Swapping Lies (my next book, a true story). FBI Bank Job. ***by Frank Hickey*** "You're the P.I.?" the Lawyer asks me. "Not just a paralegal?" "I'm the private eye," I brag, like a kid. "Frank Hickey." "You're here on a civil case, I know," he says. "But I've got a client. FBI cracked him forbank robbery. I believe he's an innocent man." The Lawyer sports a short beard, rosy cheeks and a Tommy-gun talk style. Sunlight from his storefront office lights his face. "I need a smart jury for this case," he muses. "Good luck with that," I wisecrack. "My last case, the jury was so wombat-dumb, they tried to convict the judge." "Speak good Spanish?" he asks me. "The best," I fib. Maybe I'm embroidering a bit. But I want this case. I never worked an FBI case before. He slaps the desk. I flinch. "Go!" he snaps. I go. "I didn't do any bank robbery," my new client Mitchell tells me that evening. We stand on his Inwood neighborhood front stoop. Black, bone-thin, soft speaking, he sportstony horn-rimmed glasses. Squinting through them, he sees me as a stocky 24, hippie brown hair and naive blue eyes, behind heavy glasses, weighing me down. My bad eyesight keeps the government from swearing me in as a detective. So, I swear myself in. I try to be the world's best detective. Many other children make the same vow, like Huck Finn taking a blood oath. "Cops pinch me for gambling before," he says."But never anything of violence. It just doesn't pay. Gambling, policy or numbers, that gains me sweet steady coin." He unwraps a Tootsie roll candy for his chubby little daughter, five years old. She giggles. "I had innocent clients before," I say. "Facing murder charges. I work just as hard for a guilty client as an innocent one." Sharp brown eyes gauge me. "Why is that?" he asks. Again, I feel all too white, like the preppy I am. "Because everyone deserves an aggressively legal defense," I parrot."When your lawyer hires me, I enjoy the same privilege of privacy that he has. "Totally confidential. Just like your doctor or religious figure. Nobody can order me to say what you tell me." "Yeah?" he asks. "You going to believe me over the FBI?" "Try me," I say, like the movies. "What if I told you that the FBI and the cops kicked in my door?" he asks. "Grabbed me up in front of my little girl here and the wife. Held me on my windowsill. Threatened to drop me down four flights if I didn't confess to the robbery. What would you say, mister private eye?". ***Frank Hickey. ***Somehow, Frank became a detective. He writes the Dancing Max Royster crime stories about the world's only ballroom dancing detective at frankhickey.net