“Well, I wanted to know—”

“Always get your money up front. Never trust a junkie with money. That’s the only part you need to remember—never trust a junkie with money. Particularly your money.” Harvey stopped scratching to glance at the bills on the desk.

“Harvey, there’s something very strange about my new client.” A mysterious brunette hires me, a complete novice in the field of immigration law, to find Carmen Luzano, her missing maid, in the maze of red tape that is INS. Only there is no Guatemalan maid. Instead, there is a chicana actress named Cathy Vega; Lupe said she was a hooker. Cathy Vega shows up dead at a place Monica Fullbright tells me to go to, then tells me she doesn’t know any Cathy Vega. I find out from Cathy’s roommate and from Rudy Sancerre that Monica did know Cathy. Men start to follow me. Monica Fullbright had dragged me into something both illegal and dangerous. Nobody will tell me the truth about anything. But I didn’t want to tell the whole story to Harvey. “She’s lying to me about something, Harvey. Now I can’t find her.”

“Did she pay you yet?”

“Crisp hundred-dollar bills. The ones I gave you. I got the feeling she’s mixed up with drugs. A guy’s been following me. Not the one you saw, another one.”

Harvey looked thoughtful. “Could be drugs. Sounds like your client’s a small fish. Know what I mean about the food chain?” Harvey was looking past me—that is, he was looking at me, but like he wasn’t seeing me.

What the hell was I beating my gums with Harvey Kaplan for? He was fried as usual. Delusional.

“You need the source. Always go to the source if you want to know...” He started to mutter to himself in Hindi or whatever language his guru group uses. He fingered the wooden beads around his neck. “You paid the phone company yet?”

“I’m going to do that today.”

“If you got a problem, you need to take it to a higher authority,” he repeated.

“God?” I hoped I wasn’t in for one of Harvey’s dreary and incomprehensible harangues about the innumerable and strangely named deities he chanted to.

“The cops, Whitney,” he replied, sitting on the edge of my desk and picking up the half-finished motion for Mrs. Peterson’s case, which he studied for a moment. “I can tell there’s something more bothering you. You’ve been edgy and distracted lately. You haven’t been able to do your work. Go to the cops before you’re in over your head.”

“Thanks, Harvey, but I’m not over my head. No problem. Now, excuse me, I got work to do.” I don’t like cops. I don’t like authority figures. Harvey couldn’t help me; he wouldn’t understand.