The only good Lawyer

last tangible help I got from my parents. They won’t contribute to the loan payments, and the obligation isn’t dischargeable in bankruptcy, even if I were willing to commit ‘career-icide’ by filing for it.” Ling looked back at me. “Nugey’s deal seemed so neat and clean. I’m in and out of the transaction with a few thousand in cash that neither the firm nor the IRS has to know about.”
    “How did you handle things with the seller’s attorney?”
    “I told him I was practicing out of my apartment. Enough recent law grads have to do that, it doesn’t seem odd anymore. Only he forgot to send a draft of the deed to my home address for me to review, so the first time I saw it was at the closing, where I picked up on all the typos. I corrected them by hand, and then the incompetent fool didn’t even have his notarial seal with him, meaning I had to take the seller’s oath myself.”
    “Which shouldn’t have been a problem, except for somebody like me having the building’s title traced at the Registry.”
    “Yes. Why did you do that?”
    The Gang Unit, but I wasn’t about to reveal my source to her. “I thought Chan and the waitress at Viet Mam were awfully nervous, and I wanted to see if the records gave them some reason to be.”
    Ling sagged back into her chair, the eyes solemn. “So, what are you going to do now?”
    “Before we get to that, why did you really take Woodrow Gant to the restaurant for lunch that first time?”
    She straightened a little. “Just because I knew it was there. I wanted to try it, too.”
    “Doesn’t wash, counselor. The last thing you’d ever do would be to bring a partner from the firm you’d shorted to the building you’d shorted it on.”
    Ling seemed to go inside herself for a minute. “Nugey and I had become... intimate. He’s a very exciting man, Mr. Cuddy. Very different from the ones I meet through my work.” She came out of her trance. “He wanted me to bring Woodrow there.”
    “To Viet Mam?”
    “Yes.”
    “Why?”
    “Nugey is…” Ling stopped, then started oven “Nugey had a very difficult life, one where because of his... heritage he was rarely in control of anything. I think the main reason he bought that particular building was so that he could exercise some control over a ‘purebred’ Vietnamese man, the kind who would have abused him back in Saigon .”
    Trinh had told me basically the same thing. “Go ahead.”
    “Well, I think there was some of that about having Woodrow and me in the restaurant, too. Nugey had been prosecuted by him, sentenced to a juvenile detention center for a long time. Now Nugey wanted to watch Woodrow eating in a building he controlled.”
    “Watch him?”
    “Yes. When Woodrow and I ate lunch there, Nugey was kind of hiding in the kitchen, watching us through the swinging doors.”
    Christ. “That was all Trinh did, watch?”
    Ling seemed confused. “Yes. I mean, Woodrow might have recognized him. What else could Nugey do?”
    I was thinking of the way Trinh and Huong dealt with Grover Gant at the coffee shop, but I said, “Have you had any more ideas about who the woman might have been with Woodrow Gant in Viet Mam the night he was killed?”
    “No. I don’t even know why he’d go back there.”
    “Because?”
    “In the parking lot that day after lunch, Woodrow mentioned he hadn’t particularly enjoyed the food.”
    Not what Ling had told me the first time I met her, but consistent with what Uta Radachowski had said.
    When I kept silent, Deborah Ling changed the tone of her voice. “I have a question for you, Mr. Cuddy.”
    “Go ahead.”
    She seemed to choose her words carefully. “Are you going to tell Frank Neely about all this?”
    “I don’t see a reason to.”
    Ling was visibly relieved.
    “However,” I said, “there’s a life sentence of reasons why I have to tell Alan Spaeth’s attorney about it.” Ling shook her head. “Nugey owns that building as a matter of public record.”
    “Only as the ‘NT Realty Trust.’ ”
    “But he could testify he’s the one behind the trust.” I thought I could see where Ling was going. “Without involving you as the one who handled the transaction.”
    A very steady, “Yes.”
    “Ms. Ling, Steve Rothenberg hired me to find evidence establishing a reasonable doubt that his client killed Woodrow Gant. You’re not a criminal lawyer— and I’m not a lawyer, period—but it seems to me that ‘reasonable doubt’ is kind of