The words were just gushing out, in torrents, all the marvelous things about his bravery and talent for the fray that he had no one to tell about. He couldn't go on like this to Jimmy Caughey or Ray Andriutti or, any longer, to his wife, whose threshold for crime highs was by now a stone wall. But Miss Shelly Thomas—I must keep you high! She drank it all in. Those eyes! Those glistening brown lips! Her thirst for his words was bottomless, which was a good thing, because she wasn't drinking anything but designer water. Kramer had a glass of house white wine and was trying to keep from gulping it, because he could already tell this place was not as inexpensive as he had thought. Christ! His goddamned mind was double-tracking a mile a minute! It was like a two-track tape. On one track he was gushing out this speech about how he handled the trial—