He snorted. "I'd say it's an unusual club for anybody to join. An annual celebration of mortality, for God's sake. Why would anybody want to sign on for that?"

"Why did you?"

"It's hard to remember," he said. "I was much younger then, obviously. Undefined personally and professionally. If Karp's widow- what was her name, Felicia?"

"Yes."

"You name a child Felicia and you're just daring the whole world to call her Fellatio, aren't you? If Felicia Karp had seen my name on a list in 1961, she wouldn't have looked at it twice. Unless she thought Gruliow was a typographical error. I ran into that years ago, you know. People thought it must be Grillo."

"Now they know the name."

"Oh, no question. The name, the face, the hair, the voice, the sardonic wit. Everybody knows Hard-Way Ray Gruliow. Well, it's what I wanted. And that's a great curse, you know. 'May you get what you want.' Hell of a thing to wish on a man."

"The price of fame," I said.

"It's not so bad. I get tables in restaurants, I get strangers saying hello to me on the street. There's a coffee shop on Bleecker Street named a sandwich after me. You go in there and order a Ray Gruliow and they'll bring you some godforsaken combination of corned beef and raw onion and I don't know what else."

His second drink was darker than the first, and he looked to be making it disappear faster.

"Of course it's not all corned beef and onions," he said. "Sometimes they break your windows."

My eyes went to the front window.

"Replaced," he said. "That's high-impact plastic. It looks like glass, unless the light hits it just right, but it's not. It's supposed to stop bullets. Not high-velocity rounds, concrete won't stop them, but your run-of-the-mill gunshot ought to be deflected. It was a shotgun last time around, and I'm told shotgun pellets will bounce right off of my new window. Won't even mar the finish."

"They never caught the guy, did they?"

He cocked his head. "You don't really think they knocked themselves out trying, do you? I think the shooter was a cop."

"I think you're probably right."

"It was right after twelve public-spirited citizens of the Bronx gave Warren Madison judicial absolution for his sins, and that rubbed a lot of cops the wrong way."

"And a few ordinary citizens, too."

"Including you, Matt?"

"What I think's not important."

"Tell me anyhow."

"Why?"

"Why not?"

"I think Warren Madison is a homicidal son of a bitch who ought to spend the rest of his life in a cell."

"Then we agree."

I looked at him.

"Warren," he said, "is what some other clients of mine might characterize as a stone killer. I'd call him an utterly remorseless sociopath, and I'd like to see him live out his days as a guest of the state of New York."

"You defended him."

"Don't you think he's entitled to a defense?"

"You got him off."

"Don't you think he's entitled to the best possible defense?"

"You didn't just defend him," I went on. "You put the whole police department on trial. You sold the jury a bill of goods about Madison being a snitch for the local Bronx precinct, in return for which they let him deal dope and supplied him with stash confiscated from other dealers. Then they were afraid he would talk, though God knows who he would talk to or why, and they went to his mother's house not to arrest him but to murder him."

"Quite a scenario, wouldn't you say?"

"It's ridiculous."

"Don't you think cops use snitches?"

"Of course they do. They wouldn't make half their cases if they didn't."

"Don't you think they allow snitches to pursue their criminal careers in return for the help they provide?"

"That's part of how it works."

"Don't you think confiscated dope ever finds its way back onto the street? Don't you think some police officers, cops who've already broken the law, will take extreme measures to cover their asses?"

"In certain cases, but-"

"Do you know for a fact, an irrefutable fact, that those cops didn't go to Warren's mother's house looking to kill him?"

"For a fact?"

"An irrefutable fact."

"Well, no," I said. "I don't."

"I do," Gruliow said. "It was utter bullshit. They never used him as a snitch. They wouldn't use him to wipe their asses, for which I can't say I blame them. But the jury believed it."

"You did a good job of selling it to them."

"I'll be happy to take the credit, but it didn't take much selling. Because they wanted to buy it. I had a jury full of black and brown faces, and that ridiculous scenario I cooked up struck them as perfectly plausible. In their world, cops pull shit like that all the time, and lie like hell about it afterward. So why should they believe a word of police testimony? They'd rather believe something else. I gave them an acceptable alternative."

"And you put Warren Madison on the street."

He gave me a look, eyebrows raised, mouth on the verge of a smile. I'd seen it before; it was his patented expression of disappointed skepticism, flashed in court at a difficult witness, in the hallways at an uncooperative reporter. "In the first place," he said, "do you seriously think the quality of life in this city is going to be measurably different for the rest of us if Warren Madison or anybody else is on or off its streets?"

"Yes," I said, "but a cop has to believe that or it's hard to get to work in the morning."

"You're not a cop anymore."

"It's like being raised Catholic," I said. "You never get over it. And I do think it makes a difference, not so much in terms of the people Madison's likely to kill but in the message people get when they see him walking around."

"But they don't."

"How's that?"

"They don't see him walking around, not unless they're in maximum security at Green Haven. That's where Warren is, and where he's likely to be until you and I are both long past caring. Remember what Torres said when he sentenced the kid for stabbing that Mormon boy in the subway? 'Your parole officer hasn't been born yet.' You could say that about Warren. He killed those drug dealers, and he was convicted, and he'll be behind bars as long as he lives."

"You couldn't get him out from under those charges?"

"I never even tried. He had other counsel. And I wouldn't have wanted the case. Killing a drug dealer is murder for profit, and there are plenty of other lawyers who can represent you. Shoot a cop and you're making a political statement. That's when a guy named Gruliow can do you some good."

"Somehow no one remembers that Madison's serving time."

"Of course not. All they remember is Hard-Way Ray got him off. And the cops don't care whether he's locked up in Green Haven or out in Hollywood fucking Madonna. Their take on it is the same as yours, that I put the department on trial. I didn't, I put the system on trial, which is what I always do, in one sense or another. Whether it's civil-rights workers or draft resisters or Palestinians or, yes, Warren Madison, I put the system on trial. But not everybody sees it that way." He pointed at his plastic window. "Some of them take it personally."

I said, "I keep seeing that picture of you and Madison after the trial."

"Embracing."

"That's the one."

"You figured what? Bad taste? Theatrical gesture?"

"Just a memorable image," I said.

"Ever hear of a criminal lawyer named Earl Rogers? Very flamboyant and successful, represented Clarence Darrow when the great man was brought up on charges of jury tampering. In another case his client was charged with some particularly odious murder. I forget the details, but Rogers won an acquittal."

"And?"

"And when they read the verdict, the defendant rushed to shake hands with the man who got him off. Rogers wouldn't take his hand. 'Get away from me,' he cried out right there in the courtroom. 'You son of a bitch, you're as guilty as sin!' "