“That was my friend Ed Eagle,” Stone said to Ann. “Do you know him?”

“He’s a New Mexico delegate. I’ve seen his name on the list. Who is he?”

“A remarkable man. He was born in Brooklyn to a Hasidic Jewish family and became a fanatical basketball player in high school. His family wouldn’t countenance his continuing his athletic career—they wanted him in the family diamond business—so he left the sect and got himself a basketball scholarship to Arizona State. By that time, he had grown to six feet seven inches tall. He was a great player, making all-American for three years, but he didn’t play pro ball—went to law school instead. Now he lives in Santa Fe, and he’s widely thought to be the best trial attorney west of the Mississippi.”

“I’ve read something about him. Somehow, I thought he was an Indian.”

“People thought that at ASU, too, and he never corrected them. It amuses him to just let people go on thinking it. Oh, and he’s married to the film actress Susannah Wilde.”

“She’s wonderful. I love her work!”

“He had an earlier wife, though, who turned out to be a real piece of work. Let me see if I can get her story straight—there’s a lot of it. Oh, yes, she’s from a Jewish family, too, and she was married to an important diamond merchant who was considerably older than she. Unfortunately, she formed an attachment to a boyfriend who had a criminal streak in him and a desire to hit it big. Using information he got from her, he walked into her husband’s New York offices and robbed the place of every stone in the safes. Something went wrong, and the boyfriend shot and killed her husband, then he beat it out of town without her.

“She cooperated with the police, and she was helpful in catching the guy, but she ended up doing a stretch at a women’s prison in Westchester County. Ed was up there on a case, met her, and was impressed. He told her when she got out to come to Santa Fe and he’d help her restart her life. She had a couple of years left on her sentence. To his surprise, she turned up a couple of months later, having gotten out on an early-release program, and the two of them hit it off. Pretty soon they were married, and he thought it was going okay, then one day he got a call from his broker saying that she had sold most of his stock portfolio and taken all of the considerable amount of cash he had there.”

“This is some story,” Ann said. “If I ever write my novel . . .”