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goes sour.
    Sam smiles as a tear runs down his face from out of the corner of his eye. Like father, like son.
    “Why did he run?” asks Sam. “Did he tell you?”
    “I suppose because he was afraid.”
    “Did he say—”
    “Stop!”
    He looks at me.
    “You’re his dad. You and I are friends. It’s going to be hard, but there are going to be things that I will not be able to share with you. Most of the things that Carl tells me, lawyer-client, I cannot tell anyone else, including you.”
    “I understand. But I have to know. One thing.”
    “What’s that?”
    “From what you know, did he do it? Did he kill that man?”
    “If you mean did he confess, did he make any admission, the answer is no. He maintains his innocence.”
    “Thank God,” he says, heaving a long sigh as he looks up at the ceiling. “You know, I don’t know what got into him. All this stuff. The tattoos, his friends. Where did he get all that? We didn’t raise him to be that way.”
    I shake my head.
    “We used to play baseball together. I coached his Little League team. Babe Ruth when he was older. We played catch. He used to pitch to me.” He looks down at the desk, his eyes tearing up again as he thinks back. “When he was small, he thought he might play in the big leagues someday. The dreams kids have,” says Sam. “Then I looked up, and he was gone. Now this.”
    At seventeen, after an argument with his father, Carl dropped out of school, moved out of the house, and began to drift. It was the last real contact his family had with him.
    Sandra is Sam’s wife of nearly thirty years. They have two older children, a daughter, Susan, who is in grad school and a son, James, who is married with children and works with his dad in the family business, a small insurance agency.
    “Susan’s talking about dropping out of school,” he says. “She’s enrolled at Columbia. It’s gonna be tough. Tough.” I know he’s talking about finances. “She’s a smart kid.”
    “Yes.”
    “It’s hard. It’s on the news, twenty-four hours a day. Her brother’s name, his picture, lawyers and judges—they call them experts—all speculating on things they don’t know. Susie has friends at school, but she’s having a hard time. She says she’ll just drop out for a while and go back later. But I don’t want her to. It’s enough that it destroys Sandy andme. I don’t want it to affect the other kids. They have their own lives. Besides, it’s not like she can hide at home. These people are camped outside our house,” he says, “trucks with satellite dishes, people with cameras, microphones, lights. The middle of the night, they light up your bedroom. They chased Sandy down the driveway of her own home. Her own home,” he says.
    “I saw it on TV,” I tell him, half a minute of tape showing his wife rolling out the trash, fending off questions and dodging boom mikes. Film of this from different angles tumbled through the news cycle on each of the cable networks every fifteen minutes for two days. “Breaking news” is now anything on videotape that can be used to punctuate the ever-rising flood of ads. Every story, no matter what or where, is now national in scope. Johnny has a fight with Jimmy in the third grade, and the whole country is told about it by breathless “reporters” hanging from news choppers hovering over the school. Park a police car by a building and call in a rumor, and whatever you say will be broadcast around the world twice before you can hang up. Unless you knew better, you might swear that Chicken Little has taken over the newsroom and bolted the door. Hyping hysteria and peddling panic around the clock is now an enterprise listed on the Dow Jones ticker. And everybody watches, anxiety junkies cruising for another hit, just in case there’s some real news. After all, another 9/11 could happen, and we might miss it.
    “Anything else you need from me?” Sam asks, then slaps his head. “Of course there is. Let me