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league baseball. The only type of person with any reason to kill him would be a deranged, Jew-hating, lowlife piece of pond scum like Eugene Worrell.”
    â€œI know.” I gave him a sad smile. “It’s logical, it makes sense, it’s probably true. But I’m not one hundred percent convinced, yet. I need to get to there, Benny. I have to find a way to get there. Otherwise it’s just going to haunt me. I can’t—help it.” My eyes filled with tears. I used the napkin to wipe my eyes and blow my nose. “I owe it to him.”
    â€œWhy?” he said gently.
    I took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “Because he was special. Because he would have done it if I were the victim.” I paused, struggling to keep my composure. “If it turns out that Worrell was the killer, fine. But I have to know that for sure, and I don’t, yet.”
    â€œSo what are you going to do?”
    â€œI’m going to try to eliminate the other possibility.”
    â€œWhat is the other possibility?”
    â€œI’m not sure,” I said. “All I know is that when Bruce Rosenthal came to David Marcus, he was extremely nervous and looking for an attorney. Someone killed him a few days later. When David decided to look into Bruce’s death, someone killed him a few days later. If Bruce’s death had nothing to do with David’s death, then I suppose I’d be willing to accept that those skinheads killed David. But first I’ve got to satisfy myself that David’s death and Bruce’s death aren’t connected.”
    â€œHow are you going to do that?”
    I looked at Benny and sighed. “I don’t know.”

Chapter Six
    Revenge of the nerds comes in two flavors: Ivy League and MIT.
    The Ivy League version is downright creepy, as I witnessed one winter weekend during my second year at Harvard Law School. I went down to New Haven to visit a friend, and he took me to a Yale hockey game. Yale was playing the University of Connecticut, and the game was a mismatch. By the middle of the final period, UConn had built up a seven-goal lead. At that point, the Yale fans—a truly ragtag collection of sports geeks—started pointing at the UConn fans on the other side of the ice while chanting in unison:
    That’s alright, that’s okay,
You’re going to work for us someday!
That’s alright, that’s okay,
You’re going to work for us someday!
    The MIT version, while just as arrogant, is more pocket-protector arrogance. It’s more Herbie Mintler, who sat across the aisle from me in high school geometry, his eyes distorted by the thick lenses of his hornrim glasses. Herbie Mintler, whose daily costume included an ill-fitting short-sleeved shirt buttoned to the collar and decorated with black-and-white photographic scenes of New York City and a pair of black slacks belted so high on the waist that when he walked it looked like his hips were fused to his rib cage. Herbie Mintler, who occasionally cleaned his ears with a paperclip during class and wiped the ear wax off on his slacks. Herbie Mintler, who averted his eyes and made an embarrassed grunt whenever I said hello to him in the hallways. Herbie Mintler, who graduated with the highest grade point average in the class, went on to MIT, and returned for our tenth reunion with a stunning brunette on his arm and a personal net worth, according to Newsweek magazine, in excess of $120 million (thanks to his ownership of two essential patents in the field of MRI technology).
    Revenge of the nerds. Ivy League or MIT? Hiram Sullivan, managing partner of the engineering consulting firm of Smilow & Sullivan, Ltd., seemed a dangerous combination of both. A Ninja Nerd. He was in his early fifties and had the lean, wiry look of a man who swims forty laps every morning at dawn and hasn’t eaten dessert in twenty years.
    He squinted at me from behind his small wire-rimmed glasses and shook his