The only good Lawyer

law firm?”
    “If that was the only time.”
    Spaeth raked a hand through his hair. “Look, you’re talking August, all right? Over two months ago. I was going through a tough time. I mean, Gant’s representing Nicole—my wife?”
    I nodded.
    “And he got this ‘vacate the marital home’ order against me. Well, the company had laid me off from my marketing job like three weeks before, so I had to go live in a boarding-house. Try to imagine that, sport. One day I’m coming home to this nice place in West Roxbury I sweated blood to carry, and the next I’m sleeping with the fucking derelicts in Southie.”
    South Boston . “I grew up there.”
    Spaeth put the hand to his face this time. “Christ, I’m not doing such a good job of getting you on my side.”
    Truth to tell, he wasn’t. And yet... “That day at his law firm, did you threaten to kill Woodrow Gant?” A nod before letting his hand fall back to the table. “In front of like, I don’t know, six, seven people. I really made my fucking point.” Spaeth looked up at me. “But you gotta understand, he was fucking me over the coals, and he was fucking...” Spaeth trailed off, shaking his head. “Fucking me every way from Sunday. Poisoning Terry against me, too.”
    “Terry’s your son?”
    “Yeah, Terence, actually, after Nicole’s father. She got custody—so Terry could stay in the house and keep with the same school. Not the school where she teaches, that’s not... That’s not important. What is important is that Gant tells Terry, ‘Look, your father has visitation rights, but that doesn’t mean you have to see him.’ The kid’s fourteen, so the judge leaves it up to him, but meanwhile Gant’s poisoning my own son against me.”
    Sounded like more motive, not less. “Back to that day at the law firm. What exactly happened?”
    Spaeth blew out a breath. “I go in, because Rothenberg tells me they can take my ‘deposition,’ ask me a lot of questions under oath. So we’re sitting around this table in a conference room—like where we are here, only a lot bigger and nicer, view of the harbor and all. And Gant’s needling me, really tucking it under the saddle with his questions.”
    “Like what?”
    “Oh, I don’t mean the words themselves. Hell, a couple weeks later; Steve gave me this copy of the thing—a ‘transcript’?”
    “Right.”
    “Okay, so I read the transcript, and from Gant’s words, you don’t get what he was doing. He was too fucking smooth. No, it was more his... like facial expressions, and—what’s the word? ‘Inflection,’ yeah. The inflection of his voice. Gant was needling me, and I blew my stack. I said the only good lawyer like the only good...” Spaeth stopped.
    “That word I’ve heard enough of.”
    “Yeah.” A sniff, almost a good-natured laugh. “Yeah, I called him that and more, storming out of the conference room yelling... yelling I don’t remember exactly what. But I know I said if he kept it up, I was gonna kill him.”
    “Kept what up?”
    Spaeth stopped. “Fucking me over.”
    Something didn’t feel right. “But Steve told me things settled pretty soon after that.”
    “They did. That’s what I mean about not killing the bastard. The divorce was basically over with. And lawyers are a dime a dozen. Even if I did shoot Gant, Nicole would’ve just gotten herself another one.” Thinking about what kind of witness this defendant would make, I shook my head.
    “What’s the matter?”
    “Nothing,” I said. “Let’s go back to the murder weapon. Your gun?”
    Spaeth started to say something, then just, “I don’t know.”
    “You don’t know?”
    “Look, I haven’t seen it, all right? The revolver the cops say got used. I do know I had one just like it, a Taurus 85. I bought the thing on a business trip in the South, filed the serial number off it.”
    “Why the hell did you do that?”
    “I read in the paper about the ‘Castle Law’ we got here—where the state lets you off if you kill a guy coming into your house? Only the newspaper said the guy would have to be trying to kill you, so I figured, anybody ever broke in and I shot him with one of the guns I bought up here, it’d be nice to have a throwaway piece for the cops to find on the guy.”
    Alan Spaeth kept getting better and better. “How many other firearms do you have?”
    “When I was living in the ‘marital home,’ three more handguns and two rifles. I used to take Terry deer hunting until