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this bitch sitting on a couple hundred thousand dollars in jewelry, plus she got the house and everything in it, the co-op apartment on Gramercy Park with a key to the fucking park and everything, and I got my clothes and my dental equipment, and on top of that I pay her a healthy chunk of alimony every month, which I have to pay until she dies or remarries, whichever comes first, and personally I wish that what comes first is her death and that it comes yesterday. But she's healthy, and she's smart enough not to remarry, and unless she drinks and screws herself to death I'm on the hook forever."
    I'm not divorced, never having gotten married in the first place, but it seems to me that everyone I know is either divorced or separated or thinking of moving out. Sometimes, when they all carp about alimony and child-support payments, I feel vaguely out of it. But most of the time what I feel is grateful.
    "You could knock her off easy," he went on, and then he began explaining just how I could go about it and when she was apt to be off the premises and all the rest. He went into greater detail than you have to know about, with me supplying the urgs whenever he stopped for air or zeroed in for some serious work on the old molar. When the drilling was done he had me rinse and then he set about putting in a filling, and throughout the whole process I heard just what an easy score it would be and how profitable I would find it, and more than anything else, what a bitch she was and how she had it coming. I suppose a lot of this last part was rationalization. Evidently he figured I would be happier stealing from a bad person than a good one. In point of fact I've found that it doesn't make much difference to me, and that what I really prefer is to burgle a victim about whom I know absolutely nothing. This business works best when you keep it as impersonal as you can.
    He went on, did Craig Sheldrake, World's Greatest Dentist, and so did the elaborate process of filling my tooth. And finally his conversation was finished and so was my tooth, and Mr. Thirsty made his exit and so did all the now-sodden wads of cotton, and there was a spate of rinsing and spitting, a bit of opening wide a final time while the great man checked the results of his handiwork, and then I sat back in the chair while he stood beside me, I examining my remodeled tooth with the inquisitive tip of my tongue, he holding one hand with another and waiting to ask the urgent question.
    "Well, Bern? Have we got a deal?"
    "No," I said. "Absolutely not. Out of the question."
    I wasn't just fencing. I damn well meant it.
    See, I like to find my own jobs. There are a lot of burglars who love to work on the basis of inside information, and God knows there's a lot of such information to be had. Fences are a prime source of this sort of data. A fence will oftentimes contact a thief, not merely with a request for a particular item but with the specs and location of the item all written out for him. This is an easy way to work and a lot of burglars are crazy about it.
    And the jails are full of them.
    Because what do you really know when you're dealing with a fence? Receivers of stolen goods are a curious breed, and there's something unquestionably slimy about the greatest portion of them. If I had a daughter, I certainly wouldn't want her to marry one. A fence does something manifestly illegal but he rarely does a single hour behind bars for his sins, partly because it's hard to nail him with the evidence, partly because his crime is the sort there's little public outcry against, and partly because he's apt to be pretty clever at playing both sides against the middle. He may pay off cops, and if paying them off with cash and furs doesn't work, he may turn to paying them off by setting up other criminals for them. I don't say that you're likely to get set up if you take jobs a fence hands you, but I've managed to dope out one thing in my time. If you're the only one who knows