"Sir? Are you all right?" Wu was a spectral shape in the doorway. Barefoot, wrapped in the comforter they'd provided, she came into the light.
He looked up, raised his hand in greeting. "I'm trying to make the critical midnight snack decision. Could you eat something?"
"Do you have some aspirin first?"
"Sure." Hardy reached into the top drawer right next to the refrigerator, where he'd taken to storing the bottle so he could get it with his coffee, so he wouldn't have to walk the extra steps to the bathroom. "How many you need?"
"What's the legal limit?" she asked.
"I'm impressed, sir. I didn't know you could cook."
"I can't, really. If it's not in that one black pan, I'm hopeless. But that pan, I know all its secrets. I treasure it, for what that's worth. No soap, just salt and a wipe. Nothing ever sticks. It's magic."
Hardy had grabbed one of his daughter's bathrobes and Wu had put it on to come and eat. Now they sat kitty-corner to each other at the dining room table, splitting a very runny four-egg omelette of fried salami, artichoke hearts, cheddar cheese. Sourdough bread. They both had cups of hot Ovaltine.
Hardy had closed the connecting door to the kitchen so his family wouldn't wake up, but still he whispered. "And you can drop the 'sir' if you want. I realize that my august personage is intimidating, but somewhere beneath the awesome authority figure beats what Mr. Buffett calls a schoolboy heart."
"Warren Buffett talks about a schoolboy heart?"
Hardy shook his head. "No. But Jimmy does."
Wu couldn't quite get to a smile. "I've got a searing headache and you've got a schoolboy heart. Want to trade?"
"No, thanks. But they can remain our little secrets." Hardy tore a piece of the bread and sopped up some melted cheese. "Anyway, that pan. My mother got it from her mother and gave it to me when I went away to college."
"I bet she missed it."
"Not for long." Hardy pushed some egg around. "My folks both died my freshman year of college. Plane crash."
"I'm sorry. I didn't know that."
"Well, it was a long time ago. I'm over it by now."
Wu squeezed her eyes shut, fighting her hangover, then put down her fork. "You are? Really?"
"Pretty much. Sometimes I have to concentrate to remember them at all. Even what they looked like. And their voices, forget it. That's what I wish the most I had some memory for, their voices. But I can't hear them."
"Do you mind if I ask you how long that took? Before you felt, I don't know, normal again?"
"It was a while." He met her eyes. "Certainly more than four months."
Wu blinked a couple of times. "I keep wishing I'd done something more, somehow. Something my dad would have approved of."
"He didn't approve of your being a lawyer?"
"I don't know. More, I think, he didn't approve of how I lived. You know?"
"No. I don't."
"I mean, being almost thirty, not married, no kids. Oh God, I hurt." She pressed her hands up against her temples. "And the great irony is that one of the reasons I stayed in school and became a lawyer was to make him happy. Even if he didn't like me, I could always be a good student, and I thought that pleased him, so I kept at it. But it really didn't matter."
"Why do you think he didn't like you?"
"I don't know. Maybe I was too much like my mom. She left him- left us both, really- when I was thirteen. Another guy she divorced a year later. Then a few after that." She fell silent, pushed again at her temples, drew a pained breath.
"Eat some eggs," Hardy said. "Nothing's worse than cold eggs. Is your mom still around?"
Wu took a bite, shook her head. "No. She got emphysema. She died about ten years ago, but really she hadn't been in the picture for so long, her dying wasn't so hard for me, even though that sounds bad. But my dad…" She swallowed, took another bite, drank some chocolate. "Oh, man," she said.
Hardy waited while she ate and gathered some strength.
"Anyway, my dad. He regretted that he didn't marry a pure Chinese. Instead, he marries Mom, you know, a black woman, and his family just hates her, and then I come along and look like her, at least color-wise…" She stopped. "And it wasn't like he didn't try to be nice to me, but you can tell if your parent doesn't like you, you really can. Nothing you do is right. And I guess I lost patience with trying all the time and getting nothing back in return and so then I got mad at him, and then…" She swiped a finger under one eye. "And then he dies before you can fix it up." She shook her head. "I'm sorry. I don't mean to dump on you."
"It's all right. I knew something was bothering you. I thought it might be something like this. You lose your dad, it's not trivial. Then with the extra baggage. Have you thought about maybe taking some time off, letting some of this settle out?"
"From work? God, no. Work's the thing that's keeping me sane."
"Because it keeps you so busy you don't have to deal with the other personal stuff?"
She started to say something, then pushed back from the table, pulled the robe close around her. She dropped her head, shook it slowly side to side, side to side.
They remained at the dining room table, the dishes pushed to one side. Second cups of Ovaltine, now forgotten, had grown tepid in front of them.
Hardy didn't want to add to Wu's pain right now by criticizing her performance in the Bartlett case, but she introduced the topic herself, laying it all out in a torrent of words. She had loved the idea of finessing Brandt, of snookering Boscacci. These arrogant men would see that she was good, could hold her own in a fair fight. Take that, Dad! It should have all worked out.
"Still, you really should have nailed down Andrew's plea before you even tried to make any kind of deal with Allan."
"I realize that now. I just got caught up in the rush of it. If I could do it. I couldn't believe that once Andrew saw the evidence, he wouldn't realize he had to lose."
"Except if it wasn't about the evidence, to him."
"But it's always about the evidence!"
"No. Not always. O.J. wasn't about the evidence. Patty Hearst. Mark Dooher- you remember Wes's famous case? Ask him if it was about the evidence. No. It was about the passion and commitment of the defense. The vision thing."
"But you don't need that if you already have an out. And Andrew had an out."
"You call that an out? An eight-year top?"
Her arms crossed, she sat back, defiant. "The other alternatives were too risky. I still believe it's madness to let him go to trial."
"Not if he didn't do it."
Wu closed her eyes, pushed on the lids with her fingers. "Please, sir. Not you, too. It's not whether he did anything. That's Law I-A. It's whether they can prove it. And they probably can, because he probably did."
Hardy jumped on that. "Aha. You said 'probably.' At last. Doubt enters."
Wu shook her head. "Not really. Not reasonable doubt, anyway. Not enough doubt to gamble his life away."
"Which brings us back full circle. All right," Hardy said. "Let's even go on the assumption that he's guilty. What else do you know about him? I mean, personally."
"With all respect, who cares? It's not who he is, it's what he did."
"No. Sometimes it's who he is. Who the jury sees. If you can make them believe he's somebody who literally wouldn't hurt a fly, they'll never believe he killed a human being. Or if you gave him a compelling enough reason…"
"It's jealousy, sir. Diz. I mean, he probably thought it was a good enough reason at the time, but no jury in the world, not even in San Francisco, is going to buy it enough to let him off. You don't get to kill people you're jealous of."
"All right. How about his home life?"
"He's a spoiled rich kid. Not a good sell."