“What was this psychologist’s name?”
“Dr. Lopez. Mariah Lopez.”
“M-a-r-i-a-h?”
“I think so.”
“And the teacher?”
“You mean, like to talk to her?”
“Yes.”
“Her name was Sheridan. Emily Sheridan. But she retired, oh, two years back and moved to Arizona somewhere.”
“Did William like U Mass?”
“Yes. He went there for two years and did real well. All his teachers just raved about him. In fact, that was kind of the problem.”
“I don’t get you.”
“Well,” she said, reaching down for the coffee cup, but then hesitating, “the teachers thought that he could do better than U Mass, and a couple of them, along with Dr. Lopez, they pushed and pulled and got him into Goreham College for his junior year.”
“Fine school.”
“Yes, and so expensive. But there was plenty of scholarship money, it seems.”
“Did he live there?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Did he stay at Goreham? In a dormitory?”
“Oh, yes. At least, at first. Then something happened—he never would tell me what—and he moved home halfway through.”
“Halfway through?”
“Through his first semester there.”
“How was he doing gradewise?”
Mrs. Daniels unnecessarily stirred her coffee. “Not so good. Maybe too much change. Maybe too much …”
“Too much …?”
She looked up. “He took up with the white girl. Or maybe better to say she took up with him. I never did know which.”
“The girl he’s accused of killing?”
“Yes, but he didn’t. He didn’t kill her or anybody else.” Mrs. Daniels said it evenly, like a much-quoted religious tenet she knew by heart and believed was true beyond reasonable doubt.
“The girl was shot. Your son produced the gun that killed her.”
She focused on the cup and spoon again.
“Was it William’s gun, Mrs. Daniels?”
“He needed it. He said ’cause of the other kids on the block here.” She mimicked them: “ ‘White school, white girl, white Willll-yum.’ ” She moved her mouth as if she’d bit a sour grape.
“He carried a gun because of the other kids’ taunting him?”
Mrs. Daniels fixed me with a “c’mon” stare. “You been outside here, you seen ’em.”
She was probably right. They looked more like “sticks and stones will break my bones” than “words will never hurt me.”
“Had William had a fight with the girl?”
Mrs. Daniels became more agitated, waving her hands in an abbreviated version of an umpire’s “safe” sign. “I don’t know. I just don’t. He never would talk with me about her. Or about college. Goreham, I mean. Or even the new doctor he was seeing.”
“What doctor was that?”
“The one who did the hypnotizing. The one where … where …” She reached for a napkin and mumbled she was sorry, exactly as I was saying it was all right.
Mrs. Daniels sniffled for a moment or two. I waited.
“Can I tell you anything else?” she asked.
“Not now. I have to read some reports first, talk with William’s lawyer. I’ll need you to call the lawyer, tell him I’m working for your son.”
She nodded vigorously, reached for a handbag sitting on a nearby chair. “I have money. I took more out of the bank when Rob … Lieutenant Murphy told me you’d be coming. He said—”
“Mrs. Daniels. No money, please.”
She looked up with the “c’mon” expression again. “ ’Cause I didn’t used to earn enough when William was younger, he qualified for the Mass Defenders. That’s how he got to know Mr. Rothenberg, the lawyer he’s got now for this. But I gave Mr. Rothenberg a retainer, and I want to pay you, too. I never did like taking charity, and I won’t take any more of it.”
“Not charity. A favor. For”—I stretched it a bit—“a friend, Lieutenant Detective Murphy. It’s his favor, but you and William will be my clients. I’ll talk to the lieutenant only if I need information or help.”
Mrs. Daniels chewed on it for a minute. “Can you help William?” she said quietly.
“I hope so.” I meant it, and I also hoped she could tell.
She gave me Rothenberg’s address and phone number. I wrote down an authorizing message to leave in case he was out when she called him. I also gave her one of my new cards, writing my home number on the back.
Willa Daniels let me out through the chains. I had forgotten about my car. So, apparently, had the three freelancers. It was where I had left it and in one piece. I got in and drove home.
I walked in. Nothing on the tape machine. I remembered I hadn’t checked the mailbox, so I went back downstairs to the foyer. Nothing again. Not many of my friends could write, and I was too recently moved in to be receiving the “You Already May Have Won” crap.
I came back upstairs, stripped, and showered. I finished the Times and decided to turn in. I looked at the telephone a couple of times, thinking of Nancy, then dropped off.
Three
I WOKE UP AT 7:00 A.M., with the alarm. I pulled on running shoes, shorts, and a T-shirt from an army surplus store on Boylston Street. The shirt had a small USA on the left breast. It had been on the rack next to one with a skull wearing a green beret and the legend KILL THEM ALL—LET GOD SORT THEM OUT. I bought the USA.
I limbered up for ten minutes, then jogged across the Fairfield Street bridge to the Charles River. Turning left, I ran leisurely upriver toward the Boston University bridge. I passed a cormorant floating low in the water, its black-beaked head and long neck above the surface like an organic periscope. At the bridge, I reversed direction, picking up the pace maybe thirty seconds to the mile. A sixty-year-old woman blew by me as if I were standing still. Her T-shirt read GRANDMOTHERS HAVE DONE IT LONGER.
I reached Community Boating, in the shadow of the Charles Street bridge. When I got back from the service, I had learned to sail there, a six-month, good-any-time membership costing about fifty dollars. They supplied and maintained the boats, and more-experienced members taught you rigging. It was a good deal. I fell away from it after Beth got sick; the only sailboats I noticed now were the ones plying the harbor below her grave-site.
I reversed direction again and maximized my stride, taking two short breaths and one long one for every eight steps. I stopped at the Dartmouth Street bridge, making it a four-mile run. On Newbury Street, I bought some fresh muffins and orange juice for breakfast.
Back at the condo, I warmed down, showered, and ate. The kitchen clock said eight-thirty. I called the number for William’s attorney and drew a brusque female voice that said the offices didn’t open till nine. She did confirm that Rothenberg was due in that morning before court in Cambridge. After dressing reasonably well, I walked the eight blocks down Boylston to Rothenberg’s office, which was only two doors up from the old Mass Defenders building.
The door on Rothenberg’s floor said simply LAW OFFICES, with a dozen full names on separate, mismatched wooden plaques underneath. Likely that meant that he shared space and expenses—but not fees—with the eleven other attorneys. I entered a waiting room containing a grab-bag of clients. The public defenders, now the Office for Public Counsel Services, typically got the good poor and the bad poor. Anyone on a higher economic rung had to scratch for private counsel. Therefore, lawyers like Rothenberg usually got the good not-so-poor and the bad not-so-poor.
I gave the receptionist my name, profession, and mission. Ten minutes later, she answered her phone, called out my name, and pointed me down a hallway, all as she tried to persuade an animated woman speaking machine-gun Spanish to slow down.
I was halfway down the hall when a balding head bobbed out of a doorway. He said, “John Cuddy?”
“That’s right.” He beckoned me in.
His office was clutter
ed and shabby but apparently all his own. We shook hands.
“Steve Rothenberg.” He gestured to a chair with his free hand. He slumped into a cracked leather desk chair and put his feet up on the pullout from the old metal desk.
“What can I do for you?” he said. Rothenberg’s beard, flecked with gray, also bobbed up and down, riding the Adam’s apple beneath. He wore a white buttoned-down shirt and a rep tie, but the collar was undone, the tie loosened, and the sleeves rolled up.
“I’m working for Willa Daniels. I understand you represent her son, William.”
“And?”
“And I’d like to talk with you about his case.”
Rothenberg frowned, tapping a pencil against a file lying on his desk blotter. “Can I see your identification?”
I showed him. He studied it, copied some information onto a pad, and gave it back to me.
“You have any references I can check?”
“Sure,” I said, “but why?”
He picked up a pink phone-message slip. “This was waiting for me when I got in. From Mrs. Daniels. She isn’t stupid, but this sounds like somebody else wrote it for her.”
“I did. Last night, so I could speak with you today.” I shifted in my chair. “What’s wrong?”
“When I spoke with Mrs. Daniels, I didn’t have the impression that she had the kind of money to have two professionals working on William’s case.”
Rothenberg either was worried about getting more money or was suspicious that I might be leeching off a vulnerable relative. I gave him the benefit of the doubt. “If it helps any, I’m doing this as a favor for a friend.”
“That’s kind of what I’m doing too.”
“I don’t get you.”
“I represented William when he was a juvenile and I was with the Mass Defenders. You know how cases got assigned to us back then?”
“Not really.”
“Well, the short version is that we got assigned pretty regularly by some judges, not so much by others. A question of … attitudes.”
“By ‘attitudes,’ you mean a judge’s cronies who got cut out of some court-appointed fees?”
“Draw your own interpretations. Point is, almost everybody, every criminal defendant, can come up with money for private counsel somehow.”
“So?”
“So in William’s case back then, the judge at arraignment didn’t like us, and William was sort of borderline for indigency because of his mother’s job and all. But I thought I saw something in him, something worth pushing for. So we, read I, made the pitch in open court, and the judge grudgingly assigned us.”
“And?”
“And I kept the little shit he’d stepped in from becoming big shit, and then he went off to college, and then …” Rothenberg stopped, exhaling noisily.
“And then your reclamation project goes and ruins your effort by killing a girl.”
Rothenberg gritted his teeth, then relaxed. “One way of putting it.”
“Then why are you helping him now?”
“Partly money, but mostly, well, when his mother contacted me, the case seemed more interesting than it does now. Legally speaking, I mean.”
“How so?”
Rothenberg paused, fingered the file in front of him. “My client is William, not his mother.”
“Meaning?”
“Since your client is the mother, not the son, I’m not so sure I can talk with you about his case.”
“What have we been talking about—Jimmy Hoffa?”
“No, I mean the merits of the case. The factual and legal arguments, my work product, conference with him, and so on.”
I thought back to my year of law school. “Can’t I be your necessary agent, even if one of us is working for free?”
He smiled. “That’s pretty good. But the mother hired you, even without money, and that means I didn’t, and therefore I don’t think a court would buy you as an agent for William’s lawyer.”
Rothenberg made no effort to end the interview, so I assumed he wanted me to try a different tack.
“Would it be a fair bet that the reason William’s case is uninteresting is because it’s ironclad against him?”
Rothenberg, wrinkling his brow, allowed, “It would.”
“Then there probably wouldn’t be any cosmic harm if you were to go the men’s room and I, without your knowledge or help, sort of skimmed Daniels’ file.”
Rothenberg brightened. “Hypothetically speaking, no. No harm at all.” He stood up. “Would you excuse me? I have to take a leak.”
“Sure.”
He closed the door behind him.
I suppose somebody could fault Rothenberg for not observing the spirit behind some of his attorney ethics. However, all he really did was save me a second trip to his office, since William could have authorized me to see his file once I saw him.
The folder Rothenberg had been playing with was marked DANIELS, WILLIAM E. I opened it.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 1991 by Jeremiah Healy
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