Seventh Enemy (27 page)

“Mmm,” she said. “Nice.”

“How’re you doing?”

“I’ve gotten practically all of them right so far.”

“Good. That’s not what I meant.”

“Oh. Like, how was my day?”

“Like that, yes.”

“Turn that thing off, will you?”

“Gladly.” I reached over and snapped off the television. Then I slumped back on the sofa.

Alex wiggled against me and laid her cheek on my shoulder. “Wanna start again?”

“Sure,” I said. I turned, touched her hair, and kissed her softly on the lips. “How was your day?” I said.

“Good. Fine.” She nuzzled my throat. “Had an interview with the governor. If you think stories about the implications of Massachusetts converting to a graduated state income tax are exciting, I had a helluva day.”

“If anyone can make those stories exciting, you can,” I said.

“Yes, I can,” she said. “How’re you?”

I blew out a long sigh. “It was okay until the end. Sometimes I feel like a goddamn glorified butler for all the self-important old farts who are my clients. I had to drive all the way out to Lincoln at four-thirty for a conversation that would’ve taken ten minutes on the telephone because Roger Falconer doesn’t make office visits and thinks his business is too fucking grave to conduct on the telephone. ‘A matter of the utmost gravity.’ That’s what he called it. So instead of getting home at five-thirty, it’s, what, nearly eight?”

“Almost eight, yes,” she said softly. “I thought you liked your clients.”

I nodded. “Oh, I do. I don’t accept clients I don’t like. But some of them can be pretty damn self-important. Sometimes it gets to me. Whatever happened to the guy who was going to argue civil liberties cases before the Supreme Court?”

“Your career took a different turn, Brady. You do what you do, and you’re very good at it, and you’re your own boss, and it makes you a lot of money. There are worse things.”

I sipped from my drink. “There are better things, too. I mean, Billy’s out there in Idaho, a ski instructor in the winter and a trout fishing guide in the summer and a bartender in his spare time. I’d like to do that.”

“Your son is a twenty-one-year-old college dropout,” she said. “You’re not.”

“No,” I said. “Not even close. There are times I wish I was, though. I’d like to drop out and head for the Rockies, even if I’m not twenty-one.”

Her hand squeezed my leg. “Would you bring me with you?”

“Out West?”

“Yes. Would you come?”

“You bet.”

“Why not do it? Let’s do it, Brady.”

I sighed. This was one of Alex’s favorite conversational topics. “Sure.”

“What’s stopping you?” she persisted. “Billy’s off on his own, Joey’s got that scholarship to Stanford. You’ve fulfilled all your obligations. It’s time to live your own life.”

“My clients—”

“Can’t get along without you. I know.” She snuggled against me. “I’d do it. I really would.”

“You would, huh?”

“Sure. We could buy a little ranch. We’d have horses.”

“And dogs.”

“Yes,” she said. “Dogs. And cats, too, and maybe a goat. And a meadow for some cows, and beyond it a view of the mountains—”

“Don’t forget the trout stream running through the meadow.”

“Right. So I could watch you catch trout while I sat in the hot tub.”

“And afterwards I’d join you in the hot tub, and we could watch the sun set and drink beer.”

“Mmm,” she said. “Nice. Really nice.”

“Could we really do that?”

“Sure,” she mumbled. “Why not?”

“What about your career?”

“You mean,” she said, “what about
your
career?” She blew out a sigh. “Or maybe you mean, what about our relationship? If we did that, you’d never get rid of me.”

“I don’t want to get rid of you.” I nuzzled the back of her neck.

She looked up at me. “No?”

“No. It was nice coming home, sniffing the aroma of lentil soup, and finding you here.”

“It happens a lot that way.”

“And it’s always nice.”

“Well,” she said, “I’d go out West with you. I would. Then I guess I’d be there every day, and maybe you wouldn’t like that so much. You’d get sick of lentil soup.”

“I would like it. Especially if you let me put hot sausages in it.”

“But it won’t happen,” she said. “I understand.”

I laid my head on the back of the sofa and gazed up at the ceiling. “Sometimes I think I’m turning into an old fart myself,” I said.

“You’re more like a middle-aged fart,” she said.

“I mean,” I persisted, “you’re right. What’s stopping me? The boys have grown wings and flown away. I’ve had a little career, made some money. My clients don’t need me. There are certainly plenty of lawyers who can do what I do. I hate living in the city. I hate feeling I’ve got to jump when I get a summons from people like Roger Falconer. I could be a bartender.”

“You’d make a lovely bartender,” Alex said.

“Or a trout guide. I could do that.”

“I bet you’d like that,” she said.

I sighed. “It’s fun to think about.”

She sat up, turned, and frowned at me. “You’re stuck, sweetie. You should try to get unstuck. Life is too short.”

“I know.” I pushed myself to my feet. “Let’s eat.”

After supper Alex and I pulled on sweatshirts and sat out on the balcony overlooking the harbor. A misty rain swirled in the wind, and whitecaps glittered in the city lights, but we were protected from most of it by the building and the balcony above us. We sipped coffee and I smoked a cigarette.

“I heard about Glen Falconer’s accident,” she said.

Alex is a reporter for the Globe, and she knows that I must protect the confidentiality of my clients. Some aspects of my business I cannot discuss with anybody, but especially not with a reporter, even if she’s the woman who has a key to my apartment and makes lentil soup for me. So she never asks me questions. Some of the information she gets in her job as a reporter is confidential, too, so I don’t ask her questions, either. Sometimes our conversations are elliptical, and sometimes we have to search for topics we can both talk about freely.

Sometimes we can talk elliptically and still help each other do our jobs.

“What’d you hear?” I asked her.

“He flunked the Breathalyzer. He was driving a big car and he collided with a little Honda. Two people were hurt.”

“One of them died this morning,” I said.

“I didn’t know,” she said. “Shit, I hate it when that happens.”

“Me, too.” We were quiet for a couple of minutes, then I said, “What else did you hear?”

“He either rolled through a stop sign or failed to look before he entered an intersection. The Honda had the right of way. He side-swiped her. She swerved into a parked car. Her chest hit the steering column.”

“No seat belt?”

“I guess not. The other passenger was a child in a car seat. Not injured. So they’re charging him, huh?”

“You’ll probably read about it in tomorrow’s Globe,” I said.

“Falconer’s a big name in Boston.”

“Roger’s is.”

“Glen’s got lots of his daddy’s money,” she said. “Ergo, his is a big name, too. This isn’t his first, you know.”

I nodded. Glen’s license had been suspended once before for DUI when he was nailed for speeding on Route 95. He had taken the class required by the Commonwealth for convicted drunk drivers, got his license back, and then apparently resumed his old ways. “In Sweden, I think it is,” I said, “one conviction and you lose your license for life.”

“Sensible people, the Swedes.” She reached for my hand and squeezed it. Out on the harbor a big oil tanker was inching through the chop. “I’m getting chilly,” she whispered. “Almost ready for bed?”

“Definitely.”

“You’re not defending him, are you?”

I laughed. “Not me, babe. Glen needs a magician, not some paper pusher.”

“You’re not a paper pusher, Brady. You’re a fine attorney.”

“Hey,” I said. “I am one helluva paper pusher. You want some paper pushed, see Brady Coyne. Don’t knock paper pushing.”

She squeezed my thigh. “I’m sorry. You are indeed a superior paper pusher, and a noble profession it is. So who’re you getting to defend Glen Falconer?”

“Paul Cizek, if I can persuade him to take the case.”

“Ah,” she said. “The Houdini of the criminal courts.”

“Paul’s the closest thing to a magician I know,” I said. I stood up and held both of my hands down to Alex. “Come on. I’ve got a magic trick I’d like to show you.”

T
HE NEXT MORNING I
left a message with Paul Cizek’s secretary at Tarlin and Overton. He called me back a little before noon. “How’s the mighty fisherman?” he said when Julie connected us.

“Alas,” I said, “yet another season hath ended and I did not wet nearly enough lines to satisfy my lust. And you and I never did spend time together on the water.”

“Too bad, too,” he said. “I found stripers and blues in every creek and estuary and tidal flat on the north shore. I found them in the rips and in the surf and against the rocks and—”

“And you caught them on eels and sandworms and herring and bunker.”

“Do I detect scorn in your tone, Coyne?”

“Scorn? No. I know you fish with nothing but bait. It’s a pretty low-down way to do it, but you—”

“I’m a pretty low-down guy,” said Paul, “not to handicap myself with flimsy fly rods and elegant little handcrafted confections of hair and feather that have no smell to them.
Chacun à son gout,
if you ask me. The fishing was pretty damn good, and you missed it. Now the boat’s in the garage and my gear is stowed away for another dreary New England winter.”

“Next year,” I said.

“Yeah. You keep saying that.”

“Just call me. I’ll come.”

“You willing to arise before the sun and witness the dawn of a new day from the deck of
Olivia
with me?”

“Absolutely. And how is Olivia?”

“You mean the boat or the wife?”

“The wife. I know you take good care of the boat.”

“Olivia’s good. Asks after you all the time. Keeps saying we should get together. Wants to meet your Alex. Olivia’s been kicking some serious water-polluting ass. Her little group’s got three civil suits and two criminal cases pending. She’s really into it, and I admire the hell out of her. Some weeks we hardly see each other. She’s off watchdogging local zoning- and planning-board hearings, testifying before legislative subcommittees, making speeches, harassing lawmakers, organizing fund-raisers, and I—”

“You, I understand, are kicking some serious butt yourself, Paul.”

I heard him sigh. “I’ve won a few cases.”

“What I hear, you’ve won some impossible cases.”

“The presumption of innocence is a powerful ally, Brady.”

“And the assembled might of the state’s district attorneys makes a powerful adversary. No kidding, you’ve pulled some out of a hat.”

“Yeah, I guess.” He was silent for a moment. Then he said, “So what’s up?”

“I’ve got a case for you.”

“Tell me about it.”

“You know who Roger Falconer is.”

“Sure. Everybody knows Falconer. What’d he do?”

“Nothing. Or at least nothing that anyone’s going to indict him for. It’s his son.”

“Glen’s his name, right?”

“Yes. He’s about to be charged with vehicular homicide.”

“DUI?”

“You got it.”

“Did he do it?”

“He was driving the car, all right. They got him on the Breathalyzer. The woman died yesterday.”

“Aw, shit,” he said.

“So what do you say?”

“I gotta check a few things. I’ll get back to you this afternoon.”

Paul called back around three and told me that Tarlin and Overton was inclined to accept the Falconer case, but before he made a firm commitment he wanted to meet with Glen. We agreed to assemble in my office at seven that evening.

I asked Julie to call and set it up. “Roger’ll probably want to be in on it and try to talk you into holding the conference out in Lincoln. That’s unacceptable. If Roger insists on joining us, fine. But it’s got to be here. I want Glen in my office at seven, or else he’ll have to do his own shopping for a lawyer.”

Julie grinned. “I can do that.”

“I know,” I said. “You do it better than I do.”

“You don’t do it at all.”

“That’s because it’s your job,” I said.

She buzzed me five minutes later. “All set,” she said. “The old man grumbled and wanted to talk to you. I told him you were tied up. They’ll be here at seven.”

“Both of them?”

“That is my inference, yes.”

“Sure,” I said. “Roger’ll want a firsthand look at Paul. I don’t think he lets Glen blow his own nose without telling him which hand to use.”

“He lets his son drive drunk, though, huh?” said Julie.

“Driving drunk,” I said, “is evidently the way Glen asserts his independence.”

Glen Falconer arrived about a quarter of seven and, as expected, Roger was with him. Julie escorted them both into my office and offered coffee, which we all accepted.

Roger and Glen sat beside each other on the sofa. I took the armchair across from them. “Paul Cizek will be here shortly,” I said. “He’s the miracle worker I mentioned.”

“Cizek?” said Roger.

I nodded. “He’s with Tarlin and Overton in Cambridge. He sort of specializes in
Mission Impossible
criminal cases. Which is what this one looks like.”

Roger leaned forward. “What kind of name is Cizek?”

“Huh?”

“I said—”

“I heard what you said, Roger,” I said. “I just didn’t believe it.”

“We don’t want some sleazy—”

“Gotcha,” I said quickly. I stood up, went to my desk, and buzzed Julie.

“I’m brewing some fresh coffee,” she said over the intercom. “It’ll be a few minutes.”

“See if you can reach Paul Cizek,” I said to her. “Tell him to forget it.”

“Wait,” said Glen.

“Hang on,” I said to Julie. I looked at Glen. “Your father doesn’t want a lawyer with a
Z
and a
K
in his last name defending you.”

“You don’t understand,” said Roger.

“Of course I understand,” I said. “I understand perfectly. It’s really not that complicated.”