The Fire This Time

by S. Frederic Liss

  Harriman had told her no one placed Levy at the crime scene, at least not prior to the Club’s closing. Ugolino, Harriman also said, knows this. Bumper’s chess game with Mabi had adjourned, but Mabi had an alibi. Levy didn’t. Neither did Levy have any reason to return to Capablanca after it closed other than to kill Bumper. The prosecution would crow this point repeatedly. Whatever logic she had on her side would be as effective as a pea shooter against the howitzer of emotion the prosecution had in its arsenal.

  One juror out of twelve. In Boston, a possibility, more remote than she was willing to admit to herself; west of Worcester, unlikely as long as the trial did not end up in Hampshire County where a faculty member of Smith College or Mt. Holyoke College or Amherst College or the University of Massachusetts might sneak onto the jury. This must be why Ugolino wanted a change of venue. But he wouldn’t assign the investigation to Angelo the Sweeper if it were this simple. She had to do better.

  The uncertainty of her motivation for defending Levy unsettled her. Her motivation was like an arc of electric current jumping between two electrodes, one being her desire to reconcile with Trish to end the blood feud between her side of the family and Trish’s, the other her need to avenge two generations of wrongs, reconciliation be damned. Her uncertainty trapped her between competing fiduciary duties. One to Levy as his attorney. A second to Trish as her cousin. A third to her grand da Michael. A fourth to herself. Frohling had sprung the trap, refusing her request to recuse her.

  “You’re the best we’ve got,” he had said. “If you really want out, you know where the door is.”

  It was the unknown on the other side of the door that frightened her. For all her bravado in the court-room, SCLS in many ways was like a protective cocoon outside of which she feared she would not function as effectively. If only Michelle Furey would welcome her, Maddie, into her law office as she had her bedroom, but an enduring law partnership needed a stronger foundation than passionate sex.

  Suppressing these thoughts, Maddie signed into the Social Law Library, one floor below the court-rooms and chambers of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. Trial attorneys deep in their cups joked about the Freudian symbolism of this arrangement. To Maddie, it was more mythological. Like Greek gods, the SJC judges reigned in their pantheon while attorneys mined the law books beneath their feet in search of sacrifices that would buy their votes. Or, oracles to explain them. Maddie needed more than an altar of sacrifices or a Delphic virgin. She had to do better.

  Michelle Furey had volunteered to help with the legal research, but Maddie had demurred. “I read my own cases,” Maddie had explained, “refusing help even from attorneys with criminal defense experience. Cases have nuances which are lost when court opinions are reduced to summaries, opening paragraphs recitation of the facts, then the question or questions of law before the court, the holding or holdings, important dicta if any, a reprise of the court’s reasoning. Law students, at least the bright ones, produced creditable case summaries, but the real import of a case, its relevance, its usefulness, lay in its nuances which often are often found only in the silences between the lines. Legal research for Levy’s case will be a hunt for nuance.”

  The words had spewed out of her to hide the other reason, the real reason, she had refused Furey’s help. Her feelings for Furey scared her. For them to be able to work together, whether on the Levy case or in the same legal practice, she had to overcome her fear that in Furey’s mind their relationship was built on lust. Either that or neuter her feelings as if she were a cat that had to be spayed. She hoped when the Levy case was over, she’d have time to sort this out, if there was still something to sort out.

  Now, she distracted herself by concentrating on the legal research she needed to do. Religion and murder did not intersect very often in American law, certainly not as frequently as murder and money, murder and sex, murder and race, murder and revenge, murder and thrill killing; but, maybe, somewhere there were cases, a case, one case, in which a killer acting under the spell of intense religious fervor, a zealot perhaps, was acquitted, whether on the ground of insanity or the Establishment or Free Exercise clauses of the First Amendment. California, where ritual slayings and satanic cults were as common as stalled freeway traffic, might provide precedents. The Salem witch trials, some of whose original records were still extant, merited investigation. That cult in Florida that chopped off the heads of roosters . . . she wished she remembered its name. She had to do better.

  She slogged through her research, the dust from books unopened for decades accumulating on her fingers, smudging her blouse and skirt, streaking her cheeks and forehead, clogging her pores, causing her to cough and clear her throat every few minutes. She winced at the paper cuts appearing at the tips of her fingers. Stacks of books imprisoned her in a bunker of words. The sameness of the cases, barren of useful legal precedent relevant to Levy’s case, caused her to question the quality of her research. Had she missed a case? Had she misread them? Overlooked a subtlety which would distinguish the precedents arrayed against her? Or, was it the insanity of her quest? She had to do better.

  Several hours later, Maddie walked along Tremont Street following the red line in the sidewalk that guided tourists along the Freedom Trail. She paused at the Old Granary Burying Ground, the last resting place of John Hancock and Samuel Adams. Each headstone, as colonial custom dictated, had a death’s head carved into it, albeit so benign in appearance it bid welcome to the grave the way an innkeeper bade welcome to a traveler after a long, hard journey. She did not understand the quirk of fate that caused some to be buried in the Old Granary, where the letters on the stones were still crisp and clean and easily read after two hundred years, and others of equal importance to be buried a few hundred yards away in King’s Chapel, where the same two centuries of weather polished the lives of the dead into a smooth anonymity. She wondered if the same quirk of fate operated in Traitor’s Hell, the cemetery where her grand da Michael was buried. What of the graves of her namesakes, Mary and Ann Devlin? She hoped the weather had not consigned them to the ages, anonymous in death but for a jail register on display for tourists. As for her grave, she did not know whether she wanted its market to exist in 2181, its lettering legible. She prayed Elizabeth’s with its bas relief of a baby lamb would.

  Maddie’s da had drummed the Devlin family history into her since she was old enough to read and since then she had lived within that history the way the faithful live within a belief in God. The thought of Elizabeth’s grave, of her grave in one hundred years, cast her back to another Devlin grave. Another Ann. Revered was this Ann Devlin in the memories of the people of Aughrim, wherever they may be, because Ireland did not shun its birth mothers, just its fathers, like her grand da Michael. The eighteenth of September, 1851. Glasnevin Cemetery. On the Finglas Road. O’Connell Circle. The Cross of Ardboe. Ardboe. For centuries, the historic home of the Devlins. On the western shores of Lough Neagh. The Tyrone shore. “Crux Mea Stella” – The Cross is My Star. The Devlin motto from the coat of arms granted to one of the original O’Doibhilins in the twelfth century Anno Domini. The O’Doibhilins, now the Devlins. Maybe, Maddie thought, if she changed her name to O’Doibhilin, no, to Smith or Jones, her luck would change. A piece of paper filed in the probate court and she would be a new person, a person liberated from her family history. She had to do better.

  She cursed the heat.

  -2-

  Maddie skipped lunch. Once again, the heat had melted her appetite. According to a story in that morning’s Herald-American, the food carts and restaurants where Boston’s office workers usually lunched had suffered significant reductions in business during the heat wave. No one had the energy to eat.

  At the Charles Street Jail, a matron, Irene Blodgett, passed her through security with a scowl, a pat-down and a thorough search of her purse, and brief-case.

  “Shave for court,” Maddie told Levy whose beard was untrimmed and scruffy, an ascot of horsehair.

  �
�If you were Jewish you would know my beard is a sign of respect for Hashem.”

  “Where do you live?” she asked.

  “You should know that already.”

  “I ask the questions. You answer them. Those are the rules of the game even when I know the answers to the questions I’m asking.” She started to add she wanted to observe his demeanor, his body language, as he answered her questions to gauge how he would behave on the witness stand; but decided that doing so might cause him to modify his behavior. She needed Levy in his natural state, whatever that might be.

  “I want a Jewish attorney.”

  Levy’s refusal to cooperate made her feel like an interrogator trying to squeeze information out of a member of the resistance. She wished torture were an option. “I asked where do you live?”

  “Traif.”

  “Meaning.”

  “Vile. Polluted. Not fit to be looked upon by the eyes of Hashem.”

  “I’ve had worse Irish curses thrown at me.”

  Levy pulled at his beard the way someone who never had grown a beard before does. “Not an Irish curse. Not a Jewish curse. Not any curse.”

  “I’m glad we cleared that up.” She raised the decibel level of her voice to that of a thunderclap so close it hurt the ears. “Now, where the fuck do you live?”

  Levy recoiled like a young child fearful for his life. His face contorted. He inhaled sharply, then jettisoned his silence like a child afraid of the storm. “Chelsea,” he stammered. “Near the Orange Street shul.”

  “Shul?”

  “Synagogue.”

  Maddie scribbled notes on her legal pad, placing his replies in quotation marks. She usually taped her client interviews, but she worried Levy would play to the microphone rather than act naturally. “Since when?”

  “Last September.”

  “Mother?”

  “Of blessed memory.”

  “Father?”

  “The same.”

  “Why did you move to Boston?”

  “To study with Rabbi ben Reuben.”

  “Work?”

  “A janitor in a funeral home.” He picked at the skin around his fingernails.

  She showed him the photocopy of the last page of Bumper’s spiral notebook again. “Your handwriting?” She pointed to the notations of the last several moves.

  “No.”

  “Positive?”

  Levy muttered something under his breath in a language Maddie assumed was Hebrew. The tone of his voice, the dismissive look on his face, suggested to her it was an epithet. She interpreted his demeanor as a yes.

  “Any priors?”

  “What are priors?”

  “Ever been in trouble before?”

  “Always.”

  “Ever been accused of a crime? Ever been convicted?”

  “Will I be released for seder?”

  “No.”

  “I did not murder that child. If I am convicted, it will be for a greater purpose.”

  “Which is?”

  “It is not for me to question Hashem.”

  “You talk like God decreed your arrest, trial, conviction, and sentence.”

  Levy sat in silence, his ears sewn shut against her words, in Maddie’s mind the posture of a cause-driven fanatic. Asked and answered, she thought, the objection she raised when opposing counsel persisted in repeated his question in multiple disguises.

  More notes, more quotation marks. Little new information, but she had learned what she needed to know, the answer to the question every trial attorney, both criminal and civil, grapples with: whether to have the client testify. Put Levy on the stand and his subservience to a higher power will convict him regardless of what evidence there may be of his innocence, regardless of how much doubt she could create about how his skull-cap ended up on the library floor. To the jury, he would be a true believer, right or wrong determined by whether his act advanced his belief, a fanatic in the root meaning of the word. The witness stand would be his pulpit. Most fanatics were also martyrs and martyrs craved punishment for their beliefs the way addicts craved their next fix, the way penitents suffering the scourge of the plague craved flagellation. She would never gain his acquittal if he testified. Nor a mistrial. Nor reversible error. The jury would convict him faster than the IRB condemned her grand da. And, perhaps, just as wrongly, though she was skeptical.

  A plea-bargain was her only viable strategy. Convince the prosecution she had a winnable case, harp on the fact no one placed him at the crime scene, and negotiate the lightest sentence she could; but, first, she would have to persuade Moskovitzky and Rabbi ben Reuben to endorse her approach, something that might prove more difficult than finessing the DA. And, she would have to resolve her outhouse dilemma.

  Levy wrapped the sidelocks beside his left ear around one of his fingers. “You think I did it.”

  She flinched, then struggled to regain her composure. Levy did not react.

  A statement, not a question. No hint of accusation in his voice. Nor anger. No sign of the frustration so common when the client realized that she knew he was guilty. Levy’s profile, well-educated, well-read, religious, Jewish, meek yet superior, did not fit the profile of a murderer; but this profile made him a logical suspect for this unique murder. His own conduct reinforced this logic. So what-if the skull-cap seemed out of place at the murder scene. Every murder had its own internal logic and Levy’s fanaticism, his subservience to God, to his fate, whether real or feigned, was the logic of this one, a logic powerful enough to overcome his absence from Capablanca the night of Bumper’s murder. She gathered her papers.

  “I have to prepare for Friday’s bail hearing.”

  The solid steel door slammed shut behind her. The rail-thin guard with the key-jangling hip escorted her down a corridor to a sliding door of steel bars controlled by an electric switch in a distant room. The jangle of the keys, the steel bars, the remote-control door, all dissolved the reasonableness of her doubt in an acid bath of emotion.

  -3-

  Carmelita Delgado, the receptionist at Suffolk County Legal Services, waved a pink message slip. “Jeffrey Mosca expects you at seven.”

  “Let him expect all he wants,” Maddie said.

  “He said it’s urgent.”

  “What isn’t?”

  “Don’t take it out on the messenger.”

  “Give me better messages.”

  *

  The Mosca firm, like most of the big Boston law firms, donated the labor of new associates and summer interns to Suffolk County Legal Services and other legal aid organizations to do grunt work, legal research, draft memos to be wrestled into briefs, handle arraignments. She had met Mosca at the fund-raisers those firms took turns hosting. He practiced law on Oriental rugs while she huddled with her clients in the corners of dimly lit court-house corridors or sat on wooden benches beneath which cigarette butts, coffee containers, cellophane wrappers, wads of gum, collected like ancient artifacts that would define this civilization to future archeologists. Mosca negotiated multi-million-dollar transactions while she plea-bargained multi-year prison terms. He closed deals over cognac at private clubs with views of Boston harbor while she closed deals over cold, bitter coffee purchased at the concession run by the Massachusetts Commission for the Blind. She doubted he had ever been inside a court-room while she lived inside court-rooms so crowded defendants and their victims often shared the same hallway, the same benches, while they waited for their cases to be called. She had broken up more than one fight in those hallways. His office coat closet was probably larger than her office cubicle, sixty-four square feet of space encircled by portable metal partitions.

  She phoned from the conference room because it had floor-to-ceiling walls.

  “Mosca, Baruch, and Cohn.”

  The receptionist spoke with a clipped British accent. Her nasal pronunciation denuded the names of ethnic identity, making them sound as Yankee as Ropes & Gray or Choate, Hall & Stewart. When one of Boston’s oldest Yankee l
aw firms imported its receptionist from England, the Mosca firm did likewise as if the accent of the person who answered the phone bespoke the quality of law the firm practiced or the ranking of its lawyers in Boston’s social hierarchy. Maddie understood how money and privilege enabled these firms to obtain green cards when the immigration service routinely deported her clients whose accents were Hispanic or whose names ended in vowels or whose skin was the wrong shade. She resented that she and her clients were not created equal.

  Mosca’s secretary came on the line. “Attorney Mosca will meet with you at seven this evening. He does not brook tardiness.”

  “What about no-shows?” She hung up before the secretary could reply.

  After finishing the first draft of the brief for Levy’s bail hearing, Maddie freshened up in the SCLS ladies’ room, then wandered around downtown Boston. The early evening air retained the day’s heat. Sunset would not bring the steep drop in temperatures that normally accompanied April hot spells. Downtown Crossing smelled like a fast-food restaurant, the stink from each grease palace more nauseating than the last. Her appetite had not returned so she bought a coffee and donut for supper, a plain old-fashioned so she could dunk it. Her curiosity about Mosca’s call dissolved her defiance as quickly as her coffee dissolved the donut. Shortly before seven, she signed in with the lobby security guard at the Massachusetts Bay National Bank Building where the Mosca firm had its offices on the top thirteen floors. Marble, marble everywhere, she thought, but not a Michelangelo to be found. Someday, if she had the money, she would replace her grand da Michael’s stone with a marble mausoleum, one visible from outside the walls of Traitor’s Hell, a memorial to her grand da, a monument to Clancy’s venal treachery.

  At the sixty-fifth floor, a receptionist eyed her up and down with disdain, as if Maddie had come to clean the bathrooms and lacked only a mop and bucket. Maddie straightened her posture until she stood as erect as the parochial school student she once was. She knew she looked like an overripe lettuce leaf, wilted and withered. She could smell herself. She didn’t care. “You will,” Maddie said, “escort me to Attorney Mosca’s office.” With lifted head and military bearing, the receptionist led the way through the labyrinth of the law firm. Maddie marveled at the way the receptionist’s body language told Maddie to go fuck herself.