Double Deuce (8 page)

“Your friend is sitting alone at Double Deuce?” she said when she got in the car.

“He seems calm about it,” I said.

“Ah yes,” she said, “the ironist.”

“You know me that well on such brief notice?” I said.

“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.”

Quintin shrugged again.

“Do you know her?”

“What her name?”

“Devona,” Erin said. “Devona Jefferson.”

“Ain’t down with the Silks,” Quintin said. “What they shoot her with?”

“A nine millimeter,” I said.

“Use a fresh pipe anyway,” Quintin said.

“You don’t know her?” I said.

“Hell, no,” Quintin said. “Anybody know her?” The other five all said no they didn’t know her. Erin said thank you and we got back in the car. We drove around in the rain talking with people for the rest of the day, not finding anything out.

“We been renewed?” I said.

She smiled.

“Marge has forgiven you.”

“Thank God,” I said, “She finds me irrresistible?”

“We’d already hyped the thing too much informally. We didn’t want some columnist to question why we’d said we were going to do this feature and then backed off.”

“Almost like finding you irresistible,” Hawk said. “How ‘bout the detection?”

“I’m seeing a lot of the ghetto.”

Hawk nodded.

“Nobody has confessed,” I said.

“Only a matter of time,” Hawk said. “Nothing folks in the ghetto want to do more than to find some big honkie and confess to him. Been wanting to myself.”

“I don’t want to hear it,” I said. “It would take too long.”

“What are you detecting?” Jackie said.

“Who killed Devona and Crystal Jefferson.”

“Really?”

“Un huh.”

“Well, I mean I knew that was part of what you, we’re, ah, supposed to do. But, I mean what about the police?”

“Police have hung it up,” I said.

“And what about here?”

“You and Hawk have that covered,” I said.

“And we got Marge Eagen,” Hawk said, “for backup.”

“Can you move around in the black community?”

“I have a guide,” I said.

“And you think you can do what the police have given up on?”

“You bet,” I said.

“I don’t want to sound either naive or cynical, I don’t know which,” Jackie said, “but why?”

“Why do I think I can find him?”

“No, why are you willing to try?”

“Somebody ought to,” I said.

Jackie stared at me. The rain came down on the car roof in its pleasant way. The sound of rain on a car roof always made me feel comfortable.

“That’s it?” Jackie said.

“Yeah.”

“Why should somebody ought to?”

“Fourteen-year-old kid got murdered, and three-month-old kid got murdered, and as far as anyone can see they had nothing to do with it. That shouldn’t go unremarked.”

“I’ll be damned,” Jackie said.

“This time let’s try you stay in the car,” Erin said.

“Okay.”

I sat while she got out and went to the van. Again she put out her hand, again the gentle slap.

Then she got in the backseat of the van and I couldn’t see her. The two kids in front turned to talk with her. The rain made the bright colors of the pseudocolonial restaurant shiny and clean looking. There was a litter of hamburger cartons and paper wrappers and cardboard cups among the cars, and the trash barrel near the front door of the place was overfilled. With Erin out of sight I was the only white face in a sea of black ones. If I weren’t so self-assured it would have made me a little uncomfortable. If I had been uncomfortable no one would have noticed. No one paid any attention to me at all.

I shut the motor off. The rain collected on the windshield and made the colors of the restaurant streak into a kind of impressionist blur. Here’s looking at you, Claude Monet. The restaurant and its parking lot stood alone, the only principle of order in a panorama of urban blight. There were vacant lots on both sides of the place. Each one littered with the detritus of buildings long since dismantled. Across the street was a salvage yard with spiraling coils of razor wire atop a chain-link fence. Even prettified by the rain this was not the garden at Giverny.

Erin got back in the car. “Want a cheeseburger?” she said.

“Too far from medical help,” I said.

Erin smiled and closed the car door.

“These kids know Devona Jefferson,” she said.

“And?”

“She had a boyfriend named Tallboy.”

“In a gang?”

“They’re all in gangs,” Erin said. “It’s how they survive.”

“Know which gang?”

“Yes,” Erin said. “Tallboy’s a member of the Dillard Street Posse.”

“Progress,” I said.

“More than that,” Erin said. “I know him.”

“Some of them are only seven or eight years old,” Erin said.

She had half a glass of Irish whiskey which she held in both hands.

“Some of the older gang kids will recruit the wannabes to carry the weapon, or the drugs, even sometimes do the shooting-they’re juveniles. If they’re caught, the penalty is lighter. And the little ones are thrilled. Peer acceptance, peer approval.” She smiled a little and sipped her whiskey. “Upward mobility,” she said.

I nodded. Outside the window the rain was still with us, straight down in the windless darkness, making the pleasant hush hush sound it makes.

“The thing is,” I said, “is that that’s true. The gangs are upward mobility.”

“Oh, certainly,” Erin said. It was obviously so ordinary a part of what she knew that she hadn’t thought that anyone might not know it. “These kids are capitalists. They watch television and they believe it. They have the values they’ve seen on the tube. They think that the Cosby family is reality, and it is so remote from their reality that they find their own life unbearable. The inequity enrages them. It is not arrogance that causes so many explosions of violence, it’s the opposite.”

“Would the term `low self-esteem‘ be useful?” I said.

“Accurate,” Erin said. “But not very useful. None of the things people say on talk shows are very useful. What they see on television is a life entirely different than theirs, and as far as they can see, what makes the difference is money. The way for them to get money is to sell drugs or to steal from people who sell drugs-there isn’t anybody else in their world that has money to stealand since either enterprise is dangerous, the gang offers protection, identity, even a kind of nurturance.”

“Everybody needs some,” I said.

The whiskey was nearly vaporous when I sipped it, less liquid than a kind of warm miasma in the mouth. It was warm in my office, and dry, and in the quiet light the two of us were comfortable.

“Where do you get yours?” I said. “Nurturance?”

She sipped her whiskey again, bending toward the glass a little as she drank. Then she raised her head and smiled at me. “From the kids, I suppose. I guess the gangs provide me meaning and belonging and emotional sustenance.”

“Whatever works,” I said.

We were quiet briefly while the rain fell and the whiskey worked. There was no uneasiness in the silence. Either of us would talk when we had something to say. Neither of us felt the need to talk when we didn’t.

“Do you know Maslow’s hierarchy of needs?” Erin said.

“Don’t even know Maslow,” I said.

“Maslow’s studies indicate that humans have a descending order of fundamental needs: physical fulfillment, food, warmth, that sort of thing; then safety, love, and belonging; and self-esteem. Whoever-or whatever-provides for those needs will command loyalty and love.”

“Which the gangs do.”

“Yes,” Erin said. “They do.”

Again we were quiet. Erin finished her whiskey and held her glass out. I poured her another drink. Me too.

“There’s even a girls’ gang,” Erin said. “Really vicious, hostile.”

“I will make no remark about the female of the species,” I said.

“Ghetto life is sexist in the extreme,” Erin said. “Among the gangs, women are second-class citizens. Good for sex and little else. Maybe it has to do with a matriarchal society. Maybe all sexism does-the struggle between son and mother over son’s freedom. I have no theories on it-I have no theories on anything. I haven’t time.”

She drank again and seemed lost for a moment in thoughts I had no access to.

“You were talking about a female gang,” I said.

Erin shook her head, half smiling. “The Crockettes. More macho than anyone. One of the girls, name was Whistle, I don’t know why, stabbed her mother and put out a contract on her stepfather.”

“And then demanded leniency because she was an orphan.”

“It is almost like a joke, isn’t it?” Erin said. “She paid off the contract with sex. Even in the toughest of female gangs, that’s their edge, they pay for what they want by fucking.”

Erin’s voice was hard. I knew she’d chosen the word carefully.

“So finally, no matter what else they do, they perpetuate their status,” I said.

Erin nodded slowly, gazing past me at the dark vertical rain.

“The only thing that can save them, boys or girls, the only thing that works,” she said, “is if they can get some sort of positive relationship with an adult. They have no role models, nobody to demonstrate a way of life better than the one they’re in… or the church. I know it sounds silly, but if these kids get religion, they have something. The Muslims have saved a lot.”

“Another kind of gang.”

“Sure-Muslims, Baptists, the Marine Corps. Anybody, anything that can provide for Maslow’s hierarchy, that can show them that they are part of something, that they matter.”

She was leaning forward in her chair, the whiskey held in two hands in her lap and forgotten. I raised my glass toward her and gestured and took a drink.

“What I hope for you, Sister Macklin, is that you never lose this… but you get something else too.”

She smiled at me.

“That would be nice,” she said.