‘Talia’s a client,” I say.

“Is that what they call it these days? Coulda fooled me. I thought she was your concubine.” Nikki’s not so discreet, her voice at full volume. Her friends, mothers of little children back in the other room, are getting an earful. She backs into the kitchen, hands still on her hips.

“The woman is charged with murder. The firm asked me to take a hand in her defense. That’s all there is to it.”

“You don’t even bother to deny it, that you had an affair with her.” She’s blocking the way to the trash can, and ice cream is beginning to drip from the plates in my hands onto the floor.

It’s a tactical blunder. My failure to deny Nikki’s charge that I consorted with Talia carries with it the seeds of an open admission. Mentally I bite my tongue.

“What do you want me to say?” I tell her.

“That you’re not going to represent her.”

“I can’t do that. I’ve already agreed to take the case.”

“Tell ’em you’ve changed your mind.”

“This isn’t some shopping spree to the mall.”

Her eyes are burning now, two pieces of white-hot coal. “Fuck you!”

Profanity is something that Nikki reserves for those ultimate moments of excess fury in life. Here it is said with volume and intensity. I have visions of three-year-olds down the hall roosting on their mother’s knees and asking with innocent, upturned eyes,

“What does ‘fuck’ mean, Mommie?”

“Listen, can we talk about this later?”

“No. We’ll talk about it now. Later I’m leaving-with Sarah.

I want the truth. Did you have an affair with her?”

I hesitate for a moment. But there’s no use lying. In her own mind Nikki’s already condemned me.

“Yes, we went out.”

“You what? You went out” she says. She laughs. My wife has a special talent for mockery. “Call it what it is, you asshole.”

There’s a good deal of fury tonight.

“OK, we had an affair-but it was after you left me.” This somehow eases the blame for my infidelity, at least in my own mind.

But not in Nikki’s. “So it doesn’t count, is that it?” she says.

“Before we broke up, she was nothing. She’s nothing now. It’s over,” I tell her. “What’s between us now is business, the representation of a client charged with first-degree murder, nothing more.”

“You bastard.” She repeats the charge, but now she’s crying. There’s an extra shot of acid in my stomach.

“We need to talk,” I tell her.

She’s huddled over the sink, crying and wiping her eyes with a wet dishrag. As much as she knew it, suspected it, the open admission of my affair with Talia crushes Nikki.

“Listen to me.” I touch her shoulder. She pulls away.

I tell her that she has to give me a chance, that she has to hear me out.

“I have a party to get back to,” she says and leaves the room, sniffling away tears. I see her stopped in the dark hall, halfway down, composing herself. Then she plunges into the room. “Well, time to open presents.” Her voice is all cheer, but thick like a cold.

And so we put a face on it for the women waiting in the other room and pretend that nothing has happened-until they leave.

Nikki and I sit alone in the ebbing light of evening, in the living room which has been ravaged by a half-dozen partying children. Shreds of wrapping paper and ribbon litter the floor. Empty coffee cups in saucers sit on the sofa-side tables. Sarah is in her old bedroom, which is now barren of any furnishings, playing with her gifts, new toys.

“Regardless of what you think about her,” I say, “she didn’t kill Ben.”

“You’re sure of that?”

I nod confidently, like some prairie farmer predicting rain.

“I see. Lover’s intuition.” Sarcasm has taken the place of Nikki’s tears.

“Years of dealing cases,” I say. “Talia didn’t kill Ben Potter any more than you or I did.”

“Even if you’re right, somebody else could defend her.”

“Somebody else is defending her. Guy by the name of Cheetam. I’m there only as Keenan counsel, to assist him, that’s all.”

“And he asked you?”

“As a matter of fact he did. They were in a bind. The man’s from out of town. He needed somebody fast; Skarpellos recommended me.”

I don’t tell her that Talia planted this seed. Nikki’s hostility, like a dying battery, is running down now. She has a difficult time staying angry. She has always had to work hard maintaining a constant pitch to her ire. Fury, it seems, always came too quickly, spending itself in an emotional weariness.

“But you could get out of it if you wanted to.”

I shake my head. “It’s too late.”

I take the time to explain in soothing tones that I’ve already filed discovery motions in the case. This makes me counsel of record. To withdraw now would require a formal substitution of counsel, or the consent of the court. We’re too close to the preliminary hearing to get either.

“If I’d known you felt this way, I wouldn’t have taken the case. But it’s too late.”

“How did you think I’d feel? You’re rubbing my nose in your affair. Now you tell me it’s too late. Seems that your commitment to her is just a little more important than your concern for us.”

“I didn’t think,” I say. I hope that this final confession will kill it.

She sits demure at the other end of the couch, her behind on the edge, knees pressed together, hands folded tightly in her lap, as she drops the bomb.

“Still, isn’t there some kind of conflict?” she says.

I play stupid. “Whadda you mean?”

There’s a little exasperation in her eyes. “I mean, it’s not normal for a lawyer to be fucking his client, is it?”

“I told you it’s over.”

“I see,” she says. “If it’s in the past tense-if the lawyer has fucked his client, it’s all right.”

She leaves me with the ethical conundrum as she rises from the couch.

“Listen. When this is over maybe we can get together, the three of us for a weekend over on the coast. Like we used to,” I say.

“Fat chance,” she says.

She lets me know that I’ve wasted my time changing the sheets on my bed, a hopeful preliminary to a night together after a happy birthday party. Nikki’s moving toward the back of the house, calling Sarah, getting ready to leave.

“You won’t mind if I don’t stick around to help you clean up the mess.” She looks at me with a sobering expression. Like so much of what she says to me these days, her words carry some intended double meaning.

“I can handle it.”

“Let’s hope so.”

CHAPTER 14

“Where’s the eunuch?” asks Harry.

In Cheetam’s absence Ron Brown is like a shadow. He produces no real work, but checks in on us like a miser looking for spun gold. He’s the first to deliver reports on all progress to Skarpellos and Cheetam. The man trucks heavily in the intellectual coin of all toadies.

“Who cares, as long as he leaves us alone,” I say.

“Whadda we tell him when we’re done? He’s gonna demand to know what’s here.”

“We tell him as little as possible. I’ll talk to Cheetam alone, give him the bad news as soon as he graces us with his presence.”

It’s one of those long spring afternoons. I’m falling asleep over reams of paper. The clock on the wall has been changed to daylight-savings time, confusing the internal ticker that manages my body. Since childhood I’ve harbored a special resentment toward those who mess with time.

Tall, slender shadows are falling on the high rises across the canyon that is the Capitol Mall. I struggle to stay awake in the paper blizzard that Talia’s case is quickly becoming.

Flush with a five-figure retainer, a loan from Skarpellos to Talia secured by her expected interest in the firm, I’ve hired Harry for a little help. We’re closeted in the conference room at Potter, Skarpellos, poring over the piles of documents, evidence reproduced by the DA’s copy machine, responses to a dozen discovery motions I’ve filed. Cheetam’s out of town. He’s juggling three major tort cases in other cities, a minor matter he neglected to disclose until after I’d agreed to participate in the defense. Lately, it seems, he shows up only for prime time, when there’s a gaggle of cameras or notebook-toting reporters with tiny pencils looking for a case of writer’s cramp.