Close to the Bone

by William G. Tapply

  Julie turned and left the room. Glen followed her with his eyes.

  I filled the three mugs with coffee, sipped from mine, and lit a cigarette. “Just so you don’t embarrass me in front of Paul with more irrelevancies,” I said to Roger, “there are some other things you probably should know. Paul did not go to Harvard or Yale or Princeton. Not BC or BU, even. His old man was an immigrant Polish cobbler in Medford who was disabled by a stroke when Paul was fifteen and didn’t die for another five years. His mother was a checkout clerk at K Mart and cleaned office buildings at night to put food on the table for Paul and his four siblings. Paul commuted to UMass Boston, then got his law degree from Suffolk, part-time. It took him about ten years to get through college and law school. He earned his way by waiting tables and tending bar at Italian restaurants in the North End, and probably met a lot of future clients in the process. The Middlesex County DA hired him for about fifteen grand a year to handle a caseload that would overwhelm an entire State Street firm. Within two years Paul Cizek was prosecuting homicides and getting convictions at an astounding rate. All the fancy downtown firms courted him, but he went to Tarlin and Overton in Cambridge because they wanted to keep him in front of juries, where he belonged. He’s been with them almost five years. Paul’s about forty now. He’s got a nice house in Lynnfield and a Boston Whaler and a wife who went to Wellesley, who’s a lawyer herself.” I paused. “Let’s see. Anything else I should tell you before he gets here?”

  “He sounds like our man,” said Roger.

  “I hope you won’t be startled by his appearance,” I said.

  He shook his head and shrugged.

  I smiled. “But you probably will be.”

  I figured Roger had Paul Cizek pegged as a fat, big-nosed, toothpick-chewing caricature of a sleazy defense lawyer, a swarthy, foreign-looking man in a shiny suit with red suspenders and a flowery necktie and pointy shoes. In fact, Paul had fair skin, blond hair, ice-blue eyes, and the chiseled features of Butch Cassidy—or maybe it was the Sundance Kid. The Newman character.

  When Julie escorted Paul into my office, Roger, to his credit, didn’t blink. Paul was wearing chino pants and a cableknit sweater under an expensive tweed jacket. He shook hands graciously all around, declined Julie’s offer of coffee, then said, “I’ll need to talk to Glen for a few minutes.”

  I touched Roger’s arm. “He means alone,” I said.

  Roger looked up. “Huh? Oh, sure.”

  Roger and I went out to my reception area, and about ten minutes later Paul and Glen came out.

  “Okay,” said Paul to me.

  “You’ll take the case?”

  He shrugged. “I like challenges.”

  4

  THANKSGIVING, CHRISTMAS, NEW YEAR’S Eve. Celebrations of family and tradition and peace and love and hope.

  In the decade since Gloria and I had split, I had been finding the entire season disorienting and depressing and lonely, and I always greeted the arrival of the new year with relief because it marked the end of the holidays.

  This year Alex made it different. At her insistence, we cooked a Thanksgiving turkey with stuffing and squash and sweet potatoes and giblet gravy and cranberry sauce and mince pie, and my old friends Charlie and Sarah McDevitt came over to share it with us. Then Alex bought a tree for my apartment, and we decorated it with homemade strings of popcorn and cranberries. On Christmas Eve we ate chili and drank eggnog and sang along to the entire Messiah and talked to my sons on the telephone and made love, and on New Year’s Eve we drank champagne and watched the ball descend over Times Square on television, and the next day I realized that I’d made it through the whole time without once feeling disoriented or lonely or depressed.

  It was a revelation.

  I was staring out my office window at a cloudless January sky and dreaming of trout rivers and mayflies when Julie buzzed me. “Mr. Cizek, line two,” she said.

  I hit the button and said, “I was just counting the weeks until I might go fishing. I ran out of fingers.”

  “Try not to think about it,” he said. “Better yet, let me buy you a beer.”

  “That might help. When?”

  “Tonight? Say around six?”

  “None too soon. Name the place.”

  “Skeeter’s.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  I had talked to Paul a couple of times after the November meeting in my office, when he agreed to take Glen Falconer’s case. I’d filled him in on Glen’s legal and personal history and given him a few tips on dealing with Roger, whom he had instantly pegged as an obtrusive pain in the ass. The week after Thanksgiving a Middlesex County grand jury handed down an indictment, as expected, and Glen Falconer’s trial was scheduled to begin the first week of February.

  When the indictment came in, the Globe ran Alex’s story on the bottom left of page five, without a photo. She had been assigned to cover the trial and kept me updated on the case. Her boss had not at first seemed especially intrigued with the human-interest appeal of the Falconer story. Alex and I both suspected that the tentacles of Roger’s influence had wiggled into the Globe’s editorial offices. But gradually the juicy details of the Falconer family history and the tragedy of the fatal automobile collision found their way into her stories.

  Glen had been ignored and emotionally abused as a child, while his high-profile father bought and sold in the marketplace of influence and power and tyrannized his wife and son. No wonder Glen became an alcoholic ne’er-do-well as an adult.

  Otherwise, the plight of the Falconer family had not occupied me. I had other things on my mind, trivial questions such as, What’s it all about? and Who cares anyway?

  Alex kept saying we should both quit our jobs, load all our stuff into a truck, and head for Montana. I kept wondering why I always tried to change the subject.

  On one especially dismal winter day shortly after the arrival of the new year, I was having lunch at Marie’s with Charlie McDevitt. I mentioned how I’d been finding myself preoccupied with how I might squeeze maximum enjoyment from my remaining years of mortality. “I feel like I’m coasting through life,” I told Charlie. “I need a plan. Some days I just want to chuck it all and go live in a cabin out West with Alex.”

  “You want to give God a big chuckle?” said Charlie.

  “Huh?”

  “Just tell Him you’ve got plans,” he said.

  I left the office around five-thirty. The city was dark and bone-chilling cold. The wind off the water funneled between the buildings and knifed into my body. I walked briskly, hunched into my topcoat, up Boylston, past the Public Gardens, diagonally across the Common, left on Tremont, and then down Court Street to the alley off State Street to Skeeter’s Infield.

  I walked in, rubbed the cold out of my palms, and looked around. The bar was crowded and the early sports news was playing on the two big television sets at the ends. Skeeter was hustling behind the bar. When he saw me he lifted his chin in greeting.

  Paul wasn’t at the bar. I spotted him in the last booth. A short man in a camel-hair topcoat and felt hat was standing in the aisle, bent over with both hands on Paul’s table. The man seemed to be talking intently. Paul was looking down into a glass of beer.

  I went over to the booth. Paul glanced up, frowned for an instant, then said, “Oh, Brady. You’re a little early.”

  I nodded. “Sorry. I walked fast. It’s too damn cold out there to dawdle.”

  He smiled. “Don’t be sorry. Have a seat.”

  The man who’d been talking to Paul straightened up, and I slipped into the booth across from Paul.

  “Mr. Coyne,” said Paul, tipping his head in the direction of the man in the camel-hair coat, “Mr. Vaccaro.”

  Mr. Vaccaro mumbled, “Hiya,” without offering his hand, so I didn’t offer mine.

  “Mr. Vaccaro was just leaving,” said Paul.

  “Yeah,” the man said to Paul. “We’ll talk, though, huh, Mr. C?”

  “I’ll think about what you
’ve told me,” said Paul. “Okay?”

  “Sure. Sorry. I’m on my way. I just—we gotta talk sometime, you know what I mean?”

  “I know what you mean, Eddie.”

  The man stood there for a moment, then shrugged, turned, and left.

  Paul lifted his glass of dark beer and took a sip. “Nippy out there tonight,” he said.

  “Radiational cooling, they call it,” I said. “Makes you wonder if this is the year spring will never come. Was that a client?”

  “Former client.” Paul looked toward the bar and lifted his hand, and a minute later Skeeter came over and placed a bottle of Sam Adams in front of me. “Howya doin’ tonight, Mr. Coyne?” he said.

  “Cold of limb and cold of heart,” I said.

  “Ain’t it the way, though.” He pointed at Paul’s glass. “You okay, Mr. Cizek?”

  Paul gave him a wave. “Fine for now, Skeets.”

  After Skeeter went back to his post behind the bar, I lit a cigarette and said, “So what’s up, Paul? It’s been a while.”

  “If my fucked-up sense of ethics didn’t forbid it,” he said, “I’d dump this damn Falconer case.”

  “Roger bothering you?”

  He ran his fingers through his hair. “Not anymore. I fired the old bastard a month ago.”

  “You fired him?”

  “Yep. He raised the bail, and that was fine, but I guess he figured that entitled him to plan the defense.”

  “I suspect he’s not pleased with the kind of ink he’s been getting,” I said mildly.

  “I’m just trying to win a case,” said Paul. “If he cares more for his own image than whether his son spends the next ten years at MCI Concord, we should just plead guilty and take what they give us. I don’t even ask my clients for their advice on how to run a trial, never mind their relatives. I guess Roger’s not used to not being consulted. He second-guessed every move I made, and as polite as I tried to be to him, I finally just had it up to here. Told him I didn’t want to see him ever again. Told him the next time he showed up with Glen, I was outta there. Surprised he didn’t go running to you. I think you’re the only person he listens to.”

  I shrugged. “He knows what I would’ve told him.”

  Paul sipped his beer. “I don’t like Glen, either. He’s got this attitude like it’s a big nuisance, him being put on trial, and who the hell did that woman think she was, out there with her baby getting in the way, while he was exercising his God-given right as an American citizen to get shitfaced and barrel around in his car. I mean, yeah, I’ve gotta try to shift the blame. That’s basic strategy. But I’d feel a lot better if the guy showed a little remorse. Bottom line, he killed a woman.”

  “Sorry I got you involved,” I said. “I just figured you were the best man for the job.”

  He waved his hand dismissively. “I probably am,” he said. “Anyway, it’s not the old Senator, and it’s not Glen, and it’s not really even this case, and I don’t know why I’m crying on your shoulder.” He let out a deep breath and looked up at me. “Except I guess I don’t feel like crying on Olivia’s shoulder anymore.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “Nah, it’s not what you’re thinking. She’s okay. It’s just me. Listen. I remember you telling me that once upon a time you wanted to be a civil liberties lawyer.”

  I smiled. “That was a long time ago. Law school and youthful idealism. A deadly combination.”

  He nodded. “Sure. And now you’ve got a practice that’s the envy of every lawyer in the city.”

  “I haven’t had a civil liberties case in my entire career, Paul. It’s always been a regret. And somehow I doubt that you envy my practice.”

  “In lots of ways I do,” he said. “I mean, you’ve got to coddle people like Roger Falconer, and that’s no fun. But look at what I do.”

  “You perform miracles, Paul. That Benton case—”

  “Yeah, exactly. I performed a miracle, and now that goddamn sodomist is walking the streets.”

  “Sodomist? With children? Jesus.” I shook my head. “I knew about the pornographic videotapes. But I never heard anything about sodomy.”

  “It never came out in the trial.” Paul nodded. “I managed to get the whole sodomy thing suppressed. You know. Tainted evidence, shoddy investigation, impeachable witnesses. Typical.” He shrugged. “See what I mean? That’s what I do. I put child sodomists back on the streets.”

  I sipped my beer and gazed at him. “I get it,” I said. “You’re afraid you’re going to win this case and Glen Falconer will be free to get drunk and smash his car into somebody else.”

  “Sure. Absolutely. And he will, too. But that ain’t exactly it, either.” He leaned across the table. “I loved prosecuting, Brady. Prosecuting was straightforward and unambiguous, you know? Every single son of a bitch I went after had done something bad. My job was to prove it, to make the case, to convince the jury. When I succeeded, I knew I had made justice happen.”

  “And you practically always succeeded,” I said. “Listen, old buddy. You’re doing justice now, too, and you know it.”

  “Sure,” he growled. “The right to counsel, the presumption of innocence, all that shit. But you know and I know that just because the law presumes somebody’s innocent doesn’t make him innocent. It’s all just a fucking game, Brady. You go to trial to win the game, not to do justice. You play the media, you pick your best jury, you work on the judge. You wait for the prosecution to fuck up, or, even better, you sucker ’em into fucking up, and then you cram it down their throats. That’s how it goes. If they don’t fuck up, I lose. But they practically always fuck up somewhere along the line. Listen, how d’you think I felt when that foreman looked at Eddie Vaccaro standing there beside me and said, ‘The jury cannot agree on a verdict,’ huh?”

  “Vaccaro,” I said. “The guy who was just here?”

  “Yeah, him.”

  “Jesus,” I said. “I didn’t make the connection. He’s a hit man. I don’t think I ever met a hit man before.”

  “You’re not missing anything, Brady.” Paul lifted his beer glass halfway to his mouth, then put it down. “Eddie Vaccaro shoots people for a living. The first bullet through the eyeball, then one behind the ear. That’s his signature. By all rights, he should be doing life in Cedar Junction now. Instead the DA has pretty much given up going for a retrial. So Eddie Vaccaro’s a free man. Back doing what he does best, I presume. Shooting people in the eye. Thanks to me.”

  “The thrill of victory,” I said.

  “Bullshit. I felt like I’d murdered that guy in the restaurant myself, just like bargaining Victor Benton down to community service made me feel like it was me who’d been sodomizing little kids. All the time I’m interrogating witnesses on the stand and challenging evidence and manipulating procedure, I’m thinking, Man, I wish I was prosecuting these miserable pricks instead of defending them. I wish I was putting them away rather than getting them off.”

  “Somebody—”

  “Oh, yeah,” he said quickly. “Somebody’s got to do it. It’s their right to counsel. Sure. You know, there are times I wish I wasn’t so damn good at it. There are times it almost makes me cry to see an inept, inexperienced, overworked prosecutor up there trying to get my client convicted. I’m practically screaming to myself, ‘No, you dumb schmuck. Don’t put that witness up there. I’m gonna have to destroy that witness.’ You know what I mean?”

  I nodded.

  He took a sip of beer. “God help me, Brady, sometimes I find myself rooting for the other side. There are times I almost wish I’d lose.”

  “Maybe you should go back to prosecuting.”

  “Yup, I think of that. Olivia and I could sell the house and sell the boat and sell her new Saab and sell most of our furniture and go back to the little apartment on Memorial Drive. Maybe after ten or fifteen years I could run for DA and stick my thumb into the political pie and make television statements and never have to go into a courtroom again until I lost an electio
n.”

  I smiled and nodded. “Alex and I are talking about moving out West.”

  “Really?”

  I shrugged. “I doubt it’ll ever happen. But thinking about it sometimes makes it seem real, and that makes me feel better for a little while. It’s an option. It makes me feel that there’s a way out if it ever gets intolerable.”

  Paul looked up. Skeeter was standing by our booth. “ ’Scuse me, men,” he said, “but I wondered if you wanted a burger tonight? Or a refill?”

  I glanced at Paul, and he nodded. “Burgers, Skeets,” I said. “You know how we like ’em. And I’m ready for coffee.”

  “Coffee for me, too,” said Paul.

  Skeeter grinned and ambled away.

  “I don’t feel that way,” said Paul after a minute. “I don’t feel like I’ve got any options. Tarlin and Overton pays me a shitload of money, which they should considering how much I make for them. I like my house and I like my boat and I like my wife. I just…”

  He shook his head, and I said, “You just what?”

  He smiled quickly. “I guess I just don’t like myself very much. Brady, God help me, I want to lose this case. I want Glen Falconer to spend ten years in prison. I want six big guys with tattoos all over their fat hairy bellies to ream his butt in the showers. And I want that sanctimonious old shit to spend the rest of his miserable life regretting the way he raised his son, and I want your Alex to drag the Falconer name through all the puke and slime she can find. That’s what I want.”

  “If you feel that way, you should quit the case.”

  “The thing is,” he said, “I can win. I expect to win. And I don’t have it in me not to do my best to win.”

  “So that makes you the best lawyer for the case.”

  He nodded. “That’s the problem.”

  “Just as I promised Glen.”

  “Sure. And all my vows and training forbid me from quitting just because I don’t like the Falconers and don’t like defending them. Nope. I’ve gotta see it through.”

  “I guess I don’t know what to say, Paul.”

  “I didn’t expect you to say anything, old buddy. I just expected you to listen and pretend to understand. Which you did.”