Pleading Guilty

on into his account.'

'How?'

'The account number's right here on the bank card statement. But to make sure that I'm really authorized to use it, we need his password.'

'What's the password? 'Rosebud'?'

'A kid's name. Birthday. Anniversary.'

'Great,' I said again. I sat hunched, watching little iridescent squiggles radiate on the screen, as if the letters were burning, fascinated as ever by the thought of fire. This might be why Bert had the card, so he could rack up Infomode charges in another name. I grabbed her arm.

'Try Kam Roberts.' I spelled it.

The screen lit up again: welcome to infomode!

'Whoa,' I said. Once an art student, always an art student. How I love color.

'Do Billing,' she typed. The listing that scrolled up looked like the bank card statement, a log of charges incurred every day or two, which included the length of use and the cost. It was just what you'd expect of Bert. It was all for something called 'Sportsline,' or for another service they referred to as 'Mail-box.' I figured Sportsline reported the scores of games. I asked about Mailbox.

'It's what it sounds like. Get messages from people who are on-line. Like electronic mail.'

Or, it turned out, you could leave messages behind, little memos to yourself or to someone who logged into your account with your permission. That was what Bert had done. The note we found was dated three weeks ago and seemed to make no sense.

It read:

Hey Arch-

SPRINGFIELD Kam's Special 1.12-U. five, five Cleveland.

1. 3-Seton five, three Franklin.

1. 5-SJ five, three Grant.

NEW BRUNSWICK 1.2-S.F. eleven, five Grant.

Lena grabbed a yellow pad out of another carrel and wrote it down.

'Does this mean anything to you?' she asked.

Not a thing. Baseball scores in January? Map readings? The combination for a safe? We both stared desolately at the screen.

I heard my name from the PAs in the ceiling: 'Mr Malloy, please go to Mr Thale's office.' The announcement was repeated twice, somehow more ominous with each rendition. I felt trouble darken my heart. What were we going to tell Jake? I rose, thanking Lena. She clicked off the machine so that Bert's message, whatever it was, vanished in a little star of light that lingered on the dull screen.

B. Washing

Relieved to have found me, Wash welcomed me to his office with a warmth you'd expect if you were entering his home. George Washington Thale III has the sort of charm meant to reflect breeding, a steady geniality he radiates even with the secretaries. When he turns all his attention and smooth manners on you, you feel like you've met somebody out of Fitzgerald, scion of an old rich world to which all Americans once aspired. Still, I never can forget the term 'stuffed shirt'. He has this big bag belly that seems to push up to his chest when he is seated. With his bow ties and his horn-rimmed glasses, his liver-spotted face and his pipe, he is a type, one of those used-up emblems of prosperity whose very sight makes you think that somewhere there's a kid waiting for his inheritance.

Wash asked after my well-being, but he was still fretting about Jake, and he promptly dialed Martin's extension on his speakerphone. In Wash's grand corner office, decorated in dark woods, with colonial objects brightened by dabs of gold or red, the practice of law generally has an easy, elegant air, a world where men of importance make decisions and minions at a distance carry them out. He has filled this space with memorabilia of George Washington — portraiture and busts, little mementos, things that G.W. was alleged to have touched. Wash is some ninth- or twelfth-hand relation, and his hapless attachment to this stuff always seems secretly pitiful to me, as if his own life will never measure up.

'I'm with Mack,' Wash said when Martin came on.

'Good,' he replied. 'Just the men I'm looking for.' I could tell from Martin's tone, a quart over on oil, that he too was in the company of someone else. 'Mack, I just bumped into Jake and we began to talk about the progress on some of the 397 cases Bert's been handling. I invited him to stop in. I thought we all might want to talk about this together.'

'Jake's with you?' Wash asked. He only now grasped what Martin had meant when he said we all should get together.

'Right here,' Martin answered. Upbeat. Strong tone. Martin is like Brushy — like Pagnucci — like Leotis Griswell in his day, like many others who do it well, a lawyer every waking hour. He manages the firm; he plans the renewal of the river and the buildings on the shore. He counsels clients and gets fourteen younger attorneys in a room and plays war games on all his bigtime cases. He flies here and there and engages in endless conference calls with parties strung out across most of the world's time zones, during which he listens, opines, edits briefs, and reads his mail. Something in the law is always at hand and on his mind. And he adores it — he is like a gourmet gorging down an endless meal, eating every goody on his plate. With Jake there, with crisis looming, he sounded chipper and self-confident, raring to go. But when Wash looked back, his aging, pale face was stricken and he looked more scared than me.

C. Introducing the Victim of the Crime

If you've ever seen The Birth of Venus with the goddess on the half-shell and all the seraphim bent back with the vapors because she is so great, then you've seen big-firm lawyers when the General Counsel of their major client arrives. During our first few minutes with Jake Eiger in Martin's vast corner office, getting coffee and waiting as Martin quelled the usual urgent calls, about half a dozen partners stuck their heads in to tell Jake how fit he looked, or that his latest letter on the Suchandsuch matter reflected the same pith and sensibility as the Gettysburg Address; they threw out offhand invitations to dinner, theater, and basketball games. Jake, as ever, accepted this attention with grace. His father was a politician and he knows the way, waving, laughing, parrying with various skilful jests.

I have known Jake Eiger most of my life. We went to high school together at Loyola, Jake two years ahead. You and I, Elaine, we were the kind of Catholics who grew up thinking we were a minority group, the mackerel snappers who ate fish on Friday and wore ash on our foreheads and made way for the ladies in black sheets; we knew we were regarded by Protestants as a clandestine organization with foreign loyalties, like the Freemasons or the KGB. Jack Kennedy of course was our hero, and in his aftermath America for Catholics, I think, truly was different. But you are ever the child, and I'll never really be sure there is a place at the table for me.

But Jake was a Catholic boy, German-Irish, who thought he'd joined the white man's country club. I envied him that and many other things, that his father was rich and that Jake was easy with people. Very good-looking, a movie-star type, he has smooth coppery blond hair that never leaves its place and is only now, with Jake a year or two past fifty, beginning to show less of the radiance that always made you think he was under a spotlight. He has prepossessing eyes — the kind of abundant lashes that you seldom see on a man and which gave Jake, since an otherwise unimpressive childhood, the misleading look of a worldly adult depth. There were always lots of girls after him, and I suspected him of treating them cruelly, wooing them in his soft way and rebuffing them once he'd gotten between their legs.

Still, when I was on my fourteenth version of who I would be, having decided against Vincent Van Gogh, Jack Kerouac, and Dick Tracy, and figured I'd give my dad's idea, law school, a try, Jake, of all people, became a kind of ideal. Our paths had split after high school but my role as Nora's intended brought us back in contact at little family dos, and Jake took it on himself to give me pointers and advice about law school and practice. Then when I got started at BAD he called upon me for a rather auspicious favor which he felt obliged to repay years later by bringing