I counted my blessings. My partner, Toby, is dependable the way a coin spinning in the air is dependable; he doesn't ask questions and will give you the right answer half the time. That's half-the-time better than my old partner, who had given his last answer as an apology in red ink on white paper. After he wrote it, he flung himself from a twelfth story hotel window.

That's what the DA's office will tell you, anyway.

That had been four months earlier. For three of them, a letter from Mrs. Andromeda Woodstern, heiress and widow, requesting the services of a PI in exchange for an absurd sum of money, lay crushed at the bottom of a cardboard box full of the dead man's records.

When she had written that letter, she had been the perfect client: wealthy, desperate, pushing towards senility. But whatever her problems were, whatever stings stung or burdens bore on her for those long months, they had ground her to razor sharpness. Or so I thought after I had discovered the letter, called the number she had provided, and heard her Ginsu voice dicing the ripe tomatoes of my pecuniary dreams.

"I demand to speak to Conrad!" That was my partner--Conrad Chandler.
"He's dead, ma'am."
"Don't get fresh with me. Patch me through to him! I need to talk to a man with credentials."

Twenty minutes later, I had haggled her into hiring the quick over the dead, but for a fifth of the original price.

A man in my position needs able to think flexibly about the meanings of phrases like "gainful employ" and "possible eviction." I took the job drove to meet her at her mansion in Wellesley the next day.