“How do you know I’m not that guy who came in and crowned you not long ago,” I said, depositing the bag of Danish on the little table under the window at left where the coffee maker bubbled. “He put you in the hospital, remember?”

She stood and, a file folder in hand, smiled at me as I climbed out of the Burberry (but not cashmere) coat and walked back toward the door to hang it and my Dobbs hat in the closet.

“Don’t you remember, boss?” she replied smoothly. “You killed that son of a bitch.”

She rarely used terms of endearment at work. Separating business and pleasure, like I said.

“I remember, doll,” I said, “and it was a fucking pleasure.”

I did use terms of endearment at the office.

I went over, got myself some coffee—she had a cup already poured—and doctored mine with milk and sugar. Then I put my Danish and a half on one paper plate and her half on the other, and delivered both to her desk, where she was heading with the folder.

Velda had come to work for me within a few months of my opening this office—in this very space; it had been remodeled but still looked like it was 1952. You could almost say the same about Velda. She was near my age but looked fifteen years younger. Maybe twenty. Guys half her years goggled at her in the street, and it didn’t make me jealous, just proud.

She was tall, even in the flats she wore at work. Her raven hair was cut in a style-defying, shoulder-brushing pageboy that had auburn highlights in it now, her big brown eyes set off by light brown eye shadow, the dark long eyelashes needing no help from Maybelline, her lush lips glossed a sultry burgundy. That classical hourglass shape was supported by long legs, muscular in the dancer’s sense, and full high breasts on loan from the young Jane Russell.

“You know what I love?” she asked.

“Me?”

She was gliding behind her desk, opposite the entry of an outer office just big enough to accommodate some reception chairs on either side and our little coffee and snacks table under the left-hand window. Behind her desk and to the left a little was the door to my inner sanctum.

“What I love,” she said, nodding to the client’s chair opposite her, “is reading something fresh and new and exciting about you in the paper. Something you haven’t shared with me. You know how I adore surprises.”

She was pushing this morning’s Daily News at me, open to page three, already turned so that I could read it. After all, she already had.

The headline across the top of the tabloid page, the copy taking up a third of the page, was WALL STREET UP-AND-COMER STRUCK DOWN. Two photos of Vincent Colby—a close-up portrait shot and a candid of him and some society gal at a gala event—accompanied the article.

I set my coffee cup on Colby’s puss. “I didn’t have anything to do with that.”