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JURY SELECTION BEGINS AT the courthouse in Mineola tomorrow morning. Katherine Welsh will be in one corner and I’ll be in the other even if I’m somewhat under my normal fighting weight. Judge Michael Horton will be presiding over it all.

I am hoping that the familiar excitement of that, the rush of a new season starting, will somehow mitigate how truly lousy I have been feeling on a daily basis ever since Switzerland. At least when the college hockey season was starting up, I could start hitting people.

“I have to start feeling better,” I say now to Sam Wylie at the Candy Kitchen.

It’s always a good place for us to meet for coffee, this diner in Bridgehampton that is pretty much halfway between Southampton, where Sam lives and works, and where I live in Amagansett.

“You’re going to start feeling better,” she says. “The drugs just need more time.”

“I don’t have time!” I snap, loudly enough to scare a couple of farmers I recognize who are seated at the counter.

“Hey,” Sam says softly. “Hey now, girl.”

“Sorry,” I say. I manage a grin. “It must be the drugs talking.”

“I know you don’t want to hear this from me,” she says. “But it was your choice to go ahead with this trial.”

“You sound like a lawyer correcting the record,” I say.

She smiles. “Don’t be hurtful.”

I get up from our table suddenly, nearly knocking over my coffee cup, telling her I’ll be right back.

“If you need to make a call, you can make it in front of me,” she says.

“I need to go be sick,” I tell her.

I’m on my way home, feeling slightly better—as low a bar as that is these days—when Rob Jacobson calls and asks if I can stop by his rented house, there’s somebody he wants me to meet.

“A drum majorette you met while you were dog walking?” I ask him.

“You’re the one with the dog,” he says.

“No, actually you’re the dog,” I say, then tell him I’m in the car headed that way and will be there in ten minutes.

If there’s a girl in the house when I arrive, she’s nowhere to be seen. Maybe she’s sleeping upstairs. After all, I know how teenaged girls love their sleep.

But there is a man—much too tanned and skinny as a steak knife—in the living room with my client. The Maserati in the driveway surely belongs to him.

He has black hair flecked with silver brushed straight back and worn long, skinny jeans that are too young for him the way his long hair is, a pink polo shirt with the collar turned up, and white Stan Smith sneakers that look fresh out of the box.

The whole presentation comes from somebody obviously trying way too hard, somebody who’s too done, in just about every way.

“This is Thomas McGoey,” Jacobson says.

“I recognize Mr. McGoey,” I say. “Isn’t his face on the ads with his 800 number?”

I pronounce it Mc- gooey.

“It actually rhymes with go,” he says.

“Be my guest,” I say.

I am just inside the door and make no move to get any closer to either one of them.

I know McGoey only by reputation. He’s a big-city criminal defense attorney—same as I am—full-time publicity hound and cable TV whore generally regarded as being every bit as sleazy as most of his clients. I sometimes think the only mob guys he hasn’t represented are in the movies.

I ignore him and turn back to Rob Jacobson.

“Why is he here?” I ask, as if McGoey isn’t.

“I’ve hired him to be your second chair,” Jacobson says.