“You’re a real smarty,” said the lawyer. He looked her up and down: a huge woman, pathetically blonde, big-boned and absurd in a skirt sloppily crafted to be mini. Her knees were ruddy and the flesh below them was thick and white and flabby. There was no indication of age about her. Like most whores, she looked at the same time young but then old, possibly as old as her profession. Sometimes they were very old but seemed to have stopped aging at a certain point so that ranking them chronologically, as the lawyer was trying to do, came hard. He put his pipe on the table, on top of the police affidavit, and stared at her. She sat across the room, near the door in a straight chair, her flesh oozing over its sides. He watched her pull her miniskirt down over the upper part of her thigh, modestly, but with the same hard, cold look she had when she came in the room. “You’re a real smarty,” he commented, drawing on his pipe and exhaling the smoke into the room.

The fat woman in her miniskirt still glared at him. “Screw you, Yid!” she said through her teeth. “Screw your fat mama and your chubby sister with hair under her arms. Screw your brother and your father and I hope they should go crazy playing with themselves in pay toilets.”

The lawyer was about to reply when the door to the consultation room opened and another man came into the small place. “Hell, Jimmy,” he said to the lawyer, pretending to ignore the woman, “I got a problem here.”

“Yeah?” said Jimmy.

The other man walked over to the brown desk, leaned closer to Jimmy so that the woman could not hear and lowered his voice. “I got this kid,” he said. “A nice I-talian boy that grabbed this Cadillac outta a parking lot. Now he only done it twice before and I think the Judge might go easy if he got in a good mood before the kid goes on, this being Monday morning and all.”

“So?” said Jimmy.

“So I was thinking,” the other lawyer said, again lowering his voice and leaning much closer and making a sly motion with his head to indicate the whore on the chair across the room. “So I was thinking. The Judge knows Philomena over there. She’s here almost every month and she’s always good for a laugh. So I was thinking, this being Monday morning and all and with a cage-load of nigger drunks out there, why not put her on first, give the old man a good laugh and then put my I-talian boy on. I know he’d get a better deal that way.”

“What’s in it for me?” said Jimmy, rapping the ashes from his pipe into an ashtray.

“Look, I done you favors before. Remember that Chinaman? Remember the tip I gave you?”