The Only Good Lawyer - Jeremiah Healy by Jeremish Healy Page A

you're
going."
    “ Larry's point," said Velez, "is that now
we're starting to notice some cooperation among the different Asian
groups. Makes it even harder for us to trace who's doing what if a
Vietnamese gang knocks over a business or home owned by a 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