CHAPTER 2
SATURDAY, APRIL 11, 1981
Maddie Devlin spread her morning newspaper across the table in the back corner booth at Behan’s, a crowded Southie railroad diner that served green eggs and ham on St. Patrick’s Day and decorated its walls with prints of Irish heroes of the Risings, Easter 1798, 1867, Easter 1916, the rebellions before and after, those in between. For the children there were drawings of the Lorax and other Dr. Seuss characters with a bit more of the tricolors of the Irish flag than in the original illustrations. Behan’s was a neighborhood place where everyone knew everyone, a place where people knew not to wear orange whether on St. Patrick’s Day or any other day, a place where Sanka was banished because of the color of its packaging, a place with an unlisted phone number, a place whose neon sign–green, of course–said merely Good Eats Cheap.
On Saturdays and Sundays, people lined up from the door, down the steps to the sidewalk, past the newsstand and candy store, past the Convent of the Sisters of Notre Dame, to the bus stop, and beyond, willing to wait because the line at Behan’s was as much a social gathering place as any of Southie’s churches, clubs, baseball diamonds, or bars. Brendan, the owner’s son, sat singles and doubles European style, claiming credit for more than one introduction that culminated in marriage. He kept an album of wedding pictures by the cash register and celebrated anniversaries, christenings, first communions, with dinner on the house. Those who wanted to eat alone sat at the counter on stools that swiveled a full three hundred sixty degrees. Children played spin the top on those stools and more than one gave back the food he had just eaten. It was one of the many quirks which made Behan’s Behan’s.
Maddie had taken a counter seat, but when the people on either side carried their breakfasts to other stools, Brendan led her to the back-corner booth, the last booth before the door to the rest rooms. He whispered something in Gaelic which she understood to be a curse she would not be welcome back even though she did not speak the language. On this combustible Saturday, people who on previous Saturdays would have smiled a greeting, welcomed her to join them, or joined her, now looked straight ahead on the way to or from the rest-rooms as if glancing at her would turn them into pillars of salt or mounds of ash.
Maddie, Charles F. Sullivan, III, and Avram Levy, dominated Saturday’s Boston Globe, five of the six front-page stories, the odd one devoted to the heat wave, two of the three front-page photographs, the third a heat wave photo. Articles and photos filled three inside pages; on page three, a paparazzi ambush picture taken as she snuck out the service entrance of the court-house after Levy’s arraignment. Her name also monopolized the editorial page, two editorials, one preaching the Constitution created a presumption of innocence and cautioning that “Boston can ill afford another Sacco and Vanzetti,”; and a second urging the public to reserve judgment about the propriety of “. . . Ms. Devlin defending Mr. Levy. Watch her closely,” the second editorial admonished, “and judge her by what she does.”
“Seat taken?” Detective George Harriman asked.
“Every Saturday still, Uncle George?”
“The usual?” Paula, the morning waitress, asked Harriman. The grime of her breakfast shift greased her apron. The pocket where she hoarded her tips bulged with coins and bills. Her support hose billowed at the knees and buckled around the ankles; yet, on St. Patrick’s Day, she marched the entire route of the parade, then outlasted everyone line dancing. When Harriman nodded, she shouted to the cook, “Bucket of oats, stallion size.” Years of cigarette smoking had toasted her voice and she had the croak of an adolescent on the cusp of puberty.
“It’s not the same without your da,” Harriman said to Maddie.
Their friendship had been forged, Harriman’s and Brian Devlin’s, on Guadalcanal as they huddled in a foxhole behind slowly leaking sand bags along the Lunga perimeter. Behind them lay Henderson Field which they had been ordered to defend to the death by some general safely outside the line of fire. They had served together, two boys from Southie tossed by fate into the First Battalion, 7th Marines, both proud to be members of the First Team.
Brian had turned twenty on Guadalcanal. The Marines had taken Henderson and the Japs were coming at them every which way to recapture it. Sea. Air. Ground. Thousands upon thousands for whom dying for emperor and empire was a point of honor. The rounds flying overhead, mortar shells exploding around them, incendiaries making barbecue pits out of foxholes and bunkers, shrapnel shredding flesh. War’s violence convinced Brian he would not survive to legal age. He saved his last pack of cigs for his birthday. Luckies. L. S/ M. F. T. Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco. A wee bit of home. A wee bit of what he was fighting for. He tossed the pack over to the next foxhole and it went from foxhole to foxhole, everyone taking one until crumpled and crushed and empty, it came back to him. Sixty or so Marines died that afternoon, October 24, 1942. Twenty of them had smoked one of Brian’s Luckies, maybe more since Marines shared everything, in life and in death.
The shooting had stopped. Spooked by the quiet of a lull in the combat, Harriman adjusted the chin strap of his helmet, checked his weapon, his supply of ammo. He hated the quiet. In combat, nothing good ever came of quiet. “Brian,” he whispered so as not to attract the attention of the Japanese machine gunners and mortar launchers, “I’m out of smokes.”
Brian stared at the distant tree line. He squinted, raised his binoculars. “Something moving. At the tree line.” He handed them to Harriman.
“Heat currents,” Harriman said, “fucking heat currents.”
“Hear that?”
“Mosquitoes.”
Brian slapped at a mosquito on the back of his hand, smearing the blood it had just gorged on. The sun, hot and fiery, filled the sky and hovered above Guadalcanal as if it had moved several million miles closer to Earth. He could have boiled a cup of tea in his canteen if he had a teabag to dip in it. “Damn, I hate this fucking place.” Brian removed his helmet and wiped the sweat from his forehead with his shirtsleeve, then rested his head against a sandbag. He had the troubled look of someone who needed absolution to die a good death.
A second time, Harriman cleaned his weapon, checked his ammo supply, adjusted the chin strap of his helmet, preparing for the next barrage of artillery and mortars, the next wave of soldiers.
They both survived, returning home to Southie, not the same men but in many ways no different than before they had shipped out.
Now, almost forty years after Guadalcanal, these memories saddened Harriman as he sat across from Brian Devlin’s daughter in a back booth of Behan’s on another morning heat-soaked by a raging sun.
“Beg off this case, Maddie. It’s so airtight Ugolino halted the investigation.”
“He what? Suppose he’s innocent? What-if the real Dracula’s still out there?”
“I know your track record, Maddie. If the police made a chain-of-custody mistake, if Charlie corrupted the crime scene, if the crime lab misread the prints, if the M E miscalculated the time of death, you’ll sling more shit than all the sheep in Ireland.”
“Ugolino wants a change of venue. He wants to make the defense do what he should be doing. Why else his leak to the press? That means he has doubts about Levy’s guilt. If he does, why not me? Or you? Or the jury?”
“Stupidity. Ego. Vanity. All make as much sense.”
Maddie spread her eggs on a piece of toast. “Ketchup, please.” When he didn’t pass it, she reached across the table. Slapping the bottom of the bottle, she deposited thick red lines on her eggs, parallel lines like the bars of a jail cell.
Paula brought Harriman his bowl of oatmeal, side dishes of brown sugar and raisins, and a mug of black coffee. He spooned some brown sugar into the oatmeal, then paused before stirring it in. Paula lingered at the table, her teeth bared like a person who wanted to pick a fight. Looking Maddie in the eye, she crossed herself. “What you’re doing is blasphemous,” she said.
God talk, Maddie thought. She hated God talk. She had had her fill of God talk when her ma died; God talk from the nurses at the hospital who said ma’s death was a blessing because it killed her pain; God talk from Father Curry who said ma now walked with God; God talk from Cornelius Moynihan, the director of Moynihan’s funeral home, who said ma’s serene countenance was a sign she had entered heaven. Everyone talked God talk so they wouldn’t have to deal with the grief of a young girl, everyone except Uncle George, this same Uncle George who now God talked to her of abandoning Avram Levy. If God didn’t want her to defend Levy, He would strike her dead was her attitude.
Maddie wiped ketchup from her lips. At her ma’s wake, this Uncle George had sat with her in a small chapel in the back of Moynihan’s, a refuge from the thrum and thrush of conversation, the sobs of close friends, the sounds of mourning. The smell of flowers, too strong for the ventilation system, had infiltrated the chapel and roiled her stomach.
Each year after her da and Harriman returned from Guadalcanal, they celebrated St. Patrick’s Day together, marching in the parade with the veterans from World War I, World War II, and, as the years passed, Korea and Vietnam, waving at the children who lined the street, children who in years to come would fight and die in other wars in other places. After the parade, they went to O’Driscoll’s where they sang and drank draught after draught of strong, black Guinness, first to the memory of their comrades in arms killed by the Japanese, then to Parnell, Robert Emmet, that Robert Emmet, Wolfe Tone and Fitzgerald, Connolly and Pearse, MacDonagh and MacBride until they had lost count of the rounds, after which they recited Yeats’s fated benediction:
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
At her ma’s wake, Maddie had turned to this Uncle George for the consolation her Da seemed unable to provide.
“I don’t remember her being sick,” she said.
Harriman crossed himself. He had argued with her folks, Maddie found out years later, about their keeping the cancer a secret. Let Maddie grieve in advance, he said. It’ll help her when the time comes. At the wake, he wanted to tell her; but how could he? He wasn’t her da. Instead, he said, “You’ll feel anger for a long time. First, at yourself. You’ll remember every little fight, whether it was about staying out late or skipping Mass. And you’ll blame yourself for all the unhappiness you think you caused her.
“When you get over that,” he continued, “you’ll feel anger at your da for all the arguments and disagreements they had. You’ll blame him for making her life miserable. That’s not the way to grieve. If you do, you’ll lose your da in the bargain.”
She had rested her head against his shoulder that afternoon in the small chapel in Moynihan’s and asked, “Have you picked a reading for the eulogy?” and he said, “The Stolen Bride:
O’Driscoll drove with a song . . . ,
And never was the piping so sad,
And never was the piping so gay.”
He hugged her that day, that Uncle George, and told her to take good care of her da because she was all he had.
Now, at Behan’s, this Uncle George, not that Uncle George, was all she had and she needed his hug more than at her ma’s wake, her da’s, her daughter’s, a hug she knew he would not give, now or ever. In a few days it would be Easter, another Easter; or, in the words of the poetess, Easter Again. “Who now cares,” the poetess asked, “Whether Guelf or Ghibillin . . . ?” Bobby Sands for one. From Robert Emmet to Bobby Sands. A direct line. From Robert Emmet to Bobby Sands to Mary Ann Devlin. A direct line. She wished she had Bobby Sands’s courage, his conviction, his passion, his fearlessness in the face of death. She pushed her plate away.
Harriman finished his oatmeal and started on his coffee. Maddie knew she was invisible to his eyes. “Remember an attorney name of Michelle Furey?”
He shook his head.
“She helped set up the Elizabeth Fund. She says she represents the estate of some Dublin priest. Father Gabriel Finn. Says he left me an inheritance. I’m going to a reading of the will in a bit.”
“Father Gabriel Finn?”
Maddie nodded.
“A Gabriel Finn celebrated the Mass at Seamus’s funeral, said a few words over your grand da. Long time ago.” Harriman finished his coffee and dropped a few dollars on the table. He started to say something, then clenched his jaw and shook his head. A dollop of moisture in one of his eyes trapped the light from the ceiling fixture. He wiped that eye with his knuckle. Standing, he stumbled, regained his balance, and walked quickly away, struggling to contain his tears.
Maddie felt as abandoned as a martyr whose life, whose sacrifice, had been long forgotten. The thought that fate might have cast her to be that martyr frightened her. She couldn’t silence the voice inside her head bullying her to defend Levy for her da and grand da, hectoring her that whether Levy was guilty or innocent was as irrelevant as the number of grains of sand on Southie’s Carson Beach. Ugolino, her inner voice tormented her, is but a lazy rationalization to conceal your true motive from yourself. Revenge, proclaimed her inner voice as if it were a declaration of independence. But, Trish asked, what was she guilty of? And Katie, a bitter old crone who belonged in a nunnery cracking the knuckles of heretics? Jail runs in our blood, her inner voice scolded, and Clancy, childless Clancy, was the jailer.
Clancy had laid a curse on the children of his two brothers and their children and their children’s children if any there be. She and Trish, Elizabeth and Bumper, were its latest victims.
The heat blurred her vision. The letters of her name in the newspaper headlines quivered on the page like the signatures of her namesakes in the Kilmainham register, Dublin’s ancient prison to which her da had dragged her years earlier. Jail runs in your blood, her da had said at the time. What she did not understand then, what she did not want to understand then, she now did. Her inner voice cheered.
-2-
Michelle Furey’s office was in one of Boston’s many office buildings constructed when twelve to fifteen stories was considered a skyscraper and people did not trust the novelty of elevators. Built with gas lights, the building had been retrofitted for electricity twice, first when electric lights replaced gas lights, then again when the demand for electricity caused by the explosion of office equipment overwhelmed the capacity of the original wiring. Clean and reasonably well maintained except for the granite exterior, which had been blackened by more than one hundred years of soot and pollution, it had survived into a charmless old age, its rents a fraction of those in the newer glass-sheathed buildings whose ornate lobbies offered fancy florists, newsstands that sold The Economist, and cafés where tuna sandwiches were served on baguettes rather than white bread.
Furey’s office shared the sixth floor with a hodgepodge of small businesses whose common feature was that they operated behind outer doors with smoked glass windows reinforced with wire, opaque but translucent, on which the name of the current tenant had been hand stenciled in black, often without sufficient effort to obliterate the names of prior tenants. Common lavatories flanked the elevator, men to the right, women to the left. Incandescent bulbs rather than fluorescents lit the hallway.
“Law Offices of Michelle Furey” proclaimed the door to her suite, the same proclamation when she and Furey first met to discuss the incorporation of the Elizabeth Fund. “Please Enter” read the invitation stenciled in the lower right corner nearest the door knob, the same invitation. At that time, Maddie had paused to imagine such a door proclaiming “Law Offices of Mary Ann Devlin.” Or, should it read “Law Offices of Maddie Devlin?” Now, she paused, again imagining a door with her name on it. What was indecision but cowardice in disguise. She envied those who had the courage to fly solo.
Maddie knocked. When no one responded, she entered a small anteroom with a secretary’s work station, a Remington manual typewriter rather than an IBM Selectric, three plastic chairs, and a small coffee table covered with magazines that looked abandoned rather than selected. There were three interior doors, two closed, one open revealing a conference room smaller than those at Suffolk County Legal Services, with chairs so closely crowded around a circular table that their occupants rubbed shoulders and knees.
Furey did not look a day older than when Maddie had first met her, still a petite woman with delicate features, her hair in curls and ringlets the color of the night sky, her eyes as green as the Irish countryside in May. Pushing her chair back from the table, Furey bounced into the reception area. “Maddie! It’s been way too long.” That voice rumbled, again, in Maddie’s bones. She still had thin lips, severe, barely peeking out from her mouth, a pair of horizontal parentheses too fleshless for lipstick. Pale, she looked as if she would scatter like the filaments of a milkweed pod if she were to step into the draft of the window air conditioner. She wore a loose-fitting sleeveless blouse that made modesty of her breasts. At first meeting, Maddie had guessed their ages were comparable; but, now, Furey glowed with a youthfulness Maddie no longer shared. Judging by the firmness of Furey’s upper arms, Maddie thought their workout routines must be similar, though hers, Maddie’s, to be less successful. Both then and now, to Maddie’s surprise, no wedding band or engagement ring graced the third finger of Furey’s left hand. Perhaps they had divorce in common as well. She wondered if Furey had a child or children.
To Furey’s left, an empty chair, then a priest, Father Bartell Darcy, Maddie assumed. The priest sat with his hands resting on a scuffed leather satchel fat with files. He was athletic, sturdily built, with the ruddy skin of someone who had just stepped off the football or rugby pitch. His hands were rough and calloused, the hands of someone who worked outside, a farmer or construction worker or fisherman. Sitting beside the priest was Maddie’s aunt, Katie Devlin, and her cousin, Bumper’s mother, Trish Sullivan.
“Who invited that goddamn Sassenach?” Katie Devlin’s words exploded from her mouth like the swears of an Irish hurler who has been fouled. Hot weather fashions did not favor her. Her pendulous breasts spraddled her chest as invitingly as plastic bags stuffed with used clothing for a church rummage sale.
“I did,” Furey said. “She is named in the will.”
“Let’s go, Trish, before she piles another dozen stones on Seamus’s grave.” Katie tried to stand, but the legs of her chair had interlocked with those of Trish’s and she could not push back from the table.
“The terms of the will require all the beneficiaries to be present when it is read,” Furey said. “If not, everyone forfeits their inheritances.”
Father Bartell, sitting opposite Trish, raised his hand in a sign of benediction. “May God turn the hearts of those who don’t love us,” he said to Katie. “I am Father Bartell,” he said to Maddie. “Please, sit.” He gestured at the empty chair between Attorney Furey and himself.
“I’m Maddie Devlin.”
“She’ll plant horns on your head,” Katie warned Father Bartell, “and sow worms in your innards.”
“We’ll have none of those old country curses in my office,” Michelle Furey said.
Father Bartell patted the crown of his head. “Slow-growing horns.”
“Don’t play the fool, Father,” Katie said.
Father Bartell undid the straps of his satchel. “I administered Last Rites to Father Gabriel Finn and heard his last confession. When Father Gabriel was young and fresh from the seminary he heard the last confession of your uncle, Clancy. On his death-bed Father Gabriel violated the Seal of the Confessional. Clancy had confessed to him Michael was innocent of Seamus’s death and that he had sworn a false oath against his brother because of an inheritance he did not receive. He made Father Gabriel promise to get the Irish Times to print a correction. Being fresh from the seminary, Father Gabriel didn’t think he should violate the Seal of the Confessional. As he aged, his promise to Clancy ate at him. On his own death-bed, he gave me these.” Father Bartell spread on the table photocopies of the original article from the 1916 Irish Times branding Michael Devlin a traitor, and Father Gabriel’s letter to the editor recounting Clancy’s confession. “I promised Father Gabriel I’d deliver his letter. The Times agreed to print a retraction.”
Father Bartell placed a thick document on the table. A blue ribbon extended beyond the bottom of the last page. “Clancy confessed a second sin to Father Gabriel, carnal knowledge of a married woman. Maud O’Donnell. I tracked her down in a nursing home. She remembers it like it was yesterday. She was the one who made Clancy go to Father Gabriel. This is her affidavit.” He tapped the cover page with his finger.
Maddie held the document by its edge as if it were a holy text made fragile by age. She read Maud O’Donnell’s affidavit, then read it again. She brushed her fingertips against the raised lettering of the notary public’s seal. The gold leaf on which the seal had been impressed looked authoritative, magisterial. No rational person could deny the truth of an affidavit with such a seal. She passed it to Trish. Katie attempted to intercept it, but Trish pushed her aunt’s hand aside. Trish’s lips moved as she read. When the time’s right, Maddie decided, she would insist her grand da be disinterred and reinterred beside his brother Seamus. She would insist he be honored with the celebration of a proper funeral Mass. She would invite Trish to stand beside her at the graves of their grand das, Devlins both, one family under God. And Katie, too, but she doubted Katie would rewrite the past even if the rewrite was a true war story.
“That is the inheritance Father Gabriel left each of you,” Father Bartell said.
“I disclaim,” Katie said. “That’s the right word, isn’t it, when you refuse an inheritance?”
Michelle Furey opened her mouth to speak, but Father Bartell silenced her with a wave of his hand. “Is ira a cardinal or venial sin, Ms. Devlin?”
Katie flashed a smile that showed she, too, once shared the beauty of the Devlin women. She loved showing off, especially in front of men of the cloth. To her, both Father Curry and Boston’s cardinal were ignorant men who recited cant from memory. Jesus had told her so. Over her Princess phone.
“Some ira is considered to have value. The desire for revenge is ethical if it is reasonable and proportional, such as ira caused by a gross injustice against an innocent person. It becomes sinful when it exceeds reasonable limits, such as exacting vengeance on one who does not deserve it or from an improper motive. In that case, prudence and justice, cardinal virtues, demand the desire for revenge be renounced.”
“You know your doctrine,” Father Bartell said.
“I know where this is going.” Katie glared at Father Bartell, then pointed at Maddie. “Behold the devil’s maidservant, Babylon the Great, the Mother of Harlots and Abominations of the Earth, here to cleave your tongue to the devil’s. Trish. Come along, dear.”
“No, Aunt Katie,” Trish said. “For Father Gabriel to do what he did, for him to violate the Seal of the Confessional, tells me what he says is true, that Uncle Clancy lied, that Uncle Michael did not kill my grand da. It’s over, Aunt Katie. It never should have been, but it was, and now it’s over.”
“You cooked this up, Maddie.” Katie spoke through clenched teeth. “You and your doxie lawyer tricks. Don’t be such an eejit, Trish. Don’t fall for the devil’s fast talking guile. He’s blinding you so you’ll forgive Maddie getting the Jew off scot free for murdering your son.”
“It is your tongue that cleaves to the devil’s, Aunt Katie,” Trish said. “I grew up on hatred, yours and my da’s, but I won’t grow old on it and I won’t die with it.”
“May the devil give you an Aussie kiss, Maddie!” Katie bulled her way out of the conference room, elbowing the back of Maddie’s head. Maddie did not remonstrate with her.
“I have a plane to catch,” Father Bartell said. “The documents are yours. If you have any questions, Attorney Furey knows how to contact me.”
“I apologize for my aunt,” Trish said.
“Old hatreds die hard,” Father Bartell said. “Pray God will heal her.”
Michelle Furey escorted him to the door. When she returned, Trish asked, “Is there somewhere Maddie and I can talk?”
“You can use this room. I have a will and trust to finish drafting.”
Maddie and Trish sat opposite each other at the small round table, the documents between them. Heat crowded the room, shrinking it, slowing the second hand that marked time on the wall clock so that it took two minutes, three, maybe four, to make a complete circuit. “It’s awkward,” Trish said at last.
Maddie’s inner voice, silenced by this unimaginable new information, remained mute. Outside, the wail of a police siren grew louder, peaked, then faded into silence. Horns sounded as traffic returned to its normal pattern. A pigeon lit on the window sill. Maddie knocked on the glass to scare it away, then said, “Let’s not ignore the elephant on the table, Trish. Me defending Avram Levy.”
“Is Aunt Katie right?”
“I’m not a doxie lawyer.”
“So why are you defending him? Do you, did you, hate me that much?”
“Not you. Maybe. I don’t know.”
“Why, Maddie? Why?”
Maddie’s inner voice stirred. “My boss forced me to cover the arraignment. Since then it’s like . . . I don’t know, like I’m in a trance. Hypnotized. It’s like an out of body thing. I’m floating up there watching myself like I’m dead.” She shushed her inner voice. “I don’t know why, Trish. I really don’t.”
“I need to know.”
“If I knew, I’d tell you, no matter how painful.”
“For you or for me?”
The self-control that enabled Maddie to hide her reaction in court when the judge ruled against her fled like a coward from the battlefield. Her head slumped. Her shoulders sagged. Her hands seized up into fists. Her mind abandoned her vocal chords.
Trish hoisted her purse onto the table and removed a spiral notebook. “This is Charles’s. He recorded every chess game in it.” She squeezed it to her breast as if it were her son, then slid it across the table to Maddie. “Go to his last match. It’s a complete game. The opponent’s name left blank. Whoever recorded those final moves, maybe he killed Charles.”
“Where did you get this? Charlie take it from the crime scene?” Maddie studied the chess notations. “These are just letters and numbers, more like printing than writing. Can you identify them as Bumper’s handwriting?”
“Except for the last few notations. Those aren’t his.” Trish covered Maddie’s hand with hers. “If the Jew didn’t do it, Charles’s killer is still out there.”
“He has a name, Trish.”
“I don’t want an innocent man convicted and I don’t want a guilty man to get away with it.”
“Can I take this? I’ve worked with handwriting experts. There are two or three I want to show it to.”
“They won’t destroy it, will they?”
“I’ll make sure they don’t.”
Trish nodded.
“One problem,” Maddie said. “There may not be enough here. Graphologists prefer working with complete sentences, several if possible. Whatever the conclusion, same person, different person, with such a skimpy sample, a few letters and numbers, a good attorney would destroy the expert on cross-exam. Without more I doubt there’s enough here to stand up in court”
Trish withdrew into her chair.
“But it’s something to go on, something worth investigating.” Maddie closed Charles’s spiral notebook. “Does Charlie know what you’re doing?”
“No.”
“Don’t tell him. Don’t tell anyone. If it’s not Levy, the real killer might get spooked and figure a way to cover his tracks.” Maddie made room for the notebook in the zippered central compartment of her purse. “It never goes away, Trish. I still cry myself to sleep on her birthday. I can’t tell you how many times I thought about killing myself so I could be with her. It got worse after my ma and da died. More people to join in the next life, fewer to hurt in this one.”
“I’m not ready for huggy-kissy. I don’t know if I ever will be.”
“We’re the only ones left, Trish.”
“Either way it dies with us.”
Maddie wanted to say something, but she bit her tongue. For her, it had to end now, today, in this room, not thirty or forty or fifty years in the future when both she and Trish lay moldering in the grave.
Maddie struggled to compose herself. Was this another step toward her overcoming her impacted rage? The feud, the curse, jail running in her blood, had been part of her life since birth and now, suddenly, at least for her, it was no longer. She felt as if someone had sat her down and said her parents were not her parents but caretakers who had brought her up because her birth mother had abandoned her on the steps of a church. She felt adrift, as if the law of gravity no longer applied. Maddie wished Trish felt the same way. Maybe it was the shock of Bumper’s death. Or, the sudden revelation. Or, both.
“I have to go,” Trish said. “Aunt Katie’ll start gossiping and Charlie’ll ask questions if I’m gone too long.”
“We should leave separately,” Maddie said. “I don’t want people seeing us together. You go first. I’ll stay and talk to Furey so she won’t say anything.”
Alone with Maud O’Donnell’s affidavit and Father Bartell’s photocopies, Maddie wiped a tear from her eye. She felt no joy, no happiness, just an overwhelming sadness, for herself, for Trish, for the heritage of hatred that tore asunder generations of the Devlin family; but more for the soul of Father Gabriel, for the agony the old priest suffered as he debated with himself whether to violate the Seal of the Confessional, for the emotional price he paid for his betrayal. For the rest of her life, she vowed, she would pray for Father Gabriel, pray that he find peace, pray that he ascend into Paradise.
Maddie slapped her cheeks as if she were trying to sober herself up enough to drive home after a long night of drinking. She had a crime to solve, a case to win, a cousin she hoped would someday come to love her, to “huggy-kissy.” But, what-if the final chess notations were in Levy’s handwriting? The spiral notebook would be a damning piece of circumstantial evidence. Charlie’s removing it from the crime scene would be an overruled objection overwhelmed by the probative value of the evidence.
Maddie’s mind raced like the engine of a car with its throttle stuck open. At this early stage of the case, too little was known with certainty to form conclusions. Lack of certainty did not preclude speculation, did not prevent the parade of “what-ifs”. That parade had always been one of her greatest strengths, one of her greatest weaknesses. On the one hand, it opened her mind to possibilities other attorneys overlooked; on the other hand, a surfeit of possibilities often distracted the mind from the truth.
According to the autopsy, Bumper died between ten and one. Capablanca closed at nine. Levy would have to account for four hours. What-if he didn’t have an alibi? If he didn’t and if the final chess notations were in his handwriting, what then? She only needed one juror for a hung jury, but what Boston jury would give her that? She wouldn’t have the leverage to negotiate a decent plea-bargain. Her gut was not yet persuaded of Levy’s guilt. At least not beyond a reasonable doubt. She wished it were. Reconciling with Trish meant a lot to her. Maybe more than her fiduciary duty to Levy.
Maddie busied herself making photocopies of the last page of Bumper’s spiral notebook on the copy machine beside the secretary’s work-station. As the machine ejected the last copy into the tray, one of the closed doors opened and Michelle Furey stepped into the waiting area.
“Helping yourself, are you?”
“Way too long.” Maddie repeated Furey’s greeting. “Mea culpa. We’re so short-staffed, I don’t even have time to blow my nose.” From her wallet, Maddie withdrew $5.00.
“I’m not that much of a piker,” Furey said.
“This isn’t for the copies. It’s a retainer. To make me your client.”
“I didn’t realize my value had fallen so low, but then it’s five bucks more than I got for the Elizabeth Fund.”
“I want everything that happened this morning subject to attorney-client privilege. I need something more than your word you won’t tell anyone.”
“My word isn’t good enough?”
“Nothing personal. Just business.”
“I suppose you want an engagement agreement.”
“Belt and suspenders.”
“Why are you shitting all over me?” Furey’s voice quaked with rage.
“Wrong place, wrong time.”
“Take your fucking fiver and get out of my office.”
Maddie stood transfixed as if a judge had just held her in contempt and sentenced her to thirty days for nothing more than zealous advocacy on behalf of a client.
Furey reached for the phone. “You going to make me call the cops?”
“Christ, can’t we start over?”
“What’s to start?”
“Can’t we try and be friends? There aren’t many woman attorneys and even fewer Irish woman attorneys and maybe our practice areas are poles apart, but that doesn’t mean we don’t put up with the same shit from our so-called brothers at the bar and couldn’t use some moral support from time to time.”
“I don’t take shit from so-called sisters either, especially sisters who avoid me after I donate my services to them.”
Maddie sensed her impacted rage struggling to free itself. Change the subject, she told herself. “How about dinner tonight? My treat.” She hesitated. “Or tomorrow, if you have plans tonight.”
“Is that your idea of an apology?”
Furey’s put-down energized Maddie’s impacted rage the way a bolt of lightning had the Frankenstein monster in the movie. In her mind’s eye, she saw an ogre pulling apart the bars of its cage to create an opening large enough for it to escape. She saw it smashing the photocopy machine, trashing Furey’s office, advancing on Furey, fists clenched. She raced through her catalog of coping mechanisms, rejecting one after another, until, at last, she closed her eyes and visualized herself lying on a beach at sunset, the sun melting into the ocean leaving behind a tail of red on the surface of the water. Seagulls drifting on air currents sang to each other. Waves lapping the shore provided a gentle backbeat. As the red tail of the sun approached closer and closer to the beach, the ogre, exhausted by its efforts, passed out on the floor of its cage.
“Maddie. Are you okay?”
Maddie opened her eyes. “I didn’t mean to be so crass.”
“Must be your inner trial attorney.”
“Life’s one fight after another, in court and out.”
“Welcome to the circus. Look . . . Why not come over my place instead? I was planning to bake some of my famous Irish soda bread. The recipe’s been in my family since the time of the sagas.”
“I’ve been known to burn toast.”
“I’ll lock the toaster in the closet.” Furey scribbled her home address on a piece of paper. “Eight o’clock. Save some appetite. I like to nibble while I bake.”
-3-
Visiting the morgue to view the remains of victims allegedly murdered by her clients was a routine part of Maddie’s job. Corpses before they were prettified by funeral directors no longer nauseated her. She intellectualized them as road-kill on the highway of life. But Bumper Sullivan’s chalky pallor, his torso defaced by a web of autopsy scars, his boyish size, boomeranged her back to Elizabeth’s autopsy and the recurring horror of what she imagined Elizabeth’s tiny body had looked like when the medical examiner had finished. As the diener rolled Bumper into the ice box, the aura of his whiteness wrapped itself around Maddie like a shroud.
At police headquarters, she rode the elevator down to the property room in the second sub-basement to inspect Levy’s personal effects. Acquittals and convictions were often measured from the odds and ends retrieved from the defendant’s pockets at the time of his arrest, inventoried and labeled by the property clerk, sent to the lab for analysis, and finally delivered to the district attorney or defense counsel for use at trial.
“Levy’s stuff,” she said to Angelo Capitao, the property clerk.
Capitao perched on his stool like an ape sunning himself on a rock. A cheap cigar, lit in spite of a smoking ban, unraveled in his mouth, staining his chin a diarrheal brown. “You wanna see the kike’s shit, ask the wop.” His cigar glowed with each word.
“I thought you were the wop.”
The wop. The don of the Boston police department. Dante Ugolino. Commissioner Stereo. One of Maddie’s black defendants told her the brothers called him Commissioner Stereo, as in stereotype. After Charlie’s first election as mayor, he appointed Ugolino commissioner of police as a reward for delivering the North End vote. Heavy at the time, Ugolino had doubled in weight since his appointment and now looked like he wore a bullet proof vest under his skin. In order to appoint him to a second term, Charlie had to persuade the city council to adopt an ordinance exempting the commissioner from the department’s physical fitness standards.
“Judas is here,” Therese Sroka, Ugolino’s secretary, informed him as Maddie signed the visitors’ log. Younger than Maddie, Therese dressed like the elderly women who sat outside the store-fronts on Prince Street in Boston’s North End observing life pass by.
Ugolino’s door popped open.
“Who’s Professor Husam al din al-Saffah?” Maddie asked as she settled into a captain’s chair adorned with the seal of the City of Boston Department of Police. “His name’s above mine in the log.”
Ugolino blew his nose. “I had lunch with the governor last week, something we do regular. He provides the lobster, I provide the gossip. We got to talking about the Superior Court vacancy, the one here in Suffolk, and he asks me what I think of a legal aid attorney.”
“The SJC vacancy is more tempting,” Maddie said. An Associate Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court was on the verge of reaching mandatory retirement age.
“Either way, I tell him the idea sucks ’cause they’re all too soft on crime; but you know the governor once he sets his mind and the concrete cures.”
“Professor Husam al din al-Saffah. Tell me about him.”
“Professor who?”
“The name above mine in the visitors’ log.”
Ugolino eyed her. He knew enough about criminal trial procedure to realize that the prosecution would be required to disclose Professor al-Saffah’s identity to the defense as part of pre-trial discovery if al-Saffah were to testify. If it were anyone but Devlin he would bow to the inevitable, but he’d rather make her work for the information. Let her file her discovery motions. Let her whine to the judge if the DA was not forthcoming. He shifted his bulk from the left arm of his chair to the right, shifting his thoughts from one side of his brain to the other. The chair groaned under the torture of his weight.
“A concerned citizen.”
“A concerned citizen?”
“A mullah,” Ugolino wheezed. “The Imam from the Disciples of Abraham Mosque. A professor of Islamic studies at UMass-Boston who specializes in comparative religions. He offered himself as an expert witness to provide a religious context for Bumper Sullivan’s murder.”
“Religious context?”
“Motivation. One of the elements of the crime, as I’m sure you know. Relevant on the issue of bail as well. I’m not telling you anything you won’t find out when you get the DA’s witness list.”
“So why do you want a change of venue?”
Ugolino leaned forward and enveloped Maddie in the body odor obese people have even when they are fresh from the shower. “Jesus fucking Christ, Maddie. Kick a sleeping dog and you’ll get rabies.”
“Not me. I’m immune. Where’s Levy’s shit?”
Ugolino pointed to a Golden Grapefruit box adorned with a smiling sun that promised nature’s sweet goodness. Flesh hung down from his arm like a pouch weighted with heavy water. “Therese will show you to an empty office.”
The only thing with rabies was the skull-cap on the library floor. But, how to find the rabid dog that left it there?
*
Many of the things confiscated from Levy were irrelevant to his defense: a paperback edition of The Holy Scriptures; a worn copy of Martin Buber’s I and Thou; a new copy of a novel unknown to her, A Canticle for Leibowitz; a bus schedule for the New York-Boston route. The rest were problematic: an Emergency Medical Technician certificate issued by the American Red Cross suggested he knew how to administer blood transfusions; a notebook, in Levy’s handwriting she assumed, with annotations of six chess games between him and Bumper Sullivan, none of which were played the night of the murder, indicated he had a relationship with the victim; but a pocket calendar with the entry “chess?” penciled in for the Thursday evening of the murder suggested they may or may not have played chess that night.
Classic circumstantial evidence, she thought, made less circumstantial by the presence of the little cap on the library floor. Whatever Levy’s explanation, it would fall on deaf ears, ears deafened by the prosecution’s harping on that little cap the way nuns harped on original sin in parochial school. She had tried cases where juries voted murder convictions on weaker circumstantial evidence, verdicts affirmed on appeal, and she knew in a case like Levy’s no juror would give a passing thought to reasonable doubt. As long as the prosecution had more challenges than there were Jews in the jury pool, Levy was signed, sealed, and delivered. Unless he was innocent and–a very big and–she pulled a Perry Mason and produced the real killer.
Yet, Ugolino’s demeanor, the way he parried her question about the change of venue, flew off the handle rather than answer it, when considered in the context of his leak to the press, aroused her skepticism. And, according to Harriman, he had halted the investigation. He had to be afraid she’d find evidence implicating someone else. He must be protecting someone. Himself? Another member of Capablana? Get a grip, she cautioned herself. Don’t let the heat fry your brain. The evidence still pointed to Levy. She had nothing to substantiate her change of venue theory, nothing but a feeling in her gut and the spiral notebook Trish had given her with notations of a chess match. No, she was not persuaded Levy was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt; nor, however, was she persuaded of his innocence.
The smiling sun on the grapefruit box mocked her as harshly as the real sun mocked the city of Boston.
-4-
Maddie’s confusion over her motivation for defending Levy, her hemming and hawing in response to Trish’s why, intensified nature’s demonic heat as she walked down Cambridge Street to the Charles Street Jail to interview Levy, her first up-close contact with her client. Motivation had never been an issue for her before. The cases came in. Frohling assigned them. The hardest always to her. She did what she had to do. Trial, plea-bargain, whatever, then moved on to the next case. Eight years of moving on to the next case. Nameless faces and faceless names. Until now. For once, for the first time, she needed certainty. Clarity.
At the jail a guard, bone thin and black with a ring of keys so heavy weighing down his right hip he listed to the right, escorted her to a tiny room where a matron in her early sixties, white of hair and pleasant of face, waited. Age defying, the matron’s skin was unlined and sagged only slightly beneath her jaw, beneath her eyes. Despite her masculine uniform–police style jacket, matching skirt, dark blue shirt and tie, low heels–she looked like everyone’s favorite grandmother. Maddie had not known either of her grand mas. The Irish of that generation died young, if not from disease or hunger, then from British bullets.
“I have to search you.”
“I’m an attorney. I have a bar card.”
“I know who you are.”
In the years Maddie had visited clients at the Charles Street Jail, she had never been searched; but she gave the matron her purse and opened her brief-case. The matron leafed through the files, more slowly than Maddie thought appropriate, then patted her down, front and back, head to toe, under her skirt to check for weapons or drugs. The matron nodded and the guard who had refused Maddie’s request to look away during the search walked Maddie to a bare room furnished with a small wooden table outlined by cigarette burns and two straight-back slatted chairs lacking arms or cushions. Nicotine discolored the ceiling and walls, an institutional beige yellowed from years of cigarette smoke. The stale, brackish air made her eyes sting. Balls of dust hung from the holes in the grating that secured the only air duct. Someone had carved a skull into the corner of the table and she wondered whether it had been an attorney or a prisoner.
With a jangle of his keys, the guard shoved Levy into the room, then slammed and locked the door.
Levy slumped into the vacant chair and sat on his hands. He wore a navy-blue skull-cap identical to the one found near Bumper’s bloodless body. Fuzzy sideburns extended below his ear lobes to the middle of his broad, pointless chin, accentuating his spherical face. A lifetime of eating traditional kosher food girdled his waist and hung over the top of his pants. Sitting, his entire body seemed conquered by a slouch as if his backbone weren’t strong enough to hold his weight erect. Maddie ignored her first impression, something C. J. Ant had taught her the how and why of doing.
“Remember me?” Maddie asked. “I need to ask you some questions.”
“Today is the Sabbath. The holiest day of holy days. To answer questions would be a desecration.”
“How can talking be a sin?”
“Why are your arms and legs exposed? Why aren’t you wearing a wig?”
“How did your skull-cap end up on the floor of the library at Capablanca?”
“You are traif. If you were Jewish you would understand.”
“I’m not your rabbi,” Maddie said. “I’m not your spiritual counselor. I’m your lawyer. What I need to understand is the law, the secular law, the criminal law of Massachusetts. Jewish law is as relevant here as the rules of baseball.”
“What you need to understand,” Levy said, “you will never understand. Talking today is a sin. It can wait until tomorrow.”
Levy sat quietly, his lips moving, concentrating on his lap as if he were afraid to make eye contact with her. Maybe he was, Maddie thought, or maybe he considered her so contemptible that she was not worthy of eye contact. She counted to herself, one-Mississippi, two-Mississippis, three-Mississippis, how many Mississippis before he looked up. She studied his face. He did not flash the desperation of someone falsely accused. He seemed indifferent as if he believed his fate was predestined. Murderers did not act this way. Most crowed their innocence; some boasted their guilt; a few pissed their pants. Would his indifference support an insanity defense? Not in her experience.
After the twentieth Mississippi, she asked, “How did your skull-cap end up on the floor of the library at Capablanca?”
“It’s a yarmulke. I wear it as a sign of my respect to Hashem.”
“Hashem?”
“He whose name may not be spoken.”
“God?”
“Yod, Heh, Vav, Heh. The tetragrammaton. Too sacred to be spoken.” Levy pushed his yarmulke around his head until hair fell over his eyes. “My father of blessed memory gave me twelve for my bar mitzvah. I told you that before. Don’t you pay attention?”
“No, you didn’t,” Maddie said. “Not me. Who have you been talking to? Someone from the DA’s office? What else did you say? Were your statements voluntary? Was an attorney present?”
Levy ignored her. “I didn’t know one was missing until I was arrested.”
“Answer my questions, damn it. Your case may turn on whether you waived your Fifth Amendment rights.”
“I didn’t know one was missing until I was arrested.”
“The immaculate disappearance. Is that what you’re saying? Can’t build a defense on that.”
Levy’s statement troubled her both because of what he said and how he said it. It was simple, declarative, not accusatory the way the guilty who feigned innocence talked. On the other hand, the tone of his voice–flat as if he were reading names from the phone book, his body language, his demeanor–reminded her of a study of fanaticism she had read in college which posited that fanatics who murdered in furtherance of their worldview believed so strongly they had not committed a crime they exhibited no signs of guilt when they lied. Truth serums and lie detectors were useless. Cross-examination could not break them down. She had never defended a fanatic. She didn’t know anyone who had. Yet, in her meeting with Rabbi ben Reuben and Moskovitzky, they had not hinted Levy had a dark side. Had wishful thinking blinded them to reality?
“I want you to copy something for me.” Maddie withdrew from her file one of the photocopies of the last page of Bumper’s spiral notebook she had made in Michelle Furey’s office. She studied Levy’s face for a change of expression, a hint, a clue, as to whether it was his handwriting or not, but his eyes remained as blank, as dead as Bumper Sullivan’s had been before the diener lowered Bumper’s eyelids.
“It is forbidden to write on the Sabbath.”
“Could you at least tell me if it’s your handwriting?”
Levy closed his eyes. His lips moved faster. Piety or fanaticism, Maddie wished she knew what his refusal meant. Clients who refuse to cooperate were a lawyer’s worst nightmare; but Levy was unlike any uncooperative client she had ever represented. She hoped she hadn’t thrown away that study of fanaticism when she weeded out her college course books, or, at least, kept her course notes. She would settle for finding the syllabus with the reading list. Thank God for the Boston Public Library.
She waited, doodling in the margin of her yellow legal pad, cartoons without captions, people standing before a judge, a cop chasing a robber, a politician with arms flailing addressing a rally. She had met Jews at bar association functions, several in law school, a few at college. Loser Larry Gingold, her colleague at SCLS, was the only Jew she had extended contact with. She didn’t know him any better than any other office buddy, but she knew him well enough to hope he was not an exemplar of his people. Levy was not like those Jews. He reminded her of the boys at Holy Name who graduated to the seminary rather than college or the armed forces or a job because they were afraid of life. She could not stomach those kids; no one could but the priests who labored so hard to scare them into the priesthood.
“The handwriting, will you at least look at it?”
“They call me Christ killer,” Levy said, his eyes still closed. “The guards threaten to throw me in with the other prisoners.”
“I’ll draft an affidavit.”
He opened his eyes. “I can-not swear an oath.”
“It’s a civil oath, swearing to tell the truth under the pains and penalties of perjury.”
“I will affirm, but I will not swear an oath.”
Another refusal. More doubts of his innocence. “Tell me about the yarmulke.”
“They won’t serve me kosher food. Rabbi ben Reuben brings me one meal a day.”
“Charles Sullivan died because someone drained the blood from his body. At the crime scene, the police found syringes and plastic tubing, both wiped clean of fingerprints, and your yarmulke under a nearby chair. A possible chess match with the victim for the night of the murder was on your pocket calendar. Now tell me about the yarmulke. How did it get there?”
Sprinkle in one or two expletives, fucking pocket calendar, fucking yarmulke, Maddie’s impacted rage urged. Scream them as loud as you can. She lowered her hands below his line of sight and clenched her fists, then opened her hands so she could grip the legs of the chair. Berating clients rarely worked and she knew that berating this client would only cause him to retreat deeper into his shell. She needed him outside his shell, at least with her. At least with her.
Levy said something, in Hebrew she assumed. The tone of his voice startled her, the voice of a beggar, not one seeking alms, but one beseeching God. “Am I accused of the blood libel?” He paled as if the souls of every Jew who had faced that accusation poured into him from across the centuries. “Pray for me.”
Clients had gone holy on her before, usually immediately after screeching their innocence. Going holy made them appear sincere and sincerity bred credibility. Juries would rather convict an innocent atheist than a guilty believer in God. Defendants with street smarts rehearsed going holy. For someone going holy, Levy seemed too in awe of the accusation. Was he suppressing his fanaticism? Was his piety an act? His withdrawn personality an act? Only a fanatic whose eyes were gouged out by true belief would commit a blood libel. Levy appeared to lack the fire. Unless he believed he was doing God’s will. Did he drain Bumper’s blood because he believed he was doing God’s will? She wished she knew. Was that his handwriting in Bumper’s notebook? She wished she knew. Which Levy was the real Levy, the pious rabbinical student or the fanatic, or was he both? She wished she know. What was the answer to Trish’s why? She wished she knew. Maddie crammed the file into her brief-case and rapped twice on the door to summon the guard.
On the street, the heat assailed her.
-5-
Maddie sat alone in a back-corner pew of St. Elizabeth of Portugal Catholic Church. She had driven to New Bedford, almost two hours, far enough away, she hoped, that she would not be recognized. The few parishioners who took note of her reacted because she was a stranger, not because she was Maddie Devlin. She felt like a stranger, not in the sense of being a foreigner, but in the sense of being estranged from herself, from her life.
Maddie had not planned to go to Saturday Mass. She had been sleeping so poorly that not having to wake up early on Sunday morning held little attraction, but Levy had left the taste of garlic in her mouth and she hoped the ritual of the Mass would cleanse her. She believed in the comfort ritual provided, not in its religious symbolism. Ritual she hoped, would provide this cleansing.
Anyone who felt aggrieved by Mayor Charlie or persecuted by society could have murdered Charles, but only an insane madman or a fanatic to advance a political or religious cause would have drained his blood. If Levy were that madman or fanatic, she doubted an insanity defense would succeed. He clearly knew the difference between right and wrong. Worse, the preparation for his choice of the wrong proved it was clearly premeditated. For that reason, the irresistible impulse variation of the insanity defense was inapposite because of the methodical nature of the crime. While he might be insane in a clinical sense, he seemed to fall outside the legal definition of insanity.
Levy qualified for a psychiatric workup, but she doubted he could afford to pay for one. Would the rabbi or Moskovitzky pay? If they did, she would not have to disclose any adverse conclusions. If they did not and she persuaded the court to order the Commonwealth to pay, she risked the court appointing a neutral whose report would be available to both sides. She risked the neutral concluding that the crime fit the accused and the accused fit the crime. And if the neutral concluded otherwise, she doubted it would matter. The opinions of a thousand psychiatrists would not trump the physical evidence. The most rational and dispassionate of juries would be warranted in dismissing the blathering of a shrink as so much mumbo-jumbo and convicting Levy based on the skull-cap and the inferences drawn from his personal effects. The criminal defendant-friendly justices on the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court would have no choice but to affirm. Only prosecutorial error would save Levy and a good defense attorney never went to trial on the wing and prayer of prosecutorial error.
Maddie rose and joined the line awaiting Communion. Passing through on my way down the Cape, she would say if the priest remarked that he hadn’t seen her before. In all her years representing defendants in criminal cases, she had never asked whether they had done it. Experienced attorneys never did that. Only mob or gang attorneys with their outhouse morality and bulging bank accounts were completely indifferent to the foreknowledge of their client’s guilt. Her temptation to ask Levy if he murdered Bumper Sullivan was not a sin; that was black letter Catholic dogma. No, her ambivalence on whether he answered yes or no, her wisp of a wish he would confess his guilt to her, those were the sins, sins of the heart.
So, why am I still here? she asked herself as the priest placed the Host on her tongue. She felt overwhelmed by the parade of “what-ifs” which forced her to focus on possibilities that should be overlooked while distracting her from the facts. But for this parade, she would be convinced of his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. She had handled cases where she thought her clients innocent even though the facts were stacked against them. In those cases, her skepticism was rational. In this case, it was an irrational rationalization. Either I’m insane, she concluded, or my subconscious is still poisoned by hatred of Trish and lust for revenge. I wish, Maddie thought, it was nothing more than this infernal heat.
The Mass concluded, Maddie made the sign of the cross, then stepped out into that heat.
-6-
Maddie made time for a light supper and a shower before going to Michelle Furey’s. As the hot water stung her face and bounced off her shoulders, she struggled to remember whether there had been a similar invitation years earlier when the Elizabeth Fund was incorporated. If there were, it had been hidden inside a hint, a hint she had been too afraid to recognize. She did remember visualizing what it would be like to be in private practice with Furey. Then, as now, she knew little of wills or trusts or probate, only what she had learned in law school. In law offices with two or three or four attorneys, it was common for attorneys to specialize in different areas of the law. It created synergy. In a law office of two, it would have been a different kind of synergy.
Tonight would be a test to see if they could get along on a person-to-person level, a necessity in a two person law firm. If they did, she would broach the subject of practicing together on a second or third date. She laughed at her use of that word, “date,” but it was appropriate. When attorneys considered whether to form a partnership, it was like a courtship. Maddie wanted to be courted.
She dried herself and dressed. Wanting to play the polite guest, she stopped at a package store for a six pack of Guinness–what else to drink with Irish soda bread?–and rang Furey’s doorbell within minutes of the appointed time.
“Welcome,” Furey said. Her smile radiated a warm welcome even in the unseasonable heat.
Furey lived within walking distance of Cleveland Circle in the garret of what once had been a grand mansion gut-renovated and subdivided into condominiums. Her kitchen, the maid’s room when a Gilded Age family lived in the mansion, was outfitted with granite countertops, appliances with doors of brushed silver, and a window that looked out on a carriage barn that once housed several horses and carriages but which had also been converted to condominiums. Furey’s circular living room faced down Beacon Street toward Fenway Park. It had four floor-to-ceiling windows and one solid wall on which hung a framed print of Francis Bacon’s ‘Study after Velazquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X’ or “The Screaming Pope.” “It talks to me,” Furey said in reply to Maddie’s gasp.
“What does it say?”
“That even the Holy Father doesn’t always believe.”
In the kitchen, Maddie opened the first two bottles of Guinness. The granite, cool to her touch, gleamed as if it had been polished. Maddie wondered if drafting wills and trusts, probating estates, was so lucrative or whether Furey enjoyed the good fortune of a noble birth or generous inheritance. Maddie doubted that. What Irish immigrant not named Kennedy did?
“Shall we?” Furey said as she measured four cups of flour into a mixing bowl, added two tablespoons of sugar, one teaspoon of salt, and a teaspoon of baking soda. “Care to whisk?” she asked. While Maddie whisked, Furey measured four tablespoons of butter. “People say use an electric mixer, but muscle power provides the secret ingredient.”
“You mean the sweat?”
With a damp cloth Furey wiped sweat from Maddie’s forehead, cheeks, and neck.
“Feels good.”
Furey sipped her Guinness as if it were champagne. “Perfect.” She led Maddie to the sink where they washed their hands, sharing the stream of water, the soap, the hand towel. “Now, we work in the butter by hand, tablespoon by tablespoon, until it resembles a coarse meal.” Beneath the surface, their fingers rubbed against each other, then became tangled. They both laughed as their fingers slipped free. “Now the raisins,” Furey said. “One cup. It took me years of trial and error to decide one cup was the correct proportion for four cups of flour.”
“I thought you said this recipe was in your family since the time of the sagas.”
“A girl’s allowed a bit of exaggeration. Another Guinness?”
“What about the nibbles you said you ate while you bake?”
“We’re in the mixing phase. Baking comes later.”
Furey washed her hands again, then cracked a large egg into a small bowl and stirred in fourteen ounces of buttermilk. After several stirs, the ingredients coalesced into a liquid of uniform color. Slowly she poured this liquid into the flour mixture. With a wooden spoon–once part of her grandmom’s trousseau, Furey explained–she mixed the liquid into dough until it was stiff, then excavated a well in the center of the mixing bowl. “When I was a young lass helping my grandmom, digging out the opening was my favorite part. I loved dipping my fingers deep into the mixing bowl, scooping out the batter, licking it off my fingers. Want a taste?”
Gently, Maddie grasped Furey’s wrist and guided Furey’s hand toward her mouth, closing her lips around Furey’s fingers one by one, little finger, index finger, the other fingers, filling her mouth with the batter. Slowly, she withdrew Furey’s fingers. “Yum.”
“If you think it’s yummy now, wait ’til it’s baked. Want another taste?” Her eyes sparkled like droplets of water reflecting the sun at its zenith. She scooped up a dollop of batter on her finger and offered it to Maddie.
Before Maddie could indulge, the phone rang. Furey depressed the speakerphone button.
“Attorney Furey? Maud O’Donnell calling from Dublin, like you asked.”
“Thanks,” Furey said. “I’m with Maddie Devlin. We’re baking Irish soda bread.”
“Mary Ann? Michael’s granddaughter?”
Maddie remained silent.
“I’ve wanted to make this call for a long time,” O’Donnell said.
“You could have picked up the phone.” Maddie bit her tongue. Why did every conversation turn into a cross-examination?
“They called me Clancy’s whore. Who’d ever believe a whore?” Maud’s voice sounded old, cracked as if parched by time, as she told the story of a young and foolish school girl who succumbed to the blarney of a married man who filled her head with promises about the life they’d live when he divorced and inherited his grand da Patrick’s homestead. Divorced in a nation where divorce was against the law. Her voice fluctuated from whispers barely audible to shouts strong and full throated, easily heard.
“Patrick left the homestead to my grand da Michael,” Maddie said.
In the background a bell tolled. “Fifteen minutes to early Mass,” Maud said.
Furey dusted her hands with flour and gently kneaded the dough just enough to shape it into a sphere.
Maud’s voice trembled as she described how Clancy never spoke to Michael again, how overnight, Clancy became a different man, bitter, angry, withdrawn, living for his next drink and nothing more.
Furey patted down the dough, smoothed out its surface.
Maud cleared her throat. “One morning he showed up with a bottle of vintage Bushmills. Bushmills was distilled in the north and, well, people on the Republic side of the Troubles didn’t drink Bushmills. I asked where he got it. He refused to say. We argued. He tried to force himself on me. I cracked him one with a skillet. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but after the ambush, the execution, I realized what Clancy had done.”
Furey greased a baking sheet and set the ball in its center, then molded it into a rounded loaf. With a serrated knife, she scored the top of the loaf, an inch or two deep in the shape of an X so the heat would have a direct path to the center while it baked.
Another bell rang. “Five minutes to Mass,” Maud said. “I have to go.”
“Will you repeat this to my cousin Trish, Beatrice Devlin Sullivan, Seamus’s granddaughter?” Maddie asked. “And her aunt, Katie Devlin? They need to hear this from you, especially Katie.”
Furey put the soda bread in the oven. Forty-five minutes to bake. Best served hot from the oven.
“With God’s blessing.” Maud hung up without saying good-by.
Maddie’s eyes welled with tears. Furey dampened a cloth in cold water and dabbed Maddie’s eyes, patted her forehead, wiped her cheeks and neck. Maddie tried to thank Furey for the phone call, but her sobs trapped her words so she hugged Furey and wet Furey’s hair with her tears and felt such a need for a catharsis that she kissed Furey full on the mouth, something she had never done with another woman, something she had not done with a man for longer than she could remember, and Furey led her by the hand into the living room where on the floor aglow with the ambient lighting of Brookline and under the watchful eyes of The Screaming Pope, they made love and Maddie felt a satisfaction she had never felt with another person, man or woman, a satisfaction she never felt with Richard Gloucester who, once upon a time, she truly loved. Together, they savored the Irish soda bread and finished the Guinness, then made love again. Hours later, Sunday morning’s sun rose on them asleep in each other’s arms, crumbs from the soda bread clinging to their sweat-dampened skin.