“I talk to mi madre!” she blurted out, then looked around and lowered her voice. Two other inmates looked up briefly. “Shhhh!” Valencia giggled, holding a matching cherry fingernail to her lips. “Sh! Ees a library.”

“Shhh! Ees a library.” Connolly mimicked her voice almost exactly, and Valencia laughed.

“My mother, she say she got de extra money dees morning! For de tubes! Thank you, thank you!”

“How is Santo doing?”

“She say he has the ’fection, but he so much better. She say he take the medicine every day, ees pink medicine, like bubble gum. He no fight!”

“I told you he’d be okay. Now, you keep the money, tell your mother not to spend it. If he needs the tubes, he’ll have the tubes. You don’t have to worry.” Alice peered at the open law book. “How’s your appeal?”

“Look what I find!” Valencia said, excited. “Look at dees.” She turned the book eagerly toward Alice. It was the report of a legal case, an onionskin page of fine print in two columns.

Alice scoffed. “You’re no lawyer. You can’t understand this stuff.”

“Sure I do.” Valencia nodded, and her scented hair bounced like in the commercials. “De judge say de sentencing unfair. He objec’ to it. He say he no take drug cases anymore. The judge, he quit!”

“Really? A judge quit?”

“Sí. In New York.”

“New York? That doesn’t help you in Pennsylvania, dummy.”

“Cómo?”

“New York law is different from Pennsylvania law, and you’re looking in a federal reporter anyway, which is only about federal law. You don’t know what the fuck you’re doin’.”

Valencia’s sticky lip puckered with disappointment. “I can write it in my letter. I have de cite.”

“So what? They don’t have to listen to it. It doesn’t mean shit in Philly. God, are you dumb.” Alice reached over and closed Valencia’s book. “I have a better way to help with your appeal.” She leaned closer so the others couldn’t hear and almost choked on the smell of imposter Giorgio. “I have a new lawyer, a great lawyer, and I told her all about you. She has an idea for a new appeal. A new argument. She thinks she can get you out of here.”

“Díos!” Valencia blurted out, covering her mouth like a Miss Venezuela contestant. “Díos mío!”

“I know. Isn’t it great? Just don’t get too excited yet. I’m meeting with her about you. I gave her your court papers, the ones you gave me from before, and she promised she’d read them and get back to me. Then she wants to meet with you and tell you all about your new appeal.” Alice held up a finger. “You have to keep this quiet. If anybody finds out what I’m doing for you, they’ll want me to do it for them. The lawyer will drop your case in a minute.”

“I no say nothin’.” Valencia glanced quickly around. “You see.”

“Not even to your mother or Miguel. Nobody.”

“Nobody, sí.”

“You’re good at keeping secrets, I know. You’ve proved that to me.” Alice patted her hand, because that usually got a big reaction. “You don’t have to worry about anything. I’m taking care of you and I’m taking care of Santo, too.”

“Than’ God,” Valencia said softly, squeezing Alice’s hand. “Than’ God for you, my friend.”

Bennie hustled across the gray marble lobby of her office building running, pushing thoughts of her father to the back of her mind. It was almost noon. Her pumps clattered across the glistening floor to the elevator bank, where she punched the up button. She had an emergency hearing to stage and the rest of her caseload to either squeeze in, farm out, or get done. She grabbed the first elevator, swimming upstream against the lunchtime crowd, and hurried off the cab into a scene that no longer struck her as remarkable.

Rosato amp; Associates was staffed entirely by women. The receptionist, sitting at a long paneled desk after the glass-walled conference rooms, was a woman, as were all five secretaries and lawyers, their offices arranged around a horseshoe adjoining the reception area. Bennie hadn’t hired only women intentionally, but she thought of the firm as an experiment in what would happen if women ran the world. She wasn’t surprised when it turned out to be less warlike and more color-coordinated, even if the coffee stank, a point that defied both explanation and stereotype.

“Hey, Bennie,” said the receptionist, Marshall. With her hair woven into a long French braid, Marshall looked fragile in a pale-blue dress with a matching ribbed sweater. No appearance was more deceiving; she had run Bennie’s old law firm with a manicured fist and remained the office administrator at Rosato amp; Associates. “We got incoming,” Marshall said, handing Bennie a thick packet of yellow message slips.

“Any word from Judge Guthrie’s chambers about the emergency hearing?” Bennie set her briefcase by her feet and thumbed through the messages.

“Not yet. I have your entry of appearance ready in Connolly. You want to sign it?” Marshall fished a form from a neat stack on her desk and pushed it across the blotter to Bennie, who stuffed the messages under her arm, plucked a ballpoint from a jar, and scribbled her name.

“Way to go. Don’t file it, I have to talk to her old lawyer first, Warren Miller. I called him from the car and left a message. Did he call back?”

“Yep. He’s at Jemison, Crabbe. His message is in there somewhere.”

Bennie frowned. “Miller is at Jemison? Jemison is Judge Guthrie’s old law firm, from before he ascended the bench.”

“That’s not unusual, is it, for a judge to send his old firm a case?”

“It is when it’s a homicide case, going to a white-shoe firm. You can’t make any money on those cases and you have to qualify to be court-appointed. I never heard of Miller.”

“He did sound young.” Marshall gathered a stack of correspondence, creased in thirds. “You’ve got mail. You won a motion to dismiss in Sharpless. You didn’t get an extension on the brief in Isley. Also, the bar association says you’re behind on your ethic credits. You need to take two continuing-education courses.”

“What a waste of time.” Bennie hugged the mail to her suit, a plain cut of tan gabardine. “I’m too busy being a lawyer to learn how to be a lawyer. Anything else happening?”

“I’m not letting you go that easy.” Marshall produced a brochure paper-clipped to correspondence. “This is from the bar. If you don’t fulfill your credits, they can put you on inactive status.”

“They say that every year. I’ll pay the late fee.”

“You did that already. You’re Group Four and you’re out of the extension zone.”

“Out of the extension zone? That sounds scary. I don’t want to be out of the extension zone. I live in the extension zone.” Bennie picked up her briefcase and hurried to her office, nodding to the secretaries and one of the young lawyers, Mary DiNunzio, who glanced up from a casebook when Bennie charged past. “I’ll need you in fifteen minutes,” she said to DiNunzio.

“Sure thing,” Mary called back, swallowing visibly, and Bennie pretended not to notice. She had to keep a professional distance from her employees, even her colleagues, since she was solely responsible for their performance evaluation, hiring, and firing. Bennie hated firing people. It was why she dreaded her first phone call of the day.

“Warren Miller, please,” she said, after she’d set down her briefcase, slipped into her chair, and called one of the city’s most prestigious law firms, Jemison, Crabbe amp; Wolcott. She guessed Miller was an associate there, a caste she knew well from her days as a serf at the equally medieval Grun amp; Chase. Knowing the significance the big firms placed on pro bono work, Bennie figured the kid would love to off-load the Connolly case. God knew what screwup had sent it to him in the first place.

“Miller here,” said a young man’s tenor. Bennie visualized him in corporate peasant garb, three pieces and pinstripes.