After all, the A-1 Detective Agency was now ensconced in the Loop’s venerable Monadnock Building on West Jackson in a corner suite brimming with offices, operatives and secretaries as well as a more or less respectable clientele. I could pick and choose which cases, which clients, were worthy of my personal attention, and those in that favored category had to be prepared to pay our top rate of a hundred dollars a day (and expenses) if they wanted the head man.

My golfing partner had wanted the head man, all right, but I was starting to think he needed a different sort of head man than the A-1’s president. Specifically, the headshrinking variety.

Longtime client James V. Forrestal-immaculately if somberly attired in dark green sweater and light green shirt with black slacks and cleated black shoes-seemed the picture of stability. I was the one who looked unhinged, albeit spiffy, in my tan slacks, lighter tan polo shirt and brown-and-white loafers, having been encouraged to bring golf attire along, assured I was in for “perfect golfing weather.” Then why were my teeth chattering?

Forrestal carried himself (and his own golf clubs-the caddies weren’t working today) with a characteristic aura of authority, as well as a certain quiet menace; he would have made a decent movie gangster with his broad, battered Cagney-like features, and wide-set, intense blue-gray eyes that could seize you in a grip tighter than the one his small hands held on that three wood.

But on closer examination, the picture of stability started to blur. The athletically slim body had a new slump to the shoulders, his skin an ashen pallor, his short, swept-back hair had gone from a gray-at-the-temples brown to an all-over salt-and-pepper, and the eyes were sunken and shifting now, touched with a new timidity.