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Margaret Thornton phoned me after someone steered her to Slap Madigan, who’d recommended my services. The meeting place was my suggestion, but as soon as I laid eyes on her I could see it was a mistake. She wasn’t the kind of woman a man should rendezvous with at a nightclub in mid-afternoon. She said I’d recognize her by the black hat she was wearing, and there she was in a corner booth, veil pinned back over one ear. The rest of her outfit, cloth coat, a glimpse of skirt before I sat down, echoed the darkness of the place as well. That didn’t strike me as a good sign a year after her husband’s murder, but she looked fine in widow’s weeds. Her face might have hardened a bit since it graced the front pages, but there was still a girlish softness about her.

I introduced myself. She nodded nervously. She had raven-colored hair, pale, luminous skin, and a few freckles around her nose that were barely visible in the dim light. Her slender, ringless fingers fidgeted on the table. One of them was chewed to the quick. I ordered a beer, and she turned down a refill on the Presbyterian she’d been nursing. I felt like a heel for arriving stylishly late. The poor kid had probably never been in a joint like this before, at least not alone.

I was in my mid-thirties then, she was about ten years younger, so these weren’t fatherly feelings I was having, but I didn’t stop to analyze them at the time. It wouldn’t have changed anything anyway. We made some small talk. She told me she was Thornton nee Gallagher, a St. Agnes graduate. You can bet that tugged at my heart strings. In fact, it put a face to the premier fantasy in my rich array of hooch-induced fancies: Catholic school girls in Little Bo-Peep shoes, white knee socks, and those short plaid skirts they wear for God only knows what perverse reason. When I was a lad my pals and I would sometimes get a peek of alabaster thigh as they walked away. Of course, if we caught some Protestant or God forbid a sheeny doing the same, the gauntlet went down.

I managed to elicit a fair amount of personal information in the guise of professional inquiry. For example, why a proper young lady like herself married a muckraking Wobbly and a Methodist to boot, who’d published his high-minded broadside out of a cheap storefront on Selby. It came down to this: After eighteen years in the grasp of the nuns, and two more clerking at the Golden Rule department store, she wanted some excitement.

“Walter was always railing about something, and there were all these interesting people around, some with beards even,” she said. “I guess I just got carried away.”

She told me she was living with her mother, that they made ends meet with help from their fellow parishioners at St. Andrew’s and some Reds who’d admired her hubby. I told her Slap was my uncle on my mother’s side, that I was unmarried, an irregular confessor. Close to an hour passed before we got down to business.

Margaret wanted what I had an unsullied reputation for delivering, the truth about an unsolved murder. “I need to get on with my life,” she said.

She had a notion of what the truth was, and she made it clear that she’d be gratified if I validated it. That’s not unusual, most of my clients want their preconceptions confirmed, but her problem was anything but routine.

“Walter was murdered because Harry Ford wanted to stop him publishing,” she explained, and her blue eyes lit with sudden passion. “I don’t blame Lloyd Jensen. I blame the man who has everything but the respectability Lloyd Jensen could bring him. I don’t even care if Mr. Ford is tried for murder. I just want it on the radio and in the newspapers what a dreadful person he is.”

“That’s all? Nothing to it. It should be easy to get the goods on a defenseless fellow like Harry Ford.”

“You can do it, Mr. McDonough. Your uncle says you never fail.”

Her confidence was touching, but it was a daunting prospect. I’d heard rumors that Harry Ford was behind Thornton’s murder, everybody had, but those rumors had no legs because most people loved the guy, and, more important from my perspective, those who didn’t knew better than to cross him.

She brought up the matter of my fee. I said we’d discuss that after I nosed around. I’d known her less than an hour, but she already had me putting first things last. I escorted her out the back, and opened the car door for her. There weren’t many women drivers then, and to me she looked brave and vulnerable behind the wheel, all the more so because I recognized it as the same bucket that shared the front page with her the day after her husband’s murder. They’d iced the poor stiff when he stepped out of this very automobile.