Small Vices

Through tattered clothes small vices do appear;

Robes and furred gowns hide all. Plate sin with gold,

And the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks;

Arm it in rags, a pygmy's straw does pierce it.

–KING LEAR

"Coffee?" she said.

"Sure."

I had decided that I was more alert with coffee than without it. So I decided to have a couple of cups each day, to keep my heart rate up. This one would be my third, but my heart was still a little sluggish. Rita sent a female underling for the coffee, and leaned a little back in her chair and crossed her legs. Her skirt was a little short for business, just as her hair was a little long. I knew Rita knew that, and I knew she didn't care.

"Still got the wheels," I said.

"Yeah, and I'm still spinning them."

"Beats the view out of Dedham District Court," I said.

"Oh, yeah. Professionally I'm a big goddamned success. But am I married?"

"Gee," I said. "I wish I could help."

"You had your chance."

I grinned.

"Reminds me of an old joke," I said.

"I know the joke," Rita said. "And never mind."

The female underling came back with two coffees in real cups, with a cream pitcher and sugar bowl on a silver tray. Everything bore the firm's initials.

"Discourages the clients from stealing stuff," Rita said.

I put some sugar in, and some cream, and had a sip. It was lukewarm.

"I thought you got married," I said.

"I did. Twice. Both jerks."

"Probably ought to stop doing that," I said.

"Marrying jerks? Yeah, I should. But you eliminate the jerks, and who you going to marry?"

"A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle," I said.

"How come that's the only feminist remark guys can quote?"

"There's another one," I said, "something about whore to her husband, slave to her children? Have I got it right?"

Rita grinned at me. "Could you maybe just shut the fuck up?" she said.

"Sure."

Rita drank some of her coffee and made a face.

"Limoges china on a silver tray and they can't get the coffee hot," she said.

I looked out the window. The ocean was gray today, and the far sky was the same color, so that the horizon was hard to distinguish and the distance just seemed to fade away. I could see the wake of a nearly indistinguishable power boat as it pushed past one of the channel markers in the outer harbor.

"About a year and a half ago, when I was still prosecuting, we had a guy named Ellis Alves. Charged with the murder of a Pemberton College student named Melissa Henderson."

"I remember," I said. "You got a conviction."

"Yeah, what a challenge. He's black, had two priors for sexual assault. She's white, honor student at Pemberton. Father owns eight banks. Her grandfather was once Secretary of Commerce."

"And?"

"And I did what I was employed to do. I prosecuted. I won. Ellis is now at Cedar Junction. Forever."

"Way to go, Rita."

"Yeah. It was easy. He had a public defender one year out of law school, Yale, I think. Kid named Marcy Vance. Serious. Talbots suits. Just a little lipstick. Knew more law probably than I'll ever know. Knew nothing at all about criminal defense. I could convict Santa Claus if she was defending."

She finished her coffee and put the cup aside.

"You're not smoking anymore," I said.

"The patch worked for me. I been off three and a half years."

"Good," I said.

"What do you care," Rita said. "You're in love with Susan."

"This is true," I said. "But it's not monomania."

"Nice to know," Rita said. "Anyway. I didn't like the case, but it was there to be cleared and I cleared it. While I was clearing it, I was interviewing here, and a couple weeks after I cleared Ellis right over to Cedar Junction, I came to work here and started drinking coffee out of china cups."

"So?"

"So last spring who shows up here, wearing more makeup, but still dressing Talbots? My old adversary, Marcy Vance. And as soon as we get reintroduced she starts in on me about Ellis Alves. He was framed. She was too green to conduct a proper defense. He was the victim of racial discrimination."

"You believe her?"

"I believe Alves had a lousy defense. I believe it is easy to get a conviction on a black man whose victim is a rich white woman."

"You believe he was innocent?"

"Most of the people I've convicted aren't."

"True," I said.

"But Marcy says he didn't do it. She admits freely that he's a bad man and probably a career criminal and probably guilty of a lot of other things. But she says he did not have anything to do with the Henderson kid."

"If she's right it means somebody else did. And got away with it."

"Yeah."

We were quiet for a moment. The power boat was out of sight now, out in the bay somewhere. The gray sky seemed to have lowered, and the panorama had closed in considerably as we talked.

"You think she's right?" I said finally.

"I'm not sure she's wrong."

"Ah ha," I said. "So there's more to this than just the chance to flash your legs at me and remind me of what I missed."

"Well, that's the primary purpose, but the firm is also prepared to employ you to look into the matter of Ellis Alves at our expense."

"And if I find out he didn't do it?"

"Then we would be very happy to have you ascertain who did."

"Probably would have to anyway," I said. "It's a sure way to prove he didn't do it."

"Let's be clear on this," Rita said. "The firm's not hiring you to clear this guy. The firm's hiring you to establish the truth."

"And you a lawyer," I said.

Rita smiled.

"I know, I'm not comfortable with the idea either," she said. "But there it is."

"Well, okay, if that's the way you feel," I said.

Rita took a thick cardboard envelope off her desk and handed it to me.

"Trial transcript," she said.

"I'll read it," I said. "Though not happily. And I probably ought to talk with Marcy, and then I ought to talk with Ellis. How's Ellis feel about white people?"

"He feels that some of them put him away for life."

I nodded.

"Be better if I can talk with him here," I said.

"Why?"

"Bring him in, sit in a conference room, give him a decent lunch, have Hawk join us. Anybody in Corrections owe you a favor?"

"Hawk?"

"Might ease the black-white thing a little."

"Yeah, I can pull that off. He'll probably have to be shackled."

"Leg irons only," I said. "And no guards in the room."

"Ellis is kind of a dangerous guy," Rita said.

"You can be right outside," I said.

"Yeah… Hawk with anybody?"

"Always, and not for long," I said. "I don't think he's husband material."

"No," Rita said, "he's not. Be a hell of a weekend, though."

"I've heard that about you," I said.

"Really? Where?"

"I think it was written in pencil on the wall of a holding cell in the Dedham jail," I said.

Rita grinned.

"And the sad thing is, I wrote it."

"AND I HAVE to face it," Marcy Vance told me, "a lot of this is my fault."

We were sitting on stools at a high table for two in a sandwich shop on State Street, looking at the lunch menu.

"How so," I said.

"Have you read the transcript?" she said.

I nodded.

"He wanted to plea-bargain," Marcy said. "I told him no. If he were innocent, we should fight. He said they were going to convict him anyway. I wanted to prove him wrong, prove to him that the system would work. I even put him on the stand. He's not an articulate man, but I believed in his innocence and I felt that, you know, truth will out."

"Everybody starts out young," I said.

I was considering the club sandwich.

"I started out younger than most," she said.

She was a lanky woman, still younger than most. Not thirty yet, with pale skin and green eyes, and straight brown hair efficiently cut. There was a hint of freckles that no suntan had ever intensified. Her hands were big, with long fingers. She wore no jewelry, and her only makeup was a pale lip gloss.

"And I asked one of the detectives in cross-examination a question that permitted him to mention Ellis's record. The judge allowed it. Said if I were going to ask questions to which I didn't know the answer, I was going to have to live with the consequences."

"But it's Ellis that's living with them."

"Yes."

It was a given that if I had a club sandwich, I would get some of it on my shirt. What was under consideration was whether I cared or not, which was related to how I felt about Marcy. Which I hadn't decided.

"Why do you think he's innocent?"

"He said so. I believed him."

"That's it?"

"And it doesn't fit. His previous assaults were on black women in his neighborhood. The rest of his record is all of a piece. Petty street crime, extortion, possession with intent, that sort of thing, all within a mile of Ruggles Station."

The waitress was rushed. She didn't want to wait for me to evaluate my feelings about Marcy before I ordered. Marcy ordered carrot soup. I played it safe.

"Ham on light rye, mustard," I said. "Side of coleslaw. Decaf coffee."

The waitress flat-heeled away at high speed and slapped our order on the service counter. There were maybe ten other order slips already there.

"Ellis own a car?" I said.

"No."

"He got a credit card?"

"I don't know. Why?"

"Could rent a car if he had a credit card. Hard to do without one."

"I never thought…" she said.

The waitress hurried back. Put a white mug of decaf in front of me, and a Diet Coke in front of Marcy.

"Be good to know how he got out to Pemberton," I said.

"He says he wasn't there."

"Be good to know where he was."

"He says he was with a woman, doesn't know her name. Her place. Can't remember where it was. They were drinking."

"Hell of an alibi," I said.

"Don't you think if he'd done it, he would have had a better one?"

"Not necessarily. Not everybody in jail is a thinker."

I drank a little coffee. It was just as good as if it were caffeinated. Or almost just as good. At least it was hot.

"What was the case against Ellis?" I said.

"Two eyewitnesses picked him out of a lineup."

"Two?"

"Yes, a Pemberton undergraduate and her boyfriend. They said they saw him drag Melissa Henderson into a car near the campus."

"They call the cops?"

"No, not then," Marcy said. "They thought it was just some kind of lover's quarrel, and they didn't want to seem racists, you know, a black man and a white woman?"

"Which was a racist thing to worry about," I said.

Marcy frowned, and looked puzzled, and looked as if she wanted to argue. She settled for a shrug.

"But they appeared after Melissa turned up murdered," I said.

"Yes. They went to the Pemberton Police and reported what they'd seen."

"How'd they connect to Ellis?"

"Pemberton Police got an anonymous tip."

"And they grabbed Ellis and put him in a lineup and the two witnesses pick him out."

"Yes."

"And the arresting officers find the victim's underwear in Alves's room."

"Yes. The DNA tests proved they were hers."

"What's Ellis say about that," I said.

"Says the police planted them."

"They ever find the rest of the clothes?"

"No."

The waitress rushed by again and dropped off some carrot soup for Marcy and a ham sandwich for me. There was a small paper cup of coleslaw on the platter beside it. Marcy got a dinner roll with her soup.

"There's something else," Marcy said. "It sort of got me what you said about the eyewitnesses not calling the cops-that it was a racist assumption anyway."

"You sort of thought deep in your heart that Ellis was guilty," I said. "So you overcompensated because you know that it was an impure racist thought that you were harboring."

"How did you know?"

"I'm a trained sleuth," I said.

"I was terrified of him, too."

"Probably with good reason," I said.

"Maybe, but I was, no, I am, ashamed of it."

"Well, you've confessed it to me," I said. "Maybe that'll help. You got a home phone in case I need to reach you after hours?"

"Yes. I've written it out for you. And I wish you wouldn't laugh at me."

"Sorry," I said. "It's a character flaw. I laugh at nearly everything."

She handed me a piece of lined yellow paper with her name and address and phone number handwritten on it with a felt-tipped pen in lavender ink. Maybe Marcy was more exotic than she looked.