The only good Lawyer

to get my ass killed.”
    “Be patient, Grover,” said Trinh. “It could still happen.” Then, in my direction, “So what you come here for, Mr. Private Eye?”
    “I thought maybe we’d go over all the ways you were involved in Woodrow Gant’s life. And death.” The smile that showed just the tip of his tongue before Trinh laced his fingers and brought them over and behind his carefully moussed head. Reclining in the desk chair, he said, “You like a hungry dog, got a stick he want to be a bone.”
    “Meaning you had nothing to do with Gant’s being killed.”
    Grover became agitated. “Say what?”
    Trinh didn’t bother to look at him. “Shut up, deadbeat.” To me, “Like I told you before. I’m gonna kill the man, I don’t shoot him.”
    “You’d just have Oscar beat him to death.”
    “Been a pleasure,” said Huong from the wall.
    His boss gave him a look that I thought meant, “That’s enough.” Then Trinh returned to me. “But it didn’t happen that way.”
    “You’ve got a grudge against Gant. Makes you a prime suspect if he goes down, especially from a beating administered by somebody like Hands of Stone over there. Plus, you’ve been kind of dipping into his life, like getting him to eat in a restaurant you’re bankrolling.”
    More agitation from Grover. “What you saying?”
    “Nugey here isn’t just your banker, my friend. He fronted the money for the restaurant your brother ate in the night he was killed. Owns the building, in fact.” Gant seemed like he wanted to say something more. But Oscar Huong came half a step off the wall, and the sentence died in Grover’s throat.
    Trinh rocked his chair a little. “So the man eats at a restaurant maybe five mile from his condo.”
    I thought, Nugey knows where Woodrow Gant lived, down to the distance.
    Trinh kept rocking. “Shit like that happens.”
    “Only this time it didn’t just ‘happen.’ You set it up, Nugey.”
    The tongue licked out and back once. “You wanna tell me how?”
    “By having your girlfriend take him there for lunch the first time.”
    Now Gant turned in his chair toward me. “Girlfriend?”
    Trinh said, “Grover, I tell you once already, shut up. Not gonna say it again.”
    I kept my gun on the man behind the desk. “Then let me explain things so your favorite customer here doesn’t have to talk. Woodrow Gant put you and Oscar away for that home invasion. After getting out, you expand your horizons, eventually meet a lawyer in his firm. Which gives you an idea. You start threading your way back into Woodrow Gant’s life. Loaning money to his brother who likes to gamble, moving—” Grover Gant finally added things up and rose from his chair, rage in his voice. “You yellow mother’—” Thanks to peripheral vision, I was aware of Oscar Huong moving, but I couldn’t have told you what part of him struck Grover. I could see what part of Gant hit the floor, though. All of him, a cracking sound still dying away in the air as he writhed, hugging his right arm with his left hand and moaning. Huong’s face said he wasn’t finished.
    I kept the gun on Trinh. “Call him off, or I put a round in you.”
    Just a tip-of-the-tongue smile from across the desk. “You lose your license.”
    “It’s that, or lose Grover, right?”
    Trinh stopped smiling. “Oscar?”
    This time Huong needed more prodding.
    “Oscar, enough, okay? Man’s not gonna try anything more.”
    Reluctantly, Huong backed up to the wall again, Gant moaning louder.
    I said, “Grover, you all right?”
    Trinh shook his head. “Somebody come after me like that, Oscar usually break something.”
    “Just one bone,” said Huong. “So far.”
    I watched Trinh. “You started dating Deborah Ling to get your hooks further into Woodrow Gant. But why?”
    “She a good-looking chick.”
    “There’s got to be more to it than that.”
    Trinh blinked twice, pursing his lips, then moved his eyes off to the right, where nobody could see them. In a smaller voice, he said, “I fell for her, all right?” Grover Gant began to moan even louder, now sprinkling in a few words.
    I said to Trinh, “Fell in love?”
    “Yeah. Her, too. With me, I mean.”
    I tried not to shake my head. “Okay, let’s say I believe that. I still don’t see why you were stalking Woodrow Gant.”
    “You said it before.”
    “Said what?”
    Trinh swung his head back to me, the eyes as involved as his mouth in what he was saying. “The ‘grudge’ thing.