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you go back to your day job.”
    She winced. “I always looked at publishing as something romantic.” She waved the martini glass in the air. “Something almost mystical,” she said.
    “And I used to think truth and justice would just naturally prevail,” Corso said, with a shrug. A silence settled around them as he poured the remains of the Tsingtao into his beer glass. “Who knew?” he added.
    The bartender appeared at her elbow with another martini. She waited for him to leave and then picked up the glass. “Here’s to shattered illusions.”
    Corso raised his glass. She took a sip, reached over and clicked his glass with hers, and took another sip. “This is my last case for the AGO,” she said.
    “So I hear.”
    “I’ve got seventeen years in.”
    “Life goes on. You’re a survivor.”
    She offered a wry smile. “Coming from you, I’ll take that as a compliment.”
    Corso laughed. “I’ve certainly had my ups and downs.”
    “About ten million of them, as I recall.”
    “The paper settled for six million and change.”
    “How’d you do it?”
    “Do what?”
    “Go on.”
    “I’m like one of those Thomas Hardy characters. I just keep on keeping on.”
    “Seriously,” she said. “I haven’t worked in the private sector since I had a job at a root-beer stand. I’m damaged goods.”
    Corso chuckled. “And now you find yourself sitting across the table from one of the most notorious pieces of damaged goods on the planet, and you figure you might as well get a little advice on plague dispersal.”
    She wrinkled her nose and laughed into her glass. “Something like that.”
    “You got any offers?”
    “A few.”
    “I had exactly one . One publisher with a failing family newspaper who decided she was so desperate to save the paper that she’d hire the Typhoid Mary of the newspaper business just for the publicity.”
    “And?”
    “And one thing led to another. We hit a couple of big stories. The paper righted itself. I wrote a book. Turned out to be a big seller. So I wrote another one.” He shrugged. “Life went on.”
    “Did you feel exonerated?”
    “You mean like, ‘You had me down and look at me now’?”
    “Yes.”
    He shook his head. “It’s too arbitrary for that.”
    “Arbitrary how?”
    Corso thought it over. “My whole life was aimed at being a reporter. Not just a reporter but the best reporter. I was going to win a Pulitzer. I was going to win the Nobel Prize. As far as I was concerned , it was my destiny.” He looked down at the table and then up at Renee Rogers. “You understand what I’m saying? That was my path. The rest of this”—he waved a hand—“everything that’s happened since is just me stumbling around the woods. It’s not like I planned any of it. It just happened. It’s arbitrary.”
    “You see the Post Intelligencer yesterday?”
    “No. Why?”
    “They did a big story on you: RECLUSIVE LOCAL WRITER SURFACES . About how you were going to be the only spectator allowed in the courtroom. About you getting fired by the New York Times for fabricating a story, about the lawsuit and the settlement, how you’ve since become a bestselling author and all that.” She ate another olive and took a sip of the martini. “They said you’d never told your version of the New York Times story. They said you have a standing offer from Barbara Walters. Is that true?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Why’s that? Most everybody wants to tell their side of the story.”
    “Because nobody in their right mind would believe me if I did.”
    “Try me.”
    “No, thanks.”
    “No fair,” she teased. “You know my story. How I let a guy with a history of jury tampering compromise a jury of mine.”
    “You show me yours, I’ll show you mine?”
    Her eyes held a wicked gleam. “Something like that,” she said.
    Corso heaved a sigh. “I got hustled,” he said. “I got overconfident and started reading my own press clippings about how I was destined for a Pulitzer.