The only good Lawyer

diving under her collar more livid in the late afternoon light. “And so now I am with Chan, and no money can pay for these things.”
    “Dinah, I’m truly sorry, but your husband tried to help people who needed it. Can you help me?”
    She drew again on the cigarette, her eyes working hard on something. “What you want to know?”
    A window, but one I didn’t think would stay open very long. “The woman with Woodrow Gant that night. You’d seen her before?”
    “Yes.”
    “With Mr. Gant?”
    “Yes. Only.”
    “Only what?”
    “Only with him.”
    “Do you know if they left in the same car?”
    Dinah glanced to an empty parking slot. “I know they come in same car.”
    Bingo. Maybe. “You saw them arrive?”
    A look over her shoulder. “I am walking out door for cigarette break. Chan always want me in restaurant to help when new customers come. I watch them get out of car, walk to front door. Same car, he drive.”
    “When they were leaving, did they call a cab?” Genuine confusion. “Taxi?”
    “Right.”
    “Why they call, they have car?”
    One more. “The woman, was she a little drunk when they left?”
    “She drink most of wine bottle.”
    Only a quick puff now, Dinah’s cigarette almost gone, and I sensed my window closing.
    I said, “Is there anything else you can tell me about the woman that night?”
    “She always with sunglasses, always with same big hair.”
    “Same hairstyle, you mean?”
    Dinah took a last drag. “I save my tips here, study for beautician school.” The free hand went to her own head.
    “Yes?”
    Dinah dropped the stub on the ground near the pile of dead ones and crushed it out with the toe of the good foot. “I don’t look at her face so much, but I look at the hair, like I look at everybody’s.” Another smoky, hacking cough. “Same hair mean not her hair.”
    Jenifer Pollard had said that Woodrow Gant liked her to dress in costume and... “The woman in the restaurant that night was wearing a wig?”
    “Yes. That is all I know.”
    “Dinah—”
    “I must go.” She was already turned to move as she coughed a final time. “Chan give me five minute only, and too many cigarette bad for you.”
    By the time Dinah reached the kitchen door, I was halfway to my car. After what she’d been through, I thought lung cancer probably held precious little terror for the waitress of Viet Mam.

    Back at my office by half-past four, I pushed open the door to find the package from Steve Rothenberg’s badger at the Registry. It was a manila envelope, nine-by-twelve, folded over to fit through the mail slot in my now fixed door.
    Opening the envelope, I found photocopies of the seller-to-buyer conveyance documents on the Viet Mam restaurant building, the book-and-page references in stencil-like letters and numbers at the top. Each page of the printed documents contained a number of typographical errors, all corrected by hand, as though someone hadn’t proofread the ribbon originals until the closing itself.
    I didn’t find much to help the cause, the seller and his attorney—whose letterhead was on the deed—having Hispanic names that meant nothing to me. Nguyen Trinh apparently purchased the property through a straw, the “NT Realty Trust,” probably to conceal his identity as buyer. No surprise there.
    In fact, the only real surprise came at the very end of that document. It was the part where a notary public signs and presses a notarial seal in taking the seller’s oath that “the above-entitled conveyance is my free act and deed.”
    The seller’s name conformed to the typing at the beginning of the document, but the notary line wasn’t signed by his attorney. You had to read the signature carefully, and without the seal’s printing coming through in photocopy like a bad dot-matrix, I might not have taken the time to read it carefully enough. After three go-overs, though, I was pretty certain I’d gotten it right the first time.
    The deed conveying the Viet Mam building to Nguyen Trinh had been notarized by one “Deborah M. Ling.”

Chapter 13

    O n the walk over to Epstein & Neely’s offices, I thought about how to handle Deborah Ling. Riding to the fourth floor in that small elevator, I settled on an indirect approach.
    When the door opened onto the reception area, Imogene Burbage was picking up a Federal Express packet from the desk staffed by a different woman than I’d seen only the day before. Burbage wore a gray suit, the style still