Detective

them at the secretaries, and plunging back in again. The door to the right-hand office, Richard’s, remained shut.
    As usual, Kathy and Susan were both on the phone. Kathy had four other calls blinking on her switchboard, Susan three on hers.
    Kathy immediately put her fifth caller on hold to bawl me out for being late. Kathy was about 26, with short-cropped black hair, and a not unattractive face, considering, of course, that I had never seen her smile. I never could figure out just what her problem was, though, uncharitably, it would not have surprised me too much to find out that she was the type of girl that was constantly getting fucked and then dumped.
    Susan put her call on hold to come to my defense, which was embarrassing at the very least. Susan, about 22, with shoulder-length straw hair, and cute as a button in soft pinks and whites was, I imagined, also uncharitably, the type of girl it might have done some good to get fucked and then dumped.
    I survived the ordeal and was consigned to a chair in the corner. I had to move a pile of papers off it onto the floor, causing a paralegal to blanch and rush to retrieve them. He shot me a dirty look as he scurried away.
    All in all, Richard’s office wasn’t set up to receive clients any more than mine was, even less so. But I knew clients came here. That damn paralegal who had just sneered at me signed up clients right here in the office, perhaps in this very chair, any time Susan and Kathy could talk them into coming in. I resented it, of course. Every client signed here was a potential thirty- or forty-dollar job I wouldn’t get. That’s why Kathy and Susan were programmed to get the clients in here if it were at all possible. ’Cause if there was one thing Richard was, it was tight.
    I leaned back in the chair and closed my eyes, and was doing a fairly good imitation of a man sleeping, when the intercom buzzed twenty minutes later, and Kathy bellowed my name and jerked her thumb toward the right-hand door. I got up, grabbed my briefcase, and went in.
    Richard Rosenberg has always reminded me of a cross between a toy poodle and a pit bull. A little man with a pointed nose stuck in the middle of a plump, jowled face, he had a habit of yapping at you incessantly in a high-pitched, high-strung voice until he spotted his opening. Then he lunged for the throat, grabbing and holding on till doomsday. He was, as I have pointed out, frugal to the point of being miserly, and always bitched and moaned over my bills and begrudged me every penny of the small pittance he paid me. Still and all, as many poor people were finding out, he was a hell of a good man to have on your side.
    When I came in, he was on the phone, obviously with an insurance adjuster.
    “Are you kidding?” he shrilled into the phone. “You call that an offer? That’s an insult, not an offer. You call that a settlement? We’re talking about a six-year-old girl here, with facial scars. Did you see those pictures I sent over? The stitches on her cheek? That’s a double layer of stitches, forty-four in all. You know the kind of scar that’s gonna leave? We’re not just talking pain and suffering here, we’re talking permanent disfigurement. I mean who’s gonna marry her, huh? Who’s gonna give her a job? We’re talking earning potential here, on top of pain and suffering and humiliation and embarrassment. I file a 2 million dollar suit, which probably should have been 5, and you come back with an offer like that. If that’s how you feel, let’s go to court, but I’m telling you, you know what will happen then. We’re talking about a six-year-old kid. Just let me get one person on the jury with kids of their own, and you know I can do it, and you are gonna pay through the nose.”
    Richard slammed down the phone, turned to me with no discernible change in his speech pattern, and said, “All right, you’re late, let’s see what you’ve got.”
    I opened the briefcase. Before I’d even fully raised the lid he had the retainer kits out and was pulling out fact sheets.
    “O.K., pedestrian knockdown, hit and run, police didn’t catch the driver, broken leg, great, it’s a No-Fault, money in the bank, next.”
    He pulled out another sheet. “Starshima Weaver, automobile accident, driver insured, broken arm.” He shot a glance at me. “Right or left?”
    One thing I learned about Richard was, no matter how carefully I covered a case, he could always find some question to shoot at me