5 The first thing I did on coming into the office Thursday morning, after turning my computer on, was to call Sarah Scott. She was evidently expecting my call. She confirmed everything that Libby had told me about Laura Perino’s life in 1972, and we agreed that I would try to arrange for a deposition at her house on Saturday afternoon. There was another hike on Mount Tam scheduled on that day, and one of my fellow hikers, Robin James, is a freelance court reporter who lives in Corte Madera. I had made arrangements of this kind with Robin before, and I e-mailed her about it as soon as I finished my call with Sarah. I noticed a number of new messages in my inbox, but none that seemed in urgent need of reading, except Rose Bargallo’s reply to the message I had sent her the previous night. Yes, she had been out of town Saturday and yes, she was back and would come in to talk on Friday. Her message had a postscript: Say hi to Jerry for me. Next, I reread the Supreme Court’s decision in Lockyer v. City and County of San Francisco, S122923. On the face of it there seemed to be no doubt. Not only did the Court rule that the same-sex marriages authorized by the officials are void but also of no legal effect, meaning that they could not be interpreted as taking the place of registered domestic partnerships, as could civil unions registered in other jurisdictions. My case, I mean Libby Schlemmer’s case, was beginning to look like a slam-dunk, or a piece of cake. Getting derogatory information about Andy would be icing on the cake. I tried to think of more cliché metaphors to describe the situation but couldn’t come up with any. Undermining Andy’s reputation would serve mostly, I thought, to discourage Margo from wasting her time and mine by pursuing his case. Not that I seriously expected Margo to be easily discouraged. But I needed all the artillery – another metaphor! – that I could muster. It was time to call her, or at least to leave a message on her office answering machine; Margo never answered calls directly, and she chose to make do without an office assistant. “Hi, Margo,” I spoke into the telephone. “It’s Gary. This time I need to talk to you as lawyer to lawyer, and it has to do with Peter Hart’s estate.” She called back about twenty minutes later. “What’s your interest in Peter’s estate?” she asked curtly, without a greeting. I decided to lead up to it gradually. “As a matter of fact, I have a client who’s interested in it.” “And who might that be? A relative of his?” The sardonic tone of her questioning led me to assume that she had his Ohio family in mind. “Yes,” I said simply. “Who?” “His daughter.” It was one of the very few times that I ever managed to catch Margo off guard, and I savored the moment. She was silent for an exquisitely long five seconds or so. “What did you say?” she finally asked slowly. She had heard me perfectly well, and there was no point in repeating my previous answer. “It seems that when Peter was still straight, kind of, before we even knew him, he fathered a daughter. He never knew about her, but I have pretty good circumstantial evidence of his paternity.” “And she wants her half of the estate?” “That isn’t the point. What I want for her is what she’s entitled to by law, which is all of it, unless any other children turn up.” “But Andy…” “I just reread Lockyer versus San Francisco. ‘The marriages are void and of no legal effect,’ it says.” I emphasized the words and of no legal effect. “And Peter and Andy never filed a DDP, which they could have done, but chose not to.” I heard Margo sigh. If I didn’t know her as well as I did I might have thought that she was conceding defeat. But I knew that she was preparing for battle. “Can we talk about this next week?” she said. It was what I had expected. “Sure,” I said. By the following week I would have even more ammunition in my arsenal. After hanging up I went back to my e-mail. There was no reply from Robin yet. I replied to Rose’s message, suggesting 10:30 as a meeting time, and adding the postscript “I will.” Of the other ten messages in my inbox, two were reminders of the parties I was due to attend that weekend, two were inquiries from prospective clients, and four were communications of various kinds from current clients, including the software magnate. The last two were spam that had managed to get through the filter. It was now almost ten, my usual time for a midmorning cappuccino. I had intended to go out for it alone, but as I was walking out of my office and heading toward Diane’s desk to tell her that I would be out for about half an hour, I saw Barbara doing exactly the same, as though mirroring me. She smiled at me and said “Java time?” In our neighborhood there are two coffeehouses (three if you count Starbucks, which I don’t): a newer one with Java in its name and a much older one without it. Those of us who have been there for a long time, and remember it as the only one, call it simply The Coffeehouse, and we refer to the other as the Java place, with a touch of condescension that is lost on newcomers such as Barbara. Barbara Kaminsky is a criminal lawyer and is the youngest of our quartet; she is about six years younger than Nina, who in turn is five years younger than Jerry and I. She is also the only one who identifies herself as LGBT. She pronounces the initialism with a stress on the B – making it sound like an Arabic surname, El-Jibiti – probably in order to emphasize her own status as a bisexual. But nearly all of her relationships that I have observed have been with men, including three separate short-lived flings with Jerry Brucker, and several with her clients. From conversations with her and her acquaintances (including Margo) it appears that her inclinations were more lesbian in her twenties. “Jawohl,” I said, pronouncing the J as in Java. Barbara laughed. She likes puns. On the way to the Java place I asked her, “Do you know Andy Stone?” She seemed to blush ever so slightly. “Well, yes,” she said. “In a way,” she added after a pause. Knowing Barbara Kaminsky, and knowing what Libby Schlemmer had told me about Andy Stone, I didn’t need to ask Barbara what that way might be. But I decided to pursue the matter a little further. “Is it true,” I asked, trying to sound naïve, “that he’s a closet straight?” “That’s an interesting way of putting it.” “It’s Jerry’s.” “Oh,” she said. “Well, I guess he’s bisexual, as I believe we all are, deep down, whatever the New York Times may say.” She was referring to a recent article, widely discussed in San Francisco, about the controversial research of J. Michael Bailey. “You know that,” she added with a smile just as we reached the Java place. And, in fact, she had often expressed that belief, citing Freud, Kinsey and others in support. “Are you asking me about Andy,” Barbara asked after we sat down with our cappuccinos, “because Margo is representing him in the matter of Peter Hart’s estate?” “Indirectly,” I said. “You see, I’m involved in this matter too.” I began to take a sip, but quickly set my cup down. The Java place makes its cappuccinos scalding hot. “Did you say Libby Schlemmer?” she asked after I had given her a cursory account of the case while my cappuccino cooled to a drinkable temperature. “Yes. Do you know her too?” “No, but Andy mentioned her. He said that he’d never had sex with a woman until he met this absolutely beautiful girl named Libby Schlemmer. That’s when he discovered that women have possibilities. But they have to be very special women, he said.” “And you, of course, are one of those special women,” I said, trying to sound sincere. Barbara blushed again, smiled and said nothing. Barbara is attractive enough, but the idea of her belonging to a special category of which Libby Schlemmer is the prototype is ludicrous. Andy was, then, a liar, pure and simple. Or perhaps, as that famous bisexual Oscar Wilde said about the truth, rarely pure and never simple. At a nearby table someone was looking at the Datebook section of the previous day’s Chronicle. Its back page was visible to me, and in particular the Bad Reporter cartoon whose tagline is The lies behind the truth, and the truth behind those lies that are behind the truth. At that moment I resolved to find the truth behind Andy Stone’s lies, whatever relation it might have to Libby Schlemmer’s case. “How did you meet Andy?” I asked Barbara. “At a party – at Margo and Joyce’s, as a matter of fact.” “Was Peter there?” “Oh, no. Peter was long past partying by then. It was about two years ago – I think it was a Labor Day barbecue.”   Back in my office at ten-thirty, I decided to begin my quest – without waiting for Rose Bargallo – by googling Andy Stone. I don’t actually use Google; I’m a Yahoo user from way back, and I don’t change habits easily unless there’s a good reason. Not that I’m a Yahoo loyalist: I acknowledged the power of Google by selling my Yahoo stock (with a 400% profit in two years) when Google’s came out. And I’ve come to use google as a generic verb meaning use a search engine, whatever the Google people might think of such usage. Andy Stone brought up some fifty thousand hits, referring to hundreds of different persons. Thomas Anderson Stone brought only a few, all referring to dead people. This, then, was not going to be the way. While I was googling, a message alert told me that Robin James had replied. She would not be hiking on Saturday, but she would be available for an afternoon deposition. Having Rose’s and Robin’s messages in my inbox reminded me that I had not yet set up a folder for Libby’s case. I promptly did so, with a subfolder for e-mail messages, and I started a Word file in which I jotted down, at random, all the relevant facts and eventualities to date. As I was typing, visions of Libby’s face and body kept drifting past my consciousness. It would be nice to have a photograph of her in the folder, I thought; it would help me focus. After saving the file as Notes I closed the folder and went back to work on other cases. There was enough to keep me busy for the rest of the morning and a good part of the afternoon, when I had two appointments scheduled: one with a current client – a man – and one with a prospective one, a woman. I prayed – to no one in particular – that it would not be another Libby Schlemmer.   Friday morning there was no fog and the weather began to turn warm at last. I went to the Coffeehouse earlier than usual and got back to the office at ten-fifteen. Rose Bargallo – wearing, unusually for her, a knee-length skirt and a sleeveless blouse – was already there, chatting with Diane and, it seemed to me, looking at the stairs expectantly. She acknowledged my arrival with a nod and a smile but soon turned her head back to where it had been. Sure enough, after a minute or so Jerry came down the stairs, accompanying a male client. As soon as the man left, Rose rushed up to Jerry and they went up together. Diane and I exchanged smiles and I went into my office. At ten-forty Rose knocked and entered without waiting. Unlike the previous day’s broker, nothing about her appearance gave any indication of what kind of activity she had just engaged in. “Hi, Gary,” she said, looking fully composed and relaxed, and more feminine than I had ever seen her, as she sat down facing me. I was tempted to say to her that evidently quickies worked for her, but restrained myself. “Hi, Rose,” I said. And just as I had done with Barbara the preceding day, I began by asking, “Do you know Andy Stone?” “Not personally, but I know who he is.” “Do you know anything about him before he came here?” “No.” “Well, it seems that he graduated from the University of Oregon in nineteen-ninety-two, and he showed up here at Peter Hart’s side three or four years ago. I would like you to find out what you can about the ten years in between.” “Is this in connection with a case of yours?” “Yes,” I said, and explained the matter to her as briefly as I could, but taking care to include everything I knew about Andy. “But if you’re working contingency,” she said when she was done taking notes, “I’ll need to be paid, win or lose.” “You will,” I said.   After Rose left, I began to feel some misgivings about having hired her. The work she had done for me, locating missing heirs, had always been straightforward, but I knew that on some of her jobs for other lawyers she could resort to underhanded methods of gathering information. Ideally, one could find out about Andy Stone’s past by asking him about it. But the situation was not ideal for two reasons: one, that Andy was probably a liar; two, that I was representing a client who was in an adversarial position to him, and so could not talk to Andy without his attorney’s presence. My misgivings quickly evaporated. I went back to work.   I left the office fairly early that afternoon. I needed to do some shopping at Trader Joe’s and to prepare something to bring to Ann and Jeff’s party. I have known Jeff Schneider since we were both undergraduates at Berkeley, and we have kept in touch without becoming close friends. He was at my wedding, and I was at both of his. We have generally invited each other to parties. In recent years, since my divorce and especially since he has been living with the very convivial Ann Mason, the stream of invitations has been fairly one-sided. I have tried to reciprocate by contributing generously with food and drink. By and large, I don’t know the people who come to Ann and Jeff’s parties, except from having met them there before. And there’s a good chance that one of them will be a single woman that Ann or Jeff will try to fix me up with. On the way home from Trader Joe’s, I heard ominous news about Hurricane Katrina on NPR’s All Things Considered: the storm was gathering strength in the Gulf of Mexico after drenching the Miami area early in the day, and was expected to make landfall again as a Category Three storm on Monday morning.