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test.”
    Charlie was too modest to say it, but he’s the old coot who invented it. Getting latent prints from the body of a corpse was tricky stuff. Moisture, the breakdown of tissues, and the surface of the skin itself were major problems. Sometimes, prints would show up by rolling a piece of glass across the body, but usually it didn’t work. Charlie came up with the Super Glue method. Convert the glue into fumes and tent the body. The sticky stuff settles on the skin, and
voila!
if someone manhandled the body, prints appear in the glue as the fumes condense on the skin.
    “I don’t mind, Charlie. Take the job.”
    “I don’t need the money,” he said.
    “C’mon, take it. I’d rather have you on the other side than some yahoo who doesn’t know what he’s doing. Remember, I’m supposed to be seeking the truth.”
    “No, you’re not, Jake. You’re supposed to be representing Nicky Florio.”

Chapter 4
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Playing Footsie
     
    “J UST WHAT IS YOUR NET WORTH, MR. FLORIO.” H.T. PATTERSON ASKED.
    “Objection,” I called out, slapping the table with a palm. “The defendant’s financial resources are irrelevant.”
    “Irrelevant!” Patterson boomed, as if there were a judge and jury to appreciate his righteous indignation. “Dare you say irrelevant?”
    “I dare. And while I’m at it, I dare say immaterial, inadmissible, and just plain none of your business.”
    Patterson feigned outrage and turned to the court reporter. “Has the stenographer recorded every word of this obloquial colloquy? When we bring this before the Court, I shall seek sanctions.”
    The reporter, a heavyset young woman, nodded silently. Patterson was decked out in a white linen three-piece suit, which was set off nicely by his cocoa-colored skin. He was short and trim, a native of the Bahamas and a former fundamentalist preacher at the Liberty City Baptist Church. After law school, he continued his Holy Rolling, only in the courtroom.
    Five of us sat around the conference table in Patterson’s law office—Nicky and Gina Florio, the court reporter, Patterson, and a big lug who used to wear number 58 in the aqua and orange and was now squeezed into an off-the-rack, 46-long seersucker suit.
    Before we started the deposition, I sat in H.T. Patterson’s office as he slid a videotape into a VCR. The television screen flickered to life, a helicopter shot of the Miami skyline. Then the music came up, a strident beat stolen from
Miami Vice.
Finally, two men appeared on the screen, a beaming interviewer and a super-serious Peter Tupton. They sat in straight-backed chairs on a carpeted riser. Between them was a coffee table on which sat an artificial rhododendron, and behind them a logo, QUÉ PASA, MIAMI ? One of those Sunday morning public-affairs shows you watch when the hangover is so bad you can’t bend over to pick up the remote control.
    The tape was marked Plaintiff’s Exhibit Seven, and Patterson intended to introduce it at the trial. Under the rules of discovery, I could see it first.
    “What’s the relevance of this?” I asked, as the interviewer was telling us Tupton’s background.
    “Two weeks before his tragic death, Peter Tupton gave this interview. I hanks to the wonders of modern technology, we can show the jury that this was a
man.
Yea, more than a man, a towering figure of vision, courage, and honor.”
    “I’d like to listen to your client before you canonize him,” I said.
    I watched for a few minutes. The towering figure appeared to be a short, overweight man in his late thirties with receding pale hair, horn-rimmed glasses, and thin, grim lips. He wore a safari jacket over a blue chambray shirt. The pants were khaki, and when he crossed his legs, I could see one hiking boot stained with mud. I quickly learned that Tupton had studied petroleum engineering at a university out West, that his first job had been with an oil company, and after an explosion and fire on an offshore rig, he had been so shocked by