John Dobbyn - Neon Dragon

I settled down and nodded.

“Ten years ago, Lex was going through hell. His wife, Dolly, they’d been married twenty-eight years. He idolized her, and with good reason. She went through a year of fighting cancer that wound up killing her. It killed most of him, too. It kicked the will out of him. Another thing. He’d always been a good-time drinker. It goes with the profession, but he always had it in control. After Dolly died, it got away from him. This Dolson thing came along when he was about three feet from the bottom. It wasn’t the old Lex making the judgments.”

I felt as if my heart had come to rest in the pit of my stomach. “I still don’t believe it. Some things in a man just can’t change.”

He stood up and started buttoning his coat. I stood up too.

“Nobly spoken, kid. But as a Lex Devlin fan, you’re new to the game. I’ve been at it for over sixty years. We both came from the same neighborhood in Charlestown. Did he tell you that? You might say I was his first client. At nine years old, he took on three tough Irish kids to get me out of a scrape. They didn’t take much to a little Protestant kid in that neighborhood. We became like brothers, which, I must say, took a lot of guts on his part.

“When Dolly’s illness came on, I was with him on the whole ride down. And during the years afterwards. When he got himself together, it took me five years before I could talk Old Man Dawes at your esteemed law firm into putting him back in harness. If you ever say that to Lex, I’ll deny it, and probably have to punch you in the mouth. You understand, kid?”

As I looked down at him, his moustache came about up to my chest, but I believed him. I said it with a nod.

He shook his head. “Even at that, when he joined Dawes’s firm, he wouldn’t go near a criminal case. That Dolson business was the straw that broke his back. I hate to see him in this one.”

“You said something about the reaction of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court being the same on this case as in Dolson. What did you mean?”

“Not the court, kid. Just some of its inhabitants. It’s hard to describe. The Dolson case never reached the court on appeal since it ended in a guilty plea, but if there’d been a conviction, Lex would have taken it up. He’d said as much. Lex believed Dolson was innocent during that first trial. The trial judge wouldn’t allow Lex to put in evidence of the telephone conversations where Dolson claimed he made a deal to plead guilty. The judge ruled them out on hearsay. Lex said his ruling was dead wrong. He would have taken it up if there hadn’t been a hung jury.”

“So it never got to the court…”

“I know, but I remember the buzz that went on among those justices I was talking about. It was as if they were trying to decide the case just in case it went up. Anyway, I never saw anything like it before or since, until the Bradley case. Maybe I’m just superstitious. The last time, Lex almost went down for the count on a jury-tampering charge. I wish he’d never gotten into this one.”

“You know better than I do, Mr. Munsey, but he seems to be thriving on it. Maybe it’s what he needed.”

Munsey looked at me as if he wanted to say something, but he just put on his Russian fur-ball hat and pulled the flaps down over his ears.

He was on his way out, when I thought I heard him mumble something like, “Watch his back, kid.”

When I left Mr. Devlin, the plan was that I’d take the train to Harvard to talk to Anthony Bradley’s acquaintances, particularly the friend who went to Chinatown with him the day of the murder. After talking to Conrad Munsey, something seemed more pressing.

Since I was practically at the courthouse anyway, I went to the office of the clerk of the superior court. Trial records are public documents, which meant that I had the right to see the record of the Dolson case. Having the right is one thing; having the record of a ten-year-old trial excavated by a civil servant in the clerk’s office can be another. In this case, the paper chase was cut to a minimum by an old tippling friendship with one of the docket clerks. I could always count on Tony Boyle to short-circuit procedures and fly direct. It was totally legal, but the occasional Jameson’s on the rocks at the 77 after work hours never stood in the way of progress.

In an hour, I was at a side table, rifling through the familiar forms of indictment, bench warrant, pretrial motions, transcript of evidence, etc., through the dismissal of the hung jury. It read true to Mr. Munsey’s telling of the tale.

I noticed in the transcript of testimony that Mr. Devlin had tried everything short of dynamite to get in evidence of the out-of-court statements of whoever it was that contacted Dolson by phone about buying his confession and service of the jail time. Judge Bennett, the trial judge, upheld every objection of the assistant district attorney on the grounds of hearsay. If the trial hadn’t ended in a hung jury, I’d have bet my next paycheck that Mr. Devlin could have had the conviction reversed on appeal.

That came as no great shock. The Honorable Judge Bennett’s qualifications for the bench had been that he had been a bagman for the right political party. It was no surprise that his track record on evidentiary rulings was as weak ten years ago as I’d experienced it in modern times.

One thing that never came out in the trial, mostly because of the suppression of Dolson’s evidence, was who owned the building that was torched. That nagging question hung on after I had returned the file to Tony and hesitated over which direction to take from the clerk’s office.

Curiosity won out. I followed the catacomb tunnels to the registry of deeds. I had to lean heavily on what I had learned in first-year real property to decipher the chain of title. Fortunately, it was uncomplicated. Unfortunately, it was a dead end. The building where the fire started was owned by a real-estate corporation that was already in bankruptcy at the time of the fire.

The bankruptcy clerk at federal court did a quick check for me while I held the phone and found that the creditors of the corporation-the only ones who could have profited from an insurance windfall-were many, widespread, and relatively insignificant. In other words, there was no motive for a risky torching there.

I was ready to pack it up, when an obtuse thought occurred. As long as I was in the registry of deeds anyway, could it hurt to check the owners of the two properties on either side of the torched building? Testimony in the Dolson trial indicated that they were “accidentally” burned out, too. Since it seemed irrelevant at the time, nobody questioned the “accidental” nature of the burning of two side buildings.

What I struck could have been gold dust. It could also have been pyrite. At the least, though, it was interesting. The building to the left of the torched building had been owned for a year by a corporation called Adams Leasing, Inc. So what? Well, nothing, until I saw that the building to the right of the said torched building had been purchased one month before the said torching by Adams Leasing, Inc. All three buildings had been totally destroyed. While the insurance payoff to the main torched building would have been held up because of the arson, the insurance company would have no grounds to hold up the payoff on the buildings to either side.

The question then became who owned Adams Leasing, Inc. That was not a matter of public record. That was a matter for private detection. It was now four o’clock and ticking, and I hadn’t begun the day’s work at Harvard. I decided to gain speed by doing what the bike racers call “drafting”-riding in the wake of a rider who has taken the trail ahead of me.