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voice matched her euphoric spirits. As always when Angie asked for something, her mind had already eliminated the possibility of a negative reply.
    “What time will you be here?”
    “I can’t come tonight, Mom.”
    “Well, sure you can.”
    “I can’t. I have another commitment.”
    There was a brief pause before she spoke.
    “You have to go out with her again, I suppose?”
    Sam needed no clarification. Angie’s use of the pronoun had become synonymous with Pat.
    “I have a business meeting.” There was no sense opening old wounds. Angie had vented her spleen on Pat since law school. He thought the hostility had ended when he moved out of Pat’s apartment, but the bile had stopped flowing only for a brief period.
    “I’d much rather be there,” he lied. “But I’m afraid I have to sit and talk with some boring people about business over a table in a crowded restaurant.”
    “Tables, yes. You know I was wondering—that old table down in the basement. You know the one that sits by the furnace? I think that it could be finished and I could use it up here in the living room.
    What do you think?”
    She wasn’t going to get away with it, not this time. In recent months it had become her 65
    favorite ploy. Change the subject quickly and lure him into some other area. Before she was finished she would set a time for dinner and hang up.
    “We were talking about dinner, Mom.
    Remember, I said I couldn’t make it.”
    “Oh yes? Meals are such difficult times for me these days. You know it’s very hard to cook for one person. I never realized that before.”
    “Yes, Mom, I know. Maybe we can get together over the weekend. I’ll give you a call. All right?”
    “Well, what about the roast?”
    “Freeze it. We’ll make sandwiches.
    I’ll give you a call later in the week.
    Bye, Mom.”
    Sam turned his attention to a stack of papers on his desk. He quickly proofed three letters typed earlier in the day by Carol and signed each, returned several calls and then dictated a letter on tape to Jennifer Davies, asking her to call the office for another appointment. He delivered verbal instructions to Carol on the tape, asking her to order a certified copy of Jennifer Davies’s birth certificate and to inquire as to the procedure for obtaining any records of adoption.
    Putting down the microcassette dictator Sam spun around in his chair to the credenza behind his desk and grabbed the San Francisco phone directory. He looked up the name George Johnson. There were four listed. None showed an address on Olstead Street. Maybe he was unlisted. He reached for the Thomas Brothers map book for San Francisco and looked up Olstead Street. It didn’t exist; nor, he assumed, did George Johnson.
    It is an uncomfortable feeling for a lawyer when a client’s story begins to unravel, when words don’t conform to the documents in files or inconsistencies begin to creep in. Bogardus had experienced it many times during his years with the public defender, when his clients were an assortment of drug pushers, prostitutes and other habitual losers. Now it was all coming back. He could excuse the missing photograph of James Spencer in the navy files, she could know nothing about that, and George Johnson, the man who didn’t exist. But the letter to Jennifer’s mother and its cryptic reference to the parchments. It didn’t wash. Why would parchments forwarded 67
    to the mother thirty years before suddenly be mailed to the daughter with a note that James Spencer was alive?
    Sam straightened up a few papers on his desk, grabbed his coat and headed for the door. He walked slowly down the stairs and out under the arched doorway leading from the pier entrance, his thoughts mired in unanswered questions concerning the parchments and the identity of the man calling himself George Johnson. He didn’t notice the black limousine across the Embarcadero in the parking lot beyond the abandoned railroad tracks. As he boarded the bus for the ride