Client Privilege

by William G. Tapply

  I sensed I had started wrong. I took a deep breath. “Look,” I said. “Let me level with you. I’m Judge Popowski’s lawyer. He’s been nominated for a federal seat—”

  “Good for him,” she said. The vertical creases between her eyes deepened.

  “You don’t like him.”

  She shrugged and said nothing.

  “You had a relationship with him,” I blurted. “I have to know about it.”

  “Like hell you do,” she said quietly. “Like bloody hell you do.”

  “Somebody thinks they can blackmail the judge. Your name is involved.”

  “Thought,” she said.

  “Huh?”

  She laughed sarcastically. “Somebody thought they could blackmail him. That somebody’s dead now. Right?”

  I nodded. “So you know about Wayne Churchill.”

  “Yeah, I heard about him. Sure. It’s been all over the TV. He called me up, wanted to come over to talk to me.” She gazed steadily at me.

  “Did he?”

  “Come over? Hell, no, he didn’t come over. He called on the telephone. I told him not to bother coming over, I wouldn’t let him in. My father told me he might be around. Told me not to let him in. Told me this Churchill wanted to make trouble for us, wanted to snoop around in our lives.”

  “Mrs. Gorwacz—”

  “Hell,” she said, “you might as well call me Karen, you want to poke around in my life.”

  “Karen, then. What did Churchill want, did he say?”

  “Oh, he said, all right. A slick talker, he was. Wanted the same as you, I suppose. Wanted to know all about me and Chester. And I told him just what I’m gonna tell you.”

  “Which is?”

  “Nothin’. It’s my goddam life, such as it is, and what’s done is done and it’s none of anybody’s business.” She stood up abruptly and went to Paul’s door. She banged on it and yelled, “Turn that damn thing down, will you? We can hardly hear ourselves think out here.”

  She came back and sat down. “He’s jealous. Hates for me to bring men home. Not that I hardly ever do. Not much time for men.” She looked beyond my shoulder and smiled. “Men don’t seem to have much time for me, either.”

  The thumping bass sounds from Paul’s room suddenly ended. His door opened. Paul had on his coat. “I’m going out,” he announced.

  “Where to?” said Karen.

  “Out.”

  “You come here.”

  Paul glowered for an instant, then went to his mother. She reached up her arm and he bent obediently to kiss her cheek. “I won’t be late,” he said.

  “You behave yourself.”

  He glanced at me and rolled his eyes. “Sure, Ma. I always do.”

  She patted his arm and he left.

  After the downstairs door slammed shut, Karen looked at me and smiled thinly. “It’s hard to know how much rope to give them.”

  “I know,” I said. “I’ve got two boys of my own.” I didn’t tell her that Gloria had done most of their upbringing.

  “He’s a good kid. I’ve got to trust him.”

  I nodded and sipped my coffee. “When did Churchill call you, Karen?”

  “The Saturday before he got killed,” she said promptly. “He called in the afternoon. Paul was off working at the sandwich shop. I was trying to catch up on stuff, just like I was tonight. I can’t seem to ever get caught up. I was polite to him. But he kept prodding and pushing and finally I told him I was going to hang up on him. My father told me I shouldn’t even talk on the phone to him. He says I shouldn’t trust men. He says I’m too naive, that I should know what men are after. But I don’t see it that way. I figure I’m grown up, I can take care of myself if I have to. Daddy doesn’t agree. I don’t know. Maybe he’s right. He was very emphatic about me not talking to that Churchill man. I mean, I did talk to him on the phone. But I didn’t tell him anything, and I told him not to come over, that I wouldn’t let him in if he did. I wouldn’t’ve, either. Anyway, it was some shock when I saw on the TV that he’d been murdered. I hear they’ve got a suspect. Probably a woman, I figure. I’ve seen him on TV. He was a good-looking man. Good-looking men are nothing but trouble.”

  “You didn’t tell him anything?”

  “Nope. And I’m not gonna tell you anything, either.” She peered at me, frowning. “Mr. Coyne, if you’d called me on the phone, I wouldn’t have let you come over. I don’t like him telling me what to do, but I know he’s right. My father, that is. He said not to talk to you.”

  “But you did let me in.”

  She smiled softly. “That’s my mother. She says you’ve got to be polite, show your breeding. She’d say let the man in but don’t say anything to him. My mother and father don’t always agree with each other, but they agree on that. Don’t share private business with strangers. I think they’re right.”

  I paused to sip my coffee. Then I smiled at Karen Lavoie Gorwacz in an effort to soften what I was going to say. I figured she wouldn’t answer, but I had nothing to lose by asking. “You filed a complaint against Chester Popowski shortly before you left your job at the courthouse,” I said quietly.

  She stared at me for a minute, then let her breath out with a big whoosh. “Does the whole world know about that?”

  “Churchill did. I do. Then you withdrew the complaint. Is that what Churchill had to blackmail the judge with?”

  She narrowed her eyes. “Ask your friend the judge.”

  “I’m asking you, Karen.”

  “He won’t tell you, will he?” She nodded, acknowledging that she had asked a rhetorical question. “Well, neither will I. It’s over and done with. Look, Mr. Coyne. Please. Whatever happened seventeen years ago is just ancient history. I got married, had a nice son, nice husband, too, for a while. Then we split and I ended up with this life and I’ve gotta do the best I can with it. My daddy’s right about that. Dredging up the past just makes for misery. I don’t need any more misery. So I’m gonna tell you what I told that Wayne Churchill, what I shoulda told you when you came knocking at my door. Please go and leave me alone.”

  “Karen,” I said gently, “the police may try to ask you the same question I’m asking you.”

  “Please, Mr. Coyne. Don’t threaten me. It gets my back up.”

  “It’s not a threat. I’m just telling you it may happen.”

  “They can question me if they want. I know my rights. I don’t have to say anything if I don’t want to.”

  “I’m afraid it’s not that simple.”

  “You are trying to threaten me. Listen. A person’s got a right to their own privacy, I know that much. Me and Chester Popowski and anybody else. I just shouldn’t even have let you in here tonight. I was only trying to be polite, like my mother taught me, instead of being suspicious like my father. But since I did make the mistake of letting you into my house, you might as well tell the cops and your judge and television reporters and anybody else who’s interested. Karen isn’t telling anybody about her life. And nobody’s gonna change my mind about that. I’m sorry that Churchill man got killed, and I know there’s a big reward for catching whoever did it. But it’s got nothing to do with me.”

  “Really,” I said, “you should tell the police you talked to him. It might help them find who killed him.”

  She shrugged. “I doubt it. Anyway, that’s their problem.”

  “No, it’s everybody’s problem. You ought to tell the police.”

  “Well,” she said, “I’m not going to.”

  I sat back and smiled at her. “Okay. Fair enough. I hope I haven’t upset you.”

  She shrugged. “Not any more than I’m already upset.”

  I took a business card from my wallet and put it by her elbow. “In case you change your mind,” I said.

  She glanced down at it. “I’m not gonna change my mind.”

  “Well, just in case.”

  I got up and shouldered on my coat. She rose and came around the table. She followed me down the steep st
airs to the front door. In the foyer I turned and held my hand to her. “Thank you for being hospitable,” I said.

  She took my hand and nodded. “I learned that from my mother.”

  I smiled. “I know. I was there.”

  I walked out. Through the open door she said, “Please, Mr. Coyne. Just leave me alone, okay?”

  EIGHTEEN

  I GOT BACK TO my apartment a little after nine. I had given up on the blue sedan. I decided I had probably imagined being followed to Medford in the morning. Wishful thinking. Neither the police nor the media was going to allow me to help them that easily.

  The light on my answering machine was blinking. I pressed the button, heard it whirr and click, and then a man’s voice. “Mr. Coyne, this is Rodney Dennis. It’s, ah, let’s see, five-thirty Monday afternoon. Left a message at your office but you didn’t get it, I guess. Hoping you had a chance to think over what I suggested yesterday. Give me a call, huh?”

  He left two numbers, his office and his home.

  I let the machine rewind, erasing his message.

  I wished Rodney Dennis or some intrepid reporter would latch onto Karen. Or the police. Either one. They’d get her to talk, whether she wanted to or not. She’d put them onto Pops.

  I undressed my way into my bedroom and slipped into a ratty old sweatsuit, aptly named. I decided I should try to remember to send it through a washing machine sometime.

  I sloshed a little Jack Daniel’s into a glass and took it to the telephone. After a brief, losing battle with my self-respect, I dialed the old homestead in Wellesley. Joey answered.

  “H’lo?”

  “Hi, son.”

  “Oh, hi, Pop. What’s happening?”

  “Not much.” Like hell. “You?”

  “Ahh.” A verbal shrug.

  “School?”

  “Fine. Okay.”

  “Well, what’re you doing?”

  “Now? Trying to read Crime and Punishment. All these Russian names…”

  Crime and Punishment. A book for our times. “Mom around?”

  “Nope. She’s out.”

  “Expect her back soon?”

  “Dunno. She didn’t tell me. Should I have her call you?”

  “Sure. If she feels like it. Tell her it’s nothing important.”

  “Okay. Whatever.”

  “Well, get back to your homework.”

  “Yup. See you.”

  “Bye, son.”

  I hung up with Joey and sat at the table overlooking my view of the harbor. It’s not much to see on a cloudy February night. Various shades of darkness, with an occasional ship’s light a-blinking, some afterglow of the city lights. But it soothes me, and staring out at it helps me muster perspective on worldly preoccupations.

  Like being suspected of a murder I didn’t commit. And like what I recognized as an unhealthy reattachment to my former wife, after ten years of relative serenity.

  The former preoccupation seemed easier to manage than the latter. I would simply heed Zerk’s advice. Forget the Churchill killing, ignore my suspicions of Judge Chester Popowski, go about my business, and trust the cops to go about theirs. I figured I had overreacted, which was typical of me. I tended to jump into things with both feet instead of sticking my toe in first.

  I tried to figure out if I had learned anything from Karen Lavoie Gorwacz. It was impossible, since I didn’t know whether she had lied to me. Either way, she was at the center of whatever secret Wayne Churchill had uncovered about Pops. I had already known that. If she had told me the truth, Churchill called her on the phone, tried to pump her. She told him nothing. She had probably overreacted to him, though, confirming whatever assumptions he had made after seeing the complaint she had filed against Pops seventeen years earlier. It had apparently been enough for him to threaten Pops—which was enough for Pops to kill him.

  Rodney Dennis’s intuition was on target. There was a blockbuster story there. The only problem was that I wasn’t part of that story.

  I finished my drink, took my glass to the sink, rinsed it out and put it away. I wandered around my empty apartment, trying to see it as Gloria had seen it.

  Okay, it was not real neat.

  Actually, it was kind of messy.

  Truth to tell, it was a disaster. Clothes, shoes, books, empty cardboard boxes, and unopened junk mail remained wherever I happened to drop them. Nobody would believe, from looking, that I could ever find anything I was looking for.

  Gloria probably interpreted it as my unreadiness to live on my own. She would deduce, feeling fully vindicated, that I needed a woman’s touch, someone to pick up after me the way she had for all those years, someone to see that my ties matched my suits, my shirts were pressed, my diet was balanced, my bills were paid. She would not know by looking around my apartment that I could manage all those things very well for myself, thank you. She would not know that I liked it that way, preferred it to the compulsive orderliness of our Wellesley home, where I always had to remember to wipe my feet and put the magazines back in the rack with the titles facing up and double-check the locks on the doors before bed each night.

  Until Gloria had spent the night with me on Friday, I hardly ever noticed the slovenly disarray in which I lived. Oh, it was a mess. But it was an orderly mess, in its own way. It was comfortable. It was home.

  Now she had me noticing it. I wondered if I’d ever see it right again.

  I fiddled with the television and found nothing. I picked up the current issue of Field & Stream and read everything except the deer-hunting articles.

  The phone rang. I flinched at it, then forced myself to let it jangle three times. If I answered it too quickly, Gloria would think I was poised for her call.

  “Coyne,” I said.

  “Mr. Coyne, Rodney Dennis here.”

  “I still have nothing to say to you, Mr. Dennis.”

  “Well, listen, Mr. Coyne—”

  “Please stop calling me. I’m going to hang up now.”

  Which I did.

  At eleven I turned on the news. Channel 8. The lead story was the Churchill murder. As it turned out, a non-story. The reporter said that there were no new leads in the case and repeated the reward offer. Rodney Dennis did not appear.

  The suburbs had dug out from the storm. Another was due in later in the week. A policeman had been wounded in a shootout at Downtown Crossing. A prominent Wayland physician had been killed in a freak skiing accident at Killington over the weekend. A child abuse case had come to trial. Sabers were rattling again in the Middle East.

  Uplifting stuff, all of it.

  The only good news was a Celtics victory over Portland, and even that was marred by an ankle injury to Kevin McHale. When the news was over I watched Johnny Carson’s monologue. He told a few good jokes about television evangelists.

  Gloria didn’t return my call.

  It wasn’t as if I had anything particular to tell her. I just wanted to say hi.

  Hell, I missed her.

  I turned off the TV. I loaded the coffee machine for the morning. I brushed my teeth.

  Midnight. She still hadn’t called.

  Either she was staying out very late, or she was staying out all night.

  Or else she didn’t care enough to call me back.

  The hell with her.

  I went to bed.

  I was knotting my tie at around seven-thirty the next morning when the phone rang.

  “This is Jack Sylvestro.”

  It took me a minute for the name to register. I had expected it to be Gloria. “What can I do for you?” I said to the cop.

  “I’m down here in the lobby of your building. Mind if I come up?”

  “No, that’s fine, I guess.”

  In the three minutes it took him to ride the elevator up to the sixth floor I considered and rejected the notion of calling Zerk. I’d find out what Sylvestro wanted first.

  He rapped lightly on the door and I opened it. The homicide detective was even more rumpled t
han usual. A shiny gray stubble showed on his cheeks and chin. Dark rings bagged under his eyes.

  “You look like you could use some coffee,” I said.

  He nodded and sighed. “That would be great. Black.”

  I went to the machine and poured a mug for him. He slouched at the table overlooking the ocean, still burrowed in his shapeless brown topcoat. The morning had dawned cloudless and bright. Whitecaps flecked the blue harbor, and gulls were being swept sideways by the wind. Sylvestro squinted out at the scene. “Nice view,” he said, sipping.

  I sat down with him. “What’s up, Lieutenant?”

  He ran the palm of his hand over his face. “Wonder if you’d mind humoring a confused old flatfoot.”

  “Isn’t that what I’ve been doing for the past week?”

  One side of his mouth smiled briefly. “Yeah, I guess. You’ve been patient with our bumbling around, I’ll give you that. Don’t know as I’d’ve put up with it all.” He took another sip from his mug, then set it onto the table and leaned forward on his forearms. “I want you to come for a little ride with me.”

  “Where?”

  “I’d rather not say.”

  “You are stretching the limits of my good humor, Lieutenant.”

  He nodded. “I know.”

  “Do you intend to arrest me?”

  He shook his head. “No. I don’t intend to. Nothing like that. Look, Mr. Coyne. I know you think we’ve been harassing you. I know you think we’re incompetent and shortsighted. Maybe we’re guilty of harassment, I don’t know. I guess it’s what cops do. But we’re not incompetent. The fact that we haven’t told you everything we know about the Churchill case doesn’t mean we haven’t been working on it. For that matter, you haven’t told us everything you know, either. Anyway, no, I’m not arresting you. I need about an hour of your time. You’ll see why.”

  I lit my first cigarette of the day and stared at him. “Where’s your sidekick?”

  “Finnigan? Finnigan doesn’t approve of what I’m doing. So he decided not to come.”

  “I think I should call my lawyer.”

  Sylvestro shrugged. “You don’t need him. But go ahead.”

  I got up and went to the kitchen phone. Sylvestro continued to stare out at the ocean. I called Zerk’s home number. His answering machine informed me he was not home and invited me to leave a message after the beep. I declined the invitation, disconnected, and tried his office. A machine answered there, too.