The only good Lawyer

ring finger contrasting against his black skin as the hand did against the pale gray pants. There was a Glock 19 over his right hip because the commissioner doesn’t want plainclothes officers wearing their weapon for a cross-draw that could spray bullets at a civilian before the muzzle comes to bear on the righteous target. Murphy held a clipboard in his left hand, frowning at something he saw on it.
    “Lieutenant.”
    Murphy looked over. “Cuddy. Keep your distance, ‘less you want a fine layer of Crazy Glue on that suit.”
    “Not exactly a dust-free environment.”
    A smile. “Commissioner’s promising us this real fuming facility —bigger version of that room the M.E.’s got over at the new morgue? We just have to wait for ‘Headquarters Building 2000’ to go up.” Murphy turned to the men near the tent. “How you doing?”
    “Nothing yet, Lieutenant.”
    I looked toward them, too, but spoke quietly to Murphy. “That stuff really work?”
    “If there’s anything there to find. This particular vehicle, I’m not so sure we’ll need it. Case it’s from might be a real bunny.”
    “Meaning open-and-shut?”
    A nod. “Three neighborhood civilians eyeballed a homeboy they knew from the time he was three empty his Tech-9 into two merry wanderers from a turf ten blocks away.”
    “A Tech-9? That’s thirty-two bullets.”
    “If the clip was full. Homeboys don’t always remember to reload, and the Crime Scene techs didn’t hope to recover all the slugs.”
    “Motive?”
    “Witnesses said it was because ‘they be down with his lady.’ He yelled it from the rear window as one of the other kids he hangs with obliged him as wheelman.” Murphy stuck the clipboard under his arm like a drill sergeant on parade. “If only they weren’t so stupid about it.” Then he seemed to remember I’d come to see him. “So, what are you wanting?”
    “I’m on the Alan Spaeth case.”
    Murphy’s face turned toward me slowly, the eyes giving me nothing, but the lips pursing some. “Steven Rothenberg.”
    “He asked me to talk with his client over at Nashua Street . I did.”
    “Not gonna make you many friends.”
    “And I don’t want to trade on the ones I’ve already got.”
    Murphy turned back to watch the progress on the Pontiac . “Meaning I should go over things for you without you asking right out.”
    “You once told me how you hated asking for favors.”
    Murphy nodded. “William Daniels.”
    The case I’d helped him with. “Which was why Rothenberg thought of me on this one.”
    The clipboard changed arms. “Funny how things come back around, isn’t it?” A little pawing of the floor with his right shoe. “Cuddy, the Gant killing is as high-profile as a homicide can get.”
    “All the more reason to be sure that, pretrial, you’ve got the right guy for it.”
    Lieutenant Robert Murphy looked at me, then set the clipboard down on a table before calling over to the two men at the plastic tent. “I’ll be out on the street a while.”

    The maroon Crown Victoria that Murphy had signed for back at the Homicide Unit turned left in front of me. I followed in the Prelude as the road became more rural and twisty. It’s easy to forget there are still some sections of the city like this, a two-lane parkway through a forested valley.
    Murphy slowed to maybe twenty miles an hour, eventually pulling onto the grassy shoulder near skid marks darker than their neighbors on the pavement. The Crown Vic trundled along the shoulder a while more, coming to a stop about fifty feet before a tree at the bottom of the slope. The tree had a strip of yellow plastic tape tied in a simple knot about eye-height on its trunk. I stopped behind Murphy’s bumper, and we both waited for a break in the traffic before exiting our driver’s side doors.
    Shrugging into his suit jacket so the Glock on his belt wouldn’t scare the people passing us on the roadway, he walked around the front of his vehicle to its righthand headlight, waiting for me.
    “You notice the skids?” he said.
    I glanced back toward where they started. “From the blown-out tire?”
    “Shot-out tire.” Murphy pointed ahead and toward the near treeline. “You see the tape?”
    “Yes. Crime Scene stuff?”
    “Right. Marked that trunk even with Gant’s body, behind his car.”
    “What make?”
    “BMW 530i.” Murphy gestured. “Gant was lying half on the pavement, half on the shoulder.”
    “Can we walk over