Show of Evil

Parver drew herself a cup of coffee, sprinkled in half a spoonful of sugar, stirred it with her finger then sucked the coffee off it.

'Somebody said he's as good as Martin was in the old days,' she said casually, and waited for the explosion.

'Ha!' Naomi snorted. 'Who the hell told you that?'

'I don't know. Somebody.'

'Don't let somebody kid you, nobody's that good - or is ever likely to be.'

'You never talk about those days, Naomi. How long have you been with Marty?'

'Eighteen years,' Naomi said, tracing a long black finger down Vail's calendar for the day. 'When I started with Martin, he charged fifty dollars an hour and was glad to get it. And all I knew about the law was that it was a three-letter word.' She paused for a moment, then: 'My God, wait'll I run this by him. A luncheon and a cocktail party, both on the same day. The State Lawyers Association. I'll wait to tell him, he's liable to go berserk and kill Darby if I tell him before the inquiry.'

A moment later Vail stepped out of the lift, threading his way through the crowded jungle of glass partitions, desks, file cabinets, computers, blackboards, telephones, and TV screens towards his office. It was in a rear corner of the sprawling operation, as far away from the DA Jack Yancey's office as it was possible to get and still be on the same floor.

God, Naomi thought, he must've dressed in the dark. Vail was wearing an old grey flannel suit, unshined loafers, and an ancient blue knit tie that looked like it had been used as a garrotte by stranglers from Bombay. 'Christ, Martin,' Naomi said, 'you look like an unmade bed.'

'I am an unmade bed,' he growled, and stomped into his office. 'How old's this coffee?'

 'Fifteen minutes.'

'Good.' He went to the old-fashioned brass and chrome urn he had taken as part payment for handling a restaurant bankruptcy years ago and poured himself a mug of coffee. Parver and Naomi stood in the doorway.

His cluttered, unkempt office was a throwback to what Naomi sometimes referred to as the 'early years'. It was dominated by an enormous, hulking oak table that Vail used as a desk. Stacks of letters, case files, and books littered the tabletop, confining him to a small working area in the centre of the table. There were eight hardback chairs around the perimeter of the table. He flopped down in his high-backed leather chair, which was on wheels so he could spin around the room - to overrun bookshelves or stuffed file cabinets - without getting up. An enormous exhaust fan filled the bottom half of one window. Vail was the only smoker left on the staff and no one would come into his office unless he sat in front of the fan when he smoked.

'Stenner had me up before five taking a nature walk in the city dump,' Vail muttered, and sipped his coffee. 'Good morning, Shana.'

'You were out there?' Parver said with a look of awe. 'Is it true they found three bodies in the landfill?'

'What?' Naomi said.

'Three corpora delicti,' said Vail. 'And they were in there a looong time. Wonderful way to start the day. You don't want to hear any details.'

'Do you think it's murder?' Naomi asked.

'Okie'll let us know. Ready to take on James Wayne Darby and Paul Rainey?' Vail replied.

'Yes.' Emphatically.

'Want to talk about it? We have fifteen minutes before we go down.'

'If you do,' Parver said with confidence.

'Ah, the audacity of youth,' Naomi said, rolling her eyes. 'Oh to be thirty again.'

'I'm twenty-eight,' Parver said in a half-whisper.

'Twenty-eight,' Naomi said, shaking her head. 'I don't even want to think about my twenties. I'm not sure, but I think twenty-eight was one of my bad years.'

Vail casually studied the young lawyer. She was cool and steady, very self-assured for a twenty-eight-year-old. He had assembled his group of young turks carefully during the past six years, moving the assistant prosecutors from Yancey's old staff - mostly bureaucratic burnouts and unimaginative lawyers who preferred plea bargains to trials - into routine cases: drive-by gang shootings, local dope busts, assaults, robberies, burglaries, and family disputes, many of which ended in homicide. Gradually he had phased out several of them, replacing them with younger, more aggressive, yet unspectacular lawyers who preferred the long-term advantages of security to making a name for