Of course that day had been no ordinary one in the life of James M. Ragen. That day, in April, James M. Ragen was convinced he’d narrowly missed being bumped off.

That morning two men in a car had trailed Ragen’s Lincoln Continental, from his home, and when he sensed he was being shadowed, he increased his speed to sixty miles an hour, and still they came, still they clung to him. They chased him through the city streets until finally Ragen pulled up in front of, and scurried into, a precinct house-the would-be assassins whooshing by.

It was in the aftermath of that that he came to me, Nathan Heller, president of A-1 Detective Agency, looking for bodyguards. Trustworthy ones.

“Who can I trust in this town but a friend?” Ragen said, his oblong face a dour mask. “The cops offered to provide me ‘protection’-of a sort I’d be safer without, goes without saying. You can buy a Chicago cop and get change for a five-everybody knows that. And most of the private dicks in this town, even them that’s employed by the big agencies, is ex-cops.”

“So am I, Jim,” I said.

“Yeah, but you ain’t for sale, my lad. Not when a friend is what they’re buying.”

I sighed. I think he thought of me as Irish, despite the Jewish last name my father left me. It’s what my Irish Catholic mother bequeathed me that fools people-her blue eyes, regular features and reddish brown hair. Of course, where the latter’s concerned, mine is graying some, at the temples, the only temples I attend, by the way, which’ll give you an idea of about how Jewish I am. Papa was apostate, he didn’t believe in God, Hebrew or whatever else you got, though he tried to see some good in his fellow man; I guess I inherited that from him too, minus the part about my fellow man. As for my mother, she didn’t live long enough for her hair to go gray at all, which may explain why I’m not very Catholic, either. Just the same, I was Irish enough for Ragen.