Detective

accident cases? Well, I work for one of them. He handles insurance claims. People fall down and break their legs, they see his ad on TV they call him up. He calls me. I go interview the people, take down the information about the accident, try to get ’em to sign a retainer. Then I go take pictures of the scene of the accident. Sometimes I interview a witness. Sometimes I serve a subpoena or summons. I don’t do surveillance. I’m basically non-aggressive. I don’t carry a gun. I couldn’t fight my way out of a paper bag. The most dangerous thing I do is go into some pretty undesirable neighborhoods to interview prospective clients. I don’t like it. I always feel as if I have a sign saying “mug me” on my back. Actually, I’ve never had a problem. People who see me going into slums and housing projects figure I’m either a cop or I’m out of my mind, and they leave me alone. That’s what I do. And that’s all I do. You’re the first person who’s ever asked me to do anything else.”
    I stopped talking. He looked at me. He’d been looking at me the whole time I was talking, and his expression didn’t change when I stopped. He just kept looking at me. It was hard to read his expression. He looked a little like a steer must when it’s just been hit over the head with a sledgehammer at the slaughterhouse. Incredulous. Disbelieving. But something else, too. He blinked his eyes. His lips moved, but nothing came out. Then he said, almost in awe, “You’re useless.” He shook his head. “Jesus Christ, you’re absolutely useless, aren’t you.”
    He got to his feet as if in a daze and started for the door, still shaking his head. “Useless,” he muttered. He opened the door and went out. The door closed behind him.
    I sat there as his steps faded away down the corridor.

3.
    I L IVE IN A T WO -B EDROOM apartment on the upper west side of New York—five and one-half rooms for 750 a month. People always tell me that’s really cheap. Of course, they aren’t paying it. I have to scrabble for the rent, and at ten bucks an hour and thirty cents a mile, it isn’t easy. See, I don’t get paid for an eight-hour day; I only get paid when I’m on a case, and some days are slow. That’s why a nice signup in Brooklyn is a break, because I can turn it in as three or four hours on the clock, and a good thirty or forty miles round trip. Whereas a signup in Harlem is four miles, and a lot less time. The actual sign-up interview never takes me more than twenty to thirty minutes, tops. The travel time is where the bucks are. Give me three cases spread out in Brooklyn and Queens and I can charge for an eight- or nine-hour day and anywhere from fifty to a hundred miles. But give me a slow day and I won’t make squat.
    Today, I hadn’t made squat. The signup in Brooklyn was all there was. It was on Flatbush Avenue right over the Manhattan bridge, which made it nothing in mileage, and a stretch even to call it three hours, which I sure as hell did, but that was it. And since I’d wasted so much time with. Albrect, I got started so late that I still didn’t get home till nearly six, in spite of only working a three-hour day.
    My five-year-old son, Tommie, was waiting by the front door. He was wearing his baseball cap and his glove.
    “Daddy!” he screamed, running to give me a hug. “Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!”
    I picked him up and swung him around. “Hi, Tommie.”
    “Daddy, can we play baseball?”
    I hadn’t eaten since early morning. “Right after dinner.”
    “No, now.”
    “I’m hungry.”
    “No, now.”
    “After dinner.”
    “It isn’t ready yet,” my wife, Alice, said, emerging from the bedroom. “Everything’s on the stove ready to go, but you didn’t call so I didn’t know how to time things.”
    “Sorry, I should have called,” I told her. “How long will it be?”
    “Well, we’re having chicken, rice, and asparagus. The rice will take a while, say forty-five minutes.”
    I sighed, cursing myself for not calling. “O.K., Tommie, let’s go play baseball.”
    “Yay, Daddy!”
    “Go make a pee-pee while I change, and we’ll go to the park.”
    “I already did.”
    “Did he?”
    “That was a while ago. Go again, honey.”
    “Go make a pee and we’ll go to the park,” I told him.
    He ran out of the room. I went into the bedroom and began to change out of my suit. I had a brief respite while my wife got things started on the stove, but everything must have really been ready