“It’s about time you got a decent-looking male client,” Julia says so loudly the man sitting in the waiting room can’t help but overhear.

“Mr. Blessing,” I say, extending my hand, “would you like to come on back to my office?”

Richard Blessing stands and meets me at eye level with a firm handshake. Impeccably groomed in a slate green sports coat that I’ve seen at Dillard’s, he smiles, showing a row of strong, gleaming white teeth that make my dingy molars seem as if they came from a pawnshop.

“I hope you can help me,” his voice betraying an anxiousness that is at variance with his selfconfident appearance.

“I’ll do what I can,” I say, trying to get my mind off the file Chet Bracken handed me an hour ago. Over the phone yesterday Blessing had mentioned he had a products liability case he wanted to discuss. For about a year after I left the public defender’s office I was an associate at Mays amp; Burton, a firm that specializes in personal injury cases. Before being fired with another associate during an economic downturn (we were losing cases so regularly, somebody had to walk the plank, and it obviously wasn’t going to be one of the partners), I had learned enough about ambulance chasing to know I wasn’t any good at it.

The dream of every lawyer in private practice is that a client will crawl in with a ten-million-dollar injury caused by the alcoholic president of a solvent insurance company. The problem with Mr. Blessing is that he looks as if he could run a marathon without breaking into a sweat. He has a strong yet sensitive face, with so much hair on his head he is probably running a fever.

Yet every strand is in place. I resist the temptation to pat the ever-widening bald spot that sits on the back of my head like a dust bowl from the 1930s. Some guys have all the luck.