One-Way Ticket (7 page)

She held out her hand, and I took it. She shook hands like a man. She didn’t smile. “Sit down, Mr. Coyne. Pour us some tea, why don’t you.”

I poured two glasses of iced tea, handed one to her, then sat and gazed out at the formal gardens and lawns of her vast backyard, which sloped away behind the house and disappeared down the hillside. It was June, and everything seemed to be blooming. The mingled scent of dozens of varieties of flowers and the almost subsonic drone of bees filled the air. From her spot on top of Belmont Hill, the Prudential Building and the John Hancock Tower, the tallest buildings in Boston, loomed side by side through the thin city smog on the horizon.

“You’ve got quite a view, Judge,” I said.

“After a while you don’t notice it,” she said. She peered at me. Her eyes were the color of ice. “Well? What did you want, Attorney Coyne, that you had to come here to see me on a Saturday morning?”

During the drive over, I’d thought hard about what I should and shouldn’t say to her, and how I should say it. It was delicate, and I hadn’t worked it out very well.

“Please don’t ask me to explain what I’m going to tell you,” I said.

She shrugged. “Go ahead.”

“Here it is.” I cleared my throat. “If you have a case on your docket involving the Russo crime family,” I said, “I’m here to urge you to recuse yourself. It involves the safety and well-being of your family.”

Her smile was without humor. “You don’t think a statement such as that deserves an explanation?”

“Of course it does,” I said. “I just cannot provide it.”

“Can’t, or won’t?”

“Won’t.”

“My family, you say. Meaning…?”

I shook my head.

She gazed past me toward her gardens. She took an absent-minded sip of her iced tea, then put down her glass and shifted her eyes to me. “You’re asking me to trust you on this.”

I nodded.

“You are my son’s attorney, Mr. Coyne. This must involve him.” She arched her eyebrows at me.

I took a sip of tea and avoided her eyes.

She was silent for a long moment. Then she said, “A judge might be called upon to risk the hypothetical well-being of a family member to perform her duty. But no judge should ever permit the integrity of her courtroom to be questioned or compromised. That’s what this is really about, isn’t it, Attorney Coyne? My integrity, the integrity of my courtroom? The integrity of the law?”

“Yes,” I said. “I believe so.”

She nodded. “Fair enough. I won’t ask you any more questions. I respect your discretion.”

“Thank you, Judge.”

“I blame Frederick, you know,” she said after a minute. “My late husband. He was a hard man, and Dalton was a sweet, sensitive, rather ineffectual boy. He had no calling to the law. He only wanted to please his father. It was inevitable that he would rebel. Restaurants, of all things.” She smiled at the very thought of a Lancaster in the restaurant business. “Even since Frederick died, my son has continued to wrestle with his father’s demon.” She shook her head. “What could he have done this time?” She looked at me. “That was rhetorical. I did not mean it as a question.”

I smiled. “I didn’t intend to answer it.”

“Was there anything else you wanted to say?”

“No,” I said. “That’s it.”

She picked up her straw hat and fitted it onto her head. Then she pulled on her gloves and stood up. “Let me show you my roses, Attorney Coyne. They are especially spectacular this year.”

A half hour later we were standing beside my car in the gravel turnaround in front of Judge Lancaster’s house. I was holding a vase containing two dozen long-stemmed yellow rosebuds.

“I know it took courage for you to do what you did today,” said the judge. “I’m not pleased with what you had to say, but I do appreciate it.”

“Not courage,” I said. “It was just something I had to do.”

“Sometimes simply doing one’s duty demands more courage than most people have,” she said. “Don’t underestimate doing your duty. And now it seems that I must determine what my duty is.” She cocked her head and gave me a little cynical smile. “I’ve got you to thank for that.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

She held out her hand. “As am I,” she said.

I shook her hand. “Thanks for the flowers. Evie will love them.”

“Roses are good for whatever ails you,” said Judge Adrienne Lancaster. “I don’t know how I would survive without my roses.”

When I walked into the house bearing a giant bouquet of yellow roses, Evie smiled hugely, took them from me, and buried her face in them. Then she put them on the table, wrapped her arms around my neck, and gave me a long, deep kiss. “You are the sweetest man,” she murmured.

“They’re, um, actually from Judge Lancaster,” I said. “From her garden. She’s got an amazing rose garden.”

Evie’s hands slid down to my hips, and she leaned back from me in a way that pressed the lower halves of our bodies together. She cocked her head and grinned at me. “You would have brought me flowers, though, wouldn’t you?”

I nodded. “Sure. Of course. I am, after all, the sweetest man.”

“Because I’ve been depressed and grouchy.”

“There’s always a reason why people are grouchy,” I said. “Nobody wants to be grouchy and depressed.”

“And you’ve had to put up with me.”

“It requires no effort to put up with you,” I said.

Both Evie and I, for our own reasons, agreed that we needed to get away from the house and the city and the telephone, so that afternoon we put Henry in the car and drove out to Bolton Flats in Harvard. The Flats are many hundreds of acres of fields and woods bordered along one side by the Still River. The Commonwealth has set this acreage aside for pheasant hunting. For six weeks in the fall they stock it with pen-raised birds, and hunters with shotguns and English setters swarm the place hoping to shoot some of them. For the rest of the year, it’s pretty much abandoned.

Bolton Flats is one of the Commonwealth’s so-called Wildlife Management Areas, a deliciously ironic euphemism for a place where the wildlife are born and raised in chicken-wire pens and their so-called management involves men and women wearing blaze orange vests trying to kill them.

Evie and I held hands and walked along the rutted roadways, inhaling the country air of a perfect June afternoon, and since it was not October or November, we had the whole place to ourselves. Henry’s bird-hunting genes kicked in the minute he leaped out of the car, and he snarfed and snuffled the thick corners where, according to the ancient wisdom imbedded in his DNA, he suspected a pheasant might be hiding. He found no pheasants, but he did point a mourning dove, flush dozens of warblers and red-winged blackbirds, and chase some squirrels.

By the time we’d completed a big circle and made our way back to the car, Henry was panting and mud-soaked and smiling, and Evie and I had that healthy stretched-out feeling in our legs.

On the way home, we listened to NPR and picked up some takeout pad thai and hot-and-sour soup at a Thai place in Lexington.

When we got home, I checked the answering machine. No message from Robert Lancaster, or Dalt or the Judge, either. Okay by me. They knew how to reach me if they needed me. If they didn’t try to reach me, it meant they didn’t think they needed me. They probably didn’t. I’d given the three of them all the advice I had.

We warmed our soup and pad thai in the microwave and took it out onto the patio with bottles of Long Trail ale.

When we were done eating, Evie took the dishes into the house. She was gone for a long time. When she came back, her eyes looked puffy. I wondered if she’d been crying again.

She came over, sat on my lap, and snuggled against me.

“Did you talk to Ed?” I said.

She nodded.

“Any news?”

She shook her head. “He sounded… brave. He tried to cheer me up. It was scary. It’s like he’s resigned, like he expects to die, like he’s trying to… to prepare me for it. They’ve got tests they want to do. It sounds to me like they want to do exploratory surgery, although they didn’t tell him that. He doesn’t really know anything. Nobody’s telling him anything. Just the usual platitudes and evasions. He expects them to tell him that he’s going to die.”

“What’re you going to do?”

I felt her shake her head against my chest. “I don’t know. What he’s doing, I guess. Wait and see. I can’t think of anything else.”

“Bring him to Boston,” I said. “Best hospitals, best labs, best doctors in the world. You know people. Pull some strings. He could stay with us.”

Evie was quiet for a long time. Then she said, “He’d never do that.”

We spent Sunday morning drinking coffee, eating donuts, and swapping sections of the
Globe.
In the afternoon we watched the Sox beat the Yankees. When the game was over, I grilled some chicken and cut it up into a big salad with Bibb lettuce and black olives and red peppers and avocado and sliced shiitake mushrooms with a balsamic vinaigrette dressing. We ate on the picnic table with a bottle of Chardonnay and a warm baguette of French bread. Henry took up an alert position at the end of the table where he could keep an eye on both of us in case we decided to sneak a morsel to him, which, of course, we both did. Henry loved grilled chicken, but he didn’t sneer at olives or mushrooms, either.

After we ate, Evie went in and called her father again. She was dry-eyed when she came back out. She said he sounded about the same. There was no news.

I’d had no news from Dalton or Robert or Adrienne Lancaster, either, and I managed to remain dry-eyed about it.

I spent a frustrating Monday in the Concord district court. Judge Kolb was in one of his notorious crappy moods, so instead of okaying the divorce settlement that Barbara Cooper and I had spent three months hammering out for our respective clients, he sent us out to the lobby to rework our alimony and child-support calculations relative to our property-settlement calculations. Most judges rubber-stamped whatever the adversarial lawyers managed to agree upon. Not Judge Otto Kolb. He thought he knew more and was wiser than any lawyer, which is usually a slippery slope for a judge. But Kolb had been on the bench for almost thirty years, and he showed no signs of slipping down any slopes. He dismissed all criticism, debate, and doubt with Machiavelli’s prescription for the prince: “It is better to be feared than loved.”

Nobody loved Judge Kolb:

After supper that evening, Evie kissed my cheek and said she was going to take a hot bath and go to bed, maybe read for a while and try to get some sleep for a change. I asked her if she wanted me to wash her back, and she said No thanks, which was disappointing on several levels.

So I spent the evening nursing a bottle of beer and catching up on my e-mail and trying to imagine how Evie would handle it if—when—her father died. It was strictly selfish thinking. I was really wondering how our relationship would handle it.

I watched the eleven o’clock news, then let Henry out, put together the coffee for the morning, and let Henry back in. Then he and I went upstairs. He slipped into the bedroom and curled up on the rug at the foot of the bed. I undressed in the bathroom, brushed my teeth, padded barefoot into the bedroom, and slid in between the sheets next to Evie.

I lay there on my back staring up at the ceiling. I thought about Judge Adrienne Lancaster. I wondered what she planned to do with the unsettling information I’d given her on Saturday.

Beside me, Evie murmured something, rolled onto her side, flopped her arm across my chest, and hooked her leg over my hip. She was wearing her usual sleeping outfit—one of my T-shirts. When she stood up, it would hang down over her hips. Now it had ridden up to her waist. She wiggled herself against me. Her hair smelled soapy.

She moved her pelvis against my hip. The palm of her hand began sliding down over my belly.

“Honey,” I whispered, “are you awake?”

“Mm,” she said. “You’re here.”

“I certainly am.”

She wiggled herself against me. “My big guy.”

“Right now I guess I am.”

Her hand continued its travels. “Umm,” she said. “My goodness. So you are. I’m glad you’re here.”

“Me, too.”

She moved her face close to mine. Her tongue made a wet circle on the side of my throat. “Show me,” she said.

When my eyes popped open, the night was purple-black outside the bedroom window. The illuminated face of the digital clock on the table beside the bed read 3:52.

It took me a minute to realize that Evie was not beside me. Nor was Henry snoozing on his dog bed.

Then I became aware of muffled voices echoing from somewhere in the house. I slid out of bed, pulled on my boxers and a T-shirt, and padded downstairs.

I followed the voices into the living room. The only light came from the television, which was playing some old black-and-white movie. The sound was turned so low I couldn’t understand what the actors were saying.

Evie was sitting sideways in the corner of the sofa hugging her legs. Her chin was propped up on her knees, and her T-shirt was bunched up around her hips. She held a half-smoked cigarette in her fingers. The smoke twisted up in the flickering blue television light.

Henry was curled up on the floor in front of the sofa. He looked up at me without lifting his head.

It took Evie a minute to realize I was standing there. “I couldn’t sleep,” she said.

“Can I get you something?”

“Like what?”

“Glass of milk? Shot of bourbon? Aspirin?”

“No, thank you. Nothing. I’m all set.” She took a long drag on her cigarette. “Go back to bed.”

“I’ll stay with you if you like.”

“No,” she said. “Please.” She returned her gaze to the television.

I nodded and went back upstairs.

T
UESDAY MORNING I MET
with clients, and I spent the afternoon doing what lawyers mainly do, except on television, where they’re either arguing life-and-death cases in front of packed courtrooms or drinking martinis and eating braised squab with mayors and senators and mobsters in the most expensive restaurants in the city: I caught up on my paperwork.

We lawyers do spend a lot of time on the phone and at conference tables—and occasionally even in courtrooms—blustering, arguing, threatening, pontificating, and cajoling. But what really counts in the law business is what we write. Behind every rich lawyer is a clerk or a junior partner who loves research and knows how to write.