A week after we dealt with Cody Falk, I received a check in the mail from her, a smiley face drawn within the “o” in her name, yellow ducklings embossed along the borders of the check, a card enclosed that said, “Thanks! You’re the absolute best!”

Given what would happen, I’d like to say I never heard from her again until that morning six months later when I heard the news on the radio, but the truth is she called once several weeks after I’d received her check.

She reached my answering machine. I came in an hour later to grab a pair of sunglasses, heard the message. The office was closed that week because I was taking off to Bermuda with Vanessa Moore, a defense attorney who had no more interest in a serious relationship than I did. She liked beaches, though, and she liked daiquiris and sloe gin fizzes and nooners followed by late afternoon massages. She looked mouthwatering in a business suit, coronary-inducing in a bikini, and she was the only person I knew at the time who was at least as shallow as I was. So, for a month or two, we were a good match.

I found my sunglasses in a lower desk drawer as Karen Nichols’s voice played through a tinny speaker. It took me a minute to recognize it, not because I’d forgotten how she sounded, but because this didn’t sound like her voice. It sounded hoarse and weary and ragged.

“Hey, Mr. Kenzie. This is Karen. You, ahm, helped me out a month ago, maybe six weeks? Yeah, so, ahm, look, give me a call. I, ah, I’d like to run something by you.” There was a pause. “Okay, so, yeah, just give me a call.” And she left her number.

Vanessa beeped the horn out on the avenue.

Our plane left in an hour, and traffic would be a bitch, and Vanessa could do this thing with her hips and calf muscles that was probably outlawed in most of Western civilization.

I reached for the replay button and Vanessa beeped again, louder and longer, and my finger jumped and hit the erase button instead. I know what Freud would have made of the mistake, and he’d probably be right. But I had Karen Nichols’s number somewhere, and I’d be back in a week, and I’d remember to call her. Clients had to understand that I had a life, too.

So I went to my life, let Karen Nichols go to hers, and, of course, forgot to call her back.

Months later, when I heard about her on the radio, I was driving back from Maine with Tony Traverna, a bail jumper who was usually considered by those who knew him as both the best safecracker in Boston and the dumbest man in the universe.