The only good Lawyer

far?”
    “You’re pressed for time, right?”
    “Right.”
    I gave Rothenberg a summary of what little I’d developed, leaving the Gang Unit out of it except to say, “I also have a lead on the restaurant I want to follow up.”
    “What lead?” he said.
    “I’d rather get more information first. But there’s something we need to talk about with your client.”
    “Our client, John.”
    “Barely.”
    Rothenberg paused. “I’m not liking the sound of that.”
    “You’ll come to like it even less, I think. Can we see Spaeth at the jail today?”
    “Is that necessary?”
    “Maybe vital.”
    Another pause. “I could make it by, say... eleven-thirty?”
    “Good for me,” I said.
    “John, basically what’s the matter?”
    “Spaeth told his son that Daddy thought Mommy’s lawyer was hitting on her.”
    “Is that all?”
    I nearly took the phone away from my ear to stare at it. “Isn’t that enough?”
    “John, you don’t work a lot of divorce cases, do you?”
    “Not if I can help it.”
    “Well, when the wife’s lawyer is a male, the husband tends to see him as a competitor for the position the husband used to occupy with her. It’s a psychological thing.”
    “Is it a ‘psychological thing’ for that husband to report the wife’s lawyer to the Board of Bar Overseers?”
    A dead silence this time on the other end of the line. “Say it ain’t so.”
    “I thought I’d stop at the Board, too. See if I can find out whether there was a formal complaint filed.”
    “I doubt they’d tell you,” said Rothenberg. “But, shit, if there was...”
    “...then whether or not Woodrow Gant and you negotiated a settlement in the divorce case, Spaeth believing strongly that Gant was involved with his wife would enhance your guy’s motive for killing the man.”
    “ ‘Enhance’ doesn’t quite capture it, John.”

    I was just getting into my suit jacket when the phone rang back. The bedroom extension was closest. “John, it’s me.”
    Somehow, despite being disappointed over no contact since Tuesday night at Thai Basil, I wasn’t prepared for the sound of her voice. “Nance, I’m glad you called.”
    “Don’t be so sure. We need to meet, talk this through.”
    “How about dinner tonight?”
    “No. No, I was thinking lunch, today. Can you make it?”
    I wouldn’t not make it. “Where?”
    “Cricket’s by Quincy Market.”
    Tourist Central. “Not very... private, Nance.”
    “I know.”
    Okay. “When?”
    She said, “It would have to be at one o’clock.”
    “Cricket’s at one,” I said, trying to keep my temper while taking her dictation.
    “See you then, John.”
    Nancy hung up before I could say anything more. After a few moments of squeezing the receiver so hard my hand cramped, I did the opposite of what I wanted to and set the plastic instrument gently back in its cradle.

    The drive to Gant’s former county almost let me push Nancy out of my mind. The purple flower that blooms in late summer still covered the marshland bordering the Charles River , contrasting with the red, gold, and orange leaves of October. After some suburban twists and turns, I found the building with the district attorney’s office and parked in the rear.
    At the reception counter upstairs, a male security guard in a blue blazer sat next to a female in a polka-dot dress, an elaborate console of buttons and lights in front of her.
    The guard was already sizing up whoever had come in behind me when the woman said, “Can I help you, sir?”
    “Hope so. I’d like to see a prosecutor who spells his first name ‘T-H-O-M.’ The last name might begin—”
    “That’s Thom Arneson. And you are?”
    “John Cuddy.”
    “Is he expecting you?”
    “I doubt it.”
    Both the security guard and the woman looked at me then, but she punched a button, anyway.

    My identification holder came sliding back across the desk. “So, you’re ‘John Cuddy, Private Investigator.’ Why are you darkening my door?”
    I started to answer when Arneson’s phone jingled and he held up his hand. As he took the call, I looked around the small, shared office. There was another, identical desk against a second wall, no one sitting at it and no windows for either prosecutor. Arneson had stacks of red manila case files on two corners of his desk, a computer on a third, the telephone on the fourth. Talking in staccato jargon, he swung through a twenty-degree arc in his chair under a poster entitled “THINGS INVENTED