The Only Good Lawyer - Jeremiah Healy (40 page)

Neely glanced at her again. "I'm afraid so,
Imogene. After all my careful planning, I couldn't very well leave
Spaeth with a real alibi, now could I?"

I said, "You left Mantle's body instead, to be
eaten by the rats."

Burbage gagged.

Neely looked away from her. "Sweet Jesus, John.
I hadn't expected it would take so long before he was found."

"Only when I came around last Wednesday,
rattling your cage with my doubts on Spaeth's guilt, you decided his
'alibi' might need a little help in exploding."

"I called a hospital the next night, late."

"Why did you wait a day and a half?"

"So as not to have the 'news' seem obviously
triggered by your visit to us."

"And the hospital number was one you knew
wouldn't record your voice for later comparison purposes."

"Correct. I faked a 'street-black' accent to
report Mantle's body, and Woodrow's a week earlier." Neely
smiled some more. "Careful planning always pays off, John. I
learned that from my trusts and estates practice."

I wanted to change the focus a little. "You said
you followed Mantle and Spaeth. You must have followed Gant, too."

"I did. And he deserved what he got for just
that reason."

"Fooling around with one of his clients."

"One of the firm's clients, the rutting pig.
Woodrow was a fine-looking man. And, divorced as he was, he could
have had his pick of the litter."

I felt Burbage's hand start to tremble inside mine.

“
But no." said Neely. "He couldn't keep
away from the forbidden fruit."

"And so you followed Gant, too. Enough to
establish that he liked to take Nicole Spaeth to Viet Mam."

"A certain restaurant five miles from his love
nest, one that was most conveniently accessed by a very dark and
lonely road."

Squeezing my hand now, Burbage said to him, "You
killed Mr. Gant?"

"Imogene, Imogene." Neely shook his head
some more. "For such a bright woman, you are indeed a slow
learner in some ways."

Burbage began to let go of my hand, me now holding
hers more tightly.

I said, "Everybody has blind spots, Frank."

He came back to me. "Yes. Yes, I suppose they
do. Woodrow's was that he thought he'd gone well past anyone from his
prosecutor past who might want to kill him. I could tell by the way
he left his car that night, after I'd shot out the tire. I tried to
picture the scene. "Gant thought he had just a flat?"

“
Yes. My ricochet must have punctured the fuel
tank, though, because I could see him get down on his bad knee to
inspect under the rear bumper. And, once I was near enough to
Woodrow, I could smell the gasoline myself."

"At which point, you shot him, too."

"Not immediately, John. No, first I had a little
talk with the boy. Told him why he was going to die."

Burbage's hand trembled violently inside mine.

I said, "And then you went around to the
passenger side of the car and dropped the gun into Nicole Spaeth's
lap."

"Yes."

"Why didn't you kill her, too?"

"I'd thought about it, believe me. As a
contingency plan, just like you allow for when drawing a client's
complicated will. And I would have killed Mrs. Spaeth, too, if she'd
been sober enough to see or hear anything incriminating."

"But since she was drunk, you didn't have to."

"And didn't want to, John. Even with the wig and
sunglasses, I recognized the woman. But if possible, I didn't want to
kill her. Can you guess why?"

"Because while you had a motive to kill Gant,
only Alan Spaeth would have had a motive to kill him and not to kill
a potential witness only Spaeth himself loved."

"And . . . ?"

It took me a minute. "And only Spaeth would have
a revenge reason for a 'practical joke,' letting his wife know who
killed her new lover by leaving 'his' gun as the murder weapon in her
lap."

A fatherly smile. "You would have made a fine
trusts and estates lawyer, John."

"Not if it'd mean turning out like you."

The smile flew off his face. "Woodrow Gant
betrayed me!"

Neely waved the gun around his greenhouse. "Just
like those bastards in Army intelligence betrayed my Ranger outfit in
'forty-four. Not telling us the guns at Pointe-du-Hoc had been moved,
letting half my friends be cut down by enemy fire climbing that
goddamned rock that didn't mean a thing anymore. My first outfit was
betrayed that day, and Woodrow betrayed my current outfit in his own
way."

"Oh, be honest, Frank. It takes a lot of money
to maintain your little version of 'the Pointe' up here. You're on
the mortgage personally with no other tenants to help carry it. You
needed the proceeds from the policy on Gant's life."

"The firm needed it."

"No, Frank. There wasn't going to be a firm
anymore."

"There always—"

"Uta Radachowski was in line for her judgeship,
and Deborah Ling intended to pull the ripcord, too, with or without
Gant. The firm was going to lose most of its rainmakers, which would
jeopardize your staying in this building as a home."

Neely seemed to soften for a moment, even relent.
"I'd been through two partnership breakups, John. The only real
asset I had was ‘Epstein & Neely,' bringing in cash to carry
the building here. At my age, I couldn't start over again." A
hardening. “And I shouldn't have to. I survived a war, goddamnit.
It was supposed to be my turn to take it easy as a senior partner,
not hustle for clients like some insurance salesman."

"Tell me, Frank, is bailing out really what Ling
wanted to see you about the morning she died?"

Neely ground his jaw. "Deborah came into my
office, said she had to talk with me. After Woodrow was gone, I was
sure she'd stay, build her real estate practice inside the firm. But
no, I seemed to be the only good lawyer around. Deborah confirmed
that she was a traitor, too. Leaving us over her 'romantic
involvement' with that gangster, Trinh."

I closed my eyes for a second.

"Yes, John." said Neely. "I'd never
heard the name until the afternoon before, when you'd mentioned him
as a criminal connected to the Vietnamese restaurant Woodrow visited.
Trinh and Deborah being a couple seemed a bit too convenient to be
coincidental."

"So you saw a chance to punish Ling for her
'betrayal' and to cash another million-dollar policy, both in one
fell swoop."

"Actually, killing Deborah worried me more than
you can guess."

Burbage's hand squirmed in my own.

Neely made a tsking sound. "I had to follow her
last Friday and do the deed in broad daylight, stuffing her handbag
into that big old briefcase of mine, all without any real planning
ahead of time."

The reason he'd used the same method of killing that
had worked with Mantle. "But why couldn't you plan it, Frank?"

"Because that morning in my office, Deborah told
me not just about quitting the firm, but also that she was going to
the District Attorney with the fact of her representing the gangster
boyfriend in purchasing that restaurant building."

Which meant I really had panicked Ling. "And her
blowing that whistle would have widened the official investigation—"

"—like a floodgate—"

"—and tied Woodrow Gant's murder more closely
to the firm."

"Exactly. I certainly didn't want the
authorities thinking they had to reopen that whole can of worms.
Sweet Jesus, John, you were bad enough."

"But then you thought of a way to kill two birds
with one phone call."

The accomplishment smile again. "Trinh's number
was in Deborah's handbag. I'd met Grover Gant often enough, and one
street-black voice is very much like another. Not too difficult to
fool Trinh, 'if you know what I'm saying, man.' "

That last in dialect. "So Trinh buys that it's
Grover calling him to say I was the one who strangled his girlfriend,
Ling."

"As I'd hoped. And it worked, almost perfectly."

"I killed Trinh and Huong, but they didn't quite
kill me."

"No, but with them both unable to give their
versions, they turn out to be quite nice remainder suspects, and even
with you still alive, no reason to think any further investigation
was needed to get Alan Spaeth—'innocent stooge'—off the Woodrow
Gant hook."

Burbage said, "You killed Mr. Gant, and this
poor man named Mantle, and Ms. Ling. And then you tried to get
somebody else to kill Mr. Cuddy?"

"Let me guess, Imogene. With all this talk of
betrayal, you somehow feel I've let you down, too."

Burbage now wrenched her hand away from mine,
forcefully enough that the motion torqued my ribcage, and I had to
let go of her.

She stepped toward Neely and in front of me. In a
strong, even voice, Burbage said, "Woodrow Gant was my boss,
too."

"I'm sorry you feel that way, Imogene. But even
if you didn't, I'm afraid I have no—"

Whether Burbage realized Neely was going to kill both
of us, or whether she simply snapped, I'll never know. But she ran at
him just as the report of the Colt, even muffled by her body mass,
thundered in the confines of the greenhouse. The exiting forty-five
slug tore a grisly hole the size of a plum in the center of her back
before whistling past my left arm and thumping into a tree behind me.

There was nothing I could do for Imogene Burbage, so
I turned and dove into the little forest myself, the ribs punishing
me for the effort. One more shot from the rear, the unmuffled report
even louder, its bullet making a zipping noise as it plowed through
the leaves near my head and ricocheted off the brick kneewall.

My ribcage pounding, I crawled through the foliage
and onto the narrow, bordering walkway around the glass windows of
the greenhouse. Getting into a squatting position, I listened
stock-still for which route Frank Neely would take toward me.
Absolute silence from him, too.

Then just his voice with, "John?" A short
pause. "I don't expect you to answer me, of course. But I
thought talking this through might make more sense than chasing you
down."

Silence again, as though Neely really did expect me
to answer him, before, "Here's the way I see it, John." His
voice still came from near the table and chairs where he'd shot
Burbage. "We can play hide-and-seek for a while, but I'm a
little old for that, and honestly there's simply no place for you to
go. The staircase door is locked, and my elevator in the apartment
requires a key as well. Furthermore, it's kind of a long way down to
ground level by air."

A small laugh. "Sorry. I shouldn't be joking
about this. But I can't see either of us being stupid when the end of
the game isn't in doubt."

I forced my mind to weigh the options. Why would
Neely be offering me the chance to walk up to him for a functional
suicide? I looked around. It was the glass, stretching from the
ridgepoled peak down to the knee wall. He didn't want to fire another
shot that might shatter a pane and draw attention from Commercial
Street below us.

"John?"

On the other side of the trees and shrubs, Neely had
shifted, toward my right and the front of the garden. I looked around
again, this time more specifically. No rakes or shovels or even
buckets, nothing that could be a make-shift weapon.

"John, please. Let's be dignified about this,
all right?"

More to my right now, and closer to turning a corner
at the front of the roof. Where he'd spot me easily.

I tried to picture Neely where I'd last seen him. The
Colt in his right hand as Burbage lunged forward, behind us the table
and . . .

If not a weapon, maybe a shield?

A very slight crunching sound to my right, and I
hopped like a frog back into the foliage as the forty-five boomed
again, another round screaming off the brick kneewall as my cracked
ribs screamed at me. This time I kept going, plunging through the
leaves until I reached the patio furniture again.

I stepped over Imogene Burbage, her blood making the
burgundy tiles slick. Bending down, I lifted the cocktail table on my
left side. Heavier than its size suggested, I tilted it so the marble
top was in front of me like a knight's jousting shield. I heard a
footstep just before the next shot made a noise somewhere between a
thump and a whine as it struck the top of the table. Hunkered down,
with the marble covering as much of me as possible, I started running
forward. To close the gap between Neely and me, functionally making
my shield bigger and hopefully throwing off his trigger timing.

Another shot and another still, the last ripping a
chunk off the meaty outside of my right shoulder. A feeling like
being branded. Then the impact of the tabletop on Neely's chest, a
whoofing noise from the lungs as he went backward. I felt his heels
catching on something, his hips coming up and—The sound of breaking
glass.