The Blue Edge of Midnight Read Online Free PDF Page A

him on the phone I had an immediate intuition that he would not screw me.
    After feeling him out a bit and after I explained the Philadelphia street shooting, we talked several times long distance about cop procedures, civil court possibilities, investment and tax laws. I never felt he was pumping me. In fact, it was more like him spilling valuable information to me. Still, I checked him out. Law degree from Temple University. Business degree from Wharton. Published dozens of times in professional law journals. No record of a lecture series.
    He had all the credentials for academia, but was never a teacher. He had all the paper for a brilliant trial lawyer, but never tried a case I could find.
    I had a friend at the Philadelphia Daily News run a clip search for me and found little. As a young man Billy had gained some attention as a kid from the inner city with a bright academic future. There was a piece about him and a prominent North Philadelphia public school chess club winning some prestigious tournament. A clip on his graduation at the top of his class from Temple’s law school. No mention of his parents.
    How our mothers, a black woman from North Philadelphia and the white South Philly wife of a career cop, came to be friends, neither of us knew. We’d been raised in widely different ethnic neighborhoods. But we seemed to share a similar theory on the disparities in skin color and customs we grew up with: We knew it was there. You dealt with it when you had to. But most of the time, it only got in the way of things that mattered.
    After more than a dozen phone conversations, Billy persuaded me to come to Florida.
    When he met me at the airport the first time, his GQ appearance made me hesitate. Way too slick for the voice, I thought. Then he looked unblinking into my face with his steady brown eyes and issued what I would learn was his standard greeting: “M-Max. Y-You are 1-1-looking healthy.”
    After I got over the disbelief and the quick feeling that I’d somehow been conned, Billy haltingly explained that he was a tension stutterer. Over the phone or even from the other side of a wall, his speech was as straight and flawless as the head of a debate team. But face-to-face conversation was a constant struggle. His stuttering was so profound even the most basic words jammed up behind his tongue. But he was as serious and sincere as I had first judged him to be and he put me up in his beachfront tower apartment for weeks until he found the research shack for me. We made an odd pair: a successful black attorney transplanted to the south and a white Philadelphia cop trying to escape the city. But I learned to depend on his judgment and knowledge, and I figured it was going to serve me now.
    As we walked east through the heat rising up from the sun- bright sidewalks down Clematis Street, I explained again to him about the events of the night before. He’d said little when I’d called him earlier. But I knew from the envelope under his arm that he’d been busy. When we reached the corner of Flagler Avenue, Billy steered me to a shaded outdoor table on the patio of La Nuestra Café. I saw a hurried movement from the waiter who had one of those “No, no, no that’s reserved” looks on his face until he recognized Billy and then became effusive in his service.
    Billy waited until he had a tall iced tea sitting before him and I had a sweating bottle of Rolling Rock in my hand. Then he put the envelope on the table between us.
    In his phone conversations Billy was clear and logical and brilliantly straightforward. Face to face the stutter only made him more so.
    “M-Max,” he said, his eyes narrowing and going the color of black-brushed steel. “You are in s-s-some shit.”
    In the envelope was a stack of printouts dated weeks ago that Billy had copied off the computer Web sites of the three largest daily newspapers in South Florida. They lacked the typical, shouting headlines that the actual papers would have