The only good Lawyer

walk to the courthouse.

    From the last plaza step outside the main entrance, I noticed Nancy Meagher come through the revolving door. My heart did the little dance it learned the first time I’d ever seen her, presenting the Commonwealth’s side in an arson/murder hearing. She was dressed the same way, too, in a skirt-and-jacket gray suit, white blouse, and modest heels that kicked her height up to five-nine and change. The autumn-length black hair just brushed her shoulders, framing a face of bright blue eyes over freckles and pearly teeth, an image on a postcard from County Kerry . Nancy had received a cancer scare of her own a month before, and our working through it had brought us closer together.
    Shifting the strap of her bulging totebag onto a shoulder, she went up on tiptoes to peck the corner of my mouth. “If I’m not mistaken, it’s your turn to pick drinks and dinner.”
    I gave her a one-armed hug. “It is indeed.”
    “We walking or driving?”
    “Walking, unless the totebag’s going to give you trouble.”
    “The weight won’t, but what’s inside it might.”
    I turned us toward Beacon Street . “Tough trial?” Nancy shook her head. “The legislature’s finally approved some new superior court judgeships for the governor to fill, and I’m supposed to help our administrative people decide if there’s any current nominee we should be opposing.”
    “Based on trial attorneys like you litigating against the nominees as opponents?”
    “You got it.”
    “Not much fun.”
    “No, but it’s important to my boss, and he’s been loyal to me, so...” Nancy shook her head again. “How about if we talk about something besides the court system for a while, okay?”
    I’d wanted to bring up the Alan Spaeth case with her, get it over with, but right then didn’t seem the time.

    Twenty minutes later, Nancy said, “Don’t tell me you’ve joined the Harvard Club?”
    “I was Holy Cross, Nance,” though we had reached the intersection of Massachusetts Avenue and Commonwealth. I gestured toward a doorway in the hotel on the corner.
    She read the name over the threshold. “The Eliot Lounge?”
    “This is drinks.”
    We stepped down into the dark, wood-paneled foom, a bar in front of us with stools and taps, a raised platform area off to the right with tables.
    Nancy looked around, allowing her eyes to adjust, I think. “I‘ve never been here, but...?”
    “The Boston Marathon .”
    “Oh, right. The place that has a party afterwards.”
    “Not a party, the party.”
    She said, “Then how come we didn’t come here when you ran?”
    “Because after I finished the race, my legs were barely able to climb curbs, remember?”
    “I remember how stupid it was for a man six-three—”
    “—a little under, Nance-—”
    “—and almost two hundred pounds to run twenty-six miles without stopping when he didn’t have to.”
    “And I remember you, waiting for me at the finish line.”
    “With my camera.”
    “It was the ‘you’ part that mattered.”
    A smile crossed her face, almost from ear to ear. “That was certainly the right thing to say. Where do we sit?”
    I ordered a pint of draught ale for each of us and led her to a table under the “Wall of Memory.” There were photos and testaments to Johnny Kelley, who ran more Bostons than any other human being, winning several times around 1940 before finally having to stop in the early nineties. I identified some candid shots of Joan Benoit Samuelson, the great women’s and Olympic champion, and of course Boston ’s own Bill Rodgers, who finished first an incredible four times in six years.
    Nancy looked up at the wall as our drinks arrived. “You really know who all these people are?”
    Alberto Salazar, Greg Meyer, Cosmos Ndeti. “Most of them. But this was never just a runner’s bar. Professors from Berklee College of Music played jazz. And reporters from the old Phoenix kibitzed with state senators ducking quorum calls. Even the great Bill Lee made an appearance.”
    “Bill Lee?”
    “The Spaceman. He was pitching for the Red Sox one afternoon at Fenway when the game got delayed by rain. He came over to the bar in his uniform and cleats, drinking beer while monitoring the rain on television, running back to the park to retake the mound.”
    Nancy looked at me. “And when was all this?”
    “The mid-to late-seventies.”
    “John?”
    “What?”
    “In the mid- to late-seventies, the only time I’d have seen any of