"The point is," Hardy said, after a short recap and overview, "I don't want this billing issue to interfere with my defense, but we discussed this, you remember, when I first signed on. How it was going to get more expensive when it got to the trial."

"Not that it's exactly been cheap up until now."

"No. Granted. Murder trials are expensive. Even at the family-and-friends rates you're enjoying."

Will chuckled. "Enjoying. I like that."

Hardy shrugged. "I'd hope so, since it's saved you nearly sixty thousand dollars so far. But even so, I wanted to ask you if there was a financial problem. Frankly, it makes me uncomfortable to be here in the first days of the trial and have my client so far behind in payments."

"It's not that far, is it?"

"Sixty days." Hardy waved that off. "But that's not the issue. The issue is that I know you've come into quite a large sum of money recently. I'm assuming you've got significant cash flow, so that's not the problem. And meanwhile, I'm going ahead with my defense of your wife and you're not paying your legal bills."

"Well, I…"

"Please let me finish. I find this conversation as difficult as you do, believe me. But I told you coming in that my trial day fees are three times my normal billing rates, and at the time you said that sounded reasonable. It's still reasonable. But I want to tell you, you're going to get whiplash from sticker shock next month if you don't keep up on these monthly payments."

"Are you saying you're raising your rates now?"

"Not at all. It's all in the contract we signed last June. But the trial has started and that changes everything." Hardy leaned in closer and lowered his voice. "You may not realize it, Will, but it's standard practice among criminal attorneys to get the entire cost of the defense up front. You know why that is? Because a client who gets convicted often loses his motivation to pay his lawyer anymore. Now I didn't make that demand with you and Catherine because of the personal connection, but I'm beginning to wonder if maybe I should have."

Will Hanover's eyes were flashing around the courtroom, and when they came back to Hardy, he'd obviously decided to be shocked and outraged. "You've got some balls trying to shake me down at a time like this. I've paid you a hundred and fifty thousand dollars already. Up front. If that's not good faith, I don't know what is."

"It was. Then," Hardy said. "This is now. And I wanted to put you on notice that it's becoming a big issue."

"Or what? You'll quit? You'd abandon Catherine over a late payment? You've got to be kidding me?"

Hardy didn't rise to the question. Instead, he said, "What might be easiest is if you provide another retainer like the first one…"

"You're out of your mind."

Hardy didn't pause. "… like the first one, to cover what you owe and get us through this month, if the trial goes on that long. And then to begin the appeals process, if we need it."

"If we need an appeal! In other words, if you lose."

"That's right." Hardy's voice was calm. "We won't need to appeal if we win."

"Well, I'm not writing you a check for another hundred and fifty thousand dollars on that off chance, I'll tell you that. And you can take that to the bank."

Hardy pushed himself away from the table, draped an arm over the back of his chair, and looked into the callow and handsome face. With an air of sadness, he came forward again. "Will. I know that you're through with Catherine, however this comes out. I appreciate you coming down here to trial and putting on the face of the good husband. But I also think I know why you're really doing it, and that's because you don't want to lose the respect of your kids."

Will shook his head in disgust. "I've had enough of this. You don't know what you're talking about." He started to stand up.

"I'm talking about Karyn Harris, Will. Your secretary."

Sitting back down, he said, "There's nothing between me and Karyn Harris."

Hardy nodded. "That's been the party line, anyway, that you've worked so hard to keep from your kids. You weren't having an affair. It was just Catherine who was crazed, right?"

"Right." Defiant still.

"And so to your kids, you're still the good guy, aren't you? The dad they can trust, who's holding the whole thing together?"

"That's right."

"But what if they found out you've been lying to them the whole time, too? How would they feel about that? About you?"

"I haven't been lying to them. There was no affair."

Hardy stared at him for several seconds. When he spoke, there was no threat to his voice or in his manner. It was more the measured tones of disappointment that things between them had come to this pass. "Will," he said. "Do yourself a favor. Take a look at the statements I've sent you over the past months. You're going to notice payments totaling about five grand to an entity called The Hunt Club. You know what that is? No? It's a private-investigator service."

Will's initial expression of disdain turned to disbelief and then a distillate of fear itself.

Hardy went on. "If you weren't having an affair, one of the things I considered early on was that you had the same motive to kill your father as Catherine did. You'd gone to some lengths to create an airtight alibi. You would have been perfect. So I had to know, you see, if you were really in San Francisco on May twelfth, or down south."

He let the words hang in the air between them. "Understand that I don't have to bring up any of this for Catherine's sake, and really never planned to. For my purposes, it's enough that Catherine believed you were being unfaithful, and suddenly she needed to go see Paul to find out where a divorce would leave her. But if you in fact were having this affair, and the jury knew it, they might view Catherine in a more sympathetic light. And all other things being equal, that's always to the good."

Will's hands were shaking; his color had gone gray. "You're blackmailing me," he said.

"I've had this for four months. If I was blackmailing you, I would have started then."

Will glanced back at the gallery, which had started to fill for the afternoon session. In the bullpen, the popular court reporter Jan Saunders was sharing a laugh with a bailiff. Several of the jurors had wandered back in and taken their seats. "Where is all this stuff?" he asked.

"Locked away," Hardy said. "No one ever has to see it. No one ever will."

Hardy kept his poker face straight. No one would ever see the documentation of Will's affair with his secretary because it didn't exist. The Hunt Club had come to the conclusion that Will and Karyn had spent their four days aboard the Kingfisher. The captain of that boat, Morgan

Bayley, wasn't talking-Hardy's private investigator was of the opinion that the newly wealthy Will Hanover had sent him a quiet bundle of cash to keep his mouth shut. And had given Karyn a nice raise.

Hardy was running a pure bluff, and wasn't one hundred percent sure he was right until Will stood up and growled down at him, "You'll get your fucking check by the weekend."