Except the address he tossed out was not to some Chinatown dive, it was to Susanna Foo, the fanciest, priciest Chinese restaurant in the city.

PETER CRESSI HAD A DARK, Elvisine look that just sort of melted women. He told me so in his own modest way, but he was right. Take the way our secretary, Ellie, reacted after he walked by whenever he walked by. She stared at him as he strutted past, her eyes popping, her mouth agape, and then, when the door was closed, she let out a sort of helpless giggle. He was a tomato for sure, Cressi, Big Boy or beefsteak, one of them, and from my dealings with him I knew him to be just about as smart. He was actually a little brighter than he looked, but then again he’d have to be.

“How’s it hanging wit’ you, Vic?” he said to me as he sat indolently in the chair across from my desk. “Low?” His dark eyes were partly brooding, partly blank, as if he were angry at something he couldn’t quite remember. His lemon tie, delicious and bright against his black shirt, was tied with entirely too much care.

“It’s not hanging so terrifically, Pete,” I said, shaking my head at him. “Next time you buy an arsenal, try not to purchase it from an undercover cop.”

Peter gave me a wink and looked off to the side, bobbing his head up and down as he chuckled at some private little joke. Cressi chuckled a lot, little he-he-he’s coming through his Elvis lips. “Who knew?”

“Good answer. That’s exactly what we’ll tell the jury.”

That chuckle again. “Just say I’m a collector.”

I opened the file and scanned the police report. “One hundred and seventy-nine Ruger Mini-14 semiautomatics with folding fiberglass stocks and two hundred kits for illegally modifying said firearms for fully automatic performance.”

“That’s what you should tell them I was collecting.”

“Also three grenade launchers and a flamethrower. A flamethrower, Peter. Jesus. What the hell did you need a flamethrower for?”

“A weenie roast?”

“That’s what your trial is going to be unless you sharpen up and get serious. You were also trying to buy twenty thousand rounds of ammunition.”

“Me and the guys, like we sometimes target shoot out in the woods.”

“What woods are we talking about here, Peter? They got any woods in South Philly I don’t know about? Like there’s a block just south of Washington they forgot to put a row of crappy houses on, it just slipped their minds?”

“Now you being funny, Vic.” His head bobbing, the he-he-he’s coming like an underpowered lawn mower. “Upstate, I’m talking. You know, bottles and cans. Maybe next time you want I should ask you along? It’s good to keep in training, if you know what I mean. And every now and then a stray bird it lands like a douche bag on the target and then, what do you think, bam, it’s just feathers floating.”

“Seriously, Pete. Why the guns?”

His eyes darkened. “I’m being serious as a fucking heart attack.”

He looked at me and I looked at him and I knew his look was fiercer than mine so I dropped my gaze back to the file. The guys I represented were nice guys generally, respectful, funny, guys to hang around and drink beer with, nice guys except that by and large they were killers. I must admit it didn’t take much to be fiercer than me, but still my clients scared me. Which made my current position even more tenuous and doubtful. But still I had a job to do.

“It says here,” I said, looking through the file, “that the undercover cop you were buying the weapons from, this Detective Scarpatti, made tapes of certain of your conversations.” I looked back up at Cressi, hoping to see something. “Anything we should be worried about?”

“What, you shitting me? Of course we should be worried. They probably got me on tape making the whole deal with that scum-sucking slob.”

“I assumed that. What I mean is any surprises, any talk about what you were going to do with the weapons? Any plots against a government building in Oklahoma or specific crimes planned which might cause us any problems? We’re not looking at additional conspiracy charges, are we?”

“No, no way. Just the deal.”

“How much money are we talking about?”

“In general or specific terms do you want?”

“Always be specific, Pete.”

“Ninety-five thou, eight hundred and ten. Scarpatti figured it out with a calculator, the fat bastard. I had more than that when they busted me, you know, for incidentals. He told me cash only.”

“No Visa card I guess.”

“I’m already over my limit.”

“Guys like you and me, Pete, it’s congenital.”

He chuckled and bobbed and said, “What’s that, dirty or something?”

I picked up another piece of paper from the file. It was just a copy of a subpoena, but I wanted to have something to look at so the question would seem offhand. “Where’d you get the cash?”

“You know, just lying around.” He-he-he.

I dropped the subpoena and looked up and put on my most annoyed look. I kind of squinted and twisted my lips and pretended I had just eaten a lemon. Then I waited a bit for his chuckling to die down, which, surprisingly, it did. “Maybe you are confused,” I said. “Maybe you are color blind. The guy in the blue suit, black shoes, red tie, that’s the prosecutor. He wants to put your butt in jail for a decade. My suit is blue and my shoes are black, sure, but look at my tie. It’s green.”

“Where’d you get that tie anyway, Woolworth’s?”

“Why not?”

“You know, Vic, your whole sense of style is in the toilet. Who shines your suits, anyway? And then you got them shoes. You should let me set you up with something new. I know a guy what got some flash suits might change your whole look. You might even get laid, do you some good. They’s a little warm is all, but you being a lawyer, what do you care, right?”

“Something wrong with my shoes?”

His sneer lengthened.

“What I’m trying to say is that I’m not the prosecutor here, I’m your lawyer. I’m here to help you. Everything we say in this room is confidential, you know that, it’s privileged, and no subpoena on earth can drag it out of me. But I can’t defend you properly unless I know the truth.”

“I’m not sure what you want I should tell you here, Vic. I thought you lawyers didn’t want to know the truth, that it limited what you could do, stopped you from bobbing here and weaving there, turned you from a Muhammad Ali, who was always dancing and sliding, to a Chuckie Wepner, from up there in Bayonne, getting hit like a speed bag, bam-bam-bam, and whose face was a bloody slice of sausage after round two. I thought the gig was that you would get the truth from me once you, like, knew what the best truth it was to tell.”

He was right, of course, which made everything a little more difficult. Cressi was an idiot, actually, except in the three things in which he had the most experience, screwing, shooting, and the criminal justice system. “It’s different,” I told him, “when there’s an undercover cop with tapes. When there’s an undercover cop with tapes I need to know everything or we’re liable to get blasted at trial. So I’m asking you again, and I want you to tell me. Where did you get the money?”

Cressi looked at me for a while, head tilted like a dog that was trying to figure out exactly what he was looking at. Then he shrugged. “I boosted six Mercedes off a lot. Just came in with a carrier I borrowed from a buddy what knew nothing about it, waived around some paperwork, and just took them. Drove them right to Delaware. Some Arab sheik and his sons right now they’re probably riding around in circles in the desert, smiling like retards.”

“You touch base with Raffaello on that deal?”

“You working for him or you working for me?”

“I’m working for you,” I said quickly, “but if you’re crossing him I have to know. I’m not going to create a defense for you that gets you out of trouble with the law but gets you dead when you hit the street. I’m trying to watch your back and your front, but you’ve got to level with me.”