I shook my head in disbelief. "Kathy, let me introduce you. This is Alexander Davidoff, the man I hit with my cab."

"Don't talk to them." Kathy regained her composure in a second. With her platinum blonde mane, starry-blue eyes and a motherly bosom, my friend looked like a size eighteen sex-bomb. "It's a criminal case, and you will get a state defense lawyer. Don't trust them. I've heard about these kinds of tactics of the opposite side acting friendly and all that. In no time, they will slap you with a million-dollar lawsuit."

The old guy, Mr. Madnick, burst out laughing, choked on his laugh and coughed, spitting out words, "She… doesn't have a million dollars… She is dirt-poor. She is judgment-proof!"

"Well," Kathy bared her long, white crocodile teeth. "Maybe you guys want her to rot in prison? You're not gonna get her."

"No, we just…" Mr. Davidoff started, but Madnick interrupted him, "I don't mind. She is the kind of girl my mama cautioned me about. Never believe a redhead. Never."

My friend clenched her heavy fists. "You're an evil man to say that."

"Yep, you got that right, ma'am. I'm an old, evil, crazy, white man with zero tolerance for criminals and shouting bitches."

He hadn't even finished his little speech when my best friend, red-faced and sweating, opened her purse, pulled out a bunch of dollar bills and stuck them at the old guy's face, shouting, "Did you see that? You will never get that. This is not for you. You are a money grubbing… lawyer!"

"Kathy, no…!" I shouted, and moved, trying to get between them. The officer behind me grabbed my cuffed hands and jerked me back. My weight was about one hundred fifteen pounds and the cop weighed twice that much. I lost my balance and stepped on his foot, sending both of us falling back. He hit the ground with a terrible thud, and I landed on his stomach.

Meanwhile, uninterrupted, Kathy threw the money at the old guy's fat face. He turned around and opened his palm to slap her, when Mr. Davidoff jumped and pushed him away. The old guy's legs gave up, and he went down like a doomed tree in a hurricane. Falling, he swung his leg and tripped Kathy, who, trying to keep her balance, grabbed Mr. Davidoff. I saw everything while the police officer jerked me up. An enormous pang of jealousy came over me the second I saw my injured cognac prince hugging my best friend.

"Oh, I'm so sorry," Kathy sang at his face with her sweet Northeast Philadelphia accent. For ten years, she had been happily married to her college professor, but at that moment, I started to worry about the stability of her marriage.

"It's perfectly fine," Mr. Expensive Vodka answered, trying to untangle his arms from her long gorgeous hair.

A terrible moan sobered us all. The officer pushed me ahead, and we all gathered around lifeless Joe, who was lying on his back with his eyes closed.

Mr. Davidoff kneeled in front of his older friend.

"Joe, are you okay? Do you need a doctor?"

The old guy responded with another gut-wrenching moan.

"He probably injured his spine. He can't talk," I said. Mr. Davidoff looked at me thoughtfully, obviously reevaluating his optimistic view of my mental health.

"He's your lawyer. He had better start talking, because that's what he does for a living."

As if hearing him, Joe opened his black eyes with eyelashes so long and thick they looked covered with layers of mascara and threw a dirty look at his friend. "How come you guys got to schmooze with these beautiful chicks and I didn't?"

Instead of locking us up for disturbance of the peace, the officer on duty gave us papers to sign and let us go. During the following two months, I saw Alexander Davidoff twice at the police station during the cross-examinations, once at the city court, and every weekend at my studio apartment, newly decorated with the bundles of freshly cut roses. By then, I discovered he was working for an international law firm, that his wife had left him and that his teenage daughter's name was Evana.

Two months later, on Christmas morning, I opened my eyes at eleven, because I had been working the night before. Looking out the window of my basement studio apartment, I saw two things that made me hysterical. First, my cab was nowhere in sight. Second, somebody's car was parked in my spot.

I jumped into jeans and ran outside. We had gotten little snow for Christmas this year, thank God. Here it was! A red shimmering Jaguar sat on its shiny tires. I looked around. My beat-up Ford was gone.

In quiet desperation, I ran up and down the street, screaming and yelling. My cab carried a parking permit, so it shouldn't have been towed. If it had been stolen, the police wouldn't waste their time looking for an old battered Crown Victoria. If I lost the cab, I wouldn't be able to make money to pay the cab company. I barely had enough for next month's rent.

Icy Christmas rain was pouring down my face by the time I returned to the Jaguar. What was this thing doing in front of my window, anyway? Had some drug dealer burned his money for this toy? That was it! They towed away my cab to let him park! Blood rushed to my head and, seeing red, I ran toward the grossly overpriced pile of metal and started kicking its shiny grille. "Who parked this pile of shit here? This is my space! This is my parking space! Where is my car?"

I shouted because I couldn't be silent anymore about every injustice and abuse that had happened to me ever since my first husband sent me an e-mail saying that he wanted a divorce because he felt closer to his parents than to his wife.

Nobody came out to claim the Jaguar, so I kept kicking it until I smashed the grille.

"Hey," an eerily familiar voice said. "I can see that you like my gift!"

I turned around, wet sweatshirt and Mudd's jeans clinging to my bones; my mouth opened, and my eyes popped out. Alexander Davidoff stood behind me in his long gray London Fog raincoat. His brown-gloved hand was holding an umbrella.

"Huh?" I said and swallowed a handful of raindrops.

"I'm glad you like my Christmas present," Alexander repeated after a brief inspection of the car. "I'm glad you customized it right away. It looked kind of too new. Not your style."

At thirty-five, I retired as a cab driver and acquired the most exquisite taste in clothes, furniture, architecture, design, landscaping and jewelry, all by virtue of my marriage to his highness, prince, landowner, and international lawyer, Alexander Davidoff. My new husband owned a family castle in Mooresville, NJ. Built a hundred years ago by his relatives as a hunting shed, the castle was an exact copy of a French mansion from the Champagne province. When I first saw this castle, two things became clear to me. First, I'd retired as a cab driver, and second, I have a lot of time on my hands to read mystery novels.

We moved in and spread out evenly through its fifty rooms. Under `we' I mean Alexander, his daughter Evana, me, my daughter Iris, Alexander's butler Mark, the girls' tutor Larissa, Alexander's German shepherd Elvis, and my black cat Pepper.

Pepper was the first one to step inside our new house, according to the superstition rules of Alexander's old country. I agreed that the three-story gray stone mansion needed some good guardian spirits. We took the cat to the door in his basket and let him inside. He stepped on the shiny hardwood floor with his legs straight and inflexible like a little parading Pakistani soldier. The cat crossed the spacious entrance hall and then turned towards the kitchen. The shepherd, Elvis, surprised he wasn't the first one this time, trotted behind Pepper, sniffing the air.