The only good Lawyer

silver Honda Prelude, the last year of the original model. Twenty minutes later, I found Vincennes Dufresne’s boarding-house in Southie, a few blocks from where East Broadway ends at Pleasure Bay . The neighborhood is mostly blue-collar and virtually all white, a questionable legacy of the desegregation crisis two decades earlier.
    The rooming house itself was a wooden four-decker on a block of threes, so it stood out like the gawky kid in a class photo. At one time maybe a forest green, the paint on the clapboard had weathered from salt, sun, and snow to a streaked and peeling olive drab. The trim around the bay windows stacked on either side of the centered portico also needed painting, and the concrete steps leading up to the front door were crumbly at every trod edge. If you could read a book by its cover, the only thing holding the place up would be the party walls shared with its neighbors.
    At the entrance, a sign block-printed on a pink five-by-eight note card was tacked above the bell. The sign read:

    the chateau
    no trespassing
    no soliciting
    no shit

    My kind of place.
    I pushed the button and heard a sound inside like a dentist’s drill. I let up, waited a minute, and hit it again. Same noise.
    I was an inch away from a third try at the button when something heavy bumped against the door from the inside. The wood creaked loudly on its hinges and opened.
    The man in the doorway stood about five-six and blinked blearily. His black, curly hair was as long on his eyebrows as on his head, which hadn’t seen a comb yet. The mustache had bars of red through it, hooking over and covering his upper and lower lips like hundreds of narrow, curved claws. He hadn’t shaved yet, either, the black stubble on the pale cheeks, jaw, and neck as riddled with red as the mustache. The man wore a strappy T-shirt over brown pants cinched a little too high. Once the eyes stopped blinking, though, they were dark and full of fire, with enough crow’s-feet at the corners to make me push his age up ten years from the thirty-five I’d originally thought.
    He said, “You got a name?” a vestigial accent softening some of the consonants.
    “John Cuddy.”
    “Let’s see some ID, eh?”
    I took out the leather folder with the laminated copy of my license in it. The man looked down through the plastic, cocking his head to squint, as though his eyes didn’t focus straight-on.
    Then he looked up at me. “Private means you’re not a cop.”
    The accent now sounded French-Canadian. “Right.”
    “And not cop means you got no official business with my place, and I don’t got to talk with you.”
    My place. “ Vincennes Dufresne?”
    His eyes didn’t like that. “So?”
    “It’s just that you have a choice. You can talk to me here and now, or we can subpoena you in for a deposition, have you sit around a law office downtown for a day or two.”
    His eyes liked that even less. “Now you sound like a lawyer, eh?”
    “I’m working for one.”
    “Lawyers. When they swim, you can see their fins breaking the surface.”
    “Meaning you think of them as sharks.”
    “Worse. You give a shark a hunk of meat, he eats it, maybe leaves you alone. A lawyer, you give him a hunk of meat, first he eats you, figuring he can always go back for the meat.”
    If we weren’t on the Chateau’s front steps, I thought the owner would have spit. “Tell you what, Mr. Dufresne. How about you ask me inside, and that way everybody saves some time with the lawyers?” He cocked his head a different way, shifted his lips to the right, and turned without shutting the door on me. I followed him into a dimly lit foyer, then left through a freshly painted door.
    And into a different world.
    Framed movie posters from the forties were mounted on walls soaring ten feet to molded plaster fretwork around the perimeter of the room. A three-tiered chandelier anchored the middle of the space, with delicate, antique chairs and burled, carved tables straddling a tiled fireplace. The floor was hardwood, sanded and polyed to the point that it shone like the mirror over the mantel.
    I thought, “time-warp,” but kept it to myself. Dufresne settled himself into a Louis-the-Someteenth chair and motioned me toward the more substantial couch. “Not what you’d expect from the street, eh?”
    “Not exactly. Where’d you get all this?”
    “My mother.” Dufresne motioned to one of the posters behind him, showing a waist-up portrait of a man with