"Jason Brandt told Treya about the fight. Evidently a pretty good one."

"I don't know him. Brandt."

"Ask Wu; she does."

"Oh wait," Hardy said. "DA up at Youth Guidance? The Bartlett case?"

"Now the Boscacci case."

"Not." He turned, pushed the button for the espresso machine, came back around. "Look, Abe. I'm sorry I forgot to mention it last night, but if you recall, there were other things going on at the time. You saw Amy out at the lot. She could barely walk she was so drunk. Ten minutes after you let us go, she passed out on the way home in our car."

He grabbed his cup, walked over to Glitsky and sat kitty-corner to him. "You know how she got drunk? After her fight with Allan, she went over to Lou's and started pounding vodka, which she continued to do without pause until she left to go home with Barry or Larry or Jerry or whatever the hell his name was about five minutes before they discovered Allan. Lou's got six, eight, ten guys who were all trying to get into her pants for four hours in a row and will severally and individually swear that she didn't sneak out and shoot Allan. I, too, personally promise you that she didn't either."

"You still should have told me about this last night. Who we interview, and how, is not your call, Diz."

Hardy sipped his coffee. "I thought I already had apologized for that, but if not, I hereby solemnly do so again."

"I'm still going to want to talk to her. Soon. On tape."

"And she, no doubt, will be thrilled to cooperate in any way she can. Did Mr. Brandt actually accuse her of murder? Did he give you any kind of motive?"

"No. He didn't even know what he was telling Treya. But when I heard about the fight, I asked around at the Hall. People heard Allan yelling at her way out in the hallway. This was a couple of hours before he got hit."

"All too true, I'm sure. But I guarantee a complete waste of your time. Wu did not kill Allan, Abe. Is that really the best you've got?"

Glitsky sat back, crossed a leg. "We don't have anything yet. Nothing from the scene except the slug, too deformed for comparison, at least using the computer. Not that we have anything to compare it with. No casing. One witness says maybe a car peeled out of the lot just before it got dark, but he couldn't even swear to the color."

"How about Allan's family?"

"How about them? The wife is sedated right now. Clarence broke the news to her and she dissolved on him. Two kids, eight and ten. Lost. Destroyed. Nothing there."

A pause. "What was he working on?"

"One active case, that's it. A murder." At Hardy's questioning look, Glitsky explained. "He's been mostly assigning cases since he moved up to chief assistant."

"Okay, what's the murder?"

"You remember, the old guy- Matosian- who poisoned his wife and himself in a suicide pact, but miraculously survived? But the point is there's no witnesses around that case who'd want him dead. Otherwise, Allan's played a role in putting away a thousand people over the years. Although you know they never blame the prosecutor. He's just doing his job."

"Almost never."

A weary nod. "I know. We're going to look anyway. We're looking at everything."

"Then you'll probably find it."

"Let's hope," Glitsky said. "Even though it's undoubtedly a complete waste of time for everybody, would you please tell Ms. Wu we want to see her at the Hall, as in now? Could that be arranged?"

"Probably. I really did drop her off down there an hour ago to get her car. She was planning to go home and get some sleep, but she might be in your outer office even as we speak, hoping to chat with your august personage-hood. Though you might want to ask around at Lou the Greek's first. She was evidently the main event there last night. People will remember her."

"I'm sure they will." He took a beat. Then: "Do you think it could have been political?"

Hardy's mouth went tight. "I don't know, Abe. It's a reach. The campaign hasn't even begun yet. And if you want to take somebody out, you take out the candidate, not his eventual campaign manager, wouldn't you think?" He put his cup down, looked into Glitsky's face. "But no physical evidence, huh?"

"One deformed slug."

"Do you ever wish you'd let yourself swear once in a while?"

Glitsky stood up, brushed some imaginary lint from his uniform. "All the time, Diz," he said. "All the darned time."

The pale, polished wood of the door to Hardy's old office upstairs displayed a patchwork of bumper stickers. "Imagine Whirled Peas," "Kill Your Television," "Practice Random Acts of Kindness," "Wouldn't It Be Great If Schools Had Everything They Needed and the Government Had to Hold a Bake Sale to Build a Bomb?" "Support the Right to Arm Bears," "Jesus Is Coming and Boy, Is He Pissed." Perhaps twenty more in the same vein, all of them to go with Wes Farrell's collection of T-shirts.

For not the first time, as he stared at this monument to the First Amendment right to freedom of speech and expression, Hardy wondered if they'd been smart to bring Wes Farrell aboard as one of the firm's founding partners. As a business move, it had seemed defensible enough at the time. Farrell had come up the hard way in the legal profession, taking one bleeding heart case after another, forgiving nonpayments even while he was going broke himself.

But, almost in spite of himself, he'd built a practice with solid referrals, a few retained accounts, lots of estate and trust work. Plus, he practiced good lawyering. He helped his clients, cared about them, found his own motivation in their interests. In many ways, leaving his superficial lack of professionalism aside, he was the perfect attorney. He dressed well in court, deferred to judges, respected the clerical staff. And there was no question that now he more than carried his own weight in the firm.

But if Phyllis thought Hardy was slightly out of the lawyer mode, Farrell was well into the lunatic range, although due to his good manners, Phyllis had not yet caught on. And, fortunately for Wes and perhaps the rest of the firm, Phyllis's entire range of migration at work consisted of the receptionist's station and the strip of floor between that and the women's room. She ate and took breaks in her chair in the lobby, surrounded by her phones and the waist-high, polished mahogany, circular cubby Freeman had built for her back in 1985, when he'd originally bought and renovated the building.

So far as Hardy knew, Phyllis had never walked up the fourteen steps to his old office, now Farrell's domain. He was sure that if she had, they'd have known it because she'd have screamed in dismay before dying of chagrin and mortification on the spot.

Hardy heard Farrell talking within, a telephone call. He tapped once and opened the door. He'd worked in this space for most of a decade and the move from it had been if not traumatic, then at least portentous. A Rubicon of sorts. He'd jettisoned his old desk, his metal filing cabinets, the Sears furniture. He'd come up once after all the stuff had been taken out and stood in the empty room, turning a page in his life.

Now, with Farrell's furnishings, the place belonged heart and soul to the new guy, and reflected some sense of who he was. The first change- the desk- was so fundamental that Hardy had never even considered it. To him, a desk obviously went in the middle of the room, facing the door. It was the podium from which you conducted business. You could use it to create a sense of distance or formality. Most simply, it held your work stuff.

Farrell didn't think so. He had placed his in one of the room's corners, underneath one of the Sutter Street windows. There was a chair behind it, but Farrell almost never sat in it. At the moment, the chair along with the surface of the desk was cluttered with paper- red folders, three-ring binders, yellow legal pads, mail opened and unopened, a month's worth of newspapers- everything overflowing onto everything else.