Neon Dragon

by John Dobbyn

  He played freshman ball for Harvard, but like many high-school hotshots, he could never quite make the jump to the college level. He was given the option to ride the bench as a sophomore, probably out of deference to his father’s record with the Harvard team, but young Bradley chose to opt out. He left the team and all the bonuses that went with it. His life from that point in time to this early February of his junior year was a blank to me, since he was out of my most constant source of information—the Globe sports section.

  Most of the prisoners I’d seen come through that door blended with the society-gone-wrong surroundings. I’ve seen sullenness, anger, craftiness, and, worst of all, resignation. But every inch of the six-foot-four-inch body that stood holding out a strong right hand seemed to say, “I don’t belong here!” He was clean looking, with enough sincere humility to counterbalance the self-confidence that goes with an attractive appearance. But there was more to it than that. Something smacked of quality. Maybe I was seeing a reflection of his father, but there was a bright look in his eyes and a gentleness that made me want to win this one for the right reasons.

  Introductions were briefly made, and we both sat down.

  “Your dad asked me to represent you, Anthony.”

  “I know, sir. Thank you.”

  It certainly beat “the hell you say!” as a reaction. This kid was beginning to grow on me.

  “What happened yesterday, Anthony?”

  He gave a slight palms-up gesture. “I wish I knew myself, Mr. Knight.”

  “Just tell me what you did.”

  “Church in the morning. Back to the house. I live in Dunster House down by the river. I did some reading for a paper. I guess it was about two in the afternoon, a friend of mine came by and suggested we go into Chinatown for dinner and see the Chinese New Year’s.”

  “Who’s idea was it, yours or—what’s his name?”

  “Terry Blocher. It was his idea, but I was ready to go.”

  “OK. Leave in all the details.”

  “Well, that’s what we did. We had dinner at the Ming Tree restaurant on Tyler Street. Things were really getting revved up outside. By the time we came out at three thirty, there were fireworks going off everywhere. The street was about an inch deep in firecracker paper. Some people were throwing cherry bombs. It was deafening. Terry had decided when we came in that it was too loud. He said he was going to walk back to Park Street and get the train back to Harvard Square.

  “I saw the big cloth lion with people under it coming up to the little Chinese grocery shop across the street. The noise got even louder because the people at the shop lit off big chains of firecrackers in front of the lion. There were drums, cymbals, you couldn’t hear yourself think.”

  “Where were you standing in regard to the shop?”

  “I guess right in front of it. It’s a narrow street. I was probably ten yards from the shop.”

  I figured the estimate was good. Who could judge ten yards better than a former running back?

  “Did you see anyone in the window above the front door of the shop?”

  He thought for a second.

  “There were people at every window on the street. I’m sure there were people there, but nothing stands out.”

  “So how long were you there?”

  “It’s hard to say. Maybe three or four minutes. The noise was getting to me, too, so I moved down the street toward Beach Street. I just got around the corner, when two policemen stopped me. They told me I was under arrest for murder. The whole thing was unreal. They gave me warnings about the right to remain silent and brought me to the station house.”

  I leaned back and looked at him. He was sitting up straight and looking me right in the eye. I liked that. In fact, the more I grew to like about him, the larger the knot grew in the pit of my stomach.

  “When you went into Chinatown, did you have a gun with you?”

  He looked at me like I’d asked if he’d been dressed in drag. Then he realized that the circumstances made the question seem less ridiculous.

  “No. I don’t have a gun.”

  I leaned back to keep eye contact.

  “They’re charging that an old man in the window above the grocery shop was shot to death just at the time the cloth lion was at the door. Did you see anyone with a gun?”

  He shook his head.

  “Did you hear anything like a gunshot?”

  “Everything sounded like a gunshot.”

  “I know. Someone had a great sense of timing. Can you think of any reason why two witnesses might have picked you out of the crowd?”

  He leaned forward with his head on his hands. “Almost everyone there was Chinese or maybe Vietnamese. I was about a head taller than anyone and the only one I could see with black skin. I’d be pretty hard to miss.”

  “What I meant was did you make any moves that could have been mistaken for firing a gun?”

  He shrugged and just shook his head.

  I flipped the notebook closed and stood up. He was on his feet too, looking perplexed and making me wish I could walk him right out the door with me.

  “Where are they keeping you, Anthony?”

  He caught my meaning. He was the son of a judge who had dealt with some of the people with whom he was presently sharing quarters. Jailhouse murders are far too common and easy to cover up in a silent society.

  “I’m OK so far. They keep me in a single cell and bring in my meals.”

  I jotted my cell-phone number on my card and gave it to him with instructions to call night or day if things changed, even a little bit.

  3

  BY TWO O’CLOCK I was back at the office. Bilson, Dawes had the tenth and eleventh floors of a triangular building on Franklin Street. They had grown from the ten partners and five associates I had joined as an associate three years previously to twenty partners and seven associates, piggybacking on the financial success of their corporate clients. Since success breeds success, the partners kept a sharp eye on the gate to let in as new clients only corporate personae on the rise. When Willie Sutton spun off his famous answer to the question of why he robbed banks, he was also laying down a game plan for Bilson, Dawes’s selection of clients: “That’s where the money is.”

  On the walk down the hall to my office, I had the feeling that I’d brought a blast of the winter chill in with me. While the joy of human camaraderie was not exactly the hallmark of the firm on its best day, I noticed as I’d pass their offices the partners giving me fleeting glances that were even more drained of warmth than usual.

  I was something of an anomaly at Bilson, Dawes. The firm, and therefore the partners, thrived—in fact, more than thrived—on fees from clean, unsullied civil litigation. By contrast, my earlier days at the U.S. Attorney’s office had given me a familiarity with most of the judges at the federal district court, which meant that a fairly steady stream of criminal court appointments to represent indigent defendants followed me to the firm. For all of their pious and publicized pro bono posturing, the partners suffered this acne on the pristine skin of the firm not gladly. And the frequently scruffy, scratching, whiskey-breathing criminal clients who decorated the firm waiting room as a result of my court appointments did nothing to liberalize their sentiments.

  I never made it to my office. Julie Benson, my secretary of three years and one of the human elements that made life tolerable at the firm, nearly had tears in her eyes when she intercepted me with a note.

  “SEE ME IMMEDIATELY! A.D.”

  To the outside world, “A.D.” stood for Alexis Devlin. To any associate and most of the junior partners, it meant “Angel of Death.”

  I had had no direct dealings with Mr. Devlin—“Lex” to those who dared—since he joined the firm two years previously. Word around the courthouse had it that in his day, which was some ten years past, he was the best there was at the criminal bar. For some reason, as he was rising from star to legend, he suddenly dropped out. You heard conflicting rumors among those with their thr
ee-piece suits pressed to the bars of the city’s watering holes, but no one really seemed to know why. Word had it that he had a taste for the grape, but you could lay that one at the door of a fair percentage of the trial bar. Given the pressures of the trade, it’s endemic.

  Then about a year after I came to the firm, he dropped back in. To almost universal surprise, he accepted the offer of Bilson, Dawes to bring his still-legendary skill with a jury to the civil side of the court. I had not had the pleasure of working with or for him, but the associates who did bore mental lacerations that they would only bare to each other in the copy room.

  As I walked back down the corridor to the gates of hell, it was clear that word of the summons had gotten around. Every associate I passed seemed to take one last look at me in life. I winked and smiled the smile of the incredibly brave. I whispered to myself for confidence, “Latinos rush in where Anglos fear to tread.”

  His secretary never looked up. She just waved a pencil in the direction of the door behind her. There was apparently no question that I was the next item on the menu.

  I opened the door. He was standing with his back to me at the window behind his desk. Maybe it was the expectations raised by the associates’ stories, but I could actually feel the weight of his presence in the room. When he turned around, I was struck almost breathless by the power of that presence. But it was far more than that.

  He was on the phone. I doubt that my presence meant more to him than the cigarette butts in his ashtray, but I could not take my eyes off of him.

  At about seventy years, he was block built, with a jaw that could cut granite and a nose that changed direction like the Boston streets. His double-breasted pin-striped suit coat lay open to expose burgundy suspenders and a blending tie that suggested that he took his style from an era I’d only heard about. On the other hand, I thought that there was more character in that face than in any I’d seen since the death of another man who’d done more than pass through my life, and who, by coincidence, somehow resembled him.

  I stood there swimming in recollections that were churning my insides. While Mr. Devlin ignored me, I was back in the then Puerto Rican ghetto of Jamaica Plain on the southwest side of Boston. My dad had died when I was fourteen. My mother moved us to the Plain to be near some of our Puerto Rican relatives and for the comfort of a familiar culture after the loss of my dad. It was a reasonable move at the time, but by the time I was sixteen, our street had become the territorial border between two constantly warring gangs.

  My mother was somewhat oblivious to it, as adults could be, but I had a choice to make. It was join the Diablos or join the Coyotes or lose everything from my lunch money to my life to members of both gangs every time I walked to school. For reasons that seem inadequate now, I joined the Coyotes.

  The initiation was not exactly a fraternity hazing. For the first part I was sent out to hot-wire a particular vintage Cadillac parked outside of the Vasquez Funeral Home during a wake. Thank God, as fate would have it, I never got to the second part of the initiation. I would have belonged to them for life.

  In those days before keys with electronic chips, you could punch out a car’s ignition slot, cross a couple of wires, and be on the road in a matter of seconds. And so I was. And so were the police. I was busted within eight blocks of the funeral home by a cop to whom I did not look like your average Cadillac owner.

  I was tried as an adult because of the “seriousness of the crime.” It was actually because the then DA was targeting gang-related crime. My timing was impeccably bad.

  The day of my trial, I found out that the car belonged to a big-ticket criminal-trial attorney by the name of Miles O’Connor. He came as a witness, but he stayed in the courtroom while my public-defender lawyer, who had graduated from law school a few hours before taking on my defense, fumbled his way through to my conviction. To be fair to my baby lawyer, he had a guilty client with no extenuating circumstances.

  When the judge gave the prosecution two weeks to assemble a presentence report, Mr. O’Connor stood up in the back of the courtroom.

  “Your Honor, may I speak?”

  The judge recognized Mr. O’Connor, as would anyone who had ever read a Boston newspaper or watched the eleven o’clock news. The judge invited him to approach the bench. When Mr. O’Connor walked his ramrod-straight six-foot-two frame, impeccably draped in an eight-hundred-dollar suit, past me on the way to the bench, he glanced down at the little cockroach who had disrupted his routine. I was certain at that moment that between him and the judge, car theft was about to become a capital offense.

  Mr. O’Connor’s back was to me, but I could hear every word.

  “Are you considering jail time, Judge?”

  “I am, Mr. O’Connor. Unless there’s something very convincing in the presentence report, this boy is going to do some serious time. I can promise you that.”

  I went into shock. They were planning my life in the worst possible terms. My mind went into neutral and my ears jammed. For some reason that I couldn’t understand, the conversation went on and on. My mind and my hearing unblocked toward the end of it in time to hear the words that turned the course of my life in the least expected direction. Mr. O’Connor never looked back at me when he said it to the judge.

  “Give him to me, Your Honor.”

  I think the judge went into shock, and I came somewhat out of it. I was able to follow the details they discussed, which roughly came down to probation with the appointment of Mr. O’Connor as my guardian. The judge issued the order and I followed Mr. O’Connor out of the courtroom that day in complete awe. I’ve never gotten over it.

  Mr. O’Connor gave me room and board at the thoroughbred-horse farm he owned north of Boston. He set me to a daily routine of mucking out three barns of stalls every morning. If the job was not completed to his satisfaction by six in the morning, it was as if the job had not been done at all. I came to believe in my bones that Ulysses had it soft with the Augean stables.

  There was a daily inspection by Himself, and perfection was the barely passing standard. That left time to shower and don the uniform of a student at Chambers Academy, also his idea. After school, there was the washing and grooming of every horse in the stable before dinner and several hours of homework. I didn’t sleep so much as lapse into unconsciousness by nine to hit the stables by four the next morning.

  Mr. O’Connor threw me into the mix of private-school students who had lived the polished life since they came out of the womb. When my self-confidence took the occasional, or rather frequent, nosedive, he was at my back to drill it into me that I could compete with anyone even-up.

  And compete I did, for him. I spent three years at Chambers, and at the end of each of the three, Mr. O’Connor was in the audience for the awards ceremony. I was not the brightest bulb in the chandelier there, so I worked my skinny ass down to the nub to see to it that he heard my name every year among the prizewinners.

  I made it past the cut into Harvard College, but it was Mr. O’Connor who paid the freight. There was no doubt about whose shoes I wanted to fill. I knew the jump to Harvard Law School would be anything but automatic. That meant passing on the “mixers” and “smokers” and “gentleman’s Cs” and most other social byplay that could have endangered the goal. It was a small price to pay for the smile I saw on Mr. O’Connor’s face in the audience at the Harvard College graduation—and then again when I saw him rereading my letter of acceptance to Harvard Law School.

  I asked him one time why he did it, everything from that day in court on. He said it was an impulse, and the impulse got stronger every year.

  There is not a softer or more heartfelt way to put it. Mr. Miles John O’Connor, God rest his worthy soul, was the toughest son of a bitch that ever lived. And I came to love him more than I thought anyone could love or admire another human being.

  What brought all of this flooding through my memory bank while I stood there being ignored by Mr. Alexis Devlin, was that he was, in some wa
ys, the spitting image of Mr. O’Connor. The Lord knows it wasn’t their appearance. Mr. O’Connor had been trim and athletic and perfectly clad from the crest of his wavy white hair and handsome Irish features and complexion to the Armani shoes six feet and two inches below. Mr. Devlin was roughly carved out of granite like a character on Mount Rushmore. The suit he was wearing was expensive, but I think he sent his larger brother in for the fitting.

  The similarity that struck me deeply was in the way their bearing left no doubt of the immensity of their character. Other men, taller men, had seemed like pygmies in the company of Mr. O’Connor. I was getting waves of a similar sensation in the presence of Mr. Devlin.

  THE MAN WAS NOT GIVEN to social preliminaries. I restrained a slight jump when that voice that reverberated off of courtroom walls caught me dead on.

  “You’ve accepted the defense of young Bradley. Why?”

  That was a question I still hadn’t answered for myself.

  “Judge Bradley put the request in a way that was hard to turn down, Mr. Devlin. I don’t honestly know why he picked me.”

  “He didn’t pick you.” He spun the heavy leather desk chair around and dropped into it. “He was after me. Now he’s got me.”

  “Mr. Devlin, there was no mention …”

  “You’re three jumps behind, Sonny. You wear the firm name. This case is going to get more space in the Boston Herald than the Kennedys. Amos Bradley is no fool. He knew I’d be drawn into it.”

  It had the ring of logic, and it answered the question I’d had since I left Judge Bradley’s chambers—why pick a rookie when there are a handful of seasoned all-stars ready to take the bat? Still …

  “If he wanted you for defense counsel, Mr. Devlin, and I don’t doubt that he did, couldn’t he have just asked you?”

  “No. He knows I’m out of criminal work. I wouldn’t touch it, even for him.” I saw his shoulders drop a bit, and I saw something in his eyes that I still can’t fathom. “I guess I’m back in it. Let’s get to work.”