John Dobbyn - Neon Dragon

He rocked forward out of the chair and walked over to the window. “Dolson had some kind of a deal going. He confessed once to arson. Then he pulled it back when they found bodies. I defended him. That was the case that ended in a hung jury.

“Two things happened after that. The assistant DA offered a plea with a light sentence. I never bargained for it. It was just dropped on the plate. Dolson was never required to ante up any information. It smelled. I didn’t like it, but Dolson grabbed it. I think he was paid to take the fall-at least that much of a fall. He told me as much, but wouldn’t or couldn’t say who paid him. Then when I raised hell with him about fraud on the court, he said he was just joking about the payoff. I had nothing concrete to take to the court, so the plea was up to him.”

He took a breath. I don’t know what he was looking at out the window. I don’t think he did. I didn’t move.

“The other part…”

After a second, he walked back to the desk. He was looking me right in the eye. But that look couldn’t have been meant just for me. I think he was looking at every bar-rail, gossip-mongering lawyer at the trial bar. The voice was strong, and it carried the weight of ten years’ suffering.

“Get it out, sonny. You’re the only one in ten years had the guts to ask me to my face if I fixed that jury. Give me the real question.”

He was in court. He was on the stand, and he wanted the question to come from every one of his peers. The office door was open, but we both ignored it. I put the question.

“Mr. Devlin, did you have anything to do with fixing the jury in the Dolson case?”

He was at full height now, and it came from the bottom of his soul.

“I had nothing to do with it. Whether that hold-out juror was fixed or not, I never knew. Before Dolson pleaded guilty, there was supposed to be an investigation by the disciplinary committee of the bar, or the DA, or both. After the plea, they were both squelched. I went to both offices and demanded a full investigation to clear the rumors. I couldn’t get to first base. The case was closed. Nobody wanted to hear about it, except in the bars and the chambers when I wasn’t there to speak in my own defense. I’ll say it now, for the first time in ten years, in the hearing of another lawyer. I had nothing to do with it. ”

When he sat down, he didn’t fall into the chair. He sat down. The dignity and the immensity of the man’s aura poured over me until I felt a knot the size of an orange in my throat.

There were no more words to say, if, in fact, I could have gotten them out. I could see in his face, as he could see in mine, there was no question of belief.

My voice croaked when I reached the door and said, “Thank you, Mr. Devlin. I’ll do that Harvard run.”

There was a ten-ton silence in the corridor as I walked to the elevator, but it wasn’t tension. They had just heard the sound of justice, and it overwhelmed them.

It was pushing five by the time the train pulled into Harvard Square. The afternoon chill had dipped into an early-evening freeze. Crossing Mass. Avenue at rush hour from the island that houses the “T” station took skill, cunning, and the pretense of not looking. The trick, of course, was not to face a driver who was also pretending not to look.

There was always the alternate course of waiting for the light at the crosswalk, but then, why stand out from the crowd? It would only confuse the drivers.

I walked down Dunster Street, which led to the student houses on the Charles River. I found the door of a relatively modern building that housed the offices of tutors and PhD candidates. Barry Salmon fit the latter category.

I had heard from classmates over the years that after we graduated, Barry had practiced his acquired art of classical philosophy for some years at a private high school. Inevitably he came back to John Harvard for a PhD He was well into his second year at this point.

The plug-in letters on the directory board told me that they had filed Barry in room 412B.

I remembered the first time I met Barry. He was a well-shined, skinny, bow-tied, tweed-sport-coated (still bearing the frays of his older brother’s wearing) freshman at Chambers Academy. He was smiling then, and he was smiling the last time I saw him, which was the day we graduated from Harvard College. As a freshman at Chambers, he smiled out of a deep-rooted good nature. His smiles at Harvard emanated from chemical substances that the chief chemist at Dupont couldn’t have identified.

When Barry came to Harvard, he fell in love with three institutions: classical philosophy, some dredged-up cult of the old sixties’ hippie culture, and Cynthia Wallingford. The only one of the three that ever did him any good was classical philosophy. For all of his daffiness, Barry was probably the brightest individual, strictly in terms of raw intellect, that I have ever known. I would probably score Barry: Intelligence-ten; Common Sense-point three.

The funny thing was that Barry never lived in the sixties. He was born in ‘77. On the other hand, he never outlived the sixties.

Barry was a hippie in the nineties, when our classmates didn’t understand the meaning of the word, and they certainly didn’t understand Barry. We traveled in different circles, I’m happy to say, but there was always something warm in our acquaintanceship that harkened back to Chambers days.

I found room 412B with its door open. I peered inside. The room was about the size of Anthony Bradley’s cell, but it seemed a great deal smaller. There was a tiny footpath that led through mounds of books, papers, lecture notes, fruit, and sneakers. At the end was a wooden desk chair with no one in it. Then there was a desk with Barry on it, semireclined and reading. At least I suspected that what was behind the salt-and-pepper beard and under the Don King hairdo was Barry. I caught the aroma of the sneakers, and I knew it was Barry.

I knocked, but it took a yell to get his attention.

“Barry! Michael Knight. You remember?”

He squinted for a second, then sprang like a cat over the chair to the floor. I was amazed that whatever was cooking his brain cells at that point in his life had done nothing to his athletic prowess.

“Mike! I don’t believe it.”

He just laughed, and I did too. It seemed to cover all the trite, conventional questions and answers that would otherwise have been necessary to bring us up to date. There we were, and the last ten or so years were blown away.

“Barry, I want to ask you a question.”

“Shoot, Mike. Hey, would you like some coffee or something?”

I smiled and declined. Much as I still liked Barry, I wouldn’t drink coffee out of any receptacle in the room, and what “or something” meant I’d have needed a degree in pharmacology to figure out.

“I’m a lawyer, Barry. I have a client who’s on trial for murder. He’s a Harvard student. Anthony Bradley. Sophomore. African American.”

I don’t know why I was looking for recognition. If Plato didn’t report on the event, it was unlikely that it would have taken Barry’s attention. Nonetheless, I pressed on.

“He was a football player his freshman year. He lives in Dunster. His father’s a judge.”

Suddenly the beard parted as if to speak. I wondered which of the facts I had ticked off struck the chord.

“He’s a black kid. Runs that group. What do they call them? ‘The Point,’ right?”

“You lost me, Barry. I never heard of the group. What are they?”

“Yeah, well, it’s a group of students. They do some good volunteer things. Mostly they help freshmen get up to speed with their study habits. They help them make the crossover to college.” He grinned. “They help the kids that never went to Chambers.”