Detective

me out the front door, closing it behind me. Nice. No one had noticed the absence of the repair truck, unless Tony was mentioning it to Pluto now. I doubted it. It was not the sort of thing that would come up in conversation regarding the sale of a small fortune in coke.
    I wondered what they were talking about. I would have loved to have tuned in on it, but it was just too risky. I got in the car and sped back to McDonald’s. I changed in the restroom for the fourth time and emerged a civilian once again.
    I threw the costume in the trunk and drove back to my parking spot, half a block from the house. The guys in the store had assured me that would be close enough. I got out and opened the trunk of the car. I set up the two tape recorders in the trunk. The first one was tuned into the phone bugs. When I switched it on, nothing happened, since no one was using the phone. The second one, however, was tuned to the bug in the study, and when I switched it on, the tape, being voice-activated, started rolling. I plugged in the headphones.
    Pluto was laughing. “So how’s your girlfriend,” he was saying. “She know about that little escapade with Marsha?”
    “No way,” Tony said. “You think I’m crazy?”
    I didn’t care about Tony’s little escapade with Marsha, and I didn’t care if Pluto thought he was crazy. All of that would keep for me on tape. Right now, I was at high risk and needed to get the hell out of there.
    I thought about taking the package with the costume along with me, but in the end I left it in the trunk. Hell, if they found the bugs on the phone, they wouldn’t need the suit to connect them with the telephone repairman. I locked the recorders and the suit in the trunk, and started walking. I moved right along. I wanted to get out of there fast, and I knew that in a neighborhood like this it would be miles before I could get a cab.

23.
    W HEN Y OU C OME R IGHT D OWN to it, in my regular job, my job for Richard, I’m not so much a private detective as I am a salesman. In a way, I’m not unlike the real estate salesmen in David Mamet’s “Glengarry Glenn Ross.” I get the “premium leads,” that is, the names of people who have called in in response to the TV ads, and I call them, and make appointments, and go and talk to them, and try to close the deal. What I’m selling isn’t land, it’s an attorney but, the principle is the same. The only difference is, I don’t get commissions.
    With one exception.
    I’d been working for Richard for nearly two months before I found out what IB’s were. He’d neglected to tell me, and I probably still wouldn’t know if I hadn’t happened to overhear a couple of the paralegals talking about them one day when I was up to the office to turn in my cases. Unfortunately, however, when I asked them what IB stood for, one of them said “Incentive Bonus” and the other said “Initiative Bonus,” which touched off a huge argument, which to the best of my knowledge has never been resolved, and which did little to enlighten me.
    Eventually I found out that while no one was quite sure what the letters stood for, everyone in the office knew what they meant, and were surprised to find out that I didn’t. And eventually someone, I think Susan, took time out of the argument to fill me in.
    Basically, what it came down to was this. Richard wanted cases. And he wanted lots of cases, as many as he could get. He was much more concerned with quantity than with quality. That’s not to say that he wanted cases that couldn’t be settled or cases he would lose. He just wanted simple, straightforward accident cases, that could be settled expeditiously for a profit.
    What Richard didn’t want were the spectacular cases, the kind you read about in the newspapers, the kind where you’re suing for hundreds of millions of dollars and the defendants are hiring teams of lawyers, and fighting like crazy, and everything takes a whole lot of time and effort and lasts forever. Because Richard wasn’t interested in the notoriety, or publicity, that went along with getting involved in any big splashy case. All he cared about was volume, turning over as many simple, straightforward settlements as possible. When you came right down to it, what Richard wanted to be, basically, was the McDonald’s of the legal profession.
    Which was where EB’s came in. Richard was bringing in a lot of cases through his advertising, but he wanted more. So he offered a $150 finder’s