“Yes, I moved down the street not long ago and my boss just told me she thought that corner,” I pointed up to Spruce and batted my lashes, “was a place where prostitutes and drug dealers were.” The sheer eloquence was lost on him. The cop just stared. “Is that true?” I asked. He leered.

“You must be from the country. A small town or somethin’?” Me—a farm hand?!

“If you must know, I moved here from NEW YORK CITY.” I was bragging about a city I no longer lived in to a cop with a sausage up his armpit.

“Well, Ms. Big City, in that case, it should be obvious to you that’s where people sell drugs and sex. Why else would all those queers be getting into those cars? Those cars are driven by Main Line faggots who screw those guys and then go home to their wives and kids.” He appeared to grow enraged just thinking about it.

At least those guys didn’t beat their wives and kids, I thought, noticing his wedding band. Good thing he carried a gun, a beating stick, and mace.

“Great, thanks.” And I was off. James was standing where I left him moments earlier. “Yup. Guns, drugs, sex to the north. Scary, hateful, homophobic wife-beater cops to the south.” James’s mouth dropped.

“We are such assholes. You are such an asshole—you actually asked a cop if people were selling drugs.” He shook his head. “How lame.”

“Oh come on, James. Look around. It’s a bunch of middle-aged men in silver Land Cruisers. How on earth could we have known that they were getting blow jobs on their way back to Little League.”

While it was true that these Main Line fathers were not the most obvious felons, it was also true that we probably should have caught on—the bumper-to-bumper traffic every night at six, not a single female driver, and I should have probably figured out that the pockmarked guy in overalls was not at all homeless but instead was selling his body for sex to suburban professionals.

“Whatever, Sheila.” James shrugged his shoulders. “Honestly, I don’t even care. Sort of makes this whole clerkship thing that much more interesting. Edgy, almost.”

Chapter Eight

A Toronto judge fell asleep in the middle of a criminal trial but woke up when a defense lawyer dropped a 2,136-page copy of the Criminal Code on the desk in front of him, a court was told yesterday. “We decided that I would drop a copy of Tremeear’s Criminal Code . . . in order to wake His Honour.”