Mission Flats (16 page)

‘Another satisfied customer,’ Gittens drawled as the informant quick-stepped out of the park.

Echo Park was quiet again. June Veris sat alone on his bench and soon was joined by another guy, who talked to him in an animated way. The sweeper loafed near the entrance awhile, then drifted back to his friends on the benches. Kids hanging out, nothing to do but yack with one another. If Gittens had not explained what I’d just seen, I wouldn’t have recognized it as a drug sale at all.

Michael emerged on the roof again and the search procedure was repeated. He emptied his pockets to reveal no money and a little plastic envelope that had not been there when he left. The ‘controlled buy’ was complete.

Gittens displayed the little opaque plastic square to me. There was a red boxing glove rubber-stamped on the package – Knockout.

‘Send them,’ one of the cops urged Gittens. He was watching the park, apparently anxious that June Veris – the target of this whole operation – would leave or simply pass the marked twenties to someone else. If that happened, there would be no way to tie him to the drugs. It was essential the cops arrest Veris while he had the sting money in his pocket. ‘Let’s go, Martin,’ the cop urged.

‘Not yet,’ Gittens said.

‘Let’s go! Send them now!’

‘I said, not yet.’

We waited through several more purchases, maybe twenty or twenty-five minutes in all. At one point a white kid in a Volvo pulled up to the park. He had shaggy red hair and a goatee. The Volvo had a Yale sticker in the rear window. ‘Hello there, Skippy,’ Gittens muttered. Only after a handful of others had scored their drugs – that is, when it was no longer obvious that our informant was Michael – Gittens murmured into his walkie-talkie, ‘Okay, go.’

Within seconds, four unmarked black cruisers converged on the park, pulling right up onto the curb to block the three gates. The kids in the park scattered. Cops ran after them, caught and tackled a few, disappeared down side streets chasing others. It was a joyful chaos.

As it turned out, Veris escaped. The operation failed. But as I think back on that day – even knowing, as I do, that Gittens probably expected Veris would escape, maybe even warned him of the raid – what I remember is that Gittens kept his word. He protected his informant. I remember, too, how it felt to watch that wonderful anarchy in the park, the riot of police and sliders all running, all shouting. From above, through binoculars. How I smiled. It was exhilarating. It was fun.

‘Listen,’ Gittens told Kelly and me afterward, ‘the question isn’t Who killed Danziger? Everybody knows who killed Danziger. The problem is What do you do about it? Nobody in this neighborhood will even talk about Harold Braxton, let alone testify against him.

‘To tell you the truth, I don’t know what Danziger thought he was doing. That case he brought against Gerald McNeese was an old beef, just stupid crackhead stuff. Ray Ratleff was a slider who came up short on a bundle the Posse gave him to sell, so McNeese tried to collect the debt. That’s all there was to it. Ray probably did the coke himself, then he told McNeese he got robbed. Ray Rat’s a pipehead. He’s not a bad kid. I mean, I like Ray. But he’s been on the pipe a long time, he just can’t help himself. Harold shouldn’t have trusted him with the stuff in the first place. It was his mistake, really.’

We were in Echo Park, where the drug market was closed until all these cops decided to go home. The three of us sat on a bench as Gittens illuminated the secret history of Mission Flats. There was none of the wiseguy Boston accent in the detective’s voice. He spoke in an adenoidal, Midwestern tone that matched his white sneakers and home-ironed khakis. The story he told was a different thing.

‘Ray gets into a hole and the debt piles up. So now Braxton has to respond. He can’t allow that kind of thing to go on, he’s got a business to run. He can’t just get ripped off and do nothing about it.

‘So Harold sends out McNeese to square the thing away. But G-Mac was a bad choice. McNeese has killed guys for way less than what Ray Rat did, and Ray’s basically harmless. It was like dropping a bomb on a mosquito. Maybe Braxton figured G-Mac would scare Ray Rat into paying, but Ray just didn’t have the cash because, like I said, any money Ray gets goes straight into the pipe.

‘Anyway, the only thing Ray has is this piece-of-crap Volkswagen Jetta. So one day G-Mac sees Ray driving the Jetta. Ray comes to a light, G-Mac walks up, sticks a gun in his ear – this is right on Mission Ave – and he tells Ray he’s taking the car on account of the money Ray owes the Posse. Just like that. So that’s the carjacking – boom, life felony, right there.

‘Now, Ray’s not a bad kid, like I said. But let’s be honest: Ray did owe the money. Plus, he was lucky McNeese didn’t cap him right there, being the way he is. So the whole thing should have been over and done with – Ray Rat screwed up, so G-Mac took the Jetta, case closed. Ray should have walked away.

‘Okay, so at this point somehow Danziger got Ray Rat to agree to testify about the whole thing – which is unheard of. These DAs can never find a witness in a gang case. I don’t know what the heck Danziger promised him. I don’t even know why Danziger was pushing the case in the first place – and I liked Bobby Danziger, believe me; we were in SIU together a long time – but no jury in this city was going to send anyone to jail over a drug beef, not when the only witness was a crackhead like Ray Ratleff. Even if Danziger could get Ray into the courtroom, he’d have to strap him to the chair to keep him from falling off. I mean, you could have tried this case in Beijing, it still would have come back not-guilty.

‘Anyway, predictably Ray Rat boogies, and now things get really crazy. Braxton can’t find Ray Rat; and G-Mac’s all hot and bothered because Danziger is pushing this thing about Ray Rat’s Jetta. And if it gets to trial, who knows? There’s always a chance a jury will believe Ray because, crackhead or not, you know Ray
is
telling the truth. So, long story short, everybody’s looking for Ray Rat – cops, gangsters, everybody – and nobody can find him.

‘So what happens is, the trial is coming up and Braxton’s crew can’t reach the witness. Well naturally something has to be done to stop that trial. So Braxton goes up to Maine and caps Danziger. I mean, maybe he didn’t actually pull the trigger, but he sure as hell gave the order.’

I asked, ‘How do you know all that?’

‘Chief Truman, everybody knows all that. There’s no great mystery here, fellas. Half the people in this neighborhood could tell you what happened. But go prove it.’

Kelly frowned at this version of events. It was all hearsay, of course. Rumor, not evidence. Or maybe it was Gittens himself that Kelly did not approve of. But to me, this was all good news. Gittens represented something more important than evidence: an insider, a skeleton key.

‘Where is this Ray Rat now?’ Kelly asked.

‘Who knows? The whole department’s out looking for Braxton. Nobody’s thinking about Ray right now, because Ray didn’t shoot Danziger.’

‘But you could find him?’

Gittens shrugged. ‘I’ve got some friends around here who might know something.’

Friends?
What to make of this guy? If Kelly was right that there are two kinds of cops, talkers and fighters, then here was the beau ideal of the talkers. But there was no way to know how much of Gittens’s talk was just that – talk.

Kelly and I exchanged a glance.
Why not?

‘You can really find Ray Rat?’ I asked.

‘Chief Truman, I found you, didn’t I?’

14

The radio is the soundtrack of every cop’s working life.
Bravo six-five-seven, adam-robert . . . Acknowledge, bravo six-five-seven
 . . . It is a constant presence in police cars, the voices almost indecipherable, a blizzard of information. Gittens and Kelly had acquired the ability to filter out the white noise, to hear selectively. But my ear constantly sought out the pidgin messages.
One-five, could you swing by 75 Leinengen Road. We have a report of a stripped car . . . One-five, we have it, sir . . . Bravo K-one, I’m ocean-frank . . .

‘Where are we going?’ I asked Gittens.

‘This place Ray hangs out. Kind of a social club.’

We drove south on Mission Ave, past a series of parking facilities. On the sidewalk, people eyed us. Suspicion naturally attached to three white guys in a Crown Victoria – as suspicion always seemed to attach to racial difference in the Flats. It was in the air here. You were conscious of your race, you wore it like new clothes.

Gittens parked in front of a massive industrial plant just off the avenue, one of the only thriving businesses I’d seen in the area. A sign read,

Bound by high fences topped with cyclone wire, the plant consisted of three enormous warehouses. A conveyor rose out of the roof of the largest, hauling plastic bottles and containers up and dumping them into a shredder. There was no activity outside the building, though. You got the impression the plant was empty, operating on its own, robotically

‘This is the place,’ Gittens announced.

He led Kelly and me through a gate at the front of the complex, and once inside we walked along the fence to a back lot. Here great driftpiles of garbage were sorted by type, newspaper, metals, plastic. Gittens guided us through the garbage dunes to a forty-foot industrial Dumpster. The enormous container sat in a corner, seemingly abandoned. Nearby were piles of old bricks, all sorted and mounded up. I presumed that the Dumpster contained more of the same: construction materials or other junk. It was impossible to imagine why Gittens had led us here. There was a narrow corridor between the Dumpster and the heavy-gauge chain-link fence, and we had to edge in sideways to reach the rear corner of the Dumpster.

‘Let me go first,’ Gittens whispered.

‘Go where?’

Gittens winked and promptly disappeared through the wall of the Dumpster. More precisely, he pulled back a rough cloth curtain that was hanging against the steel sidewall, and he stepped through a gap in the wall. There were voices inside, and after a moment Gittens poked his head back out. ‘Come on,’ he encouraged us, ‘it’s not as bad as it looks.’

Kelly and I looked at each other. ‘You first,’ I said.

Inside the Dumpster was perfect darkness. Blind, I was acutely aware of the smell – rotting garbage, urine, the musky smell of sweat, and a more acrid odor, burned plastic maybe. After a few seconds, I was able to make out a little sitting area. A wooden cable spool had been turned on end to make a table. It was flanked by two battered chairs, one of them missing a leg. Sunlight filtered through the curtain and dimly illuminated the table and chairs. The tabletop was cluttered with needles, a lighter, scraps of blackened tinfoil, discarded containers of heroin and cocaine. The drug packages – plastic envelopes about one inch square – were ink-stamped with two different symbols. One showed the black silhouette of a dog, the other a red boxing glove – Knockout. From the looks of the table, Knockout and Black Dog seemed to be the Coke and Pepsi of the local heroin world. The table was also littered with tie-offs, cheap packages of cocaine formed by placing the rocks or powder in a corner of a plastic sandwich bag then twisting the corner off to form a little sachet. The drug packets were all empty. The party was over, for the moment.

In Versailles there is a lot of pot, misuse of prescription drugs, and a tsunami of alcohol. Occasionally a few bags of cocaine will turn up at the high school and I go over to Mattaquisett if the kid is from Versailles. There is a rumor that Joe Grasso, who drives an eighteen-wheeler between Montreal and the Florida Keys, keeps a stash at his house out on the Post Road, but there’s never been any evidence to support a search there. Freebasing, speedballing, these things I’d never seen.

Gittens poked through the empty packets on the table. He pocketed one with the Knockout label on it, but it was obvious he had no intention of making any arrests or even searching for more drugs. The drugs were beside the point.

Something shifted in the dark interior of the Dumpster. Then a groan.

I jumped back from the table, startled. Squinting into the gloom, I could just make out the contours of three or four men – impossible to see exactly how many – lying on the floor. Their movements were languid, heads and shoes lolling, shadows, no more.

‘Jesus,’ I hissed, feigning anger to mask my embarrassment.

‘Hey, that’s my works, brother,’ a voice said.

Gittens pointed to a needle and syringe on the table: a
works.
‘No one’s touching your works, brother. Everything’s okay’

Kelly, who had to stoop to avoid bumping his head, poked at the things on the table with his nightstick, careful not to touch anything barehanded.

Meanwhile Gittens moved into the darkness at the other end of the trailer. ‘Everything’s fine,’ he cooed to the men who lay on the floor side by side, ‘everything’s peachy’ He snapped rubber gloves onto his hands and straddled the first of the sleepers, bending over and laying a latex hand on the man’s side. ‘How you doing down there, my friend?’ There was no response. ‘Who do we have here? Come on, Sleeping Beauty, show me that pretty face. Any of you fellas seen Ray Ratleff? Huh?’ He stepped across the bodies as if they were fallen logs. ‘Who do we have here? Bobo! Hey, pal. Come on, Bobo, wake up a minute, I need to talk to you.’ The figure groaned and tried to push Gittens away. ‘Come on, Bobo, nap time’s over.’ He reached under the guy’s armpits and pulled him up to a sitting position. While Gittens steadied Bobo with one hand, he reached into his coat pocket and fished out a pair of rubber gloves for me. When I’d stretched the gloves over my hands, Gittens and I walked Bobo over to the table.