Nothing but the truth [antikvár]

At the tail end of a dog of a morning, Dismas Hardy was beginning to fear that he would also be spending the whole stiflingly dull afternoon in municipal court on the second floor of the Hall of Justice in San Francisco. He was waiting—interminably since nine a.m.—for his client to be admitted into the courtroom. This would not have been his first choice for how to celebrate his forty-eighth birthday. Now again the clerk called out someone not his client— this time a young man who looked as though he'd been drinking since he'd turned twenty-one and possibly two or three years before that. Maybe he was still drunk—certainly he looked wasted. The judge was Peter Li, a former assistant district attorney with whom Hardy was reasonably friendly. The prosecuting attorney was Randy Huang, who sat at his table inside the bar rail as the defendant went shuffling past. The public defender was a ten-year veteran named Donna Wong. Judge Li's longtime clerk, another Asian named Manny