Frame-Up

by John F. Dobbyn

  “He’s the runt of the litter. I’m abnormally tall.”

  She relented an inch.

  “Give me one reason why I should bend the rules, ‘Brother.’”

  “We’ve been estranged for years. I just realized how much he means to me. Before anything happens—”

  “Let’s play it again, ‘Brother,’ this time without the bullshit. You’re working on your third strike.”

  When all else fails, try the truth.

  “It’s like this. Based on what got him here, he could need my help in ways you couldn’t even imagine. I need to talk to him as soon as possible.”

  She gave me another squint, but she had a nose for the truth.

  “You get one minute, ‘Brother.’ That’s sixty seconds, not sixty-one. And—”

  “Thank you.”

  “You didn’t let me finish. If after those sixty seconds, his pulse is two clicks higher than it is right now, you’re going to be wearing this bedpan in a funny place at an unusual angle. Are we clear with one another?”

  “I take your meaning.”

  “Good. He’s in there. That’s one second—two seconds—”

  In spite of what I expected, I was stunned. Whatever parts of Danny were not encased in elevated casts were receptacles for tubes or wires. He looked like a string puppet in the hands of a mad puppeteer.

  I sensed the time bomb ticking in the hall and got down to business.

  “Danny, can you hear me?”

  I saw one finger slowly flicker at the side of the bed. A gurgling voice that seemed to come from deep in his chest rasped something like, “Could only be Mike. How’d you get in?”

  “You’re my brother. Mom says ‘Hi.’”

  “Nice. Yours or mine?”

  “Let’s not blow my cover. What happened, Danny?”

  There was silence that could have been pain, weakness, drugs, whatever. Then he gurgled again.

  “Mike . . . leave it alone.”

  “Danny, I’ve only got a minute. I think you need help on the outside. But I have to know what’s going on. What happened? Who should I be looking for?”

  “Mike, back off. This is not yours.”

  “Danny, would you back off if it were me?”

  He opened his eyes a crack for the first time and looked in my general direction.

  “Don’t make me come over there and slap you around, Mike. I want your word you’ll stay out—”

  He went back to wherever the drugs were mercifully taking him. I gave it a few seconds, and touched him as softly as I could.

  “I’ll be back, Danny.”

  When I got to the door, I barely heard a thin voice. “I’ll be here, brother.”

  It was about three o’clock that afternoon when I got back from court to the offices at 77 Franklin Street in the center of Boston, which had, for the last eight months, housed the law firm of Devlin & Knight, of which I was the junior partner. My senior partner, Mr. Alexis (Lex) Devlin, was, to be poetic but truthful, the Paul Bunyan of the criminal defense bar, aging a bit to be sure, but on any given trial date, the source of everything from butterflies to ulcers for any unfortunate prosecutor.

  I spent the rest of the afternoon trying to be absorbed in returning clients’ phone calls, drafting motions, whatever might distract my preoccupation with Danny. The visions of him, both splayed on the track and trussed up in the hospital, dominated my thoughts.

  We had a strange tie, Danny and I. After my father’s death when I was an early teen, my mother moved us from the WASPish neighborhood of Winchester outside of Boston, the ancestral home of my father, to the then heavily Puerto Rican barrio of Jamaica Plain, my mother being full-blooded from that sunny isle.

  She meant well, but without knowing it, she plunked me smack on the turf border between two of the diciest teen gangs then in existence. Not to join one or the other would have been like being a mouse between an alley cat and a coyote. For arbitrary reasons, I cast my lot with the coyotes.

  As an initiation, I was sent out to hot-wire—as any thirteen-year-old in my neighborhood could in those days—a classic Cadillac. I was caught, tried, and in short order convicted, in spite of the nervous efforts of my court-appointed lawyer, on whose law school diploma you could still smell wet ink. To be fair, it was no miscarriage of justice; I was the dictionary picture for the word “guilty.”

  I was about to be sentenced by a crusading judge to the Lord only knows what graduate school of criminality, when the owner of the Cadillac asked to approach the bench. Miles O’Connor was defense counsel to some of the top white-collar heavies of Boston’s political and financial communities. I sweated bullets while they bargained in whispered tones over my future—if any.

  When the tête-à-tête broke, the judge rapped the gavel, and I followed the summoning finger of my new guardian, Mr. Miles O’Connor. That path brought me into a life of rigid demands, no such thing as rest, and the eventual opportunity to walk through any door in life that could be opened by hard work on my part and unlimited financial and spiritual backing on his part. God love him, he’s passed on now, but there never lived a man on earth for whom I would more gladly walk off a cliff.

  My current life really began at the age of thirteen as stall mucker and horse waterer in the Beverly Thoroughbred horse stables of Miles O’Connor. My partner in grime, in those days, was another O’Connor rescue, a diminutive Irish kid from the streets of South Boston by the name of Danny Ryan.

  The two of us spent the first three weeks at the stables covering for each other, trying to find shortcuts and cover-ups to hide a job half done. We finally realized that Miles O’Connor’s time was never so taken with momentous cases as to distract him from checking every minute detail of our menial labors. Within a year, Danny and I absorbed the O’Connor principle: perfection is the barely passing standard. That scale has driven the lives of both of us to this day.

  Danny and I took different directions when we left the O’Connor nest. I went through Harvard and Harvard Law School, did a stint as prosecutor with the Boston U.S. Attorney’s office, and then went into a criminal defense practice that ultimately paired me with the only man on earth who could stand on the same pedestal with Miles O’Connor, my senior partner, Lex Devlin.

  Danny, on the other hand, had two natural attributes, an abiding love and understanding of horses, and a body that could sustain a weight of just under a hundred pounds. He rode his apprentice year as a jockey at Suffolk Downs the year I entered Harvard College. He went on from there to become the leading rider at Suffolk and held that distinction for five years running.

  Then Danny made the acquaintance of demon rum and a few other things that knocked him off that elite roster. It took a few rough years, but he finally managed to climb out of the pit. On the day of the accident, he was back in riding condition.

  However separated we were by the demands of dissimilar careers and circumstances, I don’t think in all those years, two consecutive days went by that we didn’t contact each other, at least by phone. I guess what I’m saying is that, blood aside, what I told that nurse about being his brother was as close to the truth as a lie could come.

  I heard the elevator door open onto our suite of offices about four o’clock. I thought it was Mr. Devlin coming back from court, but my secretary, Julie, buzzed my line with word that a gentleman wanted to see me. My curiosity was up, because I had no appointments, and we hardly ever get walk-in clients. Curiosity won out over the urge to have him wait while I checked with the hospital on Danny. I asked Julie to send him in.

  I was just standing up to shake hands with whomever it was, when I had one of those moments that hangs your jaw at half-mast. I’d have sooner bet on Elvis coming through that door than Hector Vasquez, the jockey who was crowding Danny toward the rail when he fell.

  I automatically held out my hand to shake hands, but the usual words of greeting just wouldn’t come out.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Knight. I didn’t give my name to your secr
etary. I didn’t think you’d see me.”

  I recovered enough to follow through on the handshake, and motioned toward the chair across from me. He sat on the edge of the seat as if he were riding it in a race. I’d felt perspiration in the handshake. I was glad it was his.

  He read the look of complete bafflement on my face and didn’t play around with niceties.

  “I want to hire you to represent me, Mr. Knight.”

  The bafflement deepened, and he must have noticed.

  “It’s a criminal case. I was indicted this afternoon.”

  That pushed it to another level. I went with a noncommittal question.

  “Indicted for what, Hector?”

  He wiped his large jockey’s hand across the tiny beads forming on his forehead and edged even closer to the front of the seat. He looked like a jack-in-the-box on a hairspring.

  “I know you’ve got reasons not to, but—”

  “Hector, indicted for what?”

  “Murder. I want you to know, Mr. Knight, I’m innocent. I wouldn’t be here—”

  I held up a hand.

  “Hector, go slow. Murder of whom?”

  He took a breath.

  “Danny Ryan.”

  The only response I could muster was disbelief.

  “Wait a minute. You mean criminal assault. I saw Danny this morning.”

  He pulled back and winced.

  “Damn. I’m sorry. I thought you knew. Danny died this morning.”

  Everything shut off. It was like a blow that doesn’t let you feel pain, just numbness, knowing the pain will follow. I couldn’t hear what Hector was saying, so I held up a hand to stop the flow while I just walked to the window. The first thought to pound its way through the log jam was that when I call Danny tomorrow, and the next day, and the next, there’ll be no Danny there. I was losing count of the ways the world without Danny in it would seem more bleak.

  I forced myself back to where Hector sat waiting and tried to pull it together. I had at least eighteen questions, but I had to start somewhere.

  “Why murder? What makes them think it’s murder?”

  “It’s not, Mr. Knight. I swear it. They say I jammed him in the ribs with my whip.”

  I was still off balance. The main obstacle was suppressing judgment of this jockey that I saw crowding Danny dangerously close to the rail when he fell.

  “They must have a reason. What do the pictures show, the stewards’ videos of the race?”

  “We were tight together just after the eighth pole. Danny was inside on the rail. My horse bore in. I switched the whip to my left hand, the hand between us. I wanted to haze my horse toward the outside away from Danny without breaking stride. That was when Danny tumbled. I never touched him. The films don’t show I did. But they don’t show I didn’t either. They just show the whip in my left hand.”

  I had to sit down to get some order to the thoughts that were flowing too fast to process.

  Danny is gone. That’s number one. Hard on that one, I had to decide if I could possibly find the commitment to represent the man who was charged with killing him.

  A far third were all the more mundane points screaming for attention, like how did Danny’s death that morning result in an indictment so fast? And why was the grand jury interested anyway? Rough riding, even an occasional assault between jockeys, is handled by the track stewards, or the racing commission in an extreme case.

  And constantly hovering over my private mental din was the picture of Danny, with his wife, Colleen, just three years married, and the two-year-old bright light of his life, Erin, who would also have to endure that stinging absence for the rest of their lives.

  I became aware that Hector was speaking, and I had to reach a decision.

  “—because I can give you $10,000 right now.”

  He laid an envelope on my desk. I was focused on other things.

  “I was at the track yesterday, Hector. I saw Danny fall. It was—unnatural. Like he just lost control of his arms and legs. I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt for the moment. Assuming it wasn’t contact with you, what else could have caused it?”

  Hector sat back in the chair, still rigid, but his silence and body language spoke of stalling.

  “That’s a question, Hector. I haven’t taken your case yet. I want an answer. You were the closest to it. What’s your explanation?”

  “I don’t want to say anything about Danny. This shouldn’t come from me.”

  “Really. Then who else? I’ll be straight with you, Hector. You know Danny and I were close. Like brothers. I need a reason to take this case. It’s only fair to you too. What caused Danny to lose control in the middle of a race?”

  I could sense that I was going to get minimal information from this source. Hector’s stalling was tipping the balance to the side of all those nerve fibers that were screaming, “Stay the hell away from this.”

  He finally broke the silence.

  “There was some talk around the jockeys’ room, Mr. Knight. Like maybe Danny was back into some heavy stuff before the race.”

  “What stuff? You mean drugs?”

  Hector held up his hands.

  “It was probably just talk, Mr. Knight. I didn’t know Danny that well. The Latinos tend to hang together. Mind our own business. But there was a buzz around the other part of the jockeys’ room yesterday about Danny. I could just pick up traces. It was a big race for him. Coming back. You know. He seemed—”

  “What?”

  “Jumpy. Maybe he took something that caused a seizure. I only know it had nothing to do with me.”

  “Did you ever see him take anything?”

  “I didn’t pay that much attention. Like I said, the Latinos were at one end of the jockeys’ room. He was at the other.”

  This was getting complicated. If we took the case, we might have to bring out ugly things about Danny to save a client. On the other hand, I brought my own answer to that question right out of my gut. Danny had cleaned up his act. He would not have taken even a diet pill before that race. My certainty was so deep that it pushed me into half a commitment.

  “Here’s where we stand, Hector, so you know. I don’t buy that drug theory. That said, I’ll go this far with you. I’ll do the investigation and the pretrial work. I’m doing this partly for Danny anyway. If I find you’re clean, I’ll go all the way with you.”

  He bounced up like a spring toy with his hand out to seal the deal. I stayed where I was.

  “Understand the other half. If I find you had a hand in Danny’s death, even remotely, you’ll be looking for another attorney. Do we understand each other?”

  “We do.”

  The hand was still out there. On those terms, I shook it.