Dirty Work

Dirty Work
By Lewis Shiner

Distributed under Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/

The office smelled like money. Brand new carpet, somebody's expensive perfume still hanging in the air. The chairs in the waiting room are leather and the copy machine has a million attachments and there's pictures on the wall that I don't know what they're supposed to be. Made me ashamed of the shirt I was wearing, the cuffs all frayed and some of the buttons don't match.
The secretary is a knockout and I figure Dennis has got to be getting in her pants. Red hair and freckles and shiny skin that looks like she just got out of a hot shower. A smile like she really means it. My name was in the book and she showed me right on in.
Dennis shook my hand and put me in a chair that was slings and tube steel. The calendar next to his desk had a ski scene on it. Behind him was solid books, law books all in the same binding, also some biographies and political stuff.
"Too bad you couldn't make the reunion," Dennis said. "It was a hoot."
"I just felt weird about it," I said. I still did. It looked like he wanted me to go on, so I said, "I knew there'd be a bunch of y'all there that had really made good, and I guess I...I don't know. Didn't want to have to make excuses."
"Hard to believe it's been twenty years. You look good. I still wouldn't want to run into you in a dark alley, but you look fit. In shape."
"I got weights in the garage, I try to work out. When you're my size you can go to hell pretty quick. You look like you're doing pretty good yourself." Charlene is always pointing to people on TV and talking about the way they dress. With Dennis I could see for the first time what she's talking about. The gray suit he had on looked like part of him, like it was alive. When I think about him in grungy sweats back at Thomas Jefferson High School, bent double from trying to run laps, it doesn't seem like the same guy.
"Can't complain," Dennis said.
"Is that your Mercedes downstairs? What do they call those, SLs?"
"My pride and joy. Can't afford it, of course, but that's what bankers are for, right? You were what, doing something in oil?"
"Rig foreman. You know what that means. 'I'm not saying business is bad, but they're telling jokes about it in Ethiopia.'"
Dennis showed me this smile that's all teeth and no eyes. "Like I told you on the phone. I can't offer you much. The technical name for what you'll be is a paralegal. Usually that means research and that kind of thing, but in your case it'll be legwork."
Beggars can't be choosers. What Dennis pays for his haircut would feed Charlene and the kids for close to a week. I must look ten years older than him. All those years in the sun put the lines in your face and the ache in your bones. He was eighteen when we graduated, I was only seventeen, now I'm the one that's middle aged. He was tennis, I was football. Even in high school he was putting it to girls that looked like that secretary of his. Whereas me and Charlene went steady from sophomore year, got married two weeks after graduation. I guess I've been to a couple of topless bars, but I've never been with anybody else, not that way.
It was hard for me to call Dennis up. What it was, I got the invitation for the class reunion, and they had addresses for other people in the class. Seemed like fate or something, him being right here in Austin and doing so good. I knew he'd remember me. Junior year a couple of guys on the team were waiting for him in the parking lot to hand him his ass, and I talked them out of it. That was over a girl too, now that I think about it.
Dennis said, "I got a case right now I could use some help with." He slid a file over from the corner of the desk and opened it up. "It's a rape case. You don't have a problem with that, do you?"
"What do you mean?"
Dennis sat back, kind of studying me, playing with the gold band on his watch. "I mean my client is the defendant. The thing is--and I'm not saying it's this way all the time or anything--but a lot of these cases aren't what you'd think. You got an underage girl, or married maybe, gets caught with the wrong jockey in her saddle, she hollers 'rape' and some guy goes to the slammer for nothing. Nothing you and I haven't