The only good Lawyer

entire meal consisted of ice water and the softest bread in the fridge for toast.
    My landlord has cable TV, and I watched the repeat of a local college football game, thinking it seemed more like a high school event, including the apparent age of the players when they took off their helmets. At noontime, I risked some tuna fish on more of the soft bread, and after lunch I felt recovered enough to call a cab and visit the State Police near the Museum of Science .
    They were pretty gentle with me, so I decided to walk to my office. The half a mile took half an hour, but the body parts other than my ribcage started to loosen up and let me feel human again, at least until I stepped down off a curb or got jostled by another citizen in a hurry to make that next appointment.
    Inside the lobby of my building, I treated myself to the slow elevator instead of the stairs. Opening the office door, some envelopes had come through the mail slot along with the junk circulars. Not surprisingly, the envelopes had canceled stamps or postage-meter markings on them.
    All except one, that is.
    I processed the regular mail and pitched the circulars, then turned the maverick around and over a few times. Just a plain white, business-sized envelope. No address—or return address—but sealed and very light in weight.
    I opened it. There was a single sheet of photocopy paper, folded perfectly in threes, an image centered on one side when I smoothed the paper out. The image was of a xeroxed phone message from a pad like the one I’d seen at the reception desk of Epstein & Neely, the generic information printed, the specific in precise handwriting. It read:

    to : DML
    from: Ms. Barber
    tel # : (617) 513-1944
    date/time : September 3rd, 9:51 a.m.
    message : Please call her ASAP

    Then, under the acronym for “as soon as possible,” there was scrawled a second message, in different, seemingly hurried handwriting and at a forty-five-degree angle to the vertical. It read:

    WWG,
    Got a closing. Can you call her back?
    DML

    I went over the xeroxed image again. It was dated seven weeks before, or almost six weeks before Woodrow Gant died. “DML” had to be Deborah Ling’s initials, and “WWG” Gant’s. But the exchange was the same as the law firm’s, and the name “Barber” came up again. The temp Patricia had used it when she interrupted Ling and me the first time I’d visited Epstein & Neely. And the same name was repeated by Imogene Burbage at the reception desk the prior Friday. In her office, Ling had said Barber was just one of Woodrow Gant’s divorce clients anxious to sell a marital home. Which made sense at the time.
    If Ling had been telling me the truth, that is. Which she hadn’t always.
    Then I looked at the photocopied message as a whole and thought about who might have slipped the envelope through my mail slot. I came up with a pretty good candidate, but I used the telephone first.
    After dialing the number on the message, I heard two rings and then “Kim Baker.”
    “I’m sorry,” I said. “I thought this was Ms. Bar ber’s number.”
    Some breathing on the other end before, “Who is this, please?”
    “I’m returning Ms. Barber’s call.”
    More breathing. “Call for whom?”
    I said, “Woodrow Gant at Epstein & Neely.”
    More breathing still, then just a hang-up.
    I dialed again, but nobody answered this time, and no tape machine or voice mail had kicked in after ten rings.
    Opening the drawer of my desk that held the photo album, I took out my reverse phone directory and ran down the number.

    The small office building on lower State Street was just a coin toss from Boston ’s elevated Central Artery that, once depressed, will no longer be a “pedestrian-flow barrier” between the Quincy Market area and our waterfront. I didn’t have to look at the lobby directory for “Harborview Realty Company”: Its stenciled picture window constituted most of the visible ground floor.
    I walked inside the door next to the window. A woman beaming a Pepsodent smile sat at the front desk to my left. It was removed from the dozen others in two rows behind her, at which three women and two men sat, several with telephones cradled at the shoulder while they scrolled information across computer screens. The reception desk seemed far less cluttered than the others. Just a pad and a telephone console.
    “I’m Kelly O’Shea.” The beaming woman beamed at me until I turned and she noticed my right eye. “Uh,