The room he leads me to is small, with a large picture window providing a view of another building’s twenty-fourth floor across the street. The table has only six chairs, which is three times as many as we’ll need for this meeting. In the center is a single banker’s box. The side label reads: “The People of the State of New York v. Dana L. Goodwin.”

I sit alone, staring at the box, afraid to open it as if inside lurks something deadly, like a poisonous snake that only LeMarcus should handle. After five minutes of me staring at it like Pandora, the door swings open and LeMarcus rushes in. He’s also wearing a three-piece suit. I wonder if it’s a coincidence or part of the uniform at the firm.

Although LeMarcus and I were friendly when we served together as young ADAs, we weren’t the kind of friends who stayed in touch after his goodbye dinner. I’d seen him through the years, sometimes as an adversary, more often at functions honoring some judge or a fellow colleague. During those meetings we were always cordial, suggesting that we should get lunch or dinner and catch up, but neither of us ever extended an actual invitation. It was the relationship I had with nearly everyone I worked with—until Lauren.

“I’m so glad that the bail’s all worked out,” he says while taking the seat across from me. “This will be so much easier now than if you were still inside.”

“Yeah, I like living at home more than sharing a cell at Rikers too.”

He nods at my joke, but it apparently only merits a thin smile. I take LeMarcus’s demeanor to suggest that he’s not going to get more attached to me than any other accused murderer who pays him to set them free.

“I’m going to get right to it,” he says, “if that’s okay with you.”

“Please do. I’ve read that they have Lauren’s iPhone, but is there anything else linking me to her murder?”

“I’ll get there in a second. Before I do, I wanted to get some preliminaries out of the way. The first is to discuss the pros and cons about our pulling Judge Gold.”

The book on Arthur Gold goes something like this. Back when I was in middle school, he was a personal-injury lawyer of limited success, which caused him to seek the pay raise the state judiciary had to offer, even though for most lawyers a judge’s salary—which amounts to less than large law firms dole out for last year’s law-school graduates—is a disincentive to taking the bench. He might not have had a chance but for the fact that he was openly gay in 1987. This endeared him to the Greenwich Village Democratic Club, and they used their growing clout to make him a judge.