Neon Dragon

by John Dobbyn

  He grabbed a yellow pad and pen with an energy that made me wonder if it was totally against his will. I wondered if something had flowed through the old fighter when he’d heard one more bell.

  “Let me have the indictment and the coroner’s report. I assume you got them immediately.”

  My right fist clenched behind the chair at the accuracy of my first instincts. The celebration was short-lived. I handed over the copy of the indictment that was still in my suit-coat pocket.

  “The DA said she’ll send the coroner’s report as soon as it’s ready.”

  His eyes were back on me like a microscope.

  “That’s twice you let yourself be taken advantage of today, sonny. Don’t keep up that average if you’re going to work around me.”

  He grabbed the phone and punched numbers into it. I came around and sat in the chair I’d been gripping. If he hadn’t invited me to sit down, at least he hadn’t forbidden it.

  “This is Lex Devlin. Let me speak to Mrs. Lamb.”

  There was a pause, but not a long one. Even the queen DA responded when the king summoned.

  “Angela, this is Lex Devlin. I’m entering the defense of young Bradley.”

  I’d have traded tickets to Fenway Park for the final game of the World Series to see that grin drop from her lips when she realized that the Perkins School for the Blind was being augmented by the Boston Celtics. There was no audible comeback.

  “I’d like you to fax the coroner’s report and a full set of pictures. I’ll need them immediately.”

  She apparently saw no advantage in playing snooker with the master, because whatever she said equaled “yes.”

  I noticed that Mr. Devlin cut the good-byes to a minimum and rang off without broaching the subject of a plea bargain before he had enough evidence to deal from a position of strength. I absorbed the lesson without necessarily mentioning that the count of my day’s miscalculations was up to three.

  “How did you know she had it already?”

  Mr. Devlin looked up over the half-glasses that were still focused on the indictment.

  “Learn fast, sonny. This graduate course is going to be brief. This case is going to set all of Chinatown on end. That means City Hall’s interested. You’ve got the son of a black judge not everyone wants on the Supreme Judicial Court for a defendant. That’ll get the bar on edge. Believe me, sonny, that coroner’s report was on her desk by midnight.”

  He pulled off the glasses and gave me the full look. He held up the indictment.

  “How’d you ask for this? I bet you walked right into her office like a piece of raw steak.”

  He won the bet.

  “Don’t. She’s too powerful on her own turf. Catch her on neutral ground, like outside of a courtroom.”

  “Yes, sir. I notice you called her in her office. That’s not the same thing?”

  He put the glasses back on, but not before I caught something in his eyes. Associates generally stop at “Yes, sir.”

  “I can. You can’t. Not for a lot of years, sonny.”

  He read the indictment while I absorbed one of life’s realities. He threw it back to me.

  “Start a file. This is straight premeditated murder. She’s going for the full penalty. What have they got?”

  “Judge Bradley says they have two witnesses from the Chinese community that can identify him. They say they saw him shoot the victim.”

  “And what does he say?”

  “He says he had dinner across the street at the Ming Tree restaurant on Tyler Street. He walked over to see the lion. They have a cloth lion with three or four men under it …”

  “I know. I’ve seen it. What’d he do?”

  “He says he watched the lion approach the Chinese grocery store across from the restaurant. He was about ten yards from the building. Firecrackers going off all over the place. It got too loud, so he left. He was arrested a few blocks away. He didn’t even know there was a shooting.”

  He leaned back in the squeaking chair. I saw the Globe on a table to the side open to the conclusion of Mike Loftus’s article. I assumed he knew as much as I did about the second-story location of the old man when he was shot.

  “We need to talk to those witnesses. The DA doesn’t have to tell us who they are. She can claim she’s protecting their lives. That means we have to find them on our own. I don’t want to see them for the first time at the trial. Why don’t you go down to Chinatown? See what you can find out. Make it fast. The DA’ll be pushing for an early trial date before we get our feet too firmly on the ground.”

  I was up and heading for the door when that voice spun me around again.

  “Sonny, I want you on this full time till this trial ends. Whatever else you’ve got on your calendar goes to another associate.”

  He was back at the window, and it was my turn to turn him around.

  “Mr. Devlin.” He looked back. “My name is Michael Knight.”

  He turned back to the window.

  “I know who you are, sonny. I want to know what you are.”

  ON THE WAY BACK DOWN the corridor to my office I had to pass the office of Whitney Caster, junior partner. Whitney was around my age, but had come directly to the firm from law school. That gave him enough of a head start to put him in a position to give the orders.

  Old Whitney suffered from that two-edged phobia that infects the brains of a number of middle-level lawyers. He was petrified of criticism from any member of the firm above him, and equally petrified of competition from those below him.

  It was, in fact, old Whitney who was responsible for the pretrial motions on the Lothrop case that I had spent the morning arguing. I had the dubious pleasure of telling him that (a) the morning’s motion session before Judge Bradley had been a total disaster, and (b) he could find another lackey to do his dirty work, since I was off the case.

  “The hell you are, Knight! You’ll go back and reargue that motion. If you think I’m going to get my ass reamed by Mr. Dawes for this, you can guess again. Who the hell gave you the authority to get off this case?”

  He was already hyperventilating from being up against a rock. In a quiet, respectful tone, I boxed him in with a hard place.

  “I’m working for Mr. Devlin full time. You might take it up with him.”

  One could gag on the silence that followed. I knew he’d rather open a vein than even meet Mr. Devlin in the corridor. I bade him a happy afternoon and took my leave.

  4

  I FIGURED THE WORD of our embroilment in the case and my usurpation by Mr. Devlin would spread like an oil slick through the three networks of the firm—secretaries, associates, and partners. The partners would be clued in by nightfall, the associates by mid-afternoon, and the secretaries by simultaneous broadcast. All to the good. It would save explanations to every partner who needed a gnome to answer the call of the list at court or a sacrificial lamb to argue unwinnable motions.

  I was out of the office by three and into a stand-up hot dog on Washington Street by three ten. I tried to focus on the case as I chewed, for two reasons. First, I occasionally make the mistake of pondering the contents of those eight-inch oral suppositories, which is even more detrimental than eating them. Secondly, there was a decision to be made.

  The immediate problem was finding the two witnesses. Chinatown was about five blocks to the left on Washington Street. On the other hand, that haystack might not even contain the needle. We had no way of knowing if the witnesses were locals or visitors.

  Another possibility occurred about four inches into the hot dog. There had to be a police report of the killing and of the arrest. The report would contain names and addresses of the witnesses. Simple. All I had to do was get my hot little hands on the police report. Not so simple. Ms. Lamb had undoubtedly given the word that the report was not to be disclosed to defense counsel—for the protection of the witnesses, of course.

  I headed in the direction of the new precinct building for Area A, which covers all of downtown Bo
ston and north to Chelsea. As I passed the two rounded buildings on Cambridge Street that look like a broken comma and are known as One and Two Center Plaza, a notion was incubating. The Area A precinct building is a state-of-the-art Bastille. Twenty feet inside of the front door is a five-foot desk that looks like a parapet, presided over by the officer on duty. Beyond that point, outsiders goeth not. I needed an entrée.

  I ran up the Center Plaza steps to slip out of the wind. I made a cellphone call to city hall and worked my way through information to reach an acquaintance who worked in payroll. He was on a work break, so I got him at his desk. It had been four years since I had sweat blood to get his son probation for unarmed theft from a candy store that turned out to be a postal substation, making the crime a federal offense. He was still grateful enough to pull some information out of his computer without asking embarrassing questions.

  The police precinct had converted the system of recording police reports from stone and chisel to computers a while ago. A number of civilian data-entry people were still hired to enter police reports and other information into the system.

  My city hall friend read to me the list of names of data-entry people employed at the Area A building; I marked time through the Joneses and O’Briens and Kosciuskos until he came to Manuel Morales. Home address—Center Street, Jamaica Plain. At that time and in that particular section of the Plain, it meant a 99 percent chance that he or his forebears were from the sunny isle of Puerto Rico. It was not because of the climate that they used to call it “Jamaica Spain.”

  It might seem that with my having a name like “Michael Knight,” my forebears ran on both sides to the decks of the Mayflower itself. Not quite the truth. In acquiring ancestry, I was farsighted enough to choose a Puerto Rican mother and a WASP father—both of them gems in any hue of skin tone. The bonus in fate’s choice is that I can play in both sandboxes. With the twin tickets of Harvard and Harvard Law School and a six-foot-two-inch frame under skin pale enough to see through, I can walk into the Boston Conservative Club and get a table center court. Thank you, Dad.

  On the other hand, I have my mother’s legacy of jet-black hair and a slender build that never seemed to hold an extra pound. Since my mother spoke Spanish to me from my cradle days, I can slip in and out of a Latino accent like a loose sweater. I can drop my hundred and sixty fat-free pounds down a little, walk with a bit more grace and rhythm, and blend into any Latino section of the city. Bilson, Dawes knew that in making me an offer they were getting a pregnant pony—a twofer. They got an up-and-coming pin-striper who can mix with the State Streeters, and double points for hiring a minority.

  I JOTTED DOWN THE NAME, Manuel Morales, and walked to the brick precinct building surrounded by blue-and-whites on Sudbury Street.

  BUSINESS COMES IN WAVES to the center desk inside the station-house door. The officer on duty was blond, buxom, and beleaguered. I waited until she was going in three directions—to check on the release of a prisoner for a mother and father, scan the sheet of located stolen cars for a teenager, and take information on a missing person from a barely prehysterical wife.

  I flashed a business card from a computer retailer who had recently tried to sell me a laptop computer. That got her attention. I didn’t say it was my name on the card. If she wanted to assume it, that was her business.

  I asked her to call Manny Morales in data entry. She took me out of order because mine was probably the easiest and least emotional demand she had had to deal with all shift.

  She grabbed one of the three phones in front of her and tapped in four digits. She asked for Morales. In about three seconds, she handed the phone over the counter to me. With me on the shelf, she was back in the maelstrom that had now grown by a young couple who were reaching high C over a car theft. In the confusion around me, I could have been talking in an isolation booth.

  I cupped my hand over the phone and said, “Officer Morales?”

  “Not ‘officer,’ just ‘mister.’ What can I do for you?”

  The words were not much, but the rolled r’s and Latino cadence of the syllables were like Mozart to my ears. I followed suit by coloring the vowels and pointing the consonants until Manny and I sounded like a couple of muchachos from San Juan. I explained that the software company had sent me to check the computer system for viruses. Since Manny’s job involved the keyboard and not the internals of the computer system, I was hoping that his training gave him a notion of what a virus was, but no clue as to how you diagnose or medicate it. I had taken a computer course at Harvard, which at least let me bandy about a few words of computer literacy.

  I caught the desk officer’s attention long enough to put her back on the line. At Manny’s request, the officer gave me a clip-on pass that got me into the bowels of the station house. I followed directions back to the computer room, where I spotted a long, lean, white-shirt-and-tie type, about three inches taller and ten pounds lighter than me, sitting at a computer console. He had the dark hair and well-structured cheekbones to go with the accent.

  There were five other men and two women at other consoles in the room. Only one of the women came unglued from the screen long enough to take note of my presence as I crossed to the one I assumed was Manuel Morales.

  Manny shook hands and pulled up a second roller chair with a sweep of one long leg. I took it and mumbled “Com-esta?” on the way down.

  He grinned and came back with, “OK, man. What’s up?”

  I took the hint that we were perhaps not in a haven of racial impartiality and switched to English.

  “How long since they checked for viruses?”

  He slouched his long frame back in an easy posture, which told me that no alarms had gone off yet. I carefully avoided the serious crime of impersonating a police officer. I had absolutely no idea of the degree of criminality attached to breaking into a police station.

  “I don’t know, man. I just got in here last week.”

  Alleluia.

  “Then I guess you’re not aware of our company policy. We give follow-up service to check for viruses in the programming every two weeks for the first three months. They’ll be giving you training. Let’s run through it.”

  I swiveled up to the side of the computer to let him follow my lead and slide in.

  “We can do it with any sample report. Let’s call up the list of police reports for—let’s see, let’s take yesterday afternoon and evening. Why don’t you go ahead and call those up while I start my report?”

  I fiddled with a notebook while Manny’s lean fingers played the keyboard like a piano. The screen responded with a list of police reports by time of day. At that point, I slipped in and took the keyboard. I knew enough to scroll down the list until I found the report of the murder of Mr. Chen filed at 4:30 PM the previous day. I centered the cursor on that report while Manny slipped back in the chair, obviously at ease with the break from the boredom of entering data written in stilted policeese. I hit ‘enter,’ and there before my eyes was the forbidden fruit.

  I scrolled through it to the section on witnesses. True enough, there were two. I feigned nonchalance while playing with the cursor and any function key that would not change the screen. I jotted the two Chinese names and addresses on a notepad in script only I could fathom and closed the book on my virus report.

  Manny displayed precious little interest in my little charade, which made the close-out easy enough.

  “OK, Manny. No problem. If anything ever looks unusual on the screen, just call the company. We’ve had all kinds of virus problems out in Springfield. Buena suerte, man.”

  If nothing else, Manny was the master of nonchalance. Before I could bounce out of the chair, mentally giving myself a high five for brilliance in espionage, Manny swiveled himself clockwise, which put his mouth close to my ear.

  “Buena suerte yourself, man. You may need the luck. You know what you’re messin’ with?”

  He had me close to paralysis.

  “I don’t get you, man.”
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  He said it low, and casual, and in Spanish. “That’s a crock about the virus, brother. They have automatic virus protection built into the program. I know you’re a defense lawyer. I saw you in court once. You did a good job for one of the brothers.”

  I looked him in the dark, emotionless eyes. I got no reading, so I still didn’t know whether or not I was an ex-lawyer.

  “Does that mean no whistle?”

  “It means you just came through here to check for virus.”

  The relief squeezed out in a major exhale.

  “I don’t want to push it, but why?”

  “I noticed you checked the Bradley case. We got orders not to give a copy of that report to defense counsel—which, of course, I didn’t do. I think the DA’s tying your hands with this Bradley kid. I’m not going to buck the DA. I just choose to believe your cover. I’m not a cop. I just punch keys here.”

  I whispered, “Gracias, man.” His elbow stopped my rise out of the chair.

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  I looked back at him with a question mark.

  “You know what you’re messin’ with?”

  “Like what?”

  His eyes scanned the room without the slightest movement of his head. He was apparently satisfied, but he stuck to Spanish.

  “You know the dudes around Center Street in the Plain? The Cavallos?”

  “I know they can get dicey. Why?”

  “You know nothing, man. They could take out your kidneys while you’re reaching for your wallet. What I’m saying is that they’re choirboys compared to what you’re going to find in Chinatown.”

  “You talking about gangs? If they’re so bad in C’town, how come I never heard of them?”

  He sprang up and gave me a head-beckon. I followed him out to the corridor that led back to the front desk. He stopped halfway down the corridor.

  “You better get out of here.”