“That was quick,” I say. Her exodus from the county jail.

She turns and looks at me, her fingers clutching a small handbag. “Couldn’t be fast enough for me.”

I move into the room, now heading for my chair behind the desk.

“How did you manage it?” I ask her.

“Friends,” she says.

“They posted your bond?”

“I owe them a lot.”

At least a hundred thousand-and some change, I think to myself.

“Who was it?” I ask.

“I can’t tell you that. They want to remain anonymous.”

“From your own lawyer?”

“I’m sorry, Paul. I promised them I wouldn’t tell anyone.”

“I see.”

Harry finally gives up the game and follows me into the office.

He shuts the door, and we sit, ready to talk to Talia.

“It’s one thing you two won’t have to worry about,” she says, “getting me out. I thought I was doing the right thing.”

I am wondering who, in Talia’s set, would have sufficient interest to post the hundred-thousand-dollar premium, and the personal guarantee required for a million-dollar bond. Regardless, it is good news.

“It frees up your mortgage money,” I tell her. “We can use it for the defense. Let’s pursue the application anyway.”

Harry nods.

She smiles at this prospect of paying a little more of her own way.

“Oh, before I forget,” she says. She is into the small handbag lying in her lap and pulls out a wrinkled brown paper bag, folded over itself a dozen times.

‘Tod found this at the house yesterday.” She’s undoing the bag and finally reaches in. When her hand comes out it’s holding a shiny semi-automatic, so small mat it is nearly lost in her palm.

“Here,” she says. Talia reaches across the desk to hand it to me.

“There,” I say, gesturing for her to put it on the desk, in the center of my paper-strewn blotter. I’m hissing under my breath. “I told you to call me if you found it. Not to touch it.” I’m looking at Harry, who’s rolling his eyes toward the ceiling.

“I guess you did. He was so excited when he found it that he must have forgotten.” She’s talking about Tod. “Me too,” she says, crumpling the paper bag and pushing it back into her handbag.

“Great. I suppose his prints are all over it too.”

She looks at me, a little whipped dog, and nods, like she assumes this is now the case. Without ballistics to match this weapon with or distinguish it from the jacket fragment found in Potter’s skull, the cops are free to draw inferences that this is the murder weapon, this little gun covered with the fingerprints of my client and her latest flame. Beyond this it is difficult for me to fathom the lack of basic prudence that should cause Talia, less than a day out of jail, to carry this thing concealed in her purse into my office.

I study it closely. It is small, about five inches in length. The safety is engaged. There’s heavy tooling on the shiny chrome barrel, scrolling around the numerals and letters 25 ACP just under the ejection port, and the image of two cards engraved farther out near the end of the barrel, double deuces laid one over the other in a fanned hand.

I’m anxious to know if it’s been fired, to pull the magazine and eject any round from the breech so I can look down the barrel for residue. But to do it I would either smudge prints or put my own next to Talia’s and Tod’s.

What to do with the gun-this is a problem. Harry wants to take it to a lab, have it screened for prints, shot for ballistic comparisons. But then Nelson will hint that perhaps we have destroyed evidence. What will be left will be our own lab report, confirming at a minimum Talia’s prints on the gun.

“No,” I say. “We’ll turn it over to Nelson. We’ll demand that we see a full print analysis and ballistics report as soon as they’re available. We give him the names, birth dates, and Social Security numbers of everybody we know who touched the gun, Talia, Tod, and probably Ben. We tell them that Tod found it and without thinking picked it up and handed it to Talia. They didn’t realize the significance of any prints. They brought it to me. That takes the sting out of their findings. Any other prints they find”-I wink at Harry-“only serve to exonerate.”

It is almost too neat. Harry’s on board quickly, all nods. My first impression might be that much of this has sailed beyond Talia. But as I look at her she is smiling, like the cat who got the canary. She seems to have a greater facility with this scenario than I would have expected, and perhaps it is exactly what she would have done herself.

They have left me alone in the office. Talia’s gone home to wash a little more hell out of her hair. Harry’s calling Nelson about the gun, confirming everything in writing. Then he will deliver the piece to one of the DA’s investigators. Against his better judgment, Harry has agreed to be my Keenan counsel for this case.

I pick up the phone receiver and dial Judy Zumwalt. She is three hundred pounds of pleasure, with a voice that is halfway into a laugh when she answers, “County clerk’s office.”

“Judy, Paul Madriani here. Wanted to ask you if you could do a little favor.”

“You can ask,” she says, “but I’m already booked tonight.” Then she laughs, big and bawdy, with waves of rolling flesh that undulate through Ma Bell.

“Bail was posted on a client this morning. I’d like to know who paid the premium. Also who signed as a guarantor for the balance.”

“Sure,” she says. “It’ll take a couple of minutes.”

I give her the file number on Talia’s case, and she vanishes from the other end of the line. Talia’s friends may cloak themselves in confidence, but those who post premium on a bond make their interest in the defendant a matter of public record. It is not something likely to go unnoticed by Nelson and his minions.

Judy is back to the phone. She is whistling, a rush of air between spaced teeth. “Don’t see many this big,” she says of Talia’s bond. “Bad lady?” she asks.

“Case of mistaken identity,” I tell her.

“Oh.” She laughs again, like “Tell me another.”

“Defendant posted the premium for her own bail,” she says.

All this means is that Talia and her friends did a little private banking, probably a quick deposit, cashier’s check to ensure ready acceptance by her bank before Talia wrote the check and paid the premium.

“And who guaranteed the balance?” I ask.

“Let’s see,” she says, searching the file. “Here it is, guy by the name of Tod Hamilton.”

CHAPTER 23

It is a middle-class neighborhood, quiet tree-lined streets, a heavy canopy of leaves that nearly meet over the center of winding intersections. Two-thirty-nine Compton Court is an understated white brick colonial, with a little trim of wrought iron near the front door, and neatly edged ivy in place of a lawn. A quaint hand-painted sign near the door reads: THECAMPANELUS, JOANDJIM.

She still lives here, though Jim has been dead for two years. I ring the bell and wait. There is no sound from within. I punch it again. Then, from a distance, I can hear the increasing register of footsteps making their way toward the door. The click of a deadbolt and it is opened, but I can’t see the figure inside, shrouded in darkness beyond the mesh of the wire screen door.

“Paul. How good to see you.” There is excitement, a little giddiness in this familiar voice, the signal that I am welcome.

“I was in the neighborhood and thought I’d stop by to say hello.”

“Well, absolutely,” she says. She unlatches the screen door and throws it open wide for me. “It’s been such a long time. Please, come in,” she says. “It’s so good to see you.”

Jo Ann Campanelli has one of those faces that has never looked good. Hair streaked with gray from an early age, she has eyes like a basset hound, long drooping bags under each. There are a few rollers in her hair, like coiled haystacks in a field. The net holding them in place is something from the Depression.