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courthouse, but half an hour before the scheduled meeting, Bender’s secretary calls to say he’s at his home and expecting Miriam there. The change in venue makes Miriam uneasy and she’s doubly glad Craig’s coming along.
    Bender’s house is a sterile-looking new construction in gray stucco on an old street of redbrick colonials. Miriam knocks on a large wooden door painted such a glossy black that it still looks wet. The heavy brass door knocker is shaped like a gavel. Miriam and Craig exchange glances and she rolls her eyes. Craig grins back. He has an expressive face. Miriam hopes he can keep it blank during the next twenty minutes, because it’s almost certain that Bender will be rude.
    Bender opens the door dressed in slacks and a pale peach shirt that brings out the sunburn on his nose and cheeks. His gut presses against the thin pima cotton. He smiles in welcome at Miriam, but the smile freezes into a grimace when he catches sight of Craig.
    “This is Craig Lang,” Miriam introduces. “He’s interning at the paper.” Craig is three years younger than Miriam and stands nearly a foot taller. Bender eyes him sourly. It does look a little like she’s brought along a bodyguard. Craig stands relaxed, arms by his side, smiling politely at the judge, bland game face on.
    “I wasn’t informed,” Bender huffs importantly. “This is a private conversation.”
    “This is an interview,” Miriam corrects. “If you say anything off the record, Craig understands that it’s confidential.”
    Bender considers her for a moment, his rat eyes flicking from her face to her chest to her notepad to Craig. Miriam holds a firm, no-nonsense gaze as her skin crawls. In another thirty seconds, she might call the interview off.
    Bender senses something of her determination. After another pursed-lip glance at Craig, he sucks on his teeth loudly and steps back to let them through. They follow him down a long, sterile hallway lined with black-and-white photos of skeletal trees. It’s cold inside and the photos make the place feel colder. Miriam wonders why a confirmed bachelor in his fifties needs such a massive home.
    There are several closed doors leading off the hallway. He opens one and ushers them in. After the modern façade of the house and the stark hallway, Miriam expects a room with lots of glass and chrome, but his office is surprisingly traditional: sizeable Oriental rug, mahogany desk, walls lined with bookshelves full of legal texts. It’s curiously warm in the office after the chill of the hallway. Too warm. There’s a large window, but the view is hidden behind a fussy striped curtain of gold and burgundy, drawn shut. It’s dim in the room without natural light and Bender flicks on a small lamp that only accentuates how stuffy and gloomy the office is, considering the bright sunshine outside.
    Craig and Miriam settle on a small brown couch and Bender eases into a wingback chair upholstered in the same ugly fabric as the curtain. There’s a space heater next to the chair, which explains the heat in the room, but not why Bender would blast AC in the house and run a space heater in the office.
    Eager to finish this awful interview, Miriam flips open her notebook, ready to begin. But Craig, who’s been unabashedly studying the place, suddenly sits up with an exclamation of alarm. Miriam follows his appalled gaze. There’s a massive terrarium flanked by two pottedficus that takes up half the wall in the corner of the office. She walked right by it as she entered the room, so distracted by the hideous drapes that she never noticed it. At first there are only brown coils in the mottled colors of a muddy topographical map. They’re so thick and tangled it takes her mind a while to work out that not only is it a snake, it is a very large snake. Each coil is almost as thick as her thigh.
    “Oh my God!” she exclaims. “How big is that snake?”
    Bender smiles benignly and Miriam is annoyed that she gave him the