'I can see where it would be.'
'When I left the office,' he said, 'after I got rid of those cops, I stopped at the bar down the block and
had a quick one before I went and hailed a cab. I can't remember the last time I did that. I never even tasted it. I threw it down and walked right on out again. And I had another when I walked in the door, I went over and poured it without thinking about it.' He looked at the glass he was holding. 'And then I called you,' he said.
'And here I am.'
'And here you are, and this will be my last drink of the night, and I'm not even sure I'll finish it. 'An Open Letter to Adrian Whitfield.' You want to know the most distressing thing about it?'
'The company you're in.'
'That's it exactly. Now how the hell did you know I was going to say that? That's the clarity of club soda talking.'
'It must be.'
'Vollmer and Salerno and Berry and Rashid. A child-killer, a mobster, an abortion-clinic bomber, and a black racist. I graduated from Williams College and Harvard Law School. I'm a member of the bar and an officer of the court. Will you please tell me how I can possibly belong on the same list with those four pariahs?'
'The thing is,' I said, 'Will gets to decide who's on his list. He doesn't have to be logical about it.'
'You're right,' he said. He went over to a chair and sank into it, held his glass to the light, then set it down untasted. 'You said something earlier about leaving the country. You were exaggerating to make a point, right? Or were you serious?'
'I was serious.'
'That's what I was afraid of.'
'If I were you,' I said, 'I'd get the hell out of the country, and I wouldn't wait, either. You have a passport, don't you? Where do you keep it?'
'In my sock drawer.'
'Put it in your pocket,' I said, 'and pack a change of clothes and whatever else will fit into a bag you can carry onto the plane. Take whatever cash you've got around the house, but don't worry if that's not very much. You're not a fugitive, so you'll be able to cash checks and use credit cards wherever you wind up.
You can even get cash. They've got ATMs all over the world.'
'Where am I going?'
'That's up to you, and don't tell me. Some European capital would be my suggestion. Go to a first-class hotel and tell the manager you want to register under another name.'
'And then what? Lock myself in my room?'
'I don't think you'd have to do that. He followed Roswell Berry to Omaha, but he didn't have to do any detective work. Berry was right there on the evening news every night, throwing cow's blood on doctors and nurses. And you don't need a passport to go to Nebraska, either. My guess is if you leave the country and don't make it too obvious where you've gone, he'll find it a lot simpler to dash off an open letter to somebody else than to knock himself out tracking you down. And he can always tell himself he won the game by scaring you out of the country.'
'And he'd be quite right about that, wouldn't he?'
'But you'll be alive.'
'And a little tarnished around the image, wouldn't you say? The fearless defense attorney who skipped the country, rousted by an anonymous letter. I've had death threats before, you know.'
'I'm sure you have.'
'The Ellsworth case brought a whole slew of them. 'You son of a bitch, if he walks you're dead.' Well, Jeremy didn't walk, so we'll never know.'
'What did you do with the letters?'
'What I've always done with them. Turned 'em over to the police.
Not that I expected a lot of sympathy from that quarter. There weren't a lot of cops pulling for me to get Jeremy Ellsworth acquitted. Still, that wouldn't keep them from doing their jobs. They investigated, but I doubt they pushed it too hard.'
'They'd have dug a lot deeper,' I said, 'if you'd gotten killed.'
He gave me a look. 'I'm not leaving town,' he said. 'That's out of the question.'
'It's your call.'
'Matt, death threats are a dime a dozen. Every criminal lawyer in this town's got a desk drawer full of them. Look at Ray Gruliow, for God's sake. How many death threats do you suppose he's received over the years?'
'Quite a few.'
'He got a shotgun blast through his front windows on Commerce Street one time, if I remember correctly. He said the shooters were cops.'
'He couldn't know that for sure,' I said, 'but it was a logical guess.
What's your point?'
'That I've got a life to live and I can't let something like this make me run like a rabbit. You've had death
