Scam

Daniels.”
    “Shelly Daniels. And the phone number?”
    I gave it to him. Waited while he wrote it down.
    “Now then,” I said. “Before we go any further, you owe me some money.”
    “How much?”
    “Quite a bit. The two hundred you gave me I paid out in bribes.”
    “Bribes?”
    “A hundred bucks to the bartender, and a hundred to the girl. That wipes that out. So you owe me for my time and expenses so far. I put in eight hours yesterday, I had two hours before. That’s five hundred dollars so far.”
    “Eight hours?”
    “You can’t just walk up on the runway of a topless bar and start talking to the dancers. I had to wait for her to leave.”
    “Of course. Okay, you’ll get the money.”
    “So you want me to go ahead with this? Interview the agent?”
    There was a pause. Then, “I don’t see the need. The agent’s only important to contact the girl. I can do that. All right, fine. So you’ll be working. What if I need to reach you?”
    “I’ll be on the beeper. Same as before. You can call the office, have them page me. You still have the number?”
    “Yeah, I got it. Okay. Good work. I’ll talk to you later.”
    And he hung up.
    I blinked.
    Good work?
    I wondered what the guy sounded like when he wasn’t happy about something.

17.
    M ARY M ASON BEEPED ME TWICE.
    Doo dah. Doo dah.
    Mary Mason beeped me twice.
    All the doo dah day.
    The first beep was for a boy who fell off a playground swing in Brooklyn.
    The second was for a girl who was hit by a car in Queens.
    The girl in Queens was dead.
    Which was a hell of a sobering note.
    I’d had a trip-and-fall in Harlem and a trip-and-fall in the Bronx. Those were the two cases I’d told Cranston Pritchert about. I’d gotten beeped on my way to the second appointment, called in and been given the case in Brooklyn. I was on my way back from that when I was beeped off the Interboro Parkway and given the one in Queens.
    So the fact is, I’d had the jingle Mary Mason beeped me twice in my head when I called in.
    And then she tells me the kid’s dead.
    Jesus.
    Of course, you get them sometimes. You’re dealing with personal injury, and the most extreme personal injury is death.
    A case like that is always rough.
    It’s rougher when it’s a kid.
    At least there’d been the passage of time. It wasn’t like it had happened today. The hit-and-run had taken place last week. So the family would have had time to adjust.
    But still.
    I was not a happy camper as I rang the doorbell.
    Or while I listened to the mother’s story.
    Maria Perez was twenty-four years of age. Divorced. The mother of two.
    Now the mother of one.
    She would have been attractive if she hadn’t been distraught. She cried telling the story. I’d known she would.
    Maria Perez had been crossing Jamaica Avenue with her children to buy a shaved ice. Her one-year-old boy was in a stroller.
    Her four-year-old girl was not.
    A gypsy cab had run the light and run her daughter down.
    “I yelled at her to look out, but she just stood there, she didn’t move,” the mother said, before dissolving into sobs.
    It killed me.
    And what really tore me up was, bad as I felt for this woman with her tragic loss, I couldn’t help thinking why?
    Why did you yell at her? Why did you have to yell at her? Why was she walking by herself? Why weren’t you holding her hand?
    I was bummed as hell driving back to Manhattan. As you might expect. But it wasn’t just the sign-up I’d been through. It was also the fact that Mary Mason had beeped me twice, and each time I’d reacted like Pavlov’s dog, salivating at the expectation that the call would be from Cranston Pritchert, relenting and telling me, yes, of course, go interview the agent, he should have said so in the first place.
    Only it hadn’t been.
    And by the time I got back to Manhattan at three-thirty that afternoon, I had come to the unhappy realization it wasn’t going to be.
    I parked in the midtown parking garage and went back up to the office just on the off chance he’d left a message on the answering machine. But of course he hadn’t.
    So, there I was, three-thirty in the afternoon in midtown Manhattan with nothing to do.
    Except.
    My office was on 47th Street, just off Seventh Avenue.
    Shelly Daniels’ office was on Eighth.
    I wondered how close.
    I got out the phone book, turned to the street conversion page, which tells you where the addresses on the avenues are located. To get the cross street for an address on Eighth