How are you?”

Behind me I hear Paul’s voice, “Jill, can you get Gideon a drink?”

Jill smiles wanly at her husband, who has come in behind us. As Angela has said, he looks in great shape. His blond hair has gone sandy but there is still lots of it, and his stomach is enviably flat under a pair of faded button-up jeans. I wonder what it must be like for her as she visibly ages and he gets more handsome. She asks me, “What would you like?”

I notice that Dick has nothing on the table beside his chair, and say I’ll take some decaf if she has some. Paul protests, but I shake my head.

Something tells me that I am going to want to remember this conversation at least until this trial is over.

Before Paul allows me to sit down he pumps my hand vigorously and looks me in the eye.

“I appreciate you coming by on short notice, Gideon. Dick and I both feel the sooner we start going down the same path the better.”

“No problem,” I say as I sit down on a black leather couch across from Dick and look around the room. On the walls are photographs of the whole family captured in activities that range from duck hunting to posing with Corliss Williamson, the former Razorback great. Jill smiles gamely in all of them as if to say, whose life goes as planned?

Paul, clutching what appears to be scotch and water, takes a seat on the couch by me. I might need a drink too if I were charged with first-degree murder.

“Gideon, Paul says you haven’t had much of a conversation with your client yet,” Dick says, pulling up a yellow legal pad from the briefcase beside his Barcalounger.

“Is he saying anything?”

They seem so eager to know if Bledsoe is going to implicate Paul that it is hard to avoid the feeling that both he and my client are guilty as hell.

“Other than he didn’t do it and that someone is framing him, not much.” “Does he have any ideas,” Dick asks, taking notes, “who that might be?”