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tipped off the cops. These guys weren't Elliott Ness. They arrested him, all right, but they gave him a choice: He could go to prison or he could give them the money and they'd leave him alone.”
    Bobby picked up the bottle from the table and took a drink.
    “If he had gone to jail, he could have kept the money, and we all would have been rich. But he had an old-fashioned sense of honor. He thought jail would disgrace his family, make it more difficult for his children and their children to be accepted. He had a choice between poverty and dishonor.”
    Bobby looked at me for a moment, his light-colored eyebrows arched high. “Do you think anyone would have remembered where the money had come from or that he had gone to prison for a while because of it? It might have been interesting to have been part of one of the wealthiest families in San Francisco.”
    He started back toward the house, a wry grin on his face, beckoning me to follow. “Don't you ever wonder what it would be like to have your picture on the society page every other week? We might have ended up like Lawrence Goldman,”he remarked as he held open the door.
    I had no idea who Lawrence Goldman was, which, as I was soon to discover, meant that I understood next to nothing about the way things worked in San Francisco. There were those who believed that without Lawrence Goldman, San Francisco would not work at all.
    “I wanted you to see the house,”Bobby remarked as we pulled out of the driveway. It was almost dark out. The long line of eucalyptus trees, sheets of bark peeling away from their trunks, stood like cutouts against the blue-black sky. High overhead a low wind rustled through the dry brittle leaves. “I hoped you'd change your mind. Why don't you stay with me? I could use the company.”
    He'd invited me as soon as I told him I was going to take the case and was disappointed when I declined on the ground that, at least at the beginning, I thought I had better stay in the city. I was a little surprised, and a little touched, when he offered again. We were cousins, and we had not seen each other very often since we were boys, but I felt closer to him than to any of the uncles and aunts whose names, if pressed, I could still remember, but who were barely more to me than identifiable strangers. Bobby and I had shared secrets together, sometimes without knowing until much later in life what the secret had been.
    “Thanks,”I replied, watching the cars fly by me as we merged into the freeway traffic. “Maybe after I get used to what I'm doing here. But I think I better stay in the city for a little while, anyway.”
    We passed through the tunnel we had come through before and spiraled along the sweeping curves of the highway that led down from the hills. Straight ahead, across the churning black waters of the bay, the lights of San Francisco lit up the sky like some exotic midnight sun.
    Bobby knew what I was thinking.
    “I drive this every day. I've been doing it for more than twenty years, and I never get tired of it: the bay, the bridge, the city. It's never the same and it never changes. It's like staring into a fire.”
    He drove along, lost in his thoughts. He did not speak again until we had passed through the short white-tiled tunnel that cut through the rock summit of Yerba Buena Island halfway across the Bay Bridge.
    “Remember when that was the biggest thing you saw?”he asked, gesturing toward the clock tower on top of the Ferry Building.
    I don't know why I said it. Something about his question brought it all back to me, as clearly as when it had happened years ago, that summer when we were still both small boys.
    “Remember the night when we sneaked out of the house and followed those two sailors and the two women they had picked up in the bar and we were going to pound on their car door and then run like hell?”
    Bobby kept his eyes focused straight ahead. “When did you figure out who they were?”
    “As soon as I saw the look