The only good Lawyer

the brakes just as a moving van pulled out from a righthand side street. The van didn’t have the turning radius to clear the parked cars the first time, requiring a leviathan three-pointer to get squared away. By the time Yuri was able to pass, the Mercedes was nowhere in sight.
    “What do I tell you? A truck comes out, and boom, we lose them.” He looked down at the meter. “Now?”
    “Back downtown, Tremont Street .”
    “Where I pick you up?”
    “Yes.”
    “This time of day, we will not until after three get there. Way—”
    “Twenty-dollar tip, or no tip. Your choice.”
    A moment’s hesitation, then Yuri picked up his radio mike and spoke some Russian into it before glancing at the inside mirror. “Again the address, please?”

    * * *

    Back in my office, I got our superintendent working on my door lock as I flipped through the mail Nguyen Trinh had opened. Nothing seemed to be missing among the flyers, insurance advice, and utility bills on the condo.
    When I called my answering service, the woman with the silky voice gave me one message on the Gant case. Steve Rothenberg’s title searcher at the Registry of Deeds would be dropping off a package of recorded documents on the Viet Mam property late that afternoon. There’d been no unstamped envelope on the floor under the mail slot, but I decided not to wait for it before driving out to the restaurant, since I thought a bluff would work, and I wanted to catch Dinah before she’d be involved in the preparations for their dinner crowd.

    Frankly, I wasn’t sorry there was no green Mercedes in the parking lot next to Viet Mam. I stopped the Prelude across the street, so that I could get a good view of the dumpster and the pyramid of cigarette butts next to it.
    About fifteen minutes later; the outside door to what I took to be the kitchen opened, and Dinah stepped onto the blacktop. Her right leg looped behind the left as she walked to the corner of the dumpster; her hair still perfect but slightly different, I thought. A cigarette was already in her mouth, a lighter coming up from an apron pocket.
    I left the car and moved toward her. Dinah was just blowing out the first big plume of smoke with something approaching pleasure on her face when I must have appeared in her peripheral vision.
    Standing hip-cocked, weight on the good left leg, her pleasure waned as she waited for me to reach her. “Dinah, I need to talk with you.”
    She took another drag on the cigarette. “This my break.” A hacking cough. “Chan give me five minute only.”
    “I know why you were so scared the last time I was here.”
    Dinah looked away, taking a deeper drag. “I not scared. I not know—”
    “Nguyen Trinh and Oscar Huong?”
    She winced, the way I suspected she’d learned not to with her leg. “I have nothing to tell you.”
    “I’m trying to help a man I think is innocent.” Dinah looked at me.
    I said, “Please?”
    She glanced once toward the kitchen door before refocusing on her cigarette. “When I in Vietnam , many ‘innocents’ die. My husband, too.”
    “I’m sorry.” The first time I saw Dinah, she’d mentioned that he’d fought. “Was your husband ARVN?” meaning Army of the Republic of Vietnam , our southern allies.
    “No. He from north, a Catholic.” Dinah fixed me with her eyes. “One of the commandos in newspaper stories.”
    Jesus. Before I got to Saigon in the late sixties, about three hundred men who’d fled from the communist North had been recruited by our C.I.A. to parachute back up there because they knew the terrain and the dialects. Thanks to a North Vietnamese mole in the ARVN, they were captured, tortured, and often killed. Recently declassified American military records confirmed that our government had written off all of them.
    Whether dead or alive.
    I said, “There’s supposed to be a payment from our Congress for survivors like you.”
    Dinah coughed out a laugh. “No. When my husband killed, American officer come to our village. With money, four thousand dollar. Family of my husband say he never marry me, and I have no record to show, so his family take all the money.”
    “But maybe you can get more now.”
    She looked at me with contempt. “No money then, no money now.” Then she sucked in more smoke. “When Communists win war, they come find me. They believe I wife of my husband. They torture him, they torture me. My leg, my br... my chest.” A hand fluttered helplessly to her neckline, the scar