When he opened the door to the apartment, even McNeil -who'd expected the worst – wasn't prepared for the damage. The place was totaled. Eventually, it took a crew of four men forty-six days to restore the apartment to habitability. The removal of debris alone was a week-long process. After that, it had to be cleaned, deodorized, cleaned again. McNeil had had to install new hardwood floors and drywall, new lights and fixtures, all new kitchen appliances. Finally, after the new paint was dry, when the work was all done at a cost to McNeil of thirty-one thousand dollars and change, he put it on the market for two thousand four hundred dollars per month, and had eleven qualified renters the first day.

Then Gait returned.

He hassled McNeil for a few months, came to his house a few times, once with some biker friends, scared everybody, made a big stink, eventually went away. And Rich had thought the nightmare was over at last.

But three weeks ago, after all this time, Gait had resurfaced, and in a guise beyond McNeil's worst imaginings. According to the complaints, both civil and criminal, filed in the courts, Gait came home to shock and dismay that he had been put out of his castle.

Contrary to his landlord's sworn statements, he had not abandoned the property. As Mr McNeil well knew, he'd had to leave with his Harley on an emergency road trip to Kentucky to care for his dying mother. Before he left town, he had paid McNeil twelve hundred dollars in cash for three months' rent in case he had to be gone that long. Upset, worried about his mother's health, in a hurry to be back at her side, he had not concerned himself about a receipt for the transaction – he was a man of his word, and assumed McNeil was as well. They'd had a relationship for years. It never occurred to him that either one of them would cheat the other.

He was stunned upon his return to find that Rich McNeil had stolen his money, taken away his home, disposed of all his treasures. After all, Gait had been a solid, rent-paying tenant – he had never, not once, missed a rent payment! And now he was ruined, with no place he could afford to live in the city he loved.

McNeil had obviously been driven to this inhuman fraud by simple greed – after all, he stood to make, he was currently making, two thousand dollars more every month on Gait's apartment alone. It was a horrible travesty.

So Gait, through his attorney Dash Logan, was appealing the eviction ruling. He was also suing McNeil to get his apartment back at the old rent, to restore his lost property, to compensate him for mental anguish, the pain and suffering he'd endured, for his attorney's fees, and for punitive damages – to the tune of a million dollars.

What made it worse for Hardy's client, though – far worse – were the criminal charges.

Like everything else in San Francisco, rent control was a political issue. And in her election campaign three years before, Sharron Pratt had made it clear that she hated slum landlords nearly as much as she loved the homeless. Her administration had pledged itself to protecting the rights of the poor, the unempowered, the disenfranchised masses. Besides which, renters in the city constituted a huge voting bloc.

And here was a Russian Hill nabob pitted against an unsympathetic biker – it was the perfect opportunity to illustrate just how venal these landlords could be in their immoral pursuit of the almighty buck.

Hardy knew McNeil well and considered his client pretty much a working stiff who'd put in thirty-five hard years behind desks in various management positions, eventually reaching the eminence of Executive Vice President of Terranew Industries, a biotech firm specializing in the ever-glamorous field of fertilizer products.

But in Sharron Pratt's opinion, Rich McNeil, by the very fact that he'd been successful and invested wisely, was of the landed class, the privileged class. Never mind that he'd earned it – that was irrelevant. And Manny Gait was low class. In fact, in the eyes of many, he was barely a citizen at all. This conflict boiled down to a class struggle. It was as simple as that.

Traditionally, as Pratt knew (and if she forgot, Gabe Torrey reminded her), the Rich McNeils of the world got their way by being in the men's club, by having the money to afford better lawyers, by buying elected officials to do their bidding and dirty work. Well, as Torrey had counseled her, she couldn't let that happen on her watch, nosiree. It wasn't going to be business as usual in San Francisco, not while she was District Attorney. That's why she'd been elected, to shake up the status quo, to ring in a new age.

She had to make the message crystal clear that her office saw through Rich McNeil's transparent grab for more income, more money that he didn't even need. Pratt had to be the people's protector here, and this was her chance to show the traditional power structure that the old way wasn't going to work. More than a landlord-tenant dispute, this had to be, by her lights, true white-collar crime, the kind that was too often tolerated in American society – and she had committed herself to punish it.

So the city and county of San Francisco brought criminal charges against Rich McNeil – grand theft, perjury, conspiracy to commit fraud. If it went to jury trial, and if he was convicted on all counts, Rich McNeil could be facing four years in state prison.

It was not the retirement he'd dreamed of.

Hardy was just turning from the window, intending to throw a couple of rounds of darts, when the telephone rang on his desk. 'Dismas Hardy.'

'Dismas?' the voice said. 'What the hell kind of name is Dismas?'

'It's the name my parents gave me, the good thief on Calvary. Who is this?'

The good thief. That's great. Dismas. Dash Logan here. Sorry it's taken so long to get back at you. I've been busy as a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest.'

Hardy bit back a sarcastic reply. 'I won't take much of your time, then. As I mentioned in my messages, I'm representing Rich McNeil and I thought we could-'

A short, barking laugh interrupted him. From the falsely hale sound on the phone, Hardy formed the impression that Logan might already have downed a cocktail or two. 'Oh, sorry,' the voice said, 'somebody said something.' There were unmistakable bar noises in the background, Ricky Martin and the La Vida Loca. 'So you're with McNeil?'

'And his fifteen witnesses,' Hardy replied.

'To what?' Another disconnected laugh. Clearly Logan was following another conversation – or something – going on in front of him. 'On me, on me. Jerry, you let him pay I'll break your arm-'

'Look,' Hardy interrupted, 'if this isn't a good time…'

'No. It's fine, fine. I'm just down here at Jupiter. You know the place?'

Hardy did and said so. A few blocks south of the Hall of Justice, the bar was kind of the up-tempo version of Lou the Greek's. Great fast food, loud music, bartenders with personality – a major hangout of the law crowd, serious drinker division.

'You free? 'Cause I'm here a while. Meeting a client.' The voice shifted, another focus. 'Yeah, you're talking to the duck. I heard it.' Back to the phone. 'So? Hardy? What do you say? Come on down, I'll buy you a drink.'

'I've got clients too, Mr Logan. Some other time, maybe. But I'd really like to talk with you.'

'Anytime, anytime. You thinking you want to settle?'

'Actually, we're talking more about a cross-complaint.'

This really seemed to strike Logan as funny. 'Get out! For what?'

'That's one of the things I thought we'd discuss.'

'That'll be a short talk.'

'Maybe. Maybe not.'

Hardy heard ice tinkling in his ear. He felt a pulse in his temple. This kind of posturing could go on forever, and he wasn't up to it today. 'Mr Logan,' he began, but again the voice cut him off.