“Steve Carella,” Carella said, and took a chair alongside Jonesy’s desk. “This is my partner, Meyer Meyer.”
“What can I do for you?” Jonesy asked.
At the water cooler, the detective straightened up and said to no one in particular, “What the fuck’s wrong with this thing?” No one answered him. “I can’t get any water out of it,” he said.
“We’re looking for a line on a street gang named the Hawks.”
“Right,” Jonesy said.
“You know them?”
“They’re inactive. Used to be a bopping gang, oh, ten, fifteen years ago. Half of them got drafted, busted or killed, the others went the drug route. Haven’t heard a peep from them in years.”
“How many members were there?”
“Maybe two dozen in the nucleus group, another fifty or so scattered throughout Diamondback. These gangs like to think of themselves as armies, you know what I mean? In fact, some of them are — four, five hundred members all over the city. Once the shit is on, it’s important how many guys they can put on the street. We had a fight three weeks ago, I swear to Christ this one gang put a thousand guys in the park. Gang called the Voyagers, I love those grand-sounding names, don’t you? Had it out with a Hispanic gang in Grover Park. The Eight-Nine put us onto it because the other gang is in their precinct. Gang named the Caballeros. What a bunch of bullshit,” Jonesy said.
“About the Hawks,” Carella said. “Would you be familiar with someone named Lloyd?”
“Lloyd what?”
“That’s all we’ve got. He would have been president of the gang twelve years ago.”
“My partner’d know more about that than me. He’s the one started this detail. We were getting so much gang activity in this precinct, we had to create a special detail, would you believe it? Two men who should be taking care of people getting robbed or mugged, got to waste our time instead riding herd on a bunch of street hoodlums. Let’s take a look at the cards, see what we got on this Lloyd. I’m not sure they go back that far, but let’s see.”
They went back that far.
Whoever Jonesy’s partner was, he had done a fine job of compiling individual dossiers not only for members of the Hawks but for every other street-gang member in the precinct. The card on Lloyd Baxter was typical of a “leader’s” card. He had been a truant throughout his elementary, junior high and high school career, finally dropping out the moment he could do so legally, at the age of sixteen, and getting busted six months later for Burglary Three, defined as “knowingly entering or remaining unlawfully in a building with intent to commit a crime therein.” The building was, naturally enough, a school. Lloyd Baxter smashed a window and went in there with the alleged intent to steal typewriters. He copped a plea for the lesser charge of Criminal Trespass Three, “knowingly entering or remaining unlawfully in or upon premises,” a simple violation for which the punishment was three months and/or a fine of two hundred and fifty dollars — just what a prostitute might have got. He was sentenced to three months in jail, and the sentence was suspended because he was a juvenile. Four months later, immediately after the probationary period ended. Lloyd Baxter was arrested for Assault Three. By that time he was sergeant at arms in the street gang known as the Hawks and the person he assaulted was a kid named Luis Sainz, who was president of a gang called Los Hermanos. Again Lloyd got off with a suspended sentence, probably because his victim was a punk like himself and the judge thought it foolish to pay for the care and feeding of hoodlums who might otherwise do away with each other if left to their own devices on their own turf. The week he beat the assault rap, Lloyd was elected president of the Hawks, a conquering hero returning home to ticker-tape parades and consequent droits du seigneur.
One of die prizes awarded to the newly elected leader was a girl named Roxanne Dumas, who sounded like either a stripper or a great-grandaughter of the late French novelist, neither of which she was. She was, instead, a fifteen-year-old girl whose parents had come from the lovely island of Jamaica, her forebears having been part-English, part-French, her nature amiable and benign until the city got hold of her.
It was some city, this city.
Roxanne was twelve when her parents moved from Jamaica into a section of the city inhabited almost exclusively by legal immigrants or illegal aliens from various Caribbean islands. And even though the mix was predominately Jamaican, the neighborhood had been dubbed Little Cruz Bay by law enforcement officers, later bastardized to Little Cruise Bay when it became a happy hunting ground for teenage prostitutes of island extraction — the white-collar white workers of this city being extremely tolerant when it came to a little café au lait on their lunch hours. Roxanne missed initiation into the oldest profession by a whisper; her parents moved from Little Cruise Bay to Diamond-back when she was thirteen, into a neighborhood where tan was black and black was beautiful whatever the nation of your origin. When Roxanne was fourteen, she began “going” with a boy of sixteen who was a member of the Hawks. She was fifteen when Lloyd Baxter assaulted the president of Los Hermanos to himself become president of the Hawks. Lloyd was seventeen at the time, an impudent age for a president; there were street-gang leaders who were in their late twenties, some of them married and with children of their own. Lloyd and Roxanne hit it off at once. Her former boyfriend, a kid named Henry, merely shined it on without a murmur; he was by then shooting twenty dollars’ worth of heroin a day and was well on his way to a career as a raging junkie. Henry died of an overdose two years later, shortly before the supposed Christmas trauma Jimmy Harris related to Major Lemarre during his stay at Fort Mercer.
There was nothing in the police dossier about Roxanne Dumas having been raped by members of the gang and carried bleeding to a vacant lot. The dossier went much beyond the Christmas twelve years ago, detailing the disposition of each gang member — drafted, busted, hooked, burned or snuffed. But there was nothing about the basement rape; nothing about a bleeding teenage girl being found in a vacant weed-filled lot on a street comer near the clubhouse; nothing about a hospital admitting Roxanne as an emergency patient, wherever she’d been found or wherever she’d dragged herself. Either the beat patrolmen had been derelict, Roxanne had crawled off unnoticed, the records kept by Jonesy’s partner were incomplete — or the incident had never taken place at all.
The records seemed fastidious enough. According to his dossier, Lloyd had resigned as president of the Hawks at the ripe old age of twenty-three, four years after the alleged basement rape. He had been in and out of trouble with the law ever since, but his biggest fall occurred six years ago when he was busted for Robbery One and sentenced to ten at Castleview. He’d served three, and was currently out on parole and working in a car-wash on Landis Avenue. He was now thirty-one years old.
Five years ago, when Lloyd was serving the first year of his sentence at Castleview, Roxanne married a dope pusher named Schoolhouse Hardy. That was his real name. She was twenty-four when she became Mrs. Hardy. She was twenty-eight when Schoolhouse got busted and sent away under the state’s stringent dope laws. Schoolhouse would not be seeing his wife again for a long, long time — except on visiting days. He was now thirty-seven, she was twenty-nine. According to the follow-up on her, she had begun working as a beautician in a place called The Beauty Hut last August, shortly after Schoolhouse was sentenced to twenty-five at Castleview for unlawful possession of eight ounces of cocaine. There was no indication in the records that she had ever again seen Lloyd Baxter from the day he was sent away to the present.