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half of it across the floor.
    “Why would you say that?” Carter said, surprised.
    “Guys like you are either completely crazy or filthy rich,” O’Connor said. “Crazy people don’t make it through Harvard. Don’t even get an interview to get in Harvard, or Yale, at that matter. Rich does. I peg you as filthy fucking rich, with a capital F.”
    “Filthy or fucking?” Kirkwood asked, laughing.
    “Take your pick,” O’Connor said, throwing his boots into the bottom of his wall locker. “Don’t get me wrong, Mickey, I like filthy fucking rich. I want to be filthy fucking rich one day. I admire filthy fucking rich. I’ll take the corner office with the big leather chair any day of the week over camping in a slum with a soap box as a desk.”
    “Rich is not all it’s cracked up to be,” Carter said, walking back to his bunk and sitting on it, resting his chin on his hands, and staring at the floor.
    “See?” O’Connor said to Kirkwood. “Can I pick ’em or can I pick ’em?”
    “Carter, you are filthy fucking rich, aren’t you,” Kirkwood said.
    “Yes,” Carter mumbled. “I hate it, too.”
    “My wife is well-to-do,” Kirkwood then admitted as he shoved his empty suitcase under the end of his bunk, hiding it behind his footlocker. “She has her emotional problems with the money and all, sounds a lot like you, too, when she bemoans the problems of having loads of cash, but given the choice of having wealth or living out of a soup can, she will choose to suffer in the lap of luxury every time.”
    “I intend to do good,” Carter said. “I refuse to be another rich, Boston elitist tossing crumbs to the poor from my Bentley on my regular weekend sojourns to Martha’s Vineyard.”
    “You drive a Bentley?” O’Connor said, kicking his suitcase under his rack. “I would have taken you for a Rolls-Royce purist.”
    “Very funny,” Carter said, still brooding with his face in his hands.
    “Hey, pal,” O’Connor said, “don’t take it so hard. Hell, you can give me a couple of your millions, and then you won’t be so rich. How’s that?”
    “Fuck off. You wouldn’t take it if I did give it to you,” Carter said.
    “Good judge of character,” Kirkwood said, leaning against his wall locker, “but I know this Irishman a lot better than that. I think that if you put a million bucks under Terry O’Connor’s nose, he would grovel for it like a hungry dog.”
    “Fuck-an-a, Jack,” O’Connor laughed, wadding his empty seabag and stuffing it in his footlocker. “Like I said, nothing wrong with money. It greases the axle for the proverbial wheel of life to keep right on spinning round and round. I’m a lawyer, for crying out loud. A law whore. Pay me a fee and I am all yours, baby.”
    “They don’t put guys like that on the defense team,” Carter said. “You’re a weenie just like the rest of us, trying to exact a little humanity and justice out of this fucked-up system. Now tell me the truth.”
    “I guess you saw the Nathan’s Hotdogs sign stenciled on my shorts,” O’Connor said and laughed, letting go of his footlocker’s lid, allowing it to bang shut. “Yeah, I really do give a shit what happens to these poor bastards. I also get good and pissed off seeing them railroaded by the likes of Dicky Fucking Doo and his Fabulous Don’ts.”
    “Dicky Doo is nothing,” Carter said. “You have not yet met the consummate evil, Captain Charles E. Heyster.”
    “As in shyster?” Kirkwood chimed with a laugh.
    “Heyster the shyster,” Carter said. “That’s good but not original, yet quite apropos. You’re not the first to call him that, nor will you be the last.”
    “So he is the shining star in Dicky Doo’s galaxy?” O’Connor said, pulling off his sweat-stained shirt.
    “He is Dicky Doo’s galaxy,” Carter said with a sigh, still sitting on his bunk resting his chin on the heels of his hands and his elbows propped on his bony knees. “His foremost champion for