I told the bartender to send over two glasses of scotch and then walked in her direction.

“You look like hell,” she said when she looked up and saw me.

She didn’t look so great herself, but a real gentleman would never, ever reciprocate and acknowledge that observation.

“That right, Moonbeam? Look who’s talking,” I spitefully said.

She hiked up her long skirt and used a foot to shove out a chair for me. I couldn’t help stealing a peek at that bare leg, since I couldn’t ever remember seeing her when she wasn’t wearing pants or a skirt that went all the way down to her ankles. For all I knew, she didn’t really have any legs, only two stout poles she hobbled around on.

But she did have legs, I quickly discovered. At least one leg, anyway. And it was the real good kind of leg, too; slender, and quite nicely sculpted. What a shame to waste that artillery on a gay woman, I thought.

“You drinking?” I asked.

“Only a beer for me,” she answered. “I can’t handle the hard stuff.”

“One beer,” I yelled across the room to the bartender, who was putting the finishing touches on my scotch. To Katherine I sourly remarked, “I guess they didn’t drink much in that commune you grew up in.”

She shot me this irritated look, because it was pretty damned transparent what I was thinking about her parents’ drug of choice.

“Have you ever been on a commune?” she asked.

“I saw some in Israel,” I admitted. “Not the flower-power kind.”

“You think the whole thing’s pretty asinine, don’t you?”

“Asinine… stupid – yeah, that sums it up.”

The bartender appeared with our glasses, and I called a truce long enough to take the first long sip from my scotch. It burned the whole way down my windpipe.

“What’s got a burr up your ass?” she asked, her eyes glued to my glass, which was now only half full.

“Try that you’re the one who dragged me into this, and I just came back from the morgue, where I spent twenty minutes with someone who looked like he used to be a real nice kid. Only he’s not breathing anymore. And our client seems to be the cause of it.”

“Did you review the autopsy results?”

“Yeah.”

She picked up her beer with both hands, took a long sip, then stared at me over the lip. “And what did you think?”

“What I think is our client’s going to end up strapped to a chair in a dark room in Leavenworth with a few thousand volts coursing through his limbs to teach him a lesson. He’ll deserve it, too.”

She put her elbow on the table and took a smaller, more ladylike sip from her beer. “Unless he was framed,” she finally said.

“Come on, Katherine, even you can’t really believe that crap.”

“Give me the benefit of the doubt for a moment,” she said. “You keep ordering me to listen, now give me a turn.”

“All right,” I said, with an expression designed specifically to let her know she was being humored. Nothing pissed off Katherine Carlson more than the suspicion somebody was humoring her.

She somehow ignored it. “Say, for the sake of argument, Thomas was so drunk he became virtually comatose. Say he was sound asleep when Lee was murdered, and the body was placed there to make it look like he did it.”

“Ah, come on,” I said.

“Suspend your disbelief for a moment.”

“Okay,” I said, “then you got two suspects. Moran or Jackson.”

“Which of the two would you home in on?”

“Moran. He’s big and he’s powerful. Lee No Tae wasn’t any weakling himself, and his body was covered with welts and scrapes and bruises. The doc told me the stomach bruises looked like they were done by a piledriver. Whole ribs were shattered. Whoever subdued him was probably pretty big, and damned strong.”

“Unless Lee was so drunk he couldn’t fend anyone off.”

“The problem with that,” I countered, “was that his blood-alcohol level was only.051. Maybe he was technically drunk at midnight, but by the time he was killed he’d sobered up enough to fend for himself.”

“Okay, good point,” she said. “And the autopsy showed no contusions on his head, like he’d been knocked out?”

“Nope. There were contusions all over his stomach, his arms, his hands, his shins, and his feet tops, but none on his head or face.”

“None anywhere on his face?” Katherine asked, sounding surprised, although I suspected this was a ruse, because she was too diligent not to have already reviewed the autopsy results.

“That’s right,” I admitted.

“Isn’t that odd?”

“Not that I can see.”

“Well, figure that he’s in a fight with his attacker. They’re struggling and Lee’s doing everything he can to get away. Why no blows to the face?”

She had a good point, but I had a better one. “Think about it, Katherine. If a guy was trying to rape him, he’d be coming at him from behind. That’s how the geometry works out between men.”

“Then how did his stomach and shins get bruised?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe the assault started from his front, then the attacker wrestled himself behind him. Remember, too, that somebody got a web belt around his neck, and the autopsy shows that the belt was being held from behind him.”

“Maybe,” she said, but without the slightest trace of conviction, mainly, I figured, because she was grasping at straws to build her frame defense and didn’t want to be particularly bothered by any distractions, like conflicting evidence, or good common sense.

I said, “Look, I know you don’t want to get into this again, but the more I learn about this case, the more dubious your frame defense looks.”

“Then you stay dubious,” she said. “Maybe it’ll do me some good to have an in-house skeptic.”

“Maybe. But you think about what you’ll do to our client if it turns out you’re wrong.”

“Speaking of which,” she said, taking a deep gulp from her beer, “are you up for visiting Thomas again?”

“For what purpose?”

“A health-and-welfare visit. He could probably use some cheer.”

“I’ll go with you,” I muttered, “but if I had my druthers, I’d rather bean him with a baseball bat than cheer him up.”

The car was out front and it took us about two hours and more wrong turns than I can remember before we found the prison again. All the signs were written in Korean, and Katherine kept berating me, like it was my fault this country was filled with folks who put those goofy sticklike symbols on their signs. Some women are that way.

It was turning dark when we pulled into the courtyard. We left the driver with the car idling. It took a few more minutes to explain to a guard at a desk who didn’t speak any English why we were there. He kept looking at us like we were door-to-door salespeople, while I kept trying to use sign language to explain what we wanted. I was pointing at the white wall, and repeating “Whitehall,” over and over. I thought it was pretty clever, but Katherine kept glaring at me like I was a complete dolt. At least until the guard finally grinned and started shaking his head up and down, like an overeager puppy who finally got it.

Then he left us there a few moments till he came back accompanied by the big goon with shoulders like an ox.

“You wish to see Whitehall?” he asked, giving us that toothy grin.

“Please,” I humbly said. “Only for a few minutes.”

He crossed his thick arms across his huge chest. “You should’ve called ahead.”

“So sorry about that,” I said. “We are relying on your overabundant generosity to allow us to see him.”

He scowled at me a few seconds, like he thought I was pulling his leg, or maybe he didn’t like being called a generous person, but then he dropped his arms and indicated for us to follow him. We made the same trek. Again, it was so eerily quiet, I swear I heard a guy break wind up on the third floor.

“What’s this, reading hour again?” I remarked.

“No, this is prayer hour.”

“How’s that one work?”