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wouldn’t have said it.”
    â€œWhy not?”
    â€œThere are just too many goddamned windmills around. That’s why.”
    And then she was gone.
    THERE IS AN ARMED guard at the law school now, a stern-eyed black woman, squat and heavy, who scrutinizedme and then my law alumni card as if she were a border agent and I were a spy. She insisted on additional proof, my driver’s license, complete with awful photo, and my bar association card. Even then, I thought she was going to refuse admittance.
    Finally, as if against her better judgment, she reluctantly allowed me to pass. I walked in with a group of serious-looking students who were hotly debating some obscure point of probate law among themselves. Some of them glanced at me, as if assessing whether I might possibly be someone of importance. Apparently I wasn’t, since I was given no more than a perfunctory up-and-down.
    They continued on as I stopped in the vaulted room they now called the Atrium, an artfully high enclosure of glass and rising beams.
    It occupied the space that had once held the dental clinic. The law school and the dental school had shared the building when I had been a student. In my mind, I seemed to hear the echo of long-ago screams from poor patients providing the young students with live practice. In the old days, we had to pass by the clinic to get to class. It had seemed more Dickens than dental.
    The dental school, now part of the rival University of Detroit, had been moved years before to much more elaborate quarters. I wondered if they still offered the free work.
    St. Benedict University had been founded at the turn of the century by the Benedictine Order as a challenge to the academic supremacy of the Jesuits and their University of Detroit. But the Jesuits had won out, slowly but surely, eventually gobbling up, one by one, all the Benedictine colleges, everything except the law school, and that too would be gone soon, given economic reality. Merger talks were already under way, with plans to unite the two Catholic law schools located only half a mile apart in the decaying dangerous downtown section of Detroit.
    But until that time, it was still St. Benedict, a kind of mother ship for thousands of its graduates. It had once been the law school for working students, Catholic mostly, the sons and daughters of immigrants, living their parents’ dream. St. Benedict’s was the first step up on the ladder to something better. If the University of Michigan was Tiffany’s, then St. Benedict would be a kind of working-class, academic K Mart.
    Still, the boys and girls of St. Benedict, those who got through, did all right. Half the judges in the state were St. Benedict products.
    So was Jacques Mease, the famous graduate who had gone on to become a bank financier and who had amassed a billion-dollar fortune. He had paid for the new Atrium and it had borne his name until his indictment and conviction. The brass plate had been removed after that. Mease had done his time, only a year, and had paid an enormous fine, a fine that left him with only a hundred million on which to skimp by. According to the magazines, Mease, poor devil, now lived a quiet life on his estate on the Caribbean island he owned, consumed, no doubt, with remorse. In any event, he was no longer interested in making big donations to his former law school.
    But before it stopped, his money had helped fund in part St. Benedict’s excellent law library, which was why I had driven in from Pickeral Point. Doctor Death’s appeal had to be prepared, which meant hours of searching law books to build a foundation for the arguments I would toss at the court in written form first, and later verbally.
    Most lawyers at some time in their lives have near-death experiences with court-imposed deadlines. Everybody tends to put things off, but lawyers make a religion of it. At least they do until they come too close one day. From then on, stark terror inspires