The only good Lawyer

been?”
    “Yes.”
    “Afraid not, but I had the impression that Woodrow was what my generation would have called a ‘ladies’ man.’ That woman you’re asking about could have been any one of a number, none of them known to me.”
    “He never mentioned their names to you?”
    “Never. In fact, it got so I’d listen for one, because he’d talk about taking a driving weekend to the Cape or the mountains. But Woodrow never used a name, just ‘Hey, man, I was with a lady.’ ”
    Neely put a lot of street-black into that last, but then he’d known Gant, and I hadn’t. “How about what you remember from the day Alan Spaeth made the scene in your reception area?”
    Neely’s account was no different from the others, and he also conceded that he hadn’t seen Spaeth move toward anyone. “But I’ll tell you what I did see.” Neely lifted the glass an inch. “I saw your client’s eyes.”
    “His eyes.”
    “Yes, from less than ten feet away. The look in them, a willingness to... kill.” Neely’s drink rose another inch. “Something I hadn’t seen up close for a long, long time.”
    I took a chance. “Not since climbing Pointe-du-Hoc?”
    Neely stopped the scotch halfway to his mouth. “That is one hell of a guess.”
    “I saw the Ranger photos on your wall downstairs. And I had an uncle who landed with the Eighth Infantry on D-Day.”
    “The Eighth. They hit Utah Beach , correct?”
    “Yes, the little he ever talked about it.”
    “It wasn’t something we did talk about.” Neely set his glass down. “I’m old enough to remember the Cocoanut Grove fire in ‘forty-two, and I’ll never forget the lines of people outside the old Southern Mortuary, praying and crying while they waited to identify their loved ones lost in the smoke and flames. But nothing else I ever saw compares to Omaha Beach that morning in June of ‘forty-four. Nothing.”
    He seemed to address the harbor. “Our unit’s mission was to knock out the one-five-five millimeter guns the Germans had mounted in concrete casemates at the top of the Pointe, six of them aimed at the Allied ships coming toward both Utah and Omaha . We were trained by British commandos, John, and they trained us well. Assaulting dress-rehearsal beaches and scaling cliffs in Scotland , double-timing everywhere we went, push-ups as a ‘rest break.’ But nothing prepared us for the Channel sea being choppy enough to swamp our landing craft if we didn’t go slow, our coxswains having to fight the tidal current. All of which meant we hit Omaha more than half an hour late, way after the naval and air bombardment on the cliff was over, giving the Germans plenty of time to climb back out of their holes and open up on us. Devastating cannon and machine-gun fire, our boats exploding, corpses floating in the water, body parts... pinwheeling through the air. The noise, the... carnage. Unbelievable. And when we fired our rocket-guns to carry grappling hooks up to the cliff, the rope attached to our hooks was so wet it was too heavy. Which meant most of the hooks fell short while we were being cut to pieces crossing from the touchdown point through the shallow water and up to the base of the cliff. But a couple of the hooks made it, and we started climbing. Hand-over-hand, up the face of that rock, the Germans sawing away on our ropes and raining death down upon us. And finally, when we reached the top...”
    I’d read about it. “The guns weren’t there.”
    Neely looked to me once before going back to the harbor. “That’s right, John. Some telephone poles were sticking out of the bunkers, to fool the aerial reconnaissance. But our intelligence people had fouled up. They didn’t know the Germans had moved the guns away from the shoreline, and they should have.” Neely drummed his index finger against the arm of his chair by the scotch. “They should have known that, John.”
    “Maybe they knew it, but couldn’t get word to you.”
    “They had radios. And even carrier pigeons that could cross the Channel with little rolled messages in metal quivers on their legs.”
    “The weather was pretty rough during the week before D-Day, wasn’t it?”
    “Awful.”
    “So, maybe they tried to send a message by radio or pigeon, but it didn’t get through to England .”
    “No, John, no. They just didn’t follow up on that casemate before we embarked. Oh, we found the guns eventually—inland a ways—and blew them to kingdom come with thermite grenades.