In the Best Families

May. Woman with pet cat stolen. Got it back; fifty dollars and expenses. Guy who got rolled in a joint on Eighth Avenue and didn't want to call the cops. Found her and scared most of it out of her. Two C.s for me. Man who wanted his son pried loose from a blonde sharpie. Shouldn't have tried it; fell on my nose; took a C. above expenses anyhow. Restaurant with a dumb cashier with sticky fingers; took only one afternoon to hook her; client beefed about my request for sixty-five dollars but paid it.

June. Spent two full weeks handling a hot insurance case for Del Bascom and damn near got my skull cracked for good. Cleaned it up. Del had the nerve to offer me three C.s; demanded a grand and got it. My idea was to net more per week than I had been getting from Wolfe, not that I cared for the money, but as a matter of principle. Found a crooked bookie for a man from Meadville, Pa. A hundred and fifty dollars. Man wanted me to find his vanished wife, but it looked dim and he could pay only twenty bucks a day, so I passed it. Girl unjustly accused, she said, of giving secret business dope to a rival firm, and fired from her job, pestered me into tackling it. Proved she was right and got her job back, doing five hundred dollars' worth of work for a measly hundred and twenty paid in instalments. Her face wasn't much, but she had a nice voice and good legs. Got an offer of a job from the F.B.I., my ninth offer from various sources in six weeks, and turned it down.

July. Took a whirl at supervising ten men for a bunch of concessionaires at

Coney Island; caught one of them taking a cut from some of the booths; he jumped me with a cooler and I broke his arm. Got tired of looking at a thousand acres of bare skin, mostly peeling, practically all non-seductive, and quit. Eight fifty for seventeen days. Had passed up at least two thousand worth of little chores. Screwball woman on Long Island had had jewellery stolen, uninsured, thought cops were in on it and stalling. Two things happened: I got some breaks, and I did a damn' good piece of work. It took me into August. I got all the jewellery back, hung it on an interior decorator's assistant with proof, billed her for thirty-five hundred gross, and collected.