Hayashida broke my thoughts by asking, for the third time, if I wanted a coffee. For the third time I told him no. He was sitting at a desk set at a right angle to me, flipping through pages in a red cardboard file. Walter had come and gone several times, conferring, I assumed, with whoever was behind the one-way mirror.

The mirror worked at blocking the view of the people watching me, but after a knock at the door took Walter out of the room, it couldn’t block the sound of his enraged voice.

A minute later the door opened again, but instead of Walter Freeman, a tall man in his forties entered, dressed and groomed as though he had stepped out of a Brooks Brothers catalogue. I had never seen a better-fitted pinstripe suit or a better-coordinated Oxford shirt and striped tie. His Afro-styled salt-and-pepper hair was the result of genes, not a hairstylist, and his tortoiseshell glasses were so out of fashion they were avant-garde.

He nodded at me, set a leather briefcase on a side table, and walked toward Hayashida with his hand extended. “J. Michael Robinson,” he said in a voice deep enough to deliver a good imitation of Barry White. “I have been appointed legal counsel for Mrs. Marshall, and I am requesting that this interrogation be suspended while I ascertain the charges against her and advise her of her rights. I am also insisting that I be present during any future interrogations.”

Hayashida ignored Robinson’s handshake. Instead, he shrugged, closed his file, and stood up. “Sure,” he said. “You want to talk to her here?”

“Absolutely not.” Robinson turned to me with his rejected handshake. I accepted it. “I insist on a counsellor’s room and full privacy.” He smiled at me as he spoke.

Standing in the open doorway, Walter Freeman’s face was as blank as an empty plate.

I left the room, guided by the lawyer’s hand at the small of my back. Three doors down the hall, past some knots of uniformed cops watching me and whispering among themselves, we entered a room about the size of a walk-in closet, with two chairs and a lamp table. Robinson closed the door behind us and set the briefcase on the table.

“Who the hell are you?” I said.

“I’m your lawyer.”

“I didn’t ask for one. I don’t need one and I can’t afford one.”

He took a deep breath and let it out noisily while staring at the ceiling. Okay, he was exasperated. I got the message. “You didn’t ask for one, correct,” he said. “You tell me to leave and I will. But before you do, understand that you need a lawyer desperately. It doesn’t matter if you can afford one or not. You either get me or you get somebody listed with legal aid who is probably sitting in a bar on James Street right now.”

“It matters to me. Whether I can afford a lawyer or not.”

“But not to Mr. Pilato.”

“He sent you here?”

“He says he owes you.”

“Then he can fix my car, the one his guys smashed with a sledgehammer. I don’t need a lawyer.”

He withdrew a sheet of paper from his briefcase and began reading from it. “It appears you are facing a charge of obstruction of police, theft of police property, possession of a firearm, resisting arrest and …” He moved the paper aside to look at me. “… attempted murder of a law enforcement officer, which carries a penalty of up to twenty years in prison.”

“That’s garbage.”

He dropped the paper on the desk. “Of course it is. It’s also legitimate. Do you want to spend twenty years in prison?”

“What do you think?”

He smiled and leaned back in the chair. “I think,” he said, “that you have set a new record for embarrassing a major metropolitan police force in this country, and they are so upset with you that they are ignoring, for the moment, the reality that they have a rogue cop in custody facing a triple murder charge.”

HALF AN HOUR LATER we gathered in Walter Freeman’s office. Walter sat behind a desk as big as my dining-room table. Two uniformed officers stood behind him, their feet apart, their hands behind their backs, as approachable as bookends. Hayashida, Robinson, the blonde policewoman, and two guys from internal affairs, wearing cheap suits and faces that desperately needed shaving, flanked me in chairs arranged in a semicircle. An overweight guy Walter introduced as a Crown attorney stood to one side, like a referee.

Walter wouldn’t look at me. His head down, he read aloud in a flat voice from a sheet of paper on the desk in front of him. “We will withdraw the charge of obstructing police on the basis of Mrs. Marshall’s telephone call earlier today to Sergeant Hayashida, who confirms that she offered information she legitimately believed would assist us in our investigation.”

“It sure as hell did, Walter,” I said. Robinson nudged me to be quiet.

“We will suspend the charges of theft of police property and illegal possession of a firearm subject to evaluation of the projectile fired by your client, the aforesaid Mrs. Marshall, this evening—”

“The one you recovered from the sandbank, right?”

Walter’s eyes flicked from the paper to me for a heartbeat, then back to the paper again. “Subject to evaluation of the projectile fired by your client this evening by the provincial forensics laboratory. We are also suspending the charge of attempted murder of a police officer pending the same forensics report and, as requested, will issue a document to the administrator of Trafalgar Towers confirming that our suspicions of possible fraud committed by Mrs. Marshall have no basis in fact.”

“I am requesting that all criminal charges be dropped as of now,” Robinson said, “on the basis that the alleged acts were conducted by Mrs. Marshall as a means of obtaining an exhibit that the forensics laboratory could use to confirm that the weapon was used in three unsolved homicides—”

Walter couldn’t take it anymore. “Citizens are not permitted, are never permitted, to seize possession of a law officer’s weapon and fire it in the direction of a member of the police force,” he partially shouted, partially spat—I could see the spittle flying like water from a lawn sprinkler—”no matter what her motives might have been!”

Things turned into a verbal food fight after that. I screamed that no cop was likely to compare rifling marks on a bullet from Mel’s gun with the ones that had killed Gabe and Dougal Dalgetty unless I gave him good reason to, and I had. Robinson quoted some statute supporting a citizen’s arrest, Walter told me to keep my damn mouth shut and ordered Robinson to stick to the facts, Hayashida asked somebody to close the door and turn off the digital recorder, and Robinson said he would consider requesting a judicial inquiry into the operations of the police force. The two bookend cops looked at each other with confusion, especially when Walter Freeman lost it and stood up, crumpled the sheet of paper he had been reading from into a ball, and threw it at J. Michael Robinson, striking him squarely in the tortoiseshells.

I laughed. I couldn’t help it. It was midnight, I was running on distilled adrenaline, Mel Holiday was being interrogated in a room down the hall, and the chief of detectives had just hurled an oversized spitball at my lawyer, who had been hired by the most notorious gangster in the city. What wasn’t there to laugh at?

The Crown attorney walked behind Walter’s desk, placed a hand on Walter’s shoulder, turned him and his swivel chair around, and began speaking to him in a low voice while Robinson made notes in a binder pulled from his briefcase. Hayashida buried his face in his hands. I couldn’t tell if he was crying or laughing.

Robinson leaned over and whispered to me while making his notes. “The Crown is telling Walter to free you on your own recognizance, with charges pending,” he said. “When they confirm the forensics that prove Sergeant Holiday’s gun killed your husband and Honeysett, all charges will be dropped.”