The Only Good Lawyer - Jeremiah Healy (2 page)

Wait a minute. I took an airplane, not a cruise ship.
What's an anchor doing on a 747?

She opened her eyes then, and at first thought she'd
somehow wandered into the cockpit of the airplane, because she was
staring out a windshield. Like the pilot would, you know? There
wasn't much light, and she couldn't see any clouds or anything, just
some trees and a hood, some gauges and a door ....

A door? A car door. Woodrow's BMW.

Oh, shit. She shook her head, clearing it of the
airplane dream. Right, right. Only . . . "Where the hell are
we?"

She turned her face to the left. "I said, where
are . . . ?"

But Woodrow wasn't behind the wheel, and the action
of swiveling her head triggered a wave of nausea, just like she felt
after that goddamn Vietnamese meal. With the six-dollar chardonnay
they marked up to twelve. And that gucky soup, the . . .

Now, thinking about all the disgusting food, she felt
more sick.

Handkerchief. Handbag.

She dug into the main compartment of the bag till she
found a hankie. Even before she held it up to her mouth, however, the
gag reflex started.

Have to get out of here.

Yanking the door handle while holding the hankie, she
realized her seat belt was still on. With the knuckles of her left
hand, she struck the button that releases the metal tab, sensing the
belt itself retract but without taking the strap of her handbag with
it.

Aspirin in the bag, too. Make me feel better. After.

She bashed the door open with her shoulder and swung
her legs out of the BMW, feeling something heavy slide off her lap
and onto the ground. The anchor, of course.

Only it wasn't an anchor. In the light from the car's
interior, she could see it was a gun, lying on the grass. A gun like
. . . God, no. "Woodrow?"

She struggled to a standing position, the ground
under the grass sloping down, giving her vertigo. Which made
everything else so much worse, both in her stomach and in her head.

"Woodrow?" Oh, God, no. Please, no.
"Woodrow, where are you?"

I'm going to be sick.

She took two steps down the slope and slid onto her
rear end, expecting to throw up into the grass to her left. But all
she could manage was the dry heaves.

The gun. He didn't . . . couldn't have. Even he's not
that stupid.

Regaining some control, she called out again.
"Woodrow?"

Please, God, where is he? "Woodrow?"

She struggled to her feet again, turning toward the
back of the car.

And saw Woodrow Wilson Gant's lifeless eyes staring
at the right rear tire.

"Oh, God, no!"

He did it. He really did.

I have to . . . Have to get as far from here as . . .

She began running along the side of the road. Away
from the BMW and the restaurant miles behind it.

Running into the night.

Stumbling to the ground.

Then staggering up and running some more.

And dropping down intentionally only when she'd see
another car's headlights coming up the road toward her.
 
 

Chapter 1

IN MY OPINION, it had been a tough year for the
neighborhood Boston calls "Back Bay." Our only family
drugstore, a fixture opposite the Lenox Hotel for decades, closed
after three discount giants bunched around it like Davy Crockett's
shot pattern. A candy store on Newbury Street also left, thereby
eliminating the irony of the diet center occupying the retail space
directly beneath it. And the Exeter Street Theatre building had
suffered a devastating fire, nearly destroying one of the city's most
upscale landmarks.

Concepts like "upscale" and "landmark"
struck me all the more that Tuesday morning as I climbed the stairs
of Steven Rothenberg's building, the elevator broken again. You
couldn't call the structure that contained his law office anything
but a dump, especially with one of its neighbors already torn down,
leaving a gap like a punched-out tooth in that block of Boylston
Street.

I'd first met Rothenberg a few years back, when he
represented an African-American college student named William
Daniels. The student was accused of killing his white girlfriend, and
I was helping out as a favor for a black lieutenant in the Boston
Homicide Unit. Since then, Rothenberg had hired me to do the private
investigator work on a number of criminal matters. This time around,
he'd left a message with my answering service the afternoon before,
asking me to drop by the next day.

I reached Rothenberg's floor and, after a turn, the
office suite he shared with half a dozen other sole practitioners.
The lawyers' names were done individually on horizontal slats of wood
stacked vertically to the side of the doorjamb. Each slat had been
lettered by a different engraver on differently grained wood, a
xylophone designed by committee. I thought a few of the names might
have changed since the last time I'd been there, but Steve's was
still in the same place.

Inside the front door, a young female receptionist
with orangeade hair cut in a shingled pattern typed on a desktop
computer. Angled away from me, she wore little earphones, the wire
running down out of sight. She might have been listening to an old
dictation machine or a new Walkman. Given the way she was rocking her
head, I put my money on the latter.

Coming up on her blind side, I said, "Excuse
me?"

She twisted around and, in a practiced way, used her
left index finger to flick the earphone behind her ear for a moment.
Even from four feet away, I could hear techno-rock music.

"John Cuddy to see Steve Rothenberg."

She held up the index finger in a "Wait one"
way and tapped a couple of buttons on the telephone console before
saying, "Steve, a John . . ." She looked up at me.

"Cuddy."

"Right. A John . . . Oh, okay." She put the
earphone back in place. "Third door."

"Thanks."

Steve Rothenberg appeared at his office threshold,
which meant he was more anxious to see me than I was to begin running
the meter. Inside, his furniture was still kind of shabby, the
upholstered seats on the client chairs looking like somebody had
shined them. Rothenberg let the coat—tree handle his suit jacket,
the dress shirt he wore rolled twice to the elbows, the tie tugged
down from an unbuttoned collar, even at nine-thirty on a cool October
day. His beard looked trimmed, but what was left of the
salt-and-pepper hair had grown a little shaggy.

"Your barber out of town, Steve?"

"Yeah."

"Maybe you should try somebody else."

"No." Rothenberg waved me to one of the
client chairs before sinking into his own behind a cluttered desk,
some veneer peeling at the corners. "No, I'd rather have it be
long for a couple of weeks than wrong for a couple of months."
 

"Makes sense." Sitting down, though, I
thought his hair-cutting schedule pretty much matched the office
decor. "How can I help you?"
 

Rothenberg picked up a pencil, fiddling with it. "Are
you still dating that A.D.A.?"

Nancy Meagher, an"assistant district attorney
for Suffolk County and the first woman I'd felt anything for since my
wife, Beth, had died of cancer. "I'm still seeing Nancy, Steve.
So if she's your direct opponent in whatever—"

"She's not, but . . ." Rothenberg looked at
his window, a pie-wedge of the Boston Common showing through the
pane. "You were out of town last week, right?"

"Out of state, actually." Rothenberg was
being oblique, and oblique never made anything easier. "Steve,
can we maybe cut to the car chase here?"

He tossed his pencil onto the desk. "John, I've
got Alan Spaeth."

The name rang a bell. "Who is . . . ?"

"The defendant in the Woodrow Gant case."

I felt a tightening in my chest. Even from three
hundred miles away, I knew that the shooting of the
prosecutor-cum-divorce-attorney had rocked Boston the prior week. The
police arrested the husband of a woman Gant had been representing.

After returning to the city, I'd gently asked Nancy
if she'd known Gant. She said that though he'd prosecuted for another
county, she'd met him once, then changed the subject.

Understandably, I'd thought. Some things are harder
to think about than others.

Rothenberg said, "John?"

I started to rise. "Good luck with Mr. Spaeth."

"Wait, please. Alan needs an investigator"

"Steve——"

"John, hear me out?"

I stayed standing. "The victim's a former A.D.A.
and—what, the third divorce attorney in two years shot by—"

"—allegedly shot by-"

"—an enraged husband."

"You don't have to tell me." Rothenberg
lowered his voice.

"But please, John. Spot me ten minutes, then you
can leave, you still want to."

Given Nancy's job, and sensibilities, I didn't see
him convincing me. On the other hand, he'd sent a good deal of
business my way over the years, and loyalty entitled Rothenberg to
the chance.

I sat back down. "Ten minutes, and counting."

"You didn't recognize my client's name, you
don't know that I was already representing him against his wife."

Rothenberg was right. "I thought you did
strictly criminal?"

"Mostly, but I don't want to do it forever."
A weak smile. "And besides, this economic climate, you have to
diversify."

Under the circumstances, not funny. "Nine
minutes, Steve."

The weak smile disappeared. "Okay. The bad news
first. A couple of months ago, Gant was taking Alan's deposition in
the divorce case when my client went ballistic. Screamed and yelled
in Gant's conference room and all the way out the door."

"Did Spaeth threaten him?"

"Expressly. In the hearing of half a dozen
witnesses and using the 'N'-word."

I remembered Gant had been African-American. "How
about the murder weapon?"

"Left at the crime scene."

"Fingerprints?"

"Not on the revolver itself, but yes on the
shells in the cylinder."

I felt like standing up again. "Spaeth's prints
were on the shells?"

"Afraid so. Probably his gun, too."

"Probably?"

"Alan says he filed the serial numbers off one
of his firearms, but it was stolen."

One of his firearms. "So, Spaeth stole the gun,
then—"

"No, no. Alan claims he bought the thing years
ago on a trip—to one of those states where you don't have to show
much—then he wiped the numbers, and thereafter it was stolen from
his room."

"His room?"

"At the boardinghouse he'd been living in."

"Stolen how long ago?"

"Four weeks before the murder."

Convenient.

Rothenberg read something in my face. "John,
Alan says that's the reason he moved out of the rooming house,
because he thought the owner of the place had stolen his piece."

"Moved to where?"

“
An apartment, three or four blocks away."
Rothenberg paused. "Part of the good news is that Alan's alibi
will also confirm the business about somebody stealing the gun."

"Spaeth has an alibi witness?"

"Yeah, one of the other men who lived in the
boarding-house."

"Steve, I don't remember hearing about that on
the news."

Spreading his fingertips, Rothenberg combed the beard
with his nails. "He hasn't come forward yet."

I closed my eyes. "Meaning neither you nor the
police know where the guy is."

"John, I won't lie to you. Our alibi witness is
a drinking buddy of Alan's. He could be anywhere, but we need to find
him."

I opened my eyes. "You need to find him, Steve."

Rothenberg clasped his hands on the desk. “I said I
wouldn't lie to you, John. I won't try to kid you, either. Alan
Spaeth was a miserable son of a bitch through most of the divorce
case. But we pretty much had it settled——house to the wife, my
client to absorb their son's future college costs, if any. We even
distributed some of the money from the marital estate to both
spouses."

I thought about it. "Kind of reduces Spaeth's
motive to kill Gant."

"Exactly. In fact, I thought Alan'd finally
adjusted to the situation, had 'let go of his wife,' as I've heard
the shrinks call it. He used some of the money to move to an
apartment, start looking for a new job——"

"New job?"

"He'd been laid off, before the marriage broke
up. One of the reasons it did." Rothenberg changed his tone.
"John, my client's been made to look like a pariah, especially
given our rash of divorce-attorney killings. And because this one was
done execution-style, I have to show the jury a somebody else who
might have wanted to shoot Gant. Now the man had an ex-wife himself,
plus a real questionable brother. And he even prosecuted gang members
once upon a time."