Detective

to imply there was something I should have included on the fact sheet. I don’t think he really cared about the answer; it was just his way of keeping me off balance and keeping himself one-up. This time his gripe was legit. I should have indicated which arm. Fortunately, I remembered from the pictures I’d just ID.’d.
    “Right,” I said. Then, inspired, remembering the retainer. “But she’s left-handed. She had no trouble signing.”
    He topped me. “So what? I’ll specify in the summons a broken right arm, and they won’t know she’s left-handed.”
    As he whizzed through the rest of the retainers and started in on the pictures, my mind wandered. I was thinking of a case I’d done for Richard early on. It was up in Poughkeepsie, which made it nice, 150-mile roundtrip and six hours. It was a case of a young guy, early twenties, who got drunk in a bar and wound up in a fight with some other young guy over a girl. Later that night, the other guy broke into his apartment and beat the shit out of him with a baseball bat. The police got him, charged him with breaking and entering, assault with a deadly weapon, and attempted murder. It was a big case, bigger than my usual trip-and-fall, and I spent a lot of time on it. I got a whole history on the assailant, got the names of the arresting officers, the district attorney, copies of the charges and court dates. I even got signed statements from two witnesses who lived in the building. All in all, I did a hell of a job.
    “What’s this?” Richard screamed when I showed it to him. “What is this shit?”
    “The facts of the case,” I told him.
    “What facts? What case?” Richard glared at me as if I were an imbecile, which was what I felt like. “You think I’m gonna sue this punk who beat him up? He’s got no money. He’s got no insurance. How the hell am I gonna sue him?”
    Of course, Richard didn’t sue him. And I went back to Poughkeepsie, on my own time, of course, since it was my mistake, and did the job again. It was a learning experience. I’d been seduced by the “glamorous” aspects of the case. But actually, the assault and attempted murder, which I’d thought were so important, were incidental. What it was all about was faulty building security—security that had allowed this maniac to get in and beat up our client. The guy who owned the building and who had rented our client the apartment was to blame, and that’s who Richard sued.
    I was roused from this recollection by the sound of, “Great! Fabulous! What are these?”
    I looked over to see Richard leafing through the shots I had taken of the stairs in Gutierrez’s building.
    “Oh—” I began.
    “This is terrific,” Richard said. “This is just the type of shot I’m always asking you to get. Good angles, good defects, good perspective. Who’s the client?”
    “There’s no client.”
    “What?!”
    “There’s no client. These are just pictures I took—”
    Richard was incensed. “You’re charging me for pictures you took when there’s no client?”
    “I didn’t charge you for those pictures.”
    “Well, you charged me for the film, didn’t you? There’s twelve pictures here; that’s half a roll of film. Didn’t you charge me for that?”
    It was a half hour before I got out of there. I got some new signup kits, and I got some more of Richard’s business cards to give clients, and I got my paycheck. It came to 440 bucks, since I handle my own taxes. My check for expenses was for $215.45. Richard had knocked off $2.50 for half a roll of film.

18.
    I G OT B ACK TO M Y O FFICE a little after one. Fortunately, there’d been no new cases. I wouldn’t have taken them if there had been. I was a wreck.
    I checked the answering machine for messages. There was one from my wife: where the hell was I, why wasn’t I wearing my beeper, why wasn’t the answering machine on before and why was it on now, and where the hell was I again, seeing as how I must have been by the office to turn on the answering machine, and why had I stood up Richard, on payday for Christ’s sake, wasn’t the money the only thing I was doing this for in the first place?
    It was quite a message. I figured Kathy must have called her five or six times.
    There were no other messages. I guess Fred Lazar wasn’t quite as fast as he said he’d be.
    I checked the tracking unit. Still nothing doing.
    I reset the answering machine, and made sure the phone ring was off. I left my beeper on,