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investigative phenom and golden boy who, Evan noted for anyone who cared, should be played by Adam Goldberg in the TV movie. Holding court with the recruits, Evan told us that Berks was the best investigator they'd ever had. “He could get anybody to say
anything,”
he said, looking rueful.
    “Pray tell,” Morgan broke in, “why don't we have the pleasure of working with this extraordinary individual?”
    “Actually, he had a misunderstanding with management.” Evan glanced out the French doors leading to the rest of the office, where the wax paper had been ripped by ornery feet and fists. The coast was clear. “Okay, he got shitcanned,” he admitted.
    Berks had been moonlighting for another investigative agency, something Evan warned us never to get caught doing. It not only violated his noncompete clause and his confidentiality agreement, but it was an irreparable betrayal. He got paid independently for a case the firm should have handled, even though, at the time, George and Sol had no policy for rewarding investigators who'd brought in business. They'd since instituted a loose practice of giving between 5 and 15 percent of the total billing on the case to whoever recruited a new client, but management had fired Berks for going behind their backs.
    Nevertheless, Berskow was still the standard-bearer as far as investigating went. Office policy, I learned, was an ad hoc game, based in part on politics and in part on the hangovers the powers that be had at any one time.
    On the day he sacked Berks, Sol had opened a major can of whoopass on the other investigators telling them, among other things, that they were “examples of how to
not
be effective workers,” and, “None of you guys are even one tenth of the investigator Berskow was.” “That was a shitty day,” Evan observed, looking pained. After the evisceration was over, though, Evan said, George handed everyone copies of
The Art of War
and took them drinking.

    “Okay, asswipes, time to get fingerprinted.” Evan took us a couple blocks over to the Fourteenth Precinct, where we got inked. “Hope none of you guys are felons, “cause we cross-reference this stuff,” Evan warned.
    Noah looked visibly agitated. “I was arrested for publicdrunkenness and lewd behavior in high school,” he whispered to me, almost as a question.
    “That's the kind of stuff we
hire
you for,” Evan said, overhearing him.
You Know Where to Stick It
    A week into the job, I was sitting at my desk and finally ready to start a case. And my phone was ringing. It was hard to tell, actually. One of the lights on the elaborate matrix was flashing, but the ringers on the phones sounded like they were all coming from the same source. I envisioned George and Sol devising a money-saving scheme that included having only one operable phone ringer.
    “Boo?”
    “Mu?” It was my ex-boyfriend Ben. We had been broken up for a year at the time, but carried on a vestigial friendship.
    While we were dating we spoke in a secret language, a patois of baby talk, infantile gibberish, and a variation of pig Latin words spoken with a lisp and a “b” added to the front. As in “Bamy bhere bar boo? ” He always seemed to trick me back into our old ways, his voice triggering my trancelike response.
    “I'm at work,” I responded in a barely audible whisper.
    “Oh,
okay, then,”
he said, annoyed. I was certain that we would never date again, but when I saw him sometimes we hugged for tens of minutes, and I didn't want to let him go. Even at an imposing six foot four, he seemed fragile. He was a magnet for muggers and bullies. Several times during our first year in the city, I came home from writing rejection letters and fetching lattes at my publishing job to find Ben holding an ice pack to a bloodied black eye and a split lip, in a tight, crimson-streaked T-shirt. His wallet had been stolen at knifepoint. He got into an argument with some Jetsfans at a sports bar. (He was wearing a Patriots