The only good Lawyer

features and reddish hair, the eyes bugging out as though he’d been pressurized from within. My bet would be that someone had strangled him, but the other characteristics of bulging tongue and blue lips weren’t there.
    Literally not there.
    Murphy spoke through his handkerchief. “Rats been at him a while.”
    “Do we know who he is?” I said, though I had a pretty good idea.
    Murphy hooded his eyes, giving me a sideways hint of them. “Why do you think I called you out?”
    “Mantle, Michael A.?”
    Murphy motioned to one of the other suits, who brought over a plastic evidence baggie with some kind of paper inside it. The lieutenant took the baggie and held it up for me to see. The paper lay open but heavily and dirtily creased in a cross pattern, as though it had been carried folded in fours for a long time.
    “No wallet,” said Murphy, “but this was in his pant pocket.”
    The lanterns threw just enough ambient light for me to read the printing on Mantle’s birth certificate. “I’m told he used it for winning drinks at bars.”
    “Winning drinks?”
    “As ‘Mickey Mantle.’ ”
    Murphy huffed out a “just-what-I-needed” laugh, then returned the baggie to the other detective. “Doc, can you give me an estimate on time of death?”
    She didn’t bother to look up. “Weather like we’ve had? More than a few days, less than a few weeks. Lab results ought to narrow the bracket.”
    The shooting of Woodrow Gant occurred a week ago Wednesday. “You figure this man was strangled?” In a sarcastic voice, the M.E. replied, “Unless he pictured me naked, and his eyes just popped out.” The top half of Murphy’s face lilted toward the stairs. “Come on.”
    When we reached the kitchen, he said, “Breathing’s better outside.”
    What passed for the backyard was strewn with broken beer bottles and busted toys, used condoms and torn shingles. We both stood for a minute as Murphy put away his handkerchief.
    Then he said, “You never met this Mantle, right?”
    “You’re talking for positive ID now?”
    “I am.”
    “We can try Vincennes Dufresne.”
    “The one I had to roust at Spaeth’s rooming house?”
    “Right.”
    Murphy nodded. “In due time.” He gestured behind us. “Unless Dufresne surprises me, I figure you can forget about your alibi witness.”
    “How did you know the corpse was down there?”
    “Got a call. Somebody said they went in the house to take a leak, saw the body.”
    “You have this tip on tape, then.”
    “Uh-unh. Man called Boston City .”
    “The hospital?”
    “Our one and only.”
    “Not nine-one-one?”
    “I talked to the hospital woman who caught the call, around three-thirty in the a.m. She said the man ‘sounded black.’ ”
    “Like the call on Woodrow Gant that night.”
    “Right. Though she’s from the Dominican herself, so what does that tell you?”
    “It tells me you’ve gotten two tips involving this case from somebody who sounded—”
    “It happens, Cuddy.”
    “The one about Gant’s body on the road, yeah. But let’s face it, Lieutenant. Not many blacks tend to just Wander into Southie.”
    “Only takes one.”
    “Did this morning’s caller give the hospital an address?" Murphy looked at me. “What do you mean?”
    “Did the woman have the exact address of this place when she telephoned you guys?”
    He thought about it. “Must have. Message slip had the number and street before we ever got a unit over here.”
    “Don’t you think it’s kind of odd a black guy strolling around this part of town at that time of the morning goes into an abandoned building to take a leak and then decides to do his business in the cellar?”
    “If he was polite about it.”
    “And then, after seeing a body, the guy’s also attentive enough to note the right address before he calls a number that by chance doesn’t automatically tape the incomings?”
    Murphy said, “What I think is kind of odd, your man’s alibi witness is found dead four blocks from your man’s apartment. And I’m betting the lab’s going to establish that this Mantle got dead right around the time last week that Woodrow Gant was killed.”
    “Lieutenant, Spaeth is going to tell you the next morning when you arrest him that he has an alibi witness he strangled the night before?”
    “Maybe he hopes we don’t find the body.”
    “Seems to me that the cellar here is a pretty good spot for the body not to be found for a while, but certainly found after a