Client Privilege

by William G. Tapply

  I lit a cigarette and didn’t say anything.

  “You still there, Brady?”

  “I’m here, Charlie.”

  “You get my point?”

  “You’re saying these cops’re like that old poacher. They go out on their porch every morning, so to speak, and yell accusations, and sooner or later someone’s going to be hiding in the bushes, thinking they’ve been found out. You’re saying I should ignore what they say to me. Just stay hunkered in the bushes.”

  “You got it, pal.”

  “Difference is, I’m not guilty of anything.”

  “That doesn’t make it different at all,” said Charlie.

  “Okay. Thanks for the advice.”

  “That’s why you called, wasn’t it? For advice?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, remember about that old poacher, then.”

  “Thanks, Charlie. Anything else I should be thinking about?”

  “Sure. Though I hesitate to mention it to you.”

  “What is it?”

  “Well,” he said. “If I know cops, they think they’ve got themselves a hot one.”

  “Me.”

  “Right. And while they’re chasing you around, the real bad guy’s feeling better and better about things. Because nobody’s chasing him around.”

  “And somebody ought to be chasing him around,” I said. “Like, for example, me.”

  “Jesus, Brady. I didn’t say that.”

  “Who else?”

  Charlie had no answer for me.

  After I hung up with Charlie I tried Detective Horowitz’s number at State Police headquarters at 1010 Commonwealth Avenue, not really expecting him to be in. But he was. I gave my name to his secretary, and a minute later he came on the line.

  “Horowitz,” he mumbled.

  “You got a mouthful of Bazooka?” I said.

  I heard a bubble pop. “Nasty habit,” he said.

  “You should try cigarettes.”

  “Coyne,” he said, “I ain’t got time for a bunch of shit. What do you want?”

  “What do you know about the Churchill killing?”

  He popped a bubble. “I know what there is to know. Just for one thing, that you seem to have stepped into some moderately deep shit.”

  “I hope you told your friends about me.”

  He snorted through his nose. “Would you really want me to do that?”

  “Come on, Horowitz.”

  “You’ve been in plenty of weird scrapes, Coyne. Christ, you killed a guy with your gun a few years back.”

  “You know about that. You investigated that one.”

  “Sure. You were defending the virtue of a woman. Still, you can see how it looks.”

  “What’ve they got on me?”

  “Look, Coyne. You are pushing what is already a tenuous friendship to its limits. You follow me?”

  “Spell it out.”

  “Hell, you’re a witness in a homicide.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Okay,” he said. “You’re a possible suspect. How’s that?”

  “That’s not very good.”

  “They haven’t got anything more than circumstance right now. They come up with much more…” He paused. “Will they?”

  “Will they what?”

  “Come up with something else?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Well, I didn’t really think so. Still…”

  “Look,” I said. “What the hell is going on?”

  He sighed. “I guess I won’t be screwing anything up if I tell you what I’ve heard. The papers got most of it anyway. You got the right to know.”

  “Thanks.”

  “This’ll cost you something fancy at the Ritz when it’s all over.”

  “Fine. Gladly. It’ll be worth a celebration.”

  He cleared his throat. “This girl found Churchill’s body on the living room floor in his condo on Beacon Street. He was—”

  “What girl?”

  “His girlfriend, I gather. She had a key to the place. Name of Gretchen Warde. Warde with an e. Works over at Channel Eight. Assistant producer or something, which means glorified gofer. Anyhow, she went in and found the body. Called the cops.”

  “What time?”

  “Little after midnight. Gather she and Churchill spent the night together now and then.”

  “She’s not a suspect?”

  “Of course she is. She’s the main suspect. She’s a better suspect than you. They grilled her. She didn’t seem to have her times straight. Holes in her story. Nothing like hard evidence, from what I hear. Like they didn’t find a weapon. The M.E. looked at the body, estimated how long it had been dead, and I guess they figure she could’ve done it after she left the station. They’re shy motive, but they’ve got opportunity.”

  “Same as me,” I said.

  “That’s what I hear.”

  “So how’d they glom on to me so quick?” I said.

  “This is why I don’t think you did it,” said Horowitz.

  “Why?”

  “Churchill had a piece of paper in his pocket. It had your name, the name of the bar you met him at—”

  “Skeeter’s.”

  “Right. And the time. Nine o’clock.”

  “How’s that get me off the hook?”

  “It gets you off the hook with me. Not with Sylvestro and Finnigan. See, I know you, and for all your shortcomings, I know you ain’t dumb. If you shot Churchill to death, you would’ve gone through his pockets. You sure as hell wouldn’t have left that piece of paper there. In fact, it occurred to me that whoever did shoot him might’ve stuck the paper into his pocket afterwards.”

  “Who’d do a thing like that?”

  Horowitz laughed. “Make a list of your enemies, Coyne.”

  “He had that paper there because we had a meeting set up at Skeeter’s for nine o’clock. That’s how the cops knew to go and question Skeeter.”

  “Whatever you say,” said Horowitz.

  “So they went to Skeeter’s, and they found out that I had been there with Churchill, that we’d had a discussion that wasn’t exactly amicable, and that we both left around nine-thirty. And since I was basically unable to account for my time between then and eleven-thirty, by which time Churchill was already dead, I could easily have followed him home, or gone with him, and plugged him, and had plenty of time to get back to my place by the time I called Gloria.”

  “Well, all of that sounds about the way I’m hearing it around here. They haven’t got a weapon and they haven’t figured out your connection to Churchill. They do have this Warde woman. But they’ve also got you. I know Finnigan. I’ve worked with Sylvestro a couple times, too. They’re good. Dogged. They think they’ve got a hot one, they don’t give up. They’ll work their asses off till they dig something up. I hear you weren’t especially cooperative when they braced you yesterday.”

  “They were back this morning.” I said. “I tried to be cooperative.”

  “Well, good. You should be.”

  “I told them what I could,” I said.

  “I gotta tell you, Coyne,” he said. “They came away from that little interrogation more suspicious than when they went into it.”

  “I imagine they did.”

  “The way I hear it, you fudged awhile before you admitted you’d been with the guy.”

  “They showed me his picture and told me his name. When I met Churchill he was wearing sunglasses and a fake mustache. I didn’t know his name. Once I figured out he was the guy I met at Skeeter’s, I readily admitted it.”

  “They thought it was odd, you didn’t recognize his picture or latch onto his name.”

  “Suspicious, you mean.”

  “Whatever. I hear Skeeter recognized the guy right off by his picture. They figure you should have, too.”

  “I guess Skeeter’s better at faces than me.”

  “And then you refused to tell them what you and Churchill were doing together.”

/>   “Yes, I did.”

  “Well, shit. How do you think that looks?”

  “That looks to me the way it was. I was there for a client. To them I guess it looks bad. I can’t help it.”

  “You talk to this client of yours?”

  “Of course.” I hesitated. “Why?”

  “You ask him where he or she was?”

  “What’re you trying to say?”

  He popped his gum. “Maybe I was wrong.”

  “About what?”

  “Back there I said you ain’t dumb. Now I’m not so sure.”

  “I’m not dumb,” I said after a moment. “I know what you’re thinking. What you’re thinking is dumb.”

  “If you say so.”

  “I do.”

  Horowitz hesitated. “You wanna know something, Coyne?”

  “What?”

  “I don’t think I better talk to you anymore.”

  “Why?”

  “In fact, I don’t think I should’ve told you this much already.”

  “Come on, Horowitz.”

  “I mean, look, as a friend, if that’s what I am, I gotta tell you it does look bad.”

  “I didn’t kill him, for God’s sake.”

  “Well, why the hell don’t you tell them the truth, then?”

  “I can’t.”

  EIGHT

  WHEN I HUNG UP with Horowitz, I lit a cigarette, sighed deeply, and prepared to make a pass at the stack of paperwork in my desk. The console buzzed unpleasantly. I picked up the phone. “Yes, Julie?”

  “Boy, do you sound grouchy.”

  “I’m sorry. What is it?”

  “Mickey Gillis called. She’d like you to call her.”

  “She say why?”

  “No.”

  “Okay. I’ll call her.”

  Mickey Gillis is a columnist for the Globe. The city and its people are her beat. She has more snitches than the cops on Hill Street Blues. She has the tenacity of an angry pit bull, the eclectic knowledge of a Jeopardy champion, the commonsense smarts of a down-east lobsterman, and the mistrust of human nature of a maximum-security prison guard. What comes to her as a strand of idle gossip leaves her typewriter as hard, well-fortified fact. She has been sued a dozen times. She has never lost. I have defended her several of those times. It has always been a simple matter of reminding a jury of Mickey’s peers of the intent of the First Amendment.

  Mickey and I went to high school together. We had been lovers, if that’s what you call two adolescents engaged in violent chemical reactions with each other. She married a guy named Gillis, left the state for several years, and then came back, divorced, to write society for the Globe. Within two years she had her own column and carte blanche from the editor to write about what and whom she chose. Mickey Gillis pisses people off. She tells the truth. And she sells a helluva lot of newspapers.

  She has two phones in her office. One is listed with the Globe. The other is a private number known only to her snitches. Sometimes she talks on both phones at once and hammers at her word processer at the same time. I’ve seen her do it.

  The number I dialed was the snitches’ number. She answered, “Gillis.”

  “Mickey,” I said. “It’s Brady.”

  She chuckled in that raspy, throaty way of hers. Mickey smoked little cigars and drank a lot of whiskey. “Glad you called back, Counselor.”

  “What’s up, Mickey? You in trouble again?”

  “Nope. You are.”

  “Oh, boy. Word gets around, huh?”

  “To some of us it does. I bet you want to know about Wayne Churchill, huh?”

  “Whatever made you think that?”

  “Sylvestro and Finnigan’ve been giving you a hard time, I hear.”

  “Do you hear everything, Mickey?”

  “You bet your ass I do.”

  “You planning to write about me in your column?”

  “Hey. A story’s a story.”

  “Come on, Mickey.”

  “Just joshing, Brady. There’s nothing to write, yet. You didn’t kill Wayne Churchill, did you?”

  “Of course not.”

  “You been arrested or anything?”

  “No.”

  “I knew that. Hey, I’m just being friendly here. I hear things, I’ve got sources most people don’t have. I figure, hey, I hear my friend Brady’s name bandied about, I oughta see what I can do for the guy. Right?”

  “Right, Mickey.”

  “So I figure I’ll give him a call, remind him old Mickey’s here.”

  “I appreciate it.”

  “So,” she said, exhaling loudly. I pictured her puffing on one of her little cigars. “What would you like old Mickey to find out for you?”

  “I’m not sure, to tell you the truth. Somebody killed the man. It wasn’t me. But the cops seem to be focused on me, which means that whoever did it is getting no attention. If I could just come up with a motive, or an enemy, or some niche in his armor…”

  “He was a golden boy, for sure. But you’re right. There was something about the man.” She paused. “You know something about him, don’t you?”

  “No, not really,” I lied. Of all people, Mickey Gillis was the last one I could mention Judge Popowski and Wayne Churchill to in the same breath.

  “But you wouldn’t mind if Mickey did a little checking, just for old times’ sake.”

  “Mickey, listen. I don’t want to find my name in your column tomorrow morning.”

  “Aw, Brady…”

  “I don’t want to be quoted. You want to write about the Churchill murder, I can’t stop you. Go ahead. But leave me out of it.”

  “You’re in it, pal.”

  “Then let’s forget the whole thing.”

  “You misunderstand, Brady. Christ, I know you didn’t kill anybody. I figure it’d be good for both of us if we figured out who did, that’s all. I intend to pursue this story. I just figured I might share with you. Out of friendship. If you want to share with me, hey, great.” She paused. “If not, well, okay. Either way, I’m gonna pick a few scabs. Would you mind if I did that?”

  “I guess I wouldn’t mind, Mickey.”

  She paused. I heard the click of a lighter. Then she exhaled loudly. “Remember Granny Hill, Brady?”

  “You were a sexy one, all right.”

  “Were,” she repeated. “Fuck you, Coyne.”

  “You’ve still got great legs, Mickey.”

  “I wear the same size dress I did then.”

  “Terrific body. You always had a great body.”

  “It’s the face, ain’t it?”

  “You look wonderful, Mickey. Come on. Granny Hill was a very long time ago.”

  “Yeah,” she sighed. “You ain’t the same lean stud you once were, either, you know.”

  “Don’t I know it.”

  “Well, hell. This Churchill thing’s interesting. Maybe I’ll just roll over a few rocks, see what crawls out. I’ll keep you posted.”

  “Appreciate it.”

  “You take care of yourself, Brady,” she said softly. “You’re not used to being on the other side.”

  “Ain’t it the truth,” I said.

  Mickey called back the next morning. “I got some dirt,” she said.

  “On Churchill?”

  “Yup.”

  “Let’s have it.”

  “Rather not on the phone.”

  “Lunch, then.”

  “Can you deduct it?”

  “No. It won’t be business.”

  “We could do some business.”

  “Couldn’t justify it,” I said.

  “You are so goddam ethical sometimes, Counselor. Okay, then. I’ll pay. I can deduct it.”

  “No you can’t. Not unless you’re working on a story. And if you’re working on this story, then I better not be one of your sources. In which case, you can’t deduct my meal.”

  “Okay, okay,” she said. “I know a little place around the corner from the courthouse, right next to
the bakery that makes dirty cakes. It’s cheap and quiet and they have great hot turkey sandwiches. We’ll go dutch.”

  “Dirty cakes?”

  “Oh, yes. They’re a riot. X-rated cakes. They have their regular assortment, or you can have them custom designed. Breasts, asses, phalluses, or any combination thereof.”

  “What’s this restaurant like?”

  “Not much if you’re looking for ambience. Hole in the wall, actually.”

  “Why don’t we meet at the Oyster House, instead,” I said.

  “You wanna go for ambience, then.”

  “I can’t get excited about a turkey sandwich, that’s all.”

  “Ambience it is. Twelve-thirty?”

  “Twelve-thirty is fine.”

  I thought of calling Pops, then I thought better of it. He couldn’t help me. I thought of calling Xerxes Garrett, the good young defense attorney who had clerked for me for a year while studying for the bar. But at this point, I didn’t figure I needed an attorney. Not yet. If they decided they wanted to arrest me…

  I did want to get a line on Wayne Churchill. I wanted to find out something I could give to Sylvestro and Finnigan so they’d leave me alone, something that would provide somebody with a motive to murder him, an enemy, a weakness, a secret. I knew there was something. After all, somebody had murdered him.

  Mickey was waiting for me at the bar at the Union Oyster House when I got there. Her slim, muscular legs were crossed, and she had hiked her skirt up over her knees to display them to their best advantage. She was hunched over a glass of Scotch. A thin black cigar was burning in the ashtray by her elbow. I eased onto the stool beside her. The young woman behind the bar said, “Sir?”

  “Jack Daniel’s on the rocks, please.”

  Mickey turned to look at me. Her monkey face broke into a grin, spreading tiny crinkles at the corners of her eyes and mouth. I bent to kiss her cheek, and she managed to get her mouth in the way of my aim. Before I could pull back, she had flicked her tongue out, licking my lips.

  “Come on, Mickey. Behave.”

  “Ah, you old fart, Coyne. Always were a prude.”

  “I never particularly thought so.”

  “Trust me,” she said. “You always were a prude.”

  My drink arrived. I lit a cigarette. She puffed on her cigar. I noticed that she inhaled it. The blush on her cheeks and the glitter in her eyes told me that the Scotch she was sipping wasn’t her first.