The only good Lawyer

Chinese.”
    I shook my head. “Yeah, only what does this have to do with Woodrow Gant? He hadn’t been prosecuting for years.”
    Cosentino came away from the window and sat on the desk again, but fidgety. “I heard some noise about one of the gangs Gant helped put away back then.”
    “Vietnamese?”
    “Kind of.”
    “What does that mean?”
    “It was an Amerasian gang, mostly teens whose mothers were Vietnamese women, fathers GI’s during the war. You spent some time in Saigon , right?”
    “Right.”
    “So you know what I mean. The kids were neither fish nor fowl to the purebred Vietnamese. And not just because of the mixed blood, either. It was more that the kids reminded the rest of the people what the war had done to their country, which made any Amerasian a real outcast over there.”
    “And not much better treated over here,” said Velez. “I remember in my school, nobody would hang with a mixed-race kid except the others.”
    Cosentino cracked another knuckle. “That task force I told you about set up kind of a sting, caught four Amerasian kids in a house out in Weston Hills, Gant’s jurisdiction.”
    I’d had a case in the town a while ago.
    Cosentino said, “Two of the kids got killed, the other two prosecuted and turned over to DYS.” Division of Youth Services, our Commonwealth’s reformatory system. “And Gant was their prosecutor.”
    “Right. Only problem was, even with the killings that night—and maybe five others we could guess about—DYS couldn’t hold them past their eighteenth birthdays.”
    “Wait a minute. How old were the kids when they pulled the home invasion?”
    “The two survivors were fifteen and sixteen.”
    “How’d they get out there in the first place?”
    “Stolen car.” Cosentino shrugged. “You don’t have to be old enough to get a driver’s license in order to drive, Cuddy.”
    “Okay,” I said. “So these—what were their names, anyway?”
    “The muscle was Oscar Huong, a real Mr. five-by-five. Father supposedly a black Marine boxing champion. The brains was Nguyen Trinh—or ‘Nugey,’ for short. He had no idea who his daddy was.”
    “So Huong and Trinh were with DYS—”
    “—until they turned eighteen. Then the system had to cut them loose. Only Nugey learned a few things while he was away. One, Oscar could protect him. Two, you get along by going along.”
    “Meaning?”
    “Nugey started brokering deals inside DYS. One group of bad guys cooperates with another, everybody gets better treatment as a result.”
    “How about when he got out?”
    “Went straight,” said Cosentino, his face neutral. “And that’s the ‘noise’ you heard about him? That Trinh actually reformed?”
    Cosentino looked at his partner. “You want to leave now?”
    Velez reached her left hand up to the ponytail, curling an inch or two of hair around her index finger. “I’ve sat through this much, I’ll stay for the punch line.”
    “Which is?” I said.
    Cosentino came back to me. “When Nugey and Oscar graduated from DYS, they had a nest egg. They started loaning it out to people who got turned down by your normal kind of banks.”
    “Sharking.”
    “Yeah, but very quiet, very... progressive. Not the ‘I-need-five-hundred-for-the-rent’ types. More business investments where the ultimate payoff might be bigger.”
    “You make them sound like venture capitalists.” Velez laughed, nervously.
    Cosentino didn’t even grin. “When Woodrow Gant got killed, I asked around about Nugey. On instinct, you might say. I found out he has a half-assed office out in Brighton .”
    A western part of Boston . “Which led you to Trinh’s loan-shark/investor profile.”
    “And led me to something else, too.”
    “What?”
    “You know Woodrow Gant ate at a restaurant the night of the murder?”
    “Place called Viet Mam.”
    “Right,” said Cosentino. “Now, you want to guess who owns the building it’s in?”
    I looked from Larry Cosentino to Alicia Velez and back again, both of them nodding.
    No wonder Chan and Dinah were so scared.

Chapter 6

    B efore leaving the gang unit, I got Nguyen Trinh’s office address. I thought about paying Chan’s landlord a visit, but my original trip to Viet Mam might itself trigger something, and given Cosentino’s description of Oscar Huong, I’d want to meet the Amerasians on my ground rather than theirs. Also, Woodrow Gant’s eating at a restaurant in a building owned by a prior defendant could have