“You did bow,” I said. Flynn looked at me, a quizzical expression on his face. “That became part of the legend,” I explained.
“It was the first thing the two deputy sheriffs who dragged you out of there told everyone. ‘Called Jeffries an asshole and then he bowed.’ That’s the way the story got handed down. After that, for months, every time a lawyer had to appear in front of Jeffries, as soon as he finished, as soon as he said ‘Thank you, your honor’
and turned to leave, he’d whisper to the lawyer who was coming up next, ‘And then he bowed,’ just to see if he could make him laugh while Jeffries was watching.”
“And all this time I thought my short-lived legal career had been a failure,” Flynn drawled as he got to his feet. He stood in front of the desk, a pensive expression on his face. “The police came to see me about this.”
I could scarcely believe it. “His murder?”
“Yeah. Just routine stuff. But they knew all about what happened. They knew I’d been disbarred and that it was because of Jeffries.”
“How would they have known about that?”
“With all the pressure they were under, they must have looked at every case he ever had anything to do with. And besides, I was a legend, remember? As soon as they started asking around the courthouse about who might have held a grudge, who might have wanted to kill him, my name was bound to come up.”
“They never talked to me,” I objected.
“Maybe you should sue them for defamation.”
“So what did they want to know? Where you were that night?”
I asked. I was smiling because I knew where he was nearly every night.
“Yeah. I told them I was at an AA meeting. Stupid cop-he was young-asks me if I’m an alcoholic. I say no, I just go there because it’s the only place left I can still smoke.”
His eye wandered around the room, surveying the gold-sealed diplomas and the framed degrees; the hundreds of uniform cloth-covered volumes that contained thousands of appellate court decisions; the thick treatises on criminal procedure and the law of evidence and the endless updated alphabetized manuals on the criminal law; all the books every lawyer owns and seldom takes the time to read.
“I liked being a lawyer,” he said, thoughtfully. He took a deep breath and let out a long, soulful sigh. Glancing back at me, he flashed an apologetic smile. “But Jeffries was right. I had no business being one. Not like that.”
“You needed help, that’s all. You shouldn’t even have been suspended. You should have been put into a residential treatment program. That’s what anyone else would have done.”
Flynn was not convinced. “Sometimes you have to hit bottom.
I’m serious. Jeffries did me a favor. The law was all I had left, and when that was taken away…” As the thought finished itself, he remembered something else. “I once wrote him a letter of apology. It was part of the treatment. You were supposed to write to everyone that had been hurt by your drinking. I wrote to Jeffries, read the letter out loud in front of everyone in my group. I meant it, too. Every word of it. I was really sorry.”
I got up from behind the desk and walked him out to the elevator. “Did Jeffries ever write back?”
Flynn laid his hand on my shoulder. “I wrote it so I would feel bad, not so he’d feel good. I never sent it to him,” he said with a wry grin. “Screw him.”
It reminded me of the letter that was still sitting in my desk drawer, the one I had forgotten to mail.
“Why don’t you take the case,” Flynn said as the elevator arrived.
I did not know what he was talking about. “What case?” I asked as he stepped inside.
“The case of whoever they charge with killing Jeffries,” he replied, holding the door open with his hand. “Whoever did it probably had a pretty good excuse.”
A few minutes later, at precisely eight o’clock, my secretary, Helen Lundgren, hung her coat in the closet and with her usual efficiency entered my office with both hands full. “Finished with those?” she asked, nodding her forehead toward the stack of files she had left at the end of the day on Friday. Before I could answer, she dropped another manila folder in front of me. “This is the one you need for court this morning. State v. Anderson. Motion Calendar. Nine-thirty.” Her left hand now free, she placed it on my arm so I would not move while she set a steaming cup of coffee down on the desk next to the file.
She moved all around me, arranging files, issuing instructions, a bare-bones skeleton of a woman, with sharp pointed elbows and razor thin legs, a shrill high-pitched voice and dark black eyes that were always darting from one thing to another, as if she could never quite decide which emergency to handle first. I told her I needed to send a letter, and before I had finished the sentence, she was on the other side of the desk, perched on the edge of the chair, a pencil held at attention just above the steno pad open on her bony knees.
I handed her the envelope that had been entrusted to me by Elliott Winston and asked her to find the home address for Calvin Jeffries and send it on to his wife. Then I dictated a short note explaining the circumstances under which I had received it, and added at the end a few words expressing my condolences for her loss.
Helen’s blue-veined hand flew across the page. “Anything else?”
she asked as she snapped the notebook shut and rose from the chair. With the question still echoing in the air, she turned and walked rapidly back to her desk.
“No, I guess not,” I said to the vacant chair.
When it was time to leave, I found her hunched over the keyboard of her computer, peering intently at the monitor while her red-lacquered fingers added new language to an old form.
“I’m going to court,” I announced, my hand on the doorknob.
A furtive smile creased the corners of her mouth. “It’s a little chilly out. Better take your coat,” she said dryly, her eyes fixed on the screen.
I started to open the door and she stopped typing. “Would you drop this in the mail slot next to the elevator?” She handed me a large envelope. “It’s what you wanted me to send to Mrs. Jeffries.”
Television trucks were parked on both sides of the park that separated the county courthouse from the police department, waiting for any news they could get from either the police or the district attorney’s office. There had been an arrest, but nothing had been said about an indictment. Every journalist in town had a question they were dying to ask, and they were willing to ask it of anyone they could get to answer. One reporter, microphone in hand, stood on the sidewalk at the courthouse entrance and asked anyone who happened to walk past what they thought about the news that the killer of Calvin Jeffries had been arrested. He stopped a young blue-eyed blonde, so attractive that everyone around stopped to watch. Gazing down at her, he adjusted his tie and asked what she thought should happen to the killer of Judge Jeffries.
“Who?” she asked with a glittering blank smile that for a moment made him forget the question.
“Cut,” he said, shaking his head, as he let the microphone dan-gle down from the cord he held in his hands.
Inside, journalists prowled the hallways, talking to bailiffs, court clerks, anyone they knew who might know something they did not. On the second floor, as I was making my way to the courtroom at the end of the hall where the presiding circuit court judge took care of all the preliminary motions made before a case was set for trial, Harper Bryce caught up with me. Before he could ask me anything, I held up my hands.
“It’s not true, Harper. They did not arrest me; I’m not out on bail; and I don’t think I’m even a suspect.” I looked first one way, then the other. “But off the record, just between you and me, I did it. I swore I’d get even with him, and I did.”