Detective

Jonathan Dursky,” I said.
    “Slide it through the slot,” came the voice.
    I held up the receipt book. “Sorry,” I said. “You have to sign for it.”
    The plate on the peephole slid back in place. There was a pause, during which I held my breath, and then I heard the reassuring click of the deadbolts being unlocked. The greatest hi-fi system in the world never sounded so good. One, two, three. . . they were done, and the door swung open.
    Standing there was a frail, doddering old. . . woman!
    I couldn’t believe it. I’d blown it again. What an idiot. It’d never occurred to me that someone other than Dursky might come to the door. This old lady might be his wife or his housekeeper or his mother or his grandmother. It really didn’t matter. Whoever she was, she wasn’t him.
    And before the “words were even out of her mouth, I knew what she was about to say.
    “Where do I sign?”
    It was too much. I felt like saying, “Forget it,” and getting back in my car and driving away. But I had worked too hard and come too far to just let it go. And so I said a stupid thing. A hollow, transparent lie.
    “You can’t sign for it. He has to sign for it.”
    She looked at me with a look that told me I had just said a stupid thing. “But I’m his wife,” she said. “I always sign for him.”
    “Not with me, you don’t,” I said, improvising wildly. “We’ve had trouble with unauthorized people receiving telegrams, and my boss is cracking down. I could lose my job over this.”
    She just stared at me for a few seconds.
    Then she slammed the door. One by one, the deadbolts clicked back.
    I turned around and sat down on the top step. I wanted to cry. Twenty hours down the tubes. Richard’s case down the tubes. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Whatever made me think Dursky would come to the door himself? Why hadn’t I thought of something clever enough to get me into the house, to guarantee personal contact, to guarantee my getting to him? Now he was doubly warned and we’d never get him. He’d sit in his house till doomsday, rather than open that door, and—
    Behind me, once again, came the familiar click. I sprang to my feet and turned around. Another click. And a third. And the door opened.
    Standing there in the doorway, leaning on a walker, was an emaciated old man—eighty-five if he was a day. He looked so fragile and helpless that I felt a pang of remorse at having tricked him. Then I remembered how rich and shifty and tricky he was, and what a fucking sleazebag he was, and how he deserved everything he was about to get.
    “Jonathan Dursky?” I asked.
    “Yeah,” he said. “Where do I sign?”
    I slapped the summons into his hand. He knew at once what it was, and knew he’d been had. He jerked his hand back as if the summons were hot, and slammed and locked the door, leaving the summons lying on the ground at my feet. It didn’t matter. I had touched him with it, and it was a legal service. The sleazebag was mine.
    I filled out my affidavit, and sent in a whopping bill to Richard, 22 hours and 264 miles. I felt terrific. I was on top of the world.
    A week later I was up in the office talking to one of Richard’s paralegals about serving the summons, since it had now become my favorite story, and he asked me who the client was, and when I told him, he said, oh yeah, he remembered the case, in fact, he’d helped develop it. I asked him what he meant. He said it was a case where there was tremendous liability, because the boy’s leg was badly broken, and might never heal right, but there was no defect on the steps where he fell down. Since there had been no police on the scene, though, and no ambulance since the mother had taken the kid to the hospital herself, and thus no witnesses of any kind, he had looked around the neighborhood until he found a house where the front steps were broken, and he had taken pictures of that, and then looked up the owners, and Richard had filed suit against them.
    The guy was pleased as punch when he told me all this, but my world had just collapsed. Golden and Dursky had nothing to do with the summons I’d just served. They had been picked at random as defendants. Golden and Dursky were innocent. Golden and Dursky weren’t the sleazebags. I was the sleazebag. I was the sneaky, tricky son of a bitch who had managed to nail two innocent men.
    These happy thoughts raced through my head as I followed the limo to a house in Woodmere not unlike the one where I