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    “I just saw her briefly at the house,” I say. “We didn’t have time to talk.” In reality, I wanted to come see Roosevelt. He may be a homicide inspector, but he’s family. “Besides,” I say, “your feelings would have been hurt if I didn’t come to you first.”
    He chuckles. “I’m too old and cranky to have my feelings hurt about anything.” He gulps the rest of his coffee and wipes his mustache with a napkin. “Let’s go for a walk,” he says. “The walls in this room have ears.”
    We adjourn to the little Greek restaurant across Bryant Street, where we take a booth in the back. This has beenRoosevelt’s private office since the McDonald’s down the block put the old cafeteria in the basement of the Hall out of business several years ago. I’m drinking a Diet Coke. Roosevelt nurses a cup of coffee. He asks, “Why the hell are you representing Skipper Gates?”
    Don’t sugarcoat it, Roosevelt. Tell me how you really feel.
    I could give him the standard defense attorney line that every defendant is entitled to competent representation. He won’t respect me if I do. “He called me. He needs a lawyer. He can afford to pay me. I don’t have to love my clients, Roosevelt.”
    “He’s an ass.”
    “He’s no saint, but he’s done some good things. Look at his record on gun control.”
    “He became a gun control advocate when he figured out he could get his name in the papers.”
    “After his predecessor, I would have thought you’d be happy about having a law-and-order guy.” The man who occupied the DA’s office immediately before Skipper had a background in social work. The cops thought he was soft.
    Roosevelt points a finger at me and says, “Skipper isn’t a prosecutor—he’s a politician. He won’t take on the close cases. He won’t back up the cops. He’s been running for governor since the day he was elected DA.” He scowls as he adds, “I don’t have much time. The room service waiter found them. The victim was handcuffed to the bedposts, face covered with tape. Skipper was asleep in the chair by the TV”
    “It doesn’t mean he killed him.”
    He cocks his head. Sometimes I get a little ahead of myself. He’s doing me a favor. I shut up. “They found a roll of duct tape in his room,” he says. “It looks like it’s a match for the tape used to cover the guy’s face.”
    “It could have been planted.”
    He gives me the “oh, come on” look.
    “Have they been able to identify the victim?” I ask.
    He looks at the picture of Willie Mays on the wall above our table. “Not yet.” He’s been a cop for four decades. He’s seen everything. Even so, it’s clear this case bothers him. “He was a kid,” he says. “Maybe nineteen, twenty years old. We’re guessing he was a prostitute. If you believe Skipper, the victim beamed himself in and handcuffed and suffocated himself. It doesn’t add up.”
    I ask him if they found anything else.
    He says the FETs are still collecting evidence. “We’re testing for prints. We’ve placed him at the scene. He had no credible explanation, so we went ahead and made the arrest.”
    I give him a skeptical look.
    “Look,” he says, “you find a guy in a hotel room with a dead hooker. He has no explanation, plausible or otherwise. He claims somebody must have brought the body into his room in the middle of the night. He says he didn’t see anything. What would you have done?”
    “I don’t know.” I would have made the arrest.
    There are over twelve thousand felony arrests in San Francisco each year. Formal charges are filed in about half of those cases. Fewer than one percent of the arrests ever go to trial. The DA has forty-eight hours to file charges or turn him loose.
    “Thanks for your help, Roosevelt,” I say. He promises to call me if he hears anything.
    When I get back to the office, Rosie’s niece Rolanda, our secretary, office manager, computer technician and law clerk, hands me a stack of phone