Murder on Trial by Cynthia Manson

Author:Cynthia Manson [Manson, Cynthia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0451177215
Publisher: Signet
Published: 1993-12-31T21:00:00+00:00

Hanged for a Sheep

by Henry Slesar

They would call him Boze here. It was Phil Boswell’s first thought when the elevator shivered to a halt on the third floor of the County Criminal Courts Building. Nothing had changed in the past nine years. There was still the same smell of sweat and stale air. There was still no way of telling grain from grime on the marble floor. There was still the same crackle and hum, almost below the threshold of audibility, like the murmur of high-tension wires. Everything was just as it was when he had been a ferrety kid new to the District Attorney’s office, so why wouldn’t his nickname be the same?

He was disappointed when the first person he met called him “sir,” looking at his grey Armani suit and taking him for an attorney—right about that, of course, but Phil hadn’t handled a criminal case in the last eight of his years in private practice. He gave the preppy young man an avuncular grin and asked if Donny Donahue still did his dirty work out of the same corner office. Yes, he was told, Donny was there, but in a different corner. He pointed east, toward the area of the building they had once called Siberia.

It still deserved the name. Donny’s star had obviously dimmed. He had sounded like his old self on the phone, but Phil had done some arithmetic in the taxi and figured that his old boss must be past sixty now—not a good age for bad politicians like Donny. But, hell, he didn’t look all that different, and he bounced out of his swivel chair and gave Phil a crushing bear hug. And sure enough, he said: “Hey, Boze!”

Donny had a face full of parentheses, lines carved mostly by pure merriment. But the lines became question marks when he heard the favor Phil had come to ask.

“Why? What for?” he said. “This guy is looney-tunes, Boze. Why do you want to see him?”

“I’m interested in the case,” Phil answered. “That’s all it is. I prosecuted a serial killer my second year on the job, remember?”

“Rat droppings,” Donny growled. “Myron Wechsler did the ‘prosecuting.’ All you did was the coolie labor.”

“But I still spent five months on the case, putting the package together, and it made me curious about this guy, Wortman.” It sounded lame even as he spoke the words, so Phil shifted gears and said: “Come on, Donny, you always told me I had markers with you. Did I ever call one in before?”

“No,” he admitted. “But I never thought you’d need anything, not from this office. What are you getting from those uptown clients these days? I read a million for your new divorce case, or is it palimony?”

“It’s divorce,” Phil said. “And, believe me, I’m earning every nickel. You think matrimonial law is a piece of cake, try spending six months with a hysterical, bloodthirsty woman.”

“Maybe that’s why you never married,” Donny grunted. “Seeing so much of these Bitches from Hell.

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