out of the town store across the highway with what looked liked a thick steak wrapped in pink butcher paper. Jimmy was in the shadows alongside the gas station. It closed at nightfall, lights out. Upchurch walked back across the empty blacktop, not in any hurry at all, apparently not having any idea someone was watching him. He glanced at a Jeep CJ-7, old style, open on the sides, parked in front of the bar, walked past it, started up the easy hill, walking in the middle of the gravel road.

Jimmy waited, followed him.

A woman in her fifties came out to poke at a charcoal fire in a steel drum smoker out behind an A-frame all by itself next to a dry creekbed in among a good stand of trees. There was an owl somewhere, hooting. She searched for it with her eyes. Then she went back inside. Jimmy watched.

And then the barrel of the tidy .38 was behind his ear.

Upchurch didn’t say anything smart or sarcastic or even nasty, just had Jimmy walk the rest of the way up toward the house, toward the light so he could get a better look at him, his gun now down at his side.

When they got into the light, Jimmy told him who he was, what he was there for.

Upchurch dropped the .38 into the pocket of his chinos but didn’t shake Jimmy’s hand or anything.

The woman, Ellie Upchurch, stepped out onto the deck, surprised to see anybody, her hand going to her breast.

“He’s here about Barry,” Upchurch said.

Maybe he was schizophrenic.

But then they went inside the house and the first thing Jimmy saw was a portrait of the real Barry Upchurch, under a brass-plated tube light. Maybe a client had painted it, “in partial payment for services rendered.” The Upchurch in the painting was older than he would have been at the time of the Kantke trial and he was better looking than his big brother, probably always had been. But the eyes, the face had the same slapped look.

The other Upchurch, whose name was D. L., stepped past Jimmy without looking at him and took the pistol out of his pants pocket and put it in a drawer in a table with a Tiffany-style lamp on it and a vase of pretty purple mountain wildflowers called nightshade. Ellie Upchurch came over and took D. L.’s hand and kissed him on the cheek, something Jimmy guessed she always did when someone was looking at the portrait of her first husband.

D. L. grunted something that could have been, I love you, too.

The A-frame was nicely furnished without a lot of references to the past, his or hers or his, except for the portrait. There was an oval “rag rug,” on top of pine flooring, a Kennedy rocking chair, an over-and-under shotgun on pins on the wall, nothing too fancy, a Browning. There was a big leather chair in front of the stand-alone black Swedish fireplace, a healthy fire, a National Geographic bright yellow on the ottoman. It was all one big room, with a bedroom upstairs, a loft.

“You can go on,” D. L. Upchurch said and walked toward the open kitchen. He meant that his wife could talk to this stranger about her first husband, his brother. He took the wrapped steaks from the counter and put them in the fridge. He got himself a Bud Light in a can and then dug around in the back of the icebox until he came out with a bottle of beer, dark German beer. He handed the Beck’s to Jimmy after he wrenched off the cap with his bare hand—it may or may not have been a twist-off—and then he went outside, left them alone.

She sat in the leather chair and Jimmy stood beside the fire and she gave him a version of the intervening years. Barry Upchurch had practiced law in Long Beach another twelve years after the Kantke trial and then he retired and they moved up the mountain and he died two years after that.

The short version was he’d never gotten over it.

“Doctors are like that, some of them,” Jimmy said. “They keep it to themselves but it rips them up when they lose one.”

She sat with her legs crossed, her hands in her lap. “That wasn’t Barry’s problem,” she said. “He had no problem losing a case.”

She probably didn’t mean the twist of bitterness in the way she said the line.

“It wasn’t that,” she said.

And then she went into it