Client Privilege by William G. Tapply

me.”
    “And then you refused to tell them what you and Churchill were doing together.”
    “Yes, I did.”
    “Well, shit. How do you think that looks?”
    “That looks to me the way it was. I was there for a client. To them I guess it looks bad. I can’t help it.”
    “You talk to this client of yours?”
    “Of course.” I hesitated. “Why?”
    “You ask him where he or she was?”
    “What’re you trying to say?”
    He popped his gum. “Maybe I was wrong.”
    “About what?”
    “Back there I said you ain’t dumb. Now I’m not so sure.”
    “I’m not dumb,” I said after a moment. “I know what you’re thinking. What you’re thinking is dumb.”
    “If you say so.”
    “I do.”
    Horowitz hesitated. “You wanna know something, Coyne?”
    “What?”
    “I don’t think I better talk to you anymore.”
    “Why?”
    “In fact, I don’t think I should’ve told you this much already.”
    “Come on, Horowitz.”
    “I mean, look, as a friend, if that’s what I am, I gotta tell you it does look bad.”
    “I didn’t kill him, for God’s sake.”
    “Well, why the hell don’t you tell them the truth, then?”
    “I can’t.”

EIGHT
    W HEN I HUNG UP with Horowitz, I lit a cigarette, sighed deeply, and prepared to make a pass at the stack of paperwork in my desk. The console buzzed unpleasantly. I picked up the phone. “Yes, Julie?”
    “Boy, do you sound grouchy.”
    “I’m sorry. What is it?”
    “Mickey Gillis called. She’d like you to call her.”
    “She say why?”
    “No.”
    “Okay. I’ll call her.”
    Mickey Gillis is a columnist for the Globe. The city and its people are her beat. She has more snitches than the cops on Hill Street Blues. She has the tenacity of an angry pit bull, the eclectic knowledge of a Jeopardy champion, the commonsense smarts of a down-east lobsterman, and the mistrust of human nature of a maximum-security prison guard. What comes to her as a strand of idle gossip leaves her typewriter as hard, well-fortified fact. She has been sued a dozen times. She has never lost. I have defended her several of those times. It has always been a simple matter of reminding a jury of Mickey’s peers of the intent of the First Amendment.
    Mickey and I went to high school together. We had been lovers, if that’s what you call two adolescents engaged in violent chemical reactions with each other. She married a guy named Gillis, left the state for several years, and then came back, divorced, to write society for the Globe. Within two years she had her own column and carte blanche from the editor to write about what and whom she chose. Mickey Gillis pisses people off. She tells the truth. And she sells a helluva lot of newspapers.
    She has two phones in her office. One is listed with the Globe. The other is a private number known only to her snitches. Sometimes she talks on both phones at once and hammers at her word processer at the same time. I’ve seen her do it.
    The number I dialed was the snitches’ number. She answered, “Gillis.”
    “Mickey,” I said. “It’s Brady.”
    She chuckled in that raspy, throaty way of hers. Mickey smoked little cigars and drank a lot of whiskey. “Glad you called back, Counselor.”
    “What’s up, Mickey? You in trouble again?”
    “Nope. You are.”
    “Oh, boy. Word gets around, huh?”
    “To some of us it does. I bet you want to know about Wayne Churchill, huh?”
    “Whatever made you think that?”
    “Sylvestro and Finnigan’ve been giving you a hard time, I hear.”
    “Do you hear everything, Mickey?”
    “You bet your ass I do.”
    “You planning to write about me in your column?”
    “Hey. A story’s a story.”
    “Come on, Mickey.”
    “Just joshing, Brady. There’s nothing to write, yet. You didn’t kill Wayne Churchill, did you?”
    “Of course not.”
    “You been arrested or anything?”
    “No.”
    “I knew that. Hey, I’m just being friendly here. I hear things, I’ve got sources most people don’t