The Fence - Dick Lehr [124]
“You can put that away,” a voice said from outside.
Mike turned on the porch light. He was right; it was Dave Williams.
Mike opened the door, his pistol at his side.
“Someone broke into your car.”
Mike looked past Williams. He saw the rear door of the car parked on the street was open. The interior light was on. The Coxes now lived in a neighborhood in the Area C police district, and Williams was apparently working his usual overnight shift.
Williams asked Mike to see if anything was stolen. Mike stepped out onto the porch. “No,” he said, “I don’t think so.” Williams asked Mike again to check the car. The two men exchanged looks, the eyes of two tigers sizing each other up.
Mike walked to his car, looked around, and firmly shut the door.
“No,” he said. “Nothing’s missing.”
“Okay,” Williams said.
They passed each other. Williams climbed into his cruiser. Then he drove away.
For Mike, it was another of his night’s many mysteries. He had no idea what to make of it. He simply climbed the stairs and went back inside, where he resumed the nocturnal ritual of tossing and turning and worrying about his family’s safety.
CHAPTER 16
A Federal Miscarriage of Justice
When the police union hired Willie J. Davis and his partner to represent Kenny against Merritt’s investigation, it didn’t take Davis long to understand Kenny’s predicament. Davis was a veteran of courtroom battles going back more than two decades, first as a prosecutor and then as a defense attorney. In the mid-1950s, the Georgia native had been a standout in the backfield of the Morehouse College football team, the college in Atlanta where, in 1987, a visiting student named Mike Cox met a Spelman College junior, Kimberly Nabauns. By the late 1950s, he’d moved north to Boston, where he attended law school and was named an assistant state attorney general by the state’s first black attorney general, Edward W. Brooke III. He went on to become an assistant U.S. attorney and then was the first black to serve as a U.S. magistrate on the federal bench in Boston. He entered private practice for good in the mid-1970s. He’d become friends along the way with another young state prosecutor, George V. Higgins, the future novelist known for gritty Boston-based crime stories, especially The Friends of Eddie Coyle. When he left government work in 1976, Davis joined Higgins in representing former Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver in California.
It was in 1970, while still a federal prosecutor, when Davis had what he’d later refer to as an experience matching Kenny Conley’s. Working with federal drug agents, Davis secured the indictment of two Boston men on cocaine trafficking charges. The two had long records for violent crime and were widely feared. The prior year, they’d beaten a murder rap in the shooting deaths of a Roxbury civil rights leader and two others. Police and federal agents were looking to arrest them. The next day, Davis and an agent, driving away from a meeting in Roxbury, overheard on their radio that one of the wanted men had been spotted nearby at Dudley Square. Dennis Chandler, known as Deak, was with an unidentified friend. Agents were moving in. Davis was just a block away. He and his companion headed to Dudley Square to join the capture. They pulled up alongside other law enforcement vehicles. The prosecutor had no business getting involved in an arrest, but he was caught up in the moment. “We moved in,” Davis recalled later, “and everyone had a gun but me.” Davis recognized Chandler and locked in on him. “I was looking right at Deak because I knew Deak was bad.”
But as Davis ran he missed the other man with Chandler. Then he missed seeing the other