The only good Lawyer

slicked-back hair and a pencil-thin mustache leaning against a woman with high cheekbones and a hairdo that could have coined the term “wavy.” From their expressions, they were facing the difficulties of a postwar world with desperate courage. “Best role she ever had, B-movie with Zachary Scott that went nowhere fast. The posters are hers, the furniture what she got from divorcing husband number three.”
    The name “Danielle Dufresne” appeared in lettering next to and the same size as “Zachary Scott” on the one poster, in the first or second line of supporting cast for the rest. “She was in a lot of films.”
    “Films.” Dufresne looked at me a little more carefully. “That’s what she called them. Not ‘movies,’ or ‘flicks,’ or ‘bombs,’ which half of them were. ‘A movie, Vincennes , is what a salesman takes of his vacation so he can bore the neighbors; a film is a work of creative art.’ And then more bullshit after that.”
    “Being in films make her happy?”
    “No, but that don’t make her different from anybody else on God’s earth, eh? She didn’t have the talent of an Ingrid Bergman, and she couldn’t lose enough of her accent to be anything but the ‘French girl.’ “ Then Dufresne seemed to remember he hadn’t invited me over for a seminar on the cinema. “What’s a lawyer interested in me for?”
    “Not you. Alan Spaeth.”
    “I should have known.” Dufresne dropped his head, making me notice he was wearing old-style bedroom slippers, those leather scuffles that sell well only before Father’s Day. “What an asshole.”
    “You didn’t care for him.”
    “I should have booted Spaeth out the first night he was here.”
    “Why?”
    “You told me at the door, I let you in, we can save some time. It’d take days to give you everything on him.”
    “How about just the high points?”
    “High points? There weren’t any. Guy looked down on the Chateau like it was a flophouse, but I still had to chase him every Friday for the weekly.” Dufresne waved, his hand seeming to take in everything outside his sitting room. “I grant you, most of the guys living here are down on their luck, one way or the other. Oh, a couple of them just got old, nursing pensions but without any family to give them something to do, something to live for, you know? The rest are like Spaeth, divorce squeeze. Or drunks trying to dry out, druggies trying to kick the monkey.”
    “How’d you get into the business to start with?” Dufresne cocked his head a different way. He seemed to have a variety of positions to convey emotion without words. “Divorce myself. Why I feel sorry for guys like Spaeth, I suppose. The wife got everything but my mother’s furniture, and I had to live somewhere. My divorce lawyer—may he burn in hell—had a friend who owned this place, was retiring to Florida . That sounded good to me, so I come see the Chateau—it wasn’t called that then, ‘the Chateau’ is my name for it account of my mother she always was talking about living in one instead of some third-floor walk-up.”
    Dufresne took a breath. “Well, this was twenty years ago, and I was thirty years young. Somebody else’d said, ‘Go run a resort hotel, up in New Hampshire or Maine for the Quebecois , want to come down to the States on their vacation.’ But I didn’t have enough money from the divorce for a real ‘resort,’ and when I went to this talk some ‘expert’ was giving on bed and breakfasts, all he kept saying was the three gotta’s.”
    “ ‘Gotta’s’?”
    “Yeah. He said, you wanna run a B&B, you gotta be clean, you gotta be friendly, and you gotta—I loved this—you gotta ‘exceed the expectations of your guests.’ Well, that sounded to me a lot like being married, which I already knew I wasn’t crazy about, eh? So I said fuck it and bought this place with a mortgage like the White House oughta have and found out my own three gotta’s.”
    “Which are?”
    “Gotta pay me, gotta pay me, gotta pay me.”
    Dufresne laughed, a honking sound that contrasted with the way his accent smoothed over some of his consonants. “So here I am, a Frenchy in an Irish neighborhood, running a welfare hotel for deadbeats.”
    He seemed to run down, and I decided to build slowly toward Michael Mantle, the alibi witness. “About Spaeth?”
    Dufresne seemed to look at me for the first time, a new angle for the cocked head. “What about him?”
    “I’d like to see the