“Did she say anything to you?”

“Just hello. Usually we’d chat; she always remembered to ask after my son. But Friday she seemed upset.”

“In what way?”

She looked back at the chair. “I can tell by watching people how they feel about their business here. Mrs. Cantwell sat quite straight in her chair, with her ankles crossed and her arms folded, looking at everything and nothing, if you know the look. Once she flipped a magazine and put it down without reading it. She acted as women do when they’re here on some upsetting problem.”

“But she didn’t tell you what, or why?”

“Oh, no.” She shook her head sadly. “I didn’t know until I read about the will. I suppose that would be upsetting. My son would never behave like that.”

“Then you should count your blessings. By the way, I’m not taking calls from reporters. And tell them my wife isn’t either. They can try Mr. Cade.”

“Very well, Mr. Shaw.”

I went toward my office.

The corridors droned with machines and work. In the library a table of shirt-sleeved associates read law books while another associate stood at a computer terminal that could spit out citations to any legal opinion in the last hundred years containing a phrase he wanted, like “sanctity of contract.” The morning crew in the word-processing center typed on machines that recorded their work on a screen, corrected errors, and replayed the final copy at six hundred words a minute. Their new supervisor, a brisk young woman who went to college nights, waited by the telex for a wire from London or Brazil or wherever steel companies did business. Down the hall more computers were translating the daily time sheets for each lawyer and paralegal into monthly bills to be reviewed by a senior partner and sent to clients. As I passed, Johnny Bentham emerged holding a sheaf of time sheets. “Morning, Johnny,” I said.

“Morning, Adam.” He stopped, uncomfortable. “Damned awful weekend you had. Terrible about Lydia, just unbelievable.”

“Unbelievable,” I agreed.

He shifted awkwardly, a great shambling man with the owlish look of a tax partner, unsure of what to say. “That’s a mess about Henry being gone,” he ventured, “and now that phone call. The papers keep bringing that up.”

“Of course they do.”

He scratched his cowlick. “Yeah, this is all fun to them—the biggest thing to hit Birmingham since Martin Luther King, my wife says. I just hope we can keep the firm off the front page.”

“Henry, too. But it’s not easy with that will.”

He looked at me sharply. “Well, you did what you thought best about that, I’m sure.”

I guessed my handling of the will had been the subject of discussion. “I couldn’t see getting Henry arrested.”