The anonymous waiter appears again. "I'm going to have a cheese omelet and coffee," Black tells him.

"Rye, whole wheat or pumpernickel toast?" the waiter snaps back.

"Rye sounds good."

It's my turn. I order a well-done "British Burger" (a cheddar cheese burger on an English muffin). "I don't eat burgers medium rare anymore, because of mad cow disease," I volunteer to my lawyer companion.

We talk about burned and unburned hamburgers, a subject that then segues (on my direction) into a discussion about how inexperienced murderers try to burn their victims' bodies in the mistaken belief that police won't notice the bullet holes.

"Burning a body is the dumbest thing you can do," Black insists. "I had a case where the prosecution accused my client of killing a federal informant, then chopping up his body and barbecuing the pieces to dispose of them." He shakes his head. "I brought in an expert from a funeral home who said you could never burn a body with a little barbecue. He said, 'You see pictures in India of funeral pyres? It takes three days to finish a body in a huge bonfire.'"

This talk reminds me of a famous literary cremation. "When the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley was cremated on a beach in Italy," I tell Black, "Lord Byron retrieved the dead poet's intact heart from the ashes. The thing refused to burn."

"Wait a minute," Black says. "Wasn't it Byron who drowned?"

"No. Shelley." I say.

It turns out Black is a Byron freak. "Oh, wait. Byron goes to Turkey," Black says. "He dies out there. I don't remember exactly how it is." Then he adds, "You're testing my history."

Our food comes. Between bites, Black continues talking about Shelley. "The part I love is Shelley's wife writing 'Frankenstein,'" he says. "You know the story how 'Frankenstein' got written? They had a contest: who could write the best story over the weekend."

I bite into my burger. It's good ... very good. I tell Black that I think Percy ruined Mary Shelley's manuscript by editing it. "He added all this purple prose, but her original 'Frankenstein' was really lean. Hemingwayesque. Modern."

"You know the difference between novels and nonfiction?" Black asks. "Fiction needs logic. If you invented the story of O.J. before the trial, it wouldn't have sold. No one would believe it."

I hold up his book. "You really wrote this, right? No ghostwriter?" He assures me that he did. "Weren't you tempted to try a Grisham-style novel?"

"I don't think I have the talent to do a novel," Black answers modestly. "I already had the trials' whole built-in drama. Sitting down and coming up with a story would be far more difficult."

I decide to convince him differently. "Is there a trial you lost that you still eat your liver about?"

"Marv Albert," he answers. "The whole case was a tissue of lies, but they embarrassed him into pleading to a misdemeanor."

"So write a novel where you get Marv off," I suggest.

He eats some omelet and thinks. "That's good," he finally says. "I could get revenge on all of them."

"Could you ever be a judge?" I ask.

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