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rehabilitated.”
    “Ah.” I would congratulate him, say that I was glad to hear it, but it would be a lie. What’s worse, he would know it. It is this suspension from the practice of law, more than anything else, even the time spent behind bars, that I think is the basis of his animus toward me. Chambers spent nine months in the county jail, courtesy of an indulgent judge at sentencing. Though his crime was a felony, the court took note of the fact that he was a lawyer, one of the fold, with no prior history of wrongdoing. Special rules for special folk. A non-lawyer for the same offense would have done hard time, I think.
    “Practice isn’t quite the same,” he says. “A little smaller, less ambitious,” he says. What he means is not like the days of yore, before the Walter Henley case, when he had a dozen associates in a high-toned office across from the courthouse, and a partner who walked off with everything when Chambers was jailed.
    Harry has finally tuned in to our conversation. Standing beside me, Chambers looks at him. Since Harry is in a wrinkled suit and has a stubbled face, I am sure Chambers takes him for one of my clients, and my practice for something seedy.
    “Oh, no hard feelings,” he says. “I want you to know that I don’t harbor grudges. What happened, happened,” he says. “Water under the bridge,” he says. “Just one of those things,” he tells me.
    “Sure,” I say.
    “Let bygones be bygones,” says Harry. “Forgive and forget.” Harry wrinkles his eyebrows, trying to think of a few more. “Bear no malice,” he says. “Bury the hatchet. Blessed are the meek,” he says.
    Chambers looks at him, like who is this asshole?
    Not one to leave him in doubt, Harry sticks out his hand. “Harry Hinds,” he says.
    Chambers looks but doesn’t touch.
    “Forgiveness is good for the soul,” says Harry. “Do hard time, did you?” Hinds is cultivating him. I think he senses commercial opportunities, maybe a future client.
    “No.” Chambers looks at him with an expression you might reserve for something run over on the road. “And you?” he says.
    Harry looks down at his suit coat, wrinkled and dirty, like something the homeless would wear. “Oh no,” he says. “Just trying to crack the Coconut,” says Harry.
    Chambers’s expression is quizzical. He is wondering, I think, if maybe Harry’s run afoul of a local ordinance designed to protect palm trees and their fruit.
    “But I commend your attitude. It’s the first step toward rehabilitation,” says Harry.
    “And what’s that?” says Chambers.
    “Honest remorse,” says Hinds. “It works good at sentencing, too. It’s what I tell all my clients.”
    “That so?”
    I’m sure, knowing Chambers, that he can, just like Harry’s clients, switch this on and off, his remorse, at will. It is no doubt how he regained his ticket to practice law.
    Chambers smiles at me, lips tight as banjo strings. “See you around.” He says this as if he means it, like perhaps I should pay more attention each time I walk past an alley.
    “I doubt it,” I say. “I’m a little busy, nursing an assignment elsewhere right now.” I try to quell any rising expectations of revenge.
    He looks at me, a steely-eyed smile. “We’ll be seeing each other,” he says. One last contemptuous look at Harry, and Chambers is gone, down the street.
    In his day, Chambers had done some heady cases, mostly white-collar stuff, though he has seen the seamier side of crime as well. He defended to a standstill the prosecution of the White Angels a decade ago, a group of Aryan thugs charged with the murder of a black man on the fringes of Oak Park. In his abrasive courtroom style he drew the wrath of the cops and the city’s prosecutors. He also won, which in Adrian Chambers’s book, is all that counts.
    “Delightful guy,” says Harry. “A little like Hitler, but without the charm.”
    “Yeah,” I say, “with Adrian Chambers, his mouth’s a dead