Inside, the air-conditioning was working almost too well. Costello’s reputation as a dapper dresser befit the zebra booths, pink walls, and black-and-white tile floor. But compared to the Cosmo Club, the Tic Toc was barely ticking. A couple of probable bookies were going over figures in their notebooks in one booth, an older guy with a young woman probably not his wife (or his daughter) were in another, and two teenage boys with bottles of beer sat giggling in their pew. Serving underage clientele was one thing the Cosmo and the Tic Toc did have in common.

Moving across a small uninhabited dance floor, I headed toward the rear of the room where a black chrome-trimmed bar with high-backed stools curved around its black-vested bartender and his impressive inventory. Looming over all this was a raised recessed stage where a pianist could create a mood of intimacy, or a stripper a mood of debauchery, neither having to be worried about the customers getting too close.

No musician or stripper was on stage at the moment. The barstools were empty but for a tall beefy guy off to my right who might have been a bouncer. In a pale yellow sport coat and an Aloha shirt, lacking only the lei, he was younger than me though not young, forty-five maybe. He wore a small amused smile but his gray eyes weren’t laughing, as he paid me more attention over his glass of beer than I deserved.

Ignoring him, I said to the bartender, “Is Joe Costello in?”

The bartender—mustached, bald, and until now bored—thought about the question, as if I had asked him what number pi was equal to, approximately. Before the barkeep could come up with 3.14159, the maybe bouncer intruded, saying, “Who’s asking?”

I looked at him like he was a Jehovah’s Witness on my doorstep. “Who’s asking,” I said, “who’s asking?”

While he was parsing that, I said to the bartender, “Tell Mr. Costello it’s Nathan Heller from Chicago.”

He had a phone back there by the bottles and he used it, passing the information on in a near whisper as if afraid one of the paucity of patrons might hear. “Yes, sir…I will, sir.”

Two doors were at the end of a short hallway past the restrooms—one was marked FIRE EXIT, the other PRIVATE; being a trained detective, I knocked on the latter.

The office was small, differing little from the one at Ace Cab, just a little classier—painted within the decade, carpeting and wainscoting. The desk was metal, not beat-up wood, and colorful framed posters of past Tic Toc attractions were on the walls—again, a mix of name nightclub talent (Buddy Greco, Jerry Vale) and striptease gals (Blaze Starr, Tempest Storm).

And hanging right behind his desk was an oversize framed photo of himself and his late partner Leo Brothers, shaking hands in front of Joe’s previous night spot, the Clover Club.

Like the other time I’d seen Costello, he was sharply dressed, his cream-color sport coat flecked pink and black, his tie silk, dark brown with a white-and-tan geometric design. Maybe I should ask him about pi. The intervening five years, since we’d last met, had not been kind—he looked a decade older, easy, and the curly sandy hair was going gray. He’d reminded me of Crosby back then, and he still did. But Der Bingle was getting a little long in the tooth to be making another Road picture with ol’ Ski Nose.