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was when I punched out a fucking sergeant.”
    “You punched out a sergeant?”
    “Goddamn right! He called me a Jew bastard! Wouldn’t you punch him?”
    Jake was a lot more Jewish than me, despite my last name. With my reddish-brown hair and blue eyes, I took after my Irish mother, not my Jewish pop, who had been apostate and raised me that way. But I would have given that sergeant his due beating, all right—just not where or when I could be made for it.
    My Coke and Jake’s tomato juice arrived.
    He raised his red-brimming glass in a toast and I clinked my Coke with it as he said, “ L’Chayim ,” and we nodded at each other, then sipped.
    Another dancer was onstage now, visible through the blue-smoke haze. The little combo was doing its best with David Rose’s big-band “The Stripper.” Didn’t really make it, but nobody cared—the blonde onstage, Leslee Lynn, had a nice smile and nicer legs in mesh stockings that showed under the fox-fur stole she’d strutted out in, and would soon be ridding herself of.
    “So what brings you to Chicago, Jack? Talent hunt?”
    He was turned toward the blonde, nodding as he took in her graceful, sexy moves to the clumsy music. “Yeah, a guy has to keep a finger on the pulse.”
    “Is that what he has to keep his finger on.”
    The bullet head turned my way. His smile was boyish, in a sleazy kind of way. “Lou says this girl is a class act. She’s a University of Chicago grad, he tells me.”
    “What healthy male wouldn’t want to see her diploma? So you’ll hit a lot of the clubs in town, looking for dancers?”
    “Sure.” He shrugged. “You go where the best shows are, at least in the Midwest and South. There are some talented gals in Frisco and Hollywood, but why ship them in, when there’s Fort Worth and New Orleans in my own backyard?”
    We both watched the fox stole as it drifted to the floor and got dragged behind Leslee’s confident stride. She wasn’t as busty as the other girls, but she knew how to work the crowd.
    “Class,” Jack said admiringly. “Your average stripper? Just ain’t got no class.” Without looking at me, he added, “And how about you, Nate? What brings you to the 606?”
    So he had made me.
    You didn’t need to ask a Chicagoan like Nate Heller what he was doing in a joint where good-looking girls took off their clothes. No. He’d seen me, all right.
    “I met a client here earlier,” I said.
    Had he seen me duck out, after Tom? And come back in?
    “We finished our business,” I said, “and I decided to stick around and partake in a little culture.”
    “You and Lou Nathan go way back.”
    “That we do. But truth be told, nowadays the Chez Paree is more my speed.”
    He nodded, half smiled, then sighed dreamily. “Someday. Someday that’ll be me, booking Sinatra and Sammy Davis.”
    “Booking Sammy Davis in Dallas? You are ambitious.”
    He found that real funny, or pretended to.
    The combo moved onto “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” in honor of Leslee’s heart-shaped pasties (I may have been in my fifties, but I had twenty-twenty vision).
    Jack turned his back on the stripper and showed me a different kind of smile. The kind with no teeth. Accompanied by hooded eyes.
    “We been friends a long time, Nate,” he said.
    Not really, but I gave him another little half toast and said, “Maxwell Street days.”
    He didn’t bother clinking my glass. The beady black eyes were like buttons trying to sew themselves on me. “So, you … you’d tell me, wouldn’t you?”
    “Tell you what, Jake?”
    “Jack. It’s Jack.”
    “Yeah, like the president. Tell you what?”
    “You’d tell me, somebody sent you? Was having you check up on me? You know, keeping tabs?”
    “Who would be keeping tabs on you, Jack?”
    He sighed. Shook his head. “When it’s Nate Heller sitting there? That’s the thing. You’re connected to more places than AT and T. Could be Outfit. Could be union. Could be … company.”
    Did he mean