Albert dropped his pajamas on the bed and started for the bathroom. He stopped in front of the mirror and looked at his body. He was neither pleased nor displeased by what he saw. True, his short body was not as compact as it had been when he first joined the office and his hair was thinning out. On the other hand, he was still hard underneath the extra fat.

“Let’s just say that I am keeping my perimeters in check,” he thought.

Still, he regretted getting out of shape. When he was younger, he always seemed to have energy for handball or basketball. He’d even done a little boxing in the service. It was harder now. He did pushups and situps when he had the time. And there was an occasional game of golf. Oh, well. He had made his choice. He knew the demands of the job and he accepted them willingly. He would die someday, anyway. Getting into heaven was not going to depend on the size of his waistline.

“Give me an extra slice of bacon, will you, hon,” He yelled before turning on the shower.

Fanny Maser had been the receptionist at the Portsmouth district attorney’s office since 1958. She had come in with the Republicans, stayed through the Democrats and remained at her post when the office became nonpartisan in 1970.

Fanny’s husband had been a policeman for sixteen years when he was killed trying to stop a service station holdup. The two months it had taken to pull her world back together had been the only lengthy period that she had ever taken away from her job.

Fanny was the ideal receptionist. She looked, even in her younger days, like everybody’s idea of what a mother should look like. She was a small, gray-haired woman with a perpetual smile. Her voice was soft and soothing and she had an ability to put people at ease. This trait was essential in an office whose customers were irate citizens, tired, off-duty policemen who were waiting for court after spending a night shift in a high-crime area, nervous witnesses and, occasionally, rapists, robbers and murderers.

The criminal element was one of the most exciting facets of Fanny’s job. She would often tell her bridge group about the “headliners” she had greeted. There had been the slow morning she had spent passing the time with Carl Billingsgate, the hammer killer, while he waited to be interviewed by the Chief Criminal Deputy. Carl had confessed that very morning.

And what about Marie Louise Renoud? What a nice lady she had appeared to be. Who would have guessed that she and her lesbian lover had shot her husband and left him for dead on Switchback Mountain, only to have him crawl back, as Fanny would tell it, from the “Portals of Hell” to testify at Marie Louise’s trial. Marie and Fanny had had the nicest chat.

With all the exciting things she had seen, and all of the interesting people she had met, it was no wonder that Louis Weaver made no particular impression on Fanny Maser when he pushed through the glass doors that opened into the reception area.

It was ten-thirty and the reception area was empty. An hour earlier it had been filled with young district attorneys and their witnesses, but court had started and they had all left. Louis spent the first few seconds sopping up the warmth from the courthouse heating system. He stood in the doorway shivering and casting nervous glances at his new surroundings. He was a mouse of a man. His worn raincoat, tattered suit coat and stained white shirt were all that he had between him and the sharp, winter wind. His baggy pants were tied to his waist by a knotted rope and they appeared to float around hips too narrow to hold them up.

Fanny knew that greeting Louis Weaver would be distasteful. She disapproved of drink and Mr. Weaver was obviously intoxicated. He also smelled. Nonetheless, she smiled and inquired, in her most pleasant tone,

“May I help you?”

Louis took off the cheap gray fedora he had been wearing. His fingers worried the frayed hatbrim as he shuffled unsteadily toward the bar that separated Fanny from the three rows of permanently installed plastic chairs that filled the reception room.

“Is this the district attorney’s office?” Louis managed. Fanny could see that the poor man was upset and frightened and her initial dislike was replaced by a feeling of concern.

“Yes, it is.”

“I got to see the D.A.”

“There are fifty district attorneys in our office. Is there someone in particular that you would like to talk to?”

“Ain’t…isn’t Mr. Caproni the D.A.? Willie said to say Mr. Caproni.”

“Mr. Caproni is the elected district attorney for Portsmouth County, but he doesn’t handle cases himself. Perhaps I can direct you to someone if you will tell me what your problem is.”

Louis ran the back of his hand across his grayish stubble. This was getting more complicated than he had expected. Bureaucracies, even those populated by Fanny Masers, frightened him. He wished that he could take a drink, but that was out of the question.

“It’s my friend Willie. He’s dying, so I promised him I’d do him this favor. He said to see Mr. Caproni and no one else. He said it was important and that Mr. Caproni would want to see him.”

There was something about Louis Weaver: the tone of his voice and his obvious desire to be somewhere else. Fanny made a decision.

“I can’t guarantee that Mr. Caproni will see you. He is a busy man. But, if you will tell me the subject matter of your visit, I will see if he has time to talk with you.”

Louis’s mouth was dry and his heart was pumping. Willie had said only Mr. Caproni, but, if he didn’t tell now, she would make him go.

“I’m to say Willie Heartstone is dying and he wants to tell who killed Elaine Murray.”

Despite the awful weather, the day was turning out beautifully. He had concluded his meeting with Hadley in a half hour and had extracted a promise that the Commissioner would actively push for two more staff attorneys. This was a necessity. There had been a large jump in recent years in the number of criminal cases that were going to trial. The deputies he had now were overworked. In District Court, where misdemeanors, like drunk driving and shoplifting, were tried, his deputies were going into court with almost no preparation. True, these cases were often simple and required little more than asking the only witness what happened, but Caproni did not want a criminal beating a case because a deputy did not have time to prepare.

After his meeting with Hadley, he had returned to his office for a conference with a young man that he had recently transferred to Circuit Court, where the more serious crimes, like murder and armed robbery, were tried. The deputy had been assigned his first major case. After months of work, Portsmouth police and Federal narcotics agents had finally caught one of the state’s biggest heroin dealers before he could get rid of a large shipment of heroin. Now it looked as if the entire case might be lost because of what the defendant was claiming to be an illegal search. He and the young man had spent a half hour trying to figure out a way to salvage the case.

Caproni liked the young man. He reminded Caproni of himself at that age. Both came from similar backgrounds and Caproni appreciated the grit of a boy from a poor family who had worked his way up the hard way. The case was a tough one, but the kid had sunk his teeth into the only positive approach and it looked as if he had dragged forth the germ of an idea. Caproni could see how badly the kid wanted this bastard and he approved of the effort he was putting out to get him.

Having cleared his desk of the morning mail, Albert now turned toward a stack of recent Supreme Court cases he had been meaning to read. He leaned back in his chair, a comfortable, oversized, leather-upholstered lounger, which was one of the few luxuries he had permitted himself.