Detective

fee to anyone in the office who brought in a new case that he accepted.
    When I heard that I couldn’t believe it. Why didn’t somebody tell me about this? I mean, my average case is three hours, or thirty bucks. And here he’s paying $150 for a single signup. It was too good to be true.
    After that, I took extra retainer kits with me wherever I went, and I kept my eyes open. And sure enough, two days later there I was in the pediatrics ward in Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx signing up an eight-year-old boy who’d fallen off the swing in the school playground, and looking covetously at the boy in the next bed with his leg in traction whose mother had just come to see him, and wondering how I could make a move on them without appearing to be too seedy. The best plan I could think of was to talk very loud, hoping the mother would overhear and approach me.
    It happened that the mother of the kid I was signing up was Hispanic and didn’t speak any English and had brought along another woman to interpret. So I was relaying messages back and forth from the interpreter to the mother to the kid, who spoke some English, and occasionally answered directly back to me. At the same time I was keeping an eye on the other bed to see if the other mother was picking up on the conversation. So I almost missed it when the interpreter said to me, during a lull in the translation, “You know, my daughter was hit by a car last week.” I did a double-take, and then looked at her to see if what I thought was happening was happening, and sure enough, what she was trying to find out was whether I could help her daughter too.
    I certainly could.
    The woman’s name was Maria Alvarez. She was about 30, bright, and intelligent, and I would have loved to have talked to her about her daughter’s case, but while we were still signing the papers for the kid in the hospital my beeper went off, and when I called in Richard had an “emergency” signup in Brooklyn and I had to run. I took her telephone number, called her that night, made an appointment, and drove out there first thing the next morning.
    Maria Alvarez lived in the Melrose Houses, a huge project in the South Bronx running between Courtlandt and Morris Avenues from East 153rd to East 156th Street. It’s one of those projects made up of a whole series of separate buildings, where the street address is a main gate that lets you into the complex and then you wander around a huge courtyard looking for your particular building.
    When I found mine, there were a couple of six-foot-four teenagers hanging out in the lobby. Maria Alvarez lived in 6D but, to tell you the truth, I find teenagers even more scary than adults, and I wasn’t too keen on having those guys in the elevator with me if they chose to come, so I took the stairs, and I was breathing a little hard when Maria Alvarez answered the door and let me in.
    So now I’m sitting on a couch in the living room of her apartment, and Maria is sitting in a chair, and there’s a four-year-old girl playing on the floor, and I’m filling out the fact sheet and dollar signs are flashing in my head. And Maria’s just as intelligent as she’d seemed to be, and she has all the right information, and is giving me all the right answers: yes, it was a hit-and-run at the corner of Willis Avenue and East 140th Street; yes, the police came, from the 40th precinct; yes, they caught the driver; yes, the ambulance came and took her to Lincoln Hospital. And Maria’s smiling and talking, and the kid’s playing on the floor, and I’m writing down the information, and everything’s going great, and at the same time I can’t help feeling that something is wrong. But I can’t for the life of me figure out what it is. And I go on with the information about the hospital, and I get to, “What were her injuries?” and Maria points to the girl on the floor and says, “Well, there’s a bruise on her leg, and there’s a scratch on her cheek, it’s faded now, but right there, you see it?” And I look at the kid on the floor and suddenly I realize what’s been bothering me. No cast. No scars. Nothing. Just a happy kid playing on the floor. No injury!
    And I’m furious. I don’t let it show, but I’m furious. Here’s a hundred and fifty bucks out the window. I mean, Richard’s really gonna file suit for a bruise and a scratch. No injury, no case. And I won’t even get paid for my time and mileage, ’cause I wasn’t assigned it, I did it on