That night Bunny Sauer, who reported for Department Nine across the hall and had been Mina's friend since they had sat side by side in a speed class in a basement on Mission Street in 1977, came over to the apartment on Hayes Street with a bottle of Gallo and a bag of Doritos and sat on the floor with her back against the radiator and her stockinged feet up on the coffee table and laughed so hard she had to put the wine down.
"On the record," Bunny said. "On the record. He disclosed you."
"It isn't funny."
"It's the funniest thing that's happened on the fourth floor since Judge Garibaldi's toupee got caught in the ceiling fan." She was a small, sharp woman with an enormous perm and a voice like gravel being poured. "Do you understand? Mina. Honey. Do you know how long I've been in this business? Thirteen years. And in thirteen years I have never once, not once, heard a man volunteer a fact he didn't have to. A man sat in my jury box last spring and swore he'd never been to Reno, and his wife laughed out loud in the gallery. And this one stood up in Fourteen in front of Sterling Pratt, God help him, and said, unprompted, 'I sat in a booth with the reporter and we talked about Moby-Dick.'" She picked up the wine again. "That's the most romantic thing a man has ever done in Department Fourteen."
"It isn't romantic. It's procedural."
"Honey, with men like that, the procedural is the romantic. That's the whole secret."
Mina sat on the couch with her knees drawn up and her stockinged feet tucked under her, and her steno notes from the afternoon open in her lap. She had brought the tape home. She did not usually bring tapes home. But she had brought this one, folded in its accordion pleats, and she had found the place in it without meaning to look, and she was looking at it now: the dense rows of her own shorthand, consonants and vowels in clusters that would be gibberish to anyone else in the world, and among them, unmistakable to her, his answers. Remy James. Insured for the full value. A promise with a lot of paper attached. Yes, Your Honor. I promise.
"Six weeks," she said.
"Six weeks is nothing. Six weeks is a fraud trial with a slow accountant."
"Not a word. Not a note. Not a nod. She said so. On the record."
"So don't nod," said Bunny. "And then on day forty-three, nod like a maniac." She crunched a Dorito. "Where are you going to eat lunch?"
Mina looked at her notes for a long time. In the street below, a Number 21 bus went by, its trolley poles crackling and sparking blue on the overhead wire.