Detective

snapped the briefcase shut, jumped up, and did my impression of a guy minding his own business looking for his car, just in case anyone was coming. No one was.
    I bent back down and inspected my work. It wasn’t bad. The straps were short, and I’d pulled the suction cups as far apart as they’d go, to keep the straps up tight. The bag hung down, of course, but not that much. It cleared the ground by a good 6 inches. Of course if you bent down and looked you’d see it, but you had to be looking for it. From a standing position it didn’t show at all.
    I left the Essex, took a taxi back to the Sheraton, and went up to my room. I packed the tracking unit in my briefcase and the grinder in the paper bag the suction cups had come in.
    I checked out, got in my car, and drove to the airport. On the way I stopped and threw the paper bag with the grinder into a trash can on a street corner. It still had four or five good lines in it. Some bag lady was in for one hell of a time.

14.
    T HE N EXT D AY I F OUND O UT why cocaine is so psychologically addictive. There is no hangover quite so bad as a coke hangover, at least none that I know. You’ve been up so high, and suddenly you’re down so low. Who wouldn’t want to feel good again when they’re feeling so bad?
    Of course, it was a surprise to me. I’d gotten high in Miami, and come down in Miami, and I thought that was all there was to it. Naive me. The next day is a real kick in the ass, and I felt like shit that morning as I drove out to Brooklyn to see Mrs. Rabinowitz.
    The case, however, was, as I’d imagined, a dream assignment. Nice old apartment building, clean lobby, automatic elevator, Jewish tenants. Mrs. Rabinowitz was even pretty nice, considering I’d stood her up three times. And for once, the case was simple and straightforward. The roughest part of the form I had to fill out was the blank marked “HISTORY.” There were five blank lines under it, but often they weren’t nearly enough, since clients’ complicated and sprawling accounts of their mishaps often spilled over onto the back page, filled it, and continued on into the pages of the yellow legal pad I carry for taking witness statements. Mrs. Rabinowitz’s said, in its entirety: “Client tripped on a hole in the sidewalk and fell down.”
    Also, many clients have a medical history that could fill a small novel, with frequent visits to a number of hospitals, a myriad of doctors, none of whom agreed with each other, and courses of treatment to be followed and understood only by those with degrees in medicine—preferably specialists. Mrs. Rabinowitz had broken one leg, gone to one hospital, once where one doctor had put it in one cast.
    I was done in half an hour. I’d have been done in half the time, except Mrs. Rabinowitz interrupted me incessantly in her eagerness to hear the grisly details of the automobile accident that had delayed me the day before. She seemed a nice old lady, so I created a particularly gruesome version, giving firsthand accounts of severed limbs, copious quantities of blood, and even—though suspecting I was pushing it a bit—a decapitation. Mrs. Rabinowitz ate it up, and I was glad, for she was a game old lady, and even accompanied me downstairs on her crutches to point out the defect in the sidewalk that had felled her. It was a few buildings down the street from her. It was a beauty, and I was able not only to get pictures, but also the street number of the building it was in front of. All in all, a profitable morning. Richard would be happy.
    I offered to see Mrs. Rabinowitz back to her building, but no, she was heading for the drugstore on the corner, so I said goodbye and got out of there fast. I knew she was on her way to pick up the Post and the Daily News to look for pictures of the accident on the Major Deegan, and I didn’t want to stick around and see her disappointed.
     My beeper went off just before I got to my car. That was a blessing. Usually the damn thing went off when I was on the Grand Central Parkway or some such highway where I’d have to get off and drive all over creation to find a phone. When I did find one, it would either be broken, or be occupied by some Spanish-speaking woman who was planning her life. And once I did find an unoccupied working phone, I would discover that there was no easy way of getting back on the highway from where I was.
    I went to the pay phone on the corner. It was unoccupied and working. I dialed 0, 212,