It was about 8:30 AM Tuesday when I stepped off the elevator at Bilson, Dawes. I never made it down the corridor to my office. I was cruising past the cluster of secretaries’ desks with a paper cup of black caffeine, when Julie waved to me from behind a telephone. Her right hand pointed south, and her expression said, “Poor baby.”
I got the message. Mr. Devlin wanted to see me.
I parked the coffee on her desk and caught her attention. She held a hand over the mouthpiece and looked up. I reached over and pushed her “hold” button. She looked indignant.
“Hey, you just cut off a client.”
“No, I didn’t. That was your lunch date.”
“You listened!”
“Of course. Do me a favor. I may not get serious time in my office till Groundhog Day the way this thing is going with Lex.”
Her eyebrows went up. “Oh, ‘Lex,’ is it?”
“Only out of his hearing. Otherwise it’s ‘Your Excellency.’”
“You better not get those two confused. You’ll be seeking employment.”
“Naw, he wouldn’t fire me. That would be small and vindictive. He’d just eat me alive. To finish the thought, I’ll never get to my mail or messages. Go through it all, will you? If anything looks like an emergency, leave a note on my desk. I may get to it by Friday.”
I headed for the lion’s den. I heard from behind, “What’s an emergency?”
“Death threats, malpractice actions, my subscription to DownBeat is expiring. I don’t know. I trust your judgment.”
The King was in his throne room, skimming the Globe and inhaling something black and steaming out of a paper cup. I thought of my own, cooling on Julie’s desk, and wished that I had known that it was the breakfast hour.
He waved me into the chair in front of his desk. I accepted the invitation, beginning to feel like a golden retriever responding to hand signals.
As he swung around to face me, his blackish blue suitcoat winged open over his barrel chest to a pair of red suspenders. I couldn’t help thinking that on another man they could be an affectation. Not Mr. Devlin. I sized him up as a man who measured himself by his own standards and to hell with anyone else’s. He was reminding me more of Miles O’Connor every time I saw him. I realized that if I didn’t catch myself, I could slip into something akin to hero worship.
“What have you got for me, sonny?”
I wasn’t proud of the catch. There was no way to make it look good.
“I’ve got a witness, elderly Chinese woman, who kills our client with a positive ID. She says she saw him pull the trigger. Why, I don’t know. It’s hard to read her. She’s wound pretty tight, but what really makes it difficult is that she only admits to speaking Chinese.”
“Could it be she’s telling the truth? I mean about Bradley.”
My gaze had wandered to the window, but that last question brought me back to eye contact with a snap. I felt caught like a bug under a microscope.
“I know I should never believe a client in a criminal case. I know they lie to get the best defense out of you. I know that.”
“Good. Live by that, sonny. Because if you turn this into a crusade to free a poor innocent defendant, you’ll be worse than useless to me and the client. You’ll be dangerous. You’ll be looking for evidence to back up your theory instead of the truth. That’s the best way to get blindsided.”
I gave him the agreement-in-principle nod he was looking for, but he knew there was more.
“So? Give it to me.”
“I know that. But I talked to him.”
“That’s why I’m asking. I want to know what I’m working with here.”
I sucked in an inch of stomach and looked back into those laser beams.
“It won’t change the way I work, but you might as well know this, Mr. Devlin. If they accused my grandmother of doing the Brink’s job, I’d be more likely to believe it than that this kid’s guilty. It’s not because of his background, the judge and all. It’s just something about the way he says he didn’t do it.”
I knew what I meant, but it sounded lame. He took a deep breath before swinging back in his chair. I was ready to be told that he could survive without my help. I had taken the case for Judge Bradley, but heaven knew the judge would be delighted to have the great Lex Devlin in substitution.
There were times the previous night when being back working on pretrial motions for Whitney Caster seemed almost attractive. But this was morning. I’d had a few hours’ sleep, and I realized that I’d grown fond of the big league. I watched him rub his eyes while I waited for the shoe to drop.
“How’d you find that witness? I thought the police weren’t giving out the names.”
I spun out the story of my newfound Puerto Rican contact in the police computer section. I might have been grasping at straws, but I thought I caught the slightest trace of a smile softening those Mount Rushmore features. I was cool on the surface, but inside I was sipping champagne.
The phone buzzed, and he took it. Whatever his secretary said seemed to surprise him. He punched the speaker-phone button and set it back down.
“You never know what a new day’ll bring, sonny. I want you to hear this. Put her on, Carol.”
There was something reaching for warmth and charm in the female voice that came through the speaker, but it still sounded like a barracuda in drag.
“Good morning, Lex. How are you this morning? This is Angela Lamb.”
That was never in doubt. Mr. Devlin matched her warmth. It was like watching two pit bulls sniffing each other.
“Is the sun shining on the district attorney’s office this morning, Angela?”
“It’s a beautiful day, Lex. I think I have good news for your client.”
“That’s generous. Let me guess. You caught the killer, and you’re dismissing all charges.”
I could almost hear her teeth grinding.
“Oh, we caught the killer. He’s sitting in the Suffolk County jail. As your little errand boy knows.”
This time Rushmore cracked into a slight grin. The gloves were off, and he felt more comfortable.
“You’re out of line, Angela. Michael Knight is cocounsel on this case. Matter of fact, since I haven’t entered an appearance yet, he’s the only counsel on this case. Would you like to speak to him? He’s listening to the conversation.”
Mr. Devlin threw himself back in his chair. I knew he was eating up the uncomfortable pause on the other end of the line. I also knew that the “cocounsel” speech was to stuff Angela’s patronizing remark down her throat. It still felt good.
I threw in a pleasant, “Good morning, Angela.”
It seemed a nice complement to Mr. Devlin’s salvo to put her on a first-name basis with the errand boy. She handled it by ignoring it.
“I have an offer. Do you want to hear it?”
She was back in character, and somehow it actually reduced the tension. Mr. Devlin stretched back, but his receiver was fine-tuned.
“What have you got for us, Angela?”
“Voluntary manslaughter. He takes the maximum, twenty years with the possibility of parole. Right now he’s looking at life.”
Mr. Devlin didn’t stir. He sat there with his eyes closed. I couldn’t believe he was considering it. Not this early in the case. I expected him to explode any second with a bit of well-phrased bravado that would put Angela in orbit and convey the message “no deal”-at least not yet.
The seconds ticked, and I could see storm clouds gathering over Rushmore. A plea bargain is something you accept, reject, or bargain against. This time there was a fourth option.
The fun of toying with the opposition was gone. Something heavy had settled in. I had an outside clue of what it was, and it jarred me more than anything that had happened the previous night.
Mr. Devlin leaned forward and lifted the phone out of its cradle. There was anger and something I didn’t want to recognize in his voice.
“I’ll be in touch with you, Angela.”
The phone dropped into the cradle. He leaned back, and his eyes were closed again. Lex Devlin was an old warrior who bore the scars and the years on the inside. I had come to think of him as invincible. As I looked at him now, the age and the scars showed. The lines in that cragged face opened a glimpse of something I didn’t want to see.
We both knew he could take on any prosecutor in the country and do it with a hopeless case and two hours’ sleep and take most of the rounds. We also both sensed that this one had slipped into a different plane, a different kind of fight. Ten years ago it wouldn’t have mattered. But it had been an expensive ten years on his resources, and I was embarrassed to be watching the old warrior taking a measure of what he had left.
“We have to tell Bradley about the offer, Mr. Devlin. Judge Bradley, too.”
I knew I wasn’t telling him anything he didn’t know.
“Yeah. We’ll tell ’em. I won’t let him take it, though. Not till I know a hell of a lot more about this case.”
He shook his head. “I don’t like it.”
“I don’t either.”
He looked over at me with a testing look. “Why not?”
“It doesn’t fit with the characters. When I talked to the DA, she was practically salivating for Bradley’s blood. The only thing she wanted more than his head on a platter was the governor’s seat. This case could give it to her if she doesn’t blow it. If she drops it to manslaughter on the deliberate shooting of Chinatown’s favorite son, she’s blown it. She’ll have the Chinese community, the Globe, and all the law-and-order boys in her party ready to drop her. That offer didn’t come from her. This isn’t her call.”
Mr. Devlin was out of his seat.
“Which means we’d better damn well find out whose call it is. The first rule in a fight, sonny, is to know who stands behind the man you’re trying to knock down.”
He grabbed the phone and punched the buttons with the old authority. He was back in the fight. I don’t know what drove them out, but the doubts were gone. I could feel a rush of adrenalin in my own veins.
I heard a voice crackle on the other end of the line. Mr. Devlin seemed to be enjoying himself again.
“Conrad. You old Yankee. What are you doing to stay out of trouble these days?”
Mr. Devlin leaned back and laughed out loud at something that sounded like a crack about the Irish.
“If I said what I’m thinking, I’d be in confession tomorrow.”
Whatever was said brought another laugh before the tone became serious.
“I want to chat with you, Conrad. I have a feeling the Indians have us surrounded. I want to know what tribe before I make a battle plan. Could you meet me for lunch?”
He smiled, so I gathered the date was set.
“No, not the Union League this time. I need neutral ground. Let’s meet at the Marliave. I’ll ask Tony for something upstairs. Noon?… Done.”
He hung up and turned back to me.
“I want you there, sonny. This could be your head on the block, too. Conrad Munsey is chief clerk of the Mass. Supreme Judicial Court. He knows where every body’s buried in this town and who put ’em there. We’ve swapped some favors over the years.”
I nodded.
“So tell me what you found yesterday.”
I filled him in on my bilingual chat with the woman in the restaurant. He wanted the details of everything said and every tone of voice. I told him about the fortune cookie from Red Shoes and the promise of help if I helped the prostitute who seemed to be doing very nicely without my help. When I finished, Mr. Devlin was wearing a scowl that seemed out of proportion, even given the bleakness of my report. I found it slightly unnerving.
“I’m willing to learn. Did I blow it?”
“I don’t know.”
He flipped the Globe to my side of the desk, opened to a story on page two, right opposite the men’s suits ad for Filene’s Basement. I read the headline over a Mike Eagan byline.
“BODY OF W OMAN DISCOVERED IN CHINATOWN.”
I scanned it quickly, picking out words like “Asian” and “discovered before dawn” and “not yet identified.”
I could feel a rock growing in the pit of my stomach. I was out of the chair and standing beside the desk while I asked Mr. Devlin if I could use his phone. He nodded, and I dialed police headquarters. It took a few seconds for the duty officer to transfer me to Manny Morales in the computer section.
“Manny, this is Michael Knight. I was in yesterday about the… virus in the…”
He cut me off before I got too far into it on a phone line that could have other ears.
“Right, Manny. You didn’t tell me anything. You’re a good cop. Or whatever. Listen, I need you not to tell me something else. This is a big favor. I owe you twice, hermano. ”
By this time I was full-pitch into a Puerto Rican accent, which raised Mr. Devlin’s eyebrows halfway to his hairline. Meanwhile Manny was telling me to cut the PR crap and get to the point.
“I need you to play that computer and tell me about the dead girl they found in Chinatown early this morning. Anything you can tell me from the police report. Like who was she?”
All I heard was the click of the keys in the distance. The vision of the rigid, scared old lady in the restaurant stabbed at my conscience until it was replaced by the beautiful features of the prostitute, MeiLi. Maybe she needed help more than she thought.
“There’s not much here. She was beaten to death. Officer found her back in an alley off Beach Street by Harrison.”
Mei-Li’s territory.
“What did she look like, Manny? Young? Pretty?”
“Can’t tell. She was beaten too badly to recognize. It was done by pros. They mutilated everything that could give an identification.”
The rock in my stomach felt as if it was coming up.
“Where’s the body now? I might be able to help with the identification.”
“Not likely. She’s at the morgue on South Street.”
“Manny, can you get someone to get word down there that I’m on my way? Get me permission to see her. I mean it. Maybe I can help. This could be good for you.”
“The best thing you could do for me is stop trying to lose my job for me.”
“Manny, this is the last. I might have seen her last night. You don’t have to mention that around the precinct. Just get me clearance to see her.”
I hung up before he could destroy my assumption that he would make the contact for me. I was running by the time I passed through the door. I was nearly at the elevator when Mr. Devlin’s voice boomed through the corridor.
“Marliave! Noon!”
The door of the elevator almost closed on the words, “You be careful, sonny!”