The Fence - Dick Lehr [20]
Smut spotted Tiny Evans.
Tiny was with Marquis—or Jimmy—Evans, Tiny’s younger brother. He was the biggest of them all—more than six feet tall and weighing 220 pounds. Smut hardly knew Marquis, who was his age, twenty-three. And Marquis had just gotten out of prison—convicted at age seventeen of using a sawed-off shotgun in an assault case. The one thing Smut knew was Marquis could be a hothead, which Tiny sometimes manipulated to his advantage.
Tiny saw Smut and hurried over. Tiny had spotted a kid named Little Greg who was affiliated with the Castlegate Street gang. “Tiny was saying, ‘Little Greg is in the club, Little Greg is in the club,’” Smut said. “He was talking a mile a minute.”
Tiny and Little Greg had a beef going back a couple of years—beginning when Tiny ripped Little Greg’s chain right off his neck and kept it. Then the previous summer Little Greg got some revenge. Tiny told Smut he was getting his hair cut when Little Greg burst into the barbershop and fired a shot. The next time Smut saw Tiny he was walking with a cane. “He got hit near his scrotum.” Not surprisingly, neither event was reported to police. They were matters for the street. Now inside the Cortee’s, Tiny and Little Greg exchanged looks. Smut saw that Tiny was monitoring Little Greg’s whereabouts. Smut reminded Tiny it was his birthday. “Leave it alone,” Smut said.
Looking around, Smut observed friend and enemy alike. But among the foursome—Smut, Tiny, Marquis, and Boogie-Down—he felt secure. The group stood at the bar. Boogie-Down spotted his girlfriend and snuggled with her. Marquis was broke but wanted to buy a round of drinks in honor of his brother’s birthday. He had the gall to ask Tiny to loan him $20. Tiny couldn’t believe it, but dug into the pocket of his blue jeans, where he had a roll of more than $700 in cash. Drinks were on Marquis.
The songs worked loud and hard on Smut. He ordered a drink, another smooth Cask & Cream. Smut loved rap. He saw himself as a budding lyricist and eventually would go from toying with words and beats inside his head to writing them down on paper.
They were mostly autobiographical lyrics like:
I had a Daddy who was crazy so I lost my patience
That’s when I hit the street, searchin’, hurtin’, wantin’ salvation.
My occupation was me cuttin’, puttin’ rocks in a bag….
It was a verse from a song “Our Hoods” by Smut Brown, whose hook went:
Ya’ll don’t know what it is
To grow up in our hood (our Hoods!)
Ya’ll don’t know what it is
To see the things that we would.
CHAPTER 3
Kenny Conley
When Kenny Conley arrived that night at the station in the South End of Boston to work the overnight shift—known as the “last half,” from 11:45 P.M. to 7:30 A.M.—he first went to his locker on the second floor to get his equipment squared away. Then he walked back downstairs to read some reports and talk to the guys coming off duty to see what kind of night it had been. That’s when he learned he was without his regular partner, Danny McDonald, who was out on an injury and not available for duty.
Kenny wasn’t all that surprised. McDonald had injured his knee the night before while the two worked an anti-crime unit—the Delta K–1 car—patrolling the district in an unmarked cruiser looking for trouble: drug dealing, prostitution, crimes in progress. “You’re out there hunting,” Kenny said. The anti-crime cars were considered more pro-active than the “service units” that were directed by a dispatcher to respond to calls for police assistance, ranging from a disabled vehicle to more serious crimes.
The anti-crime units were also different from the police department’s elite units that also worked in street clothes. Kenny patrolled only in his district, known as Area D–4, which