Authors: William G. Tapply
Client Privilege
A Brady Coyne Mystery
William G. Tapply
For Bud Sheridan
ContentsStill his quality is not wisdom, but prudence. The lawyer’s truth is not truth, but consistency, or a consistent expediency.”
H
ENRY
D
AVID
T
HOREAU“
On the Duty of Civil Disobedience”
ONE
T
HE JUDGE’S YOUNG CLERK
made a fist, extended one knuckle, and rapped twice on the veneer panel of the door. He paused, then pushed it open. He stuck his head into the room.
“Mr. Coyne, Your Honor?” he said.
I heard no reply, but the clerk withdrew his head and nodded to me. “Go ahead in, sir,” he said.
The Honorable Chester Y. Popowski was seated behind a big desk in the corner of the large square room. The Superior Court judge’s chambers little resembled those created for television. There was some cheap wood paneling on the walls and fading maroon wall-to-wall carpeting on the floor. A glass-fronted bookcase held some thick legal tomes. The judge had fewer volumes than I had in my law office. No flagstands flanked the desk. No oil portraits hung on the walls. No rich leather furniture. It was a big room, and it looked as if its occupant had a short lease, which was true. Massachusetts Superior Court judges rotate among the various jurisdictions in the state. Pops’ tenure in Middlesex County was one year, of which he had already served seven months.
His robe hung on a coatrack beside him. His solid blue tie was loosened at his throat. He wore bright yellow suspenders. A newspaper was spread over the top of his desk, serving the dual function of tablecloth and reading matter. Pops held a cardboard container in one hand and a white plastic spoon in the other. He was looking up at me over a pair of half glasses perched low on his nose. His thick thatch of snow-white hair looked like a wig. Laugh lines crinkled at the corners of his eyes and he was giving me his famous smile. Pops had a face that inspired faith. It was a wise face, an honest face, a confident face.
Those qualities in that face were enhanced, not contradicted, by the thin white scar on his left cheekbone. It was perhaps two inches long, and it angled from just below the outside corner of his eye toward the corner of his mouth. It was barely noticeable in the winter, but after Pops had spent some time in the sun that scar seemed to glow proudly like a battle wound.
Which, in fact, is what it was. I was with him when he got it. It was back in our law school days in New Haven. Racial tension ran high in that city, as it did in many American cities in those days, although those of us who spent our time in an ivory tower tended to perceive it as an abstraction. On that particular evening, Pops, Charlie McDevitt, and I had emerged from a cheap restaurant in a marginal part of town. We had lingered after eating, debating fine points of due process and pending Supreme Court decisions, as we usually did. Charlie and I had lubricated the conversation with several shots of Old Grand-dad apiece, while Pops, typically, had sipped on a single glass of draft beer.
We carried the debate into the empty streets and continued it as we meandered toward Pops’ car, which was parked a few blocks away. Suddenly Pops yelled, “Hey! Cut it out!” and darted away from us. He ran across the street, where we could see some sort of fight in progress.
Pops piled into the middle of it. By the time Charlie and I had gathered our wits around us and followed Pops, two of the men had fled and Pops was kneeling on the chest of the remaining one. He was pounding the man’s face with his fists, mumbling “son of a bitch” and “dirty bastards,” and Charlie and I had to drag him off. As soon as we did, that man stumbled away, too, and the three of us were left alone on the sidewalk. Then we noticed the flap of skin lying open on Pops’ cheek.
He explained what had happened: he had seen two white men taking turns kicking a black teenager, who was curled fetally on the sidewalk. He had done what anybody would do, he said. He had gone to the rescue. One of the white guys had a knife, that’s all.
That was the only time I have ever seen Pops hit anybody. The only time, in fact, I have ever seen him lose control. I believe he might have killed that man with his fists had we not pulled him off.
The scar remained as a kind of symbol of Pops’ concept of justice. His face, somehow, would have been incomplete without it.
That scar and that hair and that altogether distinguished face gave Judge Popowski, unlike virtually all the other judges in the Commonwealth, instant recognizability among television viewers and other casual political observers. Pops looked like a judge. His appearance was an asset, and while he took no credit for it, he was grateful for it. He knew it gave him an advantage.
In the case of Judge Popowski, though, unlike the cases of most people, the face actually revealed the man. I knew that the Honorable Chester Y. Popowski was, in fact, distinguished, wise, honest, and confident. Honorable, even.
He waved the plastic spoon at me and jerked his head at a chair across the desk.
“Take a load off, Brady,” he mumbled.
I sat in one of the half-dozen orange upholstered chairs that were scattered in an imperfect semicircle in front of Pops’ desk. The chair was shaped like a pair of hands trying to collect water from a spring. The back stopped below my shoulder blades. My chronic lumbar ache began almost instantly.
He gestured at the doorway. “Bright young man. My clerk. Name of Robert.
Law Review
last year. You wouldn’t like him.”
“Why not? He seemed pleasant.”
Pops spooned a mouthful of white stuff into his mouth. “Harvard boy,” he said.
I shrugged. “Makes no difference to me. Some of my best friends went to Harvard.”
“So happy Groundhog Day,” he said.
“You too.”
“My favorite holiday,” he said. “Never thought it was right to sit in session on Groundhog Day. You figure the little bugger’s gonna see his shadow today?”
“Punxsutawney Phil? No way. It’s been raining all day.”
“Sun’s probably shining down there in Pennsylvania, scare him back into his hole for six weeks. God, I hate New England winters.”
“Me too,” he said. “Well, hey. Congratulations, Pops.”
He spooned another glob of white gunk from the container into his mouth and rolled his eyes in distaste. “Thanks. You heard.”
I gave him a frown. “Had to read about it in Norma Nathan’s column. You’d think, your own lawyer…”
He waved his hand. “It only just happened, Brady. I think old Norma knew before I did.”
“Well, Federal District Court. That’s nice.”
He nodded. “What I been waiting for. Assuming I pass muster with the Bureau and the Judiciary Committee and the full Senate.”
“No reason why you shouldn’t.”
“Provided our esteemed senior senator, who submitted my name, hasn’t pissed off too many of his colleagues, which he probably has, and assuming that he has, that his colleagues don’t decide to use me as some kind of lever to sock it to him. Which they probably will.” He shrugged. “You want some coffee?”
I shook my head. “All you ever have is instant. I can’t stand instant.”
“I stopped drinking the stuff, myself,” he said. “Goes right through me. As it is I gotta take about three piss recesses a morning. Damn prostate. I go to this urologist at Mass General, he pokes his finger up there and massages the thing. Most uncomfortable sensation you can imagine. He tells me my problem is I’m not getting it regular. I tell him, hell, Doc, I get it regular. Once a month, like clockwork.”
I smiled. “So how is Marilee?”
He took another mouthful. “In Sarasota right now, working on her tan. Her face is getting to look like an old penny loafer. I tell her she’s gonna get skin cancer, never mind ugly.” He shrugged. “You eaten?”
I shook my head. “This is my lunch hour. You summoned me.”
He held the cardboard container to me. “Want some of this?”
“What is it?”
“Cottage cheese with little pieces of pineapple in it. I also got a Baggie with carrot sticks and celery. Nice glass of Belmont Springs water. Power lunch.”
“I’ll pass.” I reached into my shirt pocket and took out a pack of Winstons. “Mind if I smoke?”
He shrugged. “Go ahead.”
“I mean, there’s signs all over the place, corridors, men’s room, elevators, no smoking in this building. Hell, what I understand, you can’t smoke in the entire city of Cambridge these days.”
Pops waved his hand around the room. “No signs in here. Judge’s chambers, you can smoke. I’m the law in here.”
I lit a cigarette.
“Happy Candlemas Day, too,” he said.
“Huh?”
“February the second. It’s been Candlemas Day in England since something like the fifth century. You know what Candlemas Day is?”
“No. I suspect I’m going to find out.”
He waved his spoon. “I’ll spare you the details. Ancient Christian celebration. The blessing of the candles. Properly blessed candles presumably warded off bad fortune. Folks burned blessed candles when somebody got sick, or during a storm, or whatever. Upshot of it is, there’s this myth that goes along with Candlemas Day, which is the same day that we celebrate Groundhog Day, which probably explains our heathen faith in the little brown critter reacting to his own shadow. There’s a rhyme. Want to hear it?”
I puffed on my cigarette and smiled. “Oh, please.”
He grinned. “Goes like this. ‘If Candlemas be fair and bright, / Come, Winter, have another flight; / If Candlemas brings clouds and rain, / Go, Winter, and come not again.’”
I had been Chester Popowski’s lawyer for about fifteen years. Even judges need lawyers. Pops had been a classmate of mine at Yale Law. He was several years older than I. He ran around with Charlie McDevitt and me for a while in New Haven. Charlie and I used to hold open house most weekends at our big old rented Victorian by the water, and Pops usually showed up. But he always seemed a little self-conscious about what Charlie and I considered fun. Pops had served two stints in Vietnam between college and law school. He managed to make me feel deprived by not having been to war. In the presence of Chet Popowski, I felt immature and trivial. Pops had always seemed serious and strait-laced. Uptight, Charlie used to call him. After he met Marilee, Pops came to the bacchanalia Charlie and I sponsored with less frequency and, it seemed to me, even greater discomfort.
After law school Pops became an assistant district attorney for Middlesex County, in East Cambridge, Massachusetts, just across the Charles River from my office in Copley Square. He had come back from Indochina with that great shock of prematurely white hair. Photogenic as hell on his tall, athletic frame. And Pops had a beautiful voice and beautiful teeth and a penchant for winning tough cases. Governor Sargent soon appointed him to the District Court bench, and a few years later he was elevated to Superior Court.