Detective

I was going to be out for the day, all right, but I wasn’t leaving my office. I was going to sleep.
    I had one last chore to perform, however. I got out the tracking unit to check on Red. After all, the guy was carrying around my kilo of coke.
    I switched the unit on. Nothing happened. The red light went on, indicating the batteries were good and the unit was primed for action, but that was it. No beep. No vector. Nothing.
    I dug out the instruction manual and pored through it. I discovered the unit had a safety check button on the side. I pressed it, and the unit immediately began to go “beep, beep, beep,” and the vector arrow popped on and described a 360-degree arc, and then everything shut off again, just as the manual said it would. So the unit was working. So where the hell was Red?
    There were several possibilities, none of them good. He might have found the transmitter. Could they trace me through it? No. I’d paid cash. The most they could establish was where it was sold. That would lead them back to Florida, which wouldn’t be that bad. But they’d know someone was on to them. They’d know Red had been tracked to Arroyo, and they could figure Arroyo had been tracked to Pluto. That would piss them off immensely, and probably make the operation too dangerous to continue, even if there was anything left to salvage.
    And if they’d found the transmitter they’d also found the coke. What would they make of that? Who cares? It would probably confuse the hell out of them, but it was kind of incidental. The most it would mean would be I’d lost my chance of framing Pluto with it, if that had ever been a viable idea to begin with. It almost certainly wouldn’t be if they knew I was on to them.
    The other possibility was that the transmitter had fallen off. Not as bad, but not too good, either. On the plus side, I’d be entitled to a refund on the unit if I ever got back to Miami. On the minus side, one of the players in my little drama would be driving around with a kilo of coke on the bottom of his car, and I’d have no way to find it.
    That caught me up short. Christ, I must be tired. What did I mean, no way to find it? I had the guy’s license number.
    I went over and picked up the phone. A reassuring “beep, beep, beep” stopped me in my tracks. Thank god. Red was back.
    I slammed down the phone and lunged for the unit. I saw at once something was wrong. No vector arrow. Christ, where the fuck was—
    Then I realized. The unit was quiet. It was my goddamn beeper that had gone off. Richard’s office was beeping me with a case. Well, screw them. I wasn’t going to do it.
    I shut off the beeper and picked up the phone, but I didn’t call Richard’s office. I called Fred Lazar.
    Fred was surprised to hear from me (“Christ, I didn’t say I could do it that quick”), but I told him I was calling about something else, that I needed another favor. Could he trace a license plate number for me? He allowed as to how he could, and from his chuckle, I inferred that meant he knew a girl at Motor Vehicles too.
    I hung up and called Richard’s office to tell ’em to go to hell, but it didn’t go exactly as planned. I got Kathy, who was in a foul mood, even for her.
    “Where the hell are you?” she screamed into the phone. “Do you know it’s nearly eleven?”
    She was in such a snit, and I was in such a fog, it was a while before the information managed to filter through and sink in. Christ! I’d been so wrapped up in the Albrect thing I’d completely forgotten. Today was the day I was due at Richard’s office to turn in my cases. I was two hours late.

17.
    R ICHARD R OSENBERG W AS A G OOD ten years my junior. Like me, he had gotten a liberal arts education. Unlike me, when he had discovered his education had left him totally unprepared to deal with the outside world, he had gone back to college and studied law. He was a good student, graduating in the top one percent of his class, and as soon as he passed the bar, he received handsome job offers from several prestigious firms. He turned them all down. His reason was television.
    In 1978, when the law was changed and attorneys were finally allowed to advertise, a whole new field opened up. Civil suits, once considered nickel and dime, were suddenly big business. The reason was public awareness. It used to be that if a guy fell down and broke his leg, he figured it was his tough luck. It never would have occurred to him that he was entitled