Pratt, on the other hand, while she agreed that many criminals, indeed, had done bad things – murder, rape, burning kittens for Santeria rites – she did not agree that this necessarily made them bad people. They were misunderstood, surely, but she believed that with counseling and guidance, many of them could again become productive members of society.

Also, it hadn’t helped that Reston, a black man, had been a supporter of Proposition 209, the California Civil Rights Initiative. He opposed affirmative action, believing that trial lawyers, like brain surgeons, for example, ought to be hired and retained because of their ability to do their jobs getting convictions at trial and putting criminals in jail.

When he’d come aboard, Reston looked around the office he ran and saw that there were a lot of women, some people of color, a lot of old white guys. The job was getting done. When there were new openings, he hired the best person from a diverse pool of applicants – black, white, male, female, Asian, Hispanic – he didn’t care. Pratt did care, though. And Pratt got elected. ‘So this relates to how Eric Franco pulled a murder?’ ‘Pratt unloads all the old white guys, she’s still stuck with the cases, so to prove her theory that anybody can do this work, she hires her quotas and willy-nilly assigns the cases, and her people lose and it doesn’t matter. Eventually they might win.’ Freeman raised his shoulders expansively. ‘Who knows, it could happen. Almost everything happens sometimes.’

After he threw out Freeman, Hardy realized he’d blown nearly the whole day on Graham Russo’s problems, satisfying his own curiosity, catching up with the bureaucracy, city politics. He shouldn’t have done it – he couldn’t really spare the time – but somehow it had gotten inside him.

But the piper would have to be paid.

Hardy did not work within the organization of David Freeman & Associates, but Freeman’s overload was keeping him afloat. His life over the past six months had been dominated by a contractor’s liability lawsuit with the Port of Oakland over the failure of a loading transom. A container-load of personal computers – ten tons and over $18 million worth – fell sixty-some feet before glancing off the deck of the ship that was to take the computers to Singapore for distribution to the Asian market then sank into the bay. The accident had caused over $5 million in additional damages to the ship and, of course, delayed delivery of everything else on board.

As tended to happen, the lawsuits proliferated. The Port of Oakland was contending that the computer hardware manufacturing company – Tryptech – had overloaded its container. That had caused the transom’s failure. Other shippers who’d lost revenue on their own deliverables were lining up to sue both Tryptech and the Port. One of the workmen who’d been on deck at the time was claiming that he’d wrenched his back trying to avoid flying metal. He was seeking over a million dollars from one of the parties, whichever might be found at fault.

In the normal course of events a private practitioner like Hardy would never find himself involved in any of these lawsuits. The various litigants’ insurance carriers would slug it out through their mega-law firms and eventually somebody would settle or win and the attorneys would make a lot of money regardless.

But in this case Tryptech’s insurance carrier had refused to pay for its loss of computers because it had come to the conclusion that Tryptech had misrepresented the number of units in its transom. So the company’s president, a silver-haired Los Altos smoothie named Dyson Brunei, had come to David Freeman. He needed his own personal lawyer representing his own interests outside of the insurance chain.

There was a potentially large settlement down the road, he believed, and Freeman stood to collect a third of it. Deciding that Brunei ’s lawsuit against the Port had reasonable merit, Freeman accepted the case on a contingency basis plus expenses, and had farmed it out to Hardy, paying him by the hour.

It was a good fit all around.

So Hardy spent the rest of the afternoon and into the early evening crunching numbers. Now Tryptech seemed to be playing a game with him, its own attorney, on the number of computers that had actually been in the container, which was still sitting under forty-five feet of water at Pier 17 in Oakland. It was beginning to appear to him that his clients had, in fact, overloaded their container.

But Tryptech would contend – and Hardy would have to argue if he wanted to keep getting paid – that this, even if true, didn’t matter because the containers still weighed far less overloaded than the threshold strength of the transom…

And so on.

At eight o’clock Hardy packed it in, and it was dark by the time he finally found a parking space four blocks from his house. He was going to have to tear out his beautiful, tiny front lawn one day and put in some kind of parking structure. He could see it coming, the day he’d be getting home at ten-thirty, unable to find parking within a mile of his front door.

Instead, maybe he should give up his car. But that left the Muni, which was unthinkable. Even if the city bus system had worked, it wouldn’t fit his haphazard schedule, and it didn’t work anyway, so the point was moot. Urban living.

Maybe they’d have to move out of the city. That was it. Cash their little place in, move to the suburbs, spend half a million dollars on a three-bedroom, two-bath, in Millbrae, be the proud owner of his own garage.

Sighing, beat, lugging his fat lawyer’s briefcase and feeling a hundred years old, he arrived at his gate and stopped to take in the feel, the look, of his home.

There was no denying it: he loved the place. It was the only free-standing house on a street that was otherwise crammed to the lot lines with three- and four-story apartments. He was irrationally taken with the postage-stamp lawn, the white picket fence, the little stoop where, on evenings when he had gotten home before dusk – almost never anymore – Frannie and the kids would be out waiting for him.

Now the lights were on, inviting. He picked up the faint strains of music coming from inside, pushed open the gate.

Abe Glitsky was a surprise, sitting on his kitchen counter, carefully picking nuts out of the bowl next to him. ‘What are you doing here? You better have saved me some cashews.’

Hardy’s wife, Frannie, came up against him – long red hair and green eyes that were shining with good humor and perhaps a little Chardonnay. She was wearing black Lycra running shorts, tennis shoes, and a green-and-white Oregon sweatshirt as she pecked at his cheek, slipped an arm around his waist. He gave her a hug and felt the quick reassuring pressure of her thigh against him.

‘Abe was in the neighborhood with Orel,’ she said, ‘- soccer at Lincoln Park. I said I expected you any minute, he should wait. Orel ’s back with the kids.’

Hardy heard the unmistakable child noise from the back of the house. Orel was Glitsky’s youngest son – a twelve-year-old – and Hardy’s two kids – nine and seven – worshiped him. Glitsky, digging at the bottom of the nut bowl, looked up. ‘I’m afraid the cashews have vanished. I don’t know where they could have gone to.’

‘I asked them to stay for dinner,’ Frannie said.

‘He’s already had it.’ Hardy went over to the refrigerator. ‘Did he drink all my beer too?’

Glitsky slid off the counter. ‘I don’t drink beer. In fact, I don’t drink at all.’

Frannie was smiling at Glitsky. ‘We know you don’t drink, Abe. That’s all right. We still like you.’

Hardy wheeled. ‘How can you like a guy who eats all your cashews?’ He opened a bottle of Sierra Nevada pale ale, took a sip, faced his friend. ‘So what’s up?’

As though they’d been discussing it all along, Glitsky reported, ‘We got the autopsy back on Sal. I thought you’d want to hear. Strout’s going with homicide/suicide equivocal.’