The only good Lawyer

Spaeth began to cry from both the good eye and the bad one, and I felt that twinge in my gut a third time.

    When I walked through the door of Steve Rothenberg’s office suite, he was just turning away from the disco receptionist and she was just readjusting her earphones. Rothenberg looked at my face, frowned, and beckoned me back to his own office.
    Once inside, he moved around his desk and dropped into the chair while I took one of the worn seats in front of him. Then Rothenberg began combing his beard with his fingers again. “You saw Alan Spaeth?”
    “I did.”
    “And?”
    “Your client’s a jerk.”
    For some reason, Rothenberg seemed to take heart from that. “Most of my clients are.”
    “A racist jerk, Steve.”
    The frown again. “I was afraid that might show through.”
    “It’ll ‘show through’ wherever he happens to be, especially the witness stand.”
    Rothenberg swung in his chair a little. “There are three decisions I have to leave to the client in every case, John. The first is whether to plead out or go to trial.”
    “The D.A.’s office likely to offer much for a plea?”
    “Zip, without that alibi witness.”
    “Named ‘Mickey Mantle.’ ”
    Rothenberg winced. “If it’s to be a trial, then the second decision I leave to the client is whether to have the judge or a jury as the decider of fact.”
    “Won’t matter here, will it?”
    Rothenberg chose not to answer. “What I was building to is the third decision, whether the accused takes the stand in his own defense.”
    “Spaeth testifies, even a rookie prosecutor would draw him out on cross, and either a judge or a jury would crucify him.”
    “But... rightly?”
    I watched Rothenberg as he watched me. “You mean for the murder of Woodrow Gant?”
    “That’s what I mean.”
    We watched each other some more.
    “No,” I said finally.
    Rothenberg let out a breath I hadn’t realized he was holding. The fingers went back to grooming his beard.
    “So, you joining the team?”
    “Who’s got the file at Homicide?”
    “Robert Murphy.”
    The black lieutenant I’d helped on the William Daniels case. “And you’re sure Nancy Meagher’s not connected with this prosecution?”
    Rothenberg reeled off the names of two A.D.A.’s. I’d never heard Nancy mention either one, not so surprising when you consider Suffolk County employs over a hundred of them.
    Then Rothenberg came forward in his chair; palms flat on the desktop. “Look, John. For what it’s worth, here’s my view. Somebody killed one of my brothers at the bar in cold blood on a deserted road. Shot the poor devil three times from like ten feet away. I picture that, and I can’t let the somebody get away with it, all right? But I’m not a cop or a prosecutor; so I can’t go after the real killer. I’m just the lawyer who’s trying to show the system that they need to keep looking because the defendant they’ve settled on is the wrong one. And with your help, I just might be able to do that. Now, what do you say?”
    Rothenberg might have a shaky practice and a shabby office, but he had that guild loyalty I’d sensed in the people around me during my one year of law school many years ago. And he’d also been loyal to me.
    I sat back and told Steve Rothenberg what I was going to do.

Chapter 2

    L eaving steve rothenberg’s office for the second time that Tuesday, I bought a tuna pita from a deli in Boylston Alley. Eating the pocket sandwich on a bench along the border of Boston Common, I watched the flow of people past me. The homeless with their shopping bags drooping from hyperextended hands, stiff blankets around their shoulders like starched shawls. Day care workers pushing six-foot vegetable carts, filled not with cabbages and tomatoes but rather three-year-olds, twisting and squirming but mostly smiling and laughing as they got wheeled around the park. Beyond the curb, tourist trolleys— kind of vegetable carts for adults—motored by, their drivers echoing spiels about historical sights left andright.
    Walking back to my own office on Tremont Street , I pretty much ratified the position I’d taken with Rothenberg. I spent most of the afternoon on paperwork in other cases. Then I tackled the utility and other bills from the condo I was renting, sorting them into piles mentally labeled “Due,” “Past Due,” and “Lights Out.”
    Suitably depressed, I decided to leave those problems at my locked office door and went downstairs for the