by Parnell Hall
I was determined to get them. For one thing, I owed it to Richard. I had fucked this thing up for him, and now it was up to me to make it right. For another thing, Richard never paid for an assignment until it was completed, and I had already invested almost twenty hours in the damn case, for which I wouldn’t get a dime until the summons was served. But most of all, I had to get them for me. My self-esteem as a private detective, never particularly high, was at an all-time low, and I was feeling particularly stupid, incompetent, bungling, useless.
I swore I’d get them.
I’d failed with Golden, but I still had a shot at Dursky. His address in Woodmere would be a private house, no doorman to contend with. But he’d be forewarned. He’d know I’d tried to serve Golden, that I had Golden’s address, so he’d assume I had his address, too. He’d be expecting me. He’d take precautions. He wouldn’t open the door.
For a service to be legal, there must be physical contact. It can be slight—you can touch the guy with the summons and drop it on the ground and that’s fine—but there has to be some. So Dursky had to open the door.
I’d never gone to such lengths to serve a summons before, but I was desperate. And what I did made me feel almost like a real private detective, at least for a little while.
I dug through my desk drawers and found an old telegram someone had sent me back when Tommie was born. The envelope was a little faded, but I figured it would pass.
I borrowed an old UPS book from my father-in-law’s business. With it folded open and a carbon in place so you couldn’t see the UPS emblem, it could pass for a Western Union receipt book.
I got up early the next morning, put on a jacket and cap, which I figured was as close as Western Union messengers would come to wearing a uniform these days, and drove out to Woodmere with the telegram and receipt book. I got there a little after seven, figuring if a guy as wealthy as Dursky got up and went to work any earlier than that, perhaps he deserved to keep his money.
The address in Woodmere turned out to be a sprawling three-story stone mansion on an ungodly large lot. I parked my car in the street, and walked up the twisting drive to the house.
The front door was a massive thing of carved oak. It had a peephole in the middle, a large brass doorknocker, a mail slot, and three substantial-looking locks. The locks were my main concern. If I were to succeed, they would have to open.
I rang the bell. There was long wait, during which I thought, Jesus Christ, maybe nobody is at home. Then I heard movement behind the door—slow, shuffling steps, and then the sound of the metal plate covering the peephole being slid back. A thin voice said, “Who is it?”
I held up the telegram in front of the peephole. “Telegram for Jonathan Dursky,” I said.
“Slide it through the slot,” came the voice.
I held up the receipt book. “Sorry,” I said. “You have to sign for it.”
The plate on the peephole slid back in place. There was a pause, during which I held my breath, and then I heard the reassuring click of the deadbolts being unlocked. The greatest hi-fi system in the world never sounded so good. One, two, three. . . they were done, and the door swung open.
Standing there was a frail, doddering old. . . woman!
I couldn’t believe it. I’d blown it again. What an idiot. It’d never occurred to me that someone other than Dursky might come to the door. This old lady might be his wife or his housekeeper or his mother or his grandmother. It really didn’t matter. Whoever she was, she wasn’t him.
And before the “words were even out of her mouth, I knew what she was about to say.
“Where do I sign?”
It was too much. I felt like saying, “Forget it,” and getting back in my car and driving away. But I had worked too hard and come too far to just let it go. And so I said a stupid thing. A hollow, transparent lie.
“You can’t sign for it. He has to sign for it.”
She looked at me with a look that told me I had just said a stupid thing. “But I’m his wife,” she said. “I always sign for him.”
“Not with me, you don’t,” I said, improvising wildly. “We’ve had trouble with unauthorized people receiving telegrams, and my boss is cracking down. I could lose my job over this.”
She just stared at me for a few seconds.
Then she slammed the door. One by one, the deadbolts clicked back.
I turned around and sat down on the top step. I wanted to cry. Twenty hours down the tubes. Richard’s case down the tubes. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Whatever made me think Dursky would come to the door himself? Why hadn’t I thought of something clever enough to get me into the house, to guarantee personal contact, to guarantee my getting to him? Now he was doubly warned and we’d never get him. He’d sit in his house till doomsday, rather than open that door, and—
Behind me, once again, came the familiar click. I sprang to my feet and turned around. Another click. And a third. And the door opened.
Standing there in the doorway, leaning on a walker, was an emaciated old man—eighty-five if he was a day. He looked so fragile and helpless that I felt a pang of remorse at having tricked him. Then I remembered how rich and shifty and tricky he was, and what a fucking sleazebag he was, and how he deserved everything he was about to get.
“Jonathan Dursky?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “Where do I sign?”
I slapped the summons into his hand. He knew at once what it was, and knew he’d been had. He jerked his hand back as if the summons were hot, and slammed and locked the door, leaving the summons lying on the ground at my feet. It didn’t matter. I had touched him with it, and it was a legal service. The sleazebag was mine.
I filled out my affidavit, and sent in a whopping bill to Richard, 22 hours and 264 miles. I felt terrific. I was on top of the world.
A week later I was up in the office talking to one of Richard’s paralegals about serving the summons, since it had now become my favorite story, and he asked me who the client was, and when I told him, he said, oh yeah, he remembered the case, in fact, he’d helped develop it. I asked him what he meant. He said it was a case where there was tremendous liability, because the boy’s leg was badly broken, and might never heal right, but there was no defect on the steps where he fell down. Since there had been no police on the scene, though, and no ambulance since the mother had taken the kid to the hospital herself, and thus no witnesses of any kind, he had looked around the neighborhood until he found a house where the front steps were broken, and he had taken pictures of that, and then looked up the owners, and Richard had filed suit against them.
The guy was pleased as punch when he told me all this, but my world had just collapsed. Golden and Dursky had nothing to do with the summons I’d just served. They had been picked at random as defendants. Golden and Dursky were innocent. Golden and Dursky weren’t the sleazebags. I was the sleazebag. I was the sneaky, tricky son of a bitch who had managed to nail two innocent men.
These happy thoughts raced through my head as I followed the limo to a house in Woodmere not unlike the one where I had served the summons. The limo pulled into the driveway and stopped. I eyed the street number on the mailbox as I drove by. I kept on going. It was late, I was tired, and stopping would have been risky. I’d done enough for one night. I had Pluto’s address now. Like Golden and Dursky, he wouldn’t get away.
16.
I OVERSLEPT THE NEXT MORNING, which wasn’t surprising, since it had been nearly six when I finally got home and sneaked back into bed. I woke up in a terrible mood, had a screaming argument with my wife over nothing at all, and stormed out of the apartment. I had breakfast at a greasy spoon on Broadway, and tried to pull myself together. When I finished it was after nine, so I stopped by the bank and deposited $200 of Albrect’s money in our account. Now I had a $200 withdrawal and a $200 deposit that weren’t reflected in the checkbook, but at least the balance would be the same.
I took the subway down to my office. I fell asleep, and overshot
my stop, which isn’t easy to do standing up, but I was really tired. I woke up at 34th Street, thinking I was at 42nd Street, and started to get off the train. I immediately knew something was wrong. The Penn Station stop is like no other stop on the entire subway system. It is the only express station where you cannot transfer directly from the express to the local, even though the trains stop right next to each other. You have to go downstairs from one, and back upstairs to the other. At Penn Station, you get out the local side of the local train, rather than the express side. There is no platform between the two trains. There is, however, a platform between the uptown express and the downtown express, so it is perfectly easy to transfer from one of those trains to the other, though there is no reason at all why anyone would ever want to do so, unless, of course, they had missed their stop.
I had missed my stop, but I was on the downtown local, which didn’t help me at all. As soon as the door opened on the local side, I knew I’d screwed up, so I decided to stay on the train. I took it down to Chambers Street and walked over to the Department of Buildings.
I gave the address of Rosa’s connection to a young man at a computer, who punched it in and gave me the block and lot number for the building. I filled out a form requesting information on the ownership of the building with that block and lot number, handed it in, and sat down to wait. Fifteen minutes later my name was called and I was presented with a computer printout of the ownership and tax record of the building. For the past ten years the building had been owned by a Mr. Alan Donaldson, who also listed it as his permanent address. Bingo. Another of the players-to-be-named-later identified.
Of course, it would have been more valuable to have identified Pluto, a Most Valuable Player, than Donaldson, a utility infielder, but to do that I would have had to drive to the County Clerk’s office in Nassau County. I’d never done an investigation there, so I wasn’t even sure where the County Clerk’s office was, but anywhere in Nassau County was further than I felt like driving.
I took the subway back uptown to my office. I paid attention this time, and managed to get off at the right stop. When I got to the office, I called up Fred Lazar, the guy who’d gotten me the job with Richard in the first place, and reminded him how I’d once taken a signed statement for him when he was busy with some girl or other, and how he’d always promised to return the favor. He remembered the incident because he remembered the girl, and was only too willing to help. I told him it was a big favor I wanted, that I needed an address checked in Nassau County. He laughed and said that was no big deal, he could do it with one phone call. I wanted to kill him—if there was some way to trace property ownership without going through all the shit I usually went through, I was going to feel like a real fool. Fortunately there wasn’t. He just happened to be screwing some girl in the County Clerk’s office.
I told him I’d be out for the day, but just to leave the info on my answering machine.
I hung up and checked the answering machine for messages. There were none, which wasn’t surprising, since I’d forgotten to turn the thing on. I did so now. I turned my beeper on too, since I’d also forgotten about it. It seemed like I was forgetting everything these days.
I also turned the telephone ring off. I was going to be out for the day, all right, but I wasn’t leaving my office. I was going to sleep.
I had one last chore to perform, however. I got out the tracking unit to check on Red. After all, the guy was carrying around my kilo of coke.
I switched the unit on. Nothing happened. The red light went on, indicating the batteries were good and the unit was primed for action, but that was it. No beep. No vector. Nothing.
I dug out the instruction manual and pored through it. I discovered the unit had a safety check button on the side. I pressed it, and the unit immediately began to go “beep, beep, beep,” and the vector arrow popped on and described a 360-degree arc, and then everything shut off again, just as the manual said it would. So the unit was working. So where the hell was Red?
There were several possibilities, none of them good. He might have found the transmitter. Could they trace me through it? No. I’d paid cash. The most they could establish was where it was sold. That would lead them back to Florida, which wouldn’t be that bad. But they’d know someone was on to them. They’d know Red had been tracked to Arroyo, and they could figure Arroyo had been tracked to Pluto. That would piss them off immensely, and probably make the operation too dangerous to continue, even if there was anything left to salvage.
And if they’d found the transmitter they’d also found the coke. What would they make of that? Who cares? It would probably confuse the hell out of them, but it was kind of incidental. The most it would mean would be I’d lost my chance of framing Pluto with it, if that had ever been a viable idea to begin with. It almost certainly wouldn’t be if they knew I was on to them.
The other possibility was that the transmitter had fallen off. Not as bad, but not too good, either. On the plus side, I’d be entitled to a refund on the unit if I ever got back to Miami. On the minus side, one of the players in my little drama would be driving around with a kilo of coke on the bottom of his car, and I’d have no way to find it.
That caught me up short. Christ, I must be tired. What did I mean, no way to find it? I had the guy’s license number.
I went over and picked up the phone. A reassuring “beep, beep, beep” stopped me in my tracks. Thank god. Red was back.
I slammed down the phone and lunged for the unit. I saw at once something was wrong. No vector arrow. Christ, where the fuck was—
Then I realized. The unit was quiet. It was my goddamn beeper that had gone off. Richard’s office was beeping me with a case. Well, screw them. I wasn’t going to do it.
I shut off the beeper and picked up the phone, but I didn’t call Richard’s office. I called Fred Lazar.
Fred was surprised to hear from me (“Christ, I didn’t say I could do it that quick”), but I told him I was calling about something else, that I needed another favor. Could he trace a license plate number for me? He allowed as to how he could, and from his chuckle, I inferred that meant he knew a girl at Motor Vehicles too.
I hung up and called Richard’s office to tell ’em to go to hell, but it didn’t go exactly as planned. I got Kathy, who was in a foul mood, even for her.
“Where the hell are you?” she screamed into the phone. “Do you know it’s nearly eleven?”
She was in such a snit, and I was in such a fog, it was a while before the information managed to filter through and sink in. Christ! I’d been so wrapped up in the Albrect thing I’d completely forgotten. Today was the day I was due at Richard’s office to turn in my cases. I was two hours late.
17.
RICHARD ROSENBERG WAS A GOOD ten years my junior. Like me, he had gotten a liberal arts education. Unlike me, when he had discovered his education had left him totally unprepared to deal with the outside world, he had gone back to college and studied law. He was a good student, graduating in the top one percent of his class, and as soon as he passed the bar, he received handsome job offers from several prestigious firms. He turned them all down. His reason was television.
In 1978, when the law was changed and attorneys were finally allowed to advertise, a whole new field opened up. Civil suits, once considered nickel and dime, were suddenly big business. The reason was public awareness. It used to be that if a guy fell down and broke his leg, he figured it was his tough luck. It never would have occurred to him that he was entitled to anything. If it did, he never would have thought of hiring an attorney and, even then, his first thought would have been that he couldn’t afford one.
TV changed all that. People who didn’t know what the words “contingency basis” meant all knew what the word “free” meant. It meant that your broken leg might be worth money, and that it didn’t cost anything to find out. By the time Richard emerged from college, several prominent law firms, notably Jacoby and Meyers (“It’s about time. . .”), a
nd Davis and Lee (“Dial L-A-W-Y-E-R-S”), had built up sizable reputations and practices through TV and radio advertising. Richard looked around and said, “Hmmmm.”
He rented an office on West 12th Street and opened the law firm of Rosenberg and Stone. Stone was a dummy. Rosenberg was the whole show.
He took out all the loans he could get and sank the money into twenty-second TV spots. He made three spots, all similar. A typical one showed a black family sitting on a couch. The young mother is holding a baby in her arms. A three-year-old is playing on the floor. The father is sitting next to the young mother, his right leg encased in a huge, white, hip-length cast. The wife, bravely holding back tears, says, “How we gonna pay the rent, Sam? How we gonna pay the rent?”
The answer, of course, was to call Rosenberg and Stone. Their slogan: “No case too big. No case too small.” Then there was a lot of other stuff about how it wouldn’t cost you anything, and how you could get a free consultation right in your own home.
In the beginning, Richard actually went to those free consultations. He had to. He was a one-man show. Later, as the settlements began to trickle in, he branched out. He moved into a larger suite of offices in the building and hired girls to answer the phones. He hired law students as paralegals to handle the paperwork. And he hired people to do the legwork.
One of the first people Richard contacted was Fred Lazar, who ran a detective agency in Manhattan. It was no go. The most Richard would pay was ten bucks an hour and thirty cents a mile. Fred was out of his league.
Fred and I had been on the Goddard College soccer team together, he at fullback, I in the goal. Together we formed the backbone of the team’s defensive unit, which is not really bragging, considering the emphasis they put on sports at Goddard. Anyhow, since we both live in Manhattan, Fred and I occasionally saw each other at New Year’s parties and the like. He knew I was out of work and looking for something that would be flexible enough to leave time for writing, so he gave me a call.
