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notorious philanderer. The secretaries in our office had warned me about Pisani and his endless flirtations. Rumor was that Pisani had tried to bed every attractive woman whom he’d encountered in the courthouse—and some unattractive ones, too! I’d been told that he hadn’t found any of them as fascinating as he found himself.
    In our courthouse almost every lawyer and judge had a last name that ended in a vowel. Even so, Pisani stood out. He had graduated from Phillips Exeter and Harvard Law. He was also the only assistant district attorney in Westchester who’d ever walked into a courtroom dressed in a London Savile Row suit.
    The secretaries had also tipped me off about Whitaker and his insecurities and ego. Shortly after he was elected, he’d spent thousands having contractors remove walls in the suite of rooms that included the D.A.’s office so it was now the equivalent of three offices remodeled into one. The additional space at one end had been made into a massive conference area with a table large enough to seat sixteen. On the opposite side of his expanded domain, he’d installed a lounge area with leather sofas and chairs clustered around a wooden coffee table. Directly in the center of the room was a hand-carved mahogany desk from the 1800s that was rumored to have once been owned by one of New York’s robber barons. Whitaker, who was in his midsixties, had a fondness for antiques and had found a way to purchase the desk with public funds when the desk showed up at an estate sale on the Hudson. A Waterbury school clock, another antique that he’d secured, was hanging on the wall to his left. Its noisy pendulum had been intentionally stopped because Whitaker had found the tick-tocking distracting. The clock was the only decoration in the room. All of the remaining wall space was taken up either with framed photographs or documents. The photos were eight-by-tens of Whitaker shaking hands with local, state, and national politicians or celebrities. The framed documents were certificates, honors, and awards that he had received. It was a museum of egomania.
    Pisani was seated directly in front of Whitaker’s massive desk in one of two red leather chairs. I nodded politely to Pisani as I walked across the thick carpet. I could feel both men’s eyes giving me the once-over. It seemed to take forever to reach the empty chair next to Pisani. I did not sit down but rather remained standing until Whitaker acknowledged me.
    That was not something he apparently was in a hurry to do.
    Seeing them together reminded me of the 1969 movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid . The older Whitaker would have been cast as Paul New-man while Pisani would be an Italian version of Robert Redford.
    As always, “Mr. Invincible” was stylishly dressed and not a single piece of his slicked-back black hair was out of place. He was in his midforties and had a strong jaw and beautiful steel-gray eyes.
    Some fifteen years older, District Attorney Whitaker did not have as impressive a legal pedigree as his younger impresario, which was why, I suspected, the D.A. had furnished his office with the antique remnants of the once powerful and had covered his walls with reminders that he was someone of importance. He’d graduated from Fordham University Law School and returned to White Plains, where he’d used his physician father’s social connections to open his own successful legal practice while immersing himself in local politics. Like Pisani, Whitaker dressed well, but not so well that his constituents would be resentful. Both men could feel at ease on the ninth hole at the country club. But only Whitaker could shed his jacket, roll up his sleeves, and drink mugs of draft beer with the cops and blue collars at O’Toole’s well into the night.
    After a few intentionally awkward seconds, Whitaker said, “Miss Fox, you told my secretary that it was urgent for you to see me. Something about a potential news story and big case.