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I didn’t drive away, not immediately. No, I just sat there for a long couple of minutes lost in time, unable to get the smell of her perfume out of my head.

CHAPTER SEVEN
    The stuff was all there, including the keys and check. I laughed at myself. Someone had to. It had been so long since I took a paying gig as a PI that I wouldn’t have known what to charge Nancy or what to ask as a retainer. I didn’t know where my license was, or if it was valid any longer. But it had never really been about the license for me. Looking back, I wasn’t sure what any of it had been for. For so many years I thought it was about getting my gold detective’s shield. Then it was about being a PI. Then … .
    In the end, it’s true: The older you get, the less you know; at least, the less you know for sure. No matter. Somehow I got the sense that on this case—if it actually was a case and not pure manipulation—there wouldn’t be much need for me to display current documentation.
    I did still carry my badge on me. I toted the old tin in my pocket, not so much to use it—for chrissakes, I was beyond a relic in cop years. I could maybe flash it at a blind man and get away with it. No, I think I carried it as a kind of talisman. It connected me to a distant past, to a time when I dressed in blue and things were decidedly more black and white than unendingly gray. I had, on the other hand, stopped carrying my .38 since I’d taken up drinking as an Olympic sport. Handguns, clouded judgment, and old man reflexes were a bad mix. The same was true for driving. Once I got back into the city, I was either going to have to lay off the booze or refamiliarize myself with the subway map.
    The subway map would have to wait because my first stop was only several miles to the west of Nancy Lustig’s Old Brookville manse. Great Neck, the town I was headed for, was a pretty wealthy area in its own right. The northernmost part of Great Neck, Kings Point, was rumored to have been the model for West Egg in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s
The Great Gatsby
. I smiled, thinking that Fitzgerald would have soiled himself at the notion of Great Neck having been a predominantly Jewish enclave for the latter half of the twentieth century. Tom Buchanan surely would have. Somewhere, Meyer Wolfsheim was smiling.
    The law offices of Cantor, Schreck, Forbus, Jordan, Halle, LLP took up the top two floors of a four-story glass and steel sarcophagus on Northern Boulevard. The Cantor at the head of the partners list was, according to the paper in my hand, Julian L. Cantor, Nancy’s ex and Sloane’s father. I knew the firm from when my second wife and I ran our own security outfit. Many of our steady accounts had been law firms representing one side or the other in personal injury suits. Though we never worked directly for Cantor, Schreck, et al. we had done jobs for law firms that were allied with them on class action suits. While they weren’t a huge firm by New York City standards, they were big players on Long Island and very well respected.
    The semicircular reception area was straight out of the suburban law office playbook. There was plush gray carpeting and floor-to-ceiling blond wood paneling with the firm’s name in big block letters behind the circular receptionist’s kiosk. To the right of the kiosk was a designated waiting area consisting of six severe black leather chairs and a curved coffee table covered in magazines that might interest someone with a seven-figure income. I can’t say that
Polo Month
or
Yacht and Jet Weekly
piqued my curiosity.
    “Mr. Cantor, please,” I said to the receptionist.
    Attractive, with short cropped brown hair, she was maybe thirty, but she had older eyes and a professionally cool demeanor. “Do you have an appointment?” she asked, already knowing the answer.
    “Sorry, I don’t.”
    “Then I am afraid Mr. Cantor is unavailable. Would you like to make an appointment?”
    “Look, I’m not trying to be difficult, but