Across the street from where the hackie dropped me, one place was still open and unchanged—PETE’S CHOPHOUSE, said the neon lettering above dark-tinted windows that glowed with electric beer signs like fireflies in the night. I was meeting Captain Pat Chambers of Homicide, my oldest friend in the world, going back all the way to the army and the kind of war nobody protested. One of his best officers, Lt. Casey Shannon—“the Wall Street Cop,” the News called him—was retiring soon, and this was his send-off.

Diminutive Pete himself met me just inside—he was his own maitre d’, a small jet-black-haired man in his sixties (only his hairdresser knew for sure) wearing a shiny tuxedo and a thick mustache and a puffy face that bore a smile like a duty, but one he didn’t mind. The place was smoky and dark, mirrored walls working to make the joint bigger—one of those male bastions where women were welcome, as long as they came accompanied. Like me, Pete’s was a relic—a supper club clinging desperately to the past.

“Mike!” Pete said, the smile turning real. “Or is it Mr. Hammer now that you’re respectable?”

I grinned at him. “I just killed somebody important for a change.”

I took off my porkpie fedora and Pete helped me out of the trenchcoat and took the hat and handed the works over to the blonde at her window; she was maybe twenty-five but in that low-cut sparkly thing, she looked like fifty-five—1955, that is, and that was fine by me.

“One of these serial killers you read about, huh?” Pete burbled. “Hidin’ in plain sight, in a government job yet! And you flush him out. You got a lotta play in the papers, Mr. Hammer, Mike—like the old days! Your girl Velda, she’s okay? Bastard put her in the hospital, they say.”

“She’s great. That was months ago, Pete. Old news.”

I patted his shoulder and slipped away—I wasn’t here to talk to an aging restauranteur about my latest fifteen minutes of infamy.

The hostess, a stunning redhead in a green evening dress with matching emerald eyes, intercepted me. Though I hadn’t been to Pete’s for a while, I was enough of a regular to know that her first name was Sheila, though by now we were too well-acquainted for me to ask what her last name was.

She was ten curvy pounds the right side of plump and had cherry-red lipsticked lips with a bruised Bardot look that made her smile seem knowing and sly without even trying. Her arm slipped into the crook of mine as she slow-walked me, winding around tables, pausing for bus boys and wait staff.

“Alone tonight, Mike?” She was flirty in that way that you knew would never amount to anything.

“Velda doesn’t like this place.”

Lovely raven-haired Velda was officially my secretary but unofficially my partner in a bunch of ways, with her own P.I. license and a .32 automatic in her purse and my heart tucked under her arm.