Trying to open the trunk, he fiddled with his keys, but his hands shook so much, the usual jiggling didn’t work. He laid the duffel in the back seat, on the floor, stuffing it down and covering the remains with a blanket.

All he had to do now was drive up Highway 1 and drop the duffel into a Dumpster behind the self-store place in Marina. The guy who had hired him would take it from there, and mail Stefan another five hundred the next day.

Driving slowly along Pearl Street, he struggled with himself, sweating in the cold. Who was the dead woman? Was he meant to find her? Why? On Aguajito he turned at a dignified speed. A few other cars, lights, people. He felt comforted being around the few night stragglers still on the streets.

He turned on some music and sank in to the driver’s seat, let out a big breath. All good. He fingered the little Buddha around his neck.

At the corner of Sixth, a red light erupted behind his car, just the silent, turning red light, but he knew right away that it didn’t matter that he had driven perfectly.

He should have known. He never got away with anything.

He pulled over.

Telling the story had drained him. “ Erin dumped me. She only came to see me once, to tell me she dropped my stuff at my mom’s.”

“That’s rough,” Nina said.

“Her parents were already iffy on me because of me being in jail a couple of times before.”

Nina nodded sympathetically.

“That’s the worst part, losing Erin. But here’s what I’m thinking. I go on the stand-whatever you call it when you get up in court to testify-and I tell the jury what happened, the whole thing, spit it out. What do you think are the chances that they’ll believe me? Because if they do, she has to. I know she’s hurting, too.”

“It’s an interesting story.” He did tell a good story, but then many of her clients did. They all had such excellent motivation for lying, and months in jail to perfect their yarns. If a lie bought you freedom, and telling the truth bought you imprisonment, well, the choice was a no-brainer for most of them. “I’m going to go back to it in a minute to ask you some questions. But I ought to say right now, Stefan-you won’t be telling any of this to the court.”

“Why not?”

“It’s very unusual for a criminal defendant to testify. You have the right not to testify, and a jury isn’t allowed to draw any negative conclusions if you don’t. If you do, all kinds of havoc can break out. In your case, you have two prior convictions. The prosecutor will make a very big deal out of them if you testify, which automatically makes you look very bad to the jury. Sometimes that’s fatal.”

“Yes, but how will the jury know what happened if I-”

“The witnesses and the hard evidence have to do the job for you.”

Then Nina took him through the whole thing again.

3

Monday 9/1

NINA PARKED A BLOCK AWAY AND WALKED PAST THE FLOWERS AND art galleries of the quaint tourist mecca of Carmel to the offices of Pohlmann, Cunningham, Turk. She arrived at the white wood-frame office on the corner of Lincoln and Eighth by eleven-thirty, buoyed by her talk with Stefan Wyatt. The early morning fog had burned off and she had made good time from Salinas, consolidating her thoughts all the way.

Innocent or guilty, at least she liked the client. Some clients were so angry, so distant, or so disturbed that they were an ordeal to sit next to at all. Stefan was a cooperator. The jury wouldn’t dislike him on sight. She reminded herself to try to get some young women on it.

Walking up the white-brick stairway to the law offices, she remembered herself in her thick-soled athletic shoes bounding up these same stairs during her law clerk days. Somehow she had managed to take care of Bob as a single mom, work at the Pohlmann firm, and go to the Monterey College of Law at night. None of her subsequent incarnations, as an appellate lawyer in San Francisco and as a sole practitioner at Tahoe, had been as harried, yet she remembered those days, when she had been deeply immersed in learning new things and raising a little boy, as happy and rewarding.

Back then she had assumed that the financial need, her single life, and her direction in law would all be resolved by now. Well, marrying would be a resolution of sorts, but she had lived enough to know that a good life didn’t resolve. It offered satisfying moments, new beginnings, and more irresolution.

Nina wasn’t completely lacking in self-consciousness, but she found thinking about her own life confusing. Other people’s lives never bored her, though-their lies, their capitulations, their bad luck, their fates. Other people’s situations made her skin vibrate, her heart beat louder, her blood pump harder. She could do practical things, applying her intelligence and rationality to their lives in ways she never could for her own. She could make a difference, and what else was there to live for before you ended up moldering in a coffin, bones, like the poor man in this case?

Love? She held up her left hand and looked at the glittering diamond on her finger. It had a sharp, definite look about it.

Near the top of the stairs, hurrying too much, she paused by the window. One of the secretaries had kept a delicate flower garden going out there in the old days, and the white building that had started its life as a house had blue irises, red geraniums, and a hominess that didn’t seem present anymore in the practical juniper bushes and clumps of tall grass waving in the soft gray air.

Nodding at the receptionist, she walked down the short hall and opened the door to her new office.

Nina’s secretary from Tahoe, Sandy Whitefeather, filled the brown chair in the compact front office like a lion balancing four legs on a tiny stone. Today she wore a down vest over a black turtleneck over a long denim skirt and burgundy cowboy boots. Sandy ’s long black hair was pulled into a beaded band that fell down her back. Behind her, a mullioned picture window looked over a courtyard full of stalky weeds and wildflowers.

She hung up the phone, saying, “About time. I see you have new shoes again. You’re gonna break your neck one of these days, wearing those torture heels.”

“You have new shoes, too. Don’t tell me those narrow pointy toes are the shape of your foot. I’ve seen your feet. I bet they’re killing you.”

“Yeah, but I like what I see when I look down.”

Nina sat down and kicked off the high heels. “Okay, we’ll both get bunions. Peace pipe?”

“Hmph. The Washoe people don’t use peace pipes. Get your stereotypes straight.” She studied Nina. “New shoes,” she said, “and jewelry, too. A whole new you.”

Nina felt obscurely embarrassed, but she held out her finger for Sandy ’s scrutiny.

“Big,” Sandy said. She wasn’t looking at the ring. She was looking at Nina.

“It was his grandmother’s.”

“Tradition is good.”

“No need to fall out of your chair celebrating or anything.”

“Congratulations, of course.”

“Thanks.”

“It’s a big step.”

“Forward,” Nina said firmly.

“How did Bob take the news?”

Bob had spotted the ring the minute she picked him up from her father’s house. She tried to explain, but he put up a hand. “I know what a ring means, Mom.” His reaction had been mixed, not altogether positive, but not harsh, to her relief.

“He’ll need time to adjust to the idea,” she told Sandy, realizing she was using Paul’s words.

“So you’ll be staying here. With the golfers and the retirees.”

More assumptions. “We haven’t worked out the details.”

“Hmm.” Sandy turned back to the paperwork on her desk. “I made up the files and left a list of the D.A.’s office and other numbers on your desk. Mr. Pohlmann says the firm’s taking you to lunch. He dropped off some of his files for you.”