Read Single Jeopardy for Free Online

like this:
    Jasmine, a bow-legged waitress at the local Chinese restaurant, was having some trouble getting a green card. Maybe it’s because she was an illegal alien, having overstayed her student visa and smuggled her young daughter into the country through Canada. Of course having a steady job didn’t help either, because even if your student visa is valid, you’re not supposed to be employed. That must be because our INS doesn’t want foreigners taking busboy jobs away from all the Americans who go to college just to prepare for that career.
    As the story goes, Melvin ate in the restaurant so often that he had his own regular table there. When he learned about Jasmine’s problem, he offered to fix it in his own inimitable way, and he did… he married her. Her little daughter Suzi was supposed to be a real cutie, and they certainly got that part of the story right. Unfortunately, a year or so later Jasmine died in a car accident (not having anything to do with the driving ability of Asian females) and since then Suzi has been living with her stepfather on the houseboat that the Marina provides.
    It wasn’t surprising that Melvin got a wife in that manner, because any other way would probably have been out of the question. He set the bar rather high for his ‘perfect’ woman, who he said must be a super-model who could read the Torah. When we were law students together he once bragged to several of us how he was dating a nice Catholic girl until he noticed a cross over her bed and refused to sleep with her. As the story goes, he told her that if he was going to get into bed with a woman, he wanted to be the only illegitimate Jewish con man in the room. Needless to say, he lost out that night to the guy on the wall.
    Armed with this information it isn’t hard to start piecing together the rest of the story. Melvin practices off the boat. He sends out nasty letters and makes threatening phone calls to delinquent debtors and tenants. L. Martin Unger does Melvin’s court appearances, with flunkies like me serving the papers and doing the occasional legal research.
    Most collection agencies were worried that when the federal Uniform Debt Collections Act was passed that it would crimp their style... but not Melvin. Whenever he made a threatening call outside the bounds of the UCDA (too early in the AM, too late in the PM, harassment at the debtor’s place of employment, etc.), he would also ask what the debtor thought of some political issue polarizing the country at that particular time. This was his devious way of setting up a defense for himself, so if anyone ever tried to prosecute him for violation of the Act he could claim he was conducting a political poll, and it was his right to free speech to call and ask those questions. The main secret of his success was an uncanny ability he displayed in finding the debtors that nobody else could find. No one knows how he does it, but it’s the main reason he gets a heavy load of collection and skip-tracing work. Someone on his staff certainly knows how to search on the internet. From what I’ve been told, everyone in the country is in there somewhere. One of these days, I’m going to have to learn how to surf like the kids do. They can find anything online.
    Because he didn’t have to go out very much, his main traveling was about a mile, to a massage parlor on Washington Blvd., where he keeps his regular appointments every Tuesday and Thursday for ‘physical therapy.’ Being so overweight, his back is always giving him trouble, so he bamboozled his insurance company into paying for his alleged therapy. What a wonderful state of affairs... the insurance companies refuse to pay for patients’ life-saving bone marrow transplants, but they’re paying for Melvin’s blowjobs.
    As clever as Melvin was though, I don’t think he ever came across the defense that I used once: four or five years after passing the Bar, some jerk collection agency was going after former