The Only Good Lawyer - Jeremiah Healy (15 page)

Herman's right index finger went to the mole under
her eye, flicking at it. "I don't understand."

"I'm not a police officer, Mrs. Herman."

"You're not?"

"No. I work for the attorney representing Alan
Spaeth."

The hand dropped to her side. Without another word,
she turned and began walking toward the hall I'd used for Elliot
Herman's office.

The temp glanced away from Imogene Burbage, then down
to her board, then at Karen Herman's receding back. "But your
husband's still on that conference call."

The busy associate's wife never even broke stride.
 

Chapter 8

IMOGENE BURBAGE LOOKED at me questioningly, but
didn't say anything about Karen Herman. Instead, Burbage led me back
to Frank Neely's office, and I followed her into it. As Burbage moved
toward the closed closet door, I could see Neely wasn't at his desk.
"I can come back another day."

Burbage had her hand on the knob. "Mr. Neely's
upstairs."

She opened the door. "You first, please."

A wrought-iron, spiral staircase was spotlit from
above like a piece of movable scenery on a stage.

As I walked up to Burbage, I got a closer look at a
framed photograph next to the old one of the senior partner in his
Army uniform. This shot was sepia, too, and showed Neely and a number
of other GI's, wearing Ranger patches and ducking at the base of a
cliff. Having seen a similar photo once, I thought I recognized the
setting.

"Mr. Cuddy?" said Burbage.

I climbed the narrow, winding stairs. My shoes made
the iron steps clang hollowly in the closet shaft, Burbage coming
behind me and creating echoes over echoes.

"I hope we're not trying to sneak up on him."

My guide didn't respond.

At the top of the single flight was another closed
door, the spotlight now strong and warm on my head and shoulders.

"Open it, please," said Burbage behind me.
 
The door swung outward, and I had the
sensation of being in one of those old horror movies, where the scene
you see isn't what you'd expect.

In this case, a tropical garden.

"Come in, John, come in." Neely's voice
carried through the foliage. "It's something of a jungle, but
mercifully without the predators."

There was a walkway three feet wide, its base
composed of square, inlaid tiles in burgundy. Stepping onto the path,
I looked up. Greenhouse glass reflected that alien glow of grow
lights, the glass set into an aluminum superstructure. The aluminum
struts slanted down and away from the ridgepoled peak twelve feet
above to a red-bricked knee wall rising maybe two feet off the floor.
Around me were trees and bushes bearing blossoms of every color, some
more typical, others more exotic. A thick, perfumed mugginess hung in
the air, like the atmosphere at the prayer rail of a funeral home.

Burbage closed the door and edged past me on the
walkway without brushing against my suit. "This way, Mr. Cuddy."

The path wound through the greenery to a seating area
of wrought-iron patio furniture painted white and upholstered with
cushions the color of the tiles. Frank Neely stood in front of one
chair, a rolling, glass-topped liquor cart to his right, no drink
poured as yet on the small cocktail table to his left. He'd changed
clothes since I'd seen him downstairs, the lawyer uniform gone in
favor of a long-sleeved chamois shirt, khaki pants, and boat mocs.

Burbage said, "Will you be needing me for
anything else, Mr. Neely?"

"No, thank you, Imogene. Just make sure
everything's locked tight before you leave, and I'll let Mr. Cuddy
out when he's ready to go."

"See you in the morning, then. Mr. Cuddy."

I turned, but Imogene Burbage was already walking
away, her modest heels clicking back toward the staircase door. Neely
said, “I thought I'd give you a choice."

I turned back to him.

He tapped the round, marble top of the cocktail
table. "We can have drinks here or on the terrace."

"Outside's line with me."

"Yes. A little crisp, this time of year, but you
look like the sort of man who doesn't bother with a topcoat till
Thanksgiving. I love it inside among the flowers, but I've been told
the air can be a bit close for others."

"Let's see the terrace."

Neely grinned, leading me along a different, curving
path to the front of the building. French doors opened onto a
twenty-by-fifteen area enclosed by an extension of the brick knee
wall. The terrace was bordered on the right by the greenhouse and on
the left by a sliding glass door to the living room of an apartment,
the half-structure I'd seen from the sidewalk below. There was more
of the wrought—iron furniture, but that wasn't what caught your
eye.

Neely said, "Hell of a view, isn't it?"

No argument there. A hundred-twenty-degree slice of
Boston Harbor shimmered beneath us under a veil of clouds like the
trackmarks left by a bulldozer. Five stories up, Neely's roof was
just far enough off the ground to muffle the unseen car traffic, just
close enough to distinguish the people on the moored sailboats.
Including one couple braving the wind off the water to neck on their
quarterdeck, apparently oblivious to our being able to see them from
above.

"Ah," said Neely. "Perhaps we should
leave Romeo and Juliet to themselves."

Nodding, I turned, looking into the modest front room
at the left decorated with couch and several easy chairs, louvered
windows facing eastward as well.

I said, "How big is the greenhouse part?"

"Fifty by forty."

I did some quick arithmetic. "Doesn't leave you
a lot of floorplan for apartment living space."

"That might depend on how you define 'living,'
John. All I do in the penthouse there is sleep and read, and perhaps
microwave leftovers from some take-out place or another. The terrace
and the greenhouse are where I prefer to spend my time when—wait a
minute."

I stopped, Neely looking back at the harbor. "Seems
the lovebirds have repaired to a more comfortable billet below.
Drinks on the terrace after all?"

"Fine."

"Ask for what you like. If it's not in stock, I
won't be embarrassed."

"Vodka collins."

"Have a seat and enjoy the evening."
 
Neely was gone only about five minutes,
but when he came back, the sky was nearly showing stars.

"The pity about this time of year," handing
me my drink in a tall tumbler.

"Losing the light so early?"

"Exactly." Neely had about five fingers of
what looked like scotch over ice in an Old-fashioned glass as he
lowered himself into the chair next to me, sitting at an angle so we
both could watch the harbor.

I said, "Is the view what sold you on this
location for the firm?"

Neely sipped his scotch. "Before I bore you with
that, did you speak to everyone you wanted?"

"Yes." I had the feeling each had reported
to him after seeing me, but being polite wouldn't hurt. "Thanks
again for being so cooperative and asking them to do the same."

Neely waved it off. "The right thing to do. But
now for the boring part. At my first two firms, I was mainly a trial
attorney. Both offices fronted the water, but prestige then meant the
highest floors the firms could command, and in those buildings that
was so far up, the views became . . . I don't know, 'sterile,' maybe?
You'd see the planes taking off and landing at Logan, the yachts and
the booze cruises and even some honest working folk when they could
still commercially fish the harbor. But you couldn't see any faces or
equipment, hear somebody's laughter or the wind whistling through the
rigging. From here, you get it all, even some of the stink when
summer heats up the pollution in the water."

"So you chose this building when you formed your
own firm."

"I did. Or we did, Len Epstein and I."

"The partnership owns the building?"

"Ah, no. Actually Len and I bought it as real
estate partners, not law partners. Tax reasons. When he passed on,
the building passed to me."

"Along with its 'available space'?"

That bittersweet smile. "You'd be referring to
the conspicuous absence of tenants on the floors below the firm."

"Must be one hell of a cash drain."

"It is, truth to tell. Len and I bought at the
apex of the real estate frenzy, and after the market tanked, we were
lucky to hold on." Neely seemed to look back in time. "When
Len died, I sold a few things to sort of consolidate here. I built
this little aerie and began living above the offices." A slow
swinging of the head. "I like to tell people my commute's only
fifteen vertical feet, which is about the height of that staircase
you climbed with Imogene."
 

"So you traded prestige for convenience"

Neely seemed to stall a moment, like an airplane
engine that hit a patch of turbulence it wasn't expecting. "Prestige
isn't all it's cracked up to be, John. And besides, my client base
now is trusts and estates. They're buying my capacity to do
contingency planning for generations of beneficiaries."

“
Contingency planning?"

"Yes. If X dies before Y, should everything go
to Y? If Y dies, should the remainder go to Z? And so on." The
rumbling from his chest. "An old trial lawyer's pension, John,
is doing the probate of people who predecease him."

I thought of Steve Rothenberg, "diversifying"
into divorce work from criminal, which reminded me of why I'd come to
Epstein & Neely in the first place. "Couple of questions?"

"About probating estates?"

"About Woodrow Gant."

Another, bigger bite of the scotch. "Ask."

"Do you know of anybody other than Alan Spaeth
who could have a reason for wanting Mr. Gant dead?"

"No. Emphatically, no."

"Any ideas on the woman he was having dinner
with that night?"

"As in who she could have been?"

"Yes."

"Afraid not, but I had the impression that
Woodrow was what my generation would have called a 'ladies' man.'
That woman you're asking about could have been any one of a number,
none of them known to me."

"He never mentioned their names to you?"

"Never. In fact, it got so I'd listen for one,
because he'd talk about taking a driving weekend to the Cape or the
mountains. But Woodrow never used a name, just 'Hey, man, I was with
a lady.' "

Neely put a lot of street-black into that last, but
then he'd known Gant, and I hadn't. "How about what you remember
from the day Alan Spaeth made the scene in your reception area?"

Neely's account was no different from the others, and
he also conceded that he hadn't seen Spaeth move toward anyone. "But
I'll tell you what I did see." Neely lifted the glass an inch.
"I saw your client's eyes."

"His eyes."

"Yes, from less than ten feet away. The look in
them, a willingness to . . . kill." Neely's drink rose another
inch. "Something I hadn't seen up close for a long, long time."

I took a chance. "Not since climbing
Pointe-du-Hoc?"

Neely stopped the scotch halfway to his mouth. "That
is one hell of a guess."

"I saw the Ranger photos on your wall
downstairs. And I had an uncle who landed with the Eighth Infantry on
D-Day."

"The Eighth. They hit Utah Beach, correct?"

"Yes, the little he ever talked about it."

"It wasn't something we did talk about."
Neely set his glass down. "I'm old enough to remember the
Cocoanut Grove fire in 'forty-two, and I'll never forget the lines of
people outside the old Southern Mortuary, praying and crying while
they waited to identify their loved ones lost in the smoke and
flames. But nothing else I ever saw compares to Omaha Beach that
morning in June of 'forty-four. Nothing."

He seemed to address the harbor. "Our unit's
mission was to knock out the one-five-five millimeter guns the
Germans had mounted in concrete casemates at the top of the Pointe,
six of them aimed at the Allied ships coming toward both Utah and
Omaha. We were trained by British commandos, John, and they trained
us well. Assaulting dress-rehearsal beaches and scaling cliffs in
Scotland, double-timing everywhere we went, push-ups as a 'rest
break.' But nothing prepared us for the Channel sea being choppy
enough to swamp our landing craft if we didn't go slow, our coxswains
having to fight the tidal current. All of which meant we hit Omaha
more than half an hour late, way after the naval and air bombardment
on the cliff was over, giving the Germans plenty of time to climb
back out of their holes and open up on us. Devastating cannon and
machine-gun fire, our boats exploding, corpses floating in the water,
body parts . . . pinwheeling through the air. The noise, the . . .
carnage. Unbelievable. And when we fired our rocket-guns to carry
grappling hooks up to the cliff, the rope attached to our hooks was
so wet it was too heavy. Which meant most of the hooks fell short
while we were being cut to pieces crossing from the touchdown point
through the shallow water and up to the base of the cliff. But a
couple of the hooks made it, and we started climbing hand-over-hand,
up the face of that rock, the Germans sawing away on our ropes and
raining death down upon us. And finally, when we reached the top."