The Only Good Lawyer - Jeremiah Healy (6 page)

"No, but that don't make her different from
anybody else on God's earth, eh? She didn't have the talent of an
Ingrid Bergman, and she couldn't lose enough of her accent to be
anything but the ‘French girl! " Then Dufresne seemed to
remember he hadn't invited me over for a seminar on the cinema.
"What's a lawyer interested in me for?"

"Not you. Alan Spaeth."

"I should have known." Dufresne dropped his
head, making me notice he was wearing old-style bedroom slippers,
those leather scuffies that sell well only before Father's Day. "What
an asshole."

"You didn't care for him."

"I should have booted Spaeth out the first night
he was here."

"Why?"

"You told me at the door, I let you in, we can
save some time. It'd take days to give you everything on him."

"How about just the high points?"

"High points? There weren't any. Guy looked down
on the Chateau like it was a flophouse, but I still had to chase him
every Friday for the weekly." Dufresne waved, his hand seeming
to take in everything outside his sitting room. "I grant you,
most of the guys living here are down on their luck, one way or the
other. Oh, a couple of them just got old, nursing pensions but
without any family to give them something to do, something to live
for, you know? The rest are like Spaeth, divorce squeeze. Or drunks
trying to dry out, druggies trying to kick the monkey."

"How'd you get into the business to start with?"

Dufresne cocked his head a different way. He seemed
to have a variety of positions to convey emotion without words.

"Divorce myself. Why I feel sorry for guys like
Spaeth, I suppose. The wife got everything but my mother's furniture,
and I had to live somewhere. My divorce lawyer—may he burn in
hell—had a friend who owned this place, was retiring to Florida.
That sounded good to me, so I come see the Chateau—it wasn't called
that then, ‘the Chateau' is my name for it account of my mother,
she always was talking about living in one instead of some
third-floor walk-up."

Dufresne took a breath. "Well, this was twenty
years ago, and I was thirty years young. Somebody else'd said, 'Go
run a resort hotel, up in New Hampshire or Maine for the Quebecois,
want to come down to the States on their vacation.' But I didn't have
enough money from the divorce for a real 'resort,' and when I went to
this talk some 'expert' was giving on bed and breakfasts, all he kept
saying was the three gotta's."

" 'Gotta's'?"

"Yeah. He said, you wanna run a B&B, you
gotta be clean, you gotta be friendly, and you gotta—I loved
this—you gotta 'exceed the expectations of your guests'. Well, that
sounded to me a lot like being married, which I already knew I wasn't
crazy about, eh? So I said fuck it and bought this place with a
mortgage like the White House oughta have and found out my own three
gotta's."

"Which are?"

"Gotta pay me, gotta pay me, gotta pay me."

Dufresne laughed, a honking sound that contrasted
with the way his accent smoothed over some of his consonants. "So
here I am, a Frenchy in an Irish neighborhood, running a welfare
hotel for deadbeats."

He seemed to run down, and I decided to build slowly
toward Michael Mantle, the alibi witness. "About Spaeth?"

Dufresne seemed to look at me for the first time, a
new angle for the cocked head. "What about him?"

"I'd like to see the man's room."

"It ain't his anymore."

"The one he used to rent, then."

"There's a viewing fee, eh?"

The fourth gotta. "How much?"

"I go by the amount of time I spend. So—"

“—
Twenty bucks for twenty minutes, if that."

Dufresne said, "Let's see it."

I dug out my wallet, handed him the bill. He stood up
and led me out of his sitting room to the corridor and a central
staircase.

As we topped the first flight, I could see four room
doors, all closed. Labored, wheezy coughing came from behind the one
nearest the steps. "He all right in there?"

"No, he's dying in there." Dufresne glanced
over his shoulder toward the door. "Hank's got emphysema. Some
day he's gonna stop coughing, and I'll be cleaning his lungs off the
floor along with everything else."

"Did Hank know Spaeth?"

"No."

"You sure?"

"Spaeth wouldn't go near him. Scared Hank had
something contagious."

We climbed to the third floor, Dufresne stopping at
the first door on the right of the staircase. "Your asshole used
to be in here."

Dufresne didn't have to use a key because the
old-fashioned glass knob twisted in his hand. Entering the room, I
could see carved foot and headboards, the same polished hardwood
floors as downstairs, and wallpaper that was separating only a little
in one corner from a water stain browning the ceiling plaster.

"Nice room," I said, meaning it.

"You rent from me, you get your money's worth."
Dufresne gestured at the floor. "Every time somebody moved out,
I'd do over his room. The floors, the walls. Bring up furniture from
the basement, restore it with sand-paper and varnish. Got through
twelve of the fourteen before I realized I'd never make my money
back."

"Fourteen?"

"Right. Four per floor on two through four. Just
a pair of roomers on the ground floor."

"Because you have the other half of it."

"Like you saw, eh? My bedroom's in the back of
the parlor we were in."

Parlor. That's what it'd felt like, too.

I walked around the room Spaeth had told me about.
However nice, it was only twelve-by-twelve, one window on the back
wall and a simple overhead light. A nightstand with no drawers stood
on one side of the bed, a bureau with no mirror on the other.

I pointed to the closed door on the window wall.

"Bathroom?"

"Closet. Bathroom on this floor's next to the
kitchen."

"So, four renters share the hopper and shower?"

"And sink. Some of them'll try to brush their
teeth in the kitchen, but I stop that pretty quick."

"Why?"

"You let them use the kitchen for bathroom
stuff, pretty soon they're pissing in that sink, too."

I looked at Dufresne, then went to the closet. Empty,
musty.

Turning back to the room door, I saw a dead bolt on
it, an old keyhole lock under the knob. "You give the roomers
keys to those?"

"The ones I got keys to."

"Including this room?"

"Yeah, but tell you the truth, the locks are so
old, just about everybody's is like a master key for all of them."

Which meant that Spaeth's story about somebody
stealing his gun wasn't so crazy. But given what Spaeth had said
about Dufresne's attitude on firearms, I thought I ought to hold that
until after I asked about the alibi witness.

"You said the man with emphysema didn't know
Spaeth. Anybody else here friendly with him?"

"With Spaeth, eh?"

"Yes."

"Just the Mick."

Here we go. "Irish guy, you mean?"

"Hey, no offense. I mean, you're Irish, too,
right?"

"Grew up about ten blocks from here."

"Ten blocks? You might know him, then. With his
whole name and all."

"Who?" I said, innocent.
 
"This barfly named 'Mickey Mantle,' like the
baseball player."

"Never had the pleasure"

"You ever go to the Quencher?"

God, that took me back, all the way to high school.
The drinking age in Massachusetts was supposed to be twenty-one, and
it was enforced everywhere except for private homes or college
campuses. And at the Quencher, a dive with benches in the booths and
the smell of stale smoke and fresh urine in the air. The owner was
named Victor, an older guy from Poland, though there were photos
around the bar of him as a younger man, in the circus and very
muscular.

Dufresne said, "The Mick claims it was dimeys at
the Quencher got him started on the brew."

It was possible. You could get served there if you
had proof of being at least eighteen. Construction workers would mob
the bar after they left the job sites, buying a round of "dimeys"—a
six-ounce glass of beer that cost a dime—for any kids in the place.

Dufresne shook his head. "Only thing is, I know
a lot of guys say they had their first beer at the Quencher, but not
all of them became boozers."

"This Mantle really likes the stuff?"

"Likes it too much. Half-lit, funniest guy you
ever been around. Anybody'll talk to him, even women. And the things
he comes out with. You know there's this new Irish cable channel?"

"I've caught it a couple of times."

"Well, the Mick, he sees some kind of music show
on the screen at a bar, then hears about this Portuguese guy over in
Somerville who's on a hunger strike till they carry a Portuguese
channel, too. The Mick says to me, 'Hey, Vinnie, you got to have a
rent strike till they give you a French channel.' "

The honking laugh. "See what I mean?"

"Funny." I said, guessing you had to be
there.

"Yeah, but that's only when he's half-lit."
Dufresne shook his head again. "All the way drunk, the Mick's a
fucking mess, days at a time."

"Could we check his room, too?"
 
A cocking of the head I thought I recognized.
"Viewing fee's double when somebody's still living there."

I gave Dufresne the forty, and he moved diagonally
across to the front room on the other side of the staircase. He
fished around for a while in his side pocket, coming out with a key
that turned in the lock right away.

I said, "Handy you had that with you."

"This?" He held it up. “This isn't the
Mick's key. I had the locksmith come in, make me a real master."
Dufresne twisted the glass knob, and we entered a bay-windowed front
room that was bigger than Spaeth's, maybe fifteen feet square. The
walls were painted instead of papered, but similar furniture and
floor. However, the sheets on the bed lay filthy and unmade, the air
smelling like the Quencher in high August. I wasn't surprised that
nobody was there.

Dufresne frowned. "Fuck, it's no better than
last week."

"Last week?"

"Yeah. I had to help him up the stairs one
night. The Mick's a carpenter, makes good money when he works. But
he's been on and off the benders for over a month."

The only towel I saw in the room was heaped on the
floor by the bureau. I walked over to it and bent down. Bone dry.

"You remember which day last week?"

Dufresne cocked his head a new way. "That I
helped him? Monday or Tuesday, maybe?"

Woodrow Gant had been shot on Wednesday night. "Can't
you just throw Mantle out?"

A confused look now. "I don't get you."

"He keeps his room like this, and him not
working means he's not paying rent. Is the—"

"Oh, the Mick's all paid up."

I stopped. "What?"

"Yeah. A month ago maybe, I caught him coming in
drunk again, only this time just the half-lit, eh?"

"Go on."

"Well, he wasn't working, like I told you, so I
said to him, 'You've already missed two Fridays now. What's the
story, you got money for the brew and not the weekly?' And the Mick
says, 'Hey, Vinnie, I'm sorry, really.' And he reaches into his
pants, pulls out this wad of cash, and pays the two Fridays he owes
and the next four as well."

"Wait a minute. He paid you the whole
arrearage—"

"Right."

"—and a month's advance?"

"Right, right."

"All at once?"

"Like I just said."

I thought about it. "Do you remember when this
was, too?"

The same canting of the head. “A Monday. I remember
thinking, 'He didn't have two weeklies three days ago, and he's got
six for me now?' "

"So, a Monday, a month ago."

"Right."

About the time that . . . “Mr. Dufresne, was this
before or after Alan Spaeth moved out?"

Dufresne got angry. "Right before. I remember
thinking about what my mother used to say, eh?"

"Your mother?"
 
"Yeah,
she'd tell me, 'Remember, Vincennes, God gives with one hand and
takes away with the other.' "

"Meaning?"

Dufresne looked disappointed in me. "Meaning I
get money I'm owed plus upfront from the Mick, but this asshole
Spaeth is in my face about me stealing his gun and says he's leaving.
Which also means I got five empty rooms, and the mortgage bank don't
care about—"

"Please, Mr. Dufresne, this could be very
important."