Gone, Baby, Gone - Dennis Lehane [65]
Once, on Columbus Avenue in the South End, Chris Mullen finished his lunch and walked out of Hammersleys to find a very pissed-off artiste complete with signature goatee and three studs in one ear waiting for him. Chris had blocked in the artiste’s dumpy Civic with his sleek black Benz. The artiste’s girlfriend was with him, so he had to make a stink. From where we sat, idling a half block up on the other side of the street, we couldn’t hear what was said, but we got the gist. The artiste and his girlfriend shouted and pointed. As Chris approached he tucked his cashmere scarf under his dark Armani raincoat, smoothed his tie, and kicked the artiste in the kneecap so deftly the guy was on the ground before his girlfriend ran out of things to say. Chris stood so close to the woman they could have been mistaken for lovers. He placed his index finger against her forehead and cocked his thumb, held it there for what probably seemed like hours to her. Then he dropped the hammer. He took his finger back from the woman’s head and blew on it. He smiled at her. He leaned in and gave her a quick peck on her cheek.
Then Chris walked around to his car, got in, and drove off, left the girl staring after him, stunned, still unaware, I think, that her boyfriend was howling in pain, writhing on the sidewalk like a cat with a broken back.
Besides ourselves and Broussard and Poole, several cops from the CAC unit worked the surveillance, and in addition to Gutierrez and Mullen we observed a rogues’ gallery of Cheese Olamon’s men. There was Carlos “the Shiv” Orlando, who oversaw the day-to-day operations in the housing projects and kept a stack of comic books with him wherever he went. There was JJ MacNally, who’d worked his way up to head pimp of all non-Vietnamese hookers in North Dorchester but dated and doted upon a Vietnamese girl who looked to be all of fifteen. Joel Green and Hicky Vister oversaw loansharking and bookmaking from a booth in Elsinore’s, a bar Cheese owned in Lower Mills, and Buddy Perry and Brian Box—two guys so dumb they’d need maps to find their own bathrooms—ran the muscle.
It was not, from even a cursory glance, a think tank. Cheese had risen through the ranks by paying his dues, showing respect, paying homage to anyone who could hurt him, and stepping up whenever there was a power vacuum. The biggest of these happened a few years back when Jack Rouse, godfather of the Irish mob in Dorchester and Southie, vanished along with his chief henchman, Kevin Hurlihy, a guy who had a hornet’s nest in his brain and industrial corrosive for blood. When they disappeared, Cheese put in a bid for upper Dorchester and got the action. Cheese was smart, Chris Mullen was halfway there, and Pharaoh Gutierrez seemed to have a bit on the ball. The rest of Cheese’s guys, though, conformed to his policy of never hiring anyone who, besides being greedy (which Cheese regarded as a given in this business), was smart enough to do anything about it.
So he hired chuckleheads and adrenaline freaks and guys who liked to wad their money in rubber bands and talk like James Caan and swagger, but who had very little ambition beyond that.
Every time Mullen or Gutierrez went anywhere indoors—an apartment, a warehouse, an office building—the place was immediately tagged for CAC surveillance and over the next three days was watched around the clock and infiltrated if possible.
The bugs we’d placed in Mullen’s place revealed that he called his mother every night at seven and had the same conversation about why he wasn’t married, why he was too selfish to give his mother grandkids, why he didn’t date nice girls, and how come he always looked so pale when he had such a good job working for the Forest Service. At seven-thirty every night, he watched Jeopardy!, and answered the questions aloud, batting about .300. He had a real gift for geography questions but flat-out sucked when it came to seventeenth-century French