Innocence

by David Hosp

  Slocum’s face went white.

  Finn continued. “Many of them—most, in fact—refused to speak with us. Six, though, were very cooperative.” He went back to his briefcase and took out four more documents. “These are the affidavits of Jerome Jefferson, Randall Hess, Timothy Monroe, and Salvatore Gonzales. While they are, of course, grateful for your help in meeting certain conditions of their parole, they are unsatisfied with many of the work assignments you have given them. They detail those assignments in the affidavits—activities ranging from extortion and gambling offenses to vandalism and assault. These gentlemen feel that they might be more productive in a different work atmosphere, and Mr. Kozlowski has already arranged with the parole board for new jobs.” Finn passed the affidavits over to Slocum, who was no longer capable of speaking.

  Finn went into his briefcase one last time. “I also have affidavits from two of the other individuals we spoke to. They are perfectly happy to continue working at their current positions. However, they are no longer willing to undertake illegal activities—activities that they have also detailed in their affidavits—at your direction.” He took these affidavits and slipped them into a manila envelope, sealing it and putting it back in his briefcase. “I will not reveal the identities of these last two individuals. Understand, though, that if you force any of the ex-convicts currently working for you to engage in illegal conduct, you may be dealing with one of these individuals, and he will report you.”

  There was silence in the room. “I don’t understand,” Dumonds said cautiously. “You are not going to report this to the police?”

  Finn looked shocked. “Of course not.”

  Dumonds and Slocum exchanged confused looks.

  “Have I not made myself clear?” Finn asked. “I represent each of these individuals. I am their lawyer. They have retained me to resolve their employment issues, as well as to represent them in dealing with the parole board. The information in these affidavits discloses illegal conduct engaged in by my clients, albeit under duress, that I have learned about in connection with my representation of them. As I’m sure you’ve explained to your client on numerous occasions, Mr. Dumonds, that means this information is covered under the attorney-client privilege. I am not at liberty to disclose the nature of what I’ve learned to the authorities without their permission.”

  “So what happens now?” Slocum asked.

  “Now copies of all of these affidavits have been placed in a safe-deposit box, which is controlled by an attorney I have retained. If anything happens to me, or to Mr. Kozlowski, or to any of the others who have sworn out affidavits, that attorney has been instructed to deliver the entire package to the police. Oh, and by the way, I’ve also included an affidavit from Ms. Prudet detailing the nature of your encounter with her in Las Vegas. There’s nothing against the law about the activities described in that, unless we’re talking about the laws of nature, but it makes for some fascinating reading.”

  Slocum thought about this for several minutes. Finn continued to stare across the table at him. “And what happens to me?” Slocum asked at last.

  “You, Mr. Slocum, now have the opportunity to clean up your business practices in the future. I suggest you make the most of it.” Finn closed his briefcase, stood up, and walked to the door. Kozlowski and Lissa followed his lead.

  “That’s it?” Slocum was incredulous.

  Finn turned around and looked at Slocum again. “No, that’s not it,” he said. “You also settle this divorce case for eight million six hundred and fifty-two dollars and thirty-two cents. Today.”

  z

  “That was just about the funniest thing I’ve ever seen,” Lissa choked through her laughter. They were back at Finn’s office. Three sandwiches and a couple of bags of chips were spread out on the long table against the wall. It was time to celebrate. “I mean, holy shit, did you see his face?”

  Finn beamed. “I did.”

  “God, for a second there, I thought he wasn’t going to go for it. I really thought he was going to throw all that shit back in your face. What would you have done then?”

  Finn shook his head. “He couldn’t. He had no choice. He might have been able to deal with a couple of us, but there’s just no way he could have taken out the number of people who were involved without it getting too messy. Besides, he’s getting off cheap. We’ve been able to account for over twenty-two million in his assets, and if we’d started a full investigation, I’m sure we would have found a lot more. Most of it hidden and unreported. Even coughing up eight million, he’s still got plenty to keep himself going. Ultimately, we gave him no choice.”

  Kozlowski cleared his throat. “That’s always the key to extortion, isn’t it,” he said. It wasn’t a question; it was an observation.

  Finn looked at him. “Is that how you look at this? Extortion? We went around and around on this for days. This was the only way. We didn’t have enough to go to the police with anyway, not without the cooperation of the parolees. And they weren’t about to cooperate if it meant copping to the stuff they’d done for Slocum. That would’ve put them right back in jail. I wasn’t going to sit around waiting for Slocum to take another shot at me, was I?”

  Kozlowski nodded. “It was the right thing to do,” he agreed. “But it’s extortion all the same. I’m just calling it what it is.”

  Finn shook his head and turned to Lissa. “You believe Mr. Sunshine over here? We have the best day in the short history of this little firm, and all he can do is bitch. We got seven clients out from under Slocum; we put a serious dent in his ability to keep up with his illegal activities; we took away a major risk to my own personal safety, and, oh yeah, we settled a case for one of our clients for over eight million dollars, and he still can’t be happy.”

  “Sorry,” Kozlowski grunted. “Like I said, it was the right thing to do. It’s just that sometimes breaking the rules, even for the right reasons, can go bad quickly.”

  “Hey, I broke no rules. I might have bent them slightly.”

  “Like a Slinky.”

  “I’m not listening to this.”

  Kozlowski picked up the morning’s paper and flapped it open, effectively putting a barrier between him and Finn. Finn didn’t mind. Nothing could spoil the moment for him.

  “How much do you make off this?” Lissa asked.

  “A third.”

  “Of eight million?”

  Finn nodded.

  Lissa let out a slow whistle. “Holy shit. That’s . . .” She thought for a moment. “That’s over two and a half million.”

  Finn nodded again. “Of course, about a million of that will go into taxes, and then I’ve got to pay off some overhead, and pay you and Koz, but it’ll be enough to keep the place running for a little while.”

  “I’d hope so,” Lissa said. “Shit, you might even be able to hire a full-time associate this summer.” She waggled her eyebrows.

  Finn wagged his finger back at her. “Concentrate on graduating and passing the bar. You do that, and we’ll see where we are in August.”

  “Thank God,” she replied. “The prospect of looking for a real job was scaring the shit out of me.”

  Finn smiled at her as he leaned back in his chair, taking a bite of his sandwich. These were the moments that lawyers lived for. The thrill of victory. The money was nice, and the sense of security it would provide—at least in the short term—couldn’t be underestimated, but that was all administrative bullshit to Finn. To him, as to most good lawyers, law was a contact sport, and the thrill of besting an opponent was a large part of what motivated him. He would never play in the Super Bowl or the World Series; this was the closest he’d ever come, and the feeling couldn’t be bought for any amount of money.

  He scanned his cramped office space with satisfaction. There was no mahogany. There was no artwork. There was no deep-pile carpeting or solid hardwood flooring. All he had were a few steel-gray filing cabinets, two functional desks, a secondhand computer, and some basic office
supplies. And yet he was making a go of it. He was the classic underdog, and there was nothing more satisfying than winning as the underdog.

  He looked over at Kozlowski, still hiding behind his newspaper, and chuckled to himself. The man was a class-A pain in the ass, there was no doubt about it. But he was also the best at what he did, no doubt about that, either. In any battle, in any case, Finn would take Kozlowski and Lissa over an army of overeducated, underexperienced, high-priced lawyers. They were his secret weapon.

  He smiled again, musing over his quirky friend behind the newsprint. Ah well. Even Kozlowski’s demeanor wouldn’t dampen his mood. He was determined to enjoy this moment, and nothing was going to stop him.

  And yet something did. It wasn’t Kozlowski’s moralizing, it was something that caught Finn’s eye on the front page of the morning newspaper Koz was using as a shield. It was a headline. Not quite large enough to be considered a banner, but still at the top right in bold twenty-four-point font. It screamed at him from across the room, and Finn was swept away by a wave of nausea as he leaped from his chair. He crossed the office in three strides and snatched the paper from Koz’s hands.

  “What the fuck?” Kozlowski protested. “I told you, it was the right thing—” But Finn wasn’t paying attention, and Kozlowski went silent when he saw Finn’s expression.

  “What is it?” Lissa asked, the strain on Finn’s face reflected in her voice.

  Finn had skimmed the first paragraph. It was all he needed, and now he couldn’t breathe. He slumped into a chair next to the table, the paper falling faceup so the others could see the headline.

  boston attorney murdered, it read.

  PART II

  Chapter Thirteen

  There’s a reason newspaper articles are called stories. That’s what they are most of the time. Stories. A reporter is nothing more than a storyteller when it comes right down to it. He has a limited number of facts to work with, and from those facts he must weave a tale that will hold the reader. Some of the facts the reporter has are accurate; some are not. But either way, the facts are not the story. The story lies in the inferences, the color, the spin. These are what reporters are paid for, and their job—their sacred oath—is to make the news pop. It has to sing. It has to thrill. Without all that, it isn’t really news to anyone.

  Finn could tell from the very first line of the article that the reporter in question was one of the better storytellers in the business. Mark Dobson, a prominent Boston attorney, was found brutally murdered yesterday. It was clean, it was to the point, and it was accurate in the strictest factual sense. And yet the article was already spinning. Already dragging the reader in.

  For example, the phrase prominent Boston attorney was intended to give the story a boost of gravitas. This isn’t just a regular person we’re talking about, the article implied, or even a simple attorney, but a prominent attorney. Already the story was more important. Never mind that Dobson had been a midlevel associate—a position that carried with it slightly less clout than that of the guy who filled the vending machines at a place like Howery, Black. Finn had been a midlevel at Howery five years ago, and he still hadn’t reached prominence on any relative scale that mattered.

  The phrase brutally murdered was another tip. Finn had been on the streets long enough to know that every murder was brutal. Some might be more gruesome. More sensational. More twisted. But brutality was the defining characteristic of every murder, no matter what the means or method. Had the reporter gotten any real details from the cops about the specific nature of the murder, they would have been in the article. But the article merely indicated that Dobson had died from stab wounds, so brutally was as far as the reporter’s color commentary could credibly go.

  “Shit,” Finn mumbled to himself, sitting in the chair in front of the newspaper. The three of them were crowded around it, each reading the report for the third time, still unable to formulate a coherent response.

  Kozlowski sat down across from Finn. The frown that had been plastered on his face for a week was deeper than ever, and the crease on his forehead seemed permanently carved into an expression of concern. “Shit is right.”

  “You’re not thinking this had anything to do with the Salazar case you were working on last week, are you?” Lissa asked.

  Finn looked at Kozlowski. Neither of them answered.

  “The paper makes it sound like it was a random attack,” Lissa pointed out. “There’s nothing here to suggest it has anything to do with Salazar.”

  “The paper makes it clear that they know next to nothing,” Finn corrected her. “If they had any real information, or even any suspicions, they’d be in there. The cops are giving them nothing.”

  “Maybe the cops have nothing to give,” Kozlowski suggested.

  “Maybe,” Finn said.

  They sat in silence for several minutes, each thinking about a dead attorney none of them had met until a week before. Bright, engaging, and a little too overeager, he hadn’t been one of them. He’d never been close to them. And yet here they were, stunned into silence by his death.

  “What do you want to do?” Kozlowski asked finally.

  Finn stood up and walked over to his desk. He looked down at all the pointless mail accumulated on top of his in-box. “I don’t know,” he said.

  “You don’t have to do anything,” Lissa said. “It’s not your fucking problem, after all. You never really wanted the Salazar case anyway. You have no obligation to anybody.”

  “That’s not true, exactly. I have to do something.”

  “Why?”

  Finn held up a court order that had been delivered the day before. It officially notified the DA’s office and the Boston Police Department of their instructions to transfer the fifteen-year-old skin and blood samples from underneath Madeline Steele’s fingernails to the laboratory Dobson had given to Finn. “I never filed a notice of my withdrawal with the court,” Finn said, gesturing with the notice he’d been sent by the court. “Now that Dobson’s dead, I’m the only lawyer on record. The judge wouldn’t let me out even if I asked.”

  “You can’t drop the case?” Lissa asked. “How can that be?”

  “It’s against state court rules. Once I’ve made an appearance, I can’t withdraw unless there’s another lawyer on the case to take over for me. Now that Dobson’s dead, I’m Salazar’s only attorney.”

  Finn sat heavily. All thoughts of celebration were gone. Kozlowski just looked at him. “What do you want to do?” he repeated.

  “I don’t know,” Finn replied. “I just don’t know.”

  z

  Finn stood out in back of the little brownstone that housed his office, under a crooked overhang that protected the rear entrance. The forecasters had called for sun throughout the day, but they’d missed on the fifty-fifty odds that characterized New England meteorology. A freezing rain spat down on Charlestown, dribbling off the overhang and pooling in the uneven gravel behind the building. Finn looked at the glowing ember of his cigarette, trying to organize his thoughts.

  The back door slammed open as Kozlowski stepped out. “Figured you’d be out here.”

  “Good guess.”

  “Haven’t seen you smoke in a while.”

  Finn took a long drag and let the smoke drift out of his mouth and nose. “Somebody told me it wasn’t good for you.” He ashed in the gravel. “I was going to have one to celebrate the Slocum settlement.”

  “It’s a good settlement,” Kozlowski said. “It’s a good deal for everyone involved. I wasn’t trying to question it in there.”

  “I know.”

  The two of them stood there, not talking, letting the freezing rain splatter unevenly around them. It looked as though it might turn to snow, but it was just barely too warm to commit.

  Finally, Kozlowski stuck his hands in his pockets, pulling his jacket tight. “Seems to me you’ve got three choices,” he said.

  Finn looked at him. “Which are?”

  “First, you could
go to Judge Cavanaugh and ask for permission to drop the case. Tell him you’re unwilling to go forward based on what’s happened.”

  Finn shook his head. “Even if I was ready to declare myself a coward, like I said in there, he’d never let me out at this point. I stood there last week and argued that Salazar was innocent, and that the judge should order the release of the DNA to prove it. He’s not going to let me abandon the client at this point.”

  “Agreed. So you’re down to two options.”

  “Right. I’m still listening.”

  “You could do nothing. Show up in court in a week and do a halfassed job arguing for Salazar. Keep your head down in the meantime

  and let him get sent back to jail to rot.”

  “Not exactly the honorable option, is it?”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “So what’s that leave?”

  Kozlowski looked hard at Finn. “Get involved,” he said. “Find out what happened. Figure out whether Salazar’s really innocent. Figure out who really killed Dobson. Do your job, and stop being such a pansy about it.”

  Finn took a last drag of his cigarette and threw the butt in a puddle. “You ever consider social work, Koz? With your sensitivity, you’d be a natural.”

  “I just call it like I see it.”

  Now it was Finn’s turn to stuff his hands in his pockets. “All right, sensei. So what are we supposed to do next?”

  “Next we go to the cops. We see what kind of information they’re willing to give up. Maybe even trade some of our own.”

  “And then?”

  “Then you go see your client.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  The clean glass shell of the BPD’s headquarters in Roxbury stood out like a diamond in mud. It was bordered by fresh, clean sidewalks with wide approaches and trim green grass. Two blocks to the south, though, the neighborhood sagged quickly into despair. The theory had been a good one: Put the police department in the middle of one of the city’s most dangerous areas, and it would likely yield deterrence as a dividend. There had even been an understanding that some of the parcels of land nearby would be developed as well.