“Good friend.” I say. “A million-dollar bond. I could use a few like that myself.”

She gives me the once-over, up and down, scrambling with her eyes, surprised that I have discovered her little secret, the deep pocket behind her release.

I tell her that Nelson too will know this by now, and that at some point we are likely to be confronted with Tod’s lack of an alibi and the fact of their relationship.

From the look on her face I can tell that the significance of these facts has suddenly dawned on her.

“It looks bad,” I explain to her. “You’re living together, he pays for your bail, he has no alibi for the night of the murder, the cops are looking for an accomplice. Some might think that his contribution to your bail is a little investment to ensure your silence, to keep you from fingering him as your helper.”

I can see in her eyes, like those of a startled fawn, that this scenario has never entered her mind, not until now.

“Still,” I tell her, “it could be a persuasive argument to a jury.”

“It was his mother’s money,” she says.

“What?”

“The money for the bail-it came from his mother. Tod doesn’t have that kind of money,” she says. “But his family is wealthy.”

“Whatever,” I say, as if these details don’t really matter. “His name is on the guarantee with the bondsman; that’s all Nelson needs to know. That’s all he’ll care about.”

She tells me that the collateral posted for her bail is part of a family trust, Tod’s inheritance.

“Can’t we keep him out of it?” she says. “He was only trying to help me.”

“I’m sorry,” I say, “but it’s what happens when you withhold things from your lawyer. If you’d told me that Tod was willing to guarantee your bail I would have advised against it.”

“And I would still be rotting in the county jail.” Her eyes are now ablaze, glazed a little by the start of tears. “Tod was the only one who cared,” she says. In her own way, Talia is telling me that I am no better than Cheetam, that I too welshed on my promise to spring her from jail. Maybe she is right.

“Do you think they’ll arrest him?” she asks.

“It wouldn’t surprise me.”

More tears extinguish the fire in her eyes. There’s real pathos here, the kind of anguished expression that often precedes truth.

“Oh God,” she says. “How did I get into this? How did I get him into this?”

I think for a moment that she’s talking about her general plight, the fact that she’s charged with murder. Then I realize her words have another meaning, some more specific dilemma.

She looks up at me with big, round, pleading eyes.

“He was with me the night Ben was killed,” she says.

My heart thumps, like someone has slammed me into a concrete wall. I’m speechless, allowing my expression to say it all. Like “What are you telling me?”

“The night Ben was killed,” she says. “We were together.” She pauses only slightly, taken aback a little as disbelief is replaced by emerging anger in my eyes.

“I wasn’t in Vacaville. I didn’t leave town. I was at Tod’s apartment.” Then quickly, as if to dispel what she knows is running through my mind, she says: “But I didn’t kill him. I didn’t murder Ben.”

I am walking away from her now, shaking my head as much in frustration as in fury. Angry with the cosmos of criminal defendants who tell unending lies to their lawyers. Little white ones that shade the truth, or whoppers like this one that plunge a spear through the heart of your case.

We have wasted untold hours scouring Talia’s credit card records in hopes of producing some verification of her alibi. Harry’s worn a rut in the highway between this city and Vacaville looking for anyone who might have seen her at the property she was supposedly viewing; he’s been talking to neighbors, the postman, kids on the street.

“Sonofabitch.” I say it to the wall, before I turn and look at her again. “What else?” I say. “What other little surprises do you have?” I wonder if this is only a first crack in the dam, a little leak of real fact, to be followed by a flood of contradictions, a story gone awry, a tale that flies like some wounded duck, conflicted by truth and lies. How many variations on this theme will I hear now that she tells me that her alibi is Tod. A story that, both of us know, even if true will not work.

“We were together until I left his apartment just before ten,” she says. “The police were there when I got home. Ben was already dead.”

“Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you tell the police?”

“What could I say? The police told me that my husband had just shot himself. I couldn’t very well tell them that I was off with another man, alone in his apartment.”

“Observing the social proprieties?” I say.

“I didn’t want to get Tod involved.”

I am wondering more about Harry’s theory. Whether perhaps this infatuation, Hamilton’s and Talia’s, is not mutual, and whether Tod may have acted as Harry suspects, as a lone agent in the interests of love.

“I see. So you spun a little yarn for the cops?”

“I figured they couldn’t check it out-the trip to Vacaville,” she says.

I shake my head again, this time looking straight at her. The wonder of it all. Talia fabricating a story the cops couldn’t verify to protect Tod, and at the same time destroying any hope of an alibi.

“Later I couldn’t tell anyone,” she says.

Caught in a web of her own deceit, Talia was confronted with the unshakable theory of a male accomplice. To reveal her whereabouts was to serve Tod up on a platter to the cops.

“It’s what we argued about the night you came here asking about the gun,” she says. “Remember, when you left the room. Tod wanted to tell you. I wouldn’t let him.”

“Hurray for Tod,” I say. “Too bad you didn’t take his advice.”

She’s back to studying the loops in the carpet, her eyes downcast, arms folded, forming a kind of revetment around her breasts.

“How did you come by the story, the trip to Vacaville?” I ask her.

It was typical of Talia. This, it seems, was a cover story designed for Ben, in case he called looking for her at the office. According to Talia, the county administrator charged with selling the estate for taxes had called her. Someone, an unidentified source, had given the administrator Talia’s name and phone number as a potential buyer. She was scheduled to go that day, alone, and use the realtor’s lockbox key to view the property. Talia decided she had better things to do.

“Instead you went over to Tod’s.”

She nods. There’s just a touch of shame in this gesture. “He took the day off. We were going to play tennis.” She’s picking lint off her slacks with long, delicate fingernails. “We did other things,” she says.

It’s her way of telling me that they rolled between the sheets all day, round-eyed lust in the afternoon.

I’m at the window, staring out at the yard, my back to her.

“What do we do now?” she asks.

I give a little shrug. “We go and listen to what Nelson has to offer. If it’s good, maybe we take it.”

“No,” she says. “I won’t do it. I won’t confess to a murder I didn’t commit.”

“Noble,” I say. “But it may be preferable to the alternative.” I don’t have to draw Talia a picture. I have spoken to her already, in graphic terms, about how executions are carried out in this state. This conversation, which took place in the county jail, had a purpose: to impress upon her the risk she is running if she continues to insist on a trial, to reject the DA’s overtures of a deal.

“I can’t do it,” she says.

“I can’t put you on the stand any longer.”

“Why not?”

“So you can tell them you went to Vacaville?” I look at her like a child robbed of its innocence. “I can’t suborn perjury. On the stand you would be asked where you were that day. You would be confronted with your statements to the police at the house.”