Coats is not sure about this. He wants to talk to us. He calls the lawyers up to the side of the bench.

"Mr. Madriani, it seems as though the witness has already testified to this."

"Then it's been asked and answered, Your Honor. There should be no need for the question."

"No, it's not quite the same." Tannery wades in. "I asked him about production runs, and shipping practices. I'm only trying to tie it all together," he says.

"There's no way this witness can know whether the tie used to kill the victim and the ties found in the defendant's pocket were from the same store." I am red out to the tips of my ears. "This exceeds any issue of expertise. It raises questions of factual knowledge."

"It raises issues of probabilities," says Tannery. "We know all the ties came from the same factory. They came from the same press run of machines. Is it not probable they were purchased at the same store?"

"That calls for speculation."

The judge is shaking his head. I can't believe it.

"You'll have your chance to cross-examine him, Mr. Madriani. I'm going to allow it."

We step back from the bench. Harry's looking at me, like What gives? I simply shake my head. It's how you feel when you've lost a call that you know is wrong.

"Is there not a good probability, Doctor, that the tie used to kill Kalista Jordan and the cable ties found in the coat pocket of the defendant, David Crone, were purchased at the same point of sale?"

"I believe so." Warnake is actually smiling. He knows there is no way he can prove this. Tannery has pressed it too far. It is just the kind of error that can lead to reversal on appeal.

"Perhaps they were part of the same package?" says Tannery.

"Your Honor, I have to object."

"Sustained." I can see it in the judge's face. He has made a mistake, and he knows it.

"Let me ask you this, Doctor Warnake. From what you now know, can you exclude the possibility that all of these cable ties came from the same package in the same store?" says Tannery.

He has turned it around so that there is no basis to object, though I do it anyway.

"I'll allow that," says Coats.

"No, I cannot exclude that possibility."

Crone is looking up at me from the counsel table. His hand comes over on my arm as if he is actually consoling me. His expression says he is not surprised, the scientist accepting the conclusions of science.

From Harry I get a different look: one that says, I told you so.

Within seconds of the judge's gavel coming down, a phalanx of county jail guards moves in to escort Crone back to the holding cell. There he will change from his suit and tie back to jail togs and rubber flip-flops for the shackled walk across the bridge that links the criminal courts building to the jail.

Harry and I collect our papers as the courtroom empties. A few bystanders, court hangers-on, chew on the events of the day. Most of the reporters have headed back to the pressroom where they will file their stories by e-mail, driving one more spike into our client's reputation, and tallying one more brick on the scales for the state.

Tannery's evidence is beginning to come in cleanly, the outline of a case taking shape like a Polaroid print developing in front of our eyes. Lawyers can sense when an opponent hits his stride. It's a feeling that brings on heart-pounding panic, even as you are pulling all the legal levers in court with simulated confidence and spinning a web of lies to the media outside.

The challenge, as always, is to lie to yourself and to do so convincingly. That is the art of a true believer, who will accept every deceit, even his own, on faith. Neither Harry nor I am of this religion. We are c.o.c.keyed pessimists with a cynical twist. I have my own unspoken doubts about the case. I am convinced that at the heart of it lies some corrosive deception, though I still cannot accept that my client killed Kalista Jordan.

It isn't until I turn to stash my copy of West's softcover Penal Code in my brief box that I see him, sitting alone, forlorn in the back of the courtroom. Frank Boyd has been watching our case unravel from the shadows of the last row.

He is wearing a pair of white painter's overalls, bits of sawdust on one shoulder that he has missed in brushing off. Some splotches of what look like dried glue on one pant leg.

Frank is a finish carpenter. He is an artist with wood. He has shoulders like a linebacker and forearms like Popeye. The man can move beams the size of tree trunks, notch and carve them into place single-handedly, with nothing but a hand-cranked come-along to hold the weight while he dangles from a ladder: the kind of guy you would want on your side if you had to go to war.

In another life, he'd been a teacher until he learned he couldn't stand the confinement of the cla.s.sroom. Frank took a job as a woodworker's apprentice in a shipyard and over six years he mastered the skills of a shipwright, finishing the interiors of yachts, until the federal luxury tax crushed the industry and threw him out of work. Ever resilient, he started his own business, and for the past fourteen years has worked by hiring himself out to contractors on large homes that require an artist to finish the wood.

It runs in his blood, independence and art. I have seen charcoal and pencil drawings of his children framed in the hallway of their modest home. Doris tells me that these are Frank's work. He had taken anatomy courses to better understand the articulation of the human body, how it moved and functioned. He now produces drawings-drawings with such a flourish of confidence one might think they were ripped from the sketch pad of da Vinci. It causes me to wonder what might have been, had he turned to oils or other media. Doubtless he would have been no more affluent. Unfortunately for Frank, he is also hobbled by the mercantile tin ear of the artist. He has no sense of his own worth.

Like a vagabond he now travels in his beat-up Volkswagen van, a sixties-vintage van, working on its third engine and for which the only spare parts can be found in wrecking yards. The rear springs sag under the load, tools of his trade a.s.sembled and collected over thirty years. Chisels and power saws, miters for angles and small curved handsaws of j.a.panese steel mail-ordered from Asia. He uses these for cuts of microscopic precision. I am told that he has a.s.sembled whole staircases in homes that might qualify as castles, only to dismantle the entire structure, risers, treads and railings, just to shave a little more wood until the pieces fit like the parts in a puzzle. Frank's signature in wood is perfection.

He is an addict when it comes to to his craft. He will drive a thousand miles in the broken-down van with his ladders on top to labor for a month on a log mansion in the wilds of Montana, for some eastern investment broker with the palace appet.i.te of the Medicis. For Frank, it is the work, not the client, that is critical. It is not difficult for a man like this to find himself laboring at art for which he will not be paid. The fact that contractors will hunt Frank down for these special jobs is a testament to his skill, even if what he receives barely covers his gas. He is today's equivalent of the ancient metal smith hammering gold on a pharaoh's mask. No one will ever know his name, even as they marvel at his craft.

Today the dust on his work clothes reflects the dull pallor of his face, which is lined with deep furrows as if some gnome had pulled a plowshare through the gullies under his eyes. I would bet he hasn't shaved in three days, five-o'clock shadow gone to seed. He has lost forty pounds in the months since our last meeting, so that I have to re-calibrate the register of my recognition before I am sure I have the right person.

What pa.s.ses for a smile these days edges across his face and then is gone just as quickly. He gets out of the chair and moves forward slowly, down the center aisle, then sidles sideways across the front row of chairs on the other side of the bar railing to approach.

"Frank. I haven't seen you in a while."

He extends a hand and we shake, somewhat shy. His large hand engulfs my own so that I have the feeling that it has been closed in a sandpaper glove. The flesh of his hands is tough enough to grind gla.s.s.

There has always been some social distance between us; Frank the blue-collar man, Paul the lawyer. He is constrained by self-imposed social divisions of another era. I suspect that doctors would unnerve him, like talking to G.o.d. For Frank, this would be an added point of stress in dealing with his daughter's illness.

"Been a long time," he says.

"It could have been under better circ.u.mstances." I motion with my head toward the judge's bench and smile.

"Tough day?" he asks.

"They're all tough. You know my partner, Harry Hinds?"

"Don't think we've met," says Frank.

Harry gives him a mystified look and offers his hand.

"Frank Boyd. Harry Hinds."

They shake hands, and Harry finally connects the name. "Oh, you're the little girl's . . ." then catches himself.

"Right. Her father." There is something about Boyd that brings to mind the actor William Devane. It is in the sad-sack eyes, and the face that seldom changes expression, as if the load of life were simply too oppressive to permit any real relief. It is the look of a man who is not allowed emotionally to come up for air, who is quietly drowning.

"How's Doris?" I ask.

"Oh, good. Good. She's tough."

And then the inevitable: "Penny?"

At this he gives me an expression, sort of turns away. "Not too bad," he says: the big lie. What he means is, not too bad for a child who is dying.

"I need to talk to you," he says. "If you have a minute."

"Sure. You want to do it here? I'm finished for the day."

He looks around a little at the room, daunting formality, walnut railings and fixed theater chairs. "Maybe we could get a drink," he says. "I'll buy."

Harry offers to clean up, to haul our files back to the office. He has hired some enterprising teenager with a hand truck and a van in the mornings and afternoons to help us with the cardboard transfer boxes filled with doc.u.ments. These seem to propagate like rodents as the trial goes on.

Harry and I check signals for the morning, then Boyd and I take off. It is clear that Frank is suffering from more nervous agitation than usual this afternoon. When you know someone as I've known him, not intimately but through periods of calm and frenzy, it becomes obvious when there is a favor to ask and the person is uneasy about asking it.

He follows a half step behind me, across State Street, to the Grill at the Wyndham Emerald Plaza. Frank is uncomfortable here and shows it.

"I'm not dressed for this," he tells me.

"Don't worry about it."

I suspect he's wondering whether he has enough in his pocket to spring for the drink he has offered. Though Frank has all the work he can handle, I suspect that he and Doris have never made more than fifty thousand in a single year.

Doris held a seasonal part-time job with a small company for a while, but had to give it up when Penny became too sick for day care.

We shuttle between tables as the after-work crowd starts to settle in for drinks and embellishments on the day's war stories: secretaries on the flirt, young lawyers on the make. The only ones you won't find in here are the bondsmen from bail row a block away. They are too busy making money chasing tomorrow's clients.

We find a table in the back, dim light and wood relief. I order a gla.s.s of wine, the house Chablis, and give the waitress my credit card to start a tab. Frank argues with me, but it is halfhearted. He accepts a drink, orders a beer, Bud, and thanks me.

He is a big man, sinewy and strong as a bull. He is a full inch or more taller than I am, even sitting here, hunched over the table.

He looks as if he hasn't had a good meal in two days. I order up appetizers, chicken wings and some stuffed mushrooms.

Frank kills time with small talk, his latest job, a mansion for some software mogul. He's been hauling one-ton beams into the bas.e.m.e.nt for a mammoth hearth single-handedly. Using leverage, he moves the hundred-year-old timbers that he has salvaged from some closed-down mill in Colorado. Anyone wondering how the pyramids were built might want to discuss the matter with Frank.

I can tell he is waiting for the waitress to come back so that we won't be disturbed. The drinks come first. Five minutes later the food, and Frank doesn't hesitate. He's into the mushrooms and chicken wings. "These are good," he says, then notices that I'm not eating. He puts the chicken wing down on the little plate in front of him, self-conscious eyes looking around.

"You gonna have some?" he says.

"Sure." I pick up a wing to keep him company.

"You're wondering why I need to talk?" he says.

I smile.

"It wasn't to get a meal. Or a free drink."

"I didn't think it was, Frank. You probably want what we actually owe you for your work in the office," I tell him. Frank had handcrafted some bookshelves for us into some tight s.p.a.ces in the office and charged us five hundred dollars for two thousand dollars' worth of work. When I tried to pay him more, he wouldn't take it, saying that what I had done for Penny was more than enough.

"I need a divorce." He says it just like that. Like "Pa.s.s the salt."

I don't say anything, but he can read stunned silence when he sees it.

"It's the health insurance," he says. "I need a divorce because of the medical-insurance thing. Crazy, isn't it?"

"Why don't you start at the beginning?" I tell him.

"Fine. But I'm not gonna eat unless you do."

I spear a mushroom with a toothpick, if only to make him feel comfortable.

"It's Penny," he says. He picks up the chicken wing and starts to nibble on it, but I can tell his heart is not in it. He has lost the yen to eat and drops it back on the plate. Instead he goes to the drink, something to dull the senses. Takes a swig from the bottle, ignoring the gla.s.s that the waitress poured and is half full, shrinking by the head.

"Her medical expenses are huge."

"I can imagine."

"I don't know that you can. Last month it was twenty-five thousand dollars."

He's right. I didn't have a clue. He looks at me over the bottle caught by the neck in his large hand.

"You're wondering where would I get that kind of money? Until last Tuesday, from the insurance company. But that's about to end. A lifetime million-dollar cap," he says. "We've b.u.mped up against it with Penny. That's why we need the divorce." He puts the bottle down on the table and leans forward, a salesman about to make his pitch.

"Doris and I talked about it. She didn't want to do it either, but you see, it's really the only way. We were up 'til three in the morning, talking."

I can see it in Frank's bloodshot eyes.

"She wants to divorce you?"

"G.o.d knows why she didn't do it years ago," he says. "I haven't been a great provider. A lot of squandered opportunities. If I'd stayed a schoolteacher, at least they'd have health insurance. Doris and the kids. Most of the wood I work on has more brains that I do. I've made a lot of bad decisions."

I tell him he's being too hard on himself.

At this moment I wish I had a few million in the bank I could loan him. Fact is, I'm tapped out, new practice in a new city.

"I've looked for jobs. But who's gonna hire some burned-out termite? Besides, as soon as they find out about Penny they always come up with some reason not to take me on. Suddenly they've filled the position. No longer hiring."

"You have your own business."

"Yeah. Right." He laughs.

"This is the extent of my business." He holds up his leathered hands. "My only a.s.sets. According to the bank," he says. "And I can't sell them or mortgage them, not even for body parts. So where does that leave me? Where does it leave Doris and the kids?" He's looking at me now, leaning across the table, whispering like this is some secret cabal.

"The insurance guy tells us there's nothing he can do. h.e.l.l, if I hadn't had the policy for years before Penny came along, they would have canceled us years ago. Fact is, we're uninsurable," he says. "That means the house, everything is on the block. They'll take it all, every dime. My kids are gonna end up on the street," he says. "I'd be better off dead."