Mission Flats

15

If there is a heaven for cops, it looks like the J. J. Connaughton Cafe. The interior consists of a wood-paneled room, a long, plain bar running the length of it. The bartenders wear white short-sleeve shirts and solid black clip-on neckties. On the wall behind them hang a large American flag and a much larger Irish tricolor. There are no stools, just a rail along the base of the bar to rest one foot on, and when Gittens, Kelly, and I got there — around seven-thirty that evening, after we returned from Lowell — men were lined up along the bar with one foot up like pelicans.

We settled in at a table in the back with three sweating bottles of Rolling Rock.

‘A lot of cops hang out at this place,’ Gittens said. In fact, nearly everyone in the place seemed to be a cop. There were cops in blue uniform pants, plain-clothes cops in nylon windbreakers, cops with potbellies and cops with handlebar mustaches, short cops with Popeye forearms and lanky cops with John Wayne walks.

Before long, cops began to drift up to greet Gittens. They shook his hand and said, howahya Mahtin. Several knew Kelly too, and most of those that didn’t at least had heard his name and seemed happy to see him. They seemed happy to meet me too. They brayed howahya to me and shook my hand vigorously. They sat down with their beers, and soon we were one big group of six or eight or ten or twelve, depending on who was standing and who was off milling around at any given moment. There was an infectious, pleasant sense of testosterone in low idle with these guys. It didn’t take long before I was telling people howahya just like the rest of them.

After we’d been there awhile, one of the younger guys — he had an open, pink face — asked, ‘Any word on the Danziger thing?’

Silence. Danziger’s murder was a close cousin to a cop killing, and it was treated accordingly, with reverence.

‘Nothing,’ declared Gittens, flatly lying. ‘Nobody’s talking.’

‘I’ve never heard anything like it. Nevah.’

‘It’s like Colombia, y’know? Some fuckin’ banana republic? I mean, killing the lawyers? It’s crazy.’

‘-or Sicily. That’s how they do it-’

‘-they’ll kill that kid Braxton too. You watch.’

‘Who?’

‘Up in the Flats, those people’ll kill him.’

There was a low growl — ’he-e-ey’ — emitted by the only black cop at the table.

A pause.

‘Oh, come on, he didn’t mean that,’ one of the white cops said. He held out his beer bottle and grinned. ‘Come on. To Al Sharpton.’

They clinked bottles.

‘To Rodney King,’ the black cop said. He managed a fractional smile.

‘Whoo! Rodney King!’

The crisis seemed to have passed. The monster’s head sank back under the surface of the loch, and the banter resumed as before.

‘Remember Braxton threw that kid Jameel Suggs off the roof?’

‘That was a long time ago.’

‘I remember that. Like ’92 maybe? ’93, something like that?’

I asked, ‘Who’s Jameel Suggs?’

One of the cops clued me in. ‘Suggs raped a little girl in the Grove Park project there. Hey, what was her name? Something Wells?’

‘It was like some African name, I think.’

‘Nikita-’

‘Nikisha.’

‘Nikisha Wells, that’s it. This little girl, she was like seven years old. Suggs raped her then he threw her off the roof so she wouldn’t tell nobody. So a few days later somebody went and threw Suggs off the roof too. They say it was Braxton.’

‘Hey, Maine, that’s called a misdemeanor murder.’

‘That’s the story anyway. Nobody knows if it was really Braxton.’

‘Hey, I say if Braxton really killed Suggs, let’s give him a fuckin’ medal.’

‘-Did he really do that?-’

Gittens broke in. ‘Yes, he did.’

The table got quiet again.

‘Harold threw Jameel Suggs off the roof.’ With his storyteller’s instinct, Gittens took a moment to wipe the condensation off his beer bottle with a napkin. ‘He told me so himself.’

‘“Harold”?-’

‘-get the fuck out!-’

‘-what is this with “Harold”?-’

‘-what, you know him?’

‘Course I know him.’ Gittens shrugged. ‘I’ve known him since he was a kid. I was up in A-3 a long time chasing those kids around.’

‘Get the fuck out. Why don’t you go find him then?’

‘He doesn’t want to be found. No one’s going to find Harold till he’s ready to be found.’

The cops all studied Gittens. Some found the association with Braxton suspicious, others were impressed, others simply didn’t believe it. But all were curious. Martin Gittens had a way of making people curious.

‘Stop calling him Harold,’ said one. ‘You’re weirding me out with that shit.’

‘Hey, Gittens, if you do know him, you better tell Maine here what Braxton’s like so he knows what he’s getting into.’

Gittens smirked at me. ‘Well, he’s smart, I’ll tell you that. Smarter than any of these guys. Harold put together that whole Hot Box Boys thing in high school. You go up to the Flats now, half the guys there will claim they were in Hot Box Boys. But there were really only six or seven of them, and Harold ran the whole show.’

I asked, ‘What does that mean, “Hot Box Boys”?’

‘A hot box is a stolen cah,’ one of the cops informed me.

‘Ah,’ I said, ‘a stolen cah.’

Gittens continued: ‘They were grabbing cars left and right. Fifty in one night off the lot at Hub Nissan in Dorchester. Fifty! They never did any time for anything. They’d get sent to DYS and they’d be out the same night. It was ridiculous.’

‘It’s a revolving door-’

‘-see, that’s what happens,’ one of the others scoffed. ‘You’ve got to nip this stuff in the ass. This juvenile shit-’

‘What, are you gonna lock up every kid who steals a car?’

‘Yes! Every one! That’s what you do — you hit ’em hard right away so they learn. They’ve got to know this shit isn’t gonna flush.’

‘Doesn’t matter. These kids have brass balls, they don’t care.’

‘You know what I don’t get?’ said another, in a puzzled tone.

‘We all know what you don’t get.’

Guffaws and high fives all around.

‘No, listen. The thing… the thing I don’t get is, Gittens, you said Braxton told you he threw Jameel Suggs off the roof. So if he admitted it to you, why didn’t you do anything about it? I mean, he confessed. You had him on a murder.’

‘Yeah, Jesus, Gittens, what are you, protecting this piece of shit?’

Gittens allowed the question to hang there a moment. ‘I did report it. The DA said it wasn’t enough to indict. They didn’t have anything else, and they said a confession alone wouldn’t support a conviction. They didn’t want the case.’

Another pause. We waited, uneasily, for the next gust of conversation.

‘I heard a rumor Braxton was a rat,’ said one.

‘No way-’

‘-Who would he give up? Himself?’

‘-How do you turn a guy like that anyway? Braxton’s a murderer. Even if he wanted to flip, you couldn’t give him a deal. No DA would go for it.’

‘Hey, the feds flipped Whitey Bulger. He was a murderer.’

‘That’s different, it was a Mafia thing. Whitey was a mobster.’

‘Yeah, and Whitey fucked them anyway. He didn’t give them jack shit. These feds are complete shitheads.’

‘Tell you what, if anybody ever did flip Braxton, he’d be a great rat. Imagine the shit Harold Braxton could tell you.’

‘Lowery’d never give him a deal. He’d never get elected again.’

‘Hey, you never know. It’s like the man said: Whitey Bulger got his deal.’

‘That’s because he’s white.’ This was the black cop. He delivered the statement in an even tone. It was a fact, take it or leave it.

‘Oh, Jesus, here we go-’

‘-Why are you always starting with that shit?-’

The black cop shrugged. ‘You all know if Whitey Bulger was black, the feds never would have let him flip, Mafia or no Mafia.’

‘What do you mean? Lowery’s black and he’s the DA.’

‘Yeah, what’s he, a black racist?’

This last comment was pushing. The monster’s eyes appeared on the surface of the loch and lingered there a moment before submerging again.

‘Andrew Lowery wants to be the first black mayor,’ the black cop said. ‘He can’t afford to be associated with a thug like Braxton. An African-American DA protecting an African-American gangster? No way. Braxton scares white people, and white people vote.’

Gittens said, ‘Yeah, well, just the same, I’d try and flip Braxton if I could. That’s the job.’

‘It’ll never happen. Braxton’ll never rat out anyone.’

Gittens inclined his head as if to say, Hey, you never know.

Much later, I learned that Gittens kept a photo in his office of Nikisha Wells, the little girl who had been raped and thrown off the roof in the Grove Park project. In the photo, she wore a red dress and white blouse. Her frizzly hair was arranged in two pigtails, which stuck out from her head at ten o’clock and two o’clock like antennae. There was a red ribbon at the end of each pigtail to match her dress. The photo showed Nikisha leaning forward and laughing as if she’d just heard something very funny. What time is it when an elephant sits on your fence? Typical third-grader. I asked Gittens why he kept the photo. He said he’d known Nikisha from his years in the Flats and he kept it ‘to remind me — this is who we work for.’ At the time it seemed like a full enough explanation. In hindsight, though, I wish I’d probed further. I wish I’d asked what he thought of Braxton throwing Nikisha’s murderer off that same roof. It would have been interesting to know Gittens’s answer.