Fatal Odds Page 2

  He knew without my asking that I needed his clout with the district attorney’s office to get answers that were beyond me. He hit a speed-dial number on his desk phone, put it on speaker, and tilted his solid, block-built form back in the groaning chair. The young voice of Mary Cornelius, the receptionist at the Suffolk County District Attorney’s office, gave him a greeting warmer than he was likely to get from anyone else in that office, with one exception.

  “Mary, would you do me the kindness to ring the only other one in that office of yours with more brains than ambition?”

  She was obviously alone at the moment. I could hear the unabashed grin in her voice.

  “Mr. Devlin, for you, anything.”

  “Oh-ho, don’t let the Dragon Lady hear that. She’ll have your head on a stake.”

  We could almost hear the grin broaden. “I’ll ring Mr. Coyne for you.”

  From the day I’d met Mr. Devlin, he’d told me with assurance that Billy Coyne, deputy district attorney, was the only career professional in the office with no eye on political or other advancement. He stood head, shoulders, and hips above the rest of the clan in legal acumen and, more to the point, pure old-school professionalism—meaning that if he gave his word, no power in Heaven or Hell could shake him on it. Perhaps because they were cut from the same cloth, their hundreds of one-on-one courtroom jousts had forged a respect that spilled heavily over into an unexpressed affection.

  “Lex. How pleasant to start the day with a call from a worthy opponent.”

  “Opponent to hell, Billy. Can’t a man make a call for a friendly chat with a brother at the bar?”

  “Lex, don’t ever retire. I’d starve without your steady diet of Irish horse manure. What bit of unentitled information do you want to do me out of this morning?”

  “Need I remind you of your own Gaelic heritage, Mr. Coyne? If I had a nickel for every snookering you’ve—”

  “Lex, enough. We’ll have this out later. I’m due in court. What are you looking for?”

  “A simple answer to a simple question. There was an accident at the track yesterday. A jockey was injured. It happens he was family to my partner, Michael. This morning we hear there’s an arrest warrant out for his brother. What’s that sinister spiderette you work for up to this time?”

  There was a pause. “Is Knight there with you?”

  I chipped in. “Good morning, Mr. Coyne.”

  Another pause. “I’m sorry, kid. I’d heard you were close. Roberto Mendosa died early this morning.”

  It was like a brick wall you see coming, but you won’t admit it’s there until you slam into it full force. The breath went out of me. I couldn’t have responded even if I could have focused on the conversation. I’d been more a part of Roberto’s life, and vice versa, than any member of his family except Victor. And now, in an instant—no more.

  The thought of Victor brought me back to the planet.

  “Mr. Coyne, what’s the charge against Victor?”

  “I’m sorry, kid. This is a double belt for you. The district attorney wants him charged with murder.”

  Mr. D. was up and pacing. “Billy, what the hell is going on over there? I know you can’t control her, but this is insanity. It was a racing accident. Michael was there. He described the whole thing. It would hardly call for a steward’s inquiry, let alone an indictment.”

  “You don’t have the whole picture, Lex.”

  “Well, I’m listening.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Billy, you’re the brains and morality of that outfit. Do you go along with this?”

  “I’ve said all I can. I’m due in court. I have a full day. Trial, lunch at the Marliave, trial all this afternoon. I have to go.”

  There was a catch before Mr. D. said what he was going to say in strong terms. Instead, he said it quietly. “Billy, who else?”

  “No one.”

  Mr. D. hung up the phone. I could see the concern in every line on the old warrior’s face. “Michael, I’m sorry.”

  “I know, Mr. Devlin.”

  “What about Victor?”

  “I’ve got to find him before Malloy does. I assume we’ll be representing him.” I looked up for confirmation.

  “With everything we’ve got. Do you know where to start looking for him?”

  “I think so. I’ll be in touch.”

  “Billy wants to meet us for lunch at the Marliave. That was his message. He couldn’t talk there. I want you with us to hear it firsthand.”

  THREE

  I COULD FEEL the past smothering me when I walked into Pepe’s Bar off Hyde Square in Jamaica Plain. I hadn’t set foot in the place since my early teens, but I could still walk blindfolded through the layout of tables and chairs to the long bar. The bartender didn’t recognize me, but in spite of the aging, I knew him.

  He wiped the bar and listened for an order without making eye contact.

  “Hola, Manuel.”

  He looked up, but nothing registered. I said nothing. He squinted until a dawn of faint recognition brought back more hostility than I expected. I can’t capture the venom in the tone, but what he said in Spanish was this.

  “You dare to come back here. You think you walk in here and it’s the old days? You’re dead in this town.” He said it, turned his back, and started to walk away.

  “I need to see Paco. Where is he?”

  The words stopped him. He turned around and looked in my eyes with the heat of hatred I’d never seen before. “Like it’s all over and forgotten, what you left here. You’re lucky to be able to walk out that door.”

  He turned away again.

  “It’s not your call, Manuel. I’ll leave when I hear it from Paco. This is for Victor Mendosa. It’s for his life. You call Paco now.”

  I walked to a table in the corner. I could feel his eyes burning into my back, but I felt sure the old man wouldn’t make a move on me without someone’s permission. I didn’t look back, but I could hear the click of numbers punched into the bar phone. Whatever he said was too low to make out, but I heard Paco’s name. I sat down and let the memories burn hot in my mind.

  I saw a fourteen-year-old boy who had just lost his father to a heart attack. His mother had moved the two of them from the snow-white North Shore of Boston to the mostly Puerto Rican barrio of Jamaica Plain to be among people of her familiarity and language. She didn’t know it, but she was placing her son smack on the violent border between two warring street gangs. To avoid being victimized by both, the boy had to choose between the Diablos and the Coyotes. Either one was a bad choice, but the alternative was to surrender everything from his lunch to his life to the predations of both gangs. For reasons that seem hardly adequate now, he went with the Coyotes.

  Coyote headquarters in those days, as apparently in the present, was Pepe’s Bar. A younger Manuel was the bartender, and the dominant ruler of the Coyotes was a warrior called Paco. There weren’t many to emulate in that strutting, macho collection of outcast juveniles who fell back on violence to mask the constant fear and lack of self-worth.

  But there was Paco. He was like a rough diamond in a case of costume jewelry. At somewhere in his thirties, he had come up through the same banishment to an ethnic area outside of the mainstream of “normal” society. But something about him said to that fourteen-year-old boy that there was a higher human quality, an internal strength in this man that would never surrender to self-inflating machismo. This was a real man, pure and simple.

  The odd thing was that from the day that boy first walked into that bar, there was some invisible, unlikely bond growing between him and Paco. No one else knew it, but to the boy it was almost tangible.

  After a trial time with the gang, I could hear the words of one of Paco’s lieutenants sending the boy out to pass the first stage of initiation to become a full member of the Coyotes. The boy was ordered to hot-wire a classic Cadillac parked outside of a funeral home during a wake. In those days, that was not beyond the talents of most fourte
en-year-olds in that neighborhood. The part the boy couldn’t quite carry off was impressing the police in a patrol car within six blocks of the funeral home that he was your average owner of a classic Cadillac.

  The trial was brief. The prosecutor wanted the boy tried as an adult to “send a message to the community.” Short of that, he was pressing the judge for the maximum number of years in some graduate school of criminality called a “juvenile detention home.” Either way, the boy saw it as the end of his life.

  Then a miracle happened. The owner of the Cadillac appeared in that pitiful courtroom that was, for most defendants who passed through it, the last station on the road to hell on earth. Miles O’Conner was defense attorney to names on the letterheads of Fortune 500 institutions who found themselves charged with what are appropriately called “white-collar crimes.” He conferred with the judge and prosecutor for an interminable twenty minutes before reaching a result that sent the prosecutor off in a huff, and sent the boy off on the coattail of the man who became the boy’s guardian, savior, and substitute father.

  The boy’s life became a different kind of hell, working at the lowliest chores in the North Shore stables of Miles O’Connor every waking moment that he was not in school or studying. But without realizing it, the boy grew into the O’Connor mindset that whatever exertion it took, no standard but perfection would be tolerated. That mindset eventually drove him to the top of his class at Harvard and Harvard Law School. The usual social life and college frivolity of his classmates was never an issue. There was never time for it if he was to insure the man who made everything possible that he’d hear the boy’s name among the top prizewinners at every level. When Miles O’Connor died, the boy realized that there was no human being on earth for whom he would more gladly walk off a cliff.

  * * *

  I was jolted out of the memories of those years when the door of the bar opened. I saw an older man come through the door with hard years written across his face. I didn’t recognize him until he turned to look at me. Between the deep, ancient scars on his face, I could read the features of the man I had so admired as a boy.

  When he walked toward my table, he limped on legs that were bent and misshapen. I thought I could see a misting in his eyes, but perhaps the moisture was in my own eyes.

  I stood up, and we looked at each other. I started to say, “Paco”, but the word stuck in my throat. His eyes lowered and he dropped, more than sat, in the opposite chair. As before, he was still more comfortable speaking Spanish.

  “Por qué regresastes, Miguel?”

  He said it with both pain and a softer emotion. “Why did you come back, Michael?”

  I sat down with him. “What happened to you, Paco? You were the strongest one of the gang.”

  He just slowly shook his head. When he looked up, he held up two fingers to the bartender. I could see Manuel open one Dos Equis beer. Paco saw it. He hit the table with his fist. “Dos, Manuel. Dos!”

  Manuel opened another bottle and brought them both to the table. He set one before Paco, and put the other in the center of the table before walking away. I took the bottle and held it. Paco raised his, and we drank that first sip together.

  Paco sat back. “You’ve done well, Miguel. You took the opportunity. You made something good of yourself. I’m proud of you.”

  “I’ve been very fortunate.”

  “Fortunate . . . Yes, you could call it that.”

  I heard the bartender, Manuel, smash an empty bottle into the trash. He grabbed the lip of the bar and yelled across the room. “Fortunate, you call it, do you? And to hell with you.”

  Paco shook his head and waved Manuel to break it off. Manuel ignored him. He yelled from across the room, “Sometimes good fortune has to be bought at a great price! A great price!”

  Paco looked at me with eyes that seemed to have aged since he came into the room. “Why did you come back, Miguel? It was better to leave it all in the past.”

  Manuel came out from behind the bar wringing a bar towel between his clenched fists. “You. You think you just walked away from the Coyotes? You ever heard of anyone walking away from the gang and living?”

  He walked over close and put his fists on the table. “This man paid your price. You were off somewhere with the big lawyer in the safe, easy life. We didn’t even know where. And a good thing for you. The gang found out what this man did for you, and he paid your price. Look at him. I didn’t think he’d live at the time.”

  I looked back at Paco. “I don’t understand, Paco. What did you do?”

  Manuel leaned down in my face. “He won’t tell you. That day your Miles O’Connor came to that court and took you away from a term in prison. You think a man like that just wanders into that pit of a courtroom?”

  I had never thought much about why Miles O’Connor came that day. “It was his car that I stole.”

  “What that car cost him he could make in half of one fee. He could buy a hundred more cars and never miss a meal. It wasn’t the car.”

  “Then what?”

  “I was there when this man made a call. He set up an appointment with your Miles O’Connor. He had to plead with his secretary to fit him into his schedule.”

  Manuel looked down at the bent figure of Paco. He had to force the words. “Paco went to see him. He told your Miles O’Connor there was this kid he thought was worth saving. That’s why he went to that courtroom.”

  I had trouble catching my breath to get the words out. “I never knew. Paco, I swear, I never knew.”

  Paco just waved his hand as if to wave it all away.

  Manuel stood upright. “Then it’s good you know now. Because the gang found out. What they did to him was intended for you. Look at him. Even after all that, he’s more of a man than you’ll ever be.”

  Paco took him by the elbow and turned him toward the bar. “Leave us, Manuel. Enough. I still have some pride.”

  Manuel grabbed the bar towel and left with one last meaningful look at me.

  I turned back to Paco. “I’m so sorry. I truly never knew. All these years . . .”

  Paco held up a hand. “Stop, Miguel. I see what you’ve done with your life. Do you think I wouldn’t do the same thing again? Let’s leave it there.”

  Paco leaned forward across the table. “Something brought you down here today. What is it?”

  I leaned closer across the table. This was not for Manuel’s ears. “Maybe I can pay the debt for another one of our brothers. You heard about the death of Roberto Mendosa at Suffolk Downs yesterday?”

  “I heard. You know how word travels among the brothers.”

  “The district attorney is going after his brother, Victor. She’s charging him with causing his death.”

  Paco blew a low whistle through crusty lips.

  “I’m going to represent Victor. I’ll do everything I can for him. He’s not just a client. He’s my cousin. And he’s one of us.”

  Paco nodded. “So why does that bring you here?”

  “Victor’s on the run. I need to bring him in. There’s a cop, Detective Malloy. If he catches up with him first, it could be not so good for Victor.”

  “I hear what you say, Miguel. Still, why does that bring you here?”

  I sat back in the chair. “I owe you everything in my life, Paco. I’ll never go back on that. Anything you want from me, it’s yours. I want you to know that.”

  I could see those tired eyes come alive with a fire that wasn’t there before. “I think you’re about to ask something I can’t give you, Miguel.”

  “I need to find him, Paco. Malloy may be the least of his worries.”

  He shrugged. “I’m an old man. I don’t fight those wars anymore.”

  I leaned forward to whisper, “You’ll never be that old. I saw the tattoo yesterday. On Victor. ‘NDC’.”

  His eyes took on something that looked like a defensive wall. He shrugged. “Lot of our boys have tats.”

  “Not that one. They wouldn’t dare.”
<
br />   Those eyes were ablaze now. The rest of his body just slouched as if in ignorance. “You been listening to fairy tales.”

  “Listen, Paco. I may be a half blood, but I keep in touch. Those letters mean ‘Nyeta de Corazón’—‘Nyeta from the heart.’”

  Paco just closed his eyes.

  I had to crack the shell. I was so close now we could practically touch foreheads across the table. “Don’t shut down on this, Paco. Listen to me. I had a cousin in Oso Blanco Prison in Rio Piedras in Puerto Rico. Two guards thought he had a stash of drug money on the outside. They were wrong, but they tried to muscle him into giving it up. He took a beating, but he had nothing to give them. They said they’d come back the next day. They would have killed him.”

  His eyes were open now. He said nothing, but I could sense every muscle tightening.

  “They found those guards that night with their throats cut. Here’s a puzzle. Who do you think did it?”

  His jaws just shut tighter.

  “Talk to me, Paco. Every drop of that Puerto Rican blood in your veins is saying it. The Nyetas. They made my cousin in Puerto Rico a Hermano, a Brother. He told me about them later when he needed me to defend his son in this country on a drug charge. You and I both know the Nyetas started in prison, but they’re the strongest organized gang in Puerto Rico. They’re strong here too. In the jails, in the city. Are you going to lie to me now, Paco? You going to take the safe road and tell me you never heard of them?”

  I put both my hands in a fist on the table in front of him with the forefingers and the middle fingers crossed. I know he saw the Nyeta sign, and he knew what it meant. He just looked away.

  “You don’t know what you’re playing with.”

  “I know they have thousands of members here. They make alliances with local Puerto Rican gangs here to peddle their drugs, and other things we don’t need to mention. I think that’s what happened years ago with the Coyotes?”

  “I never had anything to do with drugs.”

  “I know, Paco. But you’re not the boss now. Just tell me if I’m off base.”