Read The only good Lawyer for Free Online Page B

came through its door and glanced only at our table before asking brightly if she should bring a dessert menu.
    I told her I didn’t think so.

Chapter 3

    T he next morning , I woke up in the bedroom of my rented condo on Beacon Street . Woke up alone, and more than a little angry. The way I saw Nancy ’s blowup the prior night, she was upset at me for just doing my job.
    After using the bathroom, I thought I’d try to burn off those feelings and clear the mind for business. I stuck my head out the kitchen window to gauge the temperature. Too warm for the new hooded sweatshirt I’d bought, a quarterback’s hand muffler as front pockets against the coming arctic winds. Instead, I pulled on running shorts, a cotton turtleneck, and a T-shirt over the turtleneck. Before lacing up the Brooks HydroFlow running shoes, I reached for some tube socks and the knee brace I now have to wear on my left leg.
    Downstairs, I crossed Beacon to the Fairfield Street pedestrian ramp over Storrow Drive . Heading upriver along the Charles, I used the macadam paths that had recently, and stupidly, been divided into “travel lanes” by a white, broken line painted down the center. There were a dozen guys in dark pants and yellow T-shirts, some picking up trash and bagging it, others cutting brush and piling the branches near a nondescript minivan. If you’re not a river regular, you probably wouldn’t notice that during summers, the landscapes are male and female teens wearing orange tops, while the fall and spring folks are all older men in yellow ones. Reason? The younger workers constitute summer help from the city schools, the older workers, trusted inmates from the county jail, with the guy who tries never to leave the driver’s seat of the minivan a uniformed sheriff’s officer there to guard them.
    Our tax dollars at work.
    Passing the Boston University railroad bridge a mile later, I thought I had the situation with Nancy under control. I’m dense about some things, and somehow I’d badly misjudged her reaction to my taking Alan Spaeth’s case. She’d let me wonder about it for a day or two before calling to explain what I’d missed and then bury the hatchet. Seemed reason-able, if regrettable, and as I turned at Western Ave to head back downriver, I moved on to organizing my day.
    I’d have to start in South Boston , either with Lieutenant Robert Murphy on the homicide itself, or with Vincennes Dufresne, the owner of the boarding-house where Spaeth used to live and his alibi witness might still. Weighing things, it seemed to me that Murphy was less likely to be in, but easier to reach, and the earlier I visited the rooming house, the sooner I might find Michael Mantle.
    I finished my run with a sprint of a hundred yards or so from the Mass Ave bridge back to the Fairfield ramp, feeling a lot better than I had starting out.

    After one shower and two English muffins, I changed into a blue suit, white shirt, and quiet tie. Downstairs, I got behind the wheel of my silver Honda Prelude, the last year of the original model. Twenty minutes later, I found Vincennes Dufresne’s boarding-house in Southie, a few blocks from where East Broadway ends at Pleasure Bay . The neighborhood is mostly blue-collar and virtually all white, a questionable legacy of the desegregation crisis two decades earlier.
    The rooming house itself was a wooden four-decker on a block of threes, so it stood out like the gawky kid in a class photo. At one time maybe a forest green, the paint on the clapboard had weathered from salt, sun, and snow to a streaked and peeling olive drab. The trim around the bay windows stacked on either side of the centered portico also needed painting, and the concrete steps leading up to the front door were crumbly at every trod edge. If you could read a book by its cover, the only thing holding the place up would be the party walls shared with its neighbors.
    At the entrance, a sign block-printed on a pink five-by-eight note