The only good Lawyer

still must have been a little dazed from Nancy , because my key was almost in the lock before I noticed my door was already ajar.
    I pushed it halfway open.
    “About time, Mr. Private Eye,” said an accented voice from behind my desk.
    A slim man sat in my chair, his feet in cowboy boots and resting on the secretarial pull-tray. He had a clean-shaven face, with sallow skin and blurry Asian features, as though the angles of eye sockets and cheekbones had been arrested in early development. His hair was black, combed back along his head in a moussed wave. He wore a double-breasted jacket with lapels wide enough to challenge a zoot suit, just a yellow T-shirt underneath. The eyes were somewhere between blue and green, focusing on me the way a lizard does watching a bug it hasn’t yet decided is worth the effort. His right hand held some of my opened mail up to the light from the window behind him.
    Staying on the corridor side of the threshold—and relieved not to see my photo album with the twenties tucked in it—I said, “Anything interesting come for me today?”
    “Just bills.” He fanned himself with them. “You ought to pay these, man, you don’t want a bad credit report on your ass.”
    A little more Boston flavor in his voice with more words in the air.
    He laid the papers on my desk. “What’s the matter, you don’t want to come in your own office?”
    “Not until I see who’s behind my door.”
    A small smile, the tip of his tongue just peeking out between the lips. “Oscar?”
    I heard shoes shushing on my carpet, and another man came into view, backing up toward my desk with his hands behind his spine like a soldier moving at parade rest. Oscar was only about five-ten, but well over two hundred, his shoulders and bent arms seriously straining a single-breasted, camel-hair sports coat that probably measured a size fifty-four to start with. His skin tone went a shade lighter than mocha, the hair harder to judge since it was shaved like a recruit’s in boot camp. I thought Oscar’s nose had been broken twice to the right and thrice to the left, though the sloping eyes above the broad cheeks blazed in a way that made me seriously doubt he’d even noticed the pain involved. His ears were barely bigger than the buttons on his coat, the right one cauliflowered.
    I said, “If he’s Oscar Huong, that would make you Nguyen Trinh.”
    A broader smile from the man behind the desk. “Call me ‘Nugey,’ everybody else does.”
    “Let me guess. The first time you got busted, the booking officer didn’t know which was your family name and which was your given name.”
    “That’s pretty good, Mr. Private Eye.” He looked to his friend. “Oscar’s momma, now, she give him a real American name, easy to spot over here. Mine, she more... traditional. But I use ‘Mr. Trinh’ now, anyway. Gonna be in America , you gotta adapt to the culture, huh?” Trinh stood up, at almost six feet a little taller than he appeared sitting down. His hand made a Macarena motion toward my desk chair. “Make yourself comfortable.”
    As I moved into the office, Huong backed up farther, keeping himself between me and his boss. We all then did a slow-mo minuet, rotating so that I ended up at my desk chair and they one each behind my client chairs. Trinh and I sat down, but Huong remained standing.
    I looked at them. “How badly did you hurt my door?”
    A shrug from Trinh. “We didn’t have no tools. I figured, man’s in business, he gonna have his office open, you know?”
    “So, Oscar put his shoulder to it.”
    “Didn’t have to,” said Huong, speaking for the first time. Not exactly easy listening, either. His voice sounded as though whoever rearranged the nose had gone after the throat, too. Then he brought his hands out from behind his back, raising them as he said, “These were good enough.”
    Usually when you look at hands, they seem in rough proportion to the rest of the body. But Huong’s were huge, and there were bumps and callouses on the knuckles in places you don’t usually see them.
    I said, “Okinawan karate?”
    Huong just grinned at me.
    Nguyen Trinh said, “Oscar, he learn lots of shit back when we juvies in DYS. You do the bare-knuckle push-ups on those hard floors, man, you get like him, too. Don’t nobody mess with us, they see Oscar’s hands.”
    “How about before Oscar’s hands got like that?” Any humor faded from the sallow face. Trinh said, “You were over there,