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of pain if you get it into your head and come to grips with it now. The police, the D.A., the State of California are not testing the water here. They’re not playing Let’s Make a Deal . Given the case, the media hype, and racial politics, unless something major breaks our way, I can’t see that they would ever accept a deal, though if things get bad, we may have to go there before we’re finished. They’re doing this because they believe they have the evidence to convict you, send you to the death house at San Quentin, and inject enough lethal drugs into your body to kill you. I wish I could tell you it wasn’t true, but if they have their way, that is exactly what they intend to do.”
    It’s hard to tell whether he even hears all this. His face looking up at me is that flushed. A second later the breath seems to leave his body as his shoulders slump and he sags in the chair. His head is down. The nightmare is real. He begins to tear up, then sucks it all back in a boyish effort to keep his nose from running. He wipes his eyes with the back of his forearm, the one decorated with the swastika. Carl Arnsberg may be twenty-three and halfway to becoming a hard-baked race case, but at this moment I would gauge his social age to be no more than ten, with the hardness quotient of his heart somewhere in the neighborhood of hot Jell-O.
     
    “I don’t know what happened. I guess it’s my fault. Somehow I lost touch with him. You know how hard it is to raise kids.”
    Sam Arnsberg is a friend of long standing. We went to college together, belonged to the same fraternity, dated some of the same girls.
    Today, seated in one of the client chairs across from my desk, Sam doesn’t even look like the same person I once knew. But for certain aspects of terminal cancer, there is nothing I can think of in life that will destroy a person faster than the perils of dealing with the American judicial system. Even mired in the middle of it as I am, I cannot imagine what Sam is going through, a child facing a possible death sentence.
    “Maybe you should find someone else to do this,” I tell him.
    “No! I trust you. I have faith in you.” He says it as if he were reachingout to grasp one of those life rings they toss from a passing ship to a man who is drowning.
    “Maybe a little too much faith,” I tell him. “I never knew your son as a child. And you and I may be a little too close. Sometimes it can cloud judgment,” I tell him.
    Over the years since college, Sam and I stayed in contact, first by phone and letters and later with e-mail. We exchanged stories of family life. When Nikki died, Sam came out to California and spent almost a week helping me to pick up the pieces of my life. During later years he became an important voice on the phone, one of the few people with whom I could share intimate thoughts.
    “I know it’s bad,” he says.
    “I would be lying if I told you it wasn’t. There’s a lot of evidence. Almost none of it, as far as I can see, is going to be good for Carl.”
    “Let me guess what’s bothering you. You’re afraid that if you lose, if Carl dies, I’ll blame you, that we won’t be able to look each other in the eye again. Won’t happen,” he says.
    “What? I won’t lose?”
    “No. If Carl dies, there is only one person to blame, and that’s my boy. Will you do it? Will you take the case?”
    Sam has been to two other lawyers already, both of them major criminal-defense hotshots, people to whom I referred him when he first came to me. Whether it was the evidence in the case or the racial hot wires attached to it, neither of them would touch it.
    Sam could step away. His son is an indigent, eligible for the services of the public defender. But he doesn’t want to do that.
    “All right. Let me talk to my partner, but I’m sure he’ll go along.” I know Harry well enough to know that he will, though he will chew my ass raw and reserve the right to do so again the first minute the case