compromised ethics that drive disillusioned lawyers out of the law.
He had grit, and he had style-the kind of style that made people say regretfully, “There’ll never be another Lex Devlin.”
And he had that name that became shorthand at the bar for the best there is.
He had it until he stood in the way of a human machine so corrupt that it played without any rule but greed, so camouflaged by its outward face of public service that Lex Devlin never saw it coming or going.
When it was through with him, it had stripped Lex Devlin of the name that was the work of his lifetime. It left it tarnished with unfounded rumors of the cardinal sin against the law that he served flawlessly-the sin of jury fixing.
Lex Devlin has, for ten years, held a valid I.O.U. from this city for the redemption of that name.
So here’s the payoff, Lex. Here’s the best I can do for a start.
Thanks to the efforts of Lex’s associate, Michael Knight, the District Attorney and the United States Attorney have received incontrovertible evidence that Lex Devlin was totally innocent of any complicity in the incident of jury fixing that occurred in the case of Commonwealth v. Dolson.
The tarring of those who were responsible will fill the pages of this newspaper in the weeks to come, as the greatest scandal in this Commonwealth’s history unfolds.
But that’s for another edition. The business of this day is belated justice. This column is the first brick in the pedestal that the City of Boston should build for a son who always did it proud.
This city has its heroes, and it has its villains. Sometimes, being human, we confuse the two.
This time we got it right.
God Speed, Lex.
I let the paper sit on my lap and just soaked up the truth Mike Loftus made public. I could visualize lawyers and judges all over the city, who had innocently fallen for the lie and perhaps even spread it, wondering what they could do to make up for ten years’ shunning of one of their finest.
That thought carried me down Cambridge Street and up the elevator to the sixth floor of the cardiac unit of Mass. General Hospital.
The nurse pointed out his room. I asked how he was doing. She said, “He went to sleep last night like a hundred-year-old man. This morning, he was in his early thirties.”
I walked into the room, and the first thought that hit me was that I was at his wake. There were enough flowers in that room to bury the president. In a quick check of the attached cards, I caught sight of names like the Boston Bar Association, the Mass. Trial Lawyers’ Association, the mayor’s office, and a who’s who of the trial firms of the city.
He had a private room. He was in the bed, sleeping, with wires running to an assortment of machines.
Spread across his lap was the Globe, opened to the inside continuation of Mike Loftus’s column.
I sat down in the chair to be there when he woke. The squeak of the chair made him look over. He seemed alert when he spoke. His voice had the old sand and gravel.
“Tell me about it. Tell me about all of it. Don’t leave out one detail.”
I talked for a long time. I told him about the business with Abdul and the drug ring at Harvard. I told him about my meeting with Loring and everything that went into his signed statement about the “association” and the jury fix in the Dolson case that was now in the hands of both the federal and state prosecutors.
Then I told him every detail that led up to the dismissal of the indictment against Anthony Bradley. The punch line was that his tactic had worked.
He had his head back on the pillow. He was Mount Rushmore with his eyes focused on something on the ceiling, but I could tell from the silence that he was drinking in every word. When I finished, there was more silence.
I let it lie for a minute, until it became awkward.
“That was one serious gamble, Mr. Devlin. That early trial date nearly blew me away.”
“It was the only way. If we let them have time to pass around the word about that surprise witness, the boys in Chinatown could have come up with a dozen other trumped-up witnesses. If there was a chance Bradley was innocent, we had to ambush them.”
“Did you believe Bradley was innocent?”
He shook his head. “I didn’t care. If he was innocent, our best shot at getting Mrs. Lee to tell the truth was that young lady. If he was guilty, Mrs. Lee would have held up as a witness against him. Either way, justice would have been done.”
I smiled. I was still on the side of playing hunches about the client’s innocence. And he knew it. That’s what makes horse racing.
“I’ll give you this, Mr. Devlin. Your instincts about tactics were everything I’ve heard about.”
There was no answer. I didn’t understand why at the time. He took the free hand, the right one, the one with no tubes running into it, and he moved it slowly across his eyes. I could have sworn I heard the sound of an almost impenetrable wall crumbling. When he spoke, it was with a voice I had never heard before.
“Tactics are one thing. The talent to bring it off is what makes a lawyer.”
He held out his hand, and I took it. I held it until I needed it back to get something wet out of my own eye.
He lifted up the paper open to Mike Loftus’s column.
“Have you read it?”
I nodded. “Mike writes a good column. He had good material.”
He laughed, and the paper rested on his chest. Then he stopped smiling.
“I don’t think… I could ever put into words…”
“No need. I know.”
He shook his head. “No, you don’t. No one’ll ever know what you did for this old man.”
I looked up. “What old man? Who’s the old man?”
His head came off the pillow.
“Damn! You’re right. There’s no old man around here. I’ve got to get out of here. I’ve got things to do.”
“Whoa.” I settled him back. “Soon enough. You’ll be back soon enough terrorizing prosecutors and scaring the pants off the associates at Bilson, Dawes.”
He rested back against the pillow.
“You’re half-right. I’ll be back. I can feel the years coming back to me. But not at Bilson, Dawes. I’m going to go back to doing what I should have been doing for the last ten years.”
“Bravo! You’re going to go it on your own?”
“Well, I suppose. Unless I can find some punk of a young attorney with enough salt and starch to run with me.”
I caught his drift, and it sent my cranial cells racing. One on one for the rest of my foreseeable days with the crustiest, most cantankerous old battle-horse in any trial bar. If the Bradley case was any test, I’d probably never again have a pulse below a hundred or a stomach that didn’t generate enough acid to melt diamonds. Was this what any sane human would want for a life? The answer was easy. Yes, more than any life I could imagine. Who ever said I was sane?
He looked over.
“What about you? What are you going to do? Are you back at the Bilson shop tomorrow morning?”
I shook my head. “No. After this I can’t go back to running errands for Whitney Caster.”
“What do you have in mind?”
“There’s a tough old lion I hear is going to go into business stirring up trouble for prosecutors. I think he may be looking for an associate.”
“Not me, sonny. No, I don’t like associates. They’re too damned independent. I have to nurse them along, and then they do what they damn well please anyway.”
He looked over for a shocked reaction-which he didn’t get. I was getting to know him; at least I thought I was.
“No, sonny, I’m thinking more along the lines of a junior partner.”
This time he got the shocked reaction. I couldn’t hold it in.
“I think you and I could make some trouble out there, son. What do you think?”
