by Parnell Hall
I was surprised to hear from him. All his detectives were ex-cops, and there had never been any question of me ever working for his agency. The subject had never come up, and never would. But this was something different. It was something he didn’t want, and something I could do.
Fred introduced me to Richard, who offered me the same deal he’d offered Fred—ten bucks an hour and thirty cents a mile. There were only two requirements for the job—a car and a detective license.
I had a car.
Fred got me the license. There was nothing to it. I filled out an application. I signed an affidavit attesting that I was not a known criminal, member of the Communist party, or a general nogoodnik. Fred took me down to the 23rd precinct, where I paid ten bucks to get fingerprinted. He also took me to Woolworth’s, where I had a color photo taken for two bucks in one of those little booths. “Look mean,” Fred told me. I tried and ended up looking stupid. It didn’t matter. Fred sent the whole mess off to Albany, and two weeks later he handed me a notarized photo I.D., the one I use to impress people like Gutierrez’s super.
That’s all there was to it. Richard gave me a half-hour crash course on how to sign up clients and take pictures, handed me a briefcase full of sign-up kits, maps, and a camera, and off I went.
For a while it was fun. Hey! I’m a private detective! Me. Stanley Hastings. With a real I.D. and everything. Christ, if I weren’t married, I bet I could hang out in singles bars and get laid all the time. Stanley Hastings, P.I.
The thrill lasted about a month. During that time I was the lion of any social gathering, since all my friends wanted to know what it was like for an ordinary person, one of them, to be a private detective. But the excitement quickly waned. Soon, aside from the anxiety I built up about going into certain neighborhoods, my feelings about the job narrowed down to one specific. It was bloody fucking dull.
On days I had to turn in stuff to Richard, it was also a pain in the ass.
I got off the phone with Kathy as quickly as I could, which wasn’t nearly as quickly as I would have liked, but I was so tired the simple expedient of hanging up on her never occurred to me. I ran out to Broadway to the 60-Minute Photomat, and picked up the six rolls of film I’d shot that week. The girl gave me a hassle about my unpaid bill, but I made up some clever excuse like “The check is in the mail,” and got the hell out of there.
I went back to the office and began to sort through the photos. Some of them were easy to identify. For instance, the first envelope contained the Rabinowitz photos—four pictures of Mrs. Rabinowitz’s injury, and twenty of the defect in the sidewalk. I shoved the whole thing in a different envelope and wrote “Rabinowitz” on the label. Underneath, I wrote “L/A” for “Location of Accident,” followed by the specific street address of the defect. Done.
The next one was harder. Six clients all on the same roll.
As I looked at the pictures, my initial reaction was what it always is in these cases: “Who are these people?” Even under good circumstances, six clients on a roll gives me pause, but now, with no sleep, and a few other things on my mind, as I stared at the faces in the pictures my eyes began to glaze over.
I shook myself awake and got down to basics. The negatives are numbered, and my paysheets, which list the clients’ names and addresses and the time and mileage for each case, are in chronological order, so, theoretically, if I can get one, I can get ’em all.
All right, the little black kid with the scar on his forehead—is that Chakim Frazier from Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn? Beats me. Reconstruct. Let’s see, Throop Avenue, apartment 2R. Yeah. I remember. A three-story frame house, the front door unlocked, 2R stood for second floor right. There were three guys hanging out on the front steps, and I was nervous about going in, but I did, and who lived there? A black kid with a scar on his forehead? No. A black woman with a broken arm. Ah, here’s one. Is it her? Sure, this must be Chakim Frazier from old Bed-Stuy. Great. Four shots of Chakim Frazier. Let’s match ’em up with the negatives, put ’em in an envelope, and—shit! Another black woman with a broken arm. Which one is Chakim Frazier? Check the paysheets. Ah! Starshima Weaver, Jamaica, Queens. Great. So which is which? Check the paysheets. Starshima Weaver was Thursday afternoon. Chakim Frazier was Friday. Check the negatives. Pictures five through eight, and nine through twelve are the black women with the broken arms, so five through eight’s gotta be Starshima Weaver, and nine through twelve’s gotta be Chakim Frazier. So who the hell’s the kid with the scar on his face? He’s one through four. Oh, yeah. I had those four shots in the camera when I turned in my paysheets last time, so I didn’t develop them. He’ll be on last week’s paysheets. Let’s see. Ah yes. Hello, Teddy Robinson.
Somehow I got it done. Next, the paysheets themselves. I tallied them up, and filled in the amounts on the recapitulation page. 440 bucks for 44 hours’ work, plus $217.95 expenses for gas, tolls, film and developing. If that sounds good, consider this: I turn in my cases bi-weekly, so my average was $220 a week. Try to live on that in New York.
I shoved the whole mess in my briefcase and stumbled out the door.
I took a taxi down to West 12th Street. Ordinarily, I’d have taken the subway, but I was too damn tired. I gave the driver the exorbitant amount it cost for the pitifully short ride, tipped him half a buck at which he neither smiled nor sneered, went in, took the elevator up to the 14th floor, rang the bell, and was buzzed into the office of Rosenberg and Stone.
Richard’s outer office resembled a mail-order shipping house more than a law firm. Twin desks, manned by Kathy and Susan, flanked the doorway. Twin touch-tone switchboards, 20 lines each, sat on the desks. Behind them, the walls were lined with file cabinets, half the drawers of which were pulled open. At the back of the room, two secretaries typed furiously at typing stands. Young, underpaid law students scampered back and forth, emerging from the inner office to the left, pulling documents from the files, thrusting them at the secretaries, and plunging back in again. The door to the right-hand office, Richard’s, remained shut.
As usual, Kathy and Susan were both on the phone. Kathy had four other calls blinking on her switchboard, Susan three on hers.
Kathy immediately put her fifth caller on hold to bawl me out for being late. Kathy was about 26, with short-cropped black hair, and a not unattractive face, considering, of course, that I had never seen her smile. I never could figure out just what her problem was, though, uncharitably, it would not have surprised me too much to find out that she was the type of girl that was constantly getting fucked and then dumped.
Susan put her call on hold to come to my defense, which was embarrassing at the very least. Susan, about 22, with shoulder-length straw hair, and cute as a button in soft pinks and whites was, I imagined, also uncharitably, the type of girl it might have done some good to get fucked and then dumped.
I survived the ordeal and was consigned to a chair in the corner. I had to move a pile of papers off it onto the floor, causing a paralegal to blanch and rush to retrieve them. He shot me a dirty look as he scurried away.
All in all, Richard’s office wasn’t set up to receive clients any more than mine was, even less so. But I knew clients came here. That damn paralegal who had just sneered at me signed up clients right here in the office, perhaps in this very chair, any time Susan and Kathy could talk them into coming in. I resented it, of course. Every client signed here was a potential thirty- or forty-dollar job I wouldn’t get. That’s why Kathy and Susan were programmed to get the clients in here if it were at all possible. ’Cause if there was one thing Richard was, it was tight.
I leaned back in the chair and closed my eyes, and was doing a fairly good imitation of a man sleeping, when the intercom buzzed twenty minutes later, and Kathy bellowed my name and jerked her thumb toward the right-hand door. I got up, grabbed my briefcase, and went in.
Richard Rosenberg has always reminded me of a cross between a toy poodle and a pit bull. A little man with a pointed nose stuck in the middle of
a plump, jowled face, he had a habit of yapping at you incessantly in a high-pitched, high-strung voice until he spotted his opening. Then he lunged for the throat, grabbing and holding on till doomsday. He was, as I have pointed out, frugal to the point of being miserly, and always bitched and moaned over my bills and begrudged me every penny of the small pittance he paid me. Still and all, as many poor people were finding out, he was a hell of a good man to have on your side.
When I came in, he was on the phone, obviously with an insurance adjuster.
“Are you kidding?” he shrilled into the phone. “You call that an offer? That’s an insult, not an offer. You call that a settlement? We’re talking about a six-year-old girl here, with facial scars. Did you see those pictures I sent over? The stitches on her cheek? That’s a double layer of stitches, forty-four in all. You know the kind of scar that’s gonna leave? We’re not just talking pain and suffering here, we’re talking permanent disfigurement. I mean who’s gonna marry her, huh? Who’s gonna give her a job? We’re talking earning potential here, on top of pain and suffering and humiliation and embarrassment. I file a 2 million dollar suit, which probably should have been 5, and you come back with an offer like that. If that’s how you feel, let’s go to court, but I’m telling you, you know what will happen then. We’re talking about a six-year-old kid. Just let me get one person on the jury with kids of their own, and you know I can do it, and you are gonna pay through the nose.”
Richard slammed down the phone, turned to me with no discernible change in his speech pattern, and said, “All right, you’re late, let’s see what you’ve got.”
I opened the briefcase. Before I’d even fully raised the lid he had the retainer kits out and was pulling out fact sheets.
“O.K., pedestrian knockdown, hit and run, police didn’t catch the driver, broken leg, great, it’s a No-Fault, money in the bank, next.”
He pulled out another sheet. “Starshima Weaver, automobile accident, driver insured, broken arm.” He shot a glance at me. “Right or left?”
One thing I learned about Richard was, no matter how carefully I covered a case, he could always find some question to shoot at me to imply there was something I should have included on the fact sheet. I don’t think he really cared about the answer; it was just his way of keeping me off balance and keeping himself one-up. This time his gripe was legit. I should have indicated which arm. Fortunately, I remembered from the pictures I’d just ID.’d.
“Right,” I said. Then, inspired, remembering the retainer. “But she’s left-handed. She had no trouble signing.”
He topped me. “So what? I’ll specify in the summons a broken right arm, and they won’t know she’s left-handed.”
As he whizzed through the rest of the retainers and started in on the pictures, my mind wandered. I was thinking of a case I’d done for Richard early on. It was up in Poughkeepsie, which made it nice, 150-mile roundtrip and six hours. It was a case of a young guy, early twenties, who got drunk in a bar and wound up in a fight with some other young guy over a girl. Later that night, the other guy broke into his apartment and beat the shit out of him with a baseball bat. The police got him, charged him with breaking and entering, assault with a deadly weapon, and attempted murder. It was a big case, bigger than my usual trip-and-fall, and I spent a lot of time on it. I got a whole history on the assailant, got the names of the arresting officers, the district attorney, copies of the charges and court dates. I even got signed statements from two witnesses who lived in the building. All in all, I did a hell of a job.
“What’s this?” Richard screamed when I showed it to him. “What is this shit?”
“The facts of the case,” I told him.
“What facts? What case?” Richard glared at me as if I were an imbecile, which was what I felt like. “You think I’m gonna sue this punk who beat him up? He’s got no money. He’s got no insurance. How the hell am I gonna sue him?”
Of course, Richard didn’t sue him. And I went back to Poughkeepsie, on my own time, of course, since it was my mistake, and did the job again. It was a learning experience. I’d been seduced by the “glamorous” aspects of the case. But actually, the assault and attempted murder, which I’d thought were so important, were incidental. What it was all about was faulty building security—security that had allowed this maniac to get in and beat up our client. The guy who owned the building and who had rented our client the apartment was to blame, and that’s who Richard sued.
I was roused from this recollection by the sound of, “Great! Fabulous! What are these?”
I looked over to see Richard leafing through the shots I had taken of the stairs in Gutierrez’s building.
“Oh—” I began.
“This is terrific,” Richard said. “This is just the type of shot I’m always asking you to get. Good angles, good defects, good perspective. Who’s the client?”
“There’s no client.”
“What?!”
“There’s no client. These are just pictures I took—”
Richard was incensed. “You’re charging me for pictures you took when there’s no client?”
“I didn’t charge you for those pictures.”
“Well, you charged me for the film, didn’t you? There’s twelve pictures here; that’s half a roll of film. Didn’t you charge me for that?”
It was a half hour before I got out of there. I got some new signup kits, and I got some more of Richard’s business cards to give clients, and I got my paycheck. It came to 440 bucks, since I handle my own taxes. My check for expenses was for $215.45. Richard had knocked off $2.50 for half a roll of film.
18.
I GOT BACK TO MY OFFICE a little after one. Fortunately, there’d been no new cases. I wouldn’t have taken them if there had been. I was a wreck.
I checked the answering machine for messages. There was one from my wife: where the hell was I, why wasn’t I wearing my beeper, why wasn’t the answering machine on before and why was it on now, and where the hell was I again, seeing as how I must have been by the office to turn on the answering machine, and why had I stood up Richard, on payday for Christ’s sake, wasn’t the money the only thing I was doing this for in the first place?
It was quite a message. I figured Kathy must have called her five or six times.
There were no other messages. I guess Fred Lazar wasn’t quite as fast as he said he’d be.
I checked the tracking unit. Still nothing doing.
I reset the answering machine, and made sure the phone ring was off. I left my beeper on, though. I hated to do it, but I couldn’t take a chance on Kathy calling my wife again. If they beeped me for a case, I was gonna call and stall the client no matter what.
I lay down on the floor and was out like a light.
I woke up at 5:30 that afternoon. No one had beeped me. I checked the answering machine. No one had called, except for Fred. He had the info, as promised. Pluto was Victor Millsap. Red was Rodney Forrester from East Hampton, Long Island. It was as simple as that.
I checked out East Hampton on the map. It was way the hell out in Suffolk County near the tip of Long Island, which was why I’d never been there, and why Red hadn’t been showing up on the tracking unit. He was way out of range.
My relief was boundless.
I took the subway home and got there a little after six. Needless to say, my wife was not in the best of moods. I made up a bullshit story about my beeper being on the fritz, and having three cases in Brooklyn and one in Queens, and having had to juggle Richard in between them. Actually what I did was lie, but somehow “made up a bullshit story” sounds better. I told her I spent nine actual hours on the cases but was putting in for thirteen, that I was sorry to be away all day but we really needed the money. I told her, too, that I was sorry Kathy had called her, but neither I nor any other mortal man had control over Kathy, and I was sorry I hadn’t called Richard but how was I to know my beeper was on the fritz, etc., etc. and the end result was I was such a silver-tongu
ed devil that by the time we got Tommie in bed I began hinting about an amorous episode, to which she actually concurred.
As usual, she made fun of the interest I took in her as she undressed. She is always amazed that after ten years of marriage I am still fascinated by her breasts. I guess that’s the difference between men and women. My wife is calm and relaxed and amused by my attitude. Personally, I’m always jumping out of my skin.
An added bonus of lovemaking is that afterward my wife is usually happy and content and rolls over and goes to sleep. This night was no exception. By 11:30 she was out like a light. I, on the other hand, was wide-awake and well-rested. I slipped out of bed, pulled on my clothes, and by 11:45 I was on my way out the door.
19.
THERE WAS NO REASON TO believe that Rosa would be at the same spot at the same time as she had been the other night, but when I got to the corner of 48th and Broadway, there she was, large as life. It was a little after one in the morning. I’d driven down to my office, parking being no problem that time of night, gone in, and made a few preparations. Then I’d left the car there and strolled over to Broadway to check out the corner. And there she was again, just as before. She wore a yellow pullover this time, but the breasts seemed to be the same, and once again there seemed to be no discernible undergarment.
I stopped near the corner and looked at her, as if hesitating and making up my mind. This wasn’t hard to do, since what I was actually doing was hesitating and making up my mind. She looked at me and smiled. I smiled back somewhat nervously. I blushed, I’m sure convincingly, and strolled over.
