Detective

a key to get to the mailboxes, so I followed him in.
    Craft Associates was one of the doors on the third floor where I had found no one in. I pounded on the door again, not expecting anything, and sure enough, no one was in again. I hung around about fifteen more minutes and called it a day.
    I went back three more times on three separate days, at different times of the day, which is the legal requirement, and then did a nail-and-mail. What that consists of is taping a copy of the summons to the door, and then mailing a copy of the summons to that address. I got a two-inch roll of masking tape and plastered the summons to the door of Craft Associates, and then drove down to Richard’s office to turn in my bill.
    Which Richard refused to pay. “Are you crazy?” he screamed in his high-pitched, nasal you’re-ruining-my-life tone of voice. “Are you nuts? I have a million-dollar case here, and you’re kicking it out the window. If these guys are so slick they don’t even put the name of their company on their office, which is nothing more than a mail-drop, do you think they’re gonna fall for a nail-and-mail?” Richard put his fingers and thumbs together, held his hands to the sides of his face, and said, as if addressing a child, “They never got it. They’ll claim they never got it. I’ll have to prove they did. I can’t do it. I lose a million-dollar suit.”
    “Yeah, but—”
    “You gotta understand, you’re dealing with sleazebags here. They’re tricky, and they know all the angles. You send it regular mail, they never got it. You send it registered mail, it’s a red flag to them, they never pick it up.” Richard shook his head. “How did you send it?”
    “I didn’t send it yet. See—”
    “What?!”
    “I was going to send it out from here. See, I need to Xerox another copy to—”
    Richard couldn’t wait for me to finish. “Get it back! Get it back!” he said, practically jumping up and down. “They read that, it does nothing but let them know we’re on to them. We’ll never serve them, then. Get the hell up to Yonkers and get it off the goddamn door!”
    I broke all speed laws back to Yonkers but, of course, it was gone. I could see tape marks and traces of adhesive left on the door, but that was it.
    I had a copy of the summons in my pocket, so I pounded on the door again, but with little hope. Of course, there was no one there.
    I hated like hell to go back and report to Richard, but there was nothing else to do. On the way back I kept trying to think of some way I could make up for the fact that I’d really blown it. The best I could come up with was staking out the front door and waiting to see who showed up to pick up the mail.
    “Great!” was the way Richard, dripping sarcasm, responded to the suggestion. “Wonderful idea! You think I wanna pay you ten bucks an hour to sit and stare at a mailbox? You wanna do something useful, get up to the County Clerk’s office and see if you can dig up the corporate papers and get these jokers’ home addresses.”
    So I drove up to White Plains and spent six hours at the County Clerk’s office going through volume after volume of listings. Talk about wasting time, I thought. Wait’ll Richard sees this fucking bill. And then I found it. There was no listing for G. & D. Realty, or G. & D. anything for that matter, nor was there any listing for Craft Associates, but there was a listing for a limited partnership, Craft Partners, with the same address as G. & D. Realty and Craft Associates. The partners were listed as Marvin Golden and Jonathan Dursky.
    I copied down the numbers from the log, filled out a form, gave it to the clerk at the desk, and five minutes later I was looking at a partnership agreement called Craft Partners between Golden and Dursky. Home addresses were listed.
    I Xeroxed the document, and set out on my Golden and Dursky hunt. Golden’s address was in Englewood Cliffs. Dursky’s was in Woodmere.
    Now the thing about summonses is, people don’t want ’em. You can’t call up a guy and say, “Hey, I got a summons for you, you want me to bring it on out?” You have to drop in on them, hope they’re home, and hand them the thing when they come to the door. That’s why, with Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, right over the George Washington Bridge, and Woodmere way the hell on the South Shore of Long Island, I tried the New Jersey address first. If I hit pay dirt there my job was over, since I could serve both