One could gag on the silence that followed. I knew he’d rather open a vein than even meet Mr. Devlin in the corridor. I bade him a happy afternoon and took my leave.
4
I figured the word of our embroilment in the case and my usurpation by Mr. Devlin would spread like an oil slick through the three networks of the firm-secretaries, associates, and partners. The partners would be clued in by nightfall, the associates by mid-afternoon, and the secretaries by simultaneous broadcast. All to the good. It would save explanations to every partner who needed a gnome to answer the call of the list at court or a sacrificial lamb to argue unwinnable motions.
I was out of the office by three and into a stand-up hot dog on Washington Street by three ten. I tried to focus on the case as I chewed, for two reasons. First, I occasionally make the mistake of pondering the contents of those eight-inch oral suppositories, which is even more detrimental than eating them. Secondly, there was a decision to be made.
The immediate problem was finding the two witnesses. Chinatown was about five blocks to the left on Washington Street. On the other hand, that haystack might not even contain the needle. We had no way of knowing if the witnesses were locals or visitors.
Another possibility occurred about four inches into the hot dog. There had to be a police report of the killing and of the arrest. The report would contain names and addresses of the witnesses. Simple. All I had to do was get my hot little hands on the police report. Not so simple. Ms. Lamb had undoubtedly given the word that the report was not to be disclosed to defense counsel-for the protection of the witnesses, of course.
I headed in the direction of the new precinct building for Area A, which covers all of downtown Boston and north to Chelsea. As I passed the two rounded buildings on Cambridge Street that look like a broken comma and are known as One and Two Center Plaza, a notion was incubating. The Area A precinct building is a state-of-the-art Bastille. Twenty feet inside of the front door is a five-foot desk that looks like a parapet, presided over by the officer on duty. Beyond that point, outsiders goeth not. I needed an entree.
I ran up the Center Plaza steps to slip out of the wind. I made a cellphone call to city hall and worked my way through information to reach an acquaintance who worked in payroll. He was on a work break, so I got him at his desk. It had been four years since I had sweat blood to get his son probation for unarmed theft from a candy store that turned out to be a postal substation, making the crime a federal offense. He was still grateful enough to pull some information out of his computer without asking embarrassing questions.
The police precinct had converted the system of recording police reports from stone and chisel to computers a while ago. A number of civilian data-entry people were still hired to enter police reports and other information into the system.
My city hall friend read to me the list of names of data-entry people employed at the Area A building; I marked time through the Joneses and O’Briens and Kosciuskos until he came to Manuel Morales. Home address- Center Street, Jamaica Plain. At that time and in that particular section of the Plain, it meant a 99 percent chance that he or his forebears were from the sunny isle of Puerto Rico. It was not because of the climate that they used to call it “Jamaica Spain.”
It might seem that with my having a name like “Michael Knight,” my forebears ran on both sides to the decks of the Mayflower itself. Not quite the truth. In acquiring ancestry, I was farsighted enough to choose a Puerto Rican mother and a WASP father-both of them gems in any hue of skin tone. The bonus in fate’s choice is that I can play in both sandboxes. With the twin tickets of Harvard and Harvard Law School and a six-foot-two-inch frame under skin pale enough to see through, I can walk into the Boston Conservative Club and get a table center court. Thank you, Dad.
On the other hand, I have my mother’s legacy of jet-black hair and a slender build that never seemed to hold an extra pound. Since my mother spoke Spanish to me from my cradle days, I can slip in and out of a Latino accent like a loose sweater. I can drop my hundred and sixty fat-free pounds down a little, walk with a bit more grace and rhythm, and blend into any Latino section of the city. Bilson, Dawes knew that in making me an offer they were getting a pregnant pony-a twofer. They got an up-and-coming pin-striper who can mix with the State Streeters, and double points for hiring a minority.
I jotted down the name, Manuel Morales, and walked to the brick precinct building surrounded by blue-and- whites on Sudbury Street.
Business comes in waves to the center desk inside the station-house door. The officer on duty was blond, buxom, and beleaguered. I waited until she was going in three directions-to check on the release of a prisoner for a mother and father, scan the sheet of located stolen cars for a teenager, and take information on a missing person from a barely prehysterical wife.
I flashed a business card from a computer retailer who had recently tried to sell me a laptop computer. That got her attention. I didn’t say it was my name on the card. If she wanted to assume it, that was her business.
I asked her to call Manny Morales in data entry. She took me out of order because mine was probably the easiest and least emotional demand she had had to deal with all shift.
She grabbed one of the three phones in front of her and tapped in four digits. She asked for Morales. In about three seconds, she handed the phone over the counter to me. With me on the shelf, she was back in the maelstrom that had now grown by a young couple who were reaching high C over a car theft. In the confusion around me, I could have been talking in an isolation booth.
I cupped my hand over the phone and said, “Officer Morales?”
“Not ‘officer,’ just ‘mister.’ What can I do for you?”
The words were not much, but the rolled r ’s and Latino cadence of the syllables were like Mozart to my ears. I followed suit by coloring the vowels and pointing the consonants until Manny and I sounded like a couple of muchachos from San Juan. I explained that the software company had sent me to check the computer system for viruses. Since Manny’s job involved the keyboard and not the internals of the computer system, I was hoping that his training gave him a notion of what a virus was, but no clue as to how you diagnose or medicate it. I had taken a computer course at Harvard, which at least let me bandy about a few words of computer literacy.
I caught the desk officer’s attention long enough to put her back on the line. At Manny’s request, the officer gave me a clip-on pass that got me into the bowels of the station house. I followed directions back to the computer room, where I spotted a long, lean, white-shirt-and-tie type, about three inches taller and ten pounds lighter than me, sitting at a computer console. He had the dark hair and well-structured cheekbones to go with the accent.
There were five other men and two women at other consoles in the room. Only one of the women came unglued from the screen long enough to take note of my presence as I crossed to the one I assumed was Manuel Morales.
Manny shook hands and pulled up a second roller chair with a sweep of one long leg. I took it and mumbled “ Com-esta? ” on the way down.
He grinned and came back with, “OK, man. What’s up?”
I took the hint that we were perhaps not in a haven of racial impartiality and switched to English.
“How long since they checked for viruses?”
He slouched his long frame back in an easy posture, which told me that no alarms had gone off yet. I carefully avoided the serious crime of impersonating a police officer. I had absolutely no idea of the degree of criminality attached to breaking into a police station.
“I don’t know, man. I just got in here last week.”
Alleluia.
“Then I guess you’re not aware of our company policy. We give follow-up service to check for viruses in the programming every two weeks for the first three months. They’ll be giving you training. Let’s run through it.”
I swiveled up to the side of the computer to let him follow my lead and slide in.
“We can do it with any sample report. Let’s call up the list of police reports for-let’s see, let’s take yesterday afternoon and evening. Why don’t you go ahead and call those up while I start my report?”
I fiddled with a notebook while Manny’s lean fingers played the keyboard like a piano. The screen responded with a list of police reports by time of day. At that point, I slipped in and took the keyboard. I knew enough to scroll
