A Nasty Piece of Work Read Free

given. That you were a troublemaker in a war that had enough trouble without you. That you came out west and went into the business of detecting in order to live in the style to which you wanted to become accustomed. That you’re street-smart and tough and lucky and don’t discourage easily. That what you do, you do well, what you don’t do well, you don’t do. Which is another way of saying you don’t buy into the notion that if something is worth doing, it’s worth doing badly.”
    “That’s one hell of a list.”
    “I have a last but not least: that you charge satisfied customers ninety-five dollars a day and unsatisfied customers zero. That nobody can recall an unsatisfied customer.”
    “Can you attach a number to your problem?”
    “I bet $125,000 of my uncle’s nest egg this guy wouldn’t jump bail. I worry that I’m losing the bet. I feel real awful about it.”
    “Just out of curiosity, you want to identify your grapevine?”
    She flashed another one of those apologetic half-smiles. “Hey, I’d better not. If I tell you, you might send me packing. That’s what my grapevine said. She said you were peeved at her for being too available. She said, psychologically speaking, you wore starched collars and liked ladies who liked men who opened doors for them. She said you’d been born into the wrong century.”

 
    Two
     
    Friday’s story, the reason she had turned up at the door of my mobile home, came out in disjointed bits, which I took to mean it hadn’t been memorized. Here are the bits, jointed: Ten days before, the police in Las Cruces had apprehended a white male name of Emilio Gava on drug charges. Seems as if police undercover agents had caught him buying cocaine in a bar. After his arrest, Gava was allowed to make a phone call from the jailhouse. At the arraignment next morning, an out-of-state lawyer in a three-piece suit turned up to defend him. Friday described the lawyer, who went by the name of R. Russell Fontenrose, as unattractive a male as she’d ever set eyes on. He spurned an offer to plea bargain and pleaded his client not guilty even though he’d been caught with his hand in the cookie jar, as the saying goes. The judge, miffed to see a fancy-pants lawyer at the bar, set a high bail—$125,000. At which point a woman Friday took to be Gava’s lady friend turned up with a deed to a condominium in East of Eden Gardens.
    “Can you describe her?” I asked.
    “I’m not good at describing people,” Friday said.
    “Try.”
    The lids closed over Friday’s eyes as she rummaged through her memory. “She was roughly my height and build, with blonde hair that fell in bangs across her forehead.”
    “What about her eyes? Women always notice other women’s eyes.”
    “The single time I saw her, which was in my uncle’s office after the arraignment, she was wearing dark sunglasses.” Friday was looking at me again. “Lemuel, what do you know about the intricacies of bail bonding?”
    I had to admit what I knew could fit in a thimble.
    “Okay. Here’s the short course. Bail bondsmen—that includes bail bondswomen—require collateral for any bond over $5,000. If the collateral is real estate, they require double the amount of bail in equity. Equity is the difference between what the property is worth and the mortgage against it. A defendant’s personal property is not eligible, but the deed was in the woman’s name, which was Jennifer Leffler. She produced tax statements showing the property was valued at $375,000 and free and clear of mortgage, that the state and local property taxes had been paid up for the year. She paid the fee for the bond in advance in cash. I posted bail. Emilio Gava and Jennifer Leffler climbed into a utility vehicle and drove off.”
    “Sounds pretty cut-and-dried to me,” I said. “Where’s the problem?”
    Friday rubbed the cold beer mug against her brow as if she was suppressing a migraine. “The trial is two weeks from today. Day before