One-Way Ticket (8 page)

In my little one-lawyer office, it was just Julie and I.

So after lunch I set a big mug of coffee on the corner of my desk blotter, draped my suit jacket over the back of my chair, loosened my necktie, rolled my shirt cuffs up to my elbows, and slogged through the big pile of papers that Julie insisted she had to get faxed or mailed first thing the next morning at the latest.

There were a few checks to sign and some boilerplate documents that required only my signature, but mostly they were drafts of briefs, and letters to clients and to other lawyers, and motions for submission to courts, in which every word and mark of punctuation and paragraph break could determine who won and who lost, and would be scrutinized for slipups and loopholes by their recipients, and therefore needed to be scrutinized by me.

I wrote the rough drafts. Julie double-checked the citations, plugged in the footnotes, polished the prose, and attended to all the small but crucial details that make the difference between clarity and confusion. Julie knew her commas. You couldn’t get a dangling modifier past her, and she was a master of the gerund. She was a semicolon expert and a conjunction wizard, and she was world-class when it came to prepositions and participial phrases. If Julie put a document on my desk, I knew it was already perfect.

But the name that appeared at the top and got signed at the bottom was mine, and anyway, Julie would quit on the spot if she thought I didn’t parse her compositions as carefully as she had composed them. So I did. I contemplated her colons and pondered her pronouns.

It was boring. It was painful. It was how I spent a large percentage of my professional life. By comparison, having three months’ worth of hard negotiations negated by one of Judge Otto Kolb’s quick sneers was fun.

A little after four o’clock, my telephone console buzzed. I picked up the phone and hit the button, and Julie said, “How’s it going?”

“Great,” I said. “Haven’t had so much fun since I slammed the car door on my fingers.”

“That’s nice,” she said. “Can you talk to Mr. Lancaster? He’s on line two.”

“Got it,” I said. I hit the blinking button and said, “Dalt? What’s up? Everything all right?”

“No,” he said. “Everything is not all right. We gotta talk.”

“Sure. Okay. Fire away.”

“Not on the phone. Can you come over?”

“You at the restaurant?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll be done here in about an hour,” I said, “I guess I can be there around five-thirty. How’s that?”

“Good,” he said. “Thanks. See you then.”

It took me about half an hour to walk from my office in Copley Square to Dalt’s restaurant, the Boston Scrod, in the Faneuil Hall Marketplace, which was also called, for reasons I never understood, the Quincy Market. The Scrod was right around the corner from the venerable Durgin Park restaurant, famous for its platter-sized slabs of prime rib and its surly South Boston waitresses. Evie and I had eaten at the Scrod a few times, and we liked it. The restaurant on the second floor claimed that it served nothing but fresh catch-of-the-day seafood. The entire first floor was a three-sided horseshoe-shaped oyster bar. The Scrod was famous for its extensive oyster menu. Oysters from Nova Scotia and Maine, Long Island and Nantucket, British Columbia and Bristol Bay. Before I went there, I had no idea that oysters came in so many sizes, shapes, textures, and tastes. All, as my friend J. W. Jackson would say, were delish. You could also get an excellent Bloody Mary at the bar, as well as dozens of New England microbrewed beers and ales.

The Scrod was popular with the locals, always a good sign. Dalt seemed to be doing a good job managing it.

At five-thirty on this sunny Tuesday afternoon in June, the brick plaza outside the restaurant was, thronged with tourists from Iowa snapping digital photographs, businessfolk from the financial district just getting out of work, and street performers looking for handouts and applause. I weaved my way among them, went inside, climbed the stairs, and knocked on the door to Dalton Lancaster’s office.

His muffled voice called, “Come on in,” so in I went.

The door opened into a room that reminded me of my recent visit to Paulie Russo’s office in another restaurant, except Dalt’s was a little smaller than Russo’s, with more expensive furniture, and it was occupied only by Dalt Lancaster. Not a thug in sight.

He was on the phone. When I closed the door behind me, he looked up, nodded quickly, and turned his head away. From where I stood inside the doorway, I couldn’t see the bruised and beaten side of Dalt’s face, the left side. I figured he’d turned away from me so that I couldn’t overhear what he was saying into the telephone. So I made a point of not listening.

Dalt could’ve been renting his office by the week. Its only decoration was a large authentic-looking sepia-toned map hanging on the wall beside the desk. It showed colonial Boston back in the day when Back Bay was still under water. On one wall, a floor-to-ceiling window looked down on the Faneuil Hall plaza. A pair of oak file cabinets and a freestanding steel-and-glass bookcase stood against one wall. The shelves were packed with three-ring binders and stacks of manila folders and magazines. A few small framed photos were lined up on one of the shelves. The big desk and the chairs and the side table were steel and glass and black leather. A computer and a printer and a telephone console sat on the desk. The carpet was a red-and-blue Oriental. It was the office of a man who’d had many other offices, considered them workplaces, understood that all workplaces were temporary, and let somebody else furnish and decorate them.

After a minute, Dalt mumbled something into the phone, hung up, turned, and smiled quickly at me, as if he hadn’t noticed me come in. “Brady,” he said. “Thanks for coming. Have a seat.”

Now I saw that the left side of his face had turned a sickly greenish yellow. It was a week-old bruise, and it was the same color as Robert’s. Father and son with their matching black eyes.

I pulled an armless leather chair up to Dalt’s desk and sat down. “How’s it feeling?” I touched my own left cheekbone.

He waved his hand in the air, dismissing the importance of how he felt. He leaned forward and frowned at me. “What the hell did you say to my mother?”

“You invited me over here to yell at me?”

He blew out a breath. “I’m sorry. I’m not yelling. I’m upset.”

“You asked me to handle your problems,” I said, “so that’s what I did. You don’t have any right to be upset when I do what you ask me to do.”

“Well,” he said, “whatever you did to handle my problems, my mother the judge is furious with me.”

“I don’t doubt it.”

“What did you say about me?”

“You?” I said. “I didn’t say anything about you. Your mother’s pretty sharp, you know. She didn’t need me to say anything. You understand what this is all about, don’t you?”

“I do now,” he said. “She called me this morning, said that because of me she had to recuse herself from an important case—something involving the Russo family, I assume—and not only that, but instead of doing it quietly the way she normally would do something like that, she had to announce it at a press conference, which she did at three this afternoon, in time for the rush-hour news cycle. She said it was embarrassing and humiliating not to be able to give any reason or answer any questions, and she was holding me personally responsible, whatever that means. Probably cutting me out of her will, not that the old witch is ever going to die.”

“What did you say to her?” I said.

He spread his hands. “What could I say? That I had no idea why those goons beat me up? That I was innocent and misunderstood? That I was still her good little boy?”

I smiled. “That’s all pretty much true, isn’t it?”

“I told her I was sorry. One way or the other, it’s my fault, right?”

“No man is an island,” I said.

“You know, don’t you?”

“Don’t push it,” I said. “Judge Lancaster did what she had to do, and you can’t blame her for not liking it. Now let’s hope that takes care of it.”

“I’d be comforted if you could tell me why I got beat up.”

“Just their way of putting the screws to your mother, I guess,” I said.

He shook his head. “There’s got to be more to it than that.”

“I’ve told you everything I can tell you,” I said. “Be comforted by the prospect of not getting beat up again.”

“That’s what I thought,” he said. “There is something else.”

“Come on, Dalt. Leave it be.”

He was shaking his head. “See, what I don’t get is, why would Paulie Russo want her off some case? Does he seriously think another judge is going to give him a break?”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Now it’ll be that other judge’s problem.” I stood up. “Come on. Buy me half a dozen oysters and a Bloody Mary.”

“I don’t have to buy them,” he said. “It’s my restaurant.”

When I stepped outside I had to pause for a moment to let my eyes adjust to the brightness of the afternoon sun on the Quincy Market plaza. Then I started along the sidewalk, “weaving my way through the crowds, heading home. Up ahead a circle of people had gathered, their faces upturned, watching a man in a clown suit. He was weaving back and forth above them, balancing himself on a unicycle, one of the Quincy Market sidewalk performers.

I went over to check out his act.

He had a patter of jokes that I couldn’t hear very well in the noise of the plaza, but they made those who could hear him laugh. He managed simultaneously to talk and balance on his unicycle and juggle six balls—a golf ball, a baseball, a softball, a soccer ball, a basketball, and a beach ball, all in the air at once—and while I watched, he somehow managed to unwrap a cigar, stuff it into his mouth, strike a match, and get it lighted without dropping any of the balls.

His audience applauded loudly at this feat, and I did, too, and that’s when strong hands clamped down on both of my elbows. I tried to twist away, but the grips on my elbows tightened and held me there.

There were two of them, one holding each elbow. They were standing behind my shoulders so that I couldn’t see them, but it wasn’t much of a mystery who they were.

“What do you want?” I said.

“You fucked up with the judge,” the guy behind my right shoulder said. “Paulie ain’t happy.”

“That’s rough shit,” I said.

The fingers on my left elbow moved and poked and probed, then suddenly jabbed at a soft place and dug into my funny bone. It felt like I’d stuck a finger in an electrical socket, and my arm went numb.

“Ow,” I said. “Jesus.”

None of the people in the crowd around me seemed to notice. They were laughing at something the clown on the unicycle had said.

“So now it’s about the money,” hissed the voice in my ear. “Understand?”

“Let go of me.” I twisted and turned my head around and caught a quick glimpse of the man standing behind my left shoulder. As I’d assumed, he was one of the goons who’d grabbed me a few days earlier in my parking garage and dragged me to Paulie Russo’s office. This was the one with the shiny pink mole beside his nose. I supposed the goon holding my other elbow was the short bald one.

The one with the mole squeezed my elbow harder. I turned my head away from him, and he relaxed his grip.

“It’s on you,” he growled.

“Fuck you,” I said. “And tell Paulie Russo he can go fuck himself, too.”

He chuckled, and then there came a sudden, searing pain in my lower back just above my hipbone. It felt like I’d been stabbed, or shot, or branded. The pain zinged through my body and left me instantly dizzy and nauseated. Then the life went out of my legs, and I stumbled, toppled forward, fell against somebody who was standing in front of me, and crashed onto the pavement.

As I lay there, the goon bent close to my ear and said, “Just get it done, Mr. Lawyer.” Then he was gone.

A moment later I was aware of somebody squatting beside me. “You okay, mister?” It was a kid’s voice.

I think I was groaning.

“Hey,” said the boy. His voice was louder, more urgent. “Hey. Somebody help. Something’s wrong with this guy. A heart attack or something.”

“No heart attack,” I mumbled.

I sensed that a crowd of people had circled around me. When I opened my eyes and tried to look at them, their faces were blurry and spinning.

I reached around and gingerly touched the place behind my hip where it hurt. When I pulled my hand back and looked at it, I saw no blood. That eliminated knives and bullets, at least.

I sat there with my head between my knees and my eyes squeezed shut, breathing deeply against the pain.

A minute later somebody else was kneeling beside me. Her face was bent close to mine. “I’m a police officer.” It was a woman’s voice. “Are you all right, sir?” She put her hand on my forehead. “What happened? Can you talk to me?”

I nodded. “I think I’m okay,” I said.

She put her arm around my shoulders. My lower back throbbed. Every beat of my pulse sent a dart of pain up my spine. It felt as if somebody had pounded a red-hot railroad spike into me and was twisting it around.

I looked at the cop. She was young and African American, and concern showed in her solemn dark eyes.

“You want me to call an ambulance?” she said.

“No,” I said. “Thanks. Really. I’m okay. I just got a sudden pain here.” I patted my back. “Hurt like a bastard. It’s a little better now.”

“This ever happen before?”

I shook my head.

“Ever had kidney stones?” she said.

“No. You think that could be it?”

“I never had ’em, either,” she said, “but I saw my uncle have an attack once, and what you describe sounds like what happened to him. Poor guy was thrashing around, cursing and moaning. You’d’ve thought he was dying. Said it was the worst thing ever happened to him. Maybe we should get you to an emergency room.”

“I’m feeling better,” I said. “Really.” I pushed myself to my feet, wavered for a minute, then found my balance.

She stood up beside me and put her hand on my arm. “Sure you’re okay?”

I nodded.

“I’ve got to take your name, sir,” she said. She had a notebook in her hand.

“Can’t we just forget it?”