The Fire This Time

by S. Frederic Liss

  “I’m not ready for huggy-kissy. I don’t know if I ever will be.”

  “We’re the only ones left, Trish.”

  “Either way it dies with us.”

  Maddie wanted to say something, but she bit her tongue. For her, it had to end now, today, in this room, not thirty or forty or fifty years in the future when both she and Trish lay moldering in the grave.

  Maddie struggled to compose herself. Was this another step toward her overcoming her impacted rage? The feud, the curse, jail running in her blood, had been part of her life since birth and now, suddenly, at least for her, it was no longer. She felt as if someone had sat her down and said her parents were not her parents but caretakers who had brought her up because her birth mother had abandoned her on the steps of a church. She felt adrift, as if the law of gravity no longer applied. Maddie wished Trish felt the same way. Maybe it was the shock of Bumper’s death. Or, the sudden revelation. Or, both.

  “I have to go,” Trish said. “Aunt Katie’ll start gossiping and Charlie’ll ask questions if I’m gone too long.”

  “We should leave separately,” Maddie said. “I don’t want people seeing us together. You go first. I’ll stay and talk to Furey so she won’t say anything.”

  Alone with Maud O’Donnell’s affidavit and Father Bartell’s photocopies, Maddie wiped a tear from her eye. She felt no joy, no happiness, just an overwhelming sadness, for herself, for Trish, for the heritage of hatred that tore asunder generations of the Devlin family; but more for the soul of Father Gabriel, for the agony the old priest suffered as he debated with himself whether to violate the Seal of the Confessional, for the emotional price he paid for his betrayal. For the rest of her life, she vowed, she would pray for Father Gabriel, pray that he find peace, pray that he ascend into Paradise.

  Maddie slapped her cheeks as if she were trying to sober herself up enough to drive home after a long night of drinking. She had a crime to solve, a case to win, a cousin she hoped would someday come to love her, to “huggy-kissy.” But, what-if the final chess notations were in Levy’s handwriting? The spiral notebook would be a damning piece of circumstantial evidence. Charlie’s removing it from the crime scene would be an overruled objection overwhelmed by the probative value of the evidence.

  Maddie’s mind raced like the engine of a car with its throttle stuck open. At this early stage of the case, too little was known with certainty to form conclusions. Lack of certainty did not preclude speculation, did not prevent the parade of “what-ifs”. That parade had always been one of her greatest strengths, one of her greatest weaknesses. On the one hand, it opened her mind to possibilities other attorneys overlooked; on the other hand, a surfeit of possibilities often distracted the mind from the truth.

  According to the autopsy, Bumper died between ten and one. Capablanca closed at nine. Levy would have to account for four hours. What-if he didn’t have an alibi? If he didn’t and if the final chess notations were in his handwriting, what then? She only needed one juror for a hung jury, but what Boston jury would give her that? She wouldn’t have the leverage to negotiate a decent plea-bargain. Her gut was not yet persuaded of Levy’s guilt. At least not beyond a reasonable doubt. She wished it were. Reconciling with Trish meant a lot to her. Maybe more than her fiduciary duty to Levy.

  Maddie busied herself making photocopies of the last page of Bumper’s spiral notebook on the copy machine beside the secretary’s work-station. As the machine ejected the last copy into the tray, one of the closed doors opened and Michelle Furey stepped into the waiting area.

  “Helping yourself, are you?”

  “Way too long.” Maddie repeated Furey’s greeting. “Mea culpa. We’re so short-staffed, I don’t even have time to blow my nose.” From her wallet, Maddie withdrew $5.00.

  “I’m not that much of a piker,” Furey said.

  “This isn’t for the copies. It’s a retainer. To make me your client.”

  “I didn’t realize my value had fallen so low, but then it’s five bucks more than I got for the Elizabeth Fund.”

  “I want everything that happened this morning subject to attorney-client privilege. I need something more than your word you won’t tell anyone.”

  “My word isn’t good enough?”

  “Nothing personal. Just business.”

  “I suppose you want an engagement agreement.”

  “Belt and suspenders.”

  “Why are you shitting all over me?” Furey’s voice quaked with rage.

  “Wrong place, wrong time.”

  “Take your fucking fiver and get out of my office.”

  Maddie stood transfixed as if a judge had just held her in contempt and sentenced her to thirty days for nothing more than zealous advocacy on behalf of a client.

  Furey reached for the phone. “You going to make me call the cops?”

  “Christ, can’t we start over?”

  “What’s to start?”

  “Can’t we try and be friends? There aren’t many woman attorneys and even fewer Irish woman attorneys and maybe our practice areas are poles apart, but that doesn’t mean we don’t put up with the same shit from our so-called brothers at the bar and couldn’t use some moral support from time to time.”

  “I don’t take shit from so-called sisters either, especially sisters who avoid me after I donate my services to them.”

  Maddie sensed her impacted rage struggling to free itself. Change the subject, she told herself. “How about dinner tonight? My treat.” She hesitated. “Or tomorrow, if you have plans tonight.”

  “Is that your idea of an apology?”

  Furey’s put-down energized Maddie’s impacted rage the way a bolt of lightning had the Frankenstein monster in the movie. In her mind’s eye, she saw an ogre pulling apart the bars of its cage to create an opening large enough for it to escape. She saw it smashing the photocopy machine, trashing Furey’s office, advancing on Furey, fists clenched. She raced through her catalog of coping mechanisms, rejecting one after another, until, at last, she closed her eyes and visualized herself lying on a beach at sunset, the sun melting into the ocean leaving behind a tail of red on the surface of the water. Seagulls drifting on air currents sang to each other. Waves lapping the shore provided a gentle backbeat. As the red tail of the sun approached closer and closer to the beach, the ogre, exhausted by its efforts, passed out on the floor of its cage.

  “Maddie. Are you okay?”

  Maddie opened her eyes. “I didn’t mean to be so crass.”

  “Must be your inner trial attorney.”

  “Life’s one fight after another, in court and out.”

  “Welcome to the circus. Look . . . Why not come over my place instead? I was planning to bake some of my famous Irish soda bread. The recipe’s been in my family since the time of the sagas.”

  “I’ve been known to burn toast.”

  “I’ll lock the toaster in the closet.” Furey scribbled her home address on a piece of paper. “Eight o’clock. Save some appetite. I like to nibble while I bake.”

  -3-

  Visiting the morgue to view the remains of victims allegedly murdered by her clients was a routine part of Maddie’s job. Corpses before they were prettified by funeral directors no longer nauseated her. She intellectualized them as road-kill on the highway of life. But Bumper Sullivan’s chalky pallor, his torso defaced by a web of autopsy scars, his boyish size, boomeranged her back to Elizabeth’s autopsy and the recurring horror of what she imagined Elizabeth’s tiny body had looked like when the medical examiner had finished. As the diener rolled Bumper into the ice box, the aura of his whiteness wrapped itself around Maddie like a shroud.

  At police headquarters, she rode the elevator down to the property room in the second sub-basement to inspect Levy’s personal effects. Acquittals and convictions were often measured from the odds and ends retrieved from the defendant’s pockets at the time of his arrest, inventoried and labeled by the property clerk, sent to the lab for analysis, and finally deliv
ered to the district attorney or defense counsel for use at trial.

  “Levy’s stuff,” she said to Angelo Capitao, the property clerk.

  Capitao perched on his stool like an ape sunning himself on a rock. A cheap cigar, lit in spite of a smoking ban, unraveled in his mouth, staining his chin a diarrheal brown. “You wanna see the kike’s shit, ask the wop.” His cigar glowed with each word.

  “I thought you were the wop.”

  The wop. The don of the Boston police department. Dante Ugolino. Commissioner Stereo. One of Maddie’s black defendants told her the brothers called him Commissioner Stereo, as in stereotype. After Charlie’s first election as mayor, he appointed Ugolino commissioner of police as a reward for delivering the North End vote. Heavy at the time, Ugolino had doubled in weight since his appointment and now looked like he wore a bullet proof vest under his skin. In order to appoint him to a second term, Charlie had to persuade the city council to adopt an ordinance exempting the commissioner from the department’s physical fitness standards.

  “Judas is here,” Therese Sroka, Ugolino’s secretary, informed him as Maddie signed the visitors’ log. Younger than Maddie, Therese dressed like the elderly women who sat outside the store-fronts on Prince Street in Boston’s North End observing life pass by.

  Ugolino’s door popped open.

  “Who’s Professor Husam al din al-Saffah?” Maddie asked as she settled into a captain’s chair adorned with the seal of the City of Boston Department of Police. “His name’s above mine in the log.”

  Ugolino blew his nose. “I had lunch with the governor last week, something we do regular. He provides the lobster, I provide the gossip. We got to talking about the Superior Court vacancy, the one here in Suffolk, and he asks me what I think of a legal aid attorney.”

  “The SJC vacancy is more tempting,” Maddie said. An Associate Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court was on the verge of reaching mandatory retirement age.

  “Either way, I tell him the idea sucks ’cause they’re all too soft on crime; but you know the governor once he sets his mind and the concrete cures.”

  “Professor Husam al din al-Saffah. Tell me about him.”

  “Professor who?”

  “The name above mine in the visitors’ log.”

  Ugolino eyed her. He knew enough about criminal trial procedure to realize that the prosecution would be required to disclose Professor al-Saffah’s identity to the defense as part of pre-trial discovery if al-Saffah were to testify. If it were anyone but Devlin he would bow to the inevitable, but he’d rather make her work for the information. Let her file her discovery motions. Let her whine to the judge if the DA was not forthcoming. He shifted his bulk from the left arm of his chair to the right, shifting his thoughts from one side of his brain to the other. The chair groaned under the torture of his weight.

  “A concerned citizen.”

  “A concerned citizen?”

  “A mullah,” Ugolino wheezed. “The Imam from the Disciples of Abraham Mosque. A professor of Islamic studies at UMass-Boston who specializes in comparative religions. He offered himself as an expert witness to provide a religious context for Bumper Sullivan’s murder.”

  “Religious context?”

  “Motivation. One of the elements of the crime, as I’m sure you know. Relevant on the issue of bail as well. I’m not telling you anything you won’t find out when you get the DA’s witness list.”

  “So why do you want a change of venue?”

  Ugolino leaned forward and enveloped Maddie in the body odor obese people have even when they are fresh from the shower. “Jesus fucking Christ, Maddie. Kick a sleeping dog and you’ll get rabies.”

  “Not me. I’m immune. Where’s Levy’s shit?”

  Ugolino pointed to a Golden Grapefruit box adorned with a smiling sun that promised nature’s sweet goodness. Flesh hung down from his arm like a pouch weighted with heavy water. “Therese will show you to an empty office.”

  The only thing with rabies was the skull-cap on the library floor. But, how to find the rabid dog that left it there?

  *

  Many of the things confiscated from Levy were irrelevant to his defense: a paperback edition of The Holy Scriptures; a worn copy of Martin Buber’s I and Thou; a new copy of a novel unknown to her, A Canticle for Leibowitz; a bus schedule for the New York-Boston route. The rest were problematic: an Emergency Medical Technician certificate issued by the American Red Cross suggested he knew how to administer blood transfusions; a notebook, in Levy’s handwriting she assumed, with annotations of six chess games between him and Bumper Sullivan, none of which were played the night of the murder, indicated he had a relationship with the victim; but a pocket calendar with the entry “chess?” penciled in for the Thursday evening of the murder suggested they may or may not have played chess that night.

  Classic circumstantial evidence, she thought, made less circumstantial by the presence of the little cap on the library floor. Whatever Levy’s explanation, it would fall on deaf ears, ears deafened by the prosecution’s harping on that little cap the way nuns harped on original sin in parochial school. She had tried cases where juries voted murder convictions on weaker circumstantial evidence, verdicts affirmed on appeal, and she knew in a case like Levy’s no juror would give a passing thought to reasonable doubt. As long as the prosecution had more challenges than there were Jews in the jury pool, Levy was signed, sealed, and delivered. Unless he was innocent and–a very big and–she pulled a Perry Mason and produced the real killer.

  Yet, Ugolino’s demeanor, the way he parried her question about the change of venue, flew off the handle rather than answer it, when considered in the context of his leak to the press, aroused her skepticism. And, according to Harriman, he had halted the investigation. He had to be afraid she’d find evidence implicating someone else. He must be protecting someone. Himself? Another member of Capablana? Get a grip, she cautioned herself. Don’t let the heat fry your brain. The evidence still pointed to Levy. She had nothing to substantiate her change of venue theory, nothing but a feeling in her gut and the spiral notebook Trish had given her with notations of a chess match. No, she was not persuaded Levy was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt; nor, however, was she persuaded of his innocence.

  The smiling sun on the grapefruit box mocked her as harshly as the real sun mocked the city of Boston.

  -4-

  Maddie’s confusion over her motivation for defending Levy, her hemming and hawing in response to Trish’s why, intensified nature’s demonic heat as she walked down Cambridge Street to the Charles Street Jail to interview Levy, her first up-close contact with her client. Motivation had never been an issue for her before. The cases came in. Frohling assigned them. The hardest always to her. She did what she had to do. Trial, plea-bargain, whatever, then moved on to the next case. Eight years of moving on to the next case. Nameless faces and faceless names. Until now. For once, for the first time, she needed certainty. Clarity.

  At the jail a guard, bone thin and black with a ring of keys so heavy weighing down his right hip he listed to the right, escorted her to a tiny room where a matron in her early sixties, white of hair and pleasant of face, waited. Age defying, the matron’s skin was unlined and sagged only slightly beneath her jaw, beneath her eyes. Despite her masculine uniform–police style jacket, matching skirt, dark blue shirt and tie, low heels–she looked like everyone’s favorite grandmother. Maddie had not known either of her grand mas. The Irish of that generation died young, if not from disease or hunger, then from British bullets.

  “I have to search you.”

  “I’m an attorney. I have a bar card.”

  “I know who you are.”

  In the years Maddie had visited clients at the Charles Street Jail, she had never been searched; but she gave the matron her purse and opened her brief-case. The matron leafed through the files, more slowly than Maddie thought appropriate, then patted her down, front and back, head to toe, under her skirt to check for
weapons or drugs. The matron nodded and the guard who had refused Maddie’s request to look away during the search walked Maddie to a bare room furnished with a small wooden table outlined by cigarette burns and two straight-back slatted chairs lacking arms or cushions. Nicotine discolored the ceiling and walls, an institutional beige yellowed from years of cigarette smoke. The stale, brackish air made her eyes sting. Balls of dust hung from the holes in the grating that secured the only air duct. Someone had carved a skull into the corner of the table and she wondered whether it had been an attorney or a prisoner.

  With a jangle of his keys, the guard shoved Levy into the room, then slammed and locked the door.

  Levy slumped into the vacant chair and sat on his hands. He wore a navy-blue skull-cap identical to the one found near Bumper’s bloodless body. Fuzzy sideburns extended below his ear lobes to the middle of his broad, pointless chin, accentuating his spherical face. A lifetime of eating traditional kosher food girdled his waist and hung over the top of his pants. Sitting, his entire body seemed conquered by a slouch as if his backbone weren’t strong enough to hold his weight erect. Maddie ignored her first impression, something C. J. Ant had taught her the how and why of doing.

  “Remember me?” Maddie asked. “I need to ask you some questions.”

  “Today is the Sabbath. The holiest day of holy days. To answer questions would be a desecration.”

  “How can talking be a sin?”

  “Why are your arms and legs exposed? Why aren’t you wearing a wig?”

  “How did your skull-cap end up on the floor of the library at Capablanca?”

  “You are traif. If you were Jewish you would understand.”

  “I’m not your rabbi,” Maddie said. “I’m not your spiritual counselor. I’m your lawyer. What I need to understand is the law, the secular law, the criminal law of Massachusetts. Jewish law is as relevant here as the rules of baseball.”