The Only Good Lawyer - Jeremiah Healy (36 page)

As Elliot Herman reached the reception area, he said,
"What a fucking nightmare."

The atmosphere in the room felt like he was speaking
for everybody.
 

Chapter 20

DOWNSTAIRS, I WAITED inside the lobby doors, watching
Commercial Street to make sure I couldn't see the green Mercedes or
its usual occupants. Outside, I hailed a taxi and told the driver to
take me to the intersection of Beacon Street and Gloucester, a block
past my condo building at Fairfield. I didn't see anything
threatening as we drove by. The cabbie probably thought I was crazy,
but he followed my instructions to functionally circle the block
before dropping me off at the corner of Marlborough and Fairfield. I
stood for a while, eyes now on the parking lot behind my building.
Still nothing.

I can't say, though, that
the two minutes it took me to walk around to the stoop outside the
front door were the shortest in memory.

* * *

When I got upstairs to the condo, Nancy was on my
telephone machine, with a "Call me at home" message. After
dialing her number, I got the outgoing tape, but as I started to talk
after the beep, she picked up.

"John?"

"Screening your calls?"

"Yes, but you're the one crank I wanted to hear
from."

The bantering tone again. "That sounds hopeful."

"Thanks for letting me know you were all right."

"I wasn't sure what you'd think was going on."

"It sounds pretty . . . bizarre?"

I didn't want to worry her with the Trinh/Huong
factor.

"What's beyond 'bizarre'?"

Nancy's tone changed. "John, for obvious
reasons, I can't ask at the office how the case against Spaeth is
going, but I thought maybe you'd have heard."

"Nothing definite."

"Oh." A little breath over the phone.
"That's too bad."

I took a chance. "What's beyond 'too bad'?"

Her throaty laugh. "I had some white wine
chilled."

"And a fire stoked?"

"My apartment doesn't have a fireplace."

"I know."

Another laugh. "We'll just have to wait on that,
too."

"Nance, this is torture."

"Then just think how good you'll feel when it
stops."

I heard the click before
my next line occurred to me.

* * *

The ten o'clock television news covered Deborah
Ling's killing in the usual, tasteful manner.

Video captured the removal via gurney of the bagged
body from the dumpster area to the M.E.'s van. A solemn voiceover by
the reporter at the scene lamented another "murder by mugging"
and the "tragic irony" of a second attorney from the same
small firm meeting a "violent death" in two weeks. All of
Ling's coworkers were "deep in their own grieving" and
therefore "unavailable for comment."

I watched a different
station at eleven, but the news didn't get any better. I went to bed
right after that, laying my gun on the night table next to the
telephone.

* * *

I woke up Saturday morning without the clock radio.
When I turned on the all-news station, the weather forecaster said
the temperature had plummeted to thirty overnight. An October taste
of the December to come.

I was feeling tight and edgy, as much from not seeing
Nancy as thinking about Murphy not finding our Amerasian mafia. A
good run along the Charles might burn off the excess anxiety. I
pulled on my running shorts and the leg brace, then a pair of
sweatpants. On top I wore a cotton turtleneck and the hooded
sweatshirt with the quarterback hand muffler in front.

I debated whether or not to put the Chief's Special
in the muffler part, because then I'd have to run with both hands in
there, my right to hold the handle, my left so I wouldn't look even
odder.

Before leaving the apartment, I sat by the kitchen
window for a while, watching Beacon Street. No sign of Trinh, Huong,
or their car. Same from the foyer downstairs, so I opened the
brownstone's front door and went outside.

The cold air was bracing under a painfully blue sky,
the absence of clouds probably contributing to the radiational
cooling that had sent the mercury dropping. The wind blew a good
twenty miles an hour in the block between the buildings as I jogged
from Beacon toward the pedestrian ramp over Storrow Drive. Once on
the macadam path, I turned upriver first, the Charles to my right
showing boulder-sized whitecaps against its basically black water.
The now northwest gale had jumped up a notch to twenty-five or so,
the windchill down around zero.

I remember thinking, That which does not kill us
makes us stronger.

Usually the running paths are crowded on Saturdays,
the yuppies realizing they've been drinking the micro-brewed beer and
eating the high-test food all week, neither counting the calories nor
countering them with a little exercise. But the cold snap probably
encouraged most sane people to hit the snooze button and roll over
till the next morning. Except for a man in a ski mask bicycling, a
woman in a Gore-Tex suit Rollerblading with her malamute, and two
jail trustees in yellow parkas bundling cut branches, I was the only
fool out there.

In fact, the weather must have been affecting my
brain as well. Because after the bicyclist and the Rollerblader went
by, it took a full minute for me to register that the jail van was
nowhere in sight.

Too slow by too many seconds.

The bulkier of the men in yellow was already running
toward me from the water's edge, covering ground obliquely a lot
faster than I was jogging straight ahead. My head was barely turning
toward him when one of his feet, lashing up in a wicked arc, caught
me on the right cheekbone, and I started going down face first. As I
got my left hand out of the muffler to break my fall, another kick
was delivered to my upper right arm and a third to my lower right
torso. I felt a couple of ribs cave from that last one, the cold air
burning when I exhaled, scalding when I tried to breathe again. And I
didn't like the noise I made trying.

It sounded like a child, whimpering.

Above me, Oscar Huong's gravelly voice called out,
"He's down."

From a distance, but closing at the rate a person
strolls, Nguyen Trinh said, "Get comfortable, Mr. Private Eye.
This gonna take a while."

Lying on my stomach and facing left, I tried to make
the fingers of my right hand work inside the muffler. However, the
kick to that arm had made me feel like I was wearing a boxing glove.

The toes of Trinh's cowboy boots stopped two feet
from my face. "You come on like a real knight on the white
horse, man." He kicked me in the left shoulder, the pointed toe
piercing the muscles, making them spasm.

But I could feel my right pinky and ring finger
wiggling a little inside the muffler beneath me.

"Only thing is," continued Trinh, "you
just a piece of shit like everybody else." He moved around to my
right side, out of sight. Then another kick, a little more juice
behind it, to the ribcage where Huong had already done some damage.

I must have blacked out, because the next thing I
remember is Huong saying ". . . coming around."

Now Trinh again. "What's the matter, Mr. Private
Eye? A little tender down there? How you think Deborah feel when you
choking her out, huh?"

I got as far as "Trinh, that wasn't—"
before another boot to the ribs made me feel like I'd been kicked by
a horse.

But now I had all the fingers on my right hand
flexing except for the thumb.

"You don't talk to me, you piece of shit. You
listen." Trinh walked back around to my left side. "Roll
him over."

Huong kicked me once in the right hip, the blow
vibrating all the way through my body. Then he planted a heel on the
hip, and pushed hard.

As I flopped over, I had to hold onto the inside
fleece of the sweatshirt to keep my right arm from sliding my hand
and gun out of the muffler pocket. But now my thumb was working, and
I could feel it close around the butt of the revolver. Trinh's face
loomed into view from standing height above mine, the blue sky as
backdrop giving the eerie sensation of being in a domed chapel,
staring up at one of Lucifer's failed angels.

He said, "You don't like me calling you 'Mr.
Private Eye', right? I can tell that, the first day Oscar and me in
your office, the address where you live on the fucking bills I'm
reading, waiting for you. Then you shining on about 'jogging the
river every morning,' tell me where we can find you. Well, Mr.
Private Eye, I want you looking at me when we take your fucking
'private eyes,' man. I'm the last thing you gonna see, just like you
the last thing my Deborah see."

Trinh's face swung toward Huong, and I let my head
loll that way, too. Huong grinned at me as he stepped hard on my left
elbow, pinning that arm to the ground. When I felt Trinh's cowboy
boot begin to come down on my right elbow, I bent my right wrist
inside the muffler to bring the muzzle up against the cloth. As Huong
came down with his thumbs set for gouging out eyes, I shot him twice
in the chest, little puffs of fleece  wafting into the air as my
ears rang from the reports.

Huong rocked back and over, and Trinh jumped back,
too. I rolled away from Trinh as I cleared my gun hand from the
sweatshirt, probably bellowing from the pain I caused myself in the
ribs. Trinh had a nine-millimeter just about coming to bear on me
when I pulled the trigger three times more, two slugs lifting his
feet off the ground like somebody had lassoed him from behind, the
semiautomatic clattering to the macadam as his back hit the path.
There was no third shot because I'd had only four bullets in the
five-shot cylinder.

I turned, looking back at Huong. No movement I could
see or noises I could hear.

Trinh began wheezing. On hands and knees, I crawled
over to him.

"You . . . fucking . . . white . . ."

"Nugey?"

"You piece . . . of fucking—"

"Nugey! Can you hear me?"

More wheezing on the way in, but a burbling sound on
the way out, the blood at the bullet hole in his parka frothing pink
from underneath. In the Army we were taught to call that a “sucking
chest wound."

Which meant no hope.

Trinh's eyes rolled a little before focusing on me.

For a third time, I said, "Nugey?"

"Hear . . . you .... "

"I didn't kill Deborah Ling."

A smile, almost, blood at first trickling, then
running down from the left, and lower, corner of his mouth. "Tell
it . . . to a priest . . . you piece—"

"I didn't kill her, Nugey. Why do you think I
did?"

"Call . . ." A cough that sounded like
something a plumber does to a clogged pipe.

"Call who?" I said quickly, feeling him
going.

The head rolled left—right—left in slow motion,
like Trinh wanted to shake it. "No . . . call me .... "

"Who called you?"

"Gro . . . ver .... "

"Grover Gant?"

"Try . . . to make . . . his voice . . . all
funny." The eyes started to rotate back into the skull.

"Nugey, what did he say?"

The eyes came down again, but the left one wouldn't
focus on me. "Said . . . 'Cuddy . . . done . . . your lady.' "

"I didn't."

"Fuck you . . . white .... Fuck . . . you . . .
all .... "

Then Nguyen Trinh made a gurgling sound like the
plumbing pipe had broken, and he was gone.

As I used my left thumb
and index finger to close Trinh's eyes, I heard a scuffling noise
behind me. I was turning back when something like a battering ram hit
my right cheekbone again, and the running path opened up into a long,
deep tunnel that swallowed me whole before closing in over my head.

* * *

Once, after I'd been shot, my first conscious
impression was that polar bears were pawing and poking at me while I
lay helpless on my back. For a minute, I thought I'd been dreaming
about that scene, then I realized my left eye was open, and the man
and woman in white were pretty clearly defined.

"What time . . . is it?" my lips not
working quite right.

The woman said, "Maybe we should start with what
day it is."

Great. "You first."

The man didn't see the
heroic humor in that. To me, he said, "Don't move." To the
woman, "You can call them in."

* * *

Nancy Meagher was frowning. Robert Murphy, just
behind her, was grinning, his eyes hooded into slits.

She said, "The doctor didn't tell you?"

"No."

I was looking up at her, but I didn't move. And not
just because the doctor said so. Every time I breathed, it felt like
hot knives were twisting inside my right side, scraping against the
cartilage.