Scam

back up there and take a look, but frankly I don’t think I’m going to get a thing. The key is the girl. You gotta find her. I want you to go back to the bar tonight during happy hour and turn it upside down. I can’t believe someone there didn’t see me. You either find someone who knows the girl, or you find someone who saw what she did. But I don’t think we’re gonna know what she did until we talk to her. So let’s get her.”
    Pritchert nodded in agreement with himself, opened the door and got out. Which was quite a production, him being so tall. He had to jackknife his way out of the seat. He got out, slammed the door.
    That sound was echoed by another one, closer, right in front of my face. I looked up.
    The transit cop looked smug.
    There was a parking ticket under the wiper blade.

9.
    I WAS IN A FOUL MOOD driving back to the office. First, because I got a forty-dollar ticket for stopping in a No Stopping zone. Second, because my six-foot-six beanpole client was an asshole who couldn’t seem to do anything right, and wouldn’t let me do it for him. And third, because competent though she might be, Mary Mason had not beeped me with another case, leaving me with nothing to do.
    I drove back to the municipal lot, left the car, and went back up to the office.
    The answering machine light was not blinking.
    The mail had long since arrived, bearing nothing of note.
    Great.
    I ran out to the PhotoMat, dropped off the roll of film with the pictures of Betty Brody’s broken leg, and picked up the rolls I’d dropped off the day before. I took the pictures back up to the office to ID.
    ID’ing film is boring and important. It’s boring because the pictures are all the same, and it’s important for the same reason. Take a roll of film with pictures of three black men with casts on their legs. If you wanna know which is which, they better be pictures you took yesterday, not sometime last week. That’s not racist, by the way—three white men with casts on their legs, you’d have the same problem. You just don’t get them that often.
    I finished ID’ing the film, which left me with really nothing to do. Great. Two in the afternoon and I’m done?
    It occurred to me maybe I should take in a movie. That would be one way to get work. Kind of like hopping in the shower when you’re waiting for a phone call. The minute I got in the theater my beeper would go off. Hell, the minute I plunked down the nonrefundable seven fifty for the ticket. But it would be worth it. At twenty bucks an hour and seventy-five cents a mile, a three-hour, twenty-mile sign-up would be seventy-five bucks. So if you looked at it that way, it would be a ten to one return on my investment.
    I picked up the New York Post, tilted back in my desk chair, and turned to the entertainment section.
    I couldn’t find a damn thing I wanted to see. At least, not in a convenient theater at a convenient time. I mean, Broadway in the forties was where I was. By the time I had expanded my search as far as the Third Avenue and 59th Street theaters I knew I was in trouble.
    I flipped to the back for the sports pages. Of course, I’d already seen them early this morning. The Red Sox had lost again, minimal coverage—tough being a Boston fan in New York City. On the other hand, the Yankees had earned a two-page banner headline insinuating they had committed the crime of the century in failing to win.
    The Mets had won. That was a rare enough occasion these days to have prompted the headline “You gotta believe!”
    I flipped a page. Pete Sampras was the men’s singles winner. No surprise there, he’d been winning everything lately.
    I flipped another page. “Knicks embarrassed by Nets, still team to beat in playoffs.”
    I flipped another page.
    Something I’d just read bothered me. I had a feeling it was the Knicks headline. At least they’d be making the playoffs. The Celtics, never having recovered from the death of Reggie Lewis and the retirements of Bird and McHale, would not.
    But that wasn’t it.
    I frowned, flipped back a page. There was the tennis headline, “Sampras men’s singles winner.” That bothered me too. Sampras was the man, but it wasn’t that long ago it was Courier. And how long ago was it Lendl?
    How old am I?
    I sat there, devastated for the thousandth time by the aging process, the newspaper a blur in front of me.
    I focused in again.
    Sampras, men’s singles winner.
    It wasn’t just him.
    The headline wasn’t a