out before he leaned back in.

“When I was a kid, my daddy’d take me hunting in the mountains not far from where I grew up, place called Boone, North Carolina. And Daddy, he always told me—every trip from the time I was eight till I was eighteen—that what you had to watch out for,
really
watch out for, wasn’t the moose or the deer. It was the other hunters.”

“Deep,” Angie said.

He smiled. “See, Pat, Angie—”

“Don’t call him Pat,” Angie said. “He hates that.”

He held up the hand with the cigar clenched between the fingers. “All apologies, Patrick. How can I say this? The enemy is us. You understand? And ‘us’ is going to come looking for you soon.” He pointed the thin cigar at me. “‘Us’ already had words with you today, Patrick. How long before he ups the ante? He knows that even if you back off for a bit, sooner or later you’ll come around again, asking the wrong questions. Hell, that’s why you came to see Nick Raftopoulos tonight, am I right? Hoping he’d be coherent enough to answer some of your wrong questions. Now you can drive away. Can’t stop y’all. But he’ll come for you. And this’ll just get worse.”

I looked at Angie. She looked at me. Ryerson’s cigar smoke found the inside of the car and then the back of my lungs, clogged there like hair in a drain.

Angie turned back to him, waved him off the windowsill with a flick of her wrist. “The Blue Diner,” she said. “You know it?”

“Just a short six blocks away.”

“See you there,” she said, and we pulled out of our parking slot and headed for the exit ramp.

The exterior of the Blue Diner looks really cool at night. The only hint of neon fronting Kneeland Street at the base of the Leather District, a large white coffee cup hovers over its sign in a mostly commercial zone, so that the establishment appears, from the highway at least, like something straight out of Edward Hopper’s night-washed daydreams.

I’m not sure Hopper would have paid six thousand dollars for a hamburger, though. Not that the Blue Diner charges quite that much, but it’s in the ballpark. I’ve bought cars for less than I’ve paid for a cup of their coffee.

Neal Ryerson assured us the tab was on the Justice Department, so we splurged on coffee and a couple of Cokes. I would have ordered a hamburger, but then I remembered that the Justice Department budget was provided by my tax dollars, and Ryerson’s generosity didn’t seem like so much of a big deal.

“Let’s start from the beginning,” he said.

“By all means,” Angie said.

He poured some cream into his coffee, passed it to me. “Where did all this start?”

“With Amanda McCready’s disappearance,” I said.

He shook his head. “No. That’s just where you two came into it.” He stirred his coffee, removed the spoon, and pointed it at us. “Three years ago, Narcotics officer Remy Broussard busts Cheese Olamon, Chris Mullen, and Pharaoh Gutierrez doing a quality-control check of a processing plant in South Boston.”

“I thought all drug processing was done overseas,” Angie said.

“‘Processing’ is a euphemism. Basically, they were stomping the shit—cocaine, that time—cutting it with Similac. Broussard and his partner, Poole, couple of other Narcotics cowboys, bust Olamon, my boy Gutierrez, and a bunch of other fellas. Thing is, they don’t arrest them.”

“Why not?”

Ryerson removed a fresh cigar from his pocket, then frowned when he noticed a sign that read
NO CIGAR OR PIPE SMOKING PLEASE. THANK YOU
. He groaned and put the cigar on the table, fingered the cellophane wrapping.

“They don’t arrest them, because after they burned the evidence, there was nothing to arrest them for.”

“They burned the coke,” I said.

He nodded. “According to Pharaoh, they did. There’d been rumors floating around for years that there was a rogue unit of the Narcotics Division that had been given a mandate to hit dealers where it hurt the most. Not with busts that would give the dealers street cred, news coverage, and a very dubious conviction rate. No. This rogue unit was alleged to destroy what they caught them with. And make them watch. It was, remember, a war on drugs, supposedly. And some enterprising Boston cops decided to fight it like a guerrilla war. These guys, rumor had it, were the true untouchables. They couldn’t be bought. They couldn’t be reasoned with. They were zealots. They ran a lot of smaller dealers out of business, ran a lot of newcomers straight back out of town. The bigger dealers—the Cheese Olamons, the Winter Hill gang types, the Italians, and the Chinese—pretty soon started factoring in these raids as the price of doing business, and ultimately, because the whole drug business went into a downswing, and because the raids never proved all that much more effective than anything else, the unit was rumored to have been disbanded.”

“And Broussard and Poole transferred to CAC.”

He nodded. “Some other guys did, too, or stayed in Narcotics, or transferred to Vice or Warrants, what have you. But Cheese Olamon never forgot. And he never forgave. He swore that one day he’d get Broussard.”

“Why Broussard and not the other guys?”

“According to Pharaoh, Cheese felt personally insulted by Broussard. It wasn’t just the burning of his product, it was that Broussard taunted him while they did it, embarrassed him in front of his men. Cheese took that to heart.”

Angie lit a cigarette, held out the pack to Ryerson.

He looked at his cigar, back at the sign that told him he couldn’t smoke it, and said, “Sure. Why not?”

He smoked the cigarette like a cigar, not really inhaling, just puffing, allowing the smoke to roll around on his tongue for a moment before exhaling it.

“Last autumn,” he said, “Pharaoh makes contact with me. We meet, and he says Cheese has something on that cop from a few years back. Cheese, he promises me, is playing Payback’s a Bitch, and Mullen has intimated to Pharaoh that everyone who was in that warehouse that night and had to sit by and be humiliated while Broussard and his boys burned the coke and laughed in their faces is going to enjoy this one. Now, besides everything else, I’m a little confused why Mullen and Pharaoh are suddenly so chummy that Mullen would intimate anything to him. Pharaoh gives me this bygones-be-bygones shit, but I don’t buy it. I figure there’s only one thing Pharaoh and Chris Mullen would bond over, and that’s greed.”