The only good Lawyer

could somehow find out the way you did.”
    “Nobody told me.”
    Her features seemed to empty. “Nobody?”
    “I was going on your reaction to me at the law firm, and here at the front door, plus the fact that you match the description of the woman Mr. Gant had dinner with the night he was killed.”
    Herman watched me, something like comprehension seeping into her eyes. “You lied to me.”
    “Not exactly, but in effect.”
    “All of this...” Propping an elbow on each knee, she lowered her face into her hands, speaking through the fingers. “You put me through all of this to find out if I was the woman in that restaurant?”
    “Yes.”
    “I wasn’t.”
    “Mrs. Herman, I had to know.”
    She raised her face. “Know something else, then, all right? You know what the hardest part was?”
    After what I’d just done to her, Karen Herman was entitled to have me play along. “No.”
    “It was waking up in the clinic’s recovery room, after the abortion. Waking up to find myself crying. I knew it was Woodrow’s baby, I knew it. But I wanted a child so badly, I couldn’t stop crying. And then I looked around at the women on the other beds, and they were all crying, too. A room full of almost-mothers, crying our eyes out.”
    I didn’t say anything.
    “Well, Mr. Cuddy, I don’t have any more tears. But if I did, I’d be crying them now. For what I went through then, and what you just put me through again.”
    “I’m—”
    “When you asked me, I said I don’t work. My parents paid for four years of college, so I probably should, but I don’t. And the closest I’ve ever come to being a mother myself was in that clinic. But I’d rather wake up in its recovery room a dozen times than lie to people for a living the way you do.”
    I kept quiet.
    “I’ve told you what you wanted to know.” Karen Herman folded her arms across her chest. “Now get out of our home.”

    Driving toward the Brookline/Boston border, I tried not to think about the hurt I’d just resurrected, but it was hard. Especially because I expected to be following roughly the same course twice more that night.
    I parked downslope of the highrise tower, arriving at the buzzer system and security door just behind a teenaged kid wearing a red paper hat and carrying a brown, leatherette case shaped slightly bigger than a large pizza. Over his shoulder, I could see him press the button for “POLLARD, J.”
    The tinny voice with that trace of Olde England came over the intercom. “Pizza?”
    “You got it,” said the delivery boy.
    “I’m letting you in. Twelve-oh-seven.”
    “Hey, the van’s double-parked.” But he was talking into dead space as the door buzzer sounded.
    Stepping in front of the kid and grabbing the handle of the door, I said, “Tell you what.”
    He half-turned to me. “What?”
    “I’m going to twelve, anyway. How about if I pay you, and she pays me?”
    The delivery boy squinted. “Yeah, and where’s my ass if she calls the boss ten minutes from now with ‘The fuck is my pizza?’ ”
    For some reason, the kid’s suspicious nature lifted my spirits. “I don’t know what’s on the pizza. Inside the case like that, I can’t even smell the toppings. Figure the chances I’m going to keep it.”
    The kid looked toward the curb, then started to slide the pizza box out of his case. “Fifteen-fifty.”
    I gave him a twenty. “Keep it, ease your mind.”
    He left without a proper thank you.

    Jenifer Pollard wasn’t waiting at the elevator, with or without a can of pepper spray. But I remembered which way to turn, and after a few seconds was knocking on 1207.
    “Get that, can you?” I heard Pollard say inside the apartment, dishes clattering.
    A male voice answered. “Yeah.”
    The door swung open, and Thom Arneson, ADA , stared out at me, holding his wallet in one hand. “Whoops,” said I.
    Arneson had on a dress shirt—unbuttoned twice down the chest—and the pants to a gray houndstooth suit. No tie. Or shoes. “What the hell is this?”
    I stepped by him into the apartment, Pollard turning to look at her front door. She wore tennis shorts tonight, with a gauzy singlet top that would qualify as a mite racy for entertaining polite company.
    Setting the box on the kitchen counter, I said to Arneson, “Put your wallet away. The pizza’s my treat.”
    Pollard looked from him to me and back again. “He followed you?”
    Arneson still held his wallet, but more like he wanted to brain me with