Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow? Read Online Free PDF Page A

mean sleeping with?"
        She laughed, and the laugh exploded into a cough. I had to get some iced tea down her before the hacking stopped. She was so big and yet so delicate - death is always imminent at her age and state of health - that the kind of useless pity you feel for the dying came over me. All I can say is that on the other side everybody damned well better have brand-new cars to drive and new episodes of Gunsmoke to watch three nights a week.
        "Who told you this?" I said, when she was all right again.
        "I'm a stoolie, gumshoe. I don't reveal my sources."
        "C'mon, Helen."
        "The candy machine guy."
        "How'd he know about it?"
        "He talks to a lot of people on his route."
        "Any specific names?"
        "None that he shared."
        "He reliable, you think?"
        "At least fifty percent of the time."
        I laughed. "Now there's a recommendation."
        "Conners a client of yours?" she asked.
        "Not exactly. I mean, we haven't made anything official."
        "That's the kind of thing can get a man killed. You should tell your client that."
        
***
        
        I spent the middle hours of the afternoon finishing work on one of the Judge's other cases. This one involved a property dispute between two lonely old widowers whose only pleasure in life was harassing their neighbors, whom they resented for having actual lives. I got the two of them to sit down in a tavern. One preferred to talk without his dentures in, which is always pleasant, and the other kept passing the kind of deadly gas the Germans used in the First World War. The Judge had decided to bring back some old traffic charges against one and some old drunk-and-disorderly fines against the other - unless they agreed to drop their case. The Judge was too busy for such Mickey Mouse antics, I'd been told to tell them, and it was past time these two dipshits started acting their age, which was somewhere around ninety.
        "She really called us that?" one of them asked.
        "Dipshits, you mean?"
        "Yeah."
        "Yeah, that's exactly what she called you."
        "That gal's got some mouth on her, don't she?" he said. They agreed to drop the suit.
        My next stop was a phone booth outside the service station where I get my Ford worked on. I'd noticed a strange little squeal when I turn right abruptly. I take better care of my car's health than I do my own. I had Gil run it up on the hoist for a quick peek. Gil had been in the news lately because - in response to a competitor of his who stuffed twelve college freshmen into a phone booth - Gil had stuffed forty college freshmen into a Volkswagen. Gil was a mechanic on bombers back in the war. He's the Toscanini of motors. He told me he couldn't keep up with all the business that came in as a result of the VW thing. I'm not sure that's the greatest recommendation for a service garage, but in Gil's case it worked out.
        
***
        
        I've got this little office stuck in the back of a large building that keeps changing businesses. Right now, it's a paint store. My office has its own small parking lot and entrance. A lot of law firms these days play what they call Muzak, very bland instrumental music kept very low. It's supposed to keep spirits (and productivity) high.
        I wonder what the inventor of Muzak would think of Jamie Newton's form of Muzak: namely, Jerry Lee Lewis's "Great Balls of Fire" played very loud. I know my clients sure like it ("How the hell come you've got rock-and-roll blaring in the background every time I call there, McCain, and who's that idiot you've got answering the phone?").
        A small-town attorney gets paid in many ways. Food is a favorite. Last summer I settled a bill in exchange for a quarter of beef. I get free lunches at a restaurant for defending an arson case brought against them. I did some work for a local farmer, and I'm looking at five