The only good Lawyer

Cuddy, right?”
    Ilario “Larry” Cosentino stood near a tall window, his right foot up on the corner of a desk chair. He was tying the lace to a Turntec running shoe that hadn’t gotten any cleaner since the last time I’d seen him, some months before when a gang of young girls thought their path to riches would be clearer without me in the middle of it.
    About forty and stocky, Cosentino was wearing rumpled blue jeans and a rugby shirt, cuffs pushed halfway up his hairy forearms. There was a little less of the hair on his head than I remembered, but the wide mouth and plug-ugly face hadn’t changed much, still belonging more to a bullfrog.
    Cosentino turned to the woman sitting at the next desk. “Al, this is the guy I told you about, had that shoot-out with Las Hermanas.”
    The woman swung her chair around. Early twenties, she was petite and pretty, wearing a brown tweed skirt and a yellow blouse. Her eyeglasses rode up at her hairline, the hair itself a shade to the blond side of brunette and drawn into a ponytail above her left ear, trailing down onto the shoulder. “Alicia Velez.”
    “John Cuddy.”
    “Oh, sorry,” said Cosentino, finishing with his shoe and getting both feet back on the floor. “I forgot, Yollie and me were still partnered up back then.”
    I said, “She’s left the unit?”
    Velez nodded. “Yolanda moved over to a district detective slot.” The eyebrows went toward Cosentino. “Couldn’t stand Larry’s one-liners anymore.”
    Cosentino said, “The thanks I get, breaking her in. Sit down, sit down.”
    As I pulled over a straight-back chair, Velez said, “You went up against those BWAs, we’re lucky to be seeing you.”
    “BWA’s?”
    “ ‘Bitches with an attitude.’ Girl joined Las Hermanas, she got mean in a hurry and didn’t go back.”
    Cosentino cracked his knuckles, grew serious. “You been visited by any of them, Cuddy?”
    “Not so far.”
    “Well, then.” He seemed to relax again. “What can we do you for?”
    “I’m helping the defense in the Alan Spaeth case.”
    “Be seeing you,” said Velez, standing.
    Cosentino lowered his voice. “Al, just a second, okay?”
    “Larry, this guy’s—”
    “A second, please?”
    Velez sat back down.
    Cosentino turned to me. “Cuddy, inside the department, an officer or an A.D.A.—even an ex-A.D.A.— gets killed, we still call it by the name of the victim, you know? To us, it’s not the ‘Alan Spaeth’ case, it’s the ‘Woodrow Gant’ case.”
    Velez stuck in, “The man’s vocabulary isn’t why I was leaving.”
    “I know that, Al.” Cosentino never moved his eyes off me. “But Cuddy here took down some pretty bad kids we couldn’t protect him from, and I heard he risked his fucking life when one of them had another citizen by the balls out in suburbia. So maybe we hear what he has to say.”
    Velez didn’t like it, but she stayed seated as I tried to figure Cosentino out. He might be trying to help me, or he might be trying to get information on my client that he could feed to the prosecution, with Velez as a corroborating witness in case I tried to backpedal on anything. Either way, though, I needed Cosentino more than he needed me.
    I said, “Somebody suggested I ought to come see you.”
    Velez asked, “Who?”
    I glanced at her. “Whoever you guys tipped about something not being right in the Gant killing.” Cosentino said, “Al?”
    Her eyes went to her partner.
    He said, “I told Murphy over in Homicide what I told you.”
    “Great.” Velez’s eyes now went to her lap. “Just great.”
    I looked from one to the other. “There are some things about the murder that don’t add up to Alan Spaeth as the shooter. Since Gant once prosecuted gang members, and the killing was done execution-style, I’m thinking maybe somebody decided to settle a past grudge.”
    Cosentino crossed his ankles, swinging his sneakers back and forth a little. “Eight, nine years ago, there was this task force set up, trying to deal with Asian gangs.”
    “I remember reading about the Chinatown prosecutions.”
    “Yeah. The triads started out from Hong Kong , then the tongs got organized here in the states by Chinese-Americans, then the young-punk street gangs arrived on the scene. But it wasn’t just Chinese.”
    Velez put in, “Vietnamese, Cambodian, you name it. Very equal opportunity.”
    I looked at her. “But all that’s Boston . Gant prosecuted in the suburbs.”
    “Right,” said