Grasping the handle of the cup between his thumb and the gnarled knuckle of his forefinger, Bartram lifted it to his mouth, staring straight ahead as he drank.
“He should never have been a lawyer. He didn’t have the temperament for it. You have to treat people with respect. You have to at least pretend that a client might have something to say worth listening to. You have to defer, with a show of good grace, to anything a judge decides to say. Calvin couldn’t do it.” As soon as he said it, he took it back. “No, that’s not true. He could do it-and he did it-at least with judges, but he hated it, every minute of it. He thought it was all too demeaning.”
He paused, a blank look on his face, as if he had lost the thread of his thought.
“All too demeaning,” Micronitis reminded him.
The thin film of vague ambiguity dissolved, and Bartram’s eyes came back into focus. “Calvin Jeffries,” he said like someone recalling the name of a long-lost friend, “was blessed-or perhaps I should say cursed-with a really remarkable capacity to take in both sides of a question almost simultaneously.” A shrewd glint entered his pale eyes. “I suppose I should have said ‘to see the flaws’ in both sides of an argument. He had the most analytical mind I ever saw.”
He hesitated, just for a moment, and Micronitis opened his mouth. With a shake of his head that was more like a quick shudder, the old man cut him off. “There was something quite destructive about it, this way he had of demolishing every argument he heard. It became an obsession with him. He was so intent on showing everyone that they did not measure up, that he sometimes completely lost sight of the difference between better and worse. With that restless mind of his, everything was reduced to the absolute equality of imperfection.”
This moment of lucidity seemed to exhaust his critical facul-ties. His head sagged down and as he fumbled with his coffee cup his hand trembled for a moment before he was able to bring it back under control.
“Well,” he said, looking around the table, “for someone who wasn’t interested in money, he did all right.” His eyes landed on Micronitis. “Thanks to us, he was pretty well off, wasn’t he.”
You could almost see the electrons racing around the agile brain of Jonah Micronitis as he calculated, no doubt to the last dollar and cent, the net worth of Asa Bartram’s deceased friend. “Quite a wealthy man.” He caught the meaning of the look that passed between Harper and myself. “It all started years ago,” he explained.
“Before I joined the firm. Asa always had an eye for investments.
He put the judge into some things-real estate, mainly-that didn’t cost that much at the time.”
With a grim laugh, the old man interjected: “But whoever killed him didn’t get any of it. One thing you could always count on about Calvin-he never had enough money on him to pick up a check.”
“The killer was probably after the car,” Harper suggested. “That’s where he was stabbed, right next to his car in the courthouse parking structure.”
Wincing, Asa dropped his eyes. “Terrible thing, terrible thing,”
he muttered. “Just left there to die like that, and then somehow managed to drag himself back to his office. Must have crawled part of the way.”
Micronitis checked his watch. “We better get going,” he said.
Asa gave no sign he had heard. Instead, he raised his head and grinned at me. “Jonah was right. Calvin really hated you.”
Laying my hand on his forearm, I looked into his aging eyes.
“And do you hate me, too, Asa?” I asked gently.
He was startled at first, but then he realized I was not asking him about me at all. “No, of course not,” he replied, patting my hand. “Calvin hated everybody.” A shudder seemed to pass through him, and his mouth twisted into a grimace. He stared down at the table, shaking his head. Then he stopped, placed both hands on the arms of his chair, and drew himself up to his full height. “He was the most brilliant man and the meanest son of a bitch I ever knew. I made him rich, and he made me feel like he was doing me a favor by letting me do it.”
“Then why did you?” Harper asked.
Asa did not understand. “Why did I what?”
Harper never had a chance to answer. Before the second word was out of the old man’s mouth, Micronitis had already begun to explain. “Why did you make him rich if he treated you like that?”
With a toss of his head, Asa snorted. “Wish I knew. I just did it, that’s all.” He paused, his dim eyes twinkling with a thought that had just come to him. “It was like a marriage. After a while you settle into a kind of routine, and later on you can’t remember why. I handled the business end of things when we started out together. It became one of the things I did, and I kept doing it after he went on the bench.”
With his elbows on the table, he wrapped one hand over the other and rested his chin on top. His eyelids were closed into narrow slits and a shrewd smile played at the corners of his wide mouth.
“Once you did something for Calvin Jeffries, it stopped being a favor and became an expectation. He never thanked me, not once in all those years.” Folding his arms across his chest, he sank back in his chair. “I don’t think he even liked me,” he said, pressing his lips together as he pondered the meaning of what he had received for all his trouble. Brightening, he turned his head until his eyes met mine. “He didn’t like me, but he hated you.”
Micronitis could hardly contain himself. “Yes, he really hated you,” he said, his voice a cheerful echo.
I turned away from Asa and looked at Micronitis. “Do you know why he hated me?” I asked, irritated.
His eyes darted from mine to Asa and back again. He fidgeted around in his chair. The side of his mouth began to twitch. “No,”
he finally admitted. “I just know that he did.”
Finished with his breakfast, Harper set his empty plate to the side. “Do you know why?” he asked, looking right at me.
“It was the Larkin case,” Asa explained. Harper turned his head, waiting to hear more. “The Larkin case made our friend here famous,” he said, nodding toward me. “Every lawyer who ever became famous became famous because of one case. The Larkin case was yours, wasn’t it?”
Harper’s eyes flashed. “I remember now. It was years ago. I couldn’t cover it. I’d already been assigned to a murder trial that was scheduled at the same time.” Harper thought of something.
“Wasn’t that the case the judge threw you in jail for contempt?”
Then he realized what had happened. “Ah,” he said, suddenly subdued, “Jeffries.”
For a moment, no one said anything. Then, turning to Asa, Harper asked, “What was it about the case that made him hate Antonelli so much?”
Furrowing his brow, he tried to remember. Finally, he shook his head. “I don’t really know. I never paid much attention to what went on in the courthouse. All I know,” he said, repeating himself, “is that it was the Larkin case.” He smiled apologetically at Harper and looked at me. “Tell us what happened, Joe. The Larkin trial.”
Micronitis started to object. He tapped his fingernail on the glass crystal of his wristwatch, trying to remind Asa that there was somewhere he was supposed to be.
“Go ahead, Joe,” Asa insisted. “I’ve always wanted to hear about it.”
Harper endorsed the suggestion. “I’ve always wanted to hear about it, too.” He stole a quick, sideways glance at Micronitis, then added, “And take your time. Don’t leave anything out.”
Two
The Larkin case. As soon as I was reminded of it, I remembered everything, all of it; the way the women who worked in the courthouse went out of their way to let me know what an awful thing she had done; the rigid certainty that she was guilty; the vexation that whatever sentence she was given would be less than she deserved. Perhaps part of it was because she looked so much like they did, a plain, scarcely noticeable woman who seldom wore makeup and thought nothing of wearing the same dress two days in a row. Most of it of course was because her husband had already confessed to having done with their daughter what she was accused of having done with their son.