The office smelled like money, brand new carpet somebody expensive perfume still hanging in the air. The chairs , in 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 pay for his haircut could feed charlene and the kids for close to one 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 ever done, anyway.” “So is this one of those cases?”
“It’s a little fishy. The girl is at ut, blonde, good family, the guy is the wrong color for Mom and Dad. Maybe she wanted a little rough fun and then got cold feet. The point is, the guy gets a fair trial, no matter what he did.” He took a form out of the file. “I’ll get you a xerox of this. All I want is for you to follow this broad around for a couple of days, just kind of check her out.”
“How do you mean?”
“Just get an idea of what kind of person she is. Is she some little ice princess, like she wants the da to believe? Or is she showing her panties to anybody with a wallet and a dick?” “Geez, Dennis, I really don’t know...” “There’s nothing to it. This is absolutely standard procedure in a case like this. She knows she’s going to have people watching her, it’s just part of the legal bullshit game.” When I didn’t say anything he said, “It’s ten bucks an hour, time-and-a-half if you go over forty hours a week, which I don’t see this doing. We pay you cash, you’re responsible for your own taxes and like that, and if you forget to declare it, that’s your lookout. Hint hint. If this works out we can probably find some other things for you.”
Here’s the carrot, was what he was saying, and here’s the stick. Good money, tax free, if you do it. Turn this case down because it sounds a little hinky and you’re back on the street. “What’s this woman’s name?”

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'Some horrible yuppie name' he looked at the file 'lane that's it. Lane Rochelle. Isn’t that a hoot?”
I didn’t like the way her name made me feel. Like I was standing outside the window of one of those big Highland Park mansions back in Dallas, wearing last week’s clothes, watching guys in tuxedos and women in strapless dresses eat little sandwiches with the crusts cut off. I blamed her for it. “I don’t know anything about this kind of work,” I said. “I mean, if she sees me I’m liable to scare her off. I don’t exactly blend into a crowd.” “Let her see you. It’s not a problem.”
I still wasn’t sure. “When would you want me to start?”
He slapped me on the shoulder as he came around the desk. “There you go,” he said. He walked out of the office and I heard the hum of his big new copy machine.

So i drove over to campus in my good curdory jacket and my fray cuiffs and my black knit tie over. I parked my pickup in Dobie garage my and
walked down 21st Street to the Perry Casteñeda Library, where Lane Rochelle works. The piece of paper Dennis gave me shows her address and her job history and her criminal record (none). Also a xerox of a photo of her from the society page of the Statesman.
She’s older than Dennis let on, twenty-eight, she’s working on her master’s degree in History. She’s paying her own way with her job at the library, not living off her rich parents back in Virginia, which makes me like her more too. The photo doesn’t tell me much. Blonde hair, nice smile, wears her clothes the way Dennis wears his.
I went past the security guard and the turnstiles and looked around. I mean, I don’t spend a lot of time in libraries. The place is big and there’s this smell of old paper that makes me a little sick to my stomach. The Circulation desk is off to my left and across from it there are some shelves with new books and a yellow naugahyde couch. I found a book that looked interesting, a true-crime thing about this guy that kept a woman in a box. I sat down and every so often looked up and finally I caught sight of Lane moving around behind the counter.
She’s not an ice princess, and she’s not some kind of sexpot either. She’s just a real person, maybe a little prettier than most. Right then she looked like somebody that didn’t get a lot of sleep the night before and is having a tough day. The second time she caught me looking at her I saw it hit home—some big guy lurking around her job. I hated to see the look on her face, which was mostly fear.
A little before eleven o’clock she came out a door to one side of the counter with her purse and a bookbag. I let her get out the front door and then followed. It was nice out, warmer than you could ask February to be. The trees had their first buds, which would all die if it froze again. There were even birds and everything. She headed up 21st Street and turned at the Littlefield fountain, the one with the horses, and climbed the steps toward the two rows of buildings on top of the hill.

Once she looked back and I turned away, crouched down to pretend to tie my shoe, not fooling anybody.
I watched her go in the first building on the left, the. One with the word over the door. I followed her inside. The halls were full of students and I watched her push through them and go in one of the classrooms. Just before she went in she turned and gave me this look of pure hatred.
Made me feel pretty low. I stood there for ten minutes just the same, after the hall cleared and the bell rang, to make sure she stayed put. Then I went outside and walked around the side of the building. The classrooms all had full-length windows. The top halves were opened out to let in the warm air. I found Lane’s room and sat in the grass, watching a woman teacher write on the board. She had heavy legs and glasses and dark hair in a pony tail. Charlene always talks about going back to college, but I can’t see it, not for me. I had a semester of junior college, working construction all day and sleeping through class at night. They didn’t have football scholarships and I wasn’t good enough for the four-year colleges that did. So I went with what I knew and took a job on my daddy’s drilling crew.
By eleven thirty I was starving to death. There was a Vietnamese woman with a pushcart down by the fountain selling eggrolls. I walked down there and got me a couple and a Coke and took them back up the hill to eat. It would have been okay, really, eating eggrolls outside on a pretty spring day and getting paid for it. Only Lane knew I was there watching and I could see what it was doing to her.
At noon we went back to the library. Lane sat off to herself in the shelves behind the counter. She had brought her lunch in her bookbag, a carton of yogurt and a Diet Coke. She didn’t seem to be able to eat much. After a couple of bites she threw it away and went to the rest room.
She got off work at two in the afternoon. I watched her climb on a shuttlebus and then I drove out to her apartment and waited for her. She has a one-bedroom on 53rd street near Airport, what they call a mixed neighborhood—black, white, brown, all low-income. This is where the rape happened. There’s a swimming pool that doesn’t look too clean and a couple of 70s muscle cars up on blocks. A lot like my neighborhood, over on the far side of Manor Road.
She walked right past me on her way to her apartment. I was sitting in my truck, watching the shuttlebus pull away. She went right past me. I could tell by the set of her shoulders that she knew I was there. She went in her apartment, toward the near end of the second floor, and I could hear the locks click shut from where I sat. She pulled the blinds and that was it.
I did what Dennis told me. I got out and made a log of all the cars parked along the street there, make and model and license number, and then I went on home.
I was in time to give the kid a ride back from the bus. Ricky is fifteen and going through this phase where he dosen't talk to some one except say yes or no to direct questions. Mostly he shrugs and shakes his head in amazement at how stupid adults are.