Lowney had a Los Angeles look about him. He was tall and broad and heavily tanned, and he stepped off the plane with a kind of a swagger. His thick black hair was shiny with pomade. He wore a bright yellow shirt, a string tie, pegged pants, suede shoes, and—though it was a gloomy afternoon in Chi—dark sunglasses.

If he could have seen me, lounging against the wall just inside the departure shed, he would have had a shock. The faces weren’t the same, but everything else was. String tie, yellow shirt, sunglasses and all. I even had my cigarette drooping at the same angle. The tan had taken me four days under the U-V lamp.

I’m sort of a chameleon that way. It’s what I get paid for. Right now I was busy convincing myself that I was Vic Lowney, number three man of the Southern Cal crime syndicate. Inside of five minutes, I was going to have to convince the rest of the world that I was Lowney, too. And my life depended on making it come off.

The three Chi detectives flashed their badges at the airline man and moved out onto the field just as Lowney came sauntering across. He had long legs, and he wanted to stretch them a little before resuming his flight to Philadelphia. The Chi boys might have been ad men right off Wacker Avenue, with their flannels and their attache cases. Lowney didn’t suspect a thing right up until the moment they quietly surrounded him.

The whole thing took maybe fifteen seconds. They whispered to Lowney and one of them showed identification. I saw Lowney’s face go icy. His lips moved in brief and probably impolite phrases. The Chi men murmured back, and one of them gently took hold of Lowney’s elbow. He jerked free, and I thought there was going to be action, but the detective took the elbow again. They escorted him off the field, taking the next door down. I didn’t budge. I stubbed out my cigarette and lit another.

Ten minutes went by, and then one of the detectives reappeared, smiling like a little boy with a report card full of A’s. He wanted me to stick a gold star on his cheek, I guess. He said, “He’s in custody.”

“So?”

“Everything went smooth, no?”

“The plane’s going to leave soon,” I said. I’m not paid to hand out compliments to the locals. “You got anything for me?”

“Sure. Sure, right here.”

He slipped me a little blue folder. Lowney’s plane tickets and baggage checks. “When you get settled in Philly, go through his bags. Anything you don’t need, turn over to the police. They’ll ship it back here.”