Write me a Letter

cousin’s Vietnamese ricery, which was right next door to me, for help yet again.
    I answered a sad, xeroxed letter from an ex-cop who wanted to know if I needed any part-time assistance, which I didn’t; the sad bit came at the end and said, ”PS: Haven’t touched a drop for two weeks!” Talk about a giveaway. Maybe my memory was going but didn’t I once get the identical letter from him, some years back? Maybe it was from another ex-cop who drank—who could blame them? I answered a letter from a potential new client, a department store in one of the nearby malls, wanting to know if I offered a debt collection service and if so, could I please supply details. I wrote back saying regretfully I could not offer such a service as all my manpower was tied up at present. I’d done a spot of debt collection in my time, though, back east. I worked in tandem with Mickey, who was so tough that when we went a-calling on creditors, huge, scarred, and battered old me played the good guy, the one willing to give the poor sap a break, and him the heavy. Debt collecting can pay off as you usually get about a third of what you collect, but the work does have its perils as the kind of debts we collected on, like shylocking and gambling IOUs, being themselves illegal, had to be collected hors de law. Which, in practice, meant threatening to do serious physical damage to every bone in the creditor’s body except his check-signing hand. And often, of course, it does not need underlining, doing more than threaten. I finally had enough of it one winter day and coldcocked Mickey from behind, using the same baseball bat he’d used on some poor welsher’s kneecap, and then it was ”Feets, do your stuff!” I was on a fast train west before he came to.
    Then I thumbed through an interesting tome my pal Benny had left behind one day, Why SOBs Succeed and Nice Guys Fail in a Small Business, paying particular attention to chapter 5: ”How to Teach Legal and Financial Vultures Humility.” Lotsa good ideas there....
    After a while I closed up and nipped in next door but two to Mrs. Morales’ Taco-Burger stand and tucked away some chewy burritos and a bowl of refried (more than once) beans and a bottle of Corona, left my customary generous tip, then went back to the office and waited some more.
    Willing Boy finally showed up about a quarter to two. He stopped just outside my plate-glass front window, swung his Yamaha up on its stand, locked it, then came in, swinging his helmet by the strap.
    ”Greetings, Prof,” he said with a wave of one black-gloved hand. Ever since I’d started wearing glasses a few months back, he and noodlehead had derived considerable humor by calling me Prof, as if I cared one way or the other.
    ”Likewise I’m sure, Willing Boy,” I said. ”Take a pew.” He threw his lanky, leather-clad frame down in the spare chair, grinned at me, got his foot-long plastic comb from a back pocket, and gave his gleaming blond shoulder-length locks a good workout. Willing Boy was so handsome he could have had tresses down to and including his waist and still be handsome; no wonder the twerp was so dippy about him.
    ”So how’s it going, Prof?” he said, tucking his cootie-catcher away again. ”Haven’t see you for a couple of weeks.” It had actually been ten days ago when he’d spent two extremely profitable (for him) hours in my employ got up as a chauffeur, driving me around. In a fifty-dollar-per-hour rented white Daimler, too, I might just mention in passing, as my own pink-and-blue Nash Metropolitan didn’t seem the appropriate wheels for the occasion, which was a get-together of me, two Italian gents, a county sheriff, and a Canadian ”businessman” in a bonded warehouse down near the convention center in Long Beach.
    ”Weird,” I said, ”is how it’s going. Most bizarre. How did you get along with the little lady?”
    ”What about her!” he said. ”Phew. Did you see that mouth?”
    ”I was too busy looking at her lips,” I said. ”So where’d she go?” I would have bet my last Mexican dollar she didn’t go shopping for grapes and then go to the Hollywood Kaiser.
    ”Around the corner,” Willing Boy said, stretching out his long legs. ”She walked right past me.”
    ”Then what?”
    ”Then she gets into a blue Ford driven by an older guy, then they talk for a bit, then they drive away.”
    ”I don’t suppose the car had a license plate.”
    He reeled the number off from