The Only Good Lawyer - Jeremiah Healy

by Jeremish Healy

  Woodrow Gant had been shot on Wednesday night. "Can't you just throw Mantle out?"

  A confused look now. "I don't get you."

  "He keeps his room like this, and him not working means he's not paying rent. Is the—"

  "Oh, the Mick's all paid up."

  I stopped. "What?"

  "Yeah. A month ago maybe, I caught him coming in drunk again, only this time just the half-lit, eh?"

  "Go on."

  "Well, he wasn't working, like I told you, so I said to him, 'You've already missed two Fridays now. What's the story, you got money for the brew and not the weekly?' And the Mick says, 'Hey, Vinnie, I'm sorry, really.' And he reaches into his pants, pulls out this wad of cash, and pays the two Fridays he owes and the next four as well."

  "Wait a minute. He paid you the whole arrearage—"

  "Right."

  "—and a month's advance?"

  "Right, right."

  "All at once?"

  "Like I just said."

  I thought about it. "Do you remember when this was, too?"

  The same canting of the head. “A Monday. I remember thinking, 'He didn't have two weeklies three days ago, and he's got six for me now?' "

  "So, a Monday, a month ago."

  "Right."

  About the time that . . . “Mr. Dufresne, was this before or after Alan Spaeth moved out?"

  Dufresne got angry. "Right before. I remember thinking about what my mother used to say, eh?"

  "Your mother?"

  "Yeah, she'd tell me, 'Remember, Vincennes, God gives with one hand and takes away with the other.' "

  "Meaning?"

  Dufresne looked disappointed in me. "Meaning I get money I'm owed plus upfront from the Mick, but this asshole Spaeth is in my face about me stealing his gun and says he's leaving. Which also means I got five empty rooms, and the mortgage bank don't care about—"

  "Please, Mr. Dufresne, this could be very important."

  He stared at me.

  I said, "A month ago, Mantle gives you six weeks' worth of rent, all in cash at the same time."

  "Right. What he owed me, plus the advance."

  "Just before Spaeth accuses you of stealing his revolver."

  "I don't know what kind of gun it was."

  "You don't?"

  "Hell, no."

  "You never saw it?"

  A new cocking of the head. "I never even knew the fucking thing existed, eh? When Spaeth come to rent from me, I told him the house rule was 'no guns.' Then, after he's lived here for a while, the asshole claims I went into his room and stole the thing. Says he's moving out to an apartment three blocks over because of that."

  The version Spaeth told me at the Nashua Street jail. Which might be just a good setup by him for why Woodrow Gant could have been killed by a gun with Spaeth's prints on its shells.

  But then why wouldn't the guy just have taken the revolver with him from the crime scene and pitched the thing where it wouldn't be found and linked with the shooting?

  Dufresne gave me a new angle of his head. "Eh, you okay?"

  "Sorry." I moved around the room, more to think than to look. "You said you helped Mantle up here last week on Monday or Tuesday."

  "Right."

  "When did you see him last?"

  "Last?"

  "Yes."

  Dufresne stared at the hardwood floor. "I think that was it."

  I stopped. "You haven't seen Mantle for a full week?"

  "Yeah, but that's not so unusual, you know. I mean, the guy does his carpentry, he's got to be on the job by seven in the A.M. sometimes."

  "I thought you said he hadn't been working for the last month?"

  "Yeah, but I don't really know that. Besides, the guys here drift in and out at all hours. I try to get them to lock the front door, but they're not exactly the most responsible people on God's earth, eh?"

  "How long has Mantle lived here?"

  "Two, three years. More like three."

  "He ever pay you in advance before?"

  "Once. His uncle died, left him some kind of inheritance."

  "But other than that . . . "

  "The Mick's strictly hand-to-mouth."

  Adding things up, I said, "You think he might have gotten the advance money this time by stealing Spaeth's gun and selling it?"

  "No." Dufresne shook his head. “No, the Mick's got his faults, but he's no thief. And he's loyal, too."

  "Loyal?"

  "He wouldn't screw a friend, even just a drinking buddy like your Spaeth."

  "They drink here?"

  "Here and around here. Couple of bars up Broadway, and another on L Street toward the beach."

  "These places have names?"

  A shrug. "Not that matter."

  Growing up in Southie, I knew what he meant. "Well, thanks for your help."

  As I moved into the hall, Dufresne said, "It's a good rule, eh?"

  I stopped and looked back at him. "What is?"

  "My thing about guns. Can't have them in the house, not with these losers."

  "Mr. Dufresne—"

  “My mother, she was part Indian, where those cheekbones came from? She always said her grandma on the tribe side told her, 'Firewater and guns, they don't mix!' "

  One of the hooking laughs before Vincennes Dufresne took out his master key and locked Michael Mantle's door.

  Chapter 4

  THE BOSTON HOMICIDE Unit is on D Street in Southie, a block off West Broadway. It has the second floor of the old District 6 police station, a two-story building of bricks soot-darkened to that dingy brown of dried blood. The windows show boxy air conditioners and green trim around them. White stones embedded in the brick arc above the main entrance, like the doorway to a chapel. However, the Stars and Stripes flaps overhead, a separate black-and-white pennant remembering POW's and MIA's just below the flag they were lost fighting for.

  I stopped at the battered counter on the first floor and asked a woman from Warrants for Lieutenant,Robert Murphy. Hiking a thumb over her shoulder, she said, "I think he's in the back, fuming some relic."

  The department had let the Homicide Unit turn a portion of the old station's garage area into a fuming tent for spotting latents on vehicles suspected of being involved in homicides. Robert Murphy was standing safely away from two men working near the wooden frame covered with clear plastic, a low-slung Pontiac from the seventies getting the treatment inside.

  About six feet and barrel-chested, Murphy was wearing a long-sleeved shirt and geometric tie, the gold wedding band on his left ring finger contrasting against his black skin as the hand did against the pale gray pants. There was a Glock 19 over his right hip because the commissioner doesn't want plainclothes officers wearing their weapon for a cross-draw that could spray bullets at a civilian before the muzzle comes to bear on the righteous target. Murphy held a clipboard in his left hand, frowning at something he saw on it.

  "Lieutenant."

  Murphy looked over. "Cuddy. Keep your distance, 'less you want a fine layer of Crazy Glue on that suit."

  "Not exactly a dust-free environment."

  A smile. "Commissioner's promising us this real fuming facility—bigger version of that room the M.E.'s got over at the new morgue? We just have to wait for 'Headquarters Building 2000' to go up." Murphy turned to the men near the tent. "How you doing?"

  “Nothing yet, Lieutenant."

  I looked toward them, too, but spoke quietly to Murphy. "That stuff really work?"

  "If there's anything there to find. This particular vehicle, I'm not so sure we'll need it. Case it's from might be a real bunny."

  "Meaning open-and-shut?"

  A nod. "Three neighborhood civilians eyeballed a homeboy they knew from the time he was three empty his Tech-9 into two merry wanderers from a turf ten blocks away."

  "A Tech-9? That's thirty-two bullets."

  "If the clip was full. Homeboys don't always remember to reload, and the Crime Scene techs didn't hope to recover all the slugs
."

  "Motive?"

  “Witnesses said it was because 'they be down with his lady.' He yelled it from the rear window as one of the other kids he hangs with obliged him as wheelman." Murphy stuck the clipboard under his arm like a drill sergeant on parade. "If only they weren't so stupid about it." Then he seemed to remember I'd come to see him. "So, what are you wanting?"

  "I'm on the Alan Spaeth case."

  Murphy's face turned toward me slowly, the eyes giving me nothing, but the lips pursing some. "Steven Rothenberg."

  "He asked me to talk with his client over at Nashua Street. I did."

  "Not gonna make you many friends."

  "And I don't want to trade on the ones I've already got."

  Murphy turned back to watch the progress on the Pontiac. "Meaning I should go over things for you without you asking right out."

  "You once told me how you hated asking for favors."

  Murphy nodded. "William Daniels."

  The case I'd helped him with. "Which was why Rothenberg thought of me on this one."

  The clipboard changed arms. "Funny how things come back around, isn't it?" A little pawing of the floor with his right shoe. "Cuddy, the Gant killing is as high-profile as a homicide can get."

  "All the more reason to be sure that, pretrial, you've got the right guy for it."

  Lieutenant Robert Murphy looked at me, then set the clipboard down on a table before calling over to the two men at the plastic tent. "I'll be out on the street a while."

  * * *

  The maroon Crown Victoria that Murphy had signed for back at the Homicide Unit turned left in front of me. I followed in the Prelude as the road became more rural and twisty. It's easy to forget there are still some sections of the city like this, a two-lane parkway through a forested valley.

  Murphy slowed to maybe twenty miles an hour, eventually pulling onto the grassy shoulder near skid marks darker than their neighbors on the pavement. The Crown Vic trundled along the shoulder a while more, coming to a stop about fifty feet before a tree at the bottom of the slope. The tree had a strip of yellow plastic tape tied in a simple knot about eye-height on its trunk. I stopped behind Murphy's bumper, and we both waited for a break in the traffic before exiting our driver's side doors.

  Shrugging into his suit jacket so the Glock on his belt wouldn't scare the people passing us on the roadway, he walked around the front of his vehicle to its righthand headlight, waiting for me.

  "You notice the skids?" he said.

  I glanced back toward where they started. "From the blown-out tire?"

  "Shot-out tire." Murphy pointed ahead and toward the near treeline. "You see the tape?"

  "Yes. Crime Scene stuff?"

  "Right. Marked that trunk even with Gant's body, behind his car."

  "What make?"

  "BMW 530i." Murphy gestured. "Gant was lying half on the pavement, half on the shoulder."

  "Can we walk over there?"

  "Sure."

  As Murphy moved ahead of me, a lot of traffic whizzed by in both directions. Above the noise, I said, "Busy road."

  "This time of day, maybe."

  "But not at night?"

  "Gets kind of lonesome, account of folks don't want to take the chance of breaking down, middle of nowhere. We figure that's why your boy Spaeth picked this spot."

  "Only how did the killer, Spaeth or otherwise, know to pick it?"

  "Meaning how could he be sure Gant would come along here?"

  "That's what I mean."

  Murphy drew even with the taped tree and turned his head, back the way we'd come. "This parkway, maybe a mile beyond where we turned on it, gets pretty commercial. Auto parts, discount houses, restaurants. We know Gant and some woman had a late dinner at this place called 'Viet Mam'. "

  "Viet Mam?"

  "Right, two M's." Murphy swung his head back to the direction we'd been going. "Four, five miles up there, you've got Gant's condo building."

  " 'Four, five miles'?"

  Murphy almost smiled. "I clocked it at four-point-six on the odometer."

  "And this parkway's a good route between the restaurant and Gant's place?"

  "Most direct, anyway."

  I thought about it. "I still don't see how the killer knows

  Gant will be coming by here."

  "Well, we don't believe Spaeth staked out one restaurant out of a thousand, hoping Gant and this woman would eat there. But all your boy would have to do is be following Gant, watching for a chance to do him, and then figure after dinner, the man'll be coming back this way to go home."

  "Or take the woman back to her place."

  Murphy kicked at a stone. "We don't know whether they came to the restaurant together or in separate cars."

  "You don't."

  "Uh-unh. The parking lot's on the side of the restaurant building, no windows. All the Viet Mam people could tell us is that Gant and the woman walked in together and walked out together."

  "How about a cab?"

  "Checked with the companies. No pick-ups or drop-offs near the restaurant that we couldn't eliminate."

  I shelved the car issue for a while. Looking down at the shoulder, I could see a patch of stones and grass that seemed almost bleached. "What caused this?"

  "Gasoline."

  "From the BMW's tank?"

  "Right." Murphy pointed across the road to the other slope of the valley. "Ballistics figures it was a rifle of some kind. Bullet went through the left rear tire, ricocheted up, and punctured the gas tank."

  "But without exploding it."

  A real smile this time. "Cuddy, you watch too much TV."

  I looked back over at the hillside where the shooter supposedly had been. "Any kind of make on the bullet or rifle?"

  "No. Slug was too deformed by the things it hit. But from the composition of the metal, we know it wasn't the same as the ones found in Gant."

  "Meaning two different guns."

  "Right. A rifle and a revolver. M.E. dug two readable rounds out of Gant's soft tissue, and Ballistics matched them to Spaeth's Taurus Model 85 revolver."

  "To the revolver found at the scene."

  "With your boy's prints on the shell casings still in the cylinder. And he admits to owning a Taurus 85."

  I didn't have a good answer to that one, other than Spaeth's believing somebody stole the weapon from his room at Dufresne's boardinghouse. "Lieutenant, you have anything on the woman with Gant that night?"

  "No. Owner of Viet Mam says he never noticed her face. And the waitress there doesn't have great English, says just that the woman was blond and attractive, wore tinted glasses and drank chardonnay."

  "Enough wine so she wouldn't be able to drive?"

  Murphy looked at me. "Waitress said the bottle was empty, but she's not sure who drank how much."

  "The lab do Woodrow Gant's blood alcohol level?"

  "Point-oh-three."

  "Pretty low."

  "He was a biggish man, Cuddy."

  Okay. "Let's go back to the woman. Height, weight?"

  "Medium everything, according to the owner."

  I looked down the road in the direction of the restaurant, then across, into the trees.

  "Lieutenant, can I work something through with you?"

  "I'm listening?

  "Either Gant and the woman that night were in separate cars or the same car, which would have been Gant's BMW."

  "Go on."

  "But either way, the killer has to take some time setting up across the road. And that means gambling that Gant is going to drive back this way to his condo instead of taking or following the woman home."

  "I suppose, but there's another reason to think Woodrow Gant was alone when he got shot. We traced the man's movements that day. Found out he had the car washed and waxed after lunch. Armor All on the dash and upholstery, whole nine yards. There wasn't a readable latent on the BMW or in it that didn't belong to Gant or one of the wash crew we took elimination prints from."

  I
looked at Murphy. "Which leads you to think no passenger in the car."

  He held my gaze. "Right."

  "And Spaeth's threats at the law firm combined with his prints on the shell casings found in the murder weapon lead you to believe he did the killing."

  "Right again."

  "So this should be another . . . bunny, then."

  Murphy looked away. "Just about."

  “Only if it were," I said, "you wouldn't be out here with me, going over things as much for your benefit as mine."

  Abruptly, Murphy walked toward the ribboned tree. I followed him.

  When we got there, he turned his back to the trunk, eyes ranging around the valley. "You take away all the cars going by, this is a real pretty spot."

  "Lieutenant—"

  "Shut up a minute, listen to what I'm saying."

  I nodded.

  Murphy spoke more quietly. "Nationwide, what percentage of the population you think is African-American?"

  I started to feel we were skating on different, and thinner, ice. "Ten?"

  "About twelve and a half, actually. How about folks on death row or executed in the last twenty years?"

  "No idea."

  "About forty percent black."

  "Jesus."

  Murphy rolled his shoulders into the tree, like a bear scratching an itch. "It gets worse. Nationwide, most of the homicides—eighty percent, in fact—involve victim and killer from the same race. Most of the other twenty percent is black doing white. But here, we've got white doing black."

  Even with the traffic, the crisp October air seemed awfully quiet.

  Murphy said, "There's not much doubt why this Gant killing landed on my desk. High profile, from a lot of different angles. Victim's black and a lawyer, plus a former A.D.A. and the third divorce attorney to be killed in the Commonwealth over the last few years. Lots of constituencies interested in this one. And who's our best suspect? A white opposing client, man who likes to own guns and shoot off his mouth as well. The department expects me to clear this case, get a conviction. But, if your boy walks, the brass wants to be able to sit down—with the bar association, the African-American interest groups, the media—and say, 'Hey, we put a senior homicide detective on it, and he's even black, too; no way Murphy'd let Spaeth walk, if the white guy was really guilty."

  "Sounds like lots of pressure for you."

  "Double-boiler." Murphy clucked his tongue off the roof of his mouth. "When I came on Homicide, though, a guy named Peter O'Malley broke me in right. He had over thirty years in the unit, and he told me there's really just one rule. You never lie anybody into jail."