Dead Winter by William G. Tapply

Author:William G. Tapply [Tapply, William G.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4804-2734-1
Publisher: MysteriousPress.com/Open Road
Published: 2013-06-28T21:56:00+00:00

11

“SO THIS COP, THIS Fourier, he come out,” said Zerk, his grin broad in his strong black face, “and he ask can he help me. So I tell him I want to see Marc Winter, he my client. And Fourier, he smile, like maybe he gonna let me, then again, maybe he not. He ask me what I wanna see him for. I repeat to him Marc my client, I got a right to see him, ’specially since they ain’t even arrested the man.”

Zerk swung his big frame from the corner of my desk, where he had been perched, and settled into the chair. He gave me a big white-toothed grin. He enjoyed his self-parody. Listening to him, it would be hard to tell that he had been magna cum at Tufts and third in his class at law school. He took a sip of coffee and peered at me from over the rim.

“You are quite sensitive to racial innuendo,” I said mildly.

“Yassah, boss, I shore is. And you isn’t.”

I shrugged. “I try to distinguish ordinary rudeness from racially motivated rudeness.”

He grinned. “Safe to say, you have a different perspective on that sort of thing from me.” Xerxes Garrett, whose middle-linebacker construction was not at all disguised by his gray three-piece suit, had clerked for me several years earlier in exchange for the tutoring I gave him for the Law Boards. He had since become a first-rate criminal lawyer, and while much of his practice consisted of pro bono work for poor families in Dorchester and Roxbury, he did enjoy defending white people. “I like the way they depend on you. How they call you up for reassurance, and you’ve got to soothe them like they were children. Anyway,” he added, “it pays well. You taught me the importance of that.”

When Marc Winter was arrested on the drug charge a few years earlier, it was Zerk who I asked to take the case.

“Finally,” he continued, “I say to the cop, Fourier, I say, ‘Listen. I wanna know where my client’s at.’ And Fourier, he tip his head over to the side, like he the teacher and I the dumb burrhead student, the pompous prick, and he say, ‘You should never end a sentence with a preposition.’ So I nod my head like I just learned something important, and I say, ‘Oh, right. Thank you for reminding me. So where’s my client at, asshole?’”

“Perfect,” I said.

Zerk grinned and nodded. “I understand you’re taking a real interest in this case,” he said.

I shrugged. “There’s some interesting aspects of it.”

“‘Interesting aspects,’” he repeated. “You do have a nice way with words, boss. You never end your sentences with prepositions. This case might be less complicated than meets the eye, though, actually.”

“You think Marc killed Maggie?”

Zerk shook his head. “He might’ve. Says he didn’t. I talked with him a long time last night. Then I talked to his old man, the minister. I try to look at this as if I were prosecuting it. Look at what we got.

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