The Only Good Lawyer - Jeremiah Healy (5 page)

Nancy drew my arm toward her more tightly. "I
was kind of hoping for the birthday-suit competition."

"If you can curb your lust until after dinner."

"You're on."

Just past Dartmouth, we turned down a set of stairs
to Thai Basil.

Nancy smiled. "My tummy's happy already."

The owner, a smiling man with full cheeks and a
bustling manner, takes such pride in the place I've never eaten there
when he hasn't been behind the cash register. He welcomed Nancy and
me before leading us to a table separated from its neighbor by a
clear glass panel. Though the restaurant isn't huge, there's always a
sense of privacy accompanying the intimacy, and it's become my
favorite place in Back Bay.

I ordered a Dry Creek Fume Blanc from the ponytailed
waitress, whose command of English still reflected the tinkling
accent of her homeland. The mixed appetizer plate for two (shrimp
toast, spring rolls, and five or six other delights) arrived so
quickly you almost couldn't believe it was freshly prepared, though
one taste convinced. And, as always, the entrée dishes of Tamarind
duck and garlic pork and pad Thai noodles were truly to die for.

Nancy spooned a few more finger-sized slices of duck
onto her plate. "So, you given any thought to what we'll do for
the weekend?"

"No. You?"

"I was thinking of a road trip."

I had some wine. "To . . . ?"

"Mystic Seaport."

"In Connecticut?"

"It's only a hundred miles or so, John. We could
stay at a bed-and-breakfast Saturday night."

I pictured the bills in piles back at my office.

Nancy warmed up to her subject. "One of the
other prosecutors went last weekend, and she said it was neat. The
seaport itself has all kinds of shops set up the way they were in the
whaling days, with ships and demonstrations of sail rigging and
anchoring and so on. Be a real nice break from the city, not to
mention my judge-review homework."

As good an opening as I was likely to get. "I
don't know, Nance. I might have a case I'm starting that would make
it tough for me to take off like that."

She blinked. "You don't know whether you're
starting the case or not?"

"I told the lawyer who wants to hire me that I
needed to talk with you about it first."

"Me?" Nancy sipped some wine. "I don't
understand. If it's a case I'm working on, you really shouldn't take
it, but otherwise there's no conflict."

"Not directly, maybe. But . . . Nance, it's Alan
Spaeth."

Her face lost all color, and I suddenly had the
impression that if she hadn't set her glass down, she'd have dropped
it.

"You can't be serious."

"Steve Rothenberg asked—"

"I know who the defense attorney is, John.
Everybody in the office is on eggshells about it."

"But Steve said you weren't one of the trial
lawyers assigned."

"I'm . . . I'm not." .

"Nancy, I met with Spaeth at Nashua Street."

She stared hard at me. "And?"

"I don't think he killed Woodrow Gant."

Nancy coughed out a breath. "I don't believe
this."

"But you just said there's no conflict"

"I don't care what 1 just said."

"Nance, when we talked about this last week——"

"Last week you asked me about a news headline,
John. Now you're talking about helping the man's killer."

Her voice was rising, so I thought I should lower
mine.

"Nancy, you mentioned loyalty to your boss
before. Well, I have some loyalty to Steve Rothenberg, too. Besides,
I'm really talking about trying to find out who shot Gant because I
don't think Spaeth did."

Nancy's face seemed to close down. "You've
already made up your mind, haven't you?"

"About Spaeth's innocence? Yes. But——"

Nancy reached for her totebag and started to stand.
"Do what you feel is best, John."

"Wait a minute."

She stepped around the table. "I said, you
should do what you feel is best, and it's obvious that means you
should take on this case. But I can't . . . I have to get out of
here. I'll call you."

I swiveled in my chair. "Nancy——"

"I'll call you." she repeated over her
shoulder.

The owner was trying not to look from Nancy to me as
she strode out of the restaurant. The waitress, who'd been in the
kitchen, came through its door and glanced only at our table before
asking brightly if she should bring a dessert menu. 1 told her 1
didn't think so.
 

Chapter 3

THE NEXT MORNING, I woke up in the bedroom of my
rented condo on Beacon Street.
Woke up alone,
and more than a little angry. The way I saw Nancy's blowup the prior
night, she was upset at me for just doing my job.

After using the bathroom, I thought I'd try to burn
off those feelings and clear the mind for business. I stuck my head
out the kitchen window to gauge the temperature. Too warm for the new
hooded sweatshirt I'd bought, a quarterbacks hand muffler as front
pockets against the coming arctic winds. Instead, I pulled on running
shorts, a cotton turtleneck, and a T-shirt over the  turtleneck.
Before lacing up the Brooks HydroFlow running shoes, I reached for
some tube socks and the knee brace I now have to wear on my left leg.

Downstairs, I crossed Beacon to the Fairfield Street
pedestrian ramp over Storrow Drive. Heading upriver along the
Charles, I used the macadam paths that had recently, and stupidly,
been divided into "travel lanes" by a white, broken line
painted down the center. There were a dozen guys in dark pants and
yellow T-shirts, some picking up trash and bagging it, others cutting
brush and piling the branches near a nondescript minivan. If you're
not a river regular, you probably wouldn't notice that during
summers, the landscapers are male and female teens wearing orange
tops, while the fall and spring folks are all older men in yellow
ones. Reason? The younger workers constitute summer help from the
city schools, the older workers, trusted inmates from the county
jail, with the guy who tries never to leave the driver's seat of the
minivan a uniformed sheriff's officer there to guard them.

Our tax dollars at work.

Passing the Boston University railroad bridge a mile
later, I thought I had the situation with Nancy under control. I'm
dense about some things, and somehow I'd badly misjudged her reaction
to my taking Alan Spaeth's case. She'd let me wonder about it for a
day or two before calling to explain what I'd missed and then bury
the hatchet. Seemed reasonable, if regrettable, and as I turned at
Western Ave to head back downriver, I moved on to organizing my day.

I'd have to start in South Boston, either with
Lieutenant Robert Murphy on the homicide itself, or with Vincennes
Dufresne, the owner of the boardinghouse where Spaeth used to live
and his alibi witness might still. Weighing things, it seemed to me
that Murphy was less likely to be in, but easier to reach, and the
earlier I visited the rooming house, the sooner I might find Michael
Mantle.

I finished my run with a sprint of a hundred yards or
so from the Mass Ave bridge back to the Fairfield ramp, feeling a lot
better than I had starting out.

After one shower and two English muffins, I changed
into a blue suit, white shirt, and quiet tie. Downstairs, I got
behind the wheel of my silver Honda Prelude, the last year of the
original model. Twenty minutes later, I found Vincennes Dufresne's
boardinghouse in Southie, a few blocks from where East Broadway ends
at Pleasure Bay. The neighborhood is mostly blue-collar and virtually
all white, a questionable legacy of the desegregation crisis two
decades earlier.

The rooming house itself was a wooden four-decker on
a block of threes, so it stood out like the gawky kid in a class
photo. At one time maybe a forest green, the paint on the clapboard
had weathered from salt, sun, and snow to a streaked and peeling
olive drab. The trim around the bay windows stacked on either side of
the centered portico also needed painting, and the concrete steps
leading up to the front door y were crumbly at every trod edge. If
you could read a book by its cover, the only thing holding the place
up would be the party walls shared with its neighbors.

At the entrance, a sign block-printed on a pink
five-by-eight note card was tacked above the bell. The sign read:

THE CHATEAU
NO
TRESPASSING
NO SOLICITING
NO
SHIT

My kind of place.

I pushed the button and heard a sound inside like a
dentist's drill. I let up, waited a minute, and hit it again. Same
noise. I was an inch away from a third try at the button when
something heavy bumped against the door from the inside. The wood
creaked loudly on its hinges and opened.

The man in the doorway stood about five-six and
blinked blearily. His black, curly hair was as long on his eyebrows
as on his head, which hadn't seen a comb yet. The mustache had bars
of red through it, hooking over and covering his upper and lower lips
like hundreds of narrow, curved claws. He hadn't shaved yet, either,
the black stubble on the pale cheeks, jaw, and neck as riddled with
red as the mustache. The man wore a strappy T-shirt over brown pants
cinched a little too high. Once the eyes stopped blinking, though,
they were dark and full of fire, with enough crow's-feet at the
corners to make me push his age up ten years from the thirty-five I'd
originally thought.

He said, "You got a name?" a vestigial
accent softening some the consonants.

"John Cuddy."

"Let's see some ID, eh?"

I took out the leather folder with the laminated copy
of my license in it. The man looked down through the plastic, cocking
his head to squint, as though his eyes didn't focus straight-on. Then
he looked up at me. "Private means you're not a cop."

The accent now sounded French-Canadian. "Right."

"And not cop means you got no official business
with my place, and I don't got to talk with you."

My place. "Vincennes Dufresne?"

His eyes didn't like that. "So?"

"It's just that you have a choice. You can talk
to me here and now, or we can subpoena you in for a deposition, have
you sit around a law office downtown for a day or two."

His eyes liked that even less. "Now you sound
like a lawyer, eh?"

"I'm working for one."

"Lawyers. When they swim, you can see their fins
breaking the surface."

"Meaning you think of them as sharks."

"Worse. You give a shark a hunk of meat, he eats
it, maybe leaves you alone. A lawyer, you give him a hunk of meat,
first he eats you, figuring he can always go back for the meat."

If we weren't on the Chateau's front steps, I thought
the owner would have spit. "Tell you what, Mr. Dufresne. How
about you ask me inside, and that way everybody saves some time with
the lawyers?"

He cocked his head a different way, shifted his lips
to the right, and turned without shutting the door on me. I followed
him into a dimly lit foyer, then left through a freshly painted door.

And into a different world.

Framed movie posters from the forties were mounted on
walls soaring ten feet to molded plaster fretwork around the
perimeter of the room. A three-tiered chandelier anchored the middle
of the space, with delicate, antique chairs and buried, carved tables
straddling a tiled fireplace. The floor was hardwood, sanded and
polyed to the point that it shone like the mirror over the mantel.

I thought, "time-warp." but kept it to
myself. Dufresne settled himself into a Louis-the-Someteenth chair
and motioned me toward the more substantial couch. "Not what
you'd expect from the street, eh?"

"Not exactly. Where'd you get all this?"

"My mother." Dufresne motioned to one of
the posters behind him, showing a waist-up portrait of a man with
slicked-back hair and a pencil-thin mustache leaning against a woman
with high cheekbones and a hairdo that could have coined the term
"wavy." From their expressions, they were facing the
difficulties of a postwar world with desperate courage. "Best
role she ever had, B-movie with Zachary Scott that went no-where
fast. The posters are hers, the furniture what she got from divorcing
husband number three."

The name "Danielle Dufresne" appeared in
lettering next to and the same size as “Zachary Scott" on the
one poster, in the first or second line of supporting cast for the
rest. “She was in a lot of films."

"Films." Dufresne looked at me a little
more carefully.

"That's what she called them. Not 'movies,' or
‘flicks,' or 'bombs,' which half of them were. 'A movie, Vincennes,
is what a salesman takes of his vacation so he can bore the
neighbors; a film is a work of creative art.' And then more bullshit
after that."

"Being in films make her happy?"