“I think five-spice is more or less considered one spice. Like curry.”

“I thought curry was one spice.”

“No. It’s a mixture. That’s why you have different flavors and heats of curries. Different mixtures of stuff.”

“Dang. Just when you think you’ve got it all figured out,” Hardy said. His eyes brightened. “Maybe they’d hold the sweet and sour if we asked.”

Fisk nodded. “We could always try, though history argues against it.”

Ten minutes later, they were served. It turned out that, as expected, the sweet and sour was integral to this particular version of spinach in filo dough and couldn’t be substituted out; less expectedly, when Fisk took his first bite, he discovered that it tasted pretty good. He told a still-skeptical and reluctant Hardy, “My kids like ketchup on spinach. This is kind of similar.”

Hardy took his own small bite, chewed, shook his head in admiration. “The woman’s a genius.” He forked a larger portion. “So,” he said when he’d swallowed, “what’s up?”

“My sister,” Harlen said. “My little sister, actually. Maya. Her last name’s Townshend now. She wants to talk to a lawyer and I thought I’d recommend you, if you were interested.”

“In all probability,” Hardy said, “if it’s not a divorce. I don’t do divorce.”

“I don’t blame you,” Fisk said. “It’s not that. What it is, is she owns Bay Beans West, a coffee shop out on Haight. You know it?”

“I’ve driven past, sure.” But then Hardy’s brain caught up, and he pointed a finger. “Somebody got shot there over the weekend. The manager?”

“Right. Dylan Vogler.”

“Is she a suspect?”

Fisk had a rich two-note laugh and he used it. “No, no, no way. You’ve got to know Maya. Little Miss Junior League, mother of two, sweetest thing you ever met. No, what happened is she just got a visit from homicide yesterday-actually, in the small-world department, it was Darrel and his new partner. A woman.”

“Debra Schiff.”

“Must be, if you say so. Anyway, they came and talked to her and after they left she called and said maybe she ought to have a lawyer if she was going to be talking to the police.”

“I love people who think like she does. And she’s not all wrong.”

“That’s what I told her. You can’t be too careful on that front, although in her case, knowing her, I’d say it’s a bit of a stretch.”

“What’d they ask her about? She tell you?”

Fisk shrugged. “It all sounded general to me. Her guy gets shot outside her store, they’re going to want to talk to her, right? It turns out, evidently, that Dylan was selling dope out of the shop, and she thinks because she owned it, that might get her in trouble.”

“She might be right. What kind of dope?”

“Just weed, I think.”

“How much weed?”

“I don’t know. Does it matter?”

“It might if it was a major warehouse for distribution.”

“I don’t think it was that. It was mostly a happening coffee shop. But say it was.”

“What?”

“A major warehouse or something.”

Hardy fixed him with a wary look. “You know something you’re not telling me?”

“No, no. Just to know so I can tell Maya if she asks. What if this guy Dylan was moving large quantities? What would be Maya’s exposure as the owner?”

“I’m not sure,” Hardy said. “I’d have to look it up. Offhand, I’d say she’s probably okay if she can prove she didn’t know anything about it. But landlords in crack neighborhoods-I mean, where they’re selling out of every second apartment-they’ve been known to get their property forfeited.”

The word jacked Harlen right up. “Forfeited! You mean the whole building?”

Hardy held up a palm to calm him. “Sometimes, but usually this is with bad guys, knee-deep in the business. If the feds get involved, they can take the whole property.” Hardy knew that, actually, the city’s own DA could try to take the property too; but they never would in this situation. He took a bite of his Special. “But that’s usually, as I say, when they know they’ve got a live one they’re trying to hassle. And that doesn’t sound much like your sister’s situation.”

“Not even close, Diz. She didn’t know much, if anything, about this, I’m sure. She’s a Goody Two-shoes and would never have taken that risk. Her husband is Joel Townshend-Townshend Real Estate, struggling by on a couple of mil a year. Believe me, they don’t need more money.”

“I hate them already,” Hardy said.

“Me too. But there you go. Anyway, the point is, the cops surprised her and got her nervous. You know how that is. So would you mind talking to her?”

Hardy told Harlen that that went without saying, then pulled a small grimace. “But it’s just a shame she’s already talked to them. That’s all I was thinking. You know how long they were there, Darrel and Debra?”

“She didn’t say. Half hour or so, I gathered.”

“Well, probably not too much damage done. As long as she didn’t lie to them.”

Fisk nodded comfortably. “I don’t think you have to worry on that score,” he said. “She wouldn’t have done that. That’s just not who she is.”

After telling Fisk to have his sister give him a call to make an appointment, Hardy crossed the street and walked into the massive gray stucco block that was San Francisco ’s Hall of Justice. He’d worked there as an assistant DA for a couple of years after law school, and then for most of another year when he’d started practicing law again after he’d woken up from his own grief-induced decade following Michael’s death.

He thought it said something about the building’s load of negative karma that after all the time he’d spent in it-it was also where he’d tried the great majority of his cases as a defense attorney-he still found the place oppressive. Back in the day the front doors at least had lent an air of expansiveness to the front lobby area. But since 9/11 the terrorism experts had closed all but one doorway, covering the rest of the front window glass with plywood.

Now everyone passed through the one door, waited in line, went through the makeshift joke of a security checkpoint, metal detector and all, and eventually emerged into the din and bustle of the ground floor, which housed not only the line for traffic court, serpentining its way out of the courtroom and past the elevators, but also the Southern Station of the San Francisco Police Department.

So uniformed cops were thick on the ground, as were lawyers, people visiting the jail upstairs, workers in the building. In its wisdom the city had also licensed a snack and coffee kiosk right out on the lobby floor, and the line of cheerful folks queuing up for their something to eat or drink often got tangled up with their counterparts happily awaiting their turn in traffic court. Hardy had heard that the record for most fistfights in a day over spaces in one line or another was six, although that was admittedly an anomaly. The average for actual blows struck was no more than one a week.

But because he’d met Harlen early to avoid the rush at Lou’s, it was high lunch hour when he got to the metal detector, and all the various lines within and without the lobby seemed to have merged into one cacophonous mob. Finally, getting to the front of his own line, Hardy put his keys and his Swiss army knife onto the desk next to the metal detector and walked through, picking them up without any acknowledgment from the cop manning the station, who was turned around the whole time, arguing with another cop about when he was going to get relieved so he could have some lunch.

Hardy felt he could have put a Stinger missile on the table, walked through the metal detector, picked up the rocket, and gone on his merry way, and no one would have been the wiser. He’d seen plain-clothes cops walk through with guns and had always told himself that this was because the station cops at the detector knew the plain-clothes, but really he wasn’t so sure. Maybe it was just a stupid system that didn’t work.