MANNY MANNING and his team worked the streets in Telegraph Heights, taking the pulse of Gibraltar. LeBlanc and Scanlon covered one end of the main drag, Butterman and Hicks the other. They switched positions hourly, shuffled cars, and mixed up the teaming: Hicks and Scanlon motoring down Gibraltar Street, Butterman flying solo on the side streets, LeBlanc on foot in between.
Shecky Bliss rented a room in a slummy walk-up, catty-corner from the projects, and started snapping pictures of the avenue in action. Manny blew up the photos and taped them to the walls of Narco’s basement bomb-shelter office, grouped by time of day. Manny studied the pictures until he could give a guided tour of the ebb and flow of the indigenous dope trade. Gibraltar at morning feeding, at noon, teatime, midnight.
Junkies kept dying—one or two a week, in the suburbs and the city. Manny called on the morgue to collect the contents of their pockets, looking for leftover bags—for samples, even small ones, of the fentanyl-laced dope flowing out of Gibraltar. The bags differed in size and color, and various cuts were used: mannitol, quinine, milk sugar, others. Purity and money were, as always, inverse: the lower the purity, the higher the profits. Somebody was making a mint off of fentanyl. Gibraltar was as busy as an anthill. Manny had at first assumed that many independent operators dealt there. But the careful, constant strength of the samples meant one standard was being enforced from above. Manny surveyed the nickel bags on his desk blotter. Somewhere on the block was one ant who ran the hill. That ant was Target.
Manny and Shecky went to see Bennie Anastasia, armed with photos of the crowds around the projects, hoping Bennie could pick out the two crucial men: the Negro spot manager and the Cuban Angel. But as they scoured Bennie’s usual hangouts, Shecky got a feeling.
“Bennie’s gone,” he said flatly.
“He’ll turn up,” Manny said, from behind the wheel. “He always does.”
“No,” Shecky said, watching kids dart off the sidewalks. “Something’s happening, something strange. Bennie’s cleared out for real.”
“Fuck him then,” Manny said. “We’ll ID the guys ourselves.”
THE narcs reunited after dark at the Triple Shamrock on Dorchester Ave. Biff got the first round, elbowing his way back from the bar with a tray of beer and shots and a lone ginger ale for Dave LeBlanc. The Triple Sham was cops six deep—mostly hoi polloi patrolmen, gabbing madly, drinking hard, awash in adrenaline, just off work. Biff knew a few of them from the Academy and collected congrats on the promotion to Narco as he made his way through the crush with his tray. He passed some geezers from Robbery, who lined the bar in the weird light of a Schlitz clock, empty glasses and packs of filterless Camels in front of them, talking to no one, not even each other, calling for drinks with their fingers. Biff put the tray down at a back booth, where the narcs were relaxing after a day of surveillance around the Gibraltar Street housing project.
“Gibraltar’s active, that’s for sure,” Butterman said, taking a beer and a shot from Biff’s tray. He roughed a napkin-map of the projects, making ink dots at the busiest selling locations and little stars for the teenagers standing lookout. Nat was talking tradecraft—tac plans and ob posts and good setups for rolling surveillance. The detectives in the booth took their drinks from Biff, nodding as Butterman talked. They were men in their prime, these narcs, more seasoned than the overloud patrolmen, but not yet burned-out like the Robbery stiffs.
Manny proposed a toast to new-boy Biff, and the table drank.
Manny wiped his mouth with his hand. “According to Bennie Anastasia, there’s two faces to watch for at Gibraltar. The first is a Negro kid, name unknown. Bennie says he manages the spot. There’s also a Cuban, name of Angel.”
Manny smiled. “Let’s have us a little shooting match. Hicks and Butterman, find the Cuban Angel. Bennie says he took a drug collar over the summer—you may be able to ID him through the arrest files.”
Butterman cracked his knuckles. “Done.”
Manny turned to Scanlon and LeBlanc. “You two do the Negro manager.”
Scanlon’s cast had come off that morning, and he scratched his wrist nonstop. “Not much to go on,” he groused. “Gibraltar’s a housing project, for chrissake. It’s full of ’em. Let’s ask Bennie for more details.”
“Never mind Bennie,” Manny said. “Shecky has a ton of good surveillance shots of the foot traffic outside the projects. The manager will be in the pictures somewhere.”
“What about me?” Biff asked, pulling a chair to the fringe of the booth.
“It’s too early to use an undercover at Gibraltar,” Manny told him. “Meantime, fetch another round.”
Which Biff did, many times. Butterman and Shecky told stories on each other, on themselves, and on everybody else, until the party started breaking up. LeBlanc was the first to go. Tight-lipped Jay Scanlon followed him. The Triple Sham was almost empty by then, the kids from patrol having gone home to their families or downtown to find girls. Only the Robbery geezers remained, sitting on bar stools and looking like woodcuts. When Butterman and Hicks left for the suburbs, Manny and Shecky were alone with Biff.
“Have we bored you?” Shecky asked him.
Biff drunkenly banged his mug on the table. “More stories.”
“More?” Shecky said. “You heard ’em all, I think.”
“I haven’t heard about Pressure Point.”
“And you’re not gonna, either,” Manny said. “Shecky, tell a funny story.”
“He’s going undercover for us—for you,” Shecky said. “Don’t you think he should hear about our greatest victory?”
“He should,” Biff brazened.
Shecky cleared his throat. “Pressure Point,” he said.
“Shecky,” Manny warned.
Shecky ignored him. “Once upon a time—actually, last summer—there was a busybody state legislator from Back Bay. He was an ambitious chap, and a reformer to boot. He kept giving speeches about ‘alleged irregularities’ in the senior ranks of the Narcotics Division. He was careful to note, this friend of truth, this budding Cato, that he wasn’t accusing anyone of anything. Perish the thought. All he wanted was a simple look at Captain Gus Hanratty’s operational ledgers, which didn’t seem like a lot to ask.
“Well, Biff—are you awake?—what’s Captain Hanratty to do? Let them look, then resign? Or just resign? A normal man, a man like you or me, would decide between these two equally bad choices. But not Gus Hanratty.”
Shecky stole a look at Manny to see if he was listening, but Manny’s eyes were on the wall across the bar, where six framed pictures remembered patrolmen killed in the line of duty, going back to 1901. Shecky wondered what Manny was thinking, and guessed that he was looking at the genuine heroes and hating the phony hero, Gus Hanratty.
Biff was waiting.
Shecky said, “Hanratty had already weathered one corruption scandal—the mess that did in your da—and he had no intention of facing another one. So he fights back, our Gus. He puts a tail on the state legislator, looking for dirt. He sends out feelers through trusted intermediaries—discreet inquiries as to whether perhaps possibly the state representative might be interested in large campaign donations. Things of that nature.”
Biff faced Manny. “Is this true?”
Manny said to Shecky, “Tell the story.”
“Gus hits a brick wall,” Shecky said. “Turns out the state rep loves his wife and acts like it. Turns out the man is rich as Croesus and doesn’t need Gus’s money. It’s what’s known in the trade as a big problem: how do you whore a man you can’t blackmail or bribe? Any guesses, Biff?”
“Just tell the fucking story,” Manny said.
Shecky said, “Hanratty assembles the largest operation anybody ever saw—eighteen separate observation posts, thirty catch units, seventy cops in forty-two cars and vans, gear and men begged and stripped from the rest of the department, talking to each other over a dozen frequencies, all cleared specially for the duration. A police juggernaut. Pressure Point, it was code-named.”
Biff nodded, suddenly rapt, whispering the blood-and-thunder name to himself.
“Now, Hanratty deployed Pressure Point, where? Where would you put it, if you were he? Think, now, Biff. In the state rep’s district, to win him as a friend?” Shecky touched Biff’s arm. “You or I might have done that. But not Hanratty. Pressure Point gets orders: the South End, worst heroin country in Boston. Hanratty says, Shut it down.”
Shecky wet his lips with beer. “Fifth of December, we shut it down. We took twenty collars in five hours and kept it up, around the clock, for days and weeks. Nobody got to see their kids, their wives, their mistresses. Three hundred busts, we made. Or was it more, Manny?”
Manny grunted, eyeing the heroes.
“You invented Narco’s street tactics, Manny. Pressure Point was your crowning glory. Or it should have been.”
“Get on with it,” Manny said.
Shecky got on with it. “Picture the scene, Biff: a blasted mile along the B&M right-of-way, south to Union Park Road, Narco everywhere, arresting everyone, a school bus running shuttle down to the back door of county arraignments, night court stretching into day court stretching into night court. Junkies collared early in the op were bailed a day later, arrested again, reparoled, then rearrested. Spotlights, flares, bullhorns telling whole blocks to halt. Teams of cops with shotguns pulling late-night visits to every place where dopers were known to gather, sacking drug spots aplenty. We started calling it ‘Prussia Point.’ It was D-Day crossed with a circus. It was fucking fabulous.”
Biff, in awe, dribbled beer.
Shecky lent him a napkin. “Heroin has been sold in the South End since before you were born, Biff. There are grandparents there who saw smack deals on the way to school thirty years ago. The locals figure it can never be stopped, will never be stopped, so they live with it. It’s always been that way and will always be that way. Hope dies.
“You don’t know what I’m talking about. I see it in your face. You’re going undercover—maybe you’ll learn. But for three weeks, Prussia Point stopped the sale of heroin in the South End. Little old ladies couldn’t believe their eyes. Had Lincoln risen? White cops were saying no heroin here, and meaning it. The little old ladies baked us pies, gave us lemonade. We felt like Sherman’s army liberating Georgia. Us, Biff: cops—the line of stinky fucking drunks you saw stretching to the men’s room tonight. The question arose, what’s gotten into Hanratty? Since when did he give a fuck about Negroes? What’s his angle?”
Biff said, “His angle?”
“His angle,” Shecky said. “You see, Biff, Prussia Point made it too hot to sell dope south of the B&M tracks, so the drug trade went north. Hanratty was herding the entire South End smack traffic into Back Bay, the state rep’s lap. B&Es quintupled along the Charles. Christmas shoppers were getting mugged as they left Brooks Brothers. It was actually pretty funny seeing the pushers do deals outside the Cosmopolitan Club, jamming up the pay phones arguing with their girlfriends, slamming down the phone, turning to some blue-haired Yankee dowager and asking, ‘Can you believe the balls on that bitch?’”
Shecky, chuckling bitterly, couldn’t believe the balls. “We very nearly erased the richest, most historic neighborhood in Boston. And here’s the brilliant part: if the state rep raised a peep, Hanratty could accuse him of not wanting the cops to protect Negroes equally, which would have put Gus in the deliciously ironic position of sounding like Adlai Stevenson. It’s genius, really.
“Hanratty and the state rep sit down to talk. They realize they have much in common. They kiss and hug and fall in love. DA Johnny Cahill pronounces them man and wife. The state rep’s probe of Gus Hanratty is shelved forever and, in return, the cops pull out of the South End, which had briefly been a place for decent people.”
“That’s fucked-up,” Biff said.
“No,” Shecky said, “but this is: Hanratty called us together just before the pullback. We packed seventy men into the high school gym we were using as a command post, all of us coffee-jagging and ready for more.
“Hanratty stood up front. He said, ‘Pressure Point’s over, boys. You have won a total victory over those scumbags out there. On behalf of this department, I thank everyone for their hard work.’ He announces a week off for all hands and we whoop it up.
“Then he says, ‘But before you go, there’s one last thing. We got to clean up the mess we’ve made.’”
Biff asked, “The mess you made? What mess?”
“We all look at each other. What the fuck is Hanratty talking about?
“He says, ‘We moved a lot of niggers into Back Bay. Can’t have that. Move them back. Tonight.’”
Manny said to Biff, “I had nothing to do with it.” He got it out fast, like an apology.
“Me and Manny left,” Shecky agreed. “Came here and got potted, in fact. We didn’t want any part of what was about to happen. ’Course, we didn’t stop it, either.”
Manny said, “I couldn’t stop it. How could I stop it? I’m just a sergeant.”
“And I’m just a drunk,” Shecky said brutally. “Yes, Biff, some men left and some men stayed. The men who stayed spent that night running every black face in their path back across the line. How many beatings did they administer? A few. The kids from the Howard University Glee Club pack-mugged by mysterious white men outside the Sheraton? Scanlon, Butterman, and Hicks did that. They aren’t bad men—except maybe Scanlon. They just got bad orders at the wrong moment, and didn’t stop to think.”
Manny examined his beer.
Biff said, “Jesus.”
Shecky raised his glass and tried to come up with a toast.
MANNY’S “shooting match” got started the next morning: Butterman and Hicks, working the Cuban known as Angel, versus Scanlon and LeBlanc on Gibraltar’s night manager.
Nat Butterman found his Angel in the summer arrest files: Angel Alex Chacon, born in Havana in 1946, picked up in a Vice sweep of the South End in May 1964. Butterman and Hicks pulled the booking photo and started hanging out in Telegraph Heights. Angel Chacon didn’t keep them waiting long. Bounding down F Street from the Broadway trolley, bowling bag in his hand, was a walking mug shot, the Cuban Angel.
Angel Chacon slipped into Middle Tower and stayed sixteen minutes by Hicks’s watch, emerging with the bowling bag. He walked over the hill to Broadway and caught an inbound trolley.
Butterman caught it with him. Chacon sat in back, bowling bag on his lap. Butterman got on behind an old lady and found a seat next to her, toward the front of the car. Butterman launched into a random conversation with the old lady so the rest of the trolley would think they were together.
“Hi,” Butterman whispered. “You probably think I’m some kind of perv, talking to you like this. But I need to seem like I know you. I’m a cop. You’re part of my cover. I’m doing surveillance on that guy back there—the one dressed like Ricky Ricardo.”
The trolley rattled over the saltwater channel to Dorchester. Chacon enjoyed the view of the skyline as the train went elevated, drumming on the bowling bag.
“Don’t make a scene,” Butterman whispered. “I’d show you my shield, but that would kind of defeat the purpose.”
“You’re a pervert,” the old woman said. “You like to ravage old ladies.”
Butterman started to sweat. “I swear I’m not a pervert—”
“Pervert,” she hissed. “You’ll talk your way into my apartment, which is right near the next stop, then you’ll rip my clothes off. Your hungry hands will knead my ample, quivering flesh. You’ll mount me forcefully, your rude rod driving deeper and—”
Butterman found another seat, to hell with cover, and stayed with Chacon through Park Street, where the Cuban changed lines. Butterman let him go. He called Manny from a subway payphone.
“Everything okay?” Manny asked.
“Other than running into Shecky’s mom on the train, sure,” Butterman laughed. “I took Chacon as far as Park Street. He just scored at the location, Middle Tower, and he’s on his way home. This kid’s definitely a customer. He’s a live wire too. Betcha he’d sell to an undercover.”
“Good,” Manny said. “Find Hicks and come in.”
Manny went back to Shecky’s blowups of Gibraltar Street in action, big magnifying glass in hand. He was searching the crowd shots for the elusive spot manager, the nameless Negro kid, circling any male face which filled the bill, and numbering each with a yellow grease pencil. Manny lost himself in the pictures. He was looking hard at a tall, chubby kid who showed up outside Gibraltar early every morning and stayed late, loitering between the project towers and giving orders to the runners and the lookouts. Manny rechecked all the photos of Gibraltar. The chubby kid was always there in the same lime-green windbreaker, under which he jammed a large-caliber pistol, bulge shifting from his right to left side, depending on the day.
The gun bulge spoke volumes. Manny taught his men to pick a place where their sidearm sat best—armpit, ankle, waist, wherever—and leave it there, so they wouldn’t be digging for their pistols like loose change when the time came. Uncomfortable with the gun, the chubby kid wore it all over his body. This told Manny that the kid in the lime windbreaker was new to the life.
“You’re soft,” Manny told the kid’s picture.
LeBlanc and Scanlon set out to learn his name. They followed him from the projects to a social club near Boston City Hospital. They tailed him from the social club to a tenement apartment leased to a Mary Raines Clark. This took a whole day.
Mary Raines Clark’s application for welfare said that she had been born in Virginia. She’d lived with a porter until he ran off, then worked as a seamstress until she went blind. She claimed six dependents: two daughters, a son named Wilbur, and three grandsons. LeBlanc did a workup on the grandsons, still looking for the soft kid’s name.
“First, there’s Alvin Clark,” LeBlanc told Manny, cribbing from a file. “He’s Wilbur’s boy. He’s twenty-five. Got a sheet for burglary from across the river. Mug shots are on order.”
“He’s about the right age,” Manny said. “Who’s the next candidate?”
“Garrett Hays. He’s an interesting case. He was born in 1947 to one of Grandma Clark’s daughters. The daughter was some kind of schizo, in and out of mental hospitals, and a junkie too. In 1960, when Garrett was thirteen, Department of Youth Services tried to put him in a state home, but Grandma Clark saved the day. DYS did a report, which I glommed.”
LeBlanc read from the social worker’s report: “‘It is found that Mary Raines Clark maintains a stable, loving home, a vast improvement over that provided by Garrett’s natural mother since her relapse. Wilbur Clark is Garrett’s uncle, gainfully employed as a night watchman. Alvin Clark is Garrett’s cousin. He presently resides in the Middlesex County Jail, Cambridge. Garrett’s other cousin, Bo Norman, is twelve. He also lives in the apartment. Bo Norman is a fine student who dreams of becoming a police officer someday.’”
“Keep dreaming,” Scanlon cracked.
The narcs had a laugh at the dreamer’s expense, all except LeBlanc, who had found something else: a juvie arrest of Garrett Hays for heroin, May, 1963.
“How old’s Garrett now?” Manny asked.
Scanlon shut his eyes to do the math.
“Eighteen,” Shecky said, ruining the suspense.
“No,” Dave LeBlanc said, handing Manny a photo from his folder. “He was seventeen.” The photo was passed around, sobering all.
“Slit throat,” LeBlanc said. “Found in an alley up in Brighton just about a year ago.”
Manny studied the morgue shots of Garrett Hays. “Well,” he said, “Rule Garrett out.”
He picked up a surveillance glossy of the soft kid in the lime-green windbreaker. “Maybe this fucker’s connected to the Clarks, maybe not. Either way, stay with him. He’s the manager. He’ll tell you his name eventually.”
LeBlanc and Scanlon tailed the chubby kid from Gibraltar to an apartment in Roxbury leased to a Miss Smith. She was quiet and decent, the super said, and had a small son named Garrett Smith.
The chubby kid played hide-and-seek with Miss Smith’s child in Washington Park, the gun still under his jacket. The child hid behind a tree, giggling and hushing himself. Scanlon and LeBlanc were across Paulding Street, windows rolled down, Scanlon devouring two hot dogs at once.
“Good practice,” Scanlon said, chewing, gulping, chewing.
“Huh?” LeBlanc said.
“Good practice for the little jig—practice for hiding from us.”
“Jay, shut up, okay?”
“Why’re you so sore? All’s I said was—”
“Just shut up. I’m trying to hear.”
Soft was pretending not to know where Miss Smith’s child was, searching everywhere except where the boy crouched behind a skinny sapling, knees knocking with glee, until excitement overwhelmed him.
“Here I am, Bo,” the child shouted, jumping from behind the sapling. “Over here!”
LeBlanc started the car. “Guess Bo Norman didn’t fulfill his dream.”
THE white hood said he was looking to push dope out of state. At first, Angel Chacon didn’t trust him. “Who do you know?” Angel kept asking.
“I know lots of people,” the white hood said.
That’s not what Angel meant. “Who do you know that I know, so I’ll know you ain’t, you know—”
“A cop,” the white hood said.
Angel said, “See?”
“I know Bennie Anastasia,” the hood offered. “Me and Bennie A. got rich together. Ask him about me.”
“Bennie A. dropped out,” Angel said. “No one’s seen him since the blizzard.”
“Yeah?” Biff said.
“Yeah.”
“Well, I know Gibraltar. I had my boy Garrett Hays over there.”
“He’s dead,” Angel said, and made a slicing motion at his throat.
“I was with him like a fucking day before it happened,” Biff said. “Garrett and me was tight, right?”
“You bought off Garrett?”
“All the time,” Biff said. “Look, bro, you don’t want to sell to me? Coo’. If Garrett was alive or Bennie was around, they’d tell you I’m solid, but whatever. The important thing is that we stay friends.”
So Angel sold him dope. Biff was grinning, winking, chewing gum, dressing like Dean Martin’s stunt double, and working Angel textbook: two, five, fifty, then a hundred glassines at four bucks apiece. Biff tipped Angel well, never quibbled over weight.
Manny signed the buy-money vouchers: four deals with Angel, $720 in fees and tips. Soon Biff was splitting takeout chicken with Angel, knowing he had the Cuban cold on four felony buys already in the evidence vault.
SCANLON and LeBlanc plodded on. They stayed with the spot boss, Bo Norman, putting him in the steady company of Caesar Raines, a retired pimp and bootlegger. Bo Norman was his nephew. Garrett Hays had been a nephew too.
Manny scrawled on his blackboard with squeaky chalk:
?
CAESAR
BO ANGEL
RUNNERS LOOKOUTS INSIDE DEALERS
Manny pointed to the “?” and told his men, “That’s the source, Mr. Fentanyl. That’s the guy we’re after. Caesar’ll lead you to him.”
Caesar Raines favored creased suits, walking sticks, and Chinese hand fans, and did absolutely nothing for a living so far as surveillance showed. He never went to Gibraltar Street, but always huddled with Bo before and after Bo’s visits. Raines, unlike Bo, was a challenging mark—ponderous and cunning, passing lazy afternoons in and in front of the clubhouse, eating ample lunches in a soul-food place called Gilda’s across the way, taking coffee in a pool hall down the street, buying papers and a shoeshine in the five-and-dime next door, but always watching the street.
On the second day of the extended Scanlon-LeBlanc tail, Raines met Bo Norman inside the clubhouse, then walked alone five blocks south to a liquor store on Norfolk, where he used a pay phone, speaking briefly. Raines waited fifteen minutes by the telephone. He picked up an incoming call on the first ring and spoke for five seconds. He dialed again, talked, consulted his watch, hung up. He waited. A taxi arrived. Scanlon and LeBlanc shadowed the cab to Walter’s, a jazz bar on Mass Ave, where Raines remained until dark, four hours.
“Who else was in Walter’s?” Manny asked LeBlanc and Scanlon afterward.
“We didn’t go in,” Scanlon said. “We’d have been made in two seconds.”
Manny blew up. “Raines met somebody, right? Somebody big. So think it through. Who went in right after Raines? Who came out right before he left?”
The next day, Raines reverted to his country squire routine, and didn’t break pattern again until the fourth day of the coverage, when he used the Norfolk Street liquor store pay phone to make a call and accept a brief callback. This time, however, Raines strolled to the clubhouse and sent Bo to a black Cadillac registered to the blind grandmother, Mary Raines Clark. Raines crossed the avenue to Gilda’s and made a big pantomime of ordering half the menu.
LeBlanc and Scanlon shadowed Bo to a waterfront tavern in Italian East Boston. Scanlon followed him in and hunched over the jukebox. He punched up the Ventures’ “Pipeline,” Jan & Dean’s “Dead Man’s Curve,” then—by mistake—“How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?” Bo sat alone at the bar, nursed a beer, and nibbled pretzels.
Caesar Raines arrived an hour later, and he and Bo walked down the block to Giampanelli’s, a restaurant noted for its mussels and its mobsters. LeBlanc and Scanlon watched from a car across the street.
“Raines gonna eat again?” Scanlon marveled.
Learning from the Walter’s lapse, LeBlanc scribbled the license plate of every wiseguy leaving or arriving during the Giampanelli’s visit, coming up with half the made men in Boston, most of whom imported heroin. They were elated. Giampanelli’s was dagos and docks. After two long months bogged down among the Negroes, they were finally onto Raines’s Sicilian connection.
Or a wild goose chase, Manny thought. Bo drew the coverage to East Boston while Raines did what? Manny read the Giampanelli’s surveillance this way: Raines lies low as long as he can before reaching out to his fentanyl supplier, probably hoping that the two sore thumbs in the unmarked sedan will go away, also knowing that he could use the duration of the tail to gauge how much Narco had on him. A short tail meant Narco knew nothing, and was fishing, or knew plenty, and wasn’t curious. A long tail meant a case was being built. When Raines could wait no longer, he used Bo to draw LeBlanc and Scanlon to Eastie, then met the fentanyl source. Manny was getting a feel for Caesar Raines. Cop and Target thought alike. It felt like making a friend.
“We can’t tail Raines anywhere good,” Manny told Shecky after taking LeBlanc’s report.
“Why?” Shecky asked.
“He’ll ditch us. And he will never use the liquor store phone for real business again. It’s a decoy phone from here on out.”
“So what do we do?” Shecky asked.
“Simple. We watch that phone like hawks.”
Which they did, in triple shifts—Manny and Shecky, Butterman and Hicks, Scanlon and LeBlanc—before finally hitting pay dirt. Raines and Bo showed up together at the liquor store. Raines, true to pattern, placed a call on the liquor store phone and waited for a callback, speaking ten words, less. Then, still true to pattern, Bo departed in the Cadillac, with Scanlon and LeBlanc three cars astern. Caesar Raines watched the cops follow his decoy. Manny and Shecky went too, but peeled off after a few blocks and circled back to Raines’s home turf: the clubhouse, Gilda’s restaurant, the pool hall, the five-and-dime. Manny spied Raines alone in the dime store, talking on a pay phone.
Shecky braked to set up for a tail, but Manny told him to keep driving.
“Where to?”
“DA’s Office,” Manny said. “We need a wiretap.”