“I should never have let him know about Booker. That’s what I meant. I was drunk and angry when I called Irv. I wanted him to know what a piss-poor lay he was, and so I, well, I let him have it, right where I knew it would hurt the most.”

“You told him about Booker?” asked Jonathan, incredulous. “And the Comet Club?”

“When they print those photographs,” I said, “they’re going to slay you.”

“I slipped up,” she admitted. She gulped, her shoulders shook, and she collapsed into an emotional heap. Brassy, brave, charismatic Diana Jordan, weeping, blubbering? Not a sight I ever thought I would see. She wiped her nose with her hand. “Irv must have called every slimy rag in town and told them to show up at the Comet Club at closing time if they wanted to catch me with Booker.”

“Who called the cops?” I asked.

“Who knows?”

We watched, horrified really, as the Negroes were processed, one by one at the high desk in front of us. Most of them—patrons, musicians, even the waiters and bartenders—were arrested and booked. They would stay overnight in the slammer. Terrence rose wearily when his turn came. As they led him away, his gaze rested briefly on me, but I could not read the expression on his face, which was battered and bloody, his eye swollen, but the set of his jaw suggested a cold, abiding anger.

Except for Jonathan, Diana, and me, the white people arrested at the Comet Club all got processed, made their calls, and left. When at last the three of us were the only people left from the raid, still in handcuffs, our bruises puffing, our clothes torn, five photographers came in, including dear old sweat-stained Al Gilbert, and snapped what felt like a hundred pictures while we cursed them and their misbegotten mothers.

After the photographers were done, the cops took our handcuffs off. They let us go to the bathroom. A uniformed cop stood there at the open door of the women’s room while Diana and I each did our business in stalls with no doors. Then they herded us back into the waiting room, where we huddled together, beat-up, stinking, filthy, caked in dried blood, silent and spent. Only then did they tell us we could each make one phone call.

Diana called someone from MGM. On behalf of Jonathan and myself, I called Irene. Who else was there? Thelma didn’t have the money to pay off the cops, and that’s what needed to happen. I grew up here. I know how this works.