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giveaway.”
    Harry looks at me.
    “You know he’s lying when you see his lips move.”
    By the time we reach the house, Nikki is so angry she is not talking to me. We were late getting to the babysitter, and Nikki was called from work to pick up Sarah. I know my wife well enough to recognize her look when I get to the house, a gaze that seems to see right through me as if I am nothing more than a hole in space.
    “How are you, Harry?” She takes his coat.
    “Fine,” he says. “I’m doing fine.” She turns her back on me, leaving me on the stoop outside. Harry gives me a sideways glance, something that says maybe he’d be more comfortable in jail tonight.
    “Mmm, smells good.” He puts a face on it. Odors from the kitchen are wafting out toward the front door.
    “Sure does,” I say.
    Nikki gives me one of her “drop dead” looks, turns and heads back toward the kitchen. At least she has acknowledged my presence. The first step in the long road to redemption.
    In the last weeks the stress here at home has been palpable, ever since I took on the Davenport assignment. I have tried to assuage Nikki, offering to boost the housekeeper to once a week. I even tried to take part of the load, some household chores from her. The laundry became my province, washing, drying and folding. But the art of bleach put an end to this. Nikki took this task back after a few weeks when our underwear began to take on the gray-cast of the Confederacy.
    These days Nikki is haggard, trying to handle a job and home, being both mother and father to Sarah, worn to a fine edge because I have taken on too much at my own job.
    “Daddy. Daddy.” Sarah bounds down the hall and into my arms. “Guess what I did in school today.” She has dark hair kept short in a Dutch cut, and oval brown eyes the color of rich coffee. A few transparent fawn-like freckles dot the bridge of her nose, and wonder dances in her every expression. Kindergarten is a new and daring adventure each day for my daughter. In the afternoon she rides the bus with the high school girl down the street, the coolest thing since Barbie. As a result she talks constantly about all the homework she has to do and puts on a fatalistic expression that is comic in its efforts to look grown-up. Then she’s off to the playroom for hours of self-important scribbling on reams of binder paper.
    It is the first night this week that I have arrived home at a sufficiently early hour to see her still awake.
    She is pulling me like a little tugboat with her full hand around my forefinger down the hall now. “Look at what I did, Daddy. Look what I did at school.”
    “Just a minute,” I tell her. “I’ll look at it in a second.”
    Nikki asks Harry if he’d like something to drink, beer, wine, a soda.
    “A beer would be great,” he says.
    “Let me get that, honey. You’re busy.” I try to press past my wife to give her some help, a mild effort at amends.
    In a move that would rival the queens of roller-derby, she gives me a hip in the side, sending me past the refrigerator door and halfway into the hall, the leverage of the female center of gravity. She grabs a single bottle of Coors from the rack on the door and slams it closed. Two seconds later she is handing this to Harry, the head frothing up in a tall, frosted pilsner glass. It is her way of telling me that as far as she is concerned, I can die of thirst. I begin to wonder if I’m eating tonight.
    Finding myself in the hallway in the semi-darkness by the phone, I stand there for a moment to collect my thoughts. This day is not turning out well—first a reunion with Adrian Chambers and now this. I pull the phone book from the little shelf under the phone and look in the yellow pages under “Attorneys.” I am curious as to where Chambers is hanging his shingle these days. There is no listing. I look at the date on the book. No doubt it was published before Chambers was reinstated.
    I turn to the white pages and look under his