The only good Lawyer

hour later, I looked at the exterior of the branch office where Grover’s mother spent her days.
    The bricks probably were all orange once, judging from the ones under the metal awning and therefore protected from the effects of weather and soot. Everywhere else the brickwork was dingy, and the people walking in the wide entry doors with me drab, from their shabby clothes to their resigned expressions. The only exception were the children, some smiling and even laughing, often holding each other’s hands because mom had only the two God gave her to manage the four or five little blessings He’d given her in another sense.
    Inside the doors was a seating area swelled to standing room only. It looked as though the younger folks had all given up their chairs, but there were still more senior citizens than places to seat them. A woman with three kids who had been just ahead of me marched directly to the reception desk, an old steel monster like a battleship guarding the entrance to the wallboarded harbor behind.
    A young African-American man with processed hair staffed the desk. When the woman and her brood moved away, I walked up to him. Coming to a stop, I could hear the whitewater noise from dozens of voices talking at conversational level behind the wallboard. He looked up at me skeptically. “Yes?”
    “John Cuddy to see Helen Gant.”
    He reached a hand toward a stack of forms. “Have you filled out one of our—”
    “I’m not a client of hers.”
    His hand stopped. “Doesn’t matter. She won’t get to you before lunchtime.”
    I took out my identification. “Maybe we should let Ms. Gant be the judge of that.”

    “Mr. Cuddy, do you have any idea how many people need to see me—uh-uh—today?”
    The hiccuping sound. “I’m guessing I up the count to a hundred and one.”
    Helen Gant glared at me from behind a desk with twin towers of manila file folders stacked high enough to reach her elbows if she’d stood when I’d reached her cubicle. Which she hadn’t.
    Gant pointed to the client chair at the side of her desk. “Two minutes.”
    I stayed on my feet. “It may not take that long.” She leaned back into her chair. Not relaxing, more buying distance and maybe even some of her own valuable time. “What is it, then?”
    “I need to find your son.”
    “He’s still where we buried him.”
    The voice as hard as the look that came with it.
    “I meant your other son.”
    “Grover?” Hiccup. “You already talked to him. In fact, he was so upset that—”
    “I have to talk to him again.”
    “About what?”
    “Do you really want to know?”
    I could tell by a different look in Helen Gant’s eyes that she didn’t.

    After leaving the welfare office, I drove north through the city, weaving my way to Route 1A. At the rotary beyond the dog track, I came back south and pulled into the lot. There was free parking to the right, “Preferred & Handicapped” to the left. “Preferred” turned out to cost a buck in order to avoid a two-block hike around rows of concrete Jersey barriers. Walking toward the main entrance, I passed hundreds of already-parked cars, which surprised me. Most of them were four-door, American sedans, which didn’t surprise me.
    Above the customer gate someone had carefully drawn a greyhound with a red blanket, “ Wonderland Park ” printed beneath it. The rest of the facade sported flagpoles and the word “Clubhouse” in white letters.
    Admission proved to be all of fifty cents, and just past the turnstiles was a raised and railed seating area, bright and clean, with tables where you could eat or study a racing program in relative peace. Most of the people in the black resin chairs seemed retirement age, glancing up from food or form to the overhead television monitors touting the odds.
    “Post time for the seventh race in six minutes,” boomed the public address system. “Just six.”
    I didn’t see Grover Gant in the seating area, so I moved around it to the right. A couple of men in conservative business suits passed me before taking an escalator to shielded box seating somewhere above us hoi polloi. After sixty feet more of tiled floor, I came to a larger, glass-walled viewing area.
    “Paging the Rowley Kennel to the paddock. Report to the paddock, please.”
    To fit in a little more, I picked up a program and skimmed it. There were eight races yet to be run, the greyhounds bearing the screwy names you usually associate with thoroughbred horses and