broad—'
Vail hung up. He'd heard it all before. He headed across the park towards the far side, stopped once, and looked back. The shutters were open on one of the bedroom windows and she was watching him, wrapped only in the down comforter. She didn't wave; she just watched. Vail smiled up at her and walked through the park.
Stenner's concern for Vail went back four years, just after Flaherty had joined the Wild Bunch. Vail leaned over backwards to be impartial, but in his heart Shana Parver and Dermott Flaherty were his two favourites, probably because he saw in them his own rebellious spirit. Parver rebelling against her rich parents, Flaherty against the streets where he grew up.
Flaherty had been an angry kid, always in trouble, living on the streets, getting into fistfights, shoplifting, picking pockets, and heading for big trouble. He had one saving grace: he loved school. It was the one place he could rise above his desperate life. When he was busted for picking the pocket of a Red Sox fan and scalping the two tickets from his wallet, a kindly judge, who knew about him and was impressed with his grades, sent him to a half-way house for hardcase juveniles, where they kicked his ass and wore him out with leather belts and tried to whip the anger out of the wrathful orphan. The kid never cried.
One cold night, sitting in a bare, unheated closet that served as solitary, he had a revelation: His only asset was his brain. Intelligence was the only way out of the bleak, dead-end street he was heading down. Back on the street, he scrounged for a living, earned pocket money brawling in illegal backroom bare-knuckle fights, focused his anger on books. He became a voracious, self-motivated, straight-A student. Top of his class.
Once a month he hitched rides three hundred miles to Ossining to spend thirty minutes with the man who was responsible for his dreary existence.
'I'm gonna be a lawyer,' he would tell the man. 'I'm gonna get ya out.'
'Fuck lawyers,' the man would answer. 'Lawyers is why I'm here.'
He changed his name from Flavin to Flaherty, lived on fast-food hamburgers and chocolate bars to keep up his energy, avoided friendships, fearful they would find out who he was. He lived in fear of that. When he graduated from college, he decided to put distance between himself and Rochester and hitchhiked west until he ran out of money in Chicago. He applied for a scholarship, spent hours in the public library studying for the qualification tests. His scores were astronomical. For a kid of twenty-three, he seemed to have more than a passing knowledge of the law. Nobody knew why, nobody asked, but he impressed the review board enough to earn himself a full scholarship for one year, with the future hanging on what he showed during the first four quarters. He got a job as a night janitor in one of the city skyscrapers, slept on a pallet in the utility room. When he wasn't studying, he was in the courtroom, taking notes, watching the big boys in action, always rooting for the defendants and nursing an inbred hatred of prosecutors until he saw Vail in action, read about his young Wild Bunch, and realized, reluctantly, after a year that the assistant DA had become his idol. At the end of his first year he was courting a 3.8. Two more years on scholarship and he waltzed out with his law degree and with summa cum laude on his sheepskin.
He was twenty-seven at the time. Streetwise. Tough. Antisocial. Brilliant.
He had offers but chose to work for a broken-down old warhorse named Sid Bernstein, a once blazing star in the legal world who had turned to alcohol and coke to get through the day. For one year, Flaherty honed his skills studying the old boy's cases; reading law books; and dragging the old drunk out of bed, holding him under ice-cold showers and pumping the blackest coffee into him, dressing him and getting him into the courtroom, then prompting him through each case with notes scratched out on legal pads and law books marked with self-stick notes. One morning when Bernstein failed to show up at the office, he went to Bernstein's apartment and discovered that his boss was in the hospital. Pneumonia. The old guy lasted five days.
Sitting in Bernstein's drab office after the funeral, staring at the battered law books and worn-out cardboard file folders, he looked up and saw a handsome black woman standing in the office doorway.
'Dermott Flaherty?'
'Yes.'
'Sorry about Bernstein.'
The kid didn't know how to answer that. Bernstein was a cross he had borne for a year and a half. His sympathy for the man was superficial.
'Thanks,' he said. 'What can I do for you?'
'Are you taking over the practice?'
'Nothing to take over. Just trying to figure out what to do with his stuff. Uh, was there something…?'
'How'd you like a job?'
