Which in itself was instructive.

The younger brother, George, was an officer at a downtown bank and didn’t like the fact that he was involved in a police investigation on any level. He hadn’t seen his father in years – in fact, he didn’t even consider Sal his father. His stepfather, Leland Taylor, had raised him. George had formed the impression that he, Graham, and Debra might come into some money when the old man died, but he’d called Graham when he got word of Sal’s death and Graham told him there wasn’t any money.

Evans thought it interesting that George, like his sister, conveyed the impression that Graham was lying.

Hardy was serious about not wanting to handle any more murder cases.

He’d never bought into the ethic of his landlord, David Freeman, a truly professional defense attorney. Hardy did it for the money; Freeman’s vision of life and the law accepted the necessity, and even the rightness, of defending bad people for heinous acts they had actually committed.

Hardy had been a cop for a couple of years after college and a hitch in Vietnam. After that he spent a few years as a prosecutor for the district attorney’s office. When his first marriage broke up in the wake of the accidental death of his son, he took close to a dozen years off to tend bar and contemplate the universe through a haze of Guinness stout.

Eventually, the haze lifted. He became part owner of the Little Shamrock. He married again. Frannie was the younger sister of Moses, his partner in the Shamrock. He returned to the law – again as a prosecutor.

Office politics, not a philosophical change of heart, had driven him from the DA’s office and a benevolent fate had delivered him to defense work. He had believed in the innocence of his first two clients, and his instincts had been right.

After that there were opportunities to get ‘not guilty’ verdicts for other clients, but this was not the same thing as the clients themselves being innocent.