WHEN I HAD TOLD GAYLORD I took a keen professional interest in other people’s tragedy, it hadn’t been just banter. I am a lawyer and so tragedy is my business. Riches lurk for me in the least likely of places, in that dropped package of explosives at the railway depot, in that cup of drive-through coffee that scalds the thighs, in the airplane engine that bursts into a ball of flame mid-flight. Think of your worst nightmare, your most dreaded calamity, think of injury and anguish and death and know that for me it represents only so much profit, for I am your lawyer, the alchemist of your tragedy.

I had seemingly forgotten this, forgotten that one case can make a lawyer wealthy, one client, one fact pattern, one complaint. In delving into the death of Jacqueline Shaw I had belted myself too tightly inside the trench coat of Philip Marlowe and had forgotten that I was a lawyer first and foremost and that a lawyer, first and foremost, looks after the bottom line. You can make money charging $185 an hour, as long as you work like a dog and keep your expenses low, good money, but that’s not how lawyers get stinkingly rich. Lawyers get stinkingly rich by taking a percentage of a huge lawsuit based on somebody else’s tragedy, and that’s exactly what I meant to do.

Caroline Shaw thought someone had murdered her sister, Jacqueline, and had hired me to find out who. After looking it over it seemed to me that she might just be right, and if Jacqueline was murdered I could figure out the motive right off – money, and lots of it. Why ever would you kill an heiress if it wasn’t for the money? Caroline Shaw had only hired me to find the murderer, but I had other ideas. A wrongful death action against the killer would take back whatever had been gained by the killing and whatever else the killer owned, with a third going to the lawyers. All I needed was for Jacqueline Shaw to have been murdered for her money and for me to find the killer and for me to get Caroline to sign a fee agreement and for me to dig up enough evidence to win my case and take my third of the killer’s fortune, which in itself would be a fortune. Long shots all, to be sure, but that never stopped me from returning my Publishers Clearinghouse Sweepstakes entry twice a year.

I was on my knees picking up tiny shards of glass and placing them on a piece of cardboard, thinking it all through, when Beth showed up.

“Redecorating?” she asked.

“Just some friendly visitors from the Twilight Zone trying to scare me off the Jacqueline Shaw case.”

“Are you scared off?”

“Hardly.”

I stood up and dumped the glass fragments into the trash can where they tinkled against the sides like fairy dust.

“Think on this, Beth. Eddie Shaw’s money situation seems to have eased right after his sister’s death. And Jacqueline herself told her fiancé that she was afraid one of her brothers was trying to kill her. And somewhere there was a load of insurance money, so said Detective McDeiss. And when I had suggested to Caroline that maybe a family member had killed her sister she had snapped that her family had nothing to do with the death, protesting far too much. I’m not sure how the two losers who threatened me are involved, but what if Eddie killed his sister to increase his income and his ultimate inheritance? And what if we could bring a wrongful death action against the bastard and prove it all?”

“A lot of ifs.”

“Well, what if all those ifs?”

“You’d wipe him out with compensatory and punitive damages,” she said.

“With a third for us. McDeiss estimated the total Reddman fortune at about half a billion dollars. The brother’s share would be well over a hundred million. Let’s say we prove it and win our case and get everything in damages. We’d earn ourselves a third of over a hundred million. That would be about twenty for you and twenty for me.”

“You’re dreaming.”

“Yes I am. I’m dreaming the American dream.”

“It probably was a suicide.”

“Of course it was.”

“And if it was a murder, it probably wasn’t the brother who did it.”

“Of course not.”

“It was probably some judgment-proof derelict.”

“You’re absolutely right.”

“There’s nothing there. You’re just chasing a fool’s dream.”

“And yet when the pot was sixty-six million you bought ten lottery tickets.”

“So I did,” she said, nodding her head. “Twenty million. It’s too gaudy a number to even consider.”

“I’ve dreamed bigger,” I said, and I had. That was one of the curses of wanting so much, whatever you get can never top your dreams. “How are you on the meaning of life?”

“Pretty weak.”

“Are you willing to learn?”

“Like you have the answers,” she snorted. “Don’t you think karmic questions about life and meaning are a little beyond your depth?”

“You’re calling me shallow?”

“Aren’t you?”

“Well, sure, yes, but there’s no need to rub it in.”

“Oh, Victor, one thing I always admired about you was your cheerful shallowness. Nothing’s more boring than Mr. Sincere droning on about his life’s search for spiritual meaning in that ashram in Connecticut. Just shut up and get me a beer.”

“Well, maybe I don’t have any answers, but the Church of the New Life says it does. Novice meetings are held every Wednesday night in the basement of some house in Mount Airy. From what her fiancé told me, this was the same place where Jacqueline Shaw meditated the day she died. Somehow, it seems, their connection to her didn’t end with her death. They wanted me to come, but I think I’ll stay away for obvious health reasons. Maybe you can learn something.”

“Why don’t you just have Morris give them a look?”

“I don’t think this is quite right for Morris, do you?” I said, handing her the card.

She studied it. “Maybe not. Who’s Oleanna?”

I shrugged my ignorance.

“Sounds like a margarine. Maybe that’s the secret, low cholesterol as the way to spiritual salvation.”

“You never know, Beth. That something you’ve been looking for your whole life, maybe it’s been hiding out all this time in a rat-infested basement in Mount Airy.”

“I don’t think so,” she said, and then she looked at the card some more. She flicked it twice on her chin before saying, “Sure. Anything for a few laughs.”

Good, that was taken care of, and now I had something even more important to do. What I had was a hope and plan and the sweet lift of pure possibility. What I still needed was Caroline Shaw’s signature on a contingency fee agreement before I could begin the delicate process of spinning the tragedy of Jacqueline Shaw’s death into gold.

I CLEARED OFF MY DESK before she came, threw out the trash, filed the loose papers whose files I could find, shoved the rest into an already too full desk drawer. Only one manila folder sat neatly upon the desktop. I straightened the photographs on my office wall, arranged the client chairs at perfect obtuse angles one to another, took a plant from Beth’s office and placed it atop my crippled filing cabinet. I had on my finest suit, a little blue worsted wool number from Today’s Man, and a non-Woolworth real silk tie. I had spent a few moments that morning in my apartment, globbing polish onto my shoes and then buffing them to a sharp pasty black. I buttoned my jacket and stood formally at the door and then unbuttoned it and sat on the edge of my desk and then buttoned it again and stood behind my desk, leaning over with one hand outstretched, saying out loud, in rounded oval tones, “Pleased to see you again, Ms. Shaw.”

It was so important to get this right, to make the exactly correct impression. There is a moment in every grand venture when the enterprise teeters on the brink, and I was at that moment. I needed Caroline’s signature, and I needed it today, I believed. With it I had a chance, without it I held as much hope as a lottery ticket flushed down the toilet. That was why I was practicing my greeting like a high school freshman gearing himself to ask the pretty new girl from California to the hop.