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jowls and his eyes had regained their spark. “Rome was at war with a city called Carthage, and every time Cato the Elder stood up to speak in the Senate, he said the same thing: ‘ Cartaga delenda est .’ Carthage must be destroyed.”
    â€œWhich means?”
    â€œWhich means I want more out of this case than a ‘not guilty’ verdict,” my client pronounced. “As far as I’m concerned, Lazarus delenda est .”
    Lazarus must be destroyed. I looked at Matt’s face, and saw there what the ancient Romans must have seen on the face of Cato himself: implacable determination. My client wasn’t kidding. Lazarus must be destroyed—and he wanted me to do it.

C HAPTER F OUR
    The next issue of the Village Voice , which appeared a week after Matt’s arraignment, featured Detective Edmund Fitzgerald, whom columnist Jesse Winthrop named the Hero Cop, on its cover page. For once, Winthrop’s sarcastic knife wasn’t out; he called Eddie “the last cop in this cesspool of a city with honor and integrity.”
    Eddie’s face, his Irish-cop, grownup-altarboy face, stared up at me in gritty black-and-white. It was a face, I reflected glumly, that any jury would love: boyish and open, with a winning smile.
    I looked from the newspaper to my client, comparing Eddie’s youthful face to Matt Riordan’s—the face that had launched a thousand acquittals. It was a handsome face, but it was also one that had known guile, a face that concealed hidden agendas. A face it would be easy to distrust.
    We were in my office, on my turf. I’d insisted on that; it would be all too easy to let Matt run the show if we continued to discuss the case on Park Avenue. So he’d come to Brooklyn, still impeccably dressed, in a golf shirt and creased pants. I wore an old T-shirt with the slogan “A Woman Without a Man Is Like a Fish Without a Bicycle.” In the months since Matt and I had broken up, that T-shirt had left my closet a lot more often.
    â€œWe’ve got to do something about this Eddie,” I said. I wasn’t crazy about the wistful note in my voice; I’d said the words as if the prospect of “doing something about Eddie” was a dream that might never come true. Not exactly the attitude of a winner.
    The door opened and Angelina Irrizary, my investigator, bustled in. She tossed her oversized bag on the couch, and sat next to Matt with an eager expression on her small, heart-shaped face. “What’s the story?” she asked, an anticipatory gleam in her eyes. “What’s this case all about?”
    I let Matt tell it. “I was stupid,” he began. “I see now I was unequivocally stupid. I never should have let Jack talk me into meeting Eddie Fitz in the first place.”
    Angie nodded; with Eddie’s face on the front page of the Voice , she had no reason to ask who Riordan was talking about.
    â€œThe first I knew about any of this,” Matt went on, “Jack called me and said he wanted me to meet a friend of his, someone who might have heard something about Nunzie. I said I didn’t want to hear any more. I blew him off.”
    He paused. I raised an eyebrow; if that had been the whole story, we wouldn’t be here now preparing his defense to federal bribery charges.
    â€œJack called again. Again, I said no to a meeting. But then the rumors about Nunzie’s disappearance began floating around the courthouse. People were saying Lazarus was trying to put together a case against me for murder. It was crazy talk, but this time when Jack called, I agreed to meet this guy Eddie.”
    â€œYou knew he was a cop?”
    â€œHell, I counted on his being a cop,” Matt said with the kind of disarming honesty that just might win points with a jury. “And, yes, we talked about the rumors around the courthouse. We talked about Nunzie. But I never told him I’d pay for grand jury minutes, and