The only good Lawyer

man’s room.”
    “It ain’t his anymore.”
    “The one he used to rent, then.”
    “There’s a viewing fee, eh?”
    The fourth gotta. “How much?”
    “I go by the amount of time I spend. So—”
    “—Twenty bucks for twenty minutes, if that.” Dufresne said, “Let’s see it.”
    I dug out my wallet, handed him the bill. He stood up and led me out of his sitting room to the corridor and a central staircase.
    As we topped the first flight, I could see four room doors, all closed. Labored, wheezy coughing came from behind the one nearest the steps. “He all right in there?”
    “No, he’s dying in there.” Dufresne glanced over his shoulder toward the door. “Hank’s got emphysema. Some day he’s gonna stop coughing, and I’ll be cleaning his lungs off the floor along with everything else.”
    “Did Hank know Spaeth?”
    “No.”
    “You sure?”
    “Spaeth wouldn’t go near him. Scared Hank had something contagious.”
    We climbed to the third floor; Dufresne stopping at the first door on the right of the staircase. “Your asshole used to be in here.”
    Dufresne didn’t have to use a key because the old-fashioned glass knob twisted in his hand. Entering the room, I could see carved foot- and headboards, the same polished hardwood floors as downstairs, and wallpaper that was separating only a little in one corner from a water stain browning the ceiling piaster.
    “Nice room,” I said, meaning it.
    “You rent from me, you get your money’s worth.” Dufresne gestured at the floor. “Every time somebody moved out, I’d do over his room. The floors, the walls. Bring up furniture from the basement, restore it with sand-paper and varnish. Got through twelve of the fourteen before I realized I’d never make my money back.”
    “Fourteen?”
    “Right. Four per floor on two through four. Just a pair of roomers on the ground floor.”
    “Because you have the other half of it.”
    “Like you saw, eh? My bedroom’s in the back of the parlor we were in.”
    Parlor. That’s what it’d felt like, too.
    I walked around the room Spaeth had told me about. However nice, it was only twelve-by-twelve, one window on the back wall and a simple overhead light. A nightstand with no drawers stood on one side of the bed, a bureau with no mirror on the other.
    I pointed to the closed door on the window wall.
    “Bathroom?”
    “Closet. Bathroom on this floor’s next to the kitchen.”
    “So, four renters share the hopper and shower?”
    “And sink. Some of them’ll try to brush their teeth in the kitchen, but I stop that pretty quick.”
    “Why?”
    “You let them use the kitchen for bathroom stuff, pretty soon they’re pissing in that sink, too.”
    I looked at Dufresne, then went to the closet. Empty, musty.
    Turning back to the room door, I saw a dead bolt on it, an old keyhole lock under the knob. “You give the roomers keys to those?”
    “The ones I got keys to.”
    “Including this room?”
    “Yeah, but tell you the truth, the locks are so old, just about everybody’s is like a master key for all of them.” Which meant that Spaeth’s story about somebody stealing his gun wasn’t so crazy. But given what Spaeth had said about Dufresne’s attitude on firearms, I thought I ought to hold that until after I asked about the alibi witness.
    “You said the man with emphysema didn’t know Spaeth. Anybody else here friendly with him?”
    “With Spaeth, eh?”
    “Yes.”
    “Just the Mick.”
    Here we go. “Irish guy, you mean?”
    “Hey, no offense. I mean, you’re Irish, too, right?”
    “Grew up about ten blocks from here.”
    “Ten blocks? You might know him, then. With his whole name and all.”
    “Who?” I said, innocent.
    “This barfly named ‘Mickey Mantle,’ like the baseball player.”
    “Never had the pleasure.”
    “You ever go to the Quencher?”
    God, that took me back, all the way to high school. The drinking age in Massachusetts was supposed to be twenty-one, and it was enforced everywhere except for private homes or college campuses. And at the Quencher, a dive with benches in the booths and the smell of stale smoke and fresh urine in the air. The owner was named Victor; an older guy from Poland , though there were photos around the bar of him as a younger man, in the circus and very muscular.
    Dufresne said, “The Mick claims it was dimeys at the Quencher got him started on the brew.”
    It was possible. You could get served there if you had proof of being