Client Privilege

by William G. Tapply

  He spread his arms. “No camera. No tape recorder. I want to talk to you.”

  “Off the record,” I said.

  “Absolutely.” He cocked his head and examined me. I judged that he wasn’t much over thirty. Bright, ambitious, single-minded, to have become station manager so young. “We’ll be frank, okay?”

  “Go ahead, Mr. Dennis.”

  “Wayne Churchill worked for me. He was murdered. Maybe it had something to do with a story, maybe not. Either way, his murder is a story.” Dennis touched the end of his mustache with his thumb. “Your name, ah, is connected, Mr. Coyne.”

  “Where’d you hear that?”

  He smiled. “I’ve done some investigative reporting myself.”

  “Be specific.”

  “Look,” he said. “I was his boss. He had to account to me.

  “You knew he was meeting me that night?”

  He shrugged. “Your name was scribbled on his calendar.”

  “You didn’t get it from the police?”

  “I’ve gotten nothing from the police. That’s one reason I’m here.”

  “Do you know why we met?”

  “That’s what I’m asking you.”

  “Forget it,” I said. “What else can I do for you?”

  “Actually, of course, I want to know if you killed Wayne.”

  “That’s easy. I didn’t.”

  “But you were with him the night he died.”

  I stared at him and said nothing.

  “What did he tell you?”

  “You’re out of line, Dennis.”

  “You’re a suspect, Mr. Coyne. A helluva suspect. Police’re gonna let it out, sooner or later. I want to get there first with the story. I’ve got a personal interest in it. I’ll repeat my offer. Exclusive interview. You’ll get all the time you need, tell your story in your own way. Guarantee you don’t get edited, misquoted, taken out of context. Put your case in front of the public. Best defense, believe me.”

  “Can I ask you a question, Mr. Dennis?”

  “Sure.” He opened his arms and showed me his palms. “Ask away.”

  “Did you kill him?”

  He grinned. “Me?”

  “Are you a suspect? Have the police questioned you?”

  “Sure the police questioned me. I don’t believe I’m a suspect, however. Anyway—”

  “End of interview, Mr. Dennis.”

  “I don’t think you understand—”

  “You want a story. I’m not it.” I stood up. “Now, if you don’t mind…”

  Rodney Dennis stood. “I’m an impatient man,” he said. He narrowed his eyes. “It would be to your advantage to be candid with me, Mr. Coyne.”

  “Is that a threat?”

  He smiled. “Goodness, no. Call it an offer.”

  “Offer declined. Thanks anyway.”

  He looked at me for a moment, then shrugged. “If you change your mind, give me a call.”

  I held out my hand and he took it. “Good day, Mr. Dennis.”

  He nodded. “We’ll be in touch.”

  Xerxes Garrett was the young black attorney who had clerked for me during the year that Julie was on maternity leave, in exchange for my tutelage. When he passed the law boards he turned down my offer to join up with me, which was a relief to both of us. I liked my independence too much to work with a partner. He retained the idealism that I had lost along the way. He wanted to work with the poor and downtrodden. He did not want a career like mine, helping, as he saw it, “rich white folks get richer.”

  So he opened his own office in Cambridge near the Somerville line, not far from Tufts University where he had earned modest fame as a Little All-American linebacker and running back. Poor folks, white as well as black, flocked to him, folks whose landlords allowed apartment building pipes to freeze in the wintertime, folks whose sons got nabbed stealing cars or selling coke, folks who didn’t know how to negotiate bureaucracies to complain about insufficient welfare payments or runaway husbands.

  Zerk was a big, handsome guy. He was also smart and articulate and principled. He had become an excellent lawyer. He was one of those impressive men who grew even more impressive when you got to know him. He had even helped me through a few scrapes.

  Zerk did a lot of business at the big ugly concrete courthouse in East Cambridge. He knew all the ADAs and secretaries and judges there. From what I could gather, they all shared my impression of him.

  “Yo,” he said, when his secretary connected us. “Bossman.”

  “I need a favor, Zerk.”

  “I didn’t figure you were calling to offer one to me. You in trouble again?”

  “Not really,” I said. “At least, not yet. I just have a question for you.”

  “If you’re in trouble, you oughta tell your lawyer.”

  “I know that.”

  I heard him yawn. “Let’s have it.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Supposing, just hypothetically, a person wanted to look up an old case, and all he had was the name of the defendant. How would he go about it?”

  “It’s in the computers. It could be dug out.”

  “How?”

  “If you’re prosecuting a case, you just go to the nearest terminal in one of the D.A.’s offices and punch it up.”

  “If you’re not?”

  “If you’re defending a case, it’s a little more complicated.”

  “And if you’re neither prosecuting nor defending a case?”

  He hesitated. “This isn’t really hypothetical, is it?”

  “No. Not really.”

  “You need to check on a name?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “A defendant in a criminal case?”

  “Possibly.”

  “Or possibly something else?”

  “Possibly a defendant or plaintiff in a civil case. Possibly a witness. Possibly a prosecutor or a defense attorney. I don’t know.”

  “Jesus, man.”

  “I know.” I thought for a minute. “I could probably associate this name with a particular judge.”

  “That wouldn’t help.”

  I sighed. “You can’t help me, then?”

  “I didn’t say that. You think this name might have been a defendant in a criminal case?”

  “Might’ve been. It’s one possibility. It’s a place to start.”

  “Let me call you back.”

  I hung up.

  I got some coffee and apologized to Julie for my earlier rudeness and my extended lunch with Mickey. She said she expected as much of me. She had left a neat stack of manila folders on my desk. My afternoon assignment. Without Julie, I would tend to spend my days swiveled around with my back to my desk—both literally and figuratively—staring westward out of my window and dreaming of fishing. Periodically I would telephone Charlie McDevitt or Doc Adams to swap stories and lay plans for trips to places like Alaska and Idaho where large trout swam in clear rivers and great snow-peaked mountains rose in the distance and the air was clean and murder was someone else’s concern. Without Julie, the GONE FISHIN’ sign would hang from my doorknob most of the time.

  Without Julie, I would soon be broke. Then I couldn’t afford to go to those places.

  Julie keeps me as busy as she dares. She forces me to do all the little things that keep my wealthy clients happy, like phoning them weekly and paying them house calls and occasionally doing real legal work for them, all of which persuades them that the shamefully large retainers they pay me are a good bargain.

  So I shuffled through the manila folders she had left for me. But I couldn’t concentrate. The knot in my stomach was too persistent. It reminded me that I had smacked my nose against a brick wall.

  How in hell could I find Karen Lavoie?

  Julie came into my office half an hour later. She queried me on the contents of the folders. I answered her. She patted my shoulder, told me I was a good boy, and gave me some more stuff to look at. The phone rang a couple of times. Julie made a few calls and th
en turned them over to me. Around four-thirty she came in with some letters for me to sign. She had composed them herself.

  A little after five my phone buzzed. I picked it up and Julie said, “It’s Zerk.”

  Julie admired Zerk. Zerk had two secretaries, and kept them both overworked.

  I pressed the button that connected me to Zerk. “Hi,” I said.

  “I figured this was important,” he said.

  “Yeah, it is.”

  “You seemed to be in a rush.”

  “I guess I am.”

  “Listen carefully, bossman. Tomorrow you should take the elevator to the fifteenth floor of the courthouse. Go to the Clerk Magistrate’s office. Be there at one-thirty. Some of the folks will be at lunch. Look for Sarah. She’ll be expecting you.”

  “I don’t want to get anybody in trouble.”

  “Tell her you need the case number. Give her the year and the name. She’s a friend of mine. She said she could do it as a favor to me. I told her you were a lawyer.”

  “I am a lawyer.”

  “More or less,” he said.

  I left the office at one the next day, rescued my car from the parking garage in the bowels of my office building, and wended my way onto Storrow Drive. I negotiated the rotary by Charles Street and crossed the Charles River Dam on the Monsignor O’Brien Highway. The river was iced over. Every winter a heedless child or a drunken Harvard or MIT undergraduate tries to walk across the river, crashes through the ice, and drowns. I passed the Museum of Science, took a left onto First Street, and parked in the Lechmere Sales lot. Then I walked the two diagonal blocks to the courthouse.

  I emptied my pockets of loose change, cigarette lighters, and car keys and passed through the metal detector. Good thing I left my .38 in the office. Then I retrieved my things and rode the elevator to the fifteenth floor.

  The Clerk Magistrate’s office was a large open room. There were forty or fifty desks and several banks of file cabinets that all sat behind a chest-high countertop that extended the full width of the room and served to barricade the public from the Clerk’s operations. Some of the desks had computer terminals on them. Some didn’t.

  Perhaps half of the desks were occupied by secretaries, talking on the phone or shuffling papers or typing at their keyboards. One of them was reading a paperback novel. Very little was happening in the Clerk’s office. I guessed the Clerk himself was probably out to lunch.

  A series of signs hung over the countertop for the convenience of citizens with business there, TRAFFIC/DOG VIOLATIONS. JUVENILE. INFORMATION & HEARINGS. CRIMINAL. CIVIL & RESTRAINING ORDERS. SMALL CLAIMS. CASHIER WITNESS FEES.

  I stood under the CRIMINAL sign and looked from one secretary to another. None of them noticed me. I cleared my throat and coughed. One of the secretaries glanced up at me and I caught her eye. Her skin was the color of dark maple syrup. She had a short Afro that looked like a helmet on her head. She wore rimless eyeglasses. She was very beautiful. She looked like a young Lena Home. It was the cheekbones and the finely chiseled nose.

  “Sarah?” I said to her.

  She looked at her wristwatch. Then she cast what looked to me like a furtive glance at the other secretaries in the big room. They were ignoring us.

  She got up and came to the counter. “May I help you, sir?” she said. I detected the trace of a Jamaican accent.

  “I’m a friend of Xerxes Garrett. My name is Brady Coyne.”

  She nodded. “Yes. Zerk said you might be in. What can I do for you?”

  “I need a case number,” I said. “Defendant’s name is Karen Lavoie.”

  She peered at me for a moment, then said, “Okay. Spell the name, please.”

  I did.

  “What year was the case?”

  Not too recent, I guessed. Probably from Pops’ days as a District Court Judge. “I can’t remember exactly,” I said. “Around 1979, 1980, maybe.”

  She shrugged. “I’ll see what I can do for you.”

  She went to a desk and began to peck at the keyboard. Then she sat back, watching the monitor. After a minute or two she looked up at me. “Sorry,” she said.

  “Try ’77 or ’78,” I said. “Please.”

  She made another entry on the keyboard.

  I noticed one of the other secretaries watching us. This one was older, perhaps forty. She had straight black hair, shoulder length, liberally flecked with gray. Deep creases were etched into the corners of her mouth. She was resting her chin on her fists, propped up on her elbows, and she was frowning.

  When she saw me glance her way, she got up and walked over to the desk where Sarah was sitting.

  “Whatcha looking for?” she said to Sarah.

  Sarah didn’t look up. “Case number. This gentleman’s old case.”

  The older woman glanced at me. “How old?”

  “We’re not sure. That’s the problem.”

  “What’s the name?”

  Sarah peered over at me. I nodded.

  “Lavoie, Karen.”

  “That’s funny,” said the woman. “Used to be a Karen Lavoie who worked right in this office. Couldn’t be the same one, could it?”

  Sarah glanced at me. I shrugged.

  “Probably not,” she said, returning her attention to the computer screen.

  “Karen was here for only about a year,” went on the older secretary. “Gee, that must’ve been sixteen, eighteen years ago. When you were still a baby. Right, Sarah?”

  Sarah looked up and smiled. “Maybe not a baby, Helen.”

  “You know,” said Helen, “there was something with Karen.” She frowned for a minute, then shrugged. “Probably not. She left to get married. I guess that’s all.”

  “Where did this Karen live?” I said.

  Helen looked at me as if she were noticing me for the first time. “Medford, I think. Yes, I’m sure it was Medford. She used to talk about Medford High School. She came to work here right out of high school. She had a boyfriend who had graduated a year ahead of her. He was some kind of athlete at Medford High. Karen used to talk about him.”

  “Well, that’s not my client,” I said. “Funny coincidence, though.”

  Helen cocked her head at me, then nodded. “Yeah, funny.”

  She wandered back to her desk. Sarah looked at me and shook her head. “Not here, either. Want me to keep looking?”

  “Boy, I should’ve checked the year before I came over here,” I said.

  “That certainly would’ve made it easier.”

  “I didn’t realize,” I said. “Let me go back to my office and look it up.”

  “Good idea,” she said. “Zerk should’ve told you.”

  She switched off the computer and stood up.

  “Well,” I said. “Thanks for your trouble. I’ll get the date and be back, if that’s okay.”

  “Sure,” she said.

  I turned and walked out of the office.

  TEN

  AS SOON AS I left the Clerk Magistrate’s office, I punched my palm with my fist and whispered “Yippee!” to myself.

  Karen Lavoie was not someone who had appeared in Pops’ courtroom. She had worked in the same building with him. And if it had been, as Helen remembered, sixteen or eighteen years earlier, it was when Pops was still an assistant district attorney.

  She had been there for a year. Then she left to get married. She lived in Medford. It was a start.

  When I got back to my office, I told Julie to hold my calls for a few minutes. Then I went to my desk. I spread open the telephone directory to the page with all the Lavoies on it. With a felt-tipped pen I made a check beside every one of them with a Medford address.

  Then I started calling. I asked if I could speak to Karen. The first two told me there was no Karen living there and, no, they knew no Karen Lavoie. Then I got a no-answer. Then an answering machine, on which I left no message. I made a note to try that one again.

  The fifth number was listed for John W. Lavoie on Centralia Street. A woman answ
ered. “Hello?” she said. Her voice was soft and cheerful. I could hear the muffled sounds of television voices in the background.

  “May I speak to Karen, please,” I said.

  There was a long pause. “She’s not here,” said the woman, finally. I thought a note of caution had crept into her voice.

  “When do you expect her?”

  “Who is this, anyway?”

  “My name is Brady Coyne. I’m a lawyer.”

  “What do you want?”

  “It’s a business matter. It concerns a mutual friend. A client of mine.”

  I had contemplated an evasion. The Massachusetts Lottery Commission, congratulating Karen on a Megabucks windfall. An insurance salesman. A doctor with a laboratory report to deliver. But I don’t do that sort of thing very well. The vague “business matter” was as close as I could come.

  “Karen doesn’t live here,” said the woman.

  “Mrs. Lavoie,” I said. “Are you her mother?”

  “Yes, that’s right. Is this some kind of bad news?”

  “No, no. Nothing like that. Would you mind telling me how I can reach Karen? It is rather important.”

  There was another pause. Judging by the television voices and the music that accompanied them, Karen’s mother was watching an afternoon soap. I pictured her in a humble but neatly kept flat with her ironing board set up in the living room in front of a giant color tube.

  “I’m sorry,” she said finally. “I don’t believe you.”

  I began to protest. But she hung up.

  I thought of redialing her number, pleading with her, explaining that it was, quite literally, a matter of life and death that I contact Karen. My life. Wayne Churchill’s death.

  But I didn’t. I copied the phone number and Centralia Street address into my little breast-pocket notebook, then swiveled around to gaze out my office window.

  If Karen had left the Clerk Magistrate’s office sixteen or eighteen years earlier to get married, as the secretary, Helen, had said, then I’d never find her by looking through the phone book. Because she’d have a different name. Mr. and Mrs. John W. Lavoie of Centralia Street in Medford would know where she was. Somehow, I’d have to persuade them to tell me.

  My phone console buzzed. I rotated back to my desk and picked up the telephone. “Yes, Julie?”