Neon Dragon (3 page)

Then about a year after I came to the firm, he dropped back in. To almost universal surprise, he accepted the offer of Bilson, Dawes to
bring his still-legendary skill with a jury to the civil side of the court. I had not had the pleasure of working with or for him, but the associates who did bore mental lacerations that they would only bare to each other in the copy room.

As I walked back down the corridor to the gates of hell, it was clear that word of the summons had gotten around. Every associate I passed seemed to take one last look at me in life. I winked and smiled the smile of the incredibly brave. I whispered to myself for confidence, “Latinos rush in where Anglos fear to tread.”

His secretary never looked up. She just waved a pencil in the direction of the door behind her. There was apparently no question that I was the next item on the menu.

I opened the door. He was standing with his back to me at the window behind his desk. Maybe it was the expectations raised by the associates' stories, but I could actually feel the weight of his presence in the room. When he turned around, I was struck almost breathless by the power of that presence. But it was far more than that.

He was on the phone. I doubt that my presence meant more to him than the cigarette butts in his ashtray, but I could not take my eyes off of him.

At about seventy years, he was block built, with a jaw that could cut granite and a nose that changed direction like the Boston streets. His double-breasted pin-striped suit coat lay open to expose burgundy suspenders and a blending tie that suggested that he took his style from an era I'd only heard about. On the other hand, I thought that there was more character in that face than in any I'd seen since the death of another man who'd done more than pass through my life, and who, by coincidence, somehow resembled him.

I stood there swimming in recollections that were churning my insides. While Mr. Devlin ignored me, I was back in the then Puerto Rican ghetto of Jamaica Plain on the southwest side of Boston. My dad had died when I was fourteen. My mother moved us to the Plain to be near some of our Puerto Rican relatives and for the comfort of a
familiar culture after the loss of my dad. It was a reasonable move at the time, but by the time I was sixteen, our street had become the territorial border between two constantly warring gangs.

My mother was somewhat oblivious to it, as adults could be, but I had a choice to make. It was join the Diablos or join the Coyotes or lose everything from my lunch money to my life to members of both gangs every time I walked to school. For reasons that seem inadequate now, I joined the Coyotes.

The initiation was not exactly a fraternity hazing. For the first part I was sent out to hot-wire a particular vintage Cadillac parked outside of the Vasquez Funeral Home during a wake. Thank God, as fate would have it, I never got to the second part of the initiation. I would have belonged to them for life.

In those days before keys with electronic chips, you could punch out a car's ignition slot, cross a couple of wires, and be on the road in a matter of seconds. And so I was. And so were the police. I was busted within eight blocks of the funeral home by a cop to whom I did not look like your average Cadillac owner.

I was tried as an adult because of the “seriousness of the crime.” It was actually because the then DA was targeting gang-related crime. My timing was impeccably bad.

The day of my trial, I found out that the car belonged to a big-ticket criminal-trial attorney by the name of Miles O'Connor. He came as a witness, but he stayed in the courtroom while my public-defender lawyer, who had graduated from law school a few hours before taking on my defense, fumbled his way through to my conviction. To be fair to my baby lawyer, he had a guilty client with no extenuating circumstances.

When the judge gave the prosecution two weeks to assemble a presentence report, Mr. O'Connor stood up in the back of the courtroom.

“Your Honor, may I speak?”

The judge recognized Mr. O'Connor, as would anyone who had ever read a Boston newspaper or watched the eleven o'clock news. The
judge invited him to approach the bench. When Mr. O'Connor walked his ramrod-straight six-foot-two frame, impeccably draped in an eight-hundred-dollar suit, past me on the way to the bench, he glanced down at the little cockroach who had disrupted his routine. I was certain at that moment that between him and the judge, car theft was about to become a capital offense.

Mr. O'Connor's back was to me, but I could hear every word.

“Are you considering jail time, Judge?”

“I am, Mr. O'Connor. Unless there's something very convincing in the presentence report, this boy is going to do some serious time. I can promise you that.”

I went into shock. They were planning my life in the worst possible terms. My mind went into neutral and my ears jammed. For some reason that I couldn't understand, the conversation went on and on. My mind and my hearing unblocked toward the end of it in time to hear the words that turned the course of my life in the least expected direction. Mr. O'Connor never looked back at me when he said it to the judge.

“Give him to me, Your Honor.”

I think the judge went into shock, and I came somewhat out of it. I was able to follow the details they discussed, which roughly came down to probation with the appointment of Mr. O'Connor as my guardian. The judge issued the order and I followed Mr. O'Connor out of the courtroom that day in complete awe. I've never gotten over it.

Mr. O'Connor gave me room and board at the thoroughbred-horse farm he owned north of Boston. He set me to a daily routine of mucking out three barns of stalls every morning. If the job was not completed to his satisfaction by six in the morning, it was as if the job had not been done at all. I came to believe in my bones that Ulysses had it soft with the Augean stables.

There was a daily inspection by Himself, and perfection was the barely passing standard. That left time to shower and don the uniform of a student at Chambers Academy, also his idea. After school, there
was the washing and grooming of every horse in the stable before dinner and several hours of homework. I didn't sleep so much as lapse into unconsciousness by nine to hit the stables by four the next morning.

Mr. O'Connor threw me into the mix of private-school students who had lived the polished life since they came out of the womb. When my self-confidence took the occasional, or rather frequent, nosedive, he was at my back to drill it into me that I could compete with anyone even-up.

And compete I did, for him. I spent three years at Chambers, and at the end of each of the three, Mr. O'Connor was in the audience for the awards ceremony. I was not the brightest bulb in the chandelier there, so I worked my skinny ass down to the nub to see to it that he heard my name every year among the prizewinners.

I made it past the cut into Harvard College, but it was Mr. O'Connor who paid the freight. There was no doubt about whose shoes I wanted to fill. I knew the jump to Harvard Law School would be anything but automatic. That meant passing on the “mixers” and “smokers” and “gentleman's Cs” and most other social byplay that could have endangered the goal. It was a small price to pay for the smile I saw on Mr. O'Connor's face in the audience at the Harvard College graduation—and then again when I saw him rereading my letter of acceptance to Harvard Law School.

I asked him one time why he did it, everything from that day in court on. He said it was an impulse, and the impulse got stronger every year.

There is not a softer or more heartfelt way to put it. Mr. Miles John O'Connor, God rest his worthy soul, was the toughest son of a bitch that ever lived. And I came to love him more than I thought anyone could love or admire another human being.

What brought all of this flooding through my memory bank while I stood there being ignored by Mr. Alexis Devlin, was that he was, in some ways, the spitting image of Mr. O'Connor. The Lord knows it wasn't their appearance. Mr. O'Connor had been trim and athletic and
perfectly clad from the crest of his wavy white hair and handsome Irish features and complexion to the Armani shoes six feet and two inches below. Mr. Devlin was roughly carved out of granite like a character on Mount Rushmore. The suit he was wearing was expensive, but I think he sent his larger brother in for the fitting.

The similarity that struck me deeply was in the way their bearing left no doubt of the immensity of their character. Other men, taller men, had seemed like pygmies in the company of Mr. O'Connor. I was getting waves of a similar sensation in the presence of Mr. Devlin.

THE MAN WAS NOT GIVEN
to social preliminaries. I restrained a slight jump when that voice that reverberated off of courtroom walls caught me dead on.

“You've accepted the defense of young Bradley. Why?”

That was a question I still hadn't answered for myself.

“Judge Bradley put the request in a way that was hard to turn down, Mr. Devlin. I don't honestly know why he picked me.”

“He didn't pick you.” He spun the heavy leather desk chair around and dropped into it. “He was after me. Now he's got me.”

“Mr. Devlin, there was no mention …”

“You're three jumps behind, Sonny. You wear the firm name. This case is going to get more space in the
Boston Herald
than the Kennedys. Amos Bradley is no fool. He knew I'd be drawn into it.”

It had the ring of logic, and it answered the question I'd had since I left Judge Bradley's chambers—why pick a rookie when there are a handful of seasoned all-stars ready to take the bat? Still …

“If he wanted you for defense counsel, Mr. Devlin, and I don't doubt that he did, couldn't he have just asked you?”

“No. He knows I'm out of criminal work. I wouldn't touch it, even for him.” I saw his shoulders drop a bit, and I saw something in his eyes that I still can't fathom. “I guess I'm back in it. Let's get to work.”

He grabbed a yellow pad and pen with an energy that made me wonder if it was totally against his will. I wondered if something had flowed through the old fighter when he'd heard one more bell.

“Let me have the indictment and the coroner's report. I assume you got them immediately.”

My right fist clenched behind the chair at the accuracy of my first instincts. The celebration was short-lived. I handed over the copy of the indictment that was still in my suit-coat pocket.

“The DA said she'll send the coroner's report as soon as it's ready.”

His eyes were back on me like a microscope.

“That's twice you let yourself be taken advantage of today, sonny. Don't keep up that average if you're going to work around me.”

He grabbed the phone and punched numbers into it. I came around and sat in the chair I'd been gripping. If he hadn't invited me to sit down, at least he hadn't forbidden it.

“This is Lex Devlin. Let me speak to Mrs. Lamb.”

There was a pause, but not a long one. Even the queen DA responded when the king summoned.

“Angela, this is Lex Devlin. I'm entering the defense of young Bradley.”

I'd have traded tickets to Fenway Park for the final game of the World Series to see that grin drop from her lips when she realized that the Perkins School for the Blind was being augmented by the Boston Celtics. There was no audible comeback.

“I'd like you to fax the coroner's report and a full set of pictures. I'll need them immediately.”

She apparently saw no advantage in playing snooker with the master, because whatever she said equaled “yes.”

I noticed that Mr. Devlin cut the good-byes to a minimum and rang off without broaching the subject of a plea bargain before he had enough evidence to deal from a position of strength. I absorbed the lesson without necessarily mentioning that the count of my day's miscalculations was up to three.

“How did you know she had it already?”

Mr. Devlin looked up over the half-glasses that were still focused on the indictment.

“Learn fast, sonny. This graduate course is going to be brief. This case is going to set all of Chinatown on end. That means City Hall's interested. You've got the son of a black judge not everyone wants on the Supreme Judicial Court for a defendant. That'll get the bar on edge. Believe me, sonny, that coroner's report was on her desk by midnight.”

He pulled off the glasses and gave me the full look. He held up the indictment.

“How'd you ask for this? I bet you walked right into her office like a piece of raw steak.”

He won the bet.

“Don't. She's too powerful on her own turf. Catch her on neutral ground, like outside of a courtroom.”

“Yes, sir. I notice you called her in her office. That's not the same thing?”

He put the glasses back on, but not before I caught something in his eyes. Associates generally stop at “Yes, sir.”

“I can. You can't. Not for a lot of years, sonny.”

He read the indictment while I absorbed one of life's realities. He threw it back to me.

“Start a file. This is straight premeditated murder. She's going for the full penalty. What have they got?”

“Judge Bradley says they have two witnesses from the Chinese community that can identify him. They say they saw him shoot the victim.”

“And what does he say?”

“He says he had dinner across the street at the Ming Tree restaurant on Tyler Street. He walked over to see the lion. They have a cloth lion with three or four men under it …”

“I know. I've seen it. What'd he do?”

“He says he watched the lion approach the Chinese grocery store
across from the restaurant. He was about ten yards from the building. Firecrackers going off all over the place. It got too loud, so he left. He was arrested a few blocks away. He didn't even know there was a shooting.”

He leaned back in the squeaking chair. I saw the
Globe
on a table to the side open to the conclusion of Mike Loftus's article. I assumed he knew as much as I did about the second-story location of the old man when he was shot.