The Only Good Lawyer - Jeremiah Healy (10 page)

The woman swung her chair around. Early twenties, she
was petite and pretty, wearing a brown tweed skirt and a yellow
blouse. Her eyeglasses rode up at her hairline, the hair itself a
shade to the blond side of brunette and drawn into a ponytail above
her left ear, trailing down onto the shoulder. "Alicia Velez."

"John Cuddy."

"Oh, sorry." said Cosentino, finishing with
his shoe and getting both feet back on the floor. "I forgot,
Yollie and me were still partnered up back then."

I said, "She's left the unit?"

Velez nodded. "Yolanda moved over to a district
detective slot." The eyebrows went toward Cosentino. "Couldn't
stand Larry's one-liners anymore."

Cosentino said, "The thanks I get, breaking her
in. Sit down, sit down."

As I pulled over a straight-back chair, Velez said,
"You went up against those BWA's, we're lucky to be seeing you."

"BWA's?"

" 'Bitches with an attitude!' Girl joined Las
Hermanas, she got mean in a hurry and didn't go back."

Cosentino cracked his knuckles, grew serious. "You
been visited by any of them, Cuddy?"

"Not so far."

"Well, then." He seemed to relax again.
"What can we do you for?"

"I'm helping the defense in the Alan Spaeth
case."

"Be seeing you," said Velez, standing.

Cosentino lowered his voice. "Al, just a second,
okay?"

"Larry, this guy's—"

"A second, please?"

Velez sat back down.

Cosentino turned to me. "Cuddy, inside the
department, an officer or an A.D.A.—even an ex-A.D.A.—gets
killed, we still call it by the name of the victim, you know? To us,
it's not the 'Alan Spaeth' case, it's the 'Woodrow Gant' case."

Velez stuck in, “The man's vocabulary isn't why I
was I leaving."

"I know that, Al." Cosentino never moved
his eyes off me. "But Cuddy here took down some pretty bad kids
we couldn't protect him from, and I heard he risked his fucking life
when one of them had another citizen by the balls out in suburbia. So
maybe we hear what he has to say."

Velez didn't like it, but she stayed seated as I
tried to figure Cosentino out. He might be trying to help me, or he
might be trying to get information on my client that he could feed to
the prosecution, with Velez as a corroborating witness in case I
tried to backpedal on anything. Either way, though, I needed
Cosentino more than he needed me.

I said, "Somebody suggested I ought to come see
you."

Velez asked, "Who?"

I glanced at her. "Whoever you guys tipped about
something not being right in the Gant killing."

Cosentino said, "Al?"

Her eyes went to her partner.

He said, "I told Murphy over in Homicide what I
told you."

"Great." Velez's eyes now went to her lap.
"Just great"

I looked from one to the other. “There are some
things about the murder that don't add up to Alan Spaeth as the
shooter. Since Gant once prosecuted gang members, and the killing was
done execution-style, I'm thinking maybe somebody decided to settle a
past grudge."

Cosentino crossed his ankles, swinging his sneakers
back and forth a little. "Eight, nine years ago, there was this
task force set up, trying to deal with Asian gangs"

"I remember reading about the Chinatown
prosecutions."

"Yeah. The triads started out from Hong Kong,
then the tongs got organized here in the states by Chinese-Americans,
then the young-punk street gangs arrived on the scene. But it wasn't
just Chinese."

Velez put in, "Vietnamese, Cambodian, you name
it. Very equal opportunity."

I looked at her. "But all that's Boston. Gant
prosecuted in the suburbs."

"Right," said Cosentino, "but bear
with me a minute, okay?"

"Okay."

He spoke more slowly. "Say you're an immigrant,
but you've saved your money or somebody loaned you a grubstake, and
you go into business for yourself. Restaurant, dry cleaners,
convenience store. Only in your home country, the banks and all are
kind of shaky, and the tax collectors are always shaking you down.
Now, your business is mainly a cash-and-carry kind of operation that
turns a nice profit. What do you do?"

I said, "You carry the cash home so it's safe
and not reported as income."

Velez said, "Gold star. But, let's say word gets
around among the workers at your restaurant or whatever that the boss
is pretty flush and keeps the take at his house. What happens next?"

Pretty simple. “Home invasion."

“
Exactly," said Cosentino. "The locals
get wind of a bank without guards or vaults, and all they got to do
is go into the boss's house with some guns and duct tape. Terrorize
the guy's family, and he gives up his stash."

"And, because of the tax-dodge angle, the owner
can't turn to the police about the robbery."

"Or won't, because back home, the cops were even
worse than the banks or the revenue service." Cosentino opened
his hands, a sermonizing priest asking the flock a question. "Result?
People over here are still leery of getting involved with the
authorities?

I stopped to think about it. "I'm guessing that
a lot of the successful Asian immigrants move to the suburbs."

Velez said, "Soon as they can. Bigger house,
better schools for the kids, a sense that all their hard work is
paying off."

"So the crime against essentially a Boston
business gets pulled in a suburb, and nobody tells the police
anywhere about it."

Cosentino nodded. "Yeah, except some of the
suburban immigrants now have real friends—their own kind or
neighbors—who tell them they're better off going to the police,
otherwise they'll just get ripped off again, over and over."

"Which is how Woodrow Gant came to be involved
with the gang unit here in Boston."

"Right. The D.A.'s office he worked for didn't
have an Asian-American prosecutor at the time, so Gant got assigned
by his boss to this task force I mentioned to coordinate with us, try
to nail some of these Boston guys before they hit another land-scaped
split-level out there."

"And the task force was successful?"

"Yeah," said Cosentino, "but mainly
against the Vietnamese gangs."

"Why them?"

He moved off the desk, went around behind it to look
out the window. "Bunch of reasons. Most of the Vietnamese gangs
have only five, six kids in them, so they're manageable to prosecute.
Also, they're pretty vicious. The kids in the Chinese gangs grew up
in a real family system. You do things a certain way, rules and
shit."

Velez said, "Many of the Vietnamese came to the
States from refugee camps, got scattered all over the map without a
family support system in place. They didn't know much English, had a
lot of trouble in school .... "

Cosentino turned back to me. "Home invasion, a
Chinese gang will say to the victim, 'Call the cops, we kill one of
your daughters.' The Vietnamese will say, 'We're gonna take a finger
off this daughter here right now, just so you know what'll happen to
the rest of her, you report us.' "

"Also," said Velez, "the Vietnamese
gangs are more mobile. They go state-to-state in cars, kind of roving
bandits."

I thought about that. "But if the gang members
aren't from the area, how do they know who to target?"

Cosentino and Velez exchanged looks. Then he said to
me, "Traditionally, when you had a mixed neighborhood, you'd get
some mixing in the gangs, too."

"Meaning?"

Velez said, "Meaning, you have Irish, Latinos,
and blacks living in the same couple of blocks, maybe you have a
rainbow-coalition gang, too."

Cosentino stayed by the window, cracked his knuckles
again. "That never used to be true with the Asians, though. The
Chinese hated the Vietnamese, the Cambodians hated the Koreans, and
vice versa all over the fucking place."

"I follow you, but I don't see where you're
going."

“
Larry's point," said Velez, "is that now
we're starting to notice some cooperation among the different Asian
groups. Makes it even harder for us to trace who's doing what if a
Vietnamese gang knocks over a business or home owned by a Chinese."

I shook my head. "Yeah, only what does this have
to do with Woodrow Gant? He hadn't been prosecuting for years."

Cosentino came away from the window and sat on the
desk again, but fidgety. "I heard some noise about one of the
gangs Gant helped put away back then."

"Vietnamese?"

"Kind of."

"What does that mean?"

"It was an Amerasian gang, mostly teens whose
mothers were Vietnamese women, fathers GI's during the war. You spent
some time in Saigon, right?"

"Right."

"So you know what I mean. The kids were neither
fish nor fowl to the purebred Vietnamese. And not just because of the
mixed blood, either. It was more that the kids reminded the rest of
the people what the war had done to their country, which made any
Amerasian a real outcast over there."

"And not much better treated over here,"
said Velez. "I remember in my school, nobody would hang with a
mixed-race kid except the others."

Cosentino cracked another knuckle. "That task
force I told you about set up kind of a sting, caught four Amerasian
kids in a house out in Weston Hills, Gant's jurisdiction."

I'd had a case in the town a while ago.

Cosentino said, "Two of the kids got killed, the
other two prosecuted and turned over to DYS."

Division of Youth Services, our Commonwealth's
reformatory system. "And Gant was their prosecutor."

"Right. Only problem was, even with the killings
that night—and maybe five others we could guess about—DYS
couldn't hold them past their eighteenth birthdays?"

"Wait a minute. How old were the kids when they
pulled the home invasion?"

"The two survivors were fifteen and sixteen."

"How'd they get out there in the first place?"

"Stolen car." Cosentino shrugged. "You
don't have to be old enough to get a driver's license in order to
drive, Cuddy."

"Okay," I said. "So these—what were
their names, anyway?"

"The muscle was Oscar Huong, a real Mr.
five-by-five. Father supposedly a black Marine boxing champion. The
brains was Nguyen Trinh—or 'Nugey,' for short. He had no idea who
his daddy was."

"So Huong and Trinh were with DYS——"

"—until they turned eighteen. Then the system
had to cut them loose. Only Nugey learned a few things while he was
away. One, Oscar could protect him. Two, you get along by going
along."

“
Meaning?"

"Nugey started brokering deals inside DYS. One
group of bad guys cooperates with another, everybody gets better
treatment as a result."

"How about when he got out?"

"Went straight." said Cosentino, his face
neutral.

"And that's the 'noise' you heard about him?
That Trinh actually reformed?"

Cosentino looked at his partner. “You want to leave
now?"

Velez reached her left hand up to the ponytail,
curling an inch or two of hair around her index finger. "I've
sat through this much, I'll stay for the punch line."

"Which is?" I said. `

Cosentino came back to me. "When Nugey and Oscar
graduated from DYS, they had a nest egg. They started loaning it out
to people who got turned down by your normal kind of banks."

"Sharking."

"Yeah, but very quiet, very . . . progressive.
Not the 'I-need-five-hundred-for-the-rent' types. More business
investments where the ultimate payoff might be bigger."

"You make them sound like venture capitalists."

Velez laughed, nervously.

Cosentino didn't even grin. "When Woodrow Gant
got killed, I asked around about Nugey. On instinct, you might say. I
found out he has a half-assed office out in Brighton."

A western part of Boston. "Which led you to
Trinh's loan-shark/investor profile."

"And led me to something else, too."

"What?"

"You know Woodrow Gant ate at a restaurant the
night of the murder?"

"Place called Viet Mam."

"Right," said Cosentino. "Now, you
want to guess who owns the building it's in?"

I looked from Larry Cosentino to Alicia Velez and
back again, both of them nodding.

No wonder Chan and Dinah were so scared.
 

Chapter 6

BEFORE LEAVING THE gang unit, I got Nguyen Trinh's
office address. I thought about paying Chan's landlord a visit, but
my original trip to Viet Mam might itself trigger something, and
given Cosentino's description of Oscar Huong, I'd want to meet the
Amerasians on my ground rather than theirs. Also, Woodrow Gant's
eating at a restaurant in a building owned by a prior defendant could
have been just random chance. In fact, it was hard to see any reason
why a former A.D.A. would ever intentionally patronize such a place.
However, if Gant's meals there were more than coincidence, my best
hope for learning what that reason might be would more likely come
from the man's present circle.