Sylvia looked at him then, and he turned his eyes away as if he were ashamed of his own emotions. “It seems kind of stupid now, but I was just a kid. I remember that I got mad at him and started bawling. He asked me what was wrong and I answered something like I had given credit because I thought he was a friend who needed help, and you can’t pay friends for helping you. I ran out of his office, blubbering. He chased and caught up with me three blocks away. Funny thing… I remember… he had tears in his eyes, too, when he asked me to forgive him. World War II came and he went… wrote to me regularly every week’ about Africa, Italy, Germany… wherever he happened to be, just like an older brother… or a father. He helped me get a scholarship at Pomona College, then sponsored me in my first two years at Boalt. I was going to be a lawyer, too… but the Korean War came along.” He shrugged. “When I came back I discovered that all these punks who had gotten deferments had crawled out of the woodwork from as far away as New York to get into Boalt, and now the school had a waiting list of two years. I got married, went to work as a cop, then got involved in a shooting beef one night with a joker who hit me in the left arm with a.44 slug. They gave me a forty percent disability and told me I wasn’t suitable for active police work any longer.” He laughed and for a moment his bitterness showed. “They offered me a job inside as a record clerk. I told them what they could do with that job. Then I used my disability pay to start my own investigation agency. So here I am.”