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Client Privilege

A Brady Coyne Mystery

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The judge's young clerk made a fist, extended one knuckle, and rapped twice on the veneer panel of the door. He paused, then pushed it open. He stuck his head into the room.

"Mr. Coyne, Your Honor?" he said.

I heard no reply, but the clerk withdrew his head and nodded to me. "Go ahead in, sir," he said.

The Honorable Chester Y. Popowski was seated behind a big desk in the corner of the large square room. The Superior Court judge's chambers little resembled those created for television. There was some cheap wood paneling on the walls and fading maroon wall-to-wall carpeting on the floor. A glass-fronted bookcase held some thick legal tomes. The judge had fewer volumes than I had in my law office. No flagstands flanked the desk. No oil portraits hung on the walls. No rich leather furniture. It was a big room, and it looked as if its occupant had a short lease, which was true. Massachusetts Superior Court judges rotate among the various jurisdictions in the state. Pops' tenure in Middlesex County was one year, of which he had already served seven months.

His robe hung on a coatrack beside him. His solid blue tie was loosened at his throat. He wore bright yellow suspenders. A newspaper was spread over the top of his desk, serving the dual function of tablecloth and reading matter. Pops held a cardboard container in one hand and a white plastic spoon in the other. He was looking up at me over a pair of half glasses perched low on his nose. His thick thatch of snow-white hair looked like a wig. Laugh lines crinkled at the corners of his eyes and he was giving me his famous smile. Pops had a face that inspired faith. It was a wise face, an honest face, a confident face.

Those qualities in that face were enhanced, not contradicted, by the thin white scar on his left cheekbone. It was perhaps two inches long, and it angled from just below the outside corner of his eye toward the corner of his mouth. It was barely noticeable in the winter, but after Pops had spent some time in the sun that scar seemed to glow proudly like a battle wound.

Which, in fact, is what it was. I was with him when he got it. It was back in our law school days in New Haven. Racial tension ran high in that city, as it did in many American cities in those days, although those of us who spent our time in an ivory tower tended to perceive it as an abstraction. On that particular evening, Pops, Charlie McDevitt, and I had emerged from a cheap restaurant in a marginal part of town. We had lingered after eating, debating fine points of due process and pending Supreme Court decisions, as we usually did. Charlie and I had lubricated the conversation with several shots of Old Grand-dad apiece, while Pops, typically, had sipped on a single glass of draft beer.

We carried the debate into the empty streets and continued it as we meandered toward Pops' car, which was parked a few blocks away. Suddenly Pops yelled, "Hey! Cut it out!" and darted away from us. He ran across the street, where we could see some sort of fight in progress.

Pops piled into the middle of it. By the time Charlie and I had gathered our wits around us and followed Pops, two of the men had fled and Pops was kneeling on the chest of the remaining one. He was pounding the man's face with his fists, mumbling "son of a bitch" and "dirty bastards," and Charlie and I had to drag him off. As soon as we did, that man stumbled away, too, and the three of us were left alone on the sidewalk. Then we noticed the flap of skin lying open on Pops' cheek.

He explained what had happened: he had seen two white men taking turns kicking a black teenager, who was curled fetally on the sidewalk. He had done what anybody would do, he said. He had gone to the rescue. One of the white guys had a knife, that's all.

That was the only time I have ever seen Pops hit anybody. The only time, in fact, I have ever seen him lose control. I believe he might have killed that man with his fists had we not pulled him off.

The scar remained as a kind of symbol of Pops' concept of justice. His face, somehow, would have been incomplete without it.

That scar and that hair and that altogether distinguished face gave Judge Popowski, unlike virtually all the other judges in the Commonwealth, instant recognizability among television viewers and other casual political observers. Pops looked like a judge. His appearance was an asset, and while he took no credit for it, he was grateful for it. He knew it gave him an advantage.

In the case of Judge Popowski, though, unlike the cases of most people, the face actually revealed the man. I knew that the Honorable Chester Y. Popowski was, in fact, distinguished, wise, honest, and confident. Honorable, even.

He waved the plastic spoon at me and jerked his head at a chair across the desk.

"Take a load off, Brady," he mumbled.

I sat in one of the half-dozen orange upholstered chairs that were scattered in an imperfect semicircle in front of Pops' desk. The chair was shaped like a pair of hands trying to collect water from a spring. The back stopped below my shoulder blades. My chronic lumbar ache began almost instantly.

He gestured at the doorway. "Bright young man. My clerk. Name of Robert. Law Review last year. You wouldn't like him."

"Why not? He seemed pleasant."

Pops spooned a mouthful of white stuff into his mouth. "Harvard boy," he said.

I shrugged. "Makes no difference to me. Some of my best friends went to Harvard."

"So happy Groundhog Day," he said.

"You too."

"My favorite holiday," he said. "Never thought it was right to sit in session on Groundhog Day. You figure the little bugger's gonna see his shadow today?"

"Punxsutawney Phil? No way. It's been raining all day."

"Sun's probably shining down there in Pennsylvania, scare him back into his hole for six weeks. God, I hate New England winters."

"Me too," he said. "Well, hey. Congratulations, Pops."

He spooned another glob of white gunk from the container into his mouth and rolled his eyes in distaste. "Thanks. You heard."

I gave him a frown. "Had to read about it in Norma Nathan's column. You'd think, your own lawyer…"

He waved his hand. "It only just happened, Brady. I think old Norma knew before I did."

"Well, Federal District Court. That's nice."

He nodded. "What I been waiting for. Assuming I pass muster with the Bureau and the Judiciary Committee and the full Senate."

"No reason why you shouldn't."

"Provided our esteemed senior senator, who submitted my name, hasn't pissed off too many of his colleagues, which he probably has, and assuming that he has, that his colleagues don't decide to use me as some kind of lever to sock it to him. Which they probably will." He shrugged. "You want some coffee?"

I shook my head. "All you ever have is instant. I can't stand instant."

"I stopped drinking the stuff, myself," he said. "Goes right through me. As it is I gotta take about three piss recesses a morning. Damn prostate. I go to this urologist at Mass General, he pokes his finger up there and massages the thing. Most uncomfortable sensation you can imagine. He tells me my problem is I'm not getting it regular. I tell him, hell, Doc, I get it regular. Once a month, like clockwork."

I smiled. "So how is Marilee?"

He took another mouthful. "In Sarasota right now, working on her tan. Her face is getting to look like an old penny loafer. I tell her she's gonna get skin cancer, never mind ugly." He shrugged. "You eaten?"

I shook my head. "This is my lunch hour. You summoned me."

He held the cardboard container to me. "Want some of this?"

"What is it?"

"Cottage cheese with little pieces of pineapple in it. I also got a Baggie with carrot sticks and celery. Nice glass of Belmont Springs water. Power lunch."

"I'll pass." I reached into my shirt pocket and took out a pack of Winstons. "Mind if I smoke?"

He shrugged. "Go ahead."

"I mean, there's signs all over the place, corridors, men's room, elevators, no smoking in this building. Hell, what I understand, you can't smoke in the entire city of Cambridge these days."

Pops waved his hand around the room. "No signs in here. Judge's chambers, you can smoke. I'm the law in here."

I lit a cigarette.

"Happy Candlemas Day, too," he said.

"Huh?"

"February the second. It's been Candlemas Day in England since something like the fifth century. You know what Candlemas Day is?"

"No. I suspect I'm going to find out."

He waved his spoon. "I'll spare you the details. Ancient Christian celebration. The blessing of the candles. Properly blessed candles presumably warded off bad fortune. Folks burned blessed candles when somebody got sick, or during a storm, or whatever. Upshot of it is, there's this myth that goes along with Candlemas Day, which is the same day that we celebrate Groundhog Day, which probably explains our heathen faith in the little brown critter reacting to his own shadow. There's a rhyme. Want to hear it?"

I puffed on my cigarette and smiled. "Oh, please."

He grinned. "Goes like this. 'If Candlemas be fair and bright, / Come, Winter, have another flight; / If Candlemas brings clouds and rain, / Go, Winter, and come not again.'"

I had been Chester Popowski's lawyer for about fifteen years. Even judges need lawyers. Pops had been a classmate of mine at Yale Law. He was several years older than I. He ran around with Charlie McDevitt and me for a while in New Haven. Charlie and I used to hold open house most weekends at our big old rented Victorian by the water, and Pops usually showed up. But he always seemed a little self-conscious about what Charlie and I considered fun. Pops had served two stints in Vietnam between college and law school. He managed to make me feel deprived by not having been to war. In the presence of Chet Popowski, I felt immature and trivial. Pops had always seemed serious and strait-laced. Uptight, Charlie used to call him. After he met Marilee, Pops came to the bacchanalia Charlie and I sponsored with less frequency and, it seemed to me, even greater discomfort.

After law school Pops became an assistant district attorney for Middlesex County, in East Cambridge, Massachusetts, just across the Charles River from my office in Copley Square. He had come back from Indochina with that great shock of prematurely white hair. Photogenic as hell on his tall, athletic frame. And Pops had a beautiful voice and beautiful teeth and a penchant for winning tough cases. Governor Sargent soon appointed him to the District Court bench, and a few years later he was elevated to Superior Court.

Now he had been nominated for Federal District Court, and I assumed he wanted to discuss it with me.

I looked around for someplace to drop the ash from my cigarette, and Pops produced a glass ashtray from a drawer in his desk. "You want to talk about the appointment?" I said "That why you summoned me?"

He dropped the cardboard container and the plastic spoon into the wastebasket beside his desk, pulled a handkerchief from his hip pocket and wiped his hands and mouth, and shook his head. "Wanted to show you something," he said.

He gathered up the sections of newspaper that had served as his tablecloth and dropped them onto the floor. Tucked into the blotter on the desk was a folded piece of paper. He unfolded it and handed it to me.

It was an eight-and-a-half-by-eleven piece of white paper. Twenty-pound bond. I felt the tiny serrations along the edges with my fingertips. Computer paper. Printed on it in dot matrix was this message:

I KNOW ABOUT KAREN LAVOIE.

There was no signature, no date, nothing else on the piece of paper.

I looked at Pops. "What's this?" I said.

He shrugged. "Came in the mail three days ago."

"Who sent it?"

"I've got no idea."

"Who the hell is Karen Lavoie?"

His eyes wandered to the bank of tall narrow windows in his corner room that looked out over the squat flat buildings and chimneys of East Cambridge ten stories below. The Bunker Hill Monument poked up in the distance. Beyond that arched the Tobin Bridge. Sooty smoke and steam rose straight up from the stacks and chimneys into the sullen gray February overcast. Pops didn't speak for several moments. Finally his eyes swung back to mine. "It's nothing to worry about."

I stared at him. "Bullshit," I said.

"I'm not exactly—shit, okay, so I'm worried. Hell, I want this appointment. Something wrong with that?"

"So who's Karen Lavoie, Pops?"

"Now don't get huffy, Brady. Believe me. I know the FBI and all Teddy's enemies are going to do their damnedest to dig up dirt on me. This does not intimidate me. I've promptly paid every parking ticket I ever got. All those times in New Haven, I never put my lips around a stick of cannabis. I spent four celibate years in Southeast Asia. There's nothing in my bank accounts I haven't got records of. The only people I owe money to are bankers. I've never set foot in a gay bar. My judicial record is, as far as I can see, impeccable. I have managed to avoid pissing off women and blacks and gays. I've sent bad guys up for long stretches. I've never visited a shrink. I know all about the things that screw up appointments. I've been in this racket a long time. Should I be worried?"

I cocked my head and looked at him. Then I tapped the single sheet of paper with the dot-matrix message on it.

"Evidently," I said.

He gazed down at the top of his desk and smiled. When he looked back up at me, he was no longer smiling. He removed his reading glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. "This is politics," he said. "This is big-time politics, now. A federal seat. I want it very badly. I've been aiming toward this. I wouldn't mind, five, ten years from now, maybe they think of old Chester Y. Popowski when one of the nine old men kicks off, either. Be a nice move for some future president, putting a second-generation Pole into the Supreme Court. Best job in the world for a lawyer, Supreme Court Justice. Be pretty nice. A Pole in the Vatican, a Pole on the Court. So, yeah, I'm worried. It's my nature to worry. I worry about all kinds of stuff. Phyllis gets an F on a French test, I worry she's gonna get kicked out of Mount Holyoke. Patty goes to the movies with that Tommy kid, the linebacker with that souped up Datsun that's shaped like a torpedo whose tires squeal around the corner, I worry I'm gonna get a phone call from the cops some night. I worry about bombs when Marilee flies to Sarasota. I worry I screwed up and they nail me on appeals. I worry about cholesterol. I worry I don't get enough fiber. I worry Marilee's gonna find a lump in her breast. I worry about her nightly headaches. It's why I gotta eat cottage cheese and yogurt and have my prostate massaged. Because I worry. It's also why I'm a good judge. Worrying keeps you sharp. Look for bad stuff. Head it off. So, yeah, you could say I'm worried. I'm always worried."

"So I repeat. Who the hell is Karen Lavoie? What is this all about, Pops? Come on. This is me, your lawyer here."

"Okay, just listen for a minute," he said, holding up his hand. "I got a phone call this morning while I was sitting in the kitchen eating a slice of dry toast and worrying about why the oil burner wouldn't shut off. Fella who sent me this cryptic message." He tapped the dot-matrix words on the computer paper. "Wanted to have a conversation."

"Did you?"

"Of course not."

"What'd he want to talk about?"

He put his finger on the piece of paper. "Her."

"Karen Lavoie."

He nodded.

"And?"

"And I told him he could shove it."

"Naturally," I said.

"He wanted to meet me in a bar, for crissake."

"But you're not going."

"He said he'd be there waiting for me. I told him he could wait six weeks for all I cared, see if the groundhog's prediction turned out to be accurate. He laughed. He said he'd be there, waiting, and if I knew what was good for me I'd be there. Then he hung up on me."

"You think that's a good idea, Pops?"

"What?"

"Standing him up?"

"What else could I do? Last thing I need is to be seen in some bar being hassled and threatened by some sleazebag who wants to muck around in my past. Christ, everybody in the city knows me."

I nodded. "You're probably right. On the other hand…"

"I know," he said. "Not going suggests certain problems, too."

I leaned back and smiled at him. "Pops, why'd you want to see me?"

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Excerpted from Client Privilege by William G. Tapply. Copyright © 1990 William G. Tapply. Excerpted by permission of MysteriousPress.com.
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