“How much was that retainer?”

She just waved her hand as if it didn’t matter, as if the amount wasn’t even worth discussing in the midst of her failures.

“You have to tell me more, Kimberly,” I said.

“Ten thousand dollars,” she said, glancing up to track my reaction.

“You have to tell me more about the case.”

“I can’t. He didn’t tell me anything more. I am so fired. I’m going to be, like, the vice president of external relations at McDonald’s. Can we super-size that for you? Oh God. For this I could have gone to a party school.”

“Maybe I can help, but you need to help me too. Let’s start with this. I know you work for a man named Eddie Dean.”

“Huh? How did you-”

“So the question is, does Mr. Dean speak with a British accent?”

She stared at me for a moment. “No. Why would he? Helloo. He’s from California.” Her hand slammed into her mouth. “But don’t let him know that I told you or-”

“What is the relation between Mr. Dean and Joey Parma?”

“I don’t know. He didn’t tell me. But it’s something that happened a long time ago, I got that.”

“Is it about a suitcase?”

“No. That’s ridiculous. What would luggage have to do with anything?”

“That’s what I’m asking you.”

“I never heard anything about luggage.”

“Okay, one final question. What does Derek Manley have to do with any of this?”

“He called him.”

“Who did?”

“Mr. Parma. He called him. Derek Manley. Mr. Parma called him right before he called you.”

“And Mr. Dean got hold of the phone records and found this out.”

“Yes.”

“And bought this note from First Pennsylvania.”

“Yes.”

“Now I understand,” I said. And I did, understand. I understood exactly why Eddie Dean had bought Derek Manley’s debt and why Eddie Dean’s vice president of external affairs had brought that debt to me and why Kimberly Blue had broken down to great effect in front of me all so that I would take this little collection case that was not so little and not so much about a collection after all. I didn’t know yet the why behind all the whys, but I knew what Eddie Dean wanted from me and I was ready, now, to give it to him.

“All right, Kimberly,” I said. “I’ll take that check.”

“Does that mean?”

“Just hand it over.”

“Oh, Victor, Victor, I am soo… soo…”

“Kimberly, let’s play like the shampoo, all right? No more tears. You don’t need them anymore, they did their job already. Just give me the check and wait here for a moment.”

A check for ten thousand dollars, from the account of Jacopo Financing, signed by Kimberly Blue, made out to Derringer and Carl. Ten thousand dollars. I held it in both hands as I soberly left my office, closed the door, and then skipped like a bunny over to Beth.

“Will this do?” I said to her after I dropped the precious little paper on her desk.

She picked it up, examined it closely, let an expression of wonderment lift her features. “How’d we get this?”

“A retainer. For a collection case.”

“We don’t do collections anymore.”

“I made an exception. It has something to do with Joey. We’ll both be working on it, doubling up the billables.”

“Are you sure?”

“If you and I, with a steady effort, can’t blow out this retainer before the first of the month, then we ought just give up law and become orthodontists.”

“How very nineties of you, Victor.”

“Why don’t you take this to the bank and then pay Ellie and Skink and the landlord. And if there is still something left over, maybe I can pay the cable bill. I miss my ESPN. This is just the start, Beth. Didn’t I tell you? Didn’t I?”

When I returned to my office, my expression was suitably somber, the tone of my voice was suitably businesslike. “All right, Miss Blue. We have decided to accept Jacopo’s representation.”

“Oh, Victor, thank you. I am so relieved.”

“Yes, I’m sure that you are. Tell your boss that I am on the case. I’ll confess judgment right away, just like the note provides, and I’ll set up an expedited deposition of Mr. Manley and I’ll have him in here within the week and I’ll ask him all I need to ask him. Tell your boss I am on the case and I will take care of everything.”

Chapter 16

I WAS FEELING chipper about things when next I visited my father. I had actual leads in the Joey Parma investigation, I had a paying client in Jacopo Financing, and, for the first time in weeks, there was money in my bank account. Not enough, yet, to get the cable back on, but it was close. I could barely suppress my excitement.

Let me tell you something true: There’s not much in this life that can’t be cured by the cable guy.

And then to top it off, I had engineered another run-in with Dr. Mayonnaise, the chance meeting in the hospital halls that was not chance at all. But I did it subtly, oh so subtly.

“What are you doing on this floor, Mr. Carl. You’re father’s on four.”

“This isn’t the fourth floor?”

So we had gotten to talking and, since she was new in town, we had gotten to talking about restaurants.

“You know a good Chinese place?” she had asked.

“Sang Kee Duck House,” I said. “In Chinatown.”

“Do they serve anything besides duck?”

“I think so. You want to, maybe, I don’t know, maybe, try it sometime?”

“With you?”

“That would be, sort of, the point.”

“I suppose.”

Is that a ringing affirmative, or what? So I was feeling pretty damn chipper when I sat down beside my father in his hospital room.

“You look like crap,” I said.

“It’s not getting better,” said my father.

“What did the doctor say?”

“She’s going to try a different antibiotic.”

“I’m sure that will work.”

My father just grunted. He was sure it wouldn’t, his natural pessimism demanded nothing less than despair, and, as was often the case with my father, maybe it was warranted. His oxygen absorption level had dropped to ninety-one percent and his breaths were coming faster now, even with the plastic tube feeding oxygen into his nose.

“Hey,” I said. “I’m going out with that doctor.”

“It won’t go nowhere.”

“Why not?”

“She ain’t your type.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“First, she’s a doctor, so she’s too damn good for you. Second, she’s from Ohio.”

“Nice,” I said, though, as usual, I worried that he was right.

“Did I tell you how I found her?” said my father.

“Who? The doctor?”

“The girl. The pleated skirt. Did I?”

“No, Dad,” I said, settling in, resigned to hearing more. “You didn’t.”

“It was the car,” he said. The long burgundy car. My father roams all over the city, looking for it. He has a motorcycle, my father, he had seen Marlon Brando in The Wild One and he liked the look, so out of the army he took what pay he had saved and bought a motorcycle. It was a used 1951 Indian Roadmaster Chief, I knew, because it had been a part of my childhood, the motorcycle, sitting amongst the weeds in the backyard, a rusting relic of a faded past collapsing in on itself. But then, in my father’s youth, it is bright blue and killer loud and perfect. Sitting on its wide black-leather seat, hands gripping the handlebars, he tears through the city, street by street, canvassing the possibilities, searching for a car.

He doesn’t spy it parked outside at the curb like any common family sedan, no. But he gets lucky one evening, sees it out and about, the long burgundy car with the high metal grill. A Bentley Mark VI, impeccably maintained. He follows it back to its lair on a small fashionable street not far from Rittenhouse Square, a spacious garage attached to a double-wide town house with a big red door.

“And once I knew where he lived, it wasn’t nothing to ask around.” The old man is well known in that part of the city, with his fancy Bentley and his colored chauffeur and his secretary. The old man’s money is inherited, his great interest is in collecting collectibles, little things with much value, stamps, coins, rare manuscripts, and, so they say with their snide smiles, pretty secretaries that are maybe more than secretaries.