The only good Lawyer

while.”
    Murphy chewed on that. “So you’re saying what?”
    “I talked to a lot of people the last two days. One of them could have made this morning’s call to the hospital.”
    “To tip us about Mantle’s body, you mean?”
    “And wipe out Spaeth’s alibi after I rattled some cages on his behalf.”
    Murphy chewed on it some more, his eyes saying what he felt before the words got to his lips. “No. No, I’ll tell you what I think. My instincts fooled me on this one, Cuddy. When I went to arrest him, Spaeth had everything all worked out. He put on a great act, and I bought it. But no more.”
    “Just a—”
    “Your man tapped Mantle as an alibi witness to drum up some reasonable doubt when he’d already killed him. The same night Spaeth did Woodrow Gant, so Mantle can’t ever set things straight. It fits.”
    “It stinks.”
    Robert Murphy hooded his eyes again. “All depends on your point of view, I suppose.”

    “Why the hell does he call this place ‘the Chateau’?”
    “It’s a long story, Lieutenant.”
    Murphy and I waited under the portico. The bump on the other side of the door made Murphy look up but not jump, and when the door itself creaked open, Vincennes Dufresne blinked out at both of us, the strap of a T-shirt-as-nightie slipping off his shoulder. “Eh, you got any idea what time it is?”
    Murphy said, “Mr. Dufresne, we’re going to be needing you for a while.”
    The boarding house owner looked at me. “After all the help I been, you bring a cop to my place?”
    “Always nice to be remembered,” said the lieutenant. Dufresne turned back to him. “What do you got to see?”
    “Other way around,” said Murphy. “First you have to see somebody, then probably we have to look at Michael Mantle’s room.”
    “The Mick?” Dufresne blinked some more. “Aw, no. He’s dead?”
    Murphy glanced at me before saying to Dufresne. “Pretty good guess.”
    The head hung down toward the T-shirt. “Well, maybe he was right after all, eh?”
    I said, “Don’t get you.”
    “The Mick.” Dufresne looked up. “One day, I say to him, ‘Mick, the way you spend your money on the brew, you don’t believe you can take it with you.’ And the Mick, he says, ‘Vinny, let me put it to you this way: You never saw no U-Haul behind a hearse, did you?’ ”
    Forgoing his honking laugh, Vincennes Dufresne left us to get a coat against the stark chill of dawn.

    Three hours later, I was sitting in Steve Rothenberg’s reception area, watching the young woman with the headphones select the first of today’s listening program from a drawerful of CD’s in her desk. When Rothenberg came through the door, suit coat flapping and tie askew, he saw me and dropped his eyes dramatically.
    “John, I’m already going to be late for a motion hearing.”
    “You catch the local news on TV this morning?”
    “If I’m late as it is, I wouldn’t have had time to— “Make time, Steve.”
    Rothenberg looked at me differently, then asked the receptionist to call a court clerk and say he’d be fifteen minutes late.

    * * *

    In his office, Steve Rothenberg sat behind the desk without shedding his jacket. “Speak.”
    I told him what I’d found out from Nicole Spaeth the prior night, and he shrunk down into his chair. I told him what I’d seen with Robert Murphy earlier that morning, and Rothenberg nearly disappeared from view.
    To the desktop, he said, “My client’s wife is the mystery woman.”
    “That’s right, Steve.”
    “And his alibi witness is dead.”
    “Probably from the night Woodrow Gant himself was killed.”
    Rothenberg looked at me with the brown eyes of a dejected puppy. “Now what do we do?”
    “My mind’s a blank, Steve. How about you take that one?”

    Walking back toward my office building on Tremont, I tried to use the bright fall colors on the Boston Common to help me think. While I’d agreed with Murphy’s initial reaction at the Gant crime scene— that Alan Spaeth was innocent—I also couldn’t fault this morning’s turn of heart. For me to be right about Spaeth being framed, someone had to know about the revolver he kept at Vincennes Dufresne’s boarding-house in Southie. That someone then had to steal the gun and use it to kill Woodrow Gant. Dufresne had access to Spaeth’s room, but no reason to want Gant dead. Michael Mantle had access, too, but also no reason to kill Gant, or to frame his drinking buddy, Spaeth. And besides, both Spaeth and