Detective

there, and I had blown it, muffed it, chickened out. Oh, I could justify my decision a lot of ways. If I said I was driving to Miami, I’d have to go through with it. How could I do that? I don’t have the time. I don’t have the money. What could I tell my wife? What could I tell Richard?
    But that didn’t really wash. I didn’t have to go to Miami. There would be ways to get out of that. Hell, I didn’t even have to agree to the proposition, assuming that Tony got around to making me one. All I had to do was say “Yes, I’m driving to Miami,” and see what happened next. But I hadn’t done that.
    I always knew I had my limitations. I’m not particularly strong, but I’ve always been athletic. In high school I was the high scorer on the basketball team, the shortstop on the baseball team, the first man on the tennis team, and the goalie on the soccer team. But those are all skill sports, sports requiring coordination and finesse, but not great strength. I could never have played football. They’d have eaten me alive. Anything requiring confrontation, aggression, or assertion was just beyond me.
    My wife was right, I realized, in her presumed opinion of me. The reason I never made it as a writer, or an actor for that matter, was that I never had the stuff. I never had the courage to get out there and hustle, to confront new situations, to meet new people, to assert myself, to get ahead.
    And it wasn’t just fear of failure. It was fear, plain and simple. Just fear. When push came to shove, when the chips were down, I was a bloody fucking coward.
    It was a hell of a realization to come to at four-thirty in the morning on a dark, deserted street corner in midtown Manhattan.

9.
    I F ELT L IKE H ELL R IDING the subway downtown the next morning, and it wasn’t just the fact that I’d gotten approximately an hour and a half of sleep. I felt like hell because I was on my way to my office to check my mail and pick up my messages before I headed out to Brooklyn to sign up Mrs. Rabinowitz and her broken leg, when in my heart of hearts what I really wanted to be doing was catching an early morning flight down to Miami to check out what was in Martin Albrect’s safe deposit box. That’s what I should have been doing. That’s what any fucking detective worth his salt would have been doing. But I couldn’t do it. Even if I had the guts to say “fuck it,” to leave Mrs. Rabinowitz in the lurch one more time, to kiss off the day’s work and head South, I simply couldn’t do it. Because, unlike any detective I’ve ever heard about, I didn’t have the money. Even if I went to the cash machine and drew out every penny left in my account, that, added to what I had left from the casino, wouldn’t be enough. I had a Master Charge card, but it had a $1500 limit, and I’d been hovering in the high 1400’s for the last year and a half. If I presented it at the airlines, the computer would register “tilt,” and the nice girl at the airline counter would take out a scissors and cut my card into little pieces right then and there, as she had been trained to do.
    What made this even more frustrating was the fact that I was sure I could do it. I was sure it would work. I had Albrect’s key and I had Albrect’s bank I.D. card. True, the card had Albrect’s picture on it and not mine, but that didn’t seem too serious a problem to me.
    Half to see if I could do it, and half to torture myself, I stopped at a shop on 42nd Street and had my picture taken in the automatic photo booth. I went into another little shop and asked them if they could make me a photo I.D. They said “sure.” I gave them Albrect’s I.D. and my photo, and ten minutes and five dollars later I was walking out of the place with a bank I.D. absolutely identical to Albrect’s, with the exception of the fact that it had my picture on it.
    As I had expected, having the I.D. only made it worse. I was in a hell of a frame of mind when I put my key in the door and unlocked the office.
    The mail was already there lying on the floor. It would be bills. Whenever the mail came early, it was always bills. This time there were three of them, and they couldn’t have come at a worse time. What with my casino withdrawal, it was going to be touch and go whether I could cover them.
    The first bill was from the Penny Copy Center—$7.80 for Xeroxing a hundred copies of my time sheets, the daily vouchers that I turned in bi-weekly to Richard’s office in