“He called me his sweet little peach,” Betty said. She moved in with him on April 16 of this year, the day after the firm filed his tax returns. He told her fairly early on that the reason he’d been sent to prison was that he’d broken the back of a person who owed money to a gambler in Atlanta, for whom Maxie was working at the time. The person was now paralyzed from the waist down, but that wasn’t Maxie’s fault, since all he’d planned to do was encourage the man to pay up, not cripple him for life, a story the Fulton County District Attorney had not bought.
There was something frightening, Betty admitted-but also excitingabout Maxie’s size. She guessed he was about six feet, four inches tall, and had to weigh something like two hundred and ten, with muscles everywhere and jail house tattoos on his shoulders and arms. It was perhaps his size that caused him to seek employment similar to what he’d had in Atlanta. “Table organizer,” it turned out, was a euphemism for “enforcer,” Maxie’s job being to bring to task any miscreant drug dealer who failed to pay Ramirez any moneys owed to him. Ramirez dealt cocaine-and “a lot of designer drugs,” according to Betty-and was connected to the Colombian cartel in a strutting bantam cock sort of way, several steps higher than the snotnosed sellers proliferating like cockroaches in the streets uptown, but nowhere close to the invisible, untouchable upper echelons of Dopeland.
In October sometime, it was brought to Maxie’s attention that a stoolie and sometime courier named Danny Gimp had done grievous harm to Ramirez. Apparently, a dealer in Majesta had agreed to pay El Jefe- as Ramirez was familiarly called-$42,000 for two kilos of coke. Ramirez turned the packaged snow over to Danny for delivery, but it never found its way to Majesta. The way El Jefe looked at it, he was out not only the coke but also the profit he would have made on the coke. It was one thing to owe money to him but quite another to steal from him. This was an unpardonable offense. This did not call for mere physical retribution. This called for extinction.
On the morning of November 8, after a night of somewhat torrid lovemaking, Maxie showered and dressed and told Betty he was going out to meet a friend of his for pizza.
“He grinned when he said this,” Betty mentioned.
On the following Monday night, Betty saw the video tape on television and thought she recognized Maxie as the white gunman shooting up Guide’s.
“They ought to get better cameras,” she said. “I have to tell you the truth, if I didn’t know Maxie, I never would have recognized him from the tape.”
The closest she came to telling Maxie that she’d seen him on the tape, and suspected he was one of the men who’d killed the rat everyone was talking about, was at breakfast a week or so later when she casually remarked, “By the way, how did you enjoy your pizza that morning?”
“What the fuck you talkin about?” Maxie said.
Four days later he moved in with an eighteen-year-old bitch whose sole claim to fame, according to Maxie, was that she knew how to do The Moroccan Sip. Whatever that was. As if Betty cared what it was.
All she wanted was for the cops to arrest him and send him to the electric chair. Was that a lot to ask for a lousy fifty thousand bucks?
She told them all this on Wednesday morning, the first day of December.
At a quarter past one the next morning, five detectives from the EightSeven drove all the way downtown to kick in Maxwell Corey Blaine’s front door.
Only one of them got shot.
They went in with a No-Knock arrest warrant and Kevlar vests because from what Betty Young had told them, the dude in here was no cookie-cutter.
The trouble with most tenement buildings in many parts of this city was that they hadn’t been designed for close police work. Maxwell Corey Blaine did not live on a ranch in Beaucoup Acres, Louisiana, where the sheriffs folk could drive up a tree-lined, moss-covered driveway and then storm the front door with a battering ram, five cops on either side of it-my how all dee catties was afeard. Maxwell-or Maxie, as he was familiarly called by his once and former rat fink girlfriend-lived in a six-story walkup on a narrow street in Calm’s Point, part of a section that had once been beautiful and civilized, had since become ugly and barbarous, and was currently targeted for gentrification in the next ten years, a cycle that was doomed to repeat itself though no one on the city council had a clue.
The building was constructed of red brick dimmed by the soot of centuries. The stairways were steep and the hallways narrow. There were four apartments on each floor, and at this hour of the morning-they had assembled outside at a quarter to two-the sounds of deep slumber rumbled from behind double-locked doors. They felt clumsy in the heavy-duty vests.
