“I picked up this baby at a discount,” said my Uncle Sammy.

“What exactly do you want me to do with it?”

“Collect it,” he said with a finger jab. “Osbourne says he’s broke and not going to pay me a cent. Get what you can off this society schmuck, and whatever you find keep a quarter for yourself. You’re getting married in the spring, right?”

“That’s the plan,” I said.

He winked. “Consider this my wedding gift.”

That was how my first case out of law school came to be a collection. I had not intended to use my degree to collect debts, I had not gone to law school so I could most effectively foreclose on the houses of the poor, but at the start I was desperate for anything. And besides, Winston Osbourne was not your usual deadbeat.

He was the scion of an old Protestant family, born to wealth, to society, given every advantage withheld from me, and through talent, luck, and sheer perseverance he became bankrupt. Tall, finely manicured, with a prosperous round face and sincere thin lips, he was of the Bryn Mawr Osbournes, an old and revered family, blue of blood, properly Mayflowered through a line of cousins, listed with the Biddles and the Ambers and the Peppers in the Social Register. In every expression, in every gesture, Osbourne’s breeding showed. He looked like a somebody, one wasn’t sure exactly whom, but a somebody who was a something and I guess that was how he managed to borrow so much money on his personal guarantee, money he invested in a huge tract of undeveloped land in Whitpain Township, seeking to reap the miracle benefits of subdivision. “Real estate is the only sure thing,” he used to say, jaw locked, chin up, “because they simply can’t make any more of it.” As he strode across his glorious acreage in Whitpain Township, planning the location of the fine luxury homes he would build there, he must not have noticed the strange foul liquid, pale and sulfurous, like the earth’s own bile, seeping into each of his footprints. Within six months of buying the property Winston Osbourne faced environmental catastrophe, and within a year he was in utter default.