Neon Dragon (2 page)

There were at least five more hands, but they were cut off when Judge Bradley stood up.

“I know it's a difficult decision. You understand why I need an answer
now. The investigation has to begin immediately, while the evidence is fresh.”

He looked at me with an expression I'm still analyzing. He had faced one of the most trying decisions of his life in selecting one person to save his son, and he had made it. There was that kind of mature manhood in his look, and he was calling on me to show the same. There was also the helplessness of a man who could only hire a defender and then sit on the sidelines while two combatants jousted for the rest of his son's life.

“Will you do it?”

Like it or not, that question allowed only one answer.

JUDGE BRADLEY REASSEMBLED
the court long enough for me to move to suspend the hearing. That brought a quizzical look from my esteemed opposing counsel, who had come back to the arena with a distinct taste of blood from the morning's minivictories. Her visions of finally nailing my lacerated corpse to the courthouse door vanished when Judge Bradley granted my motion without so much as a glance in the direction of the plaintiff's table. The last thing His Honor wanted was a full discussion in open court of the reasons for the adjournment. Plaintiff's counsel may have been steamed, but it was the first motion I'd won since that interminable morning had begun. I was happy to delude myself with a false sense of being on a roll.

Since I was in the courthouse anyway, I thought I'd touch base with the prosecuting attorney. I managed to be buzzed through to the
office of the District Attorney herself, Ms. Lamb, by name, if not by disposition.

I knew that there was no point in dealing with any of the assistants. There was not a snowball's chance in Birmingham that Her Eminence would deign to share one vote-catching headline from this case with an underling. You didn't have to be in the inner circle to know that from the day she rode into office on pledges of career commitment to the prosecution of the scourges of society, she had her antenna tuned for the case that could move her into the statehouse. This one smacked of the governorship.

I had met the First Lady of Prosecution at several bar functions. We had also had a brief meeting four years previously to work out the federal and state prosecutors' interests in a drug case, so introductions were not necessary. If she was surprised by my announcement that I represented young Bradley, she hid it well.

“The hell you say!”

I smiled, rather pleasantly considering the inference.

“One of life's little surprises, Angela. Has an indictment been returned?”

“You haven't talked to him yet?”

She wore that half grin of someone who knew they'd made it to the NCAA Final Four, and who'd just heard that the next opponent would be the Perkins School for the Blind. I suppressed my Latino instincts and followed the cool demeanor of my Anglo half.

“I'll see him this afternoon. What about the indictment?”

“Of course. I just got the presentment from the grand jury. Murder one.”

It sounded more like a verdict than a basis for negotiation.

I nodded.

“I know it's early in the case. You have a better feel for it than I do at this point. Just for discussion, what do you think you might be looking for in negotiation before the press goes off the deep end?”

She sat back in her swivel chair and spun it around to look me
dead-on in a gesture that went beyond confidence and spilled into arrogance. If there was ever anything cuddly or cute about Ms. Lamb in her playpen days, she had accomplished its complete eradication in twelve years as a lawyer. At five feet five inches, she was one hundred and twenty pounds of pure prosecutor.

She was adorned in a severely tailored suit, capped on one end by sensible shoes and on the other by darkish hair drawn in a bun tight enough to induce claustrophobia. The horn-rimmed glasses focused laser beams from the depths of two humorless pools of ambition.

“Sure we can deal. I don't want to be unreasonable. I'll settle for a plea to premeditated murder with a recommendation for life without parole.”

I smiled, still the soul of restraint. “Do I sense that we're being a little inflexible here?”

“You haven't begun to see inflexibility. I'm going to personally throw the key to his cell into Boston Harbor, and then …”

“Don't tell me. You're going to Disney World.”

Humor was not her consuming passion, especially when it interrupted a flow. Personally, I had little else going for me.

Before accepting her invitation, in effect, to get-the-hell-out-of-her-office, I asked for a copy of the coroner's report on the deceased and a copy of the indictment. She agreed to send a copy of the coroner's report to my office as soon as one was prepared. The indictment she was delighted to hand over on the spot. No major concession. As defense counsel, I was entitled to both.

SUFFOLK COUNTY JAIL
is the holding pen for the not-yet-convicted. There was little hope that young Bradley would have any other address pending the trial since bail is almost never granted on a murder-one charge.

I sat in the interviewing room in one of the two chairs that flanked a well-worn wooden table that had listened to the intimate sharing of
truths and lies between counsel and every conceivable variety of felon since long before I'd joined the battle on the side of defendants. I'd been there before, and every time, I thanked God for the particular twists and crossroads of life that put me in the chair to the left instead of the right of the door. When the interview ended, I was out of there. The person in the other chair was going back to hell. It could easily have been otherwise.

I knew more about young Bradley than most of the people I'd met in that room. Without much thought over the years, I'd read the articles about the young halfback at Arlington High School running in his father's footsteps. My interest was more in football than in Bradley, but he did well enough to be a recognizable name, which is an accomplishment for a high-school player.

He played freshman ball for Harvard, but like many high-school hotshots, he could never quite make the jump to the college level. He was given the option to ride the bench as a sophomore, probably out of deference to his father's record with the Harvard team, but young Bradley chose to opt out. He left the team and all the bonuses that went with it. His life from that point in time to this early February of his junior year was a blank to me, since he was out of my most constant source of information—the
Globe
sports section.

Most of the prisoners I'd seen come through that door blended with the society-gone-wrong surroundings. I've seen sullenness, anger, craftiness, and, worst of all, resignation. But every inch of the six-foot-four-inch body that stood holding out a strong right hand seemed to say, “I don't belong here!” He was clean looking, with enough sincere humility to counterbalance the self-confidence that goes with an attractive appearance. But there was more to it than that. Something smacked of quality. Maybe I was seeing a reflection of his father, but there was a bright look in his eyes and a gentleness that made me want to win this one for the right reasons.

Introductions were briefly made, and we both sat down.

“Your dad asked me to represent you, Anthony.”

“I know, sir. Thank you.”

It certainly beat “the hell you say!” as a reaction. This kid was beginning to grow on me.

“What happened yesterday, Anthony?”

He gave a slight palms-up gesture. “I wish I knew myself, Mr. Knight.”

“Just tell me what you did.”

“Church in the morning. Back to the house. I live in Dunster House down by the river. I did some reading for a paper. I guess it was about two in the afternoon, a friend of mine came by and suggested we go into Chinatown for dinner and see the Chinese New Year's.”

“Who's idea was it, yours or—what's his name?”

“Terry Blocher. It was his idea, but I was ready to go.”

“OK. Leave in all the details.”

“Well, that's what we did. We had dinner at the Ming Tree restaurant on Tyler Street. Things were really getting revved up outside. By the time we came out at three thirty, there were fireworks going off everywhere. The street was about an inch deep in firecracker paper. Some people were throwing cherry bombs. It was deafening. Terry had decided when we came in that it was too loud. He said he was going to walk back to Park Street and get the train back to Harvard Square.

“I saw the big cloth lion with people under it coming up to the little Chinese grocery shop across the street. The noise got even louder because the people at the shop lit off big chains of firecrackers in front of the lion. There were drums, cymbals, you couldn't hear yourself think.”

“Where were you standing in regard to the shop?”

“I guess right in front of it. It's a narrow street. I was probably ten yards from the shop.”

I figured the estimate was good. Who could judge ten yards better than a former running back?

“Did you see anyone in the window above the front door of the shop?”

He thought for a second.

“There were people at every window on the street. I'm sure there were people there, but nothing stands out.”

“So how long were you there?”

“It's hard to say. Maybe three or four minutes. The noise was getting to me, too, so I moved down the street toward Beach Street. I just got around the corner, when two policemen stopped me. They told me I was under arrest for murder. The whole thing was unreal. They gave me warnings about the right to remain silent and brought me to the station house.”

I leaned back and looked at him. He was sitting up straight and looking me right in the eye. I liked that. In fact, the more I grew to like about him, the larger the knot grew in the pit of my stomach.

“When you went into Chinatown, did you have a gun with you?”

He looked at me like I'd asked if he'd been dressed in drag. Then he realized that the circumstances made the question seem less ridiculous.

“No. I don't have a gun.”

I leaned back to keep eye contact.

“They're charging that an old man in the window above the grocery shop was shot to death just at the time the cloth lion was at the door. Did you see anyone with a gun?”

He shook his head.

“Did you hear anything like a gunshot?”

“Everything sounded like a gunshot.”

“I know. Someone had a great sense of timing. Can you think of any reason why two witnesses might have picked you out of the crowd?”

He leaned forward with his head on his hands. “Almost everyone there was Chinese or maybe Vietnamese. I was about a head taller than anyone and the only one I could see with black skin. I'd be pretty hard to miss.”

“What I meant was did you make any moves that could have been mistaken for firing a gun?”

He shrugged and just shook his head.

I flipped the notebook closed and stood up. He was on his feet too, looking perplexed and making me wish I could walk him right out the door with me.

“Where are they keeping you, Anthony?”

He caught my meaning. He was the son of a judge who had dealt with some of the people with whom he was presently sharing quarters. Jailhouse murders are far too common and easy to cover up in a silent society.

“I'm OK so far. They keep me in a single cell and bring in my meals.”

I jotted my cell-phone number on my card and gave it to him with instructions to call night or day if things changed, even a little bit.

BY TWO O'CLOCK I
was back at the office. Bilson, Dawes had the tenth and eleventh floors of a triangular building on Franklin Street. They had grown from the ten partners and five associates I had joined as an associate three years previously to twenty partners and seven associates, piggybacking on the financial success of their corporate clients. Since success breeds success, the partners kept a sharp eye on the gate to let in as new clients only corporate personae on the rise. When Willie Sutton spun off his famous answer to the question of why he robbed banks, he was also laying down a game plan for Bilson, Dawes's selection of clients: “That's where the money is.”

On the walk down the hall to my office, I had the feeling that I'd brought a blast of the winter chill in with me. While the joy of human
camaraderie was not exactly the hallmark of the firm on its best day, I noticed as I'd pass their offices the partners giving me fleeting glances that were even more drained of warmth than usual.

I was something of an anomaly at Bilson, Dawes. The firm, and therefore the partners, thrived—in fact, more than thrived—on fees from clean, unsullied
civil
litigation. By contrast, my earlier days at the U.S. Attorney's office had given me a familiarity with most of the judges at the federal district court, which meant that a fairly steady stream of criminal court appointments to represent indigent defendants followed me to the firm. For all of their pious and publicized pro bono posturing, the partners suffered this acne on the pristine skin of the firm not gladly. And the frequently scruffy, scratching, whiskey-breathing criminal clients who decorated the firm waiting room as a result of my court appointments did nothing to liberalize their sentiments.

I never made it to my office. Julie Benson, my secretary of three years and one of the human elements that made life tolerable at the firm, nearly had tears in her eyes when she intercepted me with a note.

“SEE ME IMMEDIATELY! A.D.”

To the outside world, “A.D.” stood for Alexis Devlin. To any associate and most of the junior partners, it meant “Angel of Death.”

I had had no direct dealings with Mr. Devlin—“Lex” to those who dared—since he joined the firm two years previously. Word around the courthouse had it that in his day, which was some ten years past, he was the best there was at the criminal bar. For some reason, as he was rising from star to legend, he suddenly dropped out. You heard conflicting rumors among those with their three-piece suits pressed to the bars of the city's watering holes, but no one really seemed to know why. Word had it that he had a taste for the grape, but you could lay that one at the door of a fair percentage of the trial bar. Given the pressures of the trade, it's endemic.