Seventh Enemy (2 page)

McNiff frowned. He clearly minded. But all he said was, “Sure. No problem. Really sorry I kept you waiting. I should’ve at least tried to call or something.”

“That’s okay,” said Wally. “Brady and I have some work to do anyway, so it worked out fine. Just too bad you had to come all the way in here.”

McNiff shook his head. “My own damned fault.”

Wally reached for his hand and shook it. “See you in the morning, then, Gene.”

McNiff forced a smile. “Right. See you there. Um, I’ll meet you in the rotunda a little before ten. Okay?”

Wally nodded. “Sure. I’ll be there.”

McNiff turned and trudged away. Wally and I got into my car. He said, “Boy, that’s a relief.”

“Why?”

“I was supposed to spend the night with him. Dreaded the thought of it. All the local SAFE guys’ll be waiting there in his living room, all primed to tell me about the big buck they nailed last year and how much they hate liberals. They’ll want to stay up all night drinking Budweiser and shooting the shit with the big television personality. So now McNiff comes home without me, he’s a bum. I’m sorry for him, but I’m thrilled for me. I know it’s part of the job, but I really hate that shit.”

“You told him you and I had some work to do.”

“Nah. Not really A little peace and quiet’s all I want.”

“You mind telling me what you’re doing in Boston?”

“There’s a bill up before a subcommittee of the state Senate. SAFE flew me in to testify.”

“What kind of bill?”

“Assault weapon control. The hearing’s tomorrow morning. I’ll go and do my thing, then head out to Kenwick for a glorious week at the cabin, reading old Travis McGee novels, sipping Rebel Yell, chopping wood, and casting dry flies on the Deerfield.”

“You’re testifying against this bill, I assume.”

“Hell, said Wally, “SAFE doesn’t pay expenses for someone to testify in
favor
of gun control, you know.”

“How can you testify against controlling assault weapons?”

I heard him chuckle from the seat beside me. “It’s complicated.”

“This is something you want to do?”

“Telling people what I believe in?” he said. “Yeah, I kinda like it, to tell you the truth. The upside of being a public figure is you can say what you think and people actually listen to you. Sometimes you get to believe you can make a difference. The downside is they take you so damn seriously that you have to be very careful about what you say”

“You don’t want my advice on this, I gather.”

“I never ignore your advice, Brady.”

W
ALLY AND I HAD
always done our business in my office or over a slab of prime rib at Durgin Park. He’d never been to my apartment. When we walked in, he looked around, smiled, and said, “Pretty nice.”

I tried to see my place the way he did. To me it was comfortable. I have an understanding with my apartment. I give it plenty of freedom to express itself, and it doesn’t impose too many obligations on me. The furniture can sit wherever it likes. I can leave magazines and neckties on it, and it doesn’t complain. Fly rods hide in closets and newspapers find sanctuary under the sofa. I let my shoes go where they want. It’s their home, too.

I expect, to Wally, it looked messy.

He dropped his overnight bag onto the floor and went over to the floor-to-ceiling glass windows. He slid them open and stepped out onto my little balcony. He gazed at the harbor. “This ain’t bad,” he said.

“Slug of bourbon?” I said.

“Ice. No water.”

I broke open an ice-cube tray dumped some cubes into two short glasses, and filled them from my jug of Jack Daniel’s. I went to where Wally was standing and handed one of the glasses to him.

We stood side by side and stared out into the night. After a few minutes he turned to me and said, “You once told me that you’d wanted to be a civil liberties lawyer.”

“I was young and idealistic. And naive.”

“No money in it?”

“It wasn’t that.” I said. “I mainly wanted to be my own boss. So I took the cases that came my way. Not a damn one of them involved the Bill of Rights.”

He nodded. We watched the lights of a big LNC tanker inch across the dark horizon. After a few moments, Wally said, “So what’s your take on the Second Amendment?”

“What do you mean?”

“The right to bear arms. Is it absolute?”

“Well, the Supreme Court has said many times that no right is absolute. The individual’s rights are limited by the rights of society You know, you can’t yell ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater, even though the First Amendment says you’ve got the right to free speech. I’m not up-to-date on Second Amendment cases, but I do know that there are federal and state laws regulating handgun sales that have withstood court challenges.”

“But the Second Amendment seems to be based on the rights of society, not the individual,” he said. “It’s not so much that I have the right to bear an arm as that we all have the right to protect ourselves and each other.”

“‘A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state,’” I quoted, pleased with myself. “Yes. Except the idea of a militia is pretty antiquated.”

“Damn complicated,” Wally mumbled.

“The nature of the law,” I said. “It’s why we have lawyers.”

I casually flipped my cigarette butt over the railing and watched it spark its way down to the water below. When I glanced at Wally, he was grinning at me. Wally preaches the importance of keeping our environment pristine. We should pick up trash, not dump it. I agree with him. And I had just thrown a cigarette into the ocean.

“Look,” I said, “it’s the filthiest, most polluted harbor in the world.”

Wally shrugged. “I wonder how it got that way.”

“Yeah,” I mumbled. “Valid point.” We stared into the night for a while. Then I said, “I thought those things were already regulated.”

“What things?”

“Assault guns.”

“You’re thinking of automatic weapons. You know, the kind where you hold down the trigger and they keep filing. This bill is about semiautomatics. They shoot a bullet each time you pull the trigger,”

“That’s what they mean by paramilitary, then?”

He nodded. “They’re modeled after military weapons. Your Uzi, your AK-47. Assault guns’ve got large magazines, but they’re not fully automatic.”

“A lot of sporting guns are semiautomatic, aren’t they?”

“Sure,” said Wally. “Shotguns, hunting rifles.

“So what’s the difference?”

“Functionally, the only difference is the size of the magazine. Except, of course, your assault gun
looks
—well, it
looks
—like a military weapon. And they’re pretty easy to modify into fully automatic.” Wally turned and smiled at me. “You’re not that bad at cross-examination, Brady, you know that?”

“I was just interested,” I said. “Sorry.”

“No, don’t be. Talking about it helps me clarify it.”

“So this
is
a consultation.”

He turned to me and smiled. “You gonna put me on the clock?”

“I guess I should. Julie would be pleased. Want another drink?”

He shook his head. “Mind if I use your phone?”

“You don’t have to ask.” I flapped my hand at the wall phone in the kitchen. “Help yourself.”

He went into the kitchen, took the phone off the hook, and sat at the table. He pecked out a number from memory, I turned my back to him, sipped my drink, and watched the clouds slide across the sky. I wasn’t trying to listen, but I couldn’t help hearing.

“Hey; it’s me,” said Willy into the phone. “Here, in Boston… With my lawyer… Just one night, then to the cabin. Gonna be able to make it? …Yeah, good. Terrific. I’ll meet you at your place tomorrow, then…” His voice softened. “Yeah, me, too. Um, how’s? …Oh, shit. Well, look. Keep all the doors locked and don’t be afraid to call the cops… I know, but you should still do it… Christ, babe, don’t do that. I’ll see you tomorrow, okay? It’ll wait” he chuckled softly. “Right. You, too. Bye.”

I heard him hang up. He came into the living room and slumped onto the sofa. I went over and took the chair across from him. We both put our feet up on the newspapers that were piled on the coffee table.

“That’s a friend of mine,” he said. “She’s having problems with her husband.”

“You fooling around with married ladies?”

“She’s in the middle of a messy divorce. The guy’s not handling it with much class.”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“I’m not fooling around with her,” he said. “I’m serious about her.”

“Sounds like a good situation to stay out of.”

“My lawyer’s advice?”

“Your friend’s advice.”

He shrugged. “You can’t always pick ’em. You’d like Diana. She and I are gonna spend the week at the cabin. Hey why don’t you join us?”

“Sure,” I said. “Just what you want. A threesome.”

“No, really,” he said. “We’ve got a spare bedroom. Diana would love it. So would I.”

I shook my head. “I can’t spare a week.”

“A few days, at least. How about it? The Deerfield should be prime.”

“Boy,” I said, “I haven’t had any trout fishing to speak of all spring. I could maybe take Thursday and Friday.”

“Done!” said Wally.

“I gotta check with Julie.”

“Assert yourself.”

“It’s not easy with Julie. But I’ll try.”

We sipped our drinks, chatted aimlessly, then began to yawn. I pulled out the sofa for Wally; found a blanket and pillow for him, and got ready for bed. When I went back to the living room, he was sitting at the kitchen table reading through a stack of papers and making notes on a legal-sized yellow pad. A pair of rimless reading glasses roosted on the tip of his nose.

“What’s that?” I said.

“A copy of the bill I’m supposed to testify on tomorrow and some of the SAFE propaganda. I haven’t had a chance to look it over.”

“You probably ought to before you talk about it,” I said. “Lawyer’s advice.”

“And that,” said Wally, “is why I pay you those outrageous fees.”

Whether it was the booze, or visions of Deerfield brown trout eating my dry flies, or just seeing Wally again, I don’t know, but I lay awake for a long time. It all must have affected Wally the same way, because even as I finally drifted off to sleep I could still hear him pacing around in my living room mumbling to himself.

W
HEN I STUMBLED INTO
the kitchen the next morning, Wally was slouched in the same chair at the table, scratching on his yellow legal pad. I poured two mugfuls of coffee and slid one beside his elbow. “You been sitting there all night?” I said.

He took off his reading glasses, laid them on the table, and pinched the bridge of his nose. Then he reached for his coffee and took a sip. “I slept for a while.”

“This must be important,” I persisted, gesturing at what looked like an entire pad’s worth of balled-up sheets of yellow paper scattered on the floor behind him.

Wally leaned back and rolled his shoulders. “Actually it’s just a little subcommittee hearing, one of those deals where you slip in and slip out and nobody listens to what you say because they’ve already got their minds made up, but the law requires a public hearing. So they set it up for Monday morning before the press rolls out of bed and everybody just wants to get it over with.”

“Then why…?” I gestured at the litter of paper balls on the floor.

“I just like to do things right,” said Willy with a shrug. “It’s a character flaw.”

I waited until nine to call Julie. “Brady L. Coyne, Attorney,” she said. “Good morning.”

“It’s me.”

“Where are you?”

“Home. I’m gonna be late.”

“How late?”

“Couple, three hours.”

“No, you’re not. Mrs. Mudgett has a ten o’clock.”

“Call her. Reschedule.”

“Aha.” I could visualize Julie squinting suspiciously. “Who is it? The Hungarian or the Italian?”

“I’m not with a woman, Julie. I’m with a client, and we should be done sometime before noon.”

“Don’t try to bullshit me, Brady Coyne,” said Julie.

“No. Listen—”

“I know you,” she said. “You don’t set up meetings with clients. Especially on Monday mornings. You avoid meeting with clients. You hate meeting with clients. I’m the one who sets up meetings. Then I have to keep kicking your butt to make you show up for them. Look. If you’re hung over, or if you’re calling from some fishing place in New Hampshire, or if you’ve got your legs all tangled up with some woman and just can’t summon up the strength of character to kick off the blankets, okay, fine. I mean, not fine, but at least I know you’re telling the truth.”

“It’s Wally Kinnick. He flew in unexpectedly last night. He’s got a problem. I’m his lawyer. My job is to help my clients with their problems. So—”

“Ha!” she said. “I know the kinds of problems you and Mr. Kinnick discuss. Like how to catch big trout on those little bitty flies you use.”

“No, listen,” I said. “This is lawyer stuff. We’re here at my place, and we’ve been conferring, and we’ve got more work to do, and I’ll be there by noon. And don’t give me any more shit about it or I’ll fire you.”

“Ha!” she said, “You’d go broke in a week.”

“I know. I won’t fire you. I’ll give you a raise. Call Mrs. Mudgett and reschedule her. Oh, and, um, you better clear my calendar for Thursday and Friday.”

“Fishing, right?”

“Well, yeah, but—”

“Boy,” sighed Julie. “To think, I could’ve been an emergency room nurse, run the control tower at O’Hare, something easy on the nerves.”

“Thanks, kiddo,” I said. “Love ya.” I made kissing noises into the phone.

After I hung up, Wally said, “From this end it sounded like you were taking a bunch of shit from a wife.”

“Worse. A secretary.”

Wally grinned, “That Julie’s a piece of work.”

His testimony before the Senate Subcommittee on Public Safety was scheduled for ten. It was a gorgeous May morning, so we decided to walk over from my apartment on the harbor. I carried my briefcase and Willy lugged his overnight bag. We talked about fishing and baseball and micro-breweries and girls we knew when we were in high school. We did not discuss gun control.

We got to the Common at about nine forty-five and took the diagonal pathway that led to the State House. Hallway across, Wally stopped and said, “Oh-oh.”