Okay. Darnay Hoffman’s court of Miracles often gathers at the Arte Cafe, on 73rd off Columbus, in the warm weather, an Upper West Side Via Veneto scene with cheap spaghetti and latte and Darnay expounding on the Steinberg case: “Joel and Hedda were a couple of round-heeled rubes, no matter how wicked and sophisticated they thought they were being with their ‘S&M’ lifestyle. They’re from conventional Jewish backgrounds, him from Yonkers, her from Washington Heights, and like a lot of people from the seventies generation, they both thought there’d been some total break with the past. Through Rolfing, vegetarianism, mind dynamics, rock and roll, sex and drugs, they were going to remake themselves into sentient beings. Hedda had been around more, believe it or not; she wasn’t bad-looking before the title fights started. After the all-night crack-pipe sessions, the porn and brutal sex, everything escalated. Were they involved with a group-sex Story of O suburban clique he often alluded to as a ‘cult’? Maybe. Or maybe it was just fantasy. They were certainly feeding each other’s dreams, and Hedda, the supposed slave, might have been ‘topping from the bottom,’ as S&M devotees put it—that means it was her who really controlled his actions: ‘Once you’ve had a taste of the stick,’ she infamously said at one point, ‘you can’t go back.’ ”

“So you’re giving Joel a pass?” I ask.

“A man can be factually guilty but legally innocent,” he replies.

“Then who was ultimately guilty?” Hoffman, the psychological marketing student, implies it was the media, for trying to simplify human behavior.

Joel Steinberg lives on the third floor of the Castle, with three other men. He hasn’t left the premises, except to go for a supervised car ride around upper Manhattan, since the great homecoming scene on June 30. He’s concerned about his safety once he’s actually in the street—“A lot of people hate my guts,” he told me. He likes the Fortune Society, he said—“It’s very nice, very modernlike, everything first-class. They’re treating me well and feeding me good. I’m in no hurry to move.”

I asked how he found his fellow ex-cons: “Good! Nice. One guy actually said he was glad to meet me, do you believe that? A piece of shit like me . . . ”

When I asked if coming back to New York had made him feel the death of Lisa, and the perpetual beating of Hedda, more keenly than in prison, he abruptly switched gears: “It’s not where I want to go. Of course, I’m sorry my daughter’s dead. But the medical reports showed no ‘present’ or ‘historical’ fractures or wounds. That means no history of abuse. Got it? This was from the medical officers at the University of Pennsylvania. The D.A. was trying for a very negative report, but they were honest. Do you hear? See if you can do better than those other morons do . . . ” Pathology reports from St. Vincent’s doctors showed “a map of pain,” as Joyce Johnson put it in What Lisa Knew, her superb book about the Steinberg case. Dr. Margaret McHugh, head of the Child Protection Team at Bellevue, who testified for the prosecution after examining all medical reports, told me: “He and his lawyers are just focusing on the parts [of the reports] that exonerate them. If it says ‘no fracture,’ they use that; if it says ‘hypodensity is present involving cortex and subadjacent white matter in the left frontal lobe,’ brain swelling, they leave it out.”

I’d heard Steinberg had done a “good” seventeen years, as opposed to Robert Chambers, the Preppie Killer, with whom Steinberg, Bernie Goetz, and John Gotti (!) had been confined at Rikers’ infirmary (“the Page-One Wing”) back in the eighties. I asked how he’d done it.

“Ever been in jail?” he snorted. “If you had, you’d know there isn’t any good time. You’re just thinking of getting out. It beats at you, and unless you’re nuts, you’re always afraid they’ll forget to open the door some day. What I did was work. When they were building the law library at the Southport facility in Elmira, I volunteered to help, because of my background. I worked seven days a week. I was always open for business. And some of those hard rocks were grateful . . . You know they don’t like ‘short eyes,’ guys accused of child abuse. Work. That was it . . . Plus, I couldn’t go sailing, could I?”

Steinberg’s stay at the Fortune Society may last into September. “Whadda I do?” he chuckled. “I decompress. I get that weight off my shoulders. I talk to the guys in here, who are having the same feelings as me . . . I think about my next moves.”

One of these is the possibility of a job as a host on New York Confidential, a public cable-TV show where Darnay Hoffman happens to be the attorney of record, which could start in the fall with Steinberg “learning the ropes” as an intern; it could also mean, Steinberg says, some work as a paralegal: “I’m a good lawyer, disbarred or not, and it would be wrong to throw all of that experience away . . . And some day, I hope to practice again.”

I ask Steinberg about the wisdom of being on T.V. if he’s as worried about people hating his guts as he’s indicated he is: “Fortunately,” he says, “they can’t get you through the ether, can they?”

“Joel is your grandmother,” Hoffman says. “If you let him be demonized and receive an unfair trial and distorted coverage, your relatives are next.”

During our conversation, Steinberg’s voice had a spent-force quality. He made an effort to be charming, falling into the neighborhood street rhythms and idioms that men of blue-collar backgrounds of our age share: “I hear ya did some crime reporting,” he offered heartily. “I defended quite a few goombahs in my time. They put me in the wagon [from Rikers to 100 Centre Street] with John Gotti. He didn’t say anything. Wouldn’t even meet my eyes. I told Darnay to get word to him that I’d worked for the Family.”

“You never can tell what the prosecutors had in mind when they matched them in the same vehicle,” Hoffman commented later. “You’re suggesting they wanted Gotti to have Joel offed in prison?” I asked him. Darnay shrugged.

When he learned I’d once worked for the Herald Tribune in Paris, Steinberg told me about a noblewoman he’d had an affair with in France, and said that as a young, sports-car-driving roué, he’d cut the female population of Manhattan down like “wheat before the sickle,” a generational joke I hadn’t heard for a while.

But the rest of the session was spent on his military career, something he’s quite proud of, and which the press has “totally ignored.”

“You know, Joel, I looked at your letters of discharge and commendation from former officers, and didn’t see any mention of the Phoenix Program or ‘the Company,’ which Darnay told me you’d had something to do with.”

“You have to look for code words and suggestions,” Steinberg scoffed. “They don’t come right out and say, ‘Lieutenant Steinberg helped with secret bombing information.’ That’s not how they do it.”

“Well, can you give me some examples of codes, so that I can see what you mean?”

“Your mind jumps from the general to the particular,” he told me reprovingly. “You suggest a lot more than you say. It’s hard for a person with a very organized, linear, legalistic way of thinking to keep up with you . . . ”

I apologized for my mind, but pressed on. “Why would the major feel he had to encode an ordinary commendation with secret references?” I insisted, then read him the passage from his discharge.

“Read more,” Steinberg said, and stopped me when I got to “Lieutenant Steinberg developed an exceptional capability for personnel and facility management and supervision [that reflected] a high degree of clear thinking and decisive planning.”

“Now, if you can’t see that, it’s because you don’t want to,” he said. “You’re not being serious.”

And so our first session ended.