"The spics are divided into two factions. One of them is San Juan Hill, the other one is Freddie Santiago."
"Is San Juan Hill a place?"
"Yeah, north end of the city. It used to be Irish and when it was we called it Galway Bay. My mother was born there. Then the Cha Chas came in and we moved out and now it's San Juan Hill."
"And Freddie Santiago?"
"Guy runs a place called Club del Aguadillano in the south end of town. He's the establishment, you know what I mean, sort of a spic Godfather. Kids in San Juan Hill broke with him maybe five, six years ago, and we don't know how organized they are, but you're in San Juan Hill, you're on the other side of whatever fight Freddie's in."
He sipped some more whiskey, held it in his mouth, then tilted his head and let it trickle down his throat. "You got anybody in there?"
"Anybody in where?"
"In San Juan Hill, in with Freddie Santiago."
"Shit no, man, Anglo won't last ten minutes under cover with one of the spic outfits, fuckers don't even speak English, most of them."
"I was thinking you might have some Hispanic officers."
Delaney laughed, started to cough, and swallowed some whiskey. The coughing subsided.
"His-pan-ic officers?" he started to laugh, caught himself, and drank again. "You think we're going to give one of those assholes a badge and a gun? They'd pawn the badge to buy dope and stick up the pawn shop afterwards."
"Any Spanish-speaking officers on the force?"
"Shit no. Freddie speaks English. We get along good with Freddie."
"I'll bet you do," I said.
Delaney paid no attention.
"Freddie's a businessman," Delaney said. "Runs a tight ship."
There was admiration in Delaney's voice.
"Gets a lot of dope and pussy traffic from the prep-school kids come in from Andover, and he don't want to scare them away. Walk around the south end, the streets are clean, the street lights work. There's zero street crime in Freddie's area."
"How about San Juan Hill?"
Delaney shook his head.
"Dodge City," he said. "Bunch of coked-up gang bangers. All we can do is pen them in up there, keep it on the Hill."
"You think Deleon might be connected to Santiago?"
"Deleon." Delaney shook his head, fumbled on the desk for his bottle, poured a little more into his cup. "What kind of fucking Spanish name is that? De-le-fucking-on?"
"Probably one of Ponce's offspring," I said.
"Well I don't know nothing about him."
"Could he be on San Juan Hill?"
"Sure, he could be up there, pal. Fucking Elvis could be up there singing `You ain't nothing but a hound dog,' you know?"
"Think Freddie Santiago would know?"
"Got no way of knowing, pal. Whyn't you go ask him?"
"Probably will," I said.
"You better ask nice, state cop or no."
"I'm not a state cop."
"You said…"
"I said I used to work for the Middlesex DA. I don't anymore. I'm private."
"Private? A fucking shoofly? Get the fuck out of here before I bust you for impersonating a police officer."
"Or vice versa," I said.
"Beat it," he said.
I took his advice, and as I went out the door I looked back and smiled a friendly smile and said "Skol." and closed the door behind me.
The fat cop at the desk was still sweating as I passed him.
"How is he?" he said.
"Gassed," I said.
The cop nodded.
"He wasn't a bad cop, once," the cop said.
"He's a bad cop now," I said.
The fat cop shrugged.
"His brother's a City Councilman," he said.
Chapter 12
San Juan Hill, when I found it, made you think maybe God liked cinema noir. The streets were narrow and the three-deckers crowded down against them. The buildings were uniformly stoop-shouldered and out of plumb, as if age and sequential squalor had sapped the strength from the wooden framing. The buildings were immediately on the sidewalk, there were no yards. There was no grass or trees, no shrubs, not even weeds, pushing up through the asphalt. Between each building was a hot-topped driveway, some with new cars parked there, some with rusting hulks that had been parked there since San Juan Hill was Galway Bay. The graffiti was intense, and brilliant; an angry, aggressive plaint of garish color on almost every surface. Somebody see me! Anybody! A swarm of young kids on mountain bikes flashed out of an alley and swooped by me. One of them scraped something, probably a 20d nail head, along the length of my car as he passed. I thought about shooting him, decided it could be construed as overreaction, and chose instead to ignore it in a dignified manner. I wondered how these impoverished children could afford bright new mountain bikes. Depended, I supposed, on one's priorities. There were trash cans out on every corner, but no sign that the city had been by to pick them up. Many had been tipped over, probably by the fun-loving kids on the mountain bikes, and the trash was scattered on the sidewalks and into the street. There were dogs nosing in the trash. They were mostly the kind of generic mongrel that seems to have bred itself back to the origin of the species, twenty, thirty pounds, gray-brown, with a tail that curled upward over their hindquarters. They were so similar they looked like a breed. They all had the low-slung furtive movements of feral animals. None of them looked friendly. Most of them looked like they didn't eat regularly. And what they did eat they probably foraged. The shades in all the windows appeared to be drawn. There were a lot of kids on the streets, but very few people over the age of twenty. Occasionally there was a storefront with hand-painted Spanish language signs in the window. Cosnidas, cervezas. Most of the kids had on colorful warmup jackets, and baggy jeans and expensive sneakers. Probably traded the mountain bikes in on the sneakers as they passed through puberty. Under the weak spring sun, the graffiti, the warmup clothes, and the sneakers were nearly the only colors in San Juan Hill. Everything else was the color of the dogs.
Near the center of San Juan Hill stood an ugly pile of angular gray stones which had blackened with time. It was a Roman Catholic church with a wide wooden door painted red. The door and most of the church walls were ornamented with graffiti. There was a sign out front that identified the church as St. Sebastian's, and listed the scheduled masses. The sign was covered with graffiti. I parked out front of the church. In San Juan Hill you could park anywhere.
Inside the church, in the back, there were three old women wearing black shawls over their heads. I had read somewhere that the Catholic church no longer required women to cover their heads when entering, but these did not look like women who would jump onto every new fad that came along. The women were saying the rosary, their lips moving silently, fingering the beads softly, sliding them along as they said the prayers. Down front a solitary old man in a black suit with no tie and his white shirt buttoned to the neck was sitting in the first pew. He didn't show any signs of prayer. He wasn't sleeping. He simply sat gazing straight ahead.
As I walked down the aisle of the church, a middleaged priest in a black cassock came out of the sacristy and met me near the altar rail.
"May I help you?" he said softly.
He was a modest-sized guy, wiry and trim with white hair and a red face.
"Is there someplace we can talk, Father?"
The priest nodded.
"Perhaps we can step out onto the front steps," he said, "so as not to disturb the worshipers."
We walked back up the central aisle in the dim, candle-smelling church, and out into the thin early spring brightness. At the foot of the church stairs my car sat at the curb, a long scratch gleaming newly along the entire passenger side. The priest looked at it.
"Your car?" he said.
"Yes."
"Welcome to San Juan Hill," the priest said. "Children on bicycles?"