It’s hard to tell whether he even hears all this. His face looking up at me is that flushed. A second later the breath seems to leave his body as his shoulders slump and he sags in the chair. His head is down. The nightmare is real. He begins to tear up, then sucks it all back in a boyish effort to keep his nose from running. He wipes his eyes with the back of his forearm, the one decorated with the swastika. Carl Arnsberg may be twenty-three and halfway to becoming a hard-baked race case, but at this moment I would gauge his social age to be no more than ten, with the hardness quotient of his heart somewhere in the neighborhood of hot Jell-O.

“I don’t know what happened. I guess it’s my fault. Somehow I lost touch with him. You know how hard it is to raise kids.”

Sam Arnsberg is a friend of long standing. We went to college together, belonged to the same fraternity, dated some of the same girls.

Today, seated in one of the client chairs across from my desk, Sam doesn’t even look like the same person I once knew. But for certain aspects of terminal cancer, there is nothing I can think of in life that will destroy a person faster than the perils of dealing with the American judicial system. Even mired in the middle of it as I am, I cannot imagine what Sam is going through, a child facing a possible death sentence.

“Maybe you should find someone else to do this,” I tell him.

“No! I trust you. I have faith in you.” He says it as if he were reaching out to grasp one of those life rings they toss from a passing ship to a man who is drowning.

“Maybe a little too much faith,” I tell him. “I never knew your son as a child. And you and I may be a little too close. Sometimes it can cloud judgment,” I tell him.

Over the years since college, Sam and I stayed in contact, first by phone and letters and later with e-mail. We exchanged stories of family life. When Nikki died, Sam came out to California and spent almost a week helping me to pick up the pieces of my life. During later years he became an important voice on the phone, one of the few people with whom I could share intimate thoughts.

“I know it’s bad,” he says.

“I would be lying if I told you it wasn’t. There’s a lot of evidence. Almost none of it, as far as I can see, is going to be good for Carl.”

“Let me guess what’s bothering you. You’re afraid that if you lose, if Carl dies, I’ll blame you, that we won’t be able to look each other in the eye again. Won’t happen,” he says.

“What? I won’t lose?”

“No. If Carl dies, there is only one person to blame, and that’s my boy. Will you do it? Will you take the case?”

Sam has been to two other lawyers already, both of them major criminal-defense hotshots, people to whom I referred him when he first came to me. Whether it was the evidence in the case or the racial hot wires attached to it, neither of them would touch it.

Sam could step away. His son is an indigent, eligible for the services of the public defender. But he doesn’t want to do that.

“All right. Let me talk to my partner, but I’m sure he’ll go along.” I know Harry well enough to know that he will, though he will chew my ass raw and reserve the right to do so again the first minute the case goes sour.

Sam smiles as a tear runs down his face from out of the corner of his eye. Like father, like son.

“Why did he run?” asks Sam. “Did he tell you?”

“I suppose because he was afraid.”

“Did he say-”

“Stop!”

He looks at me.

“You’re his dad. You and I are friends. It’s going to be hard, but there are going to be things that I will not be able to share with you. Most of the things that Carl tells me, lawyer-client, I cannot tell anyone else, including you.”

“I understand. But I have to know. One thing.”

“What’s that?”

“From what you know, did he do it? Did he kill that man?”

“If you mean did he confess, did he make any admission, the answer is no. He maintains his innocence.”

“Thank God,” he says, heaving a long sigh as he looks up at the ceiling. “You know, I don’t know what got into him. All this stuff. The tattoos, his friends. Where did he get all that? We didn’t raise him to be that way.”

I shake my head.

“We used to play baseball together. I coached his Little League team. Babe Ruth when he was older. We played catch. He used to pitch to me.” He looks down at the desk, his eyes tearing up again as he thinks back. “When he was small, he thought he might play in the big leagues someday. The dreams kids have,” says Sam. “Then I looked up, and he was gone. Now this.”

At seventeen, after an argument with his father, Carl dropped out of school, moved out of the house, and began to drift. It was the last real contact his family had with him.

Sandra is Sam’s wife of nearly thirty years. They have two older children, a daughter, Susan, who is in grad school and a son, James, who is married with children and works with his dad in the family business, a small insurance agency.

“Susan’s talking about dropping out of school,” he says. “She’s enrolled at Columbia. It’s gonna be tough. Tough.” I know he’s talking about finances. “She’s a smart kid.”

“Yes.”

“It’s hard. It’s on the news, twenty-four hours a day. Her brother’s name, his picture, lawyers and judges-they call them experts-all speculating on things they don’t know. Susie has friends at school, but she’s having a hard time. She says she’ll just drop out for a while and go back later. But I don’t want her to. It’s enough that it destroys Sandy and me. I don’t want it to affect the other kids. They have their own lives. Besides, it’s not like she can hide at home. These people are camped outside our house,” he says, “trucks with satellite dishes, people with cameras, microphones, lights. The middle of the night, they light up your bedroom. They chased Sandy down the driveway of her own home. Her own home,” he says.

“I saw it on TV,” I tell him, half a minute of tape showing his wife rolling out the trash, fending off questions and dodging boom mikes. Film of this from different angles tumbled through the news cycle on each of the cable networks every fifteen minutes for two days. “Breaking news” is now anything on videotape that can be used to punctuate the ever-rising flood of ads. Every story, no matter what or where, is now national in scope. Johnny has a fight with Jimmy in the third grade, and the whole country is told about it by breathless “reporters” hanging from news choppers hovering over the school. Park a police car by a building and call in a rumor, and whatever you say will be broadcast around the world twice before you can hang up. Unless you knew better, you might swear that Chicken Little has taken over the newsroom and bolted the door. Hyping hysteria and peddling panic around the clock is now an enterprise listed on the Dow Jones ticker. And everybody watches, anxiety junkies cruising for another hit, just in case there’s some real news. After all, another 9/11 could happen, and we might miss it.

“Anything else you need from me?” Sam asks, then slaps his head. “Of course there is. Let me write you a check.”

“Listen, we’ll talk about it later,” I tell him. “I’ve got another meeting, and I’m running late.”

“Sorry. I shouldn’t be taking up so much of your time.”

“If not you, then who?” I walk him to the door.

He turns, squeezes my arm at the shoulder. “Thanks.”

“Try not to worry.”

He nods and is out the door. Gone.

I close the door behind him. I have no appointment. But I couldn’t think of any graceful way to stop Sam from talking about money. The fees and costs in a case like this will bankrupt even an upper-income family. Welcome to the justice system.