The Ditto List Read Online Free

for hearing. Then D.T. looked in the appropriate places for his Mrs. Rodriguez. Not finding her, D.T. left the building. Another day, another dollar, another slap of shame. D.T’s only consolation was that no one except his ex-wife had ever called him anything he had not already called himself.

TWO
    Problems?” Bobby E. Lee raised a brow as D.T. came through the door. “You’ve got that look.”
    D.T. dropped the files on Bobby E. Lee’s desk. “Problems indeed. But I don’t seem to be able to blame any of them on you.”
    â€œYou never can,” Bobby E. Lee replied truthfully. “What was it this time?”
    â€œAn overabundance of the surname Rodriguez.”
    â€œSo no Chicago and no flu?”
    D.T. nodded. “Judge Hoskins depresses me so much I can’t do anything but work. What do we have?”
    â€œTwo dittos, plus one non-usual.”
    â€œAnd the lad with the scarf and earring?” D.T. dared a glance toward the couch.
    â€œHe’s with me. We’re off to lunch.”
    â€œDidn’t it hurt to stick that diamond in there?”
    â€œI suppose, but then Tod’s rather into pain.” Bobby E. Lee placed the cover over his typewriter. “I may be late getting back. I have to buy Daddy a birthday present.”
    â€œI thought you and Daddy weren’t speaking.”
    â€œWe aren’t. I’m going to get him some bikini underwear to remind him why.”
    Bobby E. Lee smiled a trifle fiendishly and closed the drawers of his desk, then plucked his satin jacket off the rack, motioning for his punctured friend to follow. The pair exited the office with the flair of those who see themselves as objets d’art .
    For the hundredth time, D.T. started to wonder about Bobby E. Lee, but as usual he stopped himself before his speculation became risqué. Bobby was a good secretary and a good person. It was all D.T. needed to know, all he trusted himself to know as well. The rest was Bobby’s business. Still, D.T. felt uneasy, as though there was some continuing obligation he was not fulfilling. He guessed it had to do with Bobby being homosexual, and with his own nonspecific responsibility for the jokes about fags and queers that befouled the air without his protest, with his apparently congenital sense that he should somehow make it better. For Bobby E. Lee. For everyone. Of course, a concrete obligation did exist. D.T. was more than a month in arrears in paying Bobby’s salary.
    D.T. glanced at the empty waiting room, then straightened the already straight copies of Cosmopolitan, Vogue, People, US, Self, Shape , and Mad that littered the coffee table. Whistling tonelessly, he emptied the ashtray and threw away the wilted rose that Bobby E. Lee had picked in the park on his way to work. Happy to be momentarily a janitor rather than a lawyer, he wished he would not have to imagine, whether in a few minutes or a few months, how the women he had freed at the Fiasco that morning would ensnarl their lives again.
    He entered his private office and took off his coat and hung it on the rack. The small refrigerator in the closet contained only a slice of swiss cheese the size of a domino, a can of light beer, and a magnum of French champagne, the latter received in lieu of a more fungible fee from a client with a flair for the unusual and a brother in the booze business. As the result of his second honeymoon—embarked upon with his ex-wife after only ninety-seven days of marriage—D.T. hated both the French and their champagne and so was waiting for a suitable occasion on which to present the magnum to Bobby E. Lee.
    D.T. took out his buck knife and cut a sugary dollop of mold away from the cheese, then downed it. The bottom drawer of his desk yielded half a roll of Lifesavers and a quart of Bailey’s Irish Cream, a Christmas gift from the member of his poker group for whom D.T. was in the nature of a perpetual annuity. The