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find out the hiding place."

    "I already have. He's at the Hotel Radcliffe."

    "That's pretty upscale. The district attorney's office must have gotten a sizable increase in its budget."

    "Maybe Paulie's dipped into his ill-gotten gains so he can live in comfort before the wizards who run the witness protection program give him a new identity and ship him off to some town in the Midwest."

    "You've done an excellent job in locating him, John. Archie Goodwin couldn't have done a better job of ferreting."

Despite the disguise of a baggy pants suit, enormous black sunglasses, and a large straw hat with floppy brim meant to further conceal long red hair that she had pulled up into a knot beneath it, she found herself recognized all the way through the airport. Suddenly, after a fourteen-year career and more than a hundred successful murder prosecutions, a television camera in the courtroom had transformed her from just one more familiar face around the Los Angeles County Criminal Court into a national celebrity. Yet amid the embarrassment of being asked for autographs as she hurried toward her departure gate, she found some comfort in the unanimous opinion of those who delayed her that the outcome of the trial was nothing less than an assault against the American system of justice and an affront to common sense and decency.
    At a newsstand she bought Good Cigar magazine with a large cover picture of Theodore Janus wreathed in a blue cloud and a provocative headline: is this man's law all smoke and mirrors?
    In a bookstore she purchased the new legal thriller by John Grisham.
    Although she could cite a few exceptions in crime fiction, all of them men, Los Angeles Deputy District Attorney Margaret Rosemary Dane viewed the overall lack of prosecutors as principal characters as a disappointing flaw in the mystery genre. Lawyers who did solve crimes were invariably working on behalf of someone who had been mistakenly charged with a crime or, even worse, set up by the police, often in collusion with a prosecutor. In the courtroom dramas of theater, film, television, and books, the rule seemed to be that true nobility of character resided only at the tables occupied by a Perry Mason rather than a District Attorney Hamilton Berger. For every capable exception to the rule, such as the prosecutors on Law and Order, television was replete with the Perry Masons.
    In detective novels the officers of the law from the cops to the prosecutors were often described as dolts or impediments to be overcome. Sherlock Holmes faced inept Scotland Yarders. Nero Wolfe had to tangle with Inspector L. T. Cramer.
    With a smile, she wondered what Wolfe would have made of Harvey Goldstein. And how might Harvey respond if the weighty private sleuth stormed into his office, as he had into Cramer's, and threatened to have the police abolished?
    When cases moved out of the hands of investigators and into courtrooms the drama in fiction, as in real life, lay in whether the defense could outwit and outmaneuver the prosecution and get the accused off. In cases in which Nero Wolfe had investigated, Assistant District Attorney Irving Mandelbaum, who shortened his name to Mandel, and Westchester County prosecutors Fletcher M. Anderson and Cleveland Archer had no need to worry that Wolfe's case might be undercut by a defense lawyer's histrionics.
    "A trial is theater," Janus had taught her, first as student and lately as adversary. "If you want to take the measure of the social, moral, and political character of a nation's people," he said, "look at their attitude toward major criminal trials. Study the great legal shows, Maggie. You can learn more from them than you'll ever pick up in a classroom."
    The first trial had grabbed the headlines from coast to coast not because the crime happened in a big city where awful things were expected to occur but in the sedate and civilized town of Fall River, Massachusetts, in 1895. Charged with taking an ax and hacking to death