Vic's clients fall into two distinct categories. There are the "bread and butter" clients who offer her fairly routine private detective jobs, which usually do not carry too much personal risk, and who pay promptly her full rates. It is these who provide her livelihood, but what she does for them is hardly ever described in any detail. The adventures in the books almost invariably concern the other kind of client - who can't afford to pay her full rates, or can't pay her at all, but she decides to take their cases anyway because of some intrinsic detail arousing her feeling of justice. She can persist in an investigation even when the client who originated it asks her to stop or is dead, and sometimes she starts an investigation on her own without a client at all. Sometimes at the end of such a case somebody who benefited from her efforts - not necessarily the original client - volunteers to pay her. But such luck cannot be relied on. At the end of several books Vic ends up - after having spent much time, effort, and money from her own pocket, risked her life and gotten battered and wounded - with no material benefits to show for it, nothing but the satisfaction of having done something good. This does not discourage her from later taking up another such case.