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jurors’ and judges’ faces, I saw she was not a happy woman.
    But counting on Bearess to protect me if she turned out to be a contemporary Charles Manson girl, I cracked the door.
    â€œYou Lilly Cleary, the lawyer?”
    â€œYes, though I much prefer that people make appointments through my secretary during business hours.”
    â€œLook,” she said, “Dave and Waylon are in the county jail for stealing a truckload of wine and they need you to go down and bail them out. Right now. Use this for bail. Here.” With that, Unhappy Hippie Girl thrust a brown paper bag at me. I took the bag, and when I looked inside, she turned and skittered off down my driveway.
    The bag, an ordinary, though crumpled, grocery store bag from Winn-Dixie, was full of money. Cash. Bills. Green paper.
    I riffled through the bag to see if there was anything else in it, and when I saw that the entire bag was full of money, I looked up after Hippie Girl and shouted, “Hey, wait a minute.”
    She got in a pickup, slammed the door, and drove off.
    Well, now what?
    For starters, I took the sack of money and went back inside and shut and locked the door.
    Then I thought about Farmer Dave’s impressive list of old felony warrants. Oh, mierda , I said, and wondered if there was some kind of statute of limitations on old warrants.
    I didn’t have a clue as to how to get people out of jail. There’s something about a bond, a bailsman, and maybe a hearing, and you have a right to remain silent, and that’s about the sum total of what I knew about criminal justice in any kind of practical sense. In other words, even with my law degree and my closetful of tailored gray suits, I knew what the average television viewer knew.
    In short, I needed a criminal-defense attorney. Mentally, I ran down the list of the ones I knew from the Sarasota Bar Association functions, and then remembered how my now very much ex-boyfriend Sam Santuri, a homicide detective and seriously humorless man, had ranted when this Philip Cohen guy had shredded him on a cross-examination. Cohen had gotten a decidedly guilty man off scot-free, at least according to Sam. That was the attorney for Dave, I thought, dragging out my phone book. Naturally there was no home listing for Cohen, and no emergency, after-hours number. I yanked out my Sarasota Bar Association yearbook, took a quick look at Cohen’s photo, assessed him in the grainy mug shot as a standard-looking attorney in glasses and dark suit, noted his law degree was from Notre Dame and his undergraduate degree was from UCLA, and threw down the yearbook in disgust at its lack of a home number.
    On a mission now, and not giving a rat’s ass that it was getting pretty late to be calling people on a Saturday night, I punched in the number for Jackson Smith, alias Stonewall. Aside from being my mentor and the object of my fantasies, Jackson is also Mr. Bar Association and knows just about everything anybody needs to know. If he ever sold his list of secret phone numbers, the peace and privacy of most of the professional denizens of the greater Sarasota Bay area would be shot to hell and back.
    Jackson answered the phone with a snarl. After my necessary apology for calling this late, and calling period, I asked if he had Philip Cohen’s home number.
    â€œDid you get arrested?” he shouted.
    â€œNo,” I snapped, making sure I was emphatically indignant-sounding. “It’s for a—” Okay, just how did I describe Farmer Dave to my mentor, the man who kept trying to mold me into a sophisticated trial lawyer? What was Dave to me? Friend? Employee? First love? The man who took Delvon and me in when we came back from a frolic in Florida as teenagers and found our mother had sold our bedroom furniture and clothes? Dave was all of those things. As well as a long-haired career criminal.
    â€œâ€”acquaintance of my brother.” I chose the safe and the