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from her family.
    The gaze from the frosty hostess told him, I know you are not a member, but I’ll take you to your table anyway. “Follow me,” she said with the slight makings of a fake smile. Clay said nothing. He swallowed hard, looked straight ahead, and tried to ignore the heavy knot in his stomach. How was he supposed to enjoy a meal in such surroundings? He and Rebecca had eaten there twice—once with Mr. and Mrs. Van Horn, once without. The food was expensive and quite good, but then Clay lived on processed turkey so his standards were low and he knew it.
    Bennett was absent. Clay gently hugged Mrs. Van Horn, a ritual both of them disliked, then offered a rather pathetic, “Happy Birthday.” He pecked Rebecca on the cheek. It was a good table, one with a sweeping view of the eighteenth green, a very prestigious spot to eat because one could watch the geezers wallow in the sand traps and miss their two-foot putts.
    “Where’s Mr. Van Horn?” Clay asked, hoping he was stuck out of town, or better yet, hospitalized with some grave ailment.
    “He’s on his way,” Rebecca said.
    “He spent the day in Richmond, meeting with the Governor,” added Mrs. Van Horn, for good measure. They were relentless. Clay wanted to say, “You win! You win! You’re more important than I am!”
    “What’s he working on?” he asked politely, once again astounded at his ability to sound sincere. Clay knew exactly why the Bulldozer was in Richmond. Thestate was broke and could not afford to build new roads in Northern Virginia, where Bennett and his ilk demanded that they be built. The votes were in Northern Virginia. The legislature was considering a local referendum on sales taxes so the cities and counties around D.C. could build their own highways. More roads, more condos, more malls, more traffic, more money for an ailing BVHG.
    “Political stuff,” Barb said. In truth, she probably didn’t know what her husband and the Governor were discussing. Clay doubted if she knew the current price of BVHG stock. She knew the days her bridge club met and she knew how little money Clay earned, but most other details were left to Bennett.
    “How was your day?” Rebecca asked, gently but quickly steering the conversation away from politics. Clay had used the word
sprawl
two or three times when debating issues with her parents and things had become tense.
    “The usual,” he said. “And you?”
    “We have hearings tomorrow, so the office was hopping today.”
    “Rebecca tells me you have another murder case,” Barb said.
    “Yes, that’s true,” Clay said, wondering what other aspects of his job as a public defender they had been talking about. Each had a glass of white wine sitting before her. Each glass was at least half-empty. He had walked in on a discussion, probably about him. Or was he being unduly sensitive? Perhaps.
    “Who’s your client?” Barb asked.
    “A kid from the streets.”
    “Who did he kill?”
    “The victim was another kid from the streets.”
    This relieved her somewhat. Blacks killing blacks. Who cared if they all killed each other? “Did he do it?” she asked.
    “As of now he is presumed to be innocent. That’s the way it works.”
    “In other words, he did it.”
    “It sort of looks that way.”
    “How can you defend people like that? If you know they’re guilty, how can you work so hard trying to get them off?”
    Rebecca took a large gulp of wine and decided to sit this one out. She had been coming to his rescue less and less in recent months. A nagging thought was that, while life would be magical with her, it would be a nightmare with them. The nightmares were winning.
    “Our Constitution guarantees everyone a lawyer and a fair trial,” he said condescendingly, as if every fool should know this. “I’m just doing my job.”
    Barb rolled her new eyes and looked at the eighteenth green. Many of the ladies at Potomac had been using a plastic surgeon whose specialty, evidently, was