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into advising Paula Kennerman of her right to have a different public defender, in which case the petition would come from the defendant, not him. Would that look better? She didn’t see why it would, but maybe he thought so. It didn’t matter much, she decided, what his motives were. She fully intended to advise Lucille Reiner to tell her sister she had the right to get rid of him and have someone else appointed. Anyone at all would be an improvement.
    So he had read about her, she thought derisively.
    What he hadn’t read was that she was out of it, out of court, out of doing battle with the giant state, money or no money. No more games, she had told her father. No more devious tricks and grandstanding, no more trying to psych out juries that more and more seemed to believe the state was the final authority, that more and more accepted as probably true enough whatever the state claimed, and that seemed more and more often to defy defense attorneys to try to rearrange their gray cells and convince them that the district attorney or his assistant might not be imbued with the wisdom of Solomon, the intelligence of Einstein, the prescience of-“Goddamn it!” she muttered as she hit the accelerator and cleared an intersection to a blare of horns. Now she was running red lights. She took a deep breath and turned at the next corner. Something to eat first, then see if Mrs. Cleveland was ready to complete the will they had started a month ago. Mrs. Cleveland was having trouble deciding who should get her sewing machine.
    After the will, laundromat, and then shopping—No, she had to clean her refrigerator first. She had made herself stop putting anything of consequence in it until she gave it a thorough scrub.
    Late in the afternoon she finished the refrigerator. It didn’t look any different, she had to admit, but now she felt she could put milk and lettuce and good things like that into the box without holding her breath. She took the newspapers out to her car and then yanked the sheets off her futon and added them to the basket of laundry. And while she worked at domesticity, she mocked herself, she was avoiding the other problem that she kept pushing out of her mind. What to tell her father.
    The next morning she read the news story about Paula Kennerman’s attempted suicide. Lucille Reiner was quoted as saying it wasn’t guilt that drove her to it. The article was fair enough, not inflammatory, and the reporter had not mentioned guilt, except to quote Lucille, but there it was. Hadn’t that asshole told Lucille not to make statements, not to comment?
    If this paper was doing this, she thought then, what were the other papers doing? The weeklies, the monthlies.
    What were the television commentators saying?
    She banged her cup down so hard, coffee splashed out on the table on her shirt. Not my business, she told herself sharply. Pulling off the shirt, she went to the bedroom for another one, then snatched up her briefcase and left the house thinking of her two appointments that morning, two more earth-shaking matters to resolve for clients. She heard the sardonic edge in her mind and shook her head. Actually, she was dealing with people for whom ten dollars was a lot to pay for advice, and for those people these were earth-shaking matters.
    When she returned home two hours later” there was an old Datsun parked out front with Lucille Reiner behind the wheel. Barbara went to the driver’s side and said hello. Lucille jumped as if she had been shocked from a trance.
    “Can I ask you something? I mean, here, not at the restaurant?”
    “Of course.”
    “I thought I shouldn’t wait until tomorrow. I can wait if you’re busy.”
    “Come on in,” Barbara said with resignation. Inside the house she herded Lucille into the kitchen and sat her down in one of the chairs out of the way, then began to make coffee.
    “You know she cut her wrists?”
    “I know.”
    “It’s my fault,” Lucille said dully.
    “I was