Eight hundred and fifty dollars is two months’ rent. I dropped the briefcase into one of the matching black vinyl chairs in front of my desk. Those chairs are empty most of the time. I want to be a good trial lawyer. Serve the people. Defend the Bill of Rights. The work I get is what I’m able to hustle from court appointments and a few phone calls from an ad in the yellow pages. I do misdemeanors, drunk driving, a preliminary hearing if I get lucky.

I wrestled open the sticky window behind my desk. The August heat rushed in. Despite the roar of traffic, I could hear Harvey pacing around me as I stared out. Hollywood Boulevard, Tinseltown, U.S.A. There’s a drugstore on the corner, a Thai restaurant downstairs and a place across the street that rents porno videos in Spanish, Vietnamese and Armenian. I don’t know what I expected when I hung my shingle out here. I wanted to protect the downtrodden and make a modest and honest living doing it. Twenty-five years old, right out of law school, and the only advice anyone had bothered to give me was from my mother, who told me to keep my subscription to Town & Country magazine. I had two good suits, a strand of opera length pearls, and Harvey Kaplan breathing down my neck.

“Look, Harvey, I just need till the end of the week,” I heard myself saying. If things get real bad, I’ll take a divorce or a custody case. I haven’t done many of them. The money is good, but I hate the sniveling and whining that go along with it.

“Whitney, you’re a nice lady. You got some good vibes, but I need to get paid. I’m giving you a terrific deal. The office. My library.”

Harvey had a terrific library. Cal Reporter. Federal Reporter, Benders, Shepherds. Manny Washington, the process server who comes around sometimes to take papers for me, told me that Harvey used to be one number-one criminal lawyer. I don’t know what happened to him. He hardly ever leaves the office now. He’s gotten tied up with the guru people, and there’s a small but steady stream in and out of his office of these pasty-faced aesthetes who wear wooden beads and beam like a good shit was the secret of life. Harvey does their wills, little accident cases, and helps divest them of their property, which they give to their “foundation.” Manny Washington says it’s too much drugs.