“I’m Andrew Chapman,” he says, holding out his right hand, which swallows mine, though we’re the same height at just under six feet.

“Sorry about the bench,” I tell him needlessly, sitting down. Some guys look rumpled in a brand-new tailored thousand-dollar suit: Chapman, on the other hand, is the type who can look good in a prison outfit. In his early thirties, I estimate, a decade younger than myself. Chapman has a lean, muscular body with no stomach (he’ll have one when he’s my age), a neat, carefully trimmed goatee, and reading glasses pushed down low on the end of his nose, all of which combine to make him look like a young Ed Bradley from “60 Minutes.” The resemblance ends there. My potential client has none of the world-weariness of Ed, who is beginning to look as if he has crossed too many time zones. De spite his apparent youth, and despite this setting. Chapman has the dignity of a much older man. Sitting erect next to me on the bench, he says quietly, “Aren’t you the lawyer who over a year ago got off with a light sentence the man who murdered the state senator?”

I watch the cell bars in the window across from us as a pair of black hands grips them. From here I cannot see a face, but the fingers wrapped around the metal look feminine. In front of our bench the place is a zoo, with prisoners and their keepers passing back and forth, making it hard to hear.

“Yeah, that was mine when I was at the public defender’s,” I whisper, pleased that the Anderson case still has some mileage. It was a famous case at the time, getting me my job at Mays amp; Burton. Hart Anderson was perhaps on his way to becoming governor of Arkansas when he was shot down in his own home by a man who was being treated for mental illness by Andersen’s wife. The plea bargain I worked out for my client, a delivery man for a food-catering service, was, under the circumstances, almost a case of blackmail, but this is not the time to be modest.