“This goes back more than ten years. Lex was, as a criminal trial lawyer… the master, the best.”
“I know. I’ve heard.”
“You know nothing. You haven’t seen his likes at the bar in the last ten years. Anyway, he took on a client named Dolson. He was a petty hood. He had a few arrests on suspicion of arson, extortion. Couple of misdemeanor convictions. Nothing too serious. This time he’s charged with a major arson, a vacant apartment building down in a run-down section of the South End. The job, if he did it, went bad. The fire spread to the two apartment buildings on either side. They went up like tinder. The clincher was an explosion that brought down most of the building.
“The police got a tip that Dolson lit the match. They picked him up, and he confessed to the arson. He pleaded guilty at the arraignment.
“Then it hit the fan. It took a couple of days to plow through the crumbled building. Everyone thought it was vacant. Anyway, they discovered a few bodies under the rubble. Probably street people who got in out of the cold.
“Now the charge is felony murder. Dolson didn’t want to confess to that, so he reneged on his arson confession. He withdrew his guilty plea and hired Lex.”
I didn’t want to interrupt, but you never know if you’ll think of the question again.
“How could a petty hood afford what Mr. Devlin must have been charging?”
“Well, that was part of the problem. The prosecution showed that a sizable deposit was made in an account set up in Dolson’s name just after the arson. That was part of the prosecution’s case. That, plus an eyewitness who spotted him around the building just before it went up.
“Dolson came up with an alibi. Another punk named Gallagher. I can’t believe I remember that name after ten years. Anyway, he testified that Dolson was with him. On the other hand, he looked as if he’d testify that he was Jimmy Hoffa if there was a drink in it. Even Lex himself will tell you it was the weakest defense he ever had to present. Dolson came up with some story that he’d been hired to plead guilty to the arson. The money in his account was to take the fall and do a few years in prison for someone else.”
I cut in again. “Who was the someone else?”
“Dolson said he never knew.”
“Who paid him the money?”
“He said he never knew that, either. He said it was all arranged over the phone. Anyway, the case was tried, and went to the jury. Three days later, they came back hopelessly deadlocked. A hung jury. One juror held out.
“Now it gets sticky. The assistant DA has the case marked up for retrial before a new jury right away. The next thing Lex knows is that he gets an offer from the assistant DA to drop the felony-murder charge down to negligent homicide, go with the arson, and work a deal for a sentence of six years, probable parole in two. Dolson jumped at it.
“Lex had a couple of problems with the plea bargain. He had a client who first insisted that he was innocent and paid to plead guilty. Now the client insists on pleading guilty and is wishy-washy on whether he actually committed the crime. If he didn’t do it, then the whole guilty plea was a fraud on the court.”
“What other problem?”
Munsey was sitting close, but he checked the area and moved a bit closer.
“I’m going to tell you this, kid, because I want you to understand fact from rumor. First the rumor. Word got out that the first jury had been fixed. The hold-out juror was supposed to have been bought. The rumors hung it on Lex. There was talk of an investigation by the disciplinary committee of the bar, maybe even prosecution. The fact is that the whole thing, if there was anything to begin with, was dropped as soon as the plea bargain went down. The rumor going around was that Lex worked a deal to have the investigation into jury tampering quashed if he got his client to plead guilty.”
“That’s bull. Are you telling me that anyone believed Mr. Devlin would fix a jury?”
“Get off the stand, kid. I’m telling you what was going around the bars.”
I knew that something had hit Mr. Devlin like a tank, but this was out of the range of my guesswork.
“Mr. Munsey, I’ve only known him a short time, but I’d sooner bet that my grandmother would fix the World Series.”
“I don’t know your grandmother, kid, but there was another reason for the rumor.”
I knew I wouldn’t like this one, but I asked anyway. Mr. Munsey gnawed his teeth a bit before he could get it out.
“It could have been true. Don’t split a gut. Listen to me. Ten years ago, what I said about Lex being the best was true. He was a hell of a lawyer. Hell of a man. He was Darrow and Marshall… After that, it wasn’t the same Lex. Even Zeus can get pulled down from Olympus.”
“I don’t believe it.” The words jumped out of me on instinct.
“You want to hear this or don’t you? You got me this far. You’re going to hear the rest of it. And open your eyes, kid. You do Lex a disservice if you think he’s more than human.”
I settled down and nodded.
“Ten years ago, Lex was going through hell. His wife, Dolly, they’d been married twenty-eight years. He idolized her, and with good reason. She went through a year of fighting cancer that wound up killing her. It killed most of him, too. It kicked the will out of him. Another thing. He’d always been a good-time drinker. It goes with the profession, but he always had it in control. After Dolly died, it got away from him. This Dolson thing came along when he was about three feet from the bottom. It wasn’t the old Lex making the judgments.”
I felt as if my heart had come to rest in the pit of my stomach. “I still don’t believe it. Some things in a man just can’t change.”
He stood up and started buttoning his coat. I stood up too.
“Nobly spoken, kid. But as a Lex Devlin fan, you’re new to the game. I’ve been at it for over sixty years. We both came from the same neighborhood in Charlestown. Did he tell you that? You might say I was his first client. At nine years old, he took on three tough Irish kids to get me out of a scrape. They didn’t take much to a little Protestant kid in that neighborhood. We became like brothers, which, I must say, took a lot of guts on his part.
“When Dolly’s illness came on, I was with him on the whole ride down. And during the years afterwards. When he got himself together, it took me five years before I could talk Old Man Dawes at your esteemed law firm into putting him back in harness. If you ever say that to Lex, I’ll deny it, and probably have to punch you in the mouth. You understand, kid?”
As I looked down at him, his moustache came about up to my chest, but I believed him. I said it with a nod.
He shook his head. “Even at that, when he joined Dawes’s firm, he wouldn’t go near a criminal case. That Dolson business was the straw that broke his back. I hate to see him in this one.”
“You said something about the reaction of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court being the same on this case as in Dolson. What did you mean?”
“Not the court, kid. Just some of its inhabitants. It’s hard to describe. The Dolson case never reached the court on appeal since it ended in a guilty plea, but if there’d been a conviction, Lex would have taken it up. He’d said as much. Lex believed Dolson was innocent during that first trial. The trial judge wouldn’t allow Lex to put in evidence of the telephone conversations where Dolson claimed he made a deal to plead guilty. The judge ruled them out on hearsay. Lex said his ruling was dead wrong. He would have taken it up if there hadn’t been a hung jury.”
“So it never got to the court…”
“I know, but I remember the buzz that went on among those justices I was talking about. It was as if they were trying to decide the case just in case it went up. Anyway, I never saw anything like it before or since, until the Bradley case. Maybe I’m just superstitious. The last time, Lex almost went down for the count on a jury-tampering charge. I wish he’d never gotten into this one.”
“You know better than I do, Mr. Munsey, but he seems to be thriving on it. Maybe it’s what he needed.”
Munsey looked at me as if he wanted to say something, but he just put on his Russian fur-ball hat and pulled the flaps down over his ears.
He was on his way out, when I thought I heard him mumble something like, “Watch his back, kid.”
