Bad Samaritan Read Free Page A

night!”
    I kissed her and headed for home, back toward Westwood, back to reality.
    Skip was sure living high off the hog, the worst thing that could have happened to him. At university he had been considered a great passing quarterback, but Stanford had turned out other quarterbacks who, though with far less natural talent than Skip, had gone on to fame, fortune and glory in the pros. In the play-for-pay leagues, everybody on the squad puts out two hundred percent, or you can forget about the Super Bowl. Skip had been born too good; it had made him less than he should have been.
    He had never had to work that hard in college, not learned to work that hard when it paid off. He had his skill and his charm and his looks. It had been easy for him to marry money. He could have done it a half dozen times when he was at Stanford.
    I had thought that crummy little gas station he ran in San Valdesto would finally make a man of him. When you are making a living selling an independent brand of cut-rate gasoline in competition with the major oil companies, man, you are putting out. Those big firms take a dim view of free enterprise. Skip had survived. Given time, he might have been successful.
    I cut over to the coast road at Oxnard, to get away from the jammed freeway traffic—and spent an extra hour in the going-home traffic from the beaches.
    I had no job scheduled for tomorrow; maybe I could prowl Sunset and then the Venice district and ask my contacts there if they had ever run into a girl named Patty Serano.
    She could be living the free will, free speech, health food life in Venice or the life of a hooker on Sunset Boulevard. With today’s kids, there was no way of knowing.
    Nor, as I settled into my lumpy bed, did I have any way of knowing that I, too, would be starting a new life tomorrow.

3
    T HE NAME OF THE law firm was Weede, Robbins, McCulloch and Adler. The woman who phoned me next morning was Grant Robbins’s secretary. Could he see me at two o’clock this afternoon?
    Business on Friday and now a new job to start the week. Things were picking up. “I’ll be there,” I promised.
    They were a prestige firm and would pay my top rates. It probably wouldn’t be divorce work. If it was, I’d take it. Earlier in my career I wouldn’t accept divorce work. Earlier in my career I didn’t handle bail bonds, either. Hunger and the advancing years can alter adolescent attitudes.
    His office was spacious and paneled, with a couple of Degas pastels on one wall and a Matisse print on another. He was a tall man, well tailored and quiet voiced.
    He shook my hand and said, “You don’t remember me, do you?”
    I smiled, admitting nothing.
    “You nailed me for an eighteen-yard loss,” he prompted, “when you were at Stanford.”
    I remembered him now, a sub quarterback for Cal. “I remember,” I said. “You almost beat us before the afternoon was over.”
    “My best day,” he admitted. “We never had a winning day against Stanford when you and Lund were there. But who did? Sit down, Brock, and prepare for the news. Unless you’ve already heard it?”
    I shook my head and sat down. This didn’t sound like divorce work.
    “We represent the estate of Homer Gallup,” he started—and my mind went blank.
    Maybe I suspected. I don’t know. I didn’t hear anything for almost a minute.
    Then his voice broke through. “Are you all right? You’re pale. What’s wrong?”
    “Nothing serious. Start over from where you told me to sit down. I missed most of the rest of it.”
    In nonlegal terms, Homer’s cousin in Houston and Brock Callahan of Westwood-Beverly Hills were the only heirs to the estate of Homer Gallup. Our shares would be equal.
    It was a vulgar thing to ask, but I’m vulgar. “How much?” I asked.
    He shrugged. “It’s almost impossible to estimate, with estate taxes what they are these days. It should be substantial.”
    “More than twelve dollars?”
    He smiled comfortingly. “At the most