“Oh never mind, I’ll figure it out,” Matthew said, scooting his chair back a few inches. “Anyway, why don’t we take advantage of today to get to the bottom of Robbie N?” Robbie N was our pet name for Robert Nussbaum, who’d come under our scrutiny since Kevin mentioned his affiliation with the mayor. Google had elicited the following information: In the three years since Robert took over his father’s tar company, he’d grown the business substantially. According to one finance news Web site, there were rumblings of an IPO on the horizon. He had a daughter, a divorce, and a cat named Tumbler, whose coy picture came up under Google Images. Then the trail went cold. There wasn’t a shred of evidence linking him to the mayor. Until something concrete turned up, I couldn’t tell the judge that Robert Nussbaum had publicly hugged Judge Adams’s husband. After all, Joe Adams was a beloved mayor and I trusted that plenty of people had make-believe relationships with him. It wasn’t long ago that I’d convinced myself that I was friends with Al Gore after he gave one of his global warming lectures at Columbia.

“Yeah, I’d love nothing more than to get to the bottom of Robbie N,” I answered. “I just wish there was some way to find out about who’s contributed to the mayor’s campaign. It’s so ridiculous that it’s not public, unlike federal campaigns.”

“Yeah, but the judge already told the clerk of the court about the calls you got from Robert Nussbaum, so you have to presume that if they hadn’t before, they’d certainly by now done background checks on that. I mean, Adams is recused from so many cases because of her husband and his campaigns,” Matthew said, scratching his head.

“That’s true,” I agreed. “Maybe he just called our chambers solely because he witnessed Friedman during oral arguments. That’s probably it.”

“Oh—I meant to tell you”—Matthew popped up—“I was telling my sis about the case this weekend and we started poking around the Internet and found an insane article online about Izzie Nelson—remember Dell’s sister, the one who was raped by Peter?” I nodded, mesmerized. “Anyway, about three years ago, Time magazine did a ‘Where Are They Now’ piece. You know, where they normally profile Corey Haim or Corey Feldman? This time they profiled Izzie Nelson, who is now some tough high school principal in Erie, Pennsylvania. She talked about how her brother’s ‘horrid lawyer’ has compelled her to spend her adult life convincing kids to graduate, go to law school, and ‘fix the legal system.’ Oh yeah—in her free time she makes and sells T-shirts with human hair and fingernail clippings glued to them.”

“What? Fingernail clippings?” I asked, fascinated.