The only good Lawyer

a dead one.’ And then he goes to roll over. And I roust him some more. Ask him where he was. He says, ‘Here, drinking. Just ask the Mick.’ And Spaeth tries to roll over again. Not like he’s acting, either. I think he’s too stupid for that. It was more like he really wasn’t concerned.”
    “The way an innocent man might behave.”
    Murphy moved on to his ring finger. “Third thing doesn’t feel right. Every other case I know of with a husband killing his wife’s lawyer the guy grandstands. Does some obvious, hot-dog thing, like shoot in broad daylight on a city street or a courtroom plaza to have an audience, be the center of attention. But this here was set up as though the guy wanted to get away with it.”
    I looked up at the hillside and nodded.
    Murphy noticed me looking. “That’s the fourth thing.”
    “What is?”
    The pinkie now. “My way of seeing it, the killer has to be following Gant for a long time, figure out about the restaurant and this route. Granted your guy had plenty of opportunity to do that since his threat at the law office back in August. But I also see our shooter sitting up there on that hillside during a fairly chilly night for quite a while, watching for Gant’s BMW. Then the killer lines up the rifle and pops off the tire. But after the car comes to a stop here, what doesn’t the killer do?”
    Murphy’s face stayed on the hillside. “The killer doesn’t use the rifle to take out Gant nice and safe from a distance. No, our shooter makes his way down here, maybe while the victim’s walking around the back, checking his tire and the gas smell. The killer gets up close and personal, then drills the man three times. Why?”
    I pictured it. “The shooter wanted Gant to know who killed him.”
    “Right. To look into Gant’s eyes as the man recognizes who it is. Maybe say something, even.” Murphy finally turned to me again. “That’s cold, Cuddy. Very fucking cold. And it’s also why I don’t see the woman from the restaurant—whoever she is—still being in the car then. Somebody that stone-kills doesn’t leave witnesses lying around.”
    “I like the ‘somebody’ part.”
    A sound between a sigh and a grunt. “I can prove Spaeth did it, but I don’t feel he did. I wouldn’t be lying your guy into jail, but I’d be doing the next thing, helping whoever set him up.”
    “Which is why we’re out here.”
    “And why you’re getting nothing more from me. Somebody hears I led you to this spot, I can always say I thought you might let something slip. After today, though, it’s me working with my side’s lawyer, and you working with yours.”
    Murphy began walking away from me. “Lieutenant?”
    He kept walking.
    I said, “Granted you’re in for the prosecution, but who are you rooting for?”
    Murphy stopped, then turned around. “Woodrow Gant was a role model. The kind we need, especially for the work he did as an A.D.A. I were you, I’d talk to the Gang Unit sometime soon.”
    It took a minute more for the lieutenant to reach his maroon Crown Vic and start the engine. Then, like the careful man he is, Robert Murphy waited for a break in traffic before easing onto the pavement.

Chapter 5

    I was a good deal closer to the restaurant than the Gang Unit. Back in the Prelude, I waited for another break in traffic to execute a U-turn and head toward the commercial strip Murphy had mentioned.
    The countryside gave way to a self-only filling station, then a smattering of outlet stores that would have last year’s styles in odd colors. After a food market and two hair salons, I saw a marquee for the “Viet Mam” restaurant on the right. It was in a stucco building shaped like a shoebox, the main entrance on one of the shorter ends of the box, parking to the side against a windowless wall. After leaving my car ‘n an angled spot by the garbage dumpster near a back door, I stepped over a pyramid of dead cigarettes and walked to the front door. As Murphy had implied, from the entrance you couldn’t see the parking area.
    Opening the door and moving inside, I was struck by the salty smell of nuoc mam, a fish-based dipping sauce and probably the source of the play on “ Viet Nam ” in the place’s name. The smell also carried me back several decades and thousands of miles, to the streets I’d patrolled as an M.P. lieutenant in Saigon . The scents of anise and cilantro and garlic spilling out from the open-air restaurants. The unfiltered exhausts of