She scanned it quickly. “How does three thousand sound as a retainer?” she asked, opening her checkbook.

“That’ll probably get you a refund when this is over,” he said.

She handed him the check, and then they were standing facing each other by the office door. “So it’s okay. I can call you?” she asked.

“Anytime, day or night.” He pointed at the card. “All the numbers in the world where I can be reached.”

The gratitude flooded back into her eyes. “Thank you,” she said.

And he opened the door to let her out.

About twenty minutes later Hardy picked up the phone on his desk.

“Yo.”

“Yo yourself.” The voice of his partner Wes Farrell. “What are you doing?”

“When?”

“Right now.”

“Many things all at once,” Hardy said. “Breathing, talking to you, figuring out our talented pool of associates’ utilization numbers for the third quarter. Why?”

“Because I wondered if you might have a minute.”

“Are you upstairs?” Wes worked alone on the third floor one level up, in an office that had once in a different world been Hardy’s. “You could always just come on down like you usually do.”

“I could, but then I’d have to pass the Phyllis test and I don’t know if I’m up to it.” Hardy heard something in the voice. Wes was nearly always upbeat, but he wasn’t now. “If I’m really not interrupting you at something important, you want to come up for a minute?”

“Sure,” Hardy said. “I’m on my way.” As he passed the reception area, Phyllis raised her eyebrows and attempted a smile that nevertheless seemed somehow accusatory. Hardy pointed upward. “Just going to see Wes,” he explained. “Firm business.”

This was the password, he knew. Hardy was doing what she thought he ought to be doing, managing the firm. Phyllis graced him with an approving nod and swirled back to face her switchboard. Over the years Hardy had developed a faint and grudging affection for his receptionist/secretary, but as he mounted the stairway at the far end of the lobby, he wondered how sad he would actually be if she were, say, mercifully and swiftly executed by a large truck running a red light.

Farrell’s door, festooned with left-wing bumper stickers, yawned open and Hardy knocked once before crossing the threshold. The office, such as it was, gave only the merest nod to the legal work Farrell supposedly did there. No desk, no files, just a couple of couches, a coffee table, some random easy chairs, a flat-screen TV on one side wall, a Nerf basketball hoop on another, a library table with more functional wooden chairs scattered roughly around it. One of the chairs was on its side at the moment.

Gert, his dog, slept in a corner.

In another corner by one of the windows Farrell did have a modern computer he never turned off, and he was sitting at that now, though facing away from it and toward him as Hardy came in. As usual when he wasn’t going to court, Wes wasn’t dressed much for success. Today he wore a pair of wrinkled tan Docker pants and wingtips that hadn’t been shined since Watergate. And of course he sported his usual T-shirt, which today took Hardy more than the usual quick glance to read: “Haikus can be easy./But sometimes they don’t make sense./Refrigerator.”

Hardy had to break a smile, pointing to it and saying, “That might be one of the best.”

Farrell looked down. “Yeah. I thought it’d get Sam laughing, but no.”

“You guys okay?”

The shoulders rose and fell. “We’ll probably get over it. I hope so.”

“What?”

“This stupid argument. Or maybe not so stupid if it might really break us up. Which I’m starting to think it’s got a chance.”

“What about?”

Farrell rolled his eyes. Sitting in his ergonomic chair, he slumped. His thick brownish-gray hair was unsecured and fell all around to the top of his shoulders. Hardy thought he looked about twenty years older than he was. “She thinks I don’t care enough about the homeless.”

“What about the homeless?”

“We shouldn’t tell ’em it’s cool to come here and then start making them go to shelters and stuff. We should respect them as individuals. Jesus. That’s how it started, anyway. Now it’s all she’s not sure she knows who I really am or if she still wants to be with me.”

Normally, Hardy would have asked why she wanted to be with him in the first place, but this wasn’t the time. So he asked, “Because why, exactly?”

“I think in the last fight, I used the word vagrant, or maybe bum. Or maybe both. I probably did both, knowing me when I’m arguing. Anyway, somehow I betrayed my terminal insensitivity to the plight of…” He gestured in little circles with his hand. “Et cetera, et cetera.” Farrell let out a long breath. “I don’t know what I’m talking about, Diz. And that’s not it, anyway. What I wanted to see you about.”

Hardy pulled the fallen wooden chair upright and sat on it. “I’m listening, but I hope you’re not going to tell me you’re quitting, because Glitsky just told me he’s quitting and if you both quit on the same day, I’ll start to feel like all my friends are old, which would mean I’m old, and that would be depressing.”

Farrell’s head came up. “Glitsky’s quitting?”

“Maybe not,” Hardy said. “I might have talked him out of it. He probably didn’t even mean it. He’s having a bad time.”

“Maybe we should start a club.”

“You don’t want to be in his club. His kid’s in the hospital with a head injury.”

“Shit. How bad?”

“Bad enough, but alive at least. For now.” Hardy let out his own sigh, met his partner’s gaze. “So. What do you want to talk about?”

Farrell came forward, elbows on his knees, his hands linked tightly in front. “There’s this coffee place out near my house,” he said. “Bay Beans West, maybe you read about it this weekend. The manager, this guy named Dylan Vogler, got himself shot on Saturday. Sam, in fact, discovered the body. Well, I just got a call on my cell from Debra Schiff, you know her?”

“Sure.” Hardy nodded. “Homicide. Why’d she call you?”

Farrell hung his head for a minute. “Because Vogler sold weed out of the shop, and he evidently kept a list of his regular clients on his computer at home.” He raised his tortured eyes. “It’s gonna get out, Diz. Hell, it’s probably already out. What I’m wondering is if you think it would be better for the good of the firm if I resigned.”

Schiff couldn’t let go of what she felt was Maya Townshend’s crucial slip of the tongue: “There’s no real reason to keep the place.” Although admittedly slim pickins, she felt it was worth pursuing. Bracco and she agreed, however, that they could do their fishing elsewhere first, before coming back if necessary and taking on Maya head-to-head.

To this end, in the midafternoon, maybe ten other people in the shop, they were sitting up near the bakery products area of BBW with Eugenio Ruiz, who’d been one of the assistant managers under Vogler, and who’d opened the place this Tuesday morning and was currently functioning as the manager.

Eugenio was in his early twenties, small, wiry, and highly strung. He wore his thick black hair in a ponytail and had a couple of days of dark beard growth covering the acne scars. Today he was wearing black slacks, sandals, an incongruous button-down pink shirt, and a vest that looked like it came from South America. A diamond sparkled in his right earlobe. Though not handsome-not with the prominent and crooked nose and the gold-crowned front tooth-he had a confidence and a straightforward warmth that Schiff thought gave him some appeal.

She must unintentionally have been conveying that fact somehow, because even though she had at least ten years on him, he was definitely hitting on her. “She’s okay,” he was saying of his boss Maya Townshend, “nice enough, but not as pretty, say, as you.”