Neon Dragon

by John Dobbyn

  He was frozen stiff. I think he saw where I was going.

  “That means you committed the unforgivable. You actually killed the Dragon Head without the permission of the tong. You tried to lay it off on Anthony so nobody in the tong would know. It didn’t work, did it? I saw at least fifteen Chinese in that courtroom. They heard what Mrs. Lee said. How long do you figure it will take for word to get to the top of the tong?”

  I was next to his ear and whispering.

  “Can you even imagine the death they’ll dream up for you when the word gets back to Hong Kong? You could set new records for pain.”

  Not a muscle was moving.

  “Where can you go to hide, Mr. Liu? Is there a hole on this earth where they won’t find you? Actually, you’ll be in prison for the foreseeable future. At least long enough to come to trial for the murder of Mr. Chen. You’ll be waiting for them like a staked goat.”

  I moved back and sat against the table. I checked my watch in front of him.

  “Well, that’s five minutes. Nice chat, Mr. Liu.”

  I was moving toward the door, when I heard the words.

  “What’s the offer?”

  I turned around and just looked at him for ten seconds. I don’t know why. It just seemed to raise the tension.

  “Witness protection program. The U.S. Attorney is ready to deal. You’ll keep that expensive skin on those bones.”

  “In exchange for what?”

  “Two things. The U.S. Attorney will want names, facts, and testimony about the tong. You’ll be the star of the show.”

  He thought for a minute without saying a word. What I suggested ran counter to his thirty-six oaths and the whole code of tong existence. On the other hand, it was the tong that would be inflicting pain that even he couldn’t imagine for committing the unpardonable.

  When he spoke, the superior tone had lost its edge.

  “And what is the second thing?”

  I was directly in his face.

  “This is the important part. If you go back on this, I’ll personally find you and feed you to the tong. From this moment on, Anthony and Mei-Li are completely free of you and that gang of thugs you give orders to. No strings. Nothing. The same goes for Mrs. Lee and Mr. Qian. That’s 100 percent nonnegotiable. It also includes me and anyone close to or connected with me. “

  He was looking directly into my face, but he was saying nothing. I could read the struggle in his eyes. I gave it ten seconds. I shrugged and said, “Good luck with your playmates.”

  I was at the door when I heard a quiet, “All right.”

  From the door I said, “What?”

  “All right.”

  I came back to stand in front of him.

  “Not good enough.”

  He looked up at me.

  “Swear it.”

  He did. I demanded it again. He did, and I demanded it a third time.

  I figured a repetition of three would somehow resonate with the ritual code he lived by.

  35

  IT WAS WELL PAST NOON when I picked up a copy of the Globe at the newsstand in the lobby of the courthouse. I caught a cab on Tremont Street for the short hop to Mass. General Hospital.

  The cab was moving before I had a chance to flip open the paper. There it was. Good old Mike Loftus. His column made the front page. I needed the old reading specs for this one. I didn’t want to miss a word. It read like this:

  To Lex Devlin

  I. O. U.

  One name—untarnished

  (Signed)

  The City of Boston

  Ten years ago, Lex Devlin was the brightest light that shone in the criminal trial bar. He had skill, wit, integrity—and he had a name. He had a name that brought hope to the prosecuted, pride to the trial bar, and a warning to prosecutors that they would pay dearly for the slightest lapse in ethics or preparation.

  That name was his life, because it summed up what Lex Devlin stood for, and what he would not stand for.

  He stood for the principles that drive young people with ideals into the law. He wouldn’t stand for the kind of compromised ethics that drive disillusioned lawyers out of the law.

  He had grit, and he had style—the kind of style that made people say regretfully, “There’ll never be another Lex Devlin.”

  And he had that name that became shorthand at the bar for the best there is.

  He had it until he stood in the way of a human machine so corrupt that it played without any rule but greed, so camouflaged by its outward face of public service that Lex Devlin never saw it coming or going.

  When it was through with him, it had stripped Lex Devlin of the name that was the work of his lifetime. It left it tarnished with unfounded rumors of the cardinal sin against the law that he served flawlessly—the sin of jury fixing.

  Lex Devlin has, for ten years, held a valid I.O.U. from this city for the redemption of that name.

  So here’s the payoff, Lex. Here’s the best I can do for a start.

  Thanks to the efforts of Lex’s associate, Michael Knight, the District Attorney and the United States Attorney have received incontrovertible evidence that Lex Devlin was totally innocent of any complicity in the incident of jury fixing that occurred in the case of Commonwealth v. Dolson.

  The tarring of those who were responsible will fill the pages of this newspaper in the weeks to come, as the greatest scandal in this Commonwealth’s history unfolds.

  But that’s for another edition. The business of this day is belated justice. This column is the first brick in the pedestal that the City of Boston should build for a son who always did it proud.

  This city has its heroes, and it has its villains. Sometimes, being human, we confuse the two.

  This time we got it right.

  God Speed, Lex.

  I let the paper sit on my lap and just soaked up the truth Mike Loftus made public. I could visualize lawyers and judges all over the city, who had innocently fallen for the lie and perhaps even spread it, wondering what they could do to make up for ten years’ shunning of one of their finest.

  That thought carried me down Cambridge Street and up the elevator to the sixth floor of the cardiac unit of Mass. General Hospital.

  The nurse pointed out his room. I asked how he was doing. She said, “He went to sleep last night like a hundred-year-old man. This morning, he was in his early thirties.”

  I walked into the room, and the first thought that hit me was that I was at his wake. There were enough flowers in that room to bury the president. In a quick check of the attached cards, I caught sight of names like the Boston Bar Association, the Mass. Trial Lawyers’ Association, the mayor’s office, and a who’s who of the trial firms of the city.

  He had a private room. He was in the bed, sleeping, with wires running to an assortment of machines.

  Spread across his lap was the Globe, opened to the inside continuation of Mike Loftus’s column.

  I sat down in the chair to be there when he woke. The squeak of the chair made him look over. He seemed alert when he spoke. His voice had the old sand and gravel.

  “Tell me about it. Tell me about all of it. Don’t leave out one detail.”

  I talked for a long time. I told him about the business with Abdul and the drug ring at Harvard. I told him about my meeting with Loring and everything that went into his signed statement about the “association” and the jury fix in the Dolson case that was now in the hands of both the federal and state prosecutors.

  Then I told him every detail that led up to the dismissal of the indictment against Anthony Bradley. The punch line was that his tactic had worked.

  He had his head back on the pillow. He was Mount Rushmore with his eyes focused on something on the ceiling, but I could tell from the silence that he was drinking in every word. When I finished, there was more silence.

  I let it lie for a minute, until it became awkward.

  “That was one serious gamble, Mr. Devlin. That early trial date nearly blew me away.”


  “It was the only way. If we let them have time to pass around the word about that surprise witness, the boys in Chinatown could have come up with a dozen other trumped-up witnesses. If there was a chance Bradley was innocent, we had to ambush them.”

  “Did you believe Bradley was innocent?”

  He shook his head. “I didn’t care. If he was innocent, our best shot at getting Mrs. Lee to tell the truth was that young lady. If he was guilty, Mrs. Lee would have held up as a witness against him. Either way, justice would have been done.”

  I smiled. I was still on the side of playing hunches about the client’s innocence. And he knew it. That’s what makes horse racing.

  “I’ll give you this, Mr. Devlin. Your instincts about tactics were everything I’ve heard about.”

  There was no answer. I didn’t understand why at the time. He took the free hand, the right one, the one with no tubes running into it, and he moved it slowly across his eyes. I could have sworn I heard the sound of an almost impenetrable wall crumbling. When he spoke, it was with a voice I had never heard before.

  “Tactics are one thing. The talent to bring it off is what makes a lawyer.”

  He held out his hand, and I took it. I held it until I needed it back to get something wet out of my own eye.

  He lifted up the paper open to Mike Loftus’s column.

  “Have you read it?”

  I nodded. “Mike writes a good column. He had good material.”

  He laughed, and the paper rested on his chest. Then he stopped smiling.

  “I don’t think … I could ever put into words …”

  “No need. I know.”

  He shook his head. “No, you don’t. No one’ll ever know what you did for this old man.”

  I looked up. “What old man? Who’s the old man?”

  His head came off the pillow.

  “Damn! You’re right. There’s no old man around here. I’ve got to get out of here. I’ve got things to do.”

  “Whoa.” I settled him back. “Soon enough. You’ll be back soon enough terrorizing prosecutors and scaring the pants off the associates at Bilson, Dawes.”

  He rested back against the pillow.

  “You’re half-right. I’ll be back. I can feel the years coming back to me. But not at Bilson, Dawes. I’m going to go back to doing what I should have been doing for the last ten years.”

  “Bravo! You’re going to go it on your own?”

  “Well, I suppose. Unless I can find some punk of a young attorney with enough salt and starch to run with me.”

  I caught his drift, and it sent my cranial cells racing. One on one for the rest of my foreseeable days with the crustiest, most cantankerous old battle-horse in any trial bar. If the Bradley case was any test, I’d probably never again have a pulse below a hundred or a stomach that didn’t generate enough acid to melt diamonds. Was this what any sane human would want for a life? The answer was easy. Yes, more than any life I could imagine. Who ever said I was sane?

  He looked over.

  “What about you? What are you going to do? Are you back at the Bilson shop tomorrow morning?”

  I shook my head. “No. After this I can’t go back to running errands for Whitney Caster.”

  “What do you have in mind?”

  “There’s a tough old lion I hear is going to go into business stirring up trouble for prosecutors. I think he may be looking for an associate.”

  “Not me, sonny. No, I don’t like associates. They’re too damned independent. I have to nurse them along, and then they do what they damn well please anyway.”

  He looked over for a shocked reaction—which he didn’t get. I was getting to know him; at least I thought I was.

  “No, sonny, I’m thinking more along the lines of a junior partner.”

  This time he got the shocked reaction. I couldn’t hold it in.

  “I think you and I could make some trouble out there, son. What do you think?”

  The grin on my face said it all.

  “You know how partnerships are made, don’t you, son?”

  He held out his hand. I took it, and the firm of Devlin & Knight drew its first breath.

  “You might be interested to know, Mr. Devlin, we have a client at the door before we have a door.”

  “Oh?”

  “Anthony Bradley wants us to handle his case when they charge him with the drug dealing at Harvard. I think we’ve got a shot at a good plea bargain. He was getting out of that business on his own. As a matter of fact, Kip Liu called him in for a last meeting at the restaurant on Chinese New Year’s. He told Anthony he was letting him out. It turned out he just wanted him in Chinatown to frame him for the murder. I talked to Anthony. He’ll help the DA prosecute the heart out of the tong.”

  “Not a bad case for an opener.”

  I got up to go.

  “Well, Mr. Devlin, the day’s running out, and I’ve got three things to do.”

  “Such as?”

  “The first thing I’m going to do is call a friend of mine in immigration. I’m going to start the process to get Mei-Li citizenship. Then I’m going to hand in my resignation at Bilson, Dawes.”

  “Sounds like a good start. What’s three?”

  “That’s the best part. I’m going to pick up a certain gal who’s been in this hospital for the last few days because she was crazy enough to go on a date with me. She’s ready to go home. I’m going to see if I can make it up to her. Maybe for the rest of our lives. Who knows?”

  His head was back on the pillow and he nodded. He had a sort of a smile that I don’t think was for me. I think it was for someone who had filled his life and then left it ten years earlier.

  I started to leave, and then turned around.

  “Could I ask my new senior partner a favor?”

  “Ask.”

  “Do you suppose you could call me ‘Michael,’ or maybe ‘Mike’?”

  He hunched up on his elbows.

  “I’ll never call you ‘Mike.’ It’s too small. A name is something you earn. Nobody gives it to you. You’ve earned a proud name. You’ll be ‘Michael’ to me from now on.”

  I started to say, “Thank you, Mr. Devlin,” but something crawled up in my throat. I just held up a hand to him on the way out the door.

  When I got to the corridor, I looked back. Some things you get to keep forever. I’ll take to my grave the look on his face. He was rereading Mike Loftus’s column.