"No, let me guess." Hardy was immediately taken with her. After a second, he said, "Chocolate something something."

"You're not from around here, are you? Or it would be obvious. Chocolate Deficit Disorder. It's pretty serious."

"Why would I have known that if I lived around here?"

"Because here in the lovely south Peninsula, you have kids and you hear 'D' attached to anything, you know it means disorder. You may not realize it, but right now we're sitting in the Ritalin capital of the world. Every second or third child here has ADD. Or maybe ADHD. At least something."

"Why is that? I mean, why's it so big down here?"

She leaned in toward him and lowered her voice. "This is heresy," she said. "I could be shot if anyone heard me, but it's because they test for it."

"Who does?"

"Any parents with a difficult kid. Your children are failing or acting up in school, take them to a shrink, have them tested for ADD. And see if you can guess- you're a shrink looking for a condition where, if it's present, you've got a lifelong patient and endless billings."

"They tend to find it?"

"Surprising, is it not? Kind of like asking a car mechanic if you really need the brake job." She shook her head. "Because it's not that kids crave attention from their both too busy and can't be bothered parents, it's that they're born with a disorder. Not the parents' fault, not the kid's, either, which is the way we like things down here. Don't get me started."

Hardy was grinning at her. "I thought you already had."

"It's my job," she said. "Forgive me."

"Nothing to forgive."

"I know I get tedious. I'm trying to stop." The dimples. "Chocolate will help."

Hardy wanted to keep her talking until she was comfortable, and it didn't seem like that was going to be much of a chore. "What do you do?"

"I'm a city attorney, believe it or not. I do code enforcement on foster homes and shrinks, mostly, but my real mission is this over-prescribing of Ritalin. It really is an epidemic down here. Maybe it's everywhere parents can afford to get their kids tested, I don't know. Maybe kids have fundamentally changed since I was growing up and everybody needs to be medicated. But if you want my opinion, and it looks like you're going to get it anyway, it's that most of the time- not always, I admit- kids have this attention deficit because they don't get attention from their parents. Is it that complicated? Oh God." She brought her hand to her forehead. "I'm sorry. Especially if your kids have it, and they probably do, don't they?"

"No. Sometimes they get COUD, but we don't medicate for that. We just bust them pretty good."

It took her a second. "Center of universe disorder?"

"You're good," he said, smiling. "You must do this all the time."

The waitress arrived. "This will shut me up." She stuck a spoon into the dessert, brought it to her mouth, savored. "Okay," she said, "Mike. You know, I never asked you what about Mike you wanted to talk about."

"But you still came down here?"

"I still cared about him, although I hadn't seen him in years. He was a good guy."

Hardy kept his opinion on that to himself. "That's what everybody says. But somebody killed him and I'm trying to find out why."

"Somebody? I understood they had a pretty solid suspect." An awareness gathered in her eyes. She killed a few seconds licking her spoon. "You're defending the killer?"

Hardy had gone through this so often that he was tempted to wave it off. But it was the first time that Catherine Bass would have heard it, and he had to give the objection its weight. "The alleged killer, yes. Andrew Bartlett. But I expect he'll be released maybe as soon as tomorrow. I'm all but certain he didn't do it. I want to find out who did."

"And you think I might know? I haven't laid eyes on Mike in years."

"I realize that." He paused, then came out with it. "Mrs. Bass, I know he was gay."

She closed her eyes for a second, drew a deep breath and let it out. "All right."

"I'm wondering if that might have played some role in his death."

"If what did? Being gay? How would it do that?"

"I don't know. If he had some secret life…?"

She poked the chocolate with her spoon. "Wasn't someone else killed with him? A girl? One of his students?"

"Yes."

"That doesn't really point to a sinister gay secret life to me."

"It doesn't to me, either. She might not have been part of the original plan, but as a witness she had to be eliminated."

"Do you really think that?"

"I really don't know. I'm hoping my client is innocent. Beyond that, I'm fishing. But it would be helpful to get the simple fact of Mike's gayness out in front of the judge."

"And how would that help?"

"It might punch some holes in the prosecution's motive theory."

"What about his father?"

Hardy's own expression had grown somber. "I know. I've been trying to figure that one out. Bring it out in chambers, seal the record, something. I see you've dealt with it, too."

Her mouth was a hard line. "God, those years. When I compare them to how I live now…"

"How long were you together?"

Her eyes came back to him. "Not so long in real time, I guess. Thirty months, something like that, beginning to end." Her mouth tried to signal a kind of apology for getting so personal. "It was an eternity, though, in psychic time. We really were best friends, even back when he was with Terri. I was the other woman, you know, in their marriage. Broke them up. It was really pretty funny, actually, if you had a taste for irony."

"Did you know?"

"About his being gay? Not at first. At the time… hell, you know… we were young and living the theater life, all of us. It was assumed that we all led active sexual lives and that some of us experimented with… various combinations. We didn't see it as a big deal. And Mike was pretty…" She laughed again with the brittle embarrassment Hardy had first heard on the phone with her. "Actually, he was pretty, period. Gorgeous. And promiscuous as all hell, trying to prove what he wasn't, you know? God! Was it exciting! Drama every day, especially when he, when we, were cheating on Terri. Sometimes she'd be out on stage doing a scene- I mean in plain sight, thirty feet from us. Jesus."

He gave her a minute to come back to him. "So how did you find out?"

Hanging her head, she drew her dessert near and picked at it. "After we got married, we had a couple of good months. But pretty soon the… the physical side… I guess what turned him on was the forbidden fruit aspect. When I stopped being that…" Her shoulders rose, then fell. "But as I said, we were friends. We liked to do the same things. So at first we pretended everything was the same, fooling ourselves, you know. I'm not sure if Mike really admitted to himself that he was strictly gay, even then. We were always together and busy and… shit, I may as well tell you… we never had sex in our bed. It was always someplace we might get caught. For me, that got a little old, but as long as we had our busy routine and found time to sneak away, I told myself that we were intimate enough. The lies we tell ourselves, huh? And then, as it turned out- nobody's fault- but the routine changed on us anyway."

"What happened?"

"Mike got called to jury duty."