The only good Lawyer

confidential.”
    “As in referring a potential client to a colleague?” Radachowski’s face became a mask. “Now what are you asking me?”
    “You met Nicole Spaeth at another charity event. She was in need of a divorce lawyer^ and you recommended your partner.”
    “Whom I knew to be a fine domestic relations attorney.”
    “With maybe a disproportionate appreciation of the women he represented?”
    Radachowski said, “I think that will be all, Mr. Cuddy.”
    “Before I go, could you try Elliot Herman for me?”
    “Elliot?”
    “I’d go back out to reception, but I hate to bother Ms. Burbage again, given all she has to do.”

    Packing papers into his briefcase, Elliot Herman said, “I have to be out of here in ten—no, five minutes.”
    “Won’t take three.”
    “All right.” Wearing pleated pants held up by whale-pattern suspenders today, he looked around the office instead of at me. “Sit.”
    Without closing his office door behind me, I took a chair. “I need to ask you an awkward question.”
    “Ask it.” Herman slipped a file from the middle of a stack on his desk. “Concisely.”
    “I’ve heard rumors about Woodrow Gant.”
    The file wouldn’t quite wedge between the others in the case. “What kind of rumors?” Herman asked, almost absently, as he tugged on the handle to a desk drawer.
    “About Mr. Gant and some of his female clients.” Herman stopped with the drawer open. Rather than close it, he crossed the room and closed his door instead, beginning to speak again while he was still behind me. “Mr. Cuddy, I don’t understand.”
    I waited until Herman returned to his desk, though he stayed standing, the pleats of his pants quivering as if the leg muscles were tensing underneath.
    I said, “There’s some talk that Mr. Gant used to see his clients... socially.”
    Herman’s right hand smoothed the hair by his white, lightning streak. “I don’t see how that—even if it were true—could matter to you.”
    “Alan Spaeth is accused of killing his wife’s lawyer. I’d like to know if other opposing husbands might have had a motive to go after Mr. Gant as well”
    I phrased my answer that way to see if it got a rise out of Herman, as a way of determining whether he knew of his own wife and Gant. But Herman’s expression never changed.
    He looked just as worried.
    “Mr. Cuddy, you realize what this could do to the firm?”
    “The rumors?”
    “The discussion of them in open court.”
    “Maybe it doesn’t have to get that far.”
    Herman thought for about three breaths. “Okay, there was some noise about Woodrow.”
    “Noise.”
    “Frank got a few calls, I think. He had a talk with Woodrow, stressing things like the firm’s image and general appearances. That’s all I know, okay?”
    “Frank Neely just talked with Mr. Gant?”
    Now a confused look. “What do you mean?”
    “There was no ‘Listen, once more and you’re out of here’ kind of warning?”
    Herman watched me. “I couldn’t tell you that. I just know what I’ve already told you.”
    “And how do you know even that?”
    “How?”
    “Yes.”
    Herman shrugged. “Woodrow and I had drinks once.”
    “Mr. Gant talked with you about this?”
    “Yes.”
    “When was this?”
    “I don’t know. Five, six months ago, maybe.”
    Around the time of Gant being with his wife. But Herman wasn’t showing anything to me except that constant concern about the firm’s future.
    I said, “Were any... names brought up?”
    “Of the women clients? Negative. Woodrow wasn’t like that, the kind to brag, I mean. But even if he had mentioned names, I couldn’t tell you. Client confidentiality.”
    I asked my next question slowly. “And what did Mr. Gant say to you about Frank Neely’s ‘talk’ with him?”
    Herman closed his eyes, as though trying to envision something, then opened them again. “Woodrow said he wasn’t sweating it too much.”
    “Why not?”
    Elliot Herman glanced at his watch and nearly jumped for his briefcase. “Woodrow said the fees he brought in, Frank wouldn’t dare call for a partnership vote with Uta, and if he did, Woodrow would bail out himself.”

    Imogene Burbage was on the phone, so I waited patiently in front of the reception desk.
    “No, Ms. Barber, Ms. Ling had a meeting after lunch, and she isn’t back yet.”
    The name was familiar. That divorce client of Gant’s who wanted to sell her house.
    Burbage said, “Yes, I left your earlier message on her desk…