'Appeal is after I'm convicted. I don't want to talk about appeal.'

'Oh, OK, let's not then.' Hardy brought a palm down sharply on the table. 'Get a clue here, Cole. You're in deep shit and Glitsky's the only one doing anything that might help you, whether helping you is his intention or not. That's assuming the truth helps you.' He'd challenged Cole a minute before with the same point, and now he waited again for a response – denial, outrage, something – but none came. He sighed. 'Now, listen, Glitsky's a fact. We'll use him if we can. If you can't live with that, then I'm gone, too.'

Cole met his gaze. 'I don't trust him.'

Hardy dropped his trump. 'Well, he's been my best friend for like thirty years, so I'd have to say I do. Now you've got two options – you can live with it, trust my instincts and talk strategy.' He threw a little edge into it. 'Or you can tell your mother to hire another lawyer.'

This brought a rise. 'It's not my mother.'

'Yeah, Cole. Yes it is. Don't kid yourself. Unless you want to take responsibility on your own. But that's not what you do, is it?' He waited, surprised that it had come to this. He hadn't intended to have any of this discussion, but now that they were in it, he'd follow it until it ended, even if it meant terminating his involvement with the case. Hardy thought that his client needed a dose of some hard life truths almost more than he needed a good attorney.

Cole swallowed rapidly, a couple of times in succession. He set his jaw, finally raised his eyes. For the first time, Hardy saw something like resolve in them. 'All right,' Cole said. 'I'm listening. We'll do it your way. What's the plan?'

Hardy felt the tension break in his shoulders. He was still angry and frustrated, he still didn't much care for his client. But for now at least they could work together. Maybe. He leaned back, arms folded over his chest. 'The strategy is two-pronged. First, if you did it-'

'Wait a minute. I said I'm not sure if… I mean I didn't-'

'You wait a minute.' Hardy came forward, fed up to here with objections and interruptions. Here, in all probability, sat the man who had killed Elaine Wager. Maybe he didn't deserve the death penalty, but Hardy didn't have to endure his self-serving excuses. 'I don't want you to tell me whether you did or didn't kill Elaine any more. Do you understand me? I don't care about your denials or your admissions. That's not why I'm defending you. And right now I'm talking. You listen, that's the deal. Maybe you'll learn something.'

Cole's eyes narrowed. Any hint of his methadone lethargy had vanished. He slumped back in the chair, his arms crossed. Pissed, dissed, and dismissed.

Hardy ignored it all. He picked up in a relaxed voice. 'Our first line of defense is unconsciousness. The facts here are going to make it very difficult, if not impossible, to even get to reasonable doubt about whether you did it.'

'I-'

Hardy held up a palm. 'Not interested. Of course we argue that you didn't do it. But what's really going to matter is if we can prove that even if you did, you were so drunk that you couldn't have realized what you were doing. With six or eight drinks in you, you're legally drunk. With twenty and in withdrawal, you're comatose.'

'What about the gun, though?'

'I was going to ask you the same thing.'

'I didn't get any gun from Cullen. He's lying.'

'Why would he lie? I thought he was your friend?'

'Yeah, right.' A shrug. 'He's out on three separate probations for selling rock. He's got three or four strike convictions – robberies. They pull him in another time, he figures this time they've got to keep him. So he makes this up and they trade. Hey. You know this stuff happens all the time. And in this case, somebody wants to see me fall more than him, so they go for the trade.'

'Who would want that? And why?'

'I don't know. Somebody with the DA. Some cop. Maybe your friend Glitsky. I don't know.'

Hardy felt his blood heating up again, but tried to ignore it. 'You know anybody either place? Have you had any run-ins I ought to know about? Screwed around with some cop's daughter, anything like that?'

'No.' He shook his head, then decided the denial wasn't strong enough. 'Hey, I swear to God, no. Nothing like that.'

Hardy was fairly sure that he was telling the truth. And the fact was, Cole didn't need to have a personal enemy in the DA's office. There might be nothing personal in it – Pratt had to win this case, that was all. To fill a hole in the prosecution's theory of the crime, a witness needed to appear to account for Cole's possession of the murder weapon.

And lo, it had come to pass.

Hardy knew he needed to have a few words with Cullen Leon Alsop, get a better feel for that situation before too long. But first he needed Cole to understand his strategy, to be on board with it. 'So Plan A is unconsciousness. You don't remember.'

'But I do remember.' He pushed ahead over Hardy's warning expression. 'Seeing the gun. I don't know why it's just that, like a snapshot. I didn't have the gun. It was in the gutter, next to her. She was already down, I swear.'

Hardy was almost tempted to believe him.

'I swear,' Cole repeated.

'All right, Cole, you swear. But moving along, I'd also like to address the point that if you didn't kill Elaine, someone else did.' Hardy didn't really think so, but mentioning it to Cole would serve as a pop-quiz for his credibility. As he sat across the table from him now, he would have given about eighty per cent odds that in the next few days his client would develop another 'snapshot' of Monday night. And this one would feature the proverbial one-armed man.

'I'm surprised Jeff would even talk to you about me.' Hardy had told him about his visit to the Chronicle that morning.

'Why's that?'

'I haven't exactly been like the perfect relative to those guys.'

'So I hear.'

'So… why?'

Hardy started gathering his documents, his legal pad, his pens. He stood up and had an acute flashback of Cole's mother in his office yesterday, the later years of her life now reduced to pain and guilt because of Cole. Even if he hadn't killed Elaine. Hardy looked across the table at him. 'Maybe with Jeff it's like your friend Cullen, Cole. Something else is going on. You're in it, but you're not it. You know what I'm saying? There's a whole universe out there, and guess what?'

'What?'

'It doesn't all revolve around you.'

22

I think I was a little hard on him.' Hardy clinked his martini glass against David Freeman's.

In theory, he'd given up martinis at lunch about ten years before, but he always made an exception at Sam's. He'd walk through the door, there would be the old, tiny dark-wood bar, the male waiters in tuxedos, the buzz of busy people fortifying themselves with honest food for a productive afternoon. And suddenly the thought of not having one martini would always seem to be an unnecessary denial of one of his life's great pleasures.

Hardy hadn't missed a day of work because of alcohol in half a dozen years, and a martini wasn't going to slow him down this afternoon. So he ordered – Bombay Sapphire gin, up, very dry, one olive, and ice cold in a chilled glass.

Freeman didn't agonize half as much as Hardy. Hell, he didn't agonize at all. He was standing, waiting at the bar when Hardy entered. Nodding in approval at the order, he said he'd have the same, and raised his glass when Hardy raised his own. 'I'm sure he had it coming.'

Hardy broke a cragged grin. 'So here's to tough love, huh?'

'Or failing that, just plain tough.'

Both men sipped appreciatively. A waiter informed them that their booth was ready. He would carry their drinks for them.