The only good Lawyer

Deborah Ling were planning to leave Epstein & Neely to open their own law office.”
    “No,” said Burbage to me.
    “I’m afraid so. The real estate broker they’d asked to help them rent space was one Frank here once used, to find this place when he was breaking off from the last of his old firms. The broker was smart enough, though, to use a different, if similar, name. ‘Barber’ instead of ‘Baker.’ ”
    “ ‘Barber.’ ” The secretary addressed her boss. “But then how would you know who she was?”
    “The telephone number itself, Imogene. The exchange was the same as ours here, not surprising given the few blocks between Ms. Baker’s office and this one.”
    Burbage seemed awed. “You remembered the last four digits for eight years?”
    “More like fifty-some,” I said.
    Now she was confused. “What?”
    Neely lost his smile. “The last four numbers are one-nine-four-four. The year of D-Day, Imogene.”
    “My God,” she said.
    I was pretty sure of the rest. “And seven weeks ago, when you saw that phone message for Gant via Ling on Ms. Burbage’s desk, you knew what it meant.”
    “Betrayal, John,” said Neely.
    “Because Gant was bailing out and taking Ling with him.”
    “Of course.” The senior partner seemed to go inside himself, reliving something. “Almost four years ago, when Woodrow approached me about joining the firm, I could tell he was a real go-getter, just what we needed, given Len’s dying months before. We never had a written partnership agreement here, but I made it clear to Woodrow that we needed his loyalty, a commitment to stay and build and be a part of the team. He agreed, and I took him at his word.” Neely came back to us. “But in the end, Woodrow betrayed me, John.”
    “Then why didn’t you kill Uta Radachowski as well?”
    Burbage drew in a breath, but Neely didn’t seem to notice.
    He said, “Uta? Why?”
    “She was leaving the firm, too, and from the files being transferred to you from her, you had to know about it.”
    “Uta told me, straight out.” Neely shook his head. “At her interview for my first firm, in fact. She made no bones back then about wanting to be a judge someday. When we all broke off from the second firm to form Epstein & Neely, Uta expressly promised Len and me that she’d stay with us forever unless she got a judgeship. Not only wouldn’t I stand in her way, I applauded the opportunity.” Neely fixed me with a baleful look. “No, Uta was forthright. It was Woodrow played the Judas.”
    “Just following in your footsteps, Frank.”
    A cocking of the head, a lot like Vincennes Dufresne at the Chateau in Southie. “What kind of a crack is that?”
    “You and Leonard Epstein jumped ship on your old firm, just the same way that Woodrow—”
    “Not in the least! You never knew Len, but you know me. And we were both men of honor, then and now.”
    “A man of honor sets up an innocent stooge to take the fall for him?”
    The accomplishment smile. “Your Mr. Alan Spaeth.”
    “That’s who I was thinking of.”
    “Then you can hardly call him an ‘innocent,’ John. He abused his family, first by neglecting them, then by putting them through the mill in his divorce case. He was... perfect.”
    “You’d heard Alan Spaeth berating Gant that day a few months ago at the deposition downstairs, even threatening him. Easy enough to wait one night until everybody else had gone home, then get Spaeth’s boarding-house address in Southie from the divorce file.”
    “Woodrow even helped out there, telling us at lunch a few weeks after the deposition about his client’s being afraid of the gun Spaeth still had.”
    “I can see you knowing about the revolver. I haven’t figured out how you got it from Spaeth’s room at the boarding-house.”
    “I didn’t. Mr. Michael Mantle got it for me.”
    “Not based on what I’ve heard from the landlord there. He—and even Spaeth himself—said Mantle was loyal to his friends.”
    “And so he was, John. To a fault, you might even say. Once I realized what a perfect scapegoat Spaeth could be, I began to spend my evenings following him. I started by using a car, but I noticed he and Mantle went out from the boarding-house at least three times a week to different bars within walking distance, so I just dressed the part and parked, waiting until one night when Mantle went out by himself. I left the car and tailed along to this dive, then sidled up to Mantle and began talking to