The only good Lawyer

engines were making all these banging noises and then the attendant has to drop...
    Wait a minute. I took an airplane, not a cruise ship. What’s an anchor doing on a 747?
    She opened her eyes then, and at first thought she’d somehow wandered into the cockpit of the airplane, because she was staring out a windshield. Like the pilot would, you know? There wasn’t much light, and she couldn’t see any clouds or anything, just some trees and a hood, some gauges and a door....
    A door? A car door. Woodrow’s BMW.
    Oh, shit. She shook her head, clearing it of the airplane dream. Right, right. Only... “Where the hell are we?”
    She turned her face to the left. “I said, where are...?” But Woodrow wasn’t behind the wheel, and the action of swiveling her head triggered a wave of nausea, just like she felt after that goddamn Vietnamese meal. With the six-dollar chardonnay they marked up to twelve. And that gucky soup, the...
    Now, thinking about all the disgusting food, she felt more sick.
    Handkerchief. Handbag.
    She dug into the main compartment of the bag till she found a hankie. Even before she held it up to her mouth, however the gag reflex started.
    Have to get out of here.
    Yanking the door handle while holding the hankie, she realized her seat belt was still on. With the knuckles of her left hand, she struck the button that releases the metal tab, sensing the belt itself retract but without taking the strap of her handbag with it.
    Aspirin in the bag, too. Make me feel better. After.
    She bashed the door open with her shoulder and swung her legs out of the BMW, feeling something heavy slide off her lap and onto the ground. The anchor; of course.
    Only it wasn’t an anchor. In the light from the car’s interior, she could see it was a gun, lying on the grass. A gun like...
    God, no. “Woodrow?”
    She struggled to a standing position, the ground under the grass sloping down, giving her vertigo. Which made everything else so much worse, both in her stomach and in her head.
    “Woodrow?” Oh, God, no. Please, no. “Woodrow, where are you?”
    I’m going to be sick.
    She took two steps down the slope and slid onto her rear end, expecting to throw up into the grass to her left. But all she could manage was the dry heaves.
    The gun. He didn’t... couldn’t have. Even he’s not that stupid.
    Regaining some control, she called out again. “Woodrow?” Please, God, where is he? “Woodrow?”
    She struggled to her feet again, turning toward the back of the car.
    And saw Woodrow Wilson Gant’s lifeless eyes staring at the right rear tire.
    “Oh, God, no!”
    He did it. He really did.
    I have to... Have to get as far from here as...
    She began running along the side of the road. Away from the BMW and the restaurant miles behind it.
    Running into the night.
    Stumbling to the ground.
    Then staggering up and running some more.
    And dropping down intentionally only when she’d see another car’s headlights coming up the road toward her.

Chapter 1

    I N MY opinion, it had been a tough year for the neighborhood Boston calls “ Back Bay .” Our only family drugstore, a fixture opposite the Lenox Hotel for decades, closed after three discount giants bunched around it like Davy Crockett’s shot pattern. A candy store on Newbury Street also left, thereby eliminating the irony of the diet center occupying the retail space directly beneath it. And the Exeter Street Theatre building had suffered a devastating fire, nearly destroying one of the city’s most upscale landmarks.
    Concepts like “upscale” and “landmark” struck me all the more that Tuesday morning as I climbed the stairs of Steven Rothenberg’s building, the elevator broken again. You couldn’t call the structure that contained his law office anything but a dump, especially with one of its neighbors already torn down, leaving a gap like a punched-out tooth in that block of Boylston Street.
    I’d first met Rothenberg a few years back, when he represented an African-American college student named William Daniels. The student was accused of killing his white girlfriend, and I was helping out as a favor for a black lieutenant in the Boston Homicide Unit. Since then, Rothenberg had hired me to do the private investigator work on a number of criminal matters. This time around, he’d left a message with my answering service the afternoon before, asking me to drop by the next day.
    I reached Rothenberg’s floor and, after a turn, the office