Neon Dragon

by John Dobbyn

  “The police got a tip that Dolson lit the match. They picked him up, and he confessed to the arson. He pleaded guilty at the arraignment.

  “Then it hit the fan. It took a couple of days to plow through the crumbled building. Everyone thought it was vacant. Anyway, they discovered a few bodies under the rubble. Probably street people who got in out of the cold.

  “Now the charge is felony murder. Dolson didn’t want to confess to that, so he reneged on his arson confession. He withdrew his guilty plea and hired Lex.”

  I didn’t want to interrupt, but you never know if you’ll think of the question again.

  “How could a petty hood afford what Mr. Devlin must have been charging?”

  “Well, that was part of the problem. The prosecution showed that a sizable deposit was made in an account set up in Dolson’s name just after the arson. That was part of the prosecution’s case. That, plus an eyewitness who spotted him around the building just before it went up.

  “Dolson came up with an alibi. Another punk named Gallagher. I can’t believe I remember that name after ten years. Anyway, he testified that Dolson was with him. On the other hand, he looked as if he’d testify that he was Jimmy Hoffa if there was a drink in it. Even Lex himself will tell you it was the weakest defense he ever had to present. Dolson came up with some story that he’d been hired to plead guilty to the arson. The money in his account was to take the fall and do a few years in prison for someone else.”

  I cut in again. “Who was the someone else?”

  “Dolson said he never knew.”

  “Who paid him the money?”

  “He said he never knew that, either. He said it was all arranged over the phone. Anyway, the case was tried, and went to the jury. Three days later, they came back hopelessly deadlocked. A hung jury. One juror held out.

  “Now it gets sticky. The assistant DA has the case marked up for retrial before a new jury right away. The next thing Lex knows is that he gets an offer from the assistant DA to drop the felony-murder charge down to negligent homicide, go with the arson, and work a deal for a sentence of six years, probable parole in two. Dolson jumped at it.

  “Lex had a couple of problems with the plea bargain. He had a client who first insisted that he was innocent and paid to plead guilty. Now the client insists on pleading guilty and is wishy-washy on whether he actually committed the crime. If he didn’t do it, then the whole guilty plea was a fraud on the court.”

  “What other problem?”

  Munsey was sitting close, but he checked the area and moved a bit closer.

  “I’m going to tell you this, kid, because I want you to understand fact from rumor. First the rumor. Word got out that the first jury had been fixed. The hold-out juror was supposed to have been bought. The rumors hung it on Lex. There was talk of an investigation by the disciplinary committee of the bar, maybe even prosecution. The fact is that the whole thing, if there was anything to begin with, was dropped as soon as the plea bargain went down. The rumor going around was that Lex worked a deal to have the investigation into jury tampering quashed if he got his client to plead guilty.”

  “That’s bull. Are you telling me that anyone believed Mr. Devlin would fix a jury?”

  “Get off the stand, kid. I’m telling you what was going around the bars.”

  I knew that something had hit Mr. Devlin like a tank, but this was out of the range of my guesswork.

  “Mr. Munsey, I’ve only known him a short time, but I’d sooner bet that my grandmother would fix the World Series.”

  “I don’t know your grandmother, kid, but there was another reason for the rumor.”

  I knew I wouldn’t like this one, but I asked anyway. Mr. Munsey gnawed his teeth a bit before he could get it out.

  “It could have been true. Don’t split a gut. Listen to me. Ten years ago, what I said about Lex being the best was true. He was a hell of a lawyer. Hell of a man. He was Darrow and Marshall. … After that, it wasn’t the same Lex. Even Zeus can get pulled down from Olympus.”

  “I don’t believe it.” The words jumped out of me on instinct.

  “You want to hear this or don’t you? You got me this far. You’re going to hear the rest of it. And open your eyes, kid. You do Lex a disservice if you think he’s more than human.”

  I settled down and nodded.

  “Ten years ago, Lex was going through hell. His wife, Dolly, they’d been married twenty-eight years. He idolized her, and with good reason. She went through a year of fighting cancer that wound up killing her. It killed most of him, too. It kicked the will out of him. Another thing. He’d always been a good-time drinker. It goes with the profession, but he always had it in control. After Dolly died, it got away from him. This Dolson thing came along when he was about three feet from the bottom. It wasn’t the old Lex making the judgments.”

  I felt as if my heart had come to rest in the pit of my stomach. “I still don’t believe it. Some things in a man just can’t change.”

  He stood up and started buttoning his coat. I stood up too.

  “Nobly spoken, kid. But as a Lex Devlin fan, you’re new to the game. I’ve been at it for over sixty years. We both came from the same neighborhood in Charlestown. Did he tell you that? You might say I was his first client. At nine years old, he took on three tough Irish kids to get me out of a scrape. They didn’t take much to a little Protestant kid in that neighborhood. We became like brothers, which, I must say, took a lot of guts on his part.

  “When Dolly’s illness came on, I was with him on the whole ride down. And during the years afterwards. When he got himself together, it took me five years before I could talk Old Man Dawes at your esteemed law firm into putting him back in harness. If you ever say that to Lex, I’ll deny it, and probably have to punch you in the mouth. You understand, kid?”

  As I looked down at him, his moustache came about up to my chest, but I believed him. I said it with a nod.

  He shook his head. “Even at that, when he joined Dawes’s firm, he wouldn’t go near a criminal case. That Dolson business was the straw that broke his back. I hate to see him in this one.”

  “You said something about the reaction of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court being the same on this case as in Dolson. What did you mean?”

  “Not the court, kid. Just some of its inhabitants. It’s hard to describe. The Dolson case never reached the court on appeal since it ended in a guilty plea, but if there’d been a conviction, Lex would have taken it up. He’d said as much. Lex believed Dolson was innocent during that first trial. The trial judge wouldn’t allow Lex to put in evidence of the telephone conversations where Dolson claimed he made a deal to plead guilty. The judge ruled them out on hearsay. Lex said his ruling was dead wrong. He would have taken it up if there hadn’t been a hung jury.”

  “So it never got to the court …”

  “I know, but I remember the buzz that went on among those justices I was talking about. It was as if they were trying to decide the case just in case it went up. Anyway, I never saw anything like it before or since, until the Bradley case. Maybe I’m just superstitious. The last time, Lex almost went down for the count on a jury-tampering charge. I wish he’d never gotten into this one.”

  “You know better than I do, Mr. Munsey, but he seems to be thriving on it. Maybe it’s what he needed.”

  Munsey looked at me as if he wanted to say something, but he just put on his Russian fur-ball hat and pulled the flaps down over his ears.

  He was on his way out, when I thought I heard him mumble something like, “Watch his back, kid.”

  13

  WHEN I LEFT MR. DEVLIN, the plan was that I’d take the train to Harvard to talk to Anthony Bradley’s acquaintances, particularly the friend who went to Chinatown with him the day of the murder. After talking to Conrad Munsey, something seemed more pressing.

  Since I was practically at the courthouse anyway, I went to the office of the clerk of the superior court. Trial records are public documen
ts, which meant that I had the right to see the record of the Dolson case. Having the right is one thing; having the record of a ten-year-old trial excavated by a civil servant in the clerk’s office can be another. In this case, the paper chase was cut to a minimum by an old tippling friendship with one of the docket clerks. I could always count on Tony Boyle to short-circuit procedures and fly direct. It was totally legal, but the occasional Jameson’s on the rocks at the 77 after work hours never stood in the way of progress.

  In an hour, I was at a side table, rifling through the familiar forms of indictment, bench warrant, pretrial motions, transcript of evidence, etc., through the dismissal of the hung jury. It read true to Mr. Munsey’s telling of the tale.

  I noticed in the transcript of testimony that Mr. Devlin had tried everything short of dynamite to get in evidence of the out-of-court statements of whoever it was that contacted Dolson by phone about buying his confession and service of the jail time. Judge Bennett, the trial judge, upheld every objection of the assistant district attorney on the grounds of hearsay. If the trial hadn’t ended in a hung jury, I’d have bet my next paycheck that Mr. Devlin could have had the conviction reversed on appeal.

  That came as no great shock. The Honorable Judge Bennett’s qualifications for the bench had been that he had been a bagman for the right political party. It was no surprise that his track record on evidentiary rulings was as weak ten years ago as I’d experienced it in modern times.

  One thing that never came out in the trial, mostly because of the suppression of Dolson’s evidence, was who owned the building that was torched. That nagging question hung on after I had returned the file to Tony and hesitated over which direction to take from the clerk’s office.

  Curiosity won out. I followed the catacomb tunnels to the registry of deeds. I had to lean heavily on what I had learned in first-year real property to decipher the chain of title. Fortunately, it was uncomplicated. Unfortunately, it was a dead end. The building where the fire started was owned by a real-estate corporation that was already in bankruptcy at the time of the fire.

  The bankruptcy clerk at federal court did a quick check for me while I held the phone and found that the creditors of the corporation—the only ones who could have profited from an insurance windfall—were many, widespread, and relatively insignificant. In other words, there was no motive for a risky torching there.

  I was ready to pack it up, when an obtuse thought occurred. As long as I was in the registry of deeds anyway, could it hurt to check the owners of the two properties on either side of the torched building? Testimony in the Dolson trial indicated that they were “accidentally” burned out, too. Since it seemed irrelevant at the time, nobody questioned the “accidental” nature of the burning of two side buildings.

  What I struck could have been gold dust. It could also have been pyrite. At the least, though, it was interesting. The building to the left of the torched building had been owned for a year by a corporation called Adams Leasing, Inc. So what? Well, nothing, until I saw that the building to the right of the said torched building had been purchased one month before the said torching by Adams Leasing, Inc. All three buildings had been totally destroyed. While the insurance payoff to the main torched building would have been held up because of the arson, the insurance company would have no grounds to hold up the payoff on the buildings to either side.

  The question then became who owned Adams Leasing, Inc. That was not a matter of public record. That was a matter for private detection. It was now four o’clock and ticking, and I hadn’t begun the day’s work at Harvard. I decided to gain speed by doing what the bike racers call “drafting”—riding in the wake of a rider who has taken the trail ahead of me.

  I went back to the superior court clerk’s office to see if there was any pending litigation against Adams Leasing, Inc. The chances were good, since any company that leased apartments, particularly roach farms, was probably a familiar name on the court docket. True to form, Adams Leasing had a string of civil suits against it.

  I ran the list until I came across a slip-and-fall case based on the dangerous condition of an apartment. The key factor was that the plaintiff’s attorney was a law-school classmate to whom I had lost enough money over a two-hand poker deck during the third year of law school to claim him as a dependant.

  Gene Martino was one of those ferreting kinds of lawyers, who keeps on ferreting long after most lawyers turn off the light. He ferrets for the sake of ferreting. He once told me that he can beat better lawyers because they learn everything necessary about a case. He learns everything about a case. I decided to “draft” on Gene’s particular talent.

  I got the number from the court records and made the call on my cell phone in the lower lobby of the courthouse. Gene’s secretary buzzed him.

  “Mike! How you doing? How about a little two-hand poker? My rent’s due.” He cackled.

  I laughed at his little funny—not because I found it humorous, but because it was the best lead-in to a favor.

  “Hi, Gene, you son of a gun. You’re still looking for a fish.”

  “No way, Mike. I never thought of you that way. It was just a friendly way of passing the time.”

  “What I remember passing was money for lunches, carfare, dates …”

  “Hey, we had fun, didn’t we, Mikey?”

  If I told him the truth, or for that matter told him that the next time he called me “Mikey” I’d feed that phone to him from one or both of two directions, he might have been inclined to deny me the favor. I wimped out.

  “Hell of a time, Gene. I’ll never forget it.”

  “So what’ve you been up to?”

  “I’ve been up to getting myself into a position where I need to ask a favor, Gene. You’ve got a case against Adams Leasing, right?”

  “That I do. Slip and fall. I’m gonna hammer ’em, Mikey. You’re not representing those scum buckets?”

  “No. No, no. No connection. Actually, I need some information. And if anybody has information, you’re the man, Gene.”

  “You got that right, Mikey. Gimme a try. What do you need?”

  “Did you ever find out from depositions or interrogatories who owns Adams Leasing?”

  “Did I find out? It pains me that you ask. Would Gene Martino walk into a courtroom against a corporation without knowing who manicures the fingernails of every secretary in the place? Come on, Mikey. That’s basics.”

  It was music to my ears to hear old self-deprecating Gene brag on because I knew he couldn’t stop himself from backing up the bravado with his ferreted information. I had but to turn the spigot to open the flow.

  “I know you, Gene, but that can be tough information to come by. Those people guard the names of the owners pretty carefully.”

  “Mikey. Listen to me. It’s wholly owned by a holding company. Which tells you nothing, because it’s just a dummy corporation owning the stock of another corporation. What you really want is who owns the stock of the holding company. That took some doing. It’s wholly owned by a limited partnership. I can give you the name of the general partner of the limited partnership. It’s right here. It’s Robert Loring. Want his address? He’s at 495 Federal Street.”

  I was writing on the back of an old Bruins ticket as fast as I could. “Gene, you’re golden. Now for the big one. Who are the limited partners?”

  “I’m working on it, Mikey. I got a deposition of Loring on Wednesday. I’ll dig till I get it. You still at Bilson?”

  “That’s where I call home.”

  “I’ll get you there.”

  “Geno, it was worth every dime, every penny I begrudgingly lost to you, every aggravating hour listening to that grinding East Boston accent of yours, to come to this moment.”

  Actually, I just thought that. What I said was, “You’re a prince, Gene. I hope I can repay the favor.”

  I HAD TO TOUCH a couple of bases at the office. Harvard could wait another hour.

  The old offices at Bilson, Dawes act
ually looked good. For some reason, the nods and smiles of the secretaries and paralegals carried a bit of what I self-indulgently sensed as respect. The usual attitude toward associates, particularly on the part of the fossilized queens of dictation of the more senior partners, is that of a day-care matron toward a child whose nose won’t stop running. I silently thanked Judge Bradley for throwing me into a case and an association with Mr. Alexis Devlin that boosted my status three rungs on the food chain.

  I was walking proudly by the time I reached Julie’s desk. Needless to say, none of the above commentary went for Julie. I always thanked God for granting me a human being for a secretary. This particular blessing came with a concomitant curse.

  Just as Julie was raising her eyebrows while she asked, “How are you and ‘Lex’ getting along?” I heard my name whined in the adenoidal tones of junior partner Whitney Caster.

  “Knight, I want to see you.”

  I smiled at Julie and whispered, “Lex wants to adopt me. Would you prepare the forms?”

  Julie’s giggle was stepped on by a second whining outburst. “Now, Knight!”

  I moved slowly backwards toward Caster’s office while asking Julie, “Anything critical?”

  She said, “Mr. Malone called three times about the Keilly case. He wants to set up a deposition.”

  “Tell him to give me a break. That case won’t go to trial for two years. What else?”

  “Mark Shuman wants a date for pretrial motions on the copyright case.”

  “When did he call?”

  “Yesterday morning.”

  “No sweat. Mark’s tuned in. He’s heard what’s going on. He won’t press it. Anything else? I mean critical.”

  “Bob Casey just called about the Detroit Red Wings game tomorrow night.”

  “That’s critical. And painful. Would you tell him it’s impossible? Maybe the Black Hawks in two weeks.”

  From behind me, at a ten-decibel increase, “KNIGHT!”

  Julie stifled a grin. “That man’s gonna split a hemorrhoid if you don’t get in there.”