05-Client

by Parnell Hall

  Richard sighed and rubbed his forehead. “There’s more to life than just money. You gotta remember that.”

  I stared. This coming from him. This to a ten buck an hour wage-slave.

  “I have not been in court for three months.” Richard stuck his finger in the air for emphasis. “Three months. The cases come in, the summonses go out, the offers come back and we settle.”

  Richard sighed and shook his head.

  And the cause for his distress became clear. As a former actor, I recognized the syndrome. Richard the showman was out of work. Just like an actor, he was between jobs, a performer with no place to perform.

  I would have liked to have been sympathetic, but quite frankly, I couldn’t. Not considering my present situation. Not with money so tight I’d taken on the distasteful Marvin Nickleson case. Gee Richard, that’s tough. Poor little rich boy. Nothing going for him but money. How sad.

  But it did make my life easier. I left Richard sulking and went out to lay his tacit approval of my work schedule on Wendy/Janet.

  Which wasn’t easy. First I had to sell them on the concept: me. In Manhattan. At one o’clock.

  I had to conduct an impromptu math lesson on the formula, D = rt (distance equals rate times time). It went something like this: a man is in Coney Island at 12:55. He must be in Manhattan by 1:00. So time equals five minutes. Manhattan is approximately twenty miles away, so distance equals twenty. If he had an hour to drive twenty miles, he could average twenty miles an hour to get there. But he only has five minutes. That’s a twelfth of an hour. So the rate is twelve times twenty, or two hundred and forty miles per hour. Now at that rate, don’t you think it’s possible he might get a speeding ticket?

  Out of the whole lesson, I doubt if Wendy and Janet got anything more than the sarcasm. If that. At best, they both wrote down that I was off work at one. How they would interpret that was anybody’s guess. And Wendy, whom I take to be the more astute of the two, if such a term is applicable, did understand the concept of having one of the other investigators change one of his other appointments so that he could handle the Coney Island one.

  I thanked them, picked up my car, which I’d left at a meter on 14th Street, and drove out to Far Rockaway.

  Driving out there, I played the game I always play when I do sign-ups: how bad is it going to be? You see, a lot of Richard’s clients aren’t particularly affluent, and some of the neighborhoods they live in are pretty bad. And when I go walking into one of those neighborhoods in my suit and tie, people tend to think I’m a cop. Or a suicidal lunatic. I have a horror of walking into a crack den, which I sometimes do, and being shot for a cop, or mugged for an easy mark, which hasn’t happened yet, knock on wood. But cowards die many deaths, and I’ve imagined the scenario many times. And on the way to an assignment I always speculate and fantasize and try to recall what I know, and generally drive myself nuts.

  The client’s name was Paul Jeffries. Now that’s a neutral name, could be white or black. The address was Beach Channel Drive, that was the main drag, running all the way down the island. There were good and bad sections, like anywhere. I hadn’t been to Far Rockaway much, it being way the hell out there, so I really didn’t know.

  The apartment number was a clue: 12H. So it wasn’t a slum. It was either a high-rise apartment building or a low-income housing project.

  Experience prompted the fervent wish: please don’t let it be a project.

  It was, but not that bad. No lock on the outside door, but at least the glass hadn’t been smashed. Both the odd and even floor elevators seemed to be working. The odd came first so I took it, even though I was going to 12, prompted by long experience—in a project, if an elevator shows up, you get in.

  I took it up to 13, walked down a flight and found 12H. The door was opened by a woman with white hair, cold, crisp, efficient and severe, in the starchy white of the medical profession.

  “Yes?” she demanded.

  “Paul Jeffries?” I said.

  “Who are you?”

  “Mr. Hastings from the lawyer’s office.”

  “Which office?”

  “Rosenberg and Stone.”

  She nodded grudgingly. “Yes. That’s who he called. All right. Come in.”

  I did. She closed and locked the door behind me, then turned to lecture me as if I were a truant schoolboy.

  “All right. You can see him. But make it short and try not to tire him.”

  “What’s he got?”

  “Cancer.”

  “Of what?”

  “Lungs, liver, colon, stomach. Just about everything.”

  “Is he conscious?”

  “Yes. But he’s very weak. Don’t tire him.”

  “He’ll have to sign some forms.”

  She threw up her hands. “Yes, yes, it’s so important, isn’t it?” she snapped. “Just try not to kill him.”

  I took a breath. Yeah, some cases are easier than others. I nodded assent.

  She gave me a disapproving look, then led me to the bedroom. One last steely-eyed glare, and she stepped aside and let me in.

  Paul Jeffries lay flat on his back in the bed. A white sheet was drawn up over him. Thin, stringy arms lay down his sides, pinning the sheet to his chest. He was a white man, tall, ancient, horribly emaciated. A thin hawk nose pointed to the sky. His mouth was opened in a perpetual O. His eyes were opened too, and his brow was furrowed, as if fiercely concentrating on something. If so, it was probably on breathing, which apparently was a Herculean task.

  Sometimes I hate my job. Actually, often I hate my job, but sometimes more than others.

  I moved up close to the bed. “Mr. Jeffries?”

  The head didn’t turn, but the eyes flicked momentarily in my direction. The lips moved with some effort, formed the word, “Yes.”

  “I’m Mr. Hastings from the lawyer’s office. You called us about your accident. I don’t want to tire you, but can you tell me what happened to you?”

  One finger of the emaciated hand raised to point. Lips moved, and I leaned close to catch the words.

  “Broke leg.”

  “Where?”

  “City bus.”

  “You fell on a city bus. Fine. Was that getting on, getting off, or on the bus itself?”

  “On. Bus moved ... before sat down.”

  “Where?”

  “Here. Bus stop. Outside.”

  “I see,” I said. “You got on a bus outside here at the bus stop. The driver moved before you could sit down. You fell and broke your leg. Did an ambulance come and take you to the hospital?”

  “Yes.”

  Better than I could have hoped. I could get the rest of the information from the hospital and the nurse. I had the guy’s name and address. Just a bit more personal data, and I’d have the guy sign the retainers—probably have to guide his hand—and I’d be done.

  “How old are you?” I asked.

  “Ninety-five.”

  “Married or single?”

  “Widower.”

  “Any children?”

  “Dead.”

  “Grandchildren?”

  “No.”

  “Brothers, sisters, relatives?”

  “No.”

  “Who’s your next of kin.”

  “No one.”

  “How about a friend?” I had to phrase this delicately. “Someone I can contact if I can’t reach you.”

  His head shook slightly. “No.”

  “No one?”

  “Outlived them all.”

  Hell. Just when I thought I had it knocked. I felt like a prick, but it was my job, so I had to do it.

  “Mr. Jeffries,” I said. “We are going to file suit in your behalf to get you money for this accident. It takes time to sue the City. In the event the case should drag on, and if you were to die in the interim, who should the money go to?”

  His lips moved, but I didn’t catch the words. I leaned closer.

  “I’m sorry. What did you say?”

>   His lips moved again, and that time I made it out.

  “Who cares?”

  I blinked, and the whole thing hit me. I suddenly felt very lightheaded, very strange, the way you feel when someone says something that snaps your thought process around.

  Exactly, Mr. Jeffries. Who cares? As sympathetic as I’d been feeling for Mr. Jeffries, I realized I’d been treating the sign-up entirely from my point of view, as something that had to be done, as something to get around. But Jesus Christ.

  Here was a ninety-five year old man, with no relatives, no friends, no one in the world, a man with weeks to live at the outside, a man whose every breath meant pain.

  And this man wanted to sue the City.

  Not for the money. Not for any friend or relative. Not even for the satisfaction of winning, since he couldn’t possibly survive long enough for that. And yet he wanted to do it. And was doing it, even though it cost him strength and caused him pain.

  It all seemed connected somehow in my mind. Paul Jeffries on his deathbed wanting to sue the City. And Richard Rosenberg, for all his money, wanting to fight in court.

  And then there was me, a man of lesser goals, a man who just wanted to pay his teeth off and get out from under, but who, in order to try to do so, had been willing to take on the Marvin Nickleson case.

  It seemed to me it must be all tied together somehow. It seemed to me it must all mean something, something about man’s indomitable spirit, and relentless will to survive. Something about how man must struggle and strive no matter what, and that the struggle itself is that which we call life, that which makes a man alive.

  Or maybe not. I’m saying it badly, and that wasn’t really how I felt, and put like that it sounds rather trite.

  But I had the feeling there must be something profound in all that somewhere, if only I were perceptive enough to see it, and articulate enough to say it.

  5.

  ALICE WAS ON THE computer when I got home. No surprise there. Alice was always on the computer these days. The machine in question was an NCR, hard drive, two floppies, IBM compatible. If you know what all that means you’re one-up on me. All I know is the damn thing cost about as much as my teeth.

  The computer was supposed to help me with my work. With my real work, that is, which is writing. My detective work is just what we in the arts call a job-job. Something you do to pay the bills. Writing is my career.

  I use the word “career” loosely, in the manner of those in the arts. What it means, loosely, is “that which one would preferably be doing if this were an ideal world.” Seeing as how this isn’t quite a perfect world yet, I spend most of my time with broken arms and legs.

  In all the time we’d had the computer, three months, I’d only used it once. Of course, I’d only had one job, a trade magazine article I’d gotten through a friend of a friend. That was a plum of an assignment, fifteen hundred dollars for three thousand words on the impact on society of recycling cans and bottles. Here I had to step lightly—in our neighborhood, the impact is largely having the trash bags ripped open and the garbage strewn on the street by bums looking for five cent deposit bottles. Since the article was supposed to advocate recycling, this wouldn’t do for a theme.

  At any rate, I got the assignment, and Alice insisted I do it on the word processor. After all, that’s what we got it for, wasn’t it?

  I didn’t want to do it. Frankly, it terrified me. I know I’m just an old fogy, but when I hit a typewriter key, I expect to see a letter appear on a piece of paper. I don’t want to see it appear magically on some TV screen, flickering elusively and tantalizingly inches away, and always seeming to say, “You can’t pick me up, can you?”

  But we must all bend with the times. Alice clicked on the power, entered WordPerfect, and ushered me into the space age.

  It wasn’t that bad. After all, the keyboard is just a typewriter. A typewriter with a lot of extra keys I don’t understand, but still a typewriter. And if I ignored all those distractions and just typed, I could do O.K.

  Better than O.K.

  First off, no carriage return. No need to judge when you’re getting to the edge of the page, with or without a margin bell. No margin release. Just keep typing and the words jump down to the next line.

  Far out.

  And if you screw up, as I often do, no problem. No Correcto type. No liquid paper. Just backspace and try again. And if you leave out a word, hey, just insert it. Everything else shifts over.

  After the first page I was typing like a fiend, fingers flying over the keyboard. Hey, people are going to be recycling all over the place and I’m going to be cashing a fifteen hundred dollar check.

  I was done in no time. Ten pages in three and a half hours. A new world’s record. I’d made a lot of typos, but who cares. I had Spell Check, the one extra function Alice had managed to teach me. I pressed “Control, F2,” and when the machine asked, I told it to check the whole document. And like lightning, the machine whizzed through my whole article, highlighting each misspelled word and offering me a list of alternatives, which a touch of a single key could insert instead. In twenty minutes I’d corrected the whole thing and was done.

  Unbelievable.

  I pressed “Exit,” and it asked me if I wanted to save the document. I pressed “Y” for “yes,” and “Enter.”

  And the whole thing disappeared.

  Poof. Gone. Vanished.

  My whole recycling article. My work. My creation.

  My fifteen hundred dollars.

  Gone.

  Unnamed.

  Untitled.

  Unsaved.

  Gone.

  And nothing would bring it back.

  And Alice had taken Tommie out shopping for the day so I could work undisturbed.

  And I had a deadline. And, of course, I had waited till the last minute to beat it.

  When Alice and Tommie returned three hours later, I was back at the good old-fashioned typewriter, laboriously and feverishly attempting to recreate my masterpiece.

  Not to fear. Alice switched on the computer, did something magical, and my original text reappeared.

  But the damage had been done. To my psyche, I mean. And it would be some time before I would try that infernal machine again.

  Not that I’m apt to get a chance to. As I say, Alice is always on the computer. And not just in WordPerfect, either. Alice is a master of all phases of the computer. She gets into the Disk Operating System (DOS), and makes it do all kinds of things. And once she gets in, she won’t get out. She’s a computer junkie. She types on impervious to me or Tommie or the outside world. I refer to this fixation as “hoggin’ DOS,” which, by pronouncing the “o” in “hoggin’ “ like the “a” in “ha,” makes it a play on words for her favorite brand of ice cream. Despite such feeble puns as this, our marriage endures.

  At any rate, I can’t fault Alice’s obsession with the computer. You see, she used to be a computer programmer for IBM. She gave it up when we had Tommie. Years later, after Tommie was successfully launched in kindergarten, she had gone back to IBM and reapplied for her old job. But it was no good. Time and technology had passed her by. The computers that five short years ago had seemed so sophisticated and modern were Stone Age implements now. Alice was not offered her old job back. Instead, IBM furnished her with a list of courses, which, if successfully completed, would make her eligible to apply for a position only two notches lower on the hierarchical ladder from the one that she had previously held. Alice, in a rare display of self-control, had restrained herself from telling IBM what it could do with its courses. But the whole thing had been a bitter pill to swallow, and while I still kid Alice about her computer obsession, as is my fashion, I always step lightly. And I have no illusions about whom the machine was really for.

  “That’s wonderful,” Alice said, when I finally got her off the screen long enough to tell her about Marvin Nickleson.

  Predictably, her reaction was the opposite of what I’d predicted. I figure
d she’d see the job as sleazy and demeaning.

  “Wonderful?” I said. “How is it wonderful?”

  “Well, it’s more money, for one thing.”

  “That’s its only redeeming feature.”

  Alice looked at me. “Are you kidding? Hey, it’s a real job. It’s real detective work.”

  “In the lowest sense. It’s spying on someone’s wife.”

  “Yeah, but not for a divorce. So he can get her back.”

  “Yeah, well that’s just what he says.”

  “Why should he lie?”

  “How the hell should I know?”

  “Then why assume it?”

  There are some things in life you always forget, no matter how obvious they are, how simple they are, or how many times you resolve to remember. The thing I always forget is, I should never, ever try to argue with my wife.

  “Look,” I said. “I’m going to do it. I’m just not happy about it.”

  “You worry too much. Look on the bright side.”

  “What bright side?”

  “See?” Alice said. “Your whole problem is your attitude. This case comes along and all you do is think of the negatives. Look at it this way. It’s a goof. It’s a lark.”

  “It’s sleazy.”

  “It’s only sleazy if you think sleazy. Don’t think sleazy. Think glamorous. Tell yourself you’re Jack Nicholson in Chinatown.”

  “As I recall, Roman Polanski sliced his nostril open with a knife.”

  “You’re incorrigible. You’re a perfect pessimist.”

  “Algernon. ‘The Importance of Being Earnest,’ Act One.”

  Alice frowned. “What?”

  “That’s a line from a play.”

  Alice shook it away. She was not to be tripped up that easily. “Now, the way you have to look at this,” she said, “is it’s a marvelous opportunity to broaden your field of experience. Make new contacts. Get referrals. Before you know it, you’ll be making two hundred dollars a day every day.”