“Only one?”

“All right, ten.”

“And what would you have done with all that money?”

“I sort of fantasized about starting a foundation to help public interest law organizations.”

“That’s noble and pathetic, both.”

“And I thought a Porsche would be nice.”

“Better,” I said. “You’d look good in a Porsche.”

“I think so, yes. What about you, Victor? You’ve thought about this, I suppose.”

“Some.” A radical understatement. Whole afternoons had been plundered in my fervent imaginings of great wealth acquired and spent.

“So what would you do?”

“The first thing I’d do,” I said, “is quit.”

“You’d leave the firm?”

“I’d leave the law, I’d leave the city, I’d leave my life. I’d cocoon somewhere hot and thick with coconuts and return as something else completely. I always thought I’d like to paint.”

“I didn’t know you had any talent.”

“I have none whatsoever,” I said cheerfully. “But isn’t that the point? If I had talent I’d be a slave to it, concerned about producing my oh so important work. Thankfully, I am completely talentless. Maybe I’d go to Long Island and wear Gap khakis and throw paint on canvas like Jackson Pollock and drink like a fish every afternoon.”

“You don’t drink well.”

“You’re right, and I’ve never been to Long Island, but the image is nice. And did I mention the Ferrari? I’d like an F355 Spider in candy-apple red. I hear the babes, they love the Ferrari. Oh hell, who knows, I’d probably be miserable even so, but at least I wouldn’t be a lawyer.”

“Do you really hate it that much?”

“You see the law as a noble pursuit, as a way to right wrongs. I see it as a somewhat distasteful job that I’m shackled to by my monthly credit card bills. And if I don’t get out, and soon,” I said, without a hint of humor in my voice, “it’s going to kill me.”

The car in front of me flashed its rear red lights and the car beside me slowed and I braked to a stop and soon we were just sitting there, all of us, hundreds and hundreds of us, parked in the largest parking lot in the city. The Schuylkill did this every now and then, just stopped, for no apparent reason, as if the King of Commuting, in his headquarters in King of Prussia, simply flicked a switch and turned the highway off. We sat quietly for a few minutes before the horns began. Is there anything so futile in a traffic jam as a horn? Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t know you were in such a hurry, in that case maybe I’ll just ram the car in front of me.

“I’d like to travel,” said Beth. “That’s what I would do if I suddenly had too much money.”

She had been thinking about it the whole time we had been stuck and that surprised me. For me to mull over all I would do with all the money I wanted was as natural as breathing, but it was not so natural for Beth. Generally she evinced great satisfaction with her life as it was. This was my first indication ever that her satisfaction was waning.

“I never saw the point of traveling,” I said. “There’s only so many museums you can rush through, so many old churches, until you’re sick of it all.”

“I’m not talking for just a week to see some museums,” said Beth. “I’m talking about taking a few years off and seeing the world.” I turned and looked at her. She was staring forward, as if from the prow of a swift ocean liner instead of through the windshield of a car stalled in traffic. “I always thought, as a girl, that there was something out there waiting for me and my purpose in life was to go out and find it. If there is a disappointment in my life it’s that I haven’t even really searched. I feel like I’ve been tromping around looking for it in Philadelphia only because the light is better here, when all along I know it’s someplace else.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know.”

“What?”

“I don’t know. It’s stupid, but it’s what I’d like to do. And even if it’s here in Philadelphia after all, maybe I need to spend time away, shucking off all my old habits and old ways of seeing and learn to look at everything new again, so I can find it. A couple of years in a foreign land is supposed to sharpen your vision.”

“At LensCrafters they’ll do it for you in less than an hour.”

“A safari in Africa. A jungle cruise up the Amazon. A month on a houseboat in India. Nepal. Sometimes I look at a map of Nepal and get chills. Katmandu.”

“What kind of toilets do they have in Katmandu? I won’t do any of that squatting stuff.”

“So if we were suddenly rich, Victor, I think what I’d do is go to Katmandu.”

The traffic started to crawl forward. First a foot at a time, then a few feet, then we began a twenty-mile-per-hour jog into the heart of the city. Beth was thinking about Katmandu, I suppose, while I thought about my Gap khakis and my Ferrari. And about Caroline Shaw.

Back in the office I sat at the quiet of my desk and ignored the message slips handed me by Ellie. I thought of things, thought of my neediness and my deprivations and how much I wanted out. I wanted out so desperately it hurt as bad as a lost love. I had to get out, for reasons that haunted half the lawyers in the country and for darker, more sinister reasons that Beth could never know. Everything was against my ever leaving, sure, except for how fiercely I wanted out. I sat and daydreamed about winning the lottery and dripping paint on canvases in the Hamptons with a gin and tonic in my hand and then I stopped daydreaming and thought about the Reddmans.

Guys like me, we don’t often brush shoulders with that much money and to accidentally rub up against it, like I did in that bank, does something ugly to us. It’s like seeing the most beautiful woman in the world walk by, a woman who makes you ache just to look at her, and knowing that she’ll never even glance in your direction, which slips the ache in even deeper. I thought about the Reddmans and all they were born to and I ached. More than anything in this world, I wish I had been born rich. It would have made up for everything. I’d still be ugly, sure, but I’d be rich and ugly. I’d still be weak and dim and tongue-tied with women, but I’d be rich enough for them not to care. I’d no longer be a social misfit, I’d be eccentric. And most of all, I’d no longer be what I was, I’d be something different. I thought about it all and let the pain of my impoverishment wash over me and then I started making calls.

“I don’t have time to chitchat,” said Detective McDeiss over the phone, after I had tracked him down to the Criminal Justice Building. “You need something from me, you can go through the D.A.”

“It’s not about an active prosecution,” I said. “The case I want to talk about is old and closed. Jacqueline Shaw.”

There was a pause and a deep breath. “The heiress.”

“I like that word, don’t you?”

“Yeah, well, this one hung herself. What could there possibly be left to talk about?”

“I don’t know. I just want to get some background. I’m representing the sister.”

“Good for you, Carl. It’s a step up I guess from your usual low-class grease-bucket clientele. How did you ever hook onto her?”

“She chased me down the street with a gun.”

“Tell me about it, you slimeball.”

“You free for lunch tomorrow?”

“To talk about Jacqueline Shaw?”

“Exactly. My treat.”

“Your treat, huh?” There was a pause while McDeiss reprioritized his day. “You eat Chinese, Carl?”

“I’m Jewish, aren’t I?” I said.

“All right then, one o’clock,” and he tossed out an address before hanging up. I knew that McDeiss wanted nothing to do with me, disdain dripped thick as oil from his voice, but in the last few years I had learned something about cops and one of the things I had learned was that there was not a cop on the force who would turn down a free lunch, even if it was just a $4.25 luncheon special at some Chinatown dive with fried rice and an egg roll soggy with grease.